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2016

A Harvard student’s open letter to the delicate flowers of the Ivy League By Jacob Russell

So your candidate lost. You have a right to be upset, frustrated and angry, but you also have an obligation to be respectful to others and to the will of the American people. Intellectual hypocrisy continues every day on campuses, where opinions that are not the norm are vilified or silenced.

Imagine if you treated people of different races as you treat people with different opinions. There would be a tremendous outcry! But somehow it is fine to discriminate against those with different views.

Did it ever occur to you that this may be why people voted for Trump? That it might not have been the â€racist proclivities of the U.S. or the dangerous nationalism of the people, but that it was people who tell them not to think or speak the way they do.

Trump won, and he did not overthrow the government or kill people to silence them. He won in the standard fashion by gettinng 270 votes in the Electoral College. As I said, you have a right to be upset, but what we have on our hands now is an embarrassment.

And this does not lie only with the undergrads. Universities themselves are making all types of provisions to coddle those who have been traumatized by the will of the American people. At Harvard, the Introduction to Economics midterm was made optional; the reason provided was that the election results came in too late, but we all know it would have been mandatory if Clinton had won by 10 p.m., as expected.

If the faculty was worried about students not getting enough sleep the night before the exam, then the exam should have been scheduled for a different day. A note to all faculty: If you did not know, the election is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. It was going to go one way or the other, and the undergrads and faculty should have known that and been prepared for any result. The Economics Department’s decision to make the midterm optional has set a bad precedent. Does this mean that whenever someone is upset, he/she can opt out of taking an exam? If you had the hubris to make the midterm the day after the election, you should have stuck with your decision instead of capitulating to the hysteria of the Flowers.

Distorting the Iran-Deal Bill A pair of Corker apologists distort the record on Congress’s review of Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement By Andrew C. McCarthy

When a couple of lawyers lecture you about your “fundamental misunderstanding of our Constitution and the relative powers of Congress and the president in foreign policy,” ask yourself this: Have they cited the provisions of constitutional or statutory law they claim you’ve misunderstood? If not, if they’re hiding the ball, you’re probably being conned. Alas, that is the case with the disingenuous defense of Senator Bob Corker’s Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015 (INARA), offered on Thursday by Lester Munson and Jamil Jaffer, two former staffers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which Corker chairs.

The senator’s nose is out of joint over a National Review editorial this week. With his name among those being floated to be appointed secretary of state in the Trump administration, the editors observed that Corker “was last seen facilitating President Obama’s Iran-deal path through Congress, in one of the prime exhibits of GOP fecklessness in recent years.”

Truer words were never spoken. Professors Munson and Jaffer try in vain to paper over this fact, replaying the sleight-of-hand their former boss has spun since first proposing the woeful INARA. They misstate both the law and the position of INARA naysayers — of whom, I am proud to say, I was among the most ardent.

Let’s deal first with the matter of misrepresenting the naysayers. Contrary to the professors’ claim, it is not true that “many people think Congress ought to have ‘forced’ the president to submit the Iran deal as a treaty.” Nor do Corker’s detractors believe “Congress should have ‘made’ the Iran deal a treaty.” Congress has no power to coerce the president to comply with the Constitution’s treaty clause (art. II, sec. 2, cl. 2), a provision the authors take pains to avoid addressing.

What we in the opposition argued is that, if Congress does not undermine it, the Constitution is plenty strong enough to foil the ambitions of a rogue president. True, Congress cannot compel the president to execute our law faithfully. But if the president is derelict in his duty to submit an international agreement to the Senate for its approval, or to the full Congress for implementation as ordinary legislation, then the agreement will not have the force of American law. It remains a mere executive agreement between the president and other chiefs of state. That means it may be rescinded at any time, by either the president who entered it or a successor president.

Islamic Terrorists not Poor and Illiterate, but Rich and Educated by Giulio Meotti

“The better young people are integrated, the greater the chance is that they radicalize. This hypothesis is supported by a lot of evidence”. — From a report by researchers at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

“The proportions of [Islamic State] administrators but also of suicide fighters increase with education,” according to a World Bank report. “Moreover, those offering to become suicide bombers ranked on average in the more educated group.”

