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June 2018

MEDIA Comments turned off

Media’s Defense of Ali Watkins Exposes the Swamp By Julie Kelly

By on June 26th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/26/defense-of-ali-watkins-exposes

In an attempt to defend its hiring of Ali Watkins, the young reporter caught having an affair with a now-indicted Senate staffer responsible for protecting some of the country’s most delicate secrets, the New York Times needs the reader to believe several incredible things:

President Trump, the Justice Department, and “right-wing” commentators are the true villains for targeting Watkins;
The affair between James Wolfe, the head of security for the Senate Intelligence Committee and a married man 32 years her senior, and Watkins is just an example of how “complicated” relationships can be in Washington, D.C.;
Watkins’s ties to a powerful man with inside information about people related to the Trump-Russia probe had nothing to do with her being hired by top news organizations, even though she casually shared that information during job interviews;
Despite repeatedly citing unnamed “intelligence officials” in many of her articles, Watkins did not use her lover as a source;
Watkins has been on a two-week “pre-planned” vacation since her ex-boyfriend was arrested on June 7 and charged with lying to the FBI about his relationship with her. (She has worked for the Times for six months.);
Watkins—not people like Carter Page, who she smeared in her reporting thanks to classified gossip from her Scoop Daddy—is the real victim because the feds seized her email and phone records.

Got all that?

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Cooler Heads Need to Prevail on Texas Climate Predictions By Kaya Forest and Sierra Rayne

By on June 26th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/cooler_heads_need_to_prevail_on_texas_climate_predictions.html

For all its positive attributes, the great state of Texas has one major failing: the inability of its mainstream media to rationally discuss climate change. Unfortunately, Texas media are being used to implement the shock doctrine approach to environmental policy.

Back in 2014, one of us (S.R.) discussed this topic specifically in the context of the severe drought that was underway in north Texas. Readers may remember that at the time, Wichita Falls was ground zero for the drought, and its municipal drinking water reservoirs were being drawn down. Residents were understandably concerned.

However, what emerged during this drought was some potentially problematic policy advice from the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas. As S.R. wrote in response at the time:

The point of all this data is that we need to be cautious with precipitation and drought statistics in Texas. Anecdotal writing is more popular in the media today than ever. Sometimes this writing style can be useful, but very often it distorts reality by over-generalizing from an isolated case, in shock doctrine style[.] …

The worst drought conditions in the state from a couple years ago are easing. Although east Texas is almost out of drought, everywhere else is still in a significant drought – but if trends continue, the pressure may lift over the next couple years. Now simply isn’t the time to create comprehensive and far-reaching water policy in shock doctrine style. Following the advice of Rahm Emanuel to “never let a good crisis go to waste” will not lead Texas in the direction it needs to go, particularly when I see statements by the George W. Bush Institute such as “the trick is finding the right balance between planning and property rights.”

Discussions over property rights are never best conducted when a crisis is at hand. Wait until the drought crisis settles down – which it undoubtedly will – and then begin examining proposals over this very contentious topic (especially in Texas, where property rights issues are taken more seriously than almost anywhere else)[.] …

Patience is needed in the Lone Star State on water policy. Avoid the shock doctrine.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Sultan Erdogan: Invincible and Doomed By Alex Alexiev

By on June 26th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/sultan_erdogan_invincible_and_doomed.html

By far the most interesting thing about Sunday’s Turkish elections was the endless speculations by pundits left and right about what would happen if Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were to lose. These clueless if numerous pontificators forgot to ask themselves a simple question: when was the last time an Islamist dictator in full control of state power lost an election? Mindless as they are, these idle meditations have little to tell us about Turkey but a lot about the West’s (and Europe’s, especially) failure or unwillingness to understand what Erdoğan is and is all about. For NATO and the West, the inevitable harsh payment due is just around the corner.

In the meantime, Turkey has a new sultan who can and will do whatever he seemingly wants – except that the time of sultans is long past, and this one is preprogrammed for failure.

