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2016

“Hillary or ‘The Donald?'” Sydney M. Williams

David Brooks’ New York Times column of March 18, “No, Not Trump, Not Ever,” got half the story. The second half should read, “No, Not Hillary, Not Ever.” The fact is voters will likely be faced with a “catch 22” choice. Deciding to not vote, as many I suspect will, is in itself a decision, as William James once reminded us: “When you have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.”

While mainstream media takes glee in pointing out the weaknesses and inanities in Donald Trump’s outbursts, they have whitewashed Hillary Clinton. They view her as flawed, but tout her experience as Secretary of State, a U.S. Senator and as one half of the Bill Clinton Presidency. However, in a recent YouGov poll, Hillary was seen as the least honest and most untrustworthy of all candidates, Republican or Democratic. A mere 9% consider her honest. According to a New York Times/CBS poll, 60% of Republicans are “embarrassed” by their party’s presidential campaign, while only 13% of Democrats are. That tells me Republicans are more honest, realistic and forthcoming than their Democrat counterparts.

Implied in Trump’s favorable poll numbers is an unfavorable view toward Washington’s establishment. Hillary, as a Washington fixture, has a different problem. She’s a bad person. Nevertheless, mainstream media has forgiven her serial lies, her corrupt – and frankly illegal – activities: from cattle futures to Whitewater to Travelgate to her current e-mail travails. They have ignored the fact that the world became more dangerous when she was Secretary of State. They have not fully investigated the Clinton Foundation, which failed to make disclosures about its sources and uses of funds, and have left unanswered questions as to whether there were quid pro quos regarding donations made and favorable deals received by foreign governments. The Clinton’s leveraged their political successes into personal wealth. How different they are from Harry Truman who once wrote: “…the office of the president…doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the American people and its not for sale.” Tell that to the lessors of the Lincoln bedroom.

George Orwell Call Your Office: Marquette Demands Ritual Apology From Embattled Professor By David French

There’s nothing like a good show trial to build confidence in the academy’s commitment to academic freedom. Marquette University is demanding that embattled professor John McAdams apologize for criticizing a colleague as a condition for keeping his job. And what outrage did McAdams commit? He tried to protect the academic freedom and free speech of conservative students:

On November 2014, McAdams, a tenured associate professor of political science, posted an entry on his Marquette Warrior blog describing a recorded conversation between an undergraduate student and the instructor for his “Theory of Ethics” philosophy course. The instructor, Cheryl Abbate, was recorded telling the student that the expression of certain opinions in class was inappropriate because those opinions may be considered offensive to other listeners. Abbate specifically cited the student’s stated opposition to same-sex marriage as a problem.

Abbate’s actions were criticized by readers of McAdams’ blog entry, and her alleged actions received widespread attention from national media. In response, Richard C. Holz, dean of Marquette’s Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, suspended McAdams.

You read that correctly. Rather than discipline the instructor who silenced a conservative student, the university suspended the whistleblower. Now it’s reportedly extending the suspension through the fall 2016 semester and demanding that he apologize as a condition of returning to work. My former colleagues at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) are right to label the forced apology “an age-old inquisitorial tactic used to violate freedom of conscience through compelled speech.”

McAdams — to his immense credit — is not backing down. Here’s his response:

The addition of a demand that we abase ourself and issue an apology and sign a loyalty oath to vaguely defined “guiding values” and to the University’s “mission” is obviously a ploy by Marquette to give the administration an excuse to fire us. They have calculated, correctly, that we will do no such thing.

University Cancels ‘Vagina Monologues’ Because a White Lady Wrote It -Makes sense — being white is pretty bad. By Katherine Timpf

Southwestern University in Texas has canceled its annual production of “The Vagina Monologues” because its author, Eve Ensler, is white — and featuring a performance written by a white lady would just not be inclusive to women of other races.

Instead, the school will host a performance of “We are Women,” which promises to “address similar experiences while emphasizing women of color,” according an article in the Megaphone, the school’s official newspaper.

“I felt that limiting women to only Eve Ensler’s work was doing a disservice to both the women performing and to the audience at large,” Rachel Arco, the sophomore who organized the performance, told the Megaphone.

“This performance will largely be done with works by women of color,” she continued. “In doing so, it will be more representative of the experience of women, rather than only offering the white woman’s experience.”

(After all, we all know that being white is basically the worst thing you can be.)

