This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Michael Cutler Moment with Michael Cutler, a former Senior INS Special Agent.
Mr. Cutler discussed Memorial Day and Celebrating the First Amendment, unveiling the best way we can give respect to our fallen heroes – and reunite our splintered nation.
Don’t miss it!http://jamieglazov.com/2016/05/24/michael-cutler-moment-memorial-day-and-celebrating-the-first-amendment/
FROM Hillary Agonistes Facing a free-wheeling Trump, she is weighted down by tons of baggage. By Victor Davis Hanson **** posted below
“Trump is many things. But he is not the fascist that neo-cons now rail against (their warnings of constitutional usurpation ironically far better apply to the concrete record of the last eight years, in which Obama has simply suspended enforcement of federal law whenever he found it politically convenient to do so, and either has turned government agencies — IRS, ICE, EPA, NSA, VA, NASA, the Secret Service — into rogue extensions of the White House or staffed them with partisan incompetents). In truth, Trump has no delineated agenda, nor is he doctrinaire in the fashion of a 20th-century European demagogue. Instead, his message is unscripted bombast, and it runs on emotion, not ideology, geared not to some grand autocratic vision but to how to stay ahead of the 24-hour news cycle and channel and exploit the venom Americans feel for Washington elites. Trump has tossed a ball and chain into the wide screen of the political establishment and shattered the glass. No one — not his 16 former Republican rivals nor Hillary Clinton — knows quite how to handle him, since he can say or do anything on any given day that no other candidate would even contemplate.
Older than Clinton, Trump comes across as far more vigorous and vital; he’s a loudmouth, but his voice is not shrill and screeching as is Clinton’s; his political incorrectness both offends and attracts, while her political correctness merely bores and has rendered her a caricature of an opportunistic toady. A wheeler-dealer roguish businessman, Trump is not yet facing criminal indictment; a lifelong government apparatchik, Clinton is courting a rendezvous with the law. Clinton still fakes regional accents; oddly, the orange-haired, combed-over Trump never does. When Trump is caught lying he often just shrugs and says without shame that he has changed his opinions; when Clinton is caught lying, she denies the lying and usually attacks the questioner. In the end, Trump makes it appear that hosting The Apprentice leads to far better political instincts than Yale Law School and the subsequent establishment CV.”
Hillary Clinton may be the weakest prohibitive favorite ever to run for the presidency.
She is generally given strong odds of beating Donald Trump in the fall, yet she is tied with him in the early going as she struggles to shake a 74-year-old socialist who persists in notching victories in the Democratic primary contest.
Armed with an impeccable résumé and pedigree, and an impressive campaign and fundraising apparatus, Hillary has it all — except a rationale for her campaign and the ability to excite voters.
The latter failing is made all the more striking by what has happened all around Clinton this year. She is bracketed in her own party and the opposing party by candidates who routinely draw crowds numbering in the thousands. Who are vivid and unmistakably themselves. Who have memorable catchphrases that capture their core message in a few words. Who are running crusades as much as campaigns.
If Donald Trump wants to make America great again, Hillary wants to keep it okay; if Bernie Sanders wants to incite a political revolution, Hillary wants to convene a task force to come up with options short of a revolution, to be studied closely for a decision at a later date. In an election season buffeted by gale-force winds of change, Clinton is the status quo rendered in the most stultifying, conventional fashion possible.
Hillary is hated without being interesting. Yes, the Republicans nominated a radioactive candidate, but only after a great upheaval forged by a highly entertaining figure who upset all prior conventions and norms. The Democrats are nominating an equally radioactive presidential candidate as the “safe” alternative of their establishment.
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/435734/print
Political satirist and video maker Ami Horowitz recently visited the campus of Portland State University, posing as a member of Hamas. He asked students to donate to the terrorist organization to help bomb schools, cafés, and other “soft targets” that would help destroy Israel.
Shockingly, Horowitz raised several hundred dollars from students who agreed that Israel needs to be “wiped off the map.” Here’s the unbelievable video:
This year was supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s “turn,” after her humiliating loss in 2008 to Barack Obama. She has paid her dues as secretary of state for Obama. And the apparent Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, is written off by most pundits as a buffoon without a chance in the general election. Yet, Clinton’s campaign continues to be dismal, and is getting worse — to the point where the socialist Bernie Sanders polls better against Trump than does Hillary Clinton. How can that be?
At least eight reasons come to mind — several of them relating to Clinton’s innate character flaws and past scandals.
1) The E-Mail Scandal
Although the FBI has not finished its investigation and sent its results and recommendations to the Obama Justice Department, most of the media and public have learned enough about the e-mail/server scandal to conclude that had any mid-level State Department or intelligence-agency employee emulated Hillary Clinton’s use of a private unsecured server — along with serial denials and lying about such use — he would have been fired and prosecuted.