In the old Ottoman days, upon the anointment of the new sultan, all male pretenders were dispatched with a silken cord. Now they are simply put in jail as “terrorists.” In the old days, all the sultan had to do was run to the largely ignorant ulema to be told why introducing the printing press is a great sacrilege, but it took centuries for the empire to become the “sick man of Europe” and a technological and military anachronism. Today, the sultan is forced to dispatch his flunkies to the captains of finance in London to explain why raising the despised interest rates sharply will calm the markets and to plead for continued funds flow.

Herein lies the new sultan’s ineluctable vulnerability and the cause of his inevitable demise. A dyed-in-the-wool Islamist, he depends for the very economic survival of the obscurantist polity he is building on the hated Western secular society and markets. Take away his privileges as a member of the European Customs Union, and Turkey becomes but a run-of-the-mill Middle Eastern satrapy. It is a match made in Islamist Hell, and that is where it will end. Unlike with the old Ottoman empire, a version of which he is trying to recreate, it will not take long.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Double Injustice Throws a Scare into the Nation’s Judges By David Solway

By on June 26th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/a_double_injustice_throws_a_scare_into_the_nations_judges.html

The June 5 voter recall of Judge Aaron Persky once again brings the Brock Turner 2015 rape case fiasco into the news. Turner, a student-athlete at Stanford, was prosecuted and sentenced for sexually assaulting a young woman at a drunken frat party. The particulars of the case were ambiguous from the start. Both participants in the sexual encounter were heavily intoxicated, and the woman claimed not to remember what had happened. No one saw the two leave the fraternity house. Turner was fully clothed when he was spotted lying on, and presumably molesting, the woman, AKA “Emily Doe,” by two passing Swedish bicyclists in the early hours of the morning – not an especially good time, given the hour and a nocturnal peloton, for accurate observation.

Many other elements of the case were equally problematic: the woman was already in a state of partial inebriation when she was driven – irresponsibly, in my opinion – by her mother to the party; she chatted to her boyfriend on her cell phone just prior to leaving with Turner on their midnight rendezvous, indicating that she was still more or less compos; the police report swarmed with lurid assumptions that could not be proven or were merely inferential; and much more, detailed both in my previous article and my wife Janice Fiamengo’s video on the subject.

Anyone interested in the truth should examine the court documents, all 471 pages, replete with inconsistencies, unverifiable interpretation, bias, conjecture, and twisted logic, before rendering judgment. Here is where the crux of the issue resides, not in the stanchless profusion of articles, blogs, reports, tweets, and Facebook postings that minister to unfounded righteous indignation and accusations of rape or assault. The lede in The Independent, to take just one example among many, already assumed Turner’s guilt and the judge’s complicity, calling the sentence “lenient” and Turner a “rapist” – the first a matter of opinion and the latter provably false.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Pompeo on What Trump Wants An interview with Trump’s top diplomat on America First and ‘the need for a reset.’Walter Russell Mead

By on June 26th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pompeo-on-what-trump-wants-1529966363

Is the Trump administration out to wreck the liberal world order? No, insisted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in an interview at his office in Foggy Bottom last week: The administration’s aim is to align that world order with 21st-century realities.

Many of the economic and diplomatic structures Mr. Trump stands accused of undermining, Mr. Pompeo argues, were developed in the aftermath of World War II. Back then, he tells me, they “made sense for America.” But in the post-Cold War era, amid a resurgence of geopolitical competition, “I think President Trump has properly identified a need for a reset.”

Mr. Trump is suspicious of global institutions and alliances, many of which he believes are no longer paying dividends for the U.S. “When I watch President Trump give guidance to our team,” Mr. Pompeo says, “his question is always, ‘How does that structure impact America?’ ” The president isn’t interested in how a given rule “may have impacted America in the ’60s or the ’80s, or even the early 2000s,” but rather how it will enhance American power “in 2018 and beyond.”