Obama Equates American and Cuban Revolutions Confusing tyranny with liberty. Humberto Fontova

Right before his first tango in Buenos Aires, President Obama addressed the Cuban people (and the world) in an instantly famous speech from Havana’s Grand Theater. Among the highlights:

“Here’s my message to the Cuban government and the Cuban people: The ideals that are the starting point for every revolution, America’s revolution, Cuba’s revolution, the liberation movements around the world, these ideals find their truest expression, I believe, in democracy.” (U.S. President Obama, Havana Cuba, March 22, 2016.)

Let’s hope this astounding observation resulted from bad staff work. Because, in fact, from the mid-fifties on, both Obama’s recent host (Raul Castro) and his recent mural idol (Che Guevara) were Soviet agents committed to creating a Stalinist Cuba—a vassal to the Communist motherland.

Oh, I know, I know — the media, your professors, the History Channel, Francis Ford Coppola, etc., etc., all claim the Cuban revolutionaries were noble “nationalists” who were pushed kicking and screaming into the arms of Mother Russia by blockheaded Yankee “bullying.”

Europe Still Sleeps, and Europeans Still Die And Europe can’t say it wasn’t warned. Bruce Thornton

While England Slept is the title of Winston Churchill’s 1938 book documenting the failure of England to counter Germany’s rearmament. Despite the gruesome price paid for ignoring Churchill’s warnings, postwar Europe has slumbered for decades while its cultural dysfunctions have nurtured the jihadist violence erupting across Europe. Last week’s attacks in Brussels, coming four months after the Paris attacks that killed 130, suggests there are more attacks to come. According to AP, 400-600 ISIS-trained terrorists are making their way to Europe.

Europe can’t say it wasn’t warned. In 2002 Oriana Fallaci published The Rage and the Pride, a passionate defense of Western civilization and an indictment of those who appease Islamic illiberalism. Ten years ago Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept gave first-hand reports of Europe’s feckless immigration policies that fostered and appeased Muslim radicalism and violence. A year later Claire Berlinski’s Menace in Europe and Melanie Phillips’ Londonistan sounded the same alarms. And there are the dystopian novels of Michel Houellebecq like Platform and last year’s Submission, which link Europe’s cultural and spiritual exhaustion to the rise of homegrown jihadism and Islamization.

An even more important prophet is Bat Ye’or, whose Eurabia (2005) documented “Europe’s evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment secular elements, into a post-Judeo-Christian civilization that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it.” The result is the dhimmi mentality of Europe’s elites, which manifests in word and deed Western inferiority to Islam, and guilt over alleged crimes against the Muslim world.

But a secularized Europe committed to multicultural fantasies and la dolce vita as the highest goods has dismissed these prophets as bigots and “Islamophobes” who distort the “religion of peace.” Yet after the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate in 1923––the “catastrophe” Osama bin Laden mentioned after 9/11–– the theorists of modern jihadism were forthright and plain in expressing the intolerant and triumphalist Islamic beliefs and jihadist imperative consistent with Ye’or’s analysis. Islam’s nature, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna wrote, is “to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations, and extend its power to the entire planet.” Fellow Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb concurred: “Islam has a right to remove all those obstacles which are in its path.” The Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Revolution, agreed: “The great prophet of Islam carried in one hand the Koran and in the other a sword; the sword is for crushing the traitor and the Koran for guidance . . . Islam is a religion of blood for infidels but a religion of guidance for other people.”

John Kerry’s New Terror Treason Befriending Communist terrorists with American blood on their hands. Daniel Greenfield

Stop by your local post office and you might just see a poster of Rodrigo “Timochenko” Londono hanging next to the Most Wanted posters of bank robbers and fugitives. The State Department is offering a $5 million reward for information about the Communist terrorist leader.

But all the State Department had to do was ask Secretary of State Kerry. Obama did the wave with the Cuban dictator and Kerry met with Timochenko , the leader of FARC, a Marxist terrorist organization that appears on his own department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations a little above Al Qaeda.

Timochenko is a Communist who was trained at the USSR’s infamous Patrice Lumumba University. The State Department accuses him of ordering the kidnapping of Americans and responsibility for much of the cocaine that is smuggled into the United States. But none of that bothered Kerry who accepted a signed copy of a memoir by the terror group’s former leader which was addressed to “Senor” Kerry.