Britain’s MI5 revealed that “two-thirds of the British suspects have a middle-class profile and those who want to become suicide bombers are often the most educated”.

Researchers have discovered that “the richer the countries are the more likely will provide foreign recruits to the terrorist group [ISIS].”

The West seems to have trouble accepting that terrorists are not driven by inequality, but by hatred for Western civilization and the Judeo-Christian values of the West.

For the Nazis, the “inferior race” (the Jews) did not deserve to exist; for the Stalinists, the “enemies of the people” were not entitled to continue living; for the Islamists, it is the West itself that does not deserve to exist.

It is anti-Semitism, not poverty, that led the Palestinian Authority to name a school after Abu Daoud, mastermind of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics.

“There is a stereotype that young people from Europe who leave for Syria are victims of a society that does not accept them and does not offer them sufficient opportunities… Another common stereotype in the debate in Belgium is that, despite research which refutes this, radicalization is still far too often misunderstood as a process resulting from failed integration… I therefore dare say that the better young people are integrated, the greater the chance is that they radicalize. This hypothesis is supported by a lot of evidence.”

How Trump Can Completely Withdraw U.S. From UN ‘Climate’ Deals By Tom Harris

President-elect Donald Trump has said he will cancel American involvement in the Paris Agreement on climate change. Commentators have pointed out that, under the treaty’s rules, Trump would need to wait three years from the date on which it came into force, November 4, 2016, to officially notify the United Nations of U.S. cancellation. Even then, the withdrawal will not take effect until one year later.

However, there is a faster, more effective way for the U.S. to exit the Paris Agreement.

The above guidelines are indeed within the Paris Agreement — but UN climate agreements are actually based on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC).

The FCCC was signed by President George H. W. Bush and other world leaders at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Per the FCCC, signatory countries are given the option of quitting provided they wait three years from the date on which the Convention came into force, March 21, 1994, with the withdrawal to take effect one year later.

So the U.S. could exit the FCCC one year after officially notifying the UN, which it can do at any time.

Most importantly, exiting the FCCC would remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement as well. Read the crucially important phrase from Article 25 of the FCCC:

Any Party that withdraws from the Convention shall be considered as also having withdrawn from any protocol to which it is a Party.

THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS NOVEMBER 19, 1863

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground.

The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Donald Trump Taps Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo as CIA Director The congressman is one of the harshest critics of the Iran nuclear deal By Felicia Schwartz see note please

JUST FOR THE RECORD: This is where Mike Pompeo stands on Israel

Withhold UN funding until voluntary and program-specific. (Aug 2011)
Rated -5 by AAI, indicating an anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record(May 2012)
Oppose Arms Treaty that limits gun trade to Israel & Taiwan. (Nov 2012)
President-elect Donald Trump said Friday he will nominate Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which would place the former Army officer and five-year member of Congress at the helm of the spy agency that has been heavily involved in global counterterrorism operations since the 2001 terror attacks.

Name: Mike Pompeo Age: 52Education: U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Harvard Law School

Background: After graduating from West Point, Mr. Pompeo served as a cavalry officer “patrolling the Iron Curtain” before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he served with the 2nd Squadron, 7th Cavalry in the Fourth Infantry Division, according to the biography on his congressional website. He went to Harvard after he left active duty, later returning home to Kansas to run two small businesses before he was elected to the House in 2010 as part of the tea-party wave. He is a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, and he was a member of the special committee investigating the 2012 attacks on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

Outlook: Mr. Pompeo would take the reins of the CIA as Mr. Trump said on the campaign trail he wanted to bring back the practice of harsh interrogation methods including waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse,” as well as refilling the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with prisoners.
Those views have prompted some concern among former military officers and intelligence officials. The current CIA director, John Brennan, in 2014 publicly distanced the agency from its use of the controversial interrogation techniques after a scathing Senate report found them to be ineffective.

