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July 2018

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Al Sharpton, Donna Brazile Push Dems to Double Down on Harassing Trump Officials By Tyler O’Neil

By on July 5th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/al-sharpton-donna-brazile-push-dems-to-double-down-on-harassing-trump-officials/

On Tuesday, nearly 200 black leaders — mostly women, but including the Rev. Al Sharpton — signed a letter attacking Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for refusing to support Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) in her call for supporters to constantly harass officials in the Trump administration.

“We, the undersigned, write to express our full support for Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who has recently been unjustly attacked by Republicans and Democratic Party leadership for speaking truth to power,” the signatories wrote.

They declared that Waters is an inspiration. “For Black women, who are the most loyal base of the Democratic Party and the Progressive Movement, Congresswoman waters is our shero [sic],” they wrote.

How did Waters inspire them? Late last month, she called for protesters to constantly harass members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet. “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, at a department store, at a gasoline station, you get you and you create a crowd,” Waters declared. “And you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Waters championed reports of “members of this cabinet that are being booed out of restaurants, who have protesters taking up at their house.” She praised protesters for chanting, “No peace! No sleep!”

When President Trump accused her of calling for “harm to my supporters,” Waters shot back, insisting she only supported “peaceful protest.”

“I did not call for harm for anybody. The president lied again,” the congresswoman told MSNBC. While Waters did not advocate for violence against Trump cabinet members, she did urge protesters to harass them and deny them of sleep and peace — which certainly constitutes harm, as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders can tell you.

This call for harm has turned Waters into a celebrity among liberals, according to the black leaders who signed the letter this week. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

UN’s ‘Green Climate Fund’ boondoggle falling apart thanks to President Trump By Thomas Lifson

By on July 5th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/uns_green_climate_fund_boondoggle_falling_apart_thanks_to_president_trump.html

Yesterday, a board meeting of the U.N. Green Climate Fund collapsed in bitterness, failing to approve any funding, and its executive director abruptly resigned. Like so many other global warmist gatherings of well paid officials in luxurious and exotic locales, this one was supposed to share the joy of distributing other people’s money and being praised for it. But President Trump turned off the spigot from the United States Treasury, and nobody else was willing to step up and replace the American cash with his own.

Megan Darby reports in Climate Change News:

Howard Bamsey resigned as executive director of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) with immediate effect on Wednesday, in a bombshell finish to a fraught board meeting.

The Australian cited “pressing personal reasons” in his resignation letter, adding that it was best he leave before the next round of fundraising started.

It came as the four-day meeting in Songdo, South Korea collapsed with no decisions on 11 funding bids worth nearly $1 billion, or on how to top up the flagship climate finance initiative’s dwindling resources.

The resources are dwindling because of President Trump’s pullout from the Paris Climate Accord and his suspension of 2 billion taxpayer dollars slated for the fund:

As well as the US withholding $2bn of its pledge, the pot has lost some $1bn in value due to exchange rate fluctuations since 2014, officials reported.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hezbollah’s Indefinite Presence in Syria by Sirwan Kajjo

By on July 5th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12608/hezbollah-syria

Sirwan Kajjo is a Syrian-Kurdish Washington-based journalist and author.

After more than seven years of fighting alongside the Assad regime in Syria, the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah is highly unlikely to make an easy exit from the war-torn territory, no matter what supposed agreements are reached or promises made.

Hezbollah fighters are now in control of much of Syria’s border with Lebanon. In fact, the Shi’ite terrorist group is in charge of controlling the Lebanese side of the border, despite the presence of the Lebanese military, which is weak.

With no end in sight to Syria’s seven-year war, Hezbollah will undoubtedly continue its military expansion, causing more instability in an already volatile region.

After weeks of shuttle diplomacy allegedly carried out by Russia and Israel, Iranian forces and allied militias — including the so-called “military wing” of the Lebanon-based organization Hezbollah, all of which has been designated as a terrorist group by the US — reportedly began to withdraw from parts of southern Syria, near Israel’s border. According to other reports, however, many Hezbollah fighters, disguised as members of the Syrian army, have simply remained on their bases to escape being targeted by the Israel Air Force. Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Israel’s air force has carried out sporadic strikes against Iranian and Hezbollah bases and convoys across its neighbor on the north. After more than seven years of fighting alongside the Assad regime in Syria, the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah is highly unlikely to make an easy exit from the war-torn territory, no matter what supposed agreements are reached or promises made.