The signatures in Kerry’s new keepsake include Pablo Catatumbo, a FARC leader with a $2.5 million reward on his head from the State Department, who is wanted for “the production, manufacture, and distribution of hundreds of tons of cocaine to the United States and the world” and “the murder of hundreds of people who violated or interfered with the FARC’s cocaine policies.”Also signing Kerry’s book was Iván Márquez, who has a $5 million reward on his head for most of the same reasons.

Two of the men sitting opposite John Kerry had been convicted of forcing children to join the terror group as soldiers and sex slaves. FARC runs on thousands of child soldiers and sex slaves. Little girls as young as 7 and 9 were brought into the terror group whose fronts have a “quota” of women to fill. Families that refuse to turn over their daughters to FARC have been massacred as a warning to others.

DHS Secretary: No ‘Specific, Credible Threat’ to U.S. Except ‘Terrorist-Inspired Acts’ By Bridget Johnson (huh???!!!!)see note

Naive or stupid? And this dolt is in charge of homeland security ?rsk

The Homeland Security secretary said that while there is no “specific, credible piece of intel about a plot of the Belgian type here in the United States, we continue to be very concerned about terrorist-inspired acts that could be carried out here in the homeland.”

DHS leader Jeh Johnson told MSNBC today that the administration is “continually concerned about foreign terrorist travel, and we continue to focus on those things.”

“We know from their public calls and from social media and the Internet that ISIL has made efforts and called for attacks here in the homeland,” he said. “And that’s — that’s one of the things we’re focused on right now. Terrorist-inspired attacks are part of the new era that we’re in right now.”

President Obama convened a meeting of “key members of his counterterrorism and homeland security team,” according to the White House, on Monday.

“The President was briefed that there is currently no specific, credible intelligence of any plot to conduct similar attacks here in the United States,” the press secretary’s office said in a readout of the meeting. “The President’s team also updated him on recent expanded information-sharing with international partners and ways that the United States is working to disrupt and counter external plots emanating from ISIL-controlled territory.”

“Additionally, the President received briefings on ongoing efforts to address ISIL’s use of the Internet to recruit followers, incite them to violence, and mobilize them to engage in attacks in the United States and abroad.”

The White House said Obama “directed his team to continue to intensify efforts to degrade and destroy ISIL and to ensure that the United States is doing everything possible to disrupt any ISIL external plotting efforts, including by continuing our strong leadership in the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL.”

Obama told the nation that there was no specific, credible threat against the homeland before and after the Dec. 2 San Bernardino terrorist attack — in statements reassuring Thanksgiving and Christmas travelers.

Johnson said today that “San Bernardino, Chattanooga, the attempt in Garland City, Texas, last year, reflect this new era that we’re in.”

“The FBI has made a number of arrests of those who have been inspired by ISIL’s calls, by al-Qaida’s calls, and that’s what we’re focused on right now in addition to the traditional concerns about aviation,” he said.

The DHS secretary urged Americans to “continue to go to public events, public gatherings, enjoy holidays, freedom to travel, freedom to associate, celebrate our immigrant heritage, but be vigilant and be aware and know that a lot of homeland security and law enforcement officials are working overtime to address the existing threats.”

Obama State Dept. Refuses to Confirm Pakistani Terrorists Targeted Christians on Easter By Debra Heine

State Department spokesman John Kirby refused to confirm “a hundred percent” on Monday what the rest of the world had already figured out: The suicide bombers in Lahore, Pakistan, on Sunday had specifically targeted Christians celebrating Easter. After an initial State Department statement neglected to mention the fact that Christians were targeted, Kirby did acknowledge yesterday that “that certainly appears to have been the case.”

The devastating blast killed more than 70 Pakistanis, 29 of them children, leaving more than 300 wounded.

Separately, at a White House press briefing yesterday, Press Secretary Josh Earnest did acknowledge that Christians were the intended targets of the bombing, but he stressed that most of the victims were Muslims.

Kirby told reporters that he did not have “the fidelity of information to confirm overtly” what the terrorists responsible for the bombing have already admitted.

Ahsanullah Ahsan, a spokesman for Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, the breakaway Taliban faction claiming responsibility for the attacks, told the Associated Press on Sunday that the suicide bomber “deliberately targeted the Christian community celebrating Easter.” He also said the attack was meant to protest Pakistan’s military operation in the tribal regions.