While in Congress, Mr. Pompeo emerged as a staunch critic of the Obama administration’s pursuit of an agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. After Republicans failed to scuttle the deal, Mr. Pompeo became active in the push to hold Iran to account for noncompliance and repeatedly has pledged to work to undo the deal. At the CIA, he would have more access to secret information about Iran’s activities since the deal took effect earlier this year. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Emerging Trump Cabinet The first three picks go to loyalists amid signs of political outreach.

Donald Trump’s transition seems to be emerging from its early turmoil, and on Friday he filled three important jobs with campaign loyalists. More encouraging is that he appears to be looking for figures of stature outside his inner circle.

The President-elect has a penchant for rewarding political loyalty, and that has paid off for Jeff Sessions as Mr. Trump’s choice for Attorney General. The Alabama Republican was the first sitting Senator to endorse Mr. Trump, and he and aide Stephen Miller refined the candidate’s populist message and defended him through the squalls.

If there’s any doubt that Mr. Trump will follow through on his immigration promises, the choice of Mr. Sessions puts that to rest. He opposes illegal and most legal immigration, including H-1B visas for high-skilled professionals. He’ll oversee the civil-rights division and immigration courts, and let’s hope Mr. Sessions’s governance will be more tolerant than his anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Then again, Mr. Sessions is an accomplished lawyer who has served as a U.S. Attorney and state AG. His opposition to President Obama’s executive immigration orders were grounded in his separation-of-powers constitutionalism more than mere politics. He has also joined with Democrats in pursuing criminal-justice reform.

Progressives are nonetheless already smearing Mr. Sessions as a racist, but that’s what they say about every Southern Republican. In 1986 a Joe Biden-Ted Kennedy special derailed the young lawyer from Mobile for a federal judgeship with innuendo and hearsay. Modern liberals may be surprised to learn that Mr. Sessions helped to desegregate Alabama public schools as U.S. Attorney, and he won a death-penalty conviction for the head of the state KKK in a capital murder trial. The 1981 case broke the Klan in the heart of dixie.

ALT-LEFT DELETE : RUTHIE BLUM

The term “alt-right,” which nobody had heard of until the unexpected emergence and rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election campaign, has become all the rage, literally and figuratively. Indeed, it is now the angry go-to explanation in every analysis of the Republican candidate’s ostensibly miraculous victory on November 8. And it is the key buzzword of the fever-pitched brouhaha surrounding Trump’s appointment of Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon as his chief strategist.

One the main arguments against Bannon — at times a self-described promoter of the alt-right message — is that he, like the neo-Nazi Trump-supporting trolls on Twitter, is an anti-Semite. Though this is patent nonsense, as the evidence raised to prove it is flimsy at best, it is one of those labels that enables both liberals and anti-Trump conservatives to kill two birds with one stone: Bannon and the man who elevated him to a highly important and coveted post.

The intellectual pitfall for mainstream conservatives here is plain. Whatever their position on Bannon, they are aware that Trump’s stunning victory not only in the race for the Oval Office, but in that of both houses of Congress — cannot be attributed to a fringe group of right-wingers with no formal homogeneous ideology. Within this loose category are white supremacists who hate Jews, blacks, gays and any member of the Right who has a nuanced view of everything from immigration to abortion. But these are a tiny minority in America as a whole, and played less of a role in the election of Trump than they and their detractors would love to imagine.

Others who are lumped into that label are people — like myself — who consider the decline of American power to be a danger both domestically and internationally, and desperately wanted the new style of Democrats — those who radicalized the party of Scoop Jackson into oblivion — out of office. We are right-wingers who believe in individual enterprise and ideological freedom. We believe that the federal government should not be dictating the rules of personal moral engagement or funding our choices. We want academia to be a place for the advanced study of humankind in all its facets and history — a space for the education and maturation of each new generation of young adults who will be faced with the often unpleasant task of making their way in the world with nothing but a set of tools in their satchel to give them a sense of their otherwise good fortune to be doing this in the United States, and not in Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela or Mexico, to name but a few examples.