Hillary’s exemption so far hinges entirely on the fact that she is the Democratic party’s only viable presidential candidate; her indictment would send the party into crisis, given that the committed socialist Bernie Sanders would be the most deserving to inherit the nomination. So her Sword of Damocles swings with public opinion. What keeps Hillary out of jail, or at least a plea-bargain, is her political viability, first as the likely Democratic nominee, and second as a presumable winner over Trump. But take either likelihood away, and she de facto loses exemption and becomes expendable — a fact that is well known to her and which cannot be an easy reality to face each morning. She is beginning to resemble a Third World caudilla who knows that the minute she loses power, so too she loses her head.
2) The Clinton Cash Shakedowns
The Clintons left the White House broke, by their own admission, in 2001 and are now worth well over $100 million — lucre apparently predicated on the degree to which corporations and foreign governments believed that the phoenix-like couple would once again return to power, and would remain true to character as punishers of non-contributors and abettors of donors.
The couple founded the Clinton Foundation as a quid-pro-quo money-laundering enterprise designed to sell influence for cash and to keep Clinton, Inc., hangers-on and employees viable in between Clinton presidential runs. The key to the Ponzi scheme was that unlike Carter, Reagan, or the Bushes, the Clinton couple could dangle the idea that Bill was not term-limited by his eight years but could become reincarnated for another two terms under Hillary’s aegis — thus transforming what should have been an emeritus president into a retread with regenerative power to use the office to help or hurt the rich. It would require a suspension of disbelief to assume that companies or foreign governments gave millions of dollars to the Clinton initiative because they wished to help the poor and the sick. All benefactors knew that they were investing in influence, and the Clintons were selling it to the highest bidder in a way never true of any other presidential foundation. Never mind that such coziness with Big Money was antithetical to the progressive pretensions of the Democratic party and the Clintons’ own populist veneer. Each day over the next six months that there is a disclosure about yet another duplicitous donor or yet another pay-to-play scheme, so each day confidence in Hillary’s honesty and integrity erodes further.
Many are the facts that the national media refuses to address. One such fact is that concerning the pattern of violence that’s emerged on the part of the supporters of self-declared “socialist,” Bernie Sanders.
In addition to the fact that they conflict wildly with those held, traditionally, by Americans generally, socialists hold moral beliefs that demand the deployment of the overt coercion of others of those who don’t share those values.
Socialists, intent upon commandeering the resources in person and property of citizens, seek to militarize the countries on which they set their sights. The quintessential illustration of this in our own place and time is the multi-trillion dollar, decades-long redistributionist scheme launched by Lyndon Johnson and deliberately couched in the militaristic language of “war,” i.e. “the War on Poverty.”
But long before anyone had heard of Johnson, one of America’s most famous 20th century philosophers—an unapologetic socialist and self-styled pacifist—recognized that if socialism stood a chance of taking root, it had to appropriate both the language and organization of the “war regime.”
As far back as 1910, William James was writing that those states that were “pacifically organized” must “preserve some of the old elements of army discipline,” for “the war-party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues…are absolute and permanent human goods.”
Thus, they “must be the enduring cement[.]”
James insists that a “permanently successful peace economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy,” that in “the more or less socialistic future towards which mankind seems drifting” humans “must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.”
Obama’s final tour of shame continues with a jaunt to Vietnam. After its Communist leader repeatedly quoted Ho Chi Minh, Obama went to his own anti-American talking points.
For you, that conflict was a bitter memory. But today, Vietnam and America show the world that hearts can change and peace is possible. And we thank Secretary Kerry and all our veterans here today, both Vietnamese and American, who had the courage not only to fight, but, more importantly, had the courage to make peace.
I think oftentimes our veterans can show us the way. One American veteran came here and described meeting a former North Vietnamese soldier. “He came up and shook my hand, and now we’re friends,” this veteran said. “Without the high-powered politicians, people can just get along as human beings.”
It’s clever of Obama to put his agenda in the mouth of some unnamed veteran even while suggesting that American veterans died and were wounded in Vietnam for nothing.
Obama not only fails to acknowledge their sacrifice, but he effectively erases it and replaces it with a Zinnian insistence that the Vietnam War was the work of politicians. But then when you form common cause with Communists, you can’t acknowledge that Communism might be an aggressive and murderous ideology. And that fighting it might be justified.
Obama dismisses the “courage to fight” and replaces it with the “courage to make peace” which is more important. The only Vietnam War veterans worth honoring are appeasers like Kerry.
Dutch politician Geert Wilders is using his popularity and name recognition to support the VoteLeave campaign, which encourages UK citizens to vote for a British exit from the European Union next month — a “Brexit.”
In a conversation with The Sunday Telegraph, Wilders — known for his euro-skepticism and his criticism of Islam — explains that if Brits seize this chance to take back their sovereignty, they could inspire many other EU members to do the same:
Like in the 1940s, once again Britain could help liberate Europe from another totalitarian monster, this time called “Brussels.” Again, we could be saved by the British. If people see that a country can leave, and the lights do not go out, there is not a war, and a country does not go bankrupt, but even flourishes. If Britain proves that this theory can become a reality, it would have an enormous effect.