Referring to the State Department’s statement condemning the attack, which conspicuously contained no reference to the targeting of Christians, AP reporter Matt Lee asked, “There’s been some commentary about why you guys didn’t mention either the Easter connection or the Christian connection in your condemnatory statements over the weekend and again today. Do you believe the claim of responsibility that Christians were targeted and are targets?”

“We have no indications that their claims of responsibility are false, though I can’t sit here and confirm it a hundred percent,” Kirby said. “Therefore I have no indications that their, the motivation that they claim was the reason is also false, but this is all going to be investigated by Pakistanis.”

Border Patrol Union: Cartels Cut Hole in Border Fence By Nicholas Ballasy

Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, said criminal cartels recently cut a hole through the fence located on a 10-mile stretch of the border in Arizona.

Judd explained that an agent in Arizona notified him that the area was unmanned for more than two days due to a lack of manpower.

“Criminal cartels were able to go to the fence, cut a hole in the fence, drive two vehicles through that hole and escape. They were able then to put the fence back up and try to hide the cuts that they had made,” Judd said during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing. “The scariest part of those vehicles entering into the United States is we don’t know what was in those vehicles. We have no idea.”

Judd clarified later in the hearing that he misread his notes and that part of the border was actually open for a period much longer than two days.

During last week’s hearing, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) questioned the Obama administration’s claim that the border is more secure than ever. He pointed out that the administration often touts the annual number of apprehensions at the border as proof the border is secured.

“The Government Accountability Process (GAO) has indicated DHS has no official metrics in place to measure whether our border is secure or not, and so those statements are very difficult to comprehend if there are no metrics in place,” he said.

Chairman of the Subcommittee on National Security Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) asked Judd if the apprehensions figure is evidence that the border is secure. Pointing to the holes cut in the fence as an example, Judd said the Border Patrol does not measure the number of people who avoided apprehension and illegally crossed into the U.S.

A Most Successful Experiment By Eileen F. Toplansky

It is difficult to imagine that the largest ongoing social experiment on how to thwart natural instincts continues to reap such rich rewards. It is not only a psychologist’s thought-provoking field of study, it is an anthropologist’s most intriguing investigation concerning child rearing customs. The rituals are time-honored and the results are repeatedly enacted. From a scientific perspective, the experiment has proven exact and predictable.

It begins with strict obedience and respect to the clan organization and permeates every aspect of the world in which these inhabitants occupy. It is characterized by an exacting hierarchy. When the young move from the environs of their home, they have with them the tools that will ensure them a good life both here on earth and in the afterlife.

But, in order for the society to thrive, there are a number of human attributes that must be extirpated for the society to survive. The first is the mother-child bond which, in most parts of the globe, is wholly protective of its young. Yet, in this society this bond must be broken. This is done in incremental steps. The child is taught that there are certain groups which, by their very existence, must be subjugated and eventually exterminated. As children are wont to do, they imitate their elders and when they continually hear and see accolades coming to those who engage in violent activity, it follows that this behavior is the road to success within their society. Unending propaganda that encourages such rage-filled hatred “as one would have for urine and excreta,” (Bawer 91) describes the early training that children acquire as they evolve. And lest their mothers try to teach empathy for other human beings, these same mothers take a chance of being brutally punished for their attempts to be humane. Defeat for the protective and life-affirming mother-child bond comes early.

In fact, in this society which can be found in at least 57 of the world’s nations, children are not considered the builders of a nation but rather are expected to sacrifice their bodies and any future dreams in order to carry out the mandates of their religious elders — mothers’ tears notwithstanding.

The next pivotal attribute of this society is the destruction of the inclination for self-preservation. Being primed to be killing machines, by acting as human sacrificial bombs, children are lauded in this society with exuberant celebrations offered after the sacrifice is made. In fact, the family of the martyred child is rewarded with money for this ultimate act. Pictures of their dead child become important artifacts in local museums and exhibits around the world.

The rites involved are revealed to the children during the period when they are being initiated into these mysteries. Thus, their educational mentors (who were properly trained when they were youngsters) will applaud and praise any actions that will lead to suicide and homicide as the highest goal for the children. In fact, the children become so emotionally invested that crying and beating of their chests is a signal that they have learned their lessons well. Take, for example, young men who are proud to amputate their own hands because they might break the law that binds this society and, thereby, dishonor their god. In fact, the society must continue the destruction of its youth in order to exist. It is actually a human piranha-like relationship, so there is a precedent in the animal world for such behavior.