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Germany: ‘Decapitating’ Freedom of the Press? by Stefan Frank

By on July 5th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12618/germany-press-freedom

If it was indeed the authorities’ plan to censor the news and keep the information of the beheading under wraps, then it backfired. Due to the reports about the raid, thousands of people have seen the video, and hundreds of thousands have heard about the botched censorship attempt.

Hamburg’s government is still trying to conceal the beheading. Among other things, they [the AfD party] wanted to know whether the child had been beheaded. The administration — in breach of its constitutional duty — refused to answer. It also censored the questions by blacking out whole sentences.

Why the beheading should be kept a secret is anyone’s guess. What has become clear is how easily authorities in Germany can censor the news and punish bloggers who spread undesired information. They have a vast toolbox of laws at their disposal. It does not seem to bother them that the law invoked in this case stipulates explicitly that it shall not be applied to the “reporting of contemporary events.”

In an apparent attempt to sweep under the rug a recent double homicide in Hamburg, Germany, authorities there censored the story. They also raided the apartments of a witness who filmed a video describing the murder, and a blogger who posted the video on YouTube.

The murder, which made headlines worldwide, occurred on the morning of April 12. The assailant, Mourtala Madou, a 33-year-old illegal immigrant from Niger, stabbed his German ex-girlfriend, identified as Sandra P., and their one-year-old daughter, Miriam, at a Hamburg subway station. The child died at the scene; her mother died later, at the hospital. The woman’s three-year-old son witnessed the murders.

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A Conversation with French Writer Renaud Camus by Grégoire Canlorbe

By on July 5th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12604/renaud-camus-interview

“Europe persists in expiating, or believing they are expiating, the horrors inflicted on Jews during the last war by importing onto its territory millions of people who, as soon as they are here, have nothing more urgent than to inflict horrors on Jews. Racism turned Europe into a field of ruins; anti-racism is making it a hate-filled slum. In both instances, the first victims are the Jews.” — Renaud Camus.

“Europe is a sort of a great Israel, threatened from all sides. Its peoples, alas, are far from showing the same attachment to their land, the same fidelity to their membership, the same spirit of resistance, as the Israelis…. The Israelis have great lessons to give us, as do the Hungarians, the Poles, the Czechs, and now the Austrians.” — Renaud Camus.

Jean Renaud Gabriel Camus, co-founder and President of the National Council of European Resistance, is a French writer known for having coined the phrase “Great replacement” — referring to the reported colonization of Western Europe by immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East.

Grégoire Canlorbe: “Replacement” is, you say, the ideology of the world superclass.[1] Do you see in Emmanuel Macron an agent of the “world superclass”?

Renaud Camus: Ah yes: the best. This is the man from Davos. Indeed, he sets in with great strides what I call the “Direct Davocracy,” the direct management of the human park by the banks, the stateless financiers, and the multinationals.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Heck with Civility—This Is War By Michael Walsh ****

By on July 5th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/05/the-heck-with-civility

At least since the appearance of my book, Rules for Radical Conservatives—originally written under the name and in the voice of my radical leftist character created for National Review, “David Kahane”—I’ve been asked whether I advocate using the same tactics against the Left as they use on us. And my answer is always the same: of course I do.

Treat us with the same contempt with which we treat you. Or, to put it in language you might actually understand: treat us with same respect we give you, which is none.

After all, you don’t see us being nice to you, do you? You don’t see us ever reaching across the aisle, extending the olive branch, blah blah blah. Laurel wreaths are for winners, but olive branches can go pound sand. If a tie, to use the old sports cliché, is like kissing your sister, losing is like… well, don’t make me go there. Remember that poor schmuck Sully in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1985 movie, Commando? You know, the part where Arnold quips: “Remember, Sully, when I promised to kill you last”?

Like Arnold: we lied.