Mr. Trump’s critics have charged that his “America First” strategy reflects a retreat from global leadership. “I see it fundamentally differently,” Mr. Pompeo says. He believes Mr. Trump “recognizes the importance of American leadership” but also of “American sovereignty.” That means Mr. Trump is “prepared to be disruptive” when the U.S. finds itself constrained by “arrangements that put America, and American workers, at a disadvantage.” Mr. Pompeo sees his task as trying to reform rules “that no longer are fair and equitable” while maintaining “the important historical relationships with Europe and the countries in Asia that are truly our partners.”

The U.S. relationship with Germany has come under particular strain. Mr. Pompeo cites two reasons. “It is important that they demonstrate a commitment to securing their own people,” he says, in reference to Germany’s low defense spending. “When they do so, we’re prepared to do the right thing and support them.” And then there’s trade. The Germans, he says, need to “create tariff systems and nontariff-barrier systems that are equitable, reciprocal.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Racial Gerrymanders Rebuked The Supreme Court calls foul on a voting-rights gambit in Texas.

By on June 26th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/racial-gerrymanders-rebuked-1529968160

Liberals have weaponized the Voting Rights Act and sometimes found support from a conflicted Supreme Court. But a 5-4 majority on Monday pushed back hard against the left’s gambit in Texas to use the law to racially gerrymander legislative districts.

At issue in Abbott v. Perez were the state legislature’s 2013 Congressional and state House maps. After liberal groups sued to block the legislature’s 2011 redistricting plans, the Supreme Court ordered a lower court to redraw the maps for the 2012 election. The legislature then adopted the lower court’s maps with a few nips and tucks.

But lo, liberal plaintiffs contended the new maps were still “tainted” by bias, and a three-judge panel last summer gave the state what amounted to an ultimatum: Redo the maps or we will. Texas sought relief from the High Court, which showed sympathy to most of the state’s claims.

Writing for the majority, Samuel Alito explains that the Court has held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act commands states to provide minorities equal opportunity to elect the candidate of their choice. But the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment also “forbids ‘racial gerrymandering,’” and prohibits “intentional ‘vote dilution.’” In other words, legislatures must consider race, but not too much.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Bois d’ébène: Slave trade replay: Nidra Poller

By on June 26th, 2018

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/bois-debene-slave-trade-replay/

Fake news, fake metaphors, fake emotions, real human trafficking

Bois d’ébène…it’s the French expression for the slave trade — ebony-black human beings stacked like wood, loaded into the stinking hold and shipped across the seas to serve as slave labor. Today, the image is replayed before the eyes of the world. But the clearly visual reality is twisted into a Shoah narrative. The St. Louis desperately roaming the seas in search of a safe harbor. We were wrong then, we sent the Jews to their death, so we will be right now, and give refuge to these new Jews streaming out of Africa.

And the slave ship is called the Aquarius! No, it isn’t the dawning of an age of peace & love. No, it has nothing to do with six million European Jews trapped in the killing fields, all doors closed to them, including the Gates of Palestine. No, these are not refugees fleeing war in Syria. Look at them! See their black-is- beautiful cargo. In this modern age of Equal Opportunity Intl. the slave traders aren’t cruel white men. They’re dark or black….perhaps Muslim? CNN did an excellent undercover report on the way these Africans are treated by the slave traders in Libya. The women are systematically and repeatedly raped. The men are beaten and tortured. Some are sold into slavery there, others shipped to Europe and who cares what becomes of them? Families pay a fortune to send one member to Europe. But once the poor souls get to Libya, the evil dealers blackmail the families, demand more money to the tune of their victims’ screams, and credible death threats against those back home.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Left must practice what they preach Adriana Cohen

By on June 26th, 2018

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/adriana_cohen/2018/06/left_must_practice_what_they_preach

Liberals put out yard signs that say “Hate Has No Home Here,” yet these are some of the very same phonies who are practicing hate and discrimination themselves on a regular basis.