Obama’s Never-Ending Lecture Tour Walter Russel Meade

WASTED WORDS

President Obama, who has done less for Europe than any American President since Calvin Coolidge, cannot stop telling Europeans what to do. As Obama sets out on his final European tour as President, with his political party back home in a state of near collapse, and with Putin inflicting yet another painful humiliation on the least successful American President in the history of the modern Middle East, nothing seems able to shake his serene confidence that he knows more than other people, sees farther than they do, and that other people are eager to gather up his pearls of insight.
Here is the Wall Street Journal on Obama’s trip to Greece:

President Barack Obama urged Europe to resolve lingering issues from its debt crisis, saying on Tuesday that leaders should favor growth over austerity, as part of their response to the rising populism in Western countries exemplified by the election of Donald Trump.
Mr. Obama made the appeal after meeting with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who said it is time for Greece to receive significant debt relief from Europe.Mr. Obama said European leaders should follow economic policies that ease some of the voter backlash against globalization, as they grapple with political trends similar to those behind Mr. Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election.

Not everything Obama is recommending to Europe is bad, but his words no longer have a significant impact from a continent battered first by his failures in foreign policy and now by the collapse of his legacy at home. Obama will be remembered by historians as the man who turned over the White House to Donald Trump, the man who let Putin unleash the forces of Hell in Syria and Ukraine, and the man who honored European values but made the world steadily less safefor them.
That Putin took the occasion of Obama’s final tour to open a widenew air offensive in Syria and withdraw from the ICC even as his allies celebrated victories in Estonia, Moldova and Bulgaria only underlines what a foreign policy disaster the 44th President has been. Many world leaders like Obama; some pity him; few respect him as a leader (rather than as a man); none fear him. Most are too busy coping with the consequences of his failures to spend a lot of time thinking about him at this point in his presidency. Even Germany, whose cheering crowds once greeted Obama as an enlightened internationalist in the mold of John F. Kennedy, has gradually lost faith in the President.The early signs of struggle and factionalism in the Donald Trump transition, meanwhile, are leading many foreigners to suppose that the next American President will be another inconsequential bumbler. We must hope that they are wrong; not even the power of the United States can survive a long string of failed Presidents unscathed.

No Trojan Horses Inside the Tower By:Srdja Trifkovic

Contrary to the MSM pack’s pitch of the week, there is no “disarray” inside Donald Trump’s transition team, no “Stalinesque” purges, and most certainly no successful insinuation of “adults” (Deep State operatives) into the list of early major appointees. They are all excellent.
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions as Trump’s attorney general, Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo as his chief of the CIA, and retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn as the national security adviser will be loyal team players who share the incoming President’s vision of America’s future in general, and her true geostrategic interests in particular. The discredited MSM’s hysterics notwithstanding, the former two will be duly confirmed by the GOP controlled Senate. (Flynn needs no confirmation.)

Sessions (69)—the first Senator to support Trump last February—said he was honored to “enthusiastically embrace President-elect Trump’s vision for ‘one America,’ and his commitment to equal justice under law.” To Sessions this will mean no amnesty, no “dreamers,” no “sanctuaries,” and no exceptions. He knows that illegal aliens have no constitutional rights, and he will act upon that knowledge. After that Jihadist’s gay club slaughter in Orlando last June he pointed out—en passant—that more than 90% of recent Muslim immigrants are on food stamps and almost 70% on cash welfare. A good man. He has “sparked controversy” indeed, but only within the devastated ruins of the Duopoly. He will breezily sail through the nomination process (and forget his alleged “racist remarks”): Even Ted Cruz (a rumored rival for the post) called his nomination “great news for all of us who revere the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Mike Pompeo, top-of-the-class West Point valedictorian and a Harvard Law School graduate, was a beneficiary of the Tea Party 2010 midterm blitz. He is skeptical of the Iran nuclear deal (a minor flaw) who knows the score on the September 2011 Benghazi affair (a major insight into the Deep State’s self-defeating shenanigans). Pompeo will not fine-tune intelligence analysis to conform with the Beltway “foreign policy community” imperial consensus. He will let the pros do their job: Had they been able to do so in 2002-2003, there would have been no Iraq disaster. He is, of course, another “troubling” and “controversial” choice as far as the losers are concerned, but that does not matter any longer. He will be confirmed.