So calls to maintain “civility” in engaging with people who manufacture fake crises and then feed them to the public via their control of the mainstream media, sucker-punch conservatives on street corners, attack patriotic events with Antifa thugs, and otherwise engage in Brownshirt tactics that would do Ernst Röhm proud, are not only asking the impossible, they’re suicidal. There’s no reasoning with them, no reaching across the aisle, no finding common ground with a large political movement—both increasingly emboldened and increasingly desperate—that wishes to destroy every meaningful aspect of the United States of America. In fact, the Democrats, under their new party chairman, Tom Perez, have become a frankly Socialist party, equally in thrall to an aged Soviet red-diaper baby and a fresh-faced imitation of la Passionara named after a city in Egypt.

So it’s them or us—and I’d much rather it’d be them.

We’ve tried civility, and we know from bitter experience it doesn’t work. There is no pacifying the Left, no accommodating it, no buying it off with a bit of appeasement here and there.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The True Meaning of the Pentagon Papers By Hadley Arkes

By on July 5th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/pentagon-papers-spielberg-film-the-post-celebrates-liberal-myths/

Editor’s Note: The following piece originally appeared in City Journal. It is reprinted here with permission. https://www.city-journal.org/html/true-meaning-pentagon-papers-15834.html

Shrouded in liberal mythology perpetuated by a new Hollywood film, the landmark court case was wrongly decided—and has been wrongly remembered.

In Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg offered an account of selfless heroism manifested by the most ordinary of men — a man more pronounced in his vices than his virtues. Oskar Schindler risked everything he had in order to rescue, from the Holocaust, as many of the innocent as he could. It was a story that needed no embellishment.

In his recent film, The Post, Spielberg sets out to tell a story with the sense, again, that the plain facts should speak powerfully for themselves. But here, he has produced a fairy tale. He has offered the narrative that liberals wish to tell themselves, filtering out facts that tell a strikingly different moral lesson. The legend involves the brave owner and editors of the Washington Post. Katharine Graham put herself and the future of her newspaper at risk by doing what even she and her lawyers recognized as a violation of the law: publishing “classified” papers on the war in Vietnam. (The recent controversy over Hillary Clinton and her handling of classified material makes the story sharply relevant.) And what deepened the danger is that her editors were stirring the ire — and the legal resistance — of an administration headed by Richard Nixon.

But then, vindication: The Post could celebrate itself for chalking up a notable victory for the First Amendment, as the government went to court, trying to get an injunction to bar or delay the publication of the papers. When faced with such crises in the past, the government stayed out of court, lest it draw attention to the unwarranted release of secrets. (During World War II, the Chicago Tribune inadvertently published the names of Japanese ships involved in the Battle of Midway. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to put Colonel Robert McCormick, the Tribune’s publisher, in jail for revealing that the U.S. had broken the Japanese code. But if the Japanese had not noticed the article, there was no point in broadcasting it through a public trial.) In the case of the Post, though, the classified documents were dribbling out day by day, drawing ever more attention — and making it clearer that the executive branch lacked control over some of its most sensitive papers on national security.

It’s no small irony that Nixon himself was not inclined to respond to the provocations of the New York Times, which took the lead in publishing the purloined papers. If the papers disclosed any wrongdoing, it concerned the record of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara. Some of the documents could be read to suggest an intention to expand the war in Southeast Asia after LBJ won the election of 1964. And he did win it, in part by painting Barry Goldwater as the candidate ready to trigger a war. But it was Henry Kissinger who jolted Nixon from his studied indifference. According to H. R. Haldeman, Kissinger argued that Nixon did not quite grasp “how dangerous the release of the Pentagon Papers was. . . . The fact that some idiot can publish all of the diplomatic secrets of this country on his own . . . could destroy our ability to conduct foreign policy. If other powers feel that we cannot control internal leaks, they will never agree to secret negotiations.” What Kissinger had in mind were the negotiations then in the works to make the breakthrough with China. Those negotiations were bound up, in turn, with attempts to deal with North Vietnam, steer into the agreements over strategic-arms limitation with the Soviet Union, and handle the delicate dance over Berlin.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Left Can’t Come to Grips with Loss of Power By Victor Davis Hanson

By on July 5th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/progressive-meltdown-left-cannot-cope-with-loss-of-power/There’s no better explanation for the current progressive meltdown.