Talk about hypocrisy.

Take the Red Hen in Lexington, Va. On Friday, Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders — an educated, professional working mom — went to the restaurant but was booted by its liberal owner for simply working for the Trump administration.

How is this type of hate and blatant discrimination any different from a pre-Civil Rights Act restaurant in rural America refusing service to black patrons? Or if a modern-day restaurant were to refuse to serve an openly gay couple?

It’s not. Discrimination is discrimination, whether that’s refusing service for one’s skin color, religion, sexual orientation, marital status or political affiliation.

It’s also an assault on the core pillars of a democracy. A political system that supports a plurality of political parties voters can choose from. One that distinguishes America from one-party dictatorships under Communist regimes.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Who’s Really to Blame at the Border? The current distress and hysteria is the fault of illegal aliens and their enablers in the courts. Heather Mac Donald

By on June 25th, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/html/whos-really-blame-border-15986.html

So it was a ruse. The hysteria over the separation of illegal-alien asylum-seekers from their children (or their purported children) was in large part pretextual. The real target of rage was the Trump administration’s policy of prosecuting all illegal border-crossers for the federal misdemeanor of illegal entry.

In April, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero-tolerance” policy for illegal entry. Henceforth, virtually all aliens caught entering the country illegally would be held for prosecution, rather than being released on their own recognizance for a later noncriminal deportation proceeding, to which few ever showed up. (This new enforcement policy would have come as a surprise to anyone who had fallen for the advocates’ decades-long lie that illegal entry is not a crime.) Under the new policy, even if the adult had brought a child with him across the border—the usual accoutrement of an asylum-seeker, for reasons explained below—the adult would still be prosecuted. The adult would be held in a U.S. marshal’s facility pending trial, while the child would be placed in a dormitory run by the U.S. Health and Human Services department, since children cannot be held in criminal lockups.

Images of child border-crossers, separated from their adult companion and crying or looking upset—and the experience would undoubtedly be traumatic for most young children—triggered nonstop coverage of Trump administration cruelty. MSNBC and CNN set up border encampments from which reporters and pundits pontificated on the child-separation crisis. Nazi and Holocaust analogies flew around the Internet; faculty petitions invoked the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Mexico and four other Latin American countries filed a human rights complaint against the U.S. Politicians and religious leaders lined up to denounce White House racism and anti-immigrant hatred.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Angela Crashes Jed Babbin

By on June 25th, 2018

https://spectator.org/angela-crashes/
If she’s remembered beyond this fall’s elections, it’ll be as the anti-Charlemagne.

ince 2005, sitting atop Europe’s strongest economy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has led her nation and the European Union. Upon the advent of President Trump’s term in office, the media quickly proclaimed her the new leader of the free world.

Mrs. Merkel’s power is not just derivative of Germany’s but also of her dedication to and support for the European Union, of which many member countries grant her near total support.

In 2008, Merkel was awarded the Charlemagne Prize, given each year by the German city of Aachen, Charlemagne’s ancient capital, to the person whose actions most greatly support European unity.

Charlemagne, in the Eighth and Ninth Century, conquered most of Europe, uniting it by force. He tried to expel the Muslims from Spain in the year 778 and was defeated. He later succeeded in reaching as far as Barcelona, but could not drive the Muslims from Europe.

Merkel is now in the political fight of her life, her chancellorship in jeopardy as a result of her immigration policies and their rejection in large parts of Germany and a growing number of EU members. For all her efforts to promote unity among European Union members, her immigration policy has made her the anti-Charlemagne.

This week, Merkel faces what could be her final political crisis, brought about by German and European rebellion against her open-door immigration policy. In 2015, when she proclaimed an open door to “Syrian” (really all Middle Eastern and African) immigrants, more than a million flocked to Germany and the rest of Europe. Almost half as many came in 2016, and the flow continues.

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