Although Wilders has consistently been portrayed as an “extremist” and a “racist xenophobe” by the media, the Party for Freedom leader is becoming less controversial. He has not softened his tone — voters are simply siding with him. He now represents a large segment of the Dutch and even the European electorate:
Not so long ago, Mr. Wilders acknowledges, such dreams of a populist revolution would have remained just that — dreams — but as in America, where Donald Trump has caught the establishment flat-footed with his brash appeal to discontented grassroots, Europe’s populists are suddenly ascendant.
Nationalist populism is taking over in Europe as it appears to be doing in the United States with the rise of Donald Trump.
The next administration will face a number of important nuclear policy decisions. On May 13, I invited Franklin Miller, a Principal in the Scowcroft Group, and a former top White House defense official, to discuss these matters before an audience of Congressional staff, senior administration defense and security officials, top staff from defense and security public policy organizations, defense media, defense industry officials and a number of allied embassy colleagues. It was interestingly the 1400th seminar I have hosted on the Hill since 1983 on key defense and national security matters.
Franklin Miller in his prepared remarks extensively addressed the nature of the current debate on future nuclear modernization and whether the US force was obsolete, unaffordable, destabilizing or an obstacle to further arms control. Those remarks were posted recently by Family Security Matters.
However, what has not yet been published is the extensive discussion after his formal remarks. Here, Franklin Miller reviewed five important issues at some length. They were: first, what kind of nuclear posture review should the next administration undertake; second, should the United States consider adopting was in known as a minimal deterrent strategy; third, is nuclear deterrence simply a strategy of what is commonly referred to as “mutual assured destruction”; fourth, should the US switch to a policy of reliance upon tactical nuclear weapons; and fifth, what is the proper role of nuclear deterrence.
Here is an edited transcript of that discussion.
Question: If there was going to be a Nuclear Posture Review in the future, what would you like to see accomplished?
MR. MILLER: If there’s a Nuclear Posture Review, and I’ve testified to this in front of the Senate, I think it should be very, very different from the ones that we’ve had in the past. I don’t believe in a congressionally mandated Nuclear Posture Review. The most successful Nuclear Posture Review that was ever held was held between 1989 and 1991 in the Defense Department, and it resulted — it didn’t go in with this intention, but it resulted in a much improved war plan and a 65 percent cut in our deployed weapons requirements.
When you have all the publicity and hoopla surrounding a Nuclear Posture Review, you create expectations that things have to change. In fact, if you go back and look historically, even though some administrations back in the ‘60s — you know, we went from “strategic sufficiency” to “essential equivalence” and all that — suggested that our policy changed each time a new administration came in, it didn’t happen. U.S. nuclear policy has been remarkably consistent. There’s been some play on the margins with regard to which programs to have in it, but the policy has been consistent. And it’s important that we demonstrate consistency and not raise expectations for change, unless of course radical change would be called for.
But I think the Nuclear Posture Review, such as it is, ought to be conducted within the Pentagon by civilian and military officials. It ought to be briefed to the secretary of Defense and the secretary ought to take any recommendations coming from that to the president, vice president, the national security adviser, you can bring in the secretary of State. And then, and only then, once we’ve established what our nuclear deterrent requirements are, then you bring in the NSC and the State Department to talk about arms control.
Ahmet Davutoglu was a typically Islamist prime minister, except that even his secular rivals admitted that he was an honest man — not corrupt at all. In contrast, Binali Yildirim, who is designated to be the next prime minister, has a different story to tell.
There are suspicions about how the Yildirim family has run its business arm.
Yildirim will leave foreign policy to Erdogan and his inner cabinet exclusively. He will devote most of his time to his number one task: putting together a parliamentary majority, either by horse-trading or by snap polls, in order to introduce the executive presidential system his boss so passionately craves.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the choice of Turkish President and would-be Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan for loyal servant in 2014, stepped down with words that were bitter but not resentful: he will always remain loyal to the sultan, party and “dawa” – the Islamist political cause.
After having been chosen by the Sultan as his first Grand Vizier, not knowing he would have to quit barely 20 months later, Davutoglu read out his government’s program in parliament on Sept. 1, 2014:
“One of the most important prerequisites to sustainable stability in the Middle East is to find a just, comprehensive and viable solution to the Palestinian dispute…. Turkey’s efforts for an end to the human tragedy in Palestine, achievement of sustainable peace in the region and support for the unity government in Palestine will continue on…. Any progress in the process of normalization of ties with Israel, which began after Israel apologized in 2013 for the Mavi Marmara attack, will not be possible unless Israel stopped its military strikes on Gaza and removed restrictions [on Gaza].”
As is almost always the case in Turkish political Islam’s inner roads of intrigue and power struggles, Davutoglu’s fierce pro-Palestinian, anti-Semitic, pro-ummah, neo-Ottomanist dreams failed to keep him afloat in a sea of sharks: his own comrades. On May 5 he announced his decision to take the party leadership to an extraordinary general convention where “he would not run for party chairman and prime minister.”
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