Key Trump administration officials have been confronted at restaurants. Representative Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) urged protesters to hound Trump officials at restaurants, gas stations, or department stores.

Progressive pundits and the liberal media almost daily think up new ways of characterizing President Trump as a Nazi, fascist, tyrant, or buffoon. Celebrities openly fantasize about doing harm to Trump.

What is behind the unprecedented furor?

Just as Barack Obama was not a centrist, neither is Trump. Obama promised to fundamentally transform the United States. Trump pledged to do the same and more — but in the exact opposite direction.

The Trump agenda enrages the Left in much the same manner that Obamacare, the Obama tax hikes, Obama’s liberal Supreme Court picks, and the Iran nuclear deal goaded the Right.

Yet the current progressive meltdown is about more than just political differences. The outrage is mostly about power — or rather, the utter and unexpected loss of it.

In 2009, Obama seemed to usher in a progressive revolution for a generation.

Democrats controlled the House. They had a supermajority in the Senate. Obama had a chance to ensure a liberal majority on the Supreme Court for years.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Michael Cutler: Immigration Anarchists Vs. National Security Dismantling ICE would lower America’s shields in a dangerous era.

By on July 5th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270632/immigration-anarchists-vs-national-security-michael-cutler
Just when you thought you’d heard and seen it all, members of the Looney Left have shown that there is no end to the insanity and depravity that they would foist upon America and Americans.

Their creation of “Sanctuary Cities” has done incredible damage to national security and public safety by harboring and shielding illegal aliens, including those who have serious criminal convictions from detection by ICE. These bastions of anarchy should be referred to as “Magnet Cities” because they attract international terrorists and fugitives and transnational gang members. In point of fact, Sanctuary Cities Endanger – National Security and Public Safety.

Not content with this insanity, some politicians are now demanding that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) be dismantled altogether, creating a de facto “Sanctuary Country.”

They attempt to justify this lunatic proposal by decrying the separation of illegal alien children from their parents when they are arrested for entering the United States without inspection.

In this Orwellian era, smugglers who assist aliens in entering the United States without inspection are referred to as “Human Traffickers.” Years ago these criminals were referred to as “Alien Smugglers.” In point of fact, I was assigned to the Anti-Smuggling Unit of the New York District Office in the late 1970’s.

There is a major difference in the perceptions created by this deceptive word-smithing, creating the false illusion that somehow these illegal aliens are “victims of human trafficking.”

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Sex, Lies and the Deep State What the affairs of the deep state tell us about it. Daniel Greenfield

By on July 5th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270615/sex-lies-and-deep-state-daniel-greenfield

At the heart of the effort to bring down President Trump were two affairs. Unlike the bizarre lies about Moscow hotel rooms and prostitutes in the Steele dossier that was used by the Clinton campaign and its allies to smear President Trump and generate an investigation against him, these affairs truly took place.

And they didn’t just expose the malfeasance of four people, but of a corrupt political culture.

The affairs between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in the FBI, and between Senate Intelligence Committee security director James Wolfe and New York Times reporter Ali Watkins, did more than betray the spouses of Strzok, Page and Wolfe. They also betrayed the duties of the two men and two women.

The affairs were not private matters. The two illicit sexual relationships were also illicit political arrangements. As the Inspector General’s report noted, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Clinton ally who has since been fired, used Page as his liaison with Strzok to circumvent the chain of command on the investigation. McCabe used Page as his conduit and Watkins’ media employers used the young reporter as a conduit to her older married lover and the leaked information he allegedly provided her.

BuzzFeed, Politico, the Huffington Post and the New York Times were aware of the Watkins affair. As the Times piece on Watkins coolly put it, “Their relationship played out in the insular world of Washington, where young, ambitious journalists compete for scoops while navigating relationships with powerful, often older, sources.” Usually it’s enemy governments that employ young women having an affair with older married government officials to extract information on Intelligence Committee proceedings.

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