Displaying posts published in

August 2018

There Is Nothing ‘Illegitimate’ About The Brett Kavanaugh Nomination Democrats keep creating a make-believe constitutional order.By David Harsanyi

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/23/there-is-nothing-illegitimate-about-the-brett-kavanaugh-nomination/

Perhaps one day a court will find that Donald Trump had conspired with his personal lawyer Michael Cohen to pay non-disclosure agreements meant to silence his mistresses. Perhaps one day the House will impeach Trump for breaking those campaign finance laws, and then, maybe the Senate will also remove him from office.

Those are the mechanisms that have been provided by the Constitution to thwart a president from nominating justices to the Supreme Court. I’m afraid there’s no clause in the document that empowers angst-y liberal pundits and politicians to question the legitimacy of duly confirmed justices.

But much like their ideal Supreme Court, Democrats have set about fabricating brand new extra-constitutional standards that happen to always align with their partisan aims. Their latest concocted stipulation states that anyone nominated by a president under suspicion of criminality becomes “illegitimate.”

Democratic Sens. Mazie Hirono and Ed Markey canceled meetings this week with prospective Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Markey said the nominee was “illegitimate” because the president was “all but named as a co-conspirator.” A similar sentiment was repeated by many Democrats and liberal pundits. The Supreme Court itself, contends The New York Times’ Paul Krugman, would become “fundamentally illegitimate.”

The Last Victim By Rael Jean Isaac

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/09/10/the-last-victim/

On January 23, 2014, the Florida Parole Commission sent Frank Fuster a letter informing him that, owing to a recent policy change, it had determined that his initial interview was scheduled for March 2134. No, that isn’t a misprint. His first parole hearing is scheduled in 120 years. And this for a crime that, by any fair reading of the evidence, not only did Fuster not commit but never even happened.

Thirty-three years ago, Fuster, along with his young wife, Ileana, was convicted of sexually abusing children at his suburban Florida home, where Ileana provided day care. He is the last person charged in the mass sex-abuse-in-day-care scares that made headlines from the 1980s to the mid ’90s to remain in prison. Part of a broader obsession with child sex abuse — therapist-induced repressed “memories” of incest destroyed thousands of families — the day-care cases were a modern version of the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, down to allegations of Satanic rituals by caregivers. They stand as a warning to those who look condescendingly at our Salem ancestors, incredulous that judges and public alike would believe girls writhing and shrieking that they were at that moment being pinched by the accused sitting far away in the dock. As a young attorney, Robert Rosenthal cut his teeth on the day-care cases, winning reversals on appeal in a number of them.

Dershowitz: Candidate Entitled To Pay Hush Money, Committed No Election Crime By Ian Schwartz

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/08/22/dershowitz_candidate_entitled_to_pay_hush_money_committed_no_election_crime.html

Alan Dershowitz said the only campaign violation that could have happened is if former Trump attorney Michael Cohen did break a campaign finance law on his own volution and called the situation a “Catch-22” on MSNBC this afternoon.

MSNBC HOST: Can I ask about a couple things, Alan? .. You said last night, ‘All Cohen has to do is say the president directed me to do it. That’s the kind of embellishment people put on a story when they want to avoid dying in prison.’ Are you suggesting Cohen lied under oath?

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Well, we don’t know. All we know is what Judge Ellis said.

Judge Ellis said is when you put pressure on somebody like Cohen, there is an incentive to embellish the story and make it better because he’s now facing 4 years. So if he comes up with strong evidence against the president that will be reduced to 2 years, 3 years, or 1 year. …

I have no idea whether Cohen is telling the truth or not, but the interesting thing is, if Cohen is telling the truth it’s a catch-22 for the prosecution. Let me lay this out for 60 seconds…

Here’s the issue: The president is entitled to pay hush money to anyone he wants during a campaign. There are no restrictions on what a candidate can contribute to his own campaign. So if, in fact, the president directed Cohen to do it as his lawyer and was going to compensate him for it, the president committed no crime. if Cohen did it on his own —

Despite Comey Assurances, Vast Bulk of Weiner Laptop Emails Were Never Examined By Paul Sperry

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/despite-comey-assurances-vast-bulk-of-weiner-laptop-emails-were-never-examined/

When then-FBI Director James Comey announced he was closing the Hillary Clinton email investigation for a second time just days before the 2016 election, he certified to Congress that his agency had “reviewed all of the communications” discovered on a personal laptop used by Clinton’s closest aide, Huma Abedin, and her husband, Anthony Weiner.

At the time, many wondered how investigators managed over the course of one week to read the “hundreds of thousands” of emails residing on the machine, which had been a focus of a sex-crimes investigation of Weiner, a former Congressman.

Comey later told Congress that “thanks to the wizardry of our technology,” the FBI was able to eliminate the vast majority of messages as “duplicates” of emails they’d previously seen. Tireless agents, he claimed, then worked “night after night after night” to scrutinize the remaining material.

But virtually none of his account was true, a growing body of evidence reveals.

In fact, a technical glitch prevented FBI technicians from accurately comparing the new emails with the old emails. Only 3,077 of the 694,000 emails were directly reviewed for classified or incriminating information. Three FBI officials completed that work in a single 12-hour spurt the day before Comey again cleared Clinton of criminal charges.

A Month of Multiculturalism in Britain: July 2018 by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12906/multiculturalism-britain-july

Not a single Christian was among the 1,112 Syrian refugees resettled in Britain in the first three months of 2018. The Home Office agreed to resettle only Muslims and rejected the four Christians recommended by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“Why, when so many in authority knew the scale and severity of this crime, did it take until 2014, with the publication of the Jay report, for a large-scale investigation to occur? How many lives could have been protected if swift action had been taken a decade before?” — Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham.

“I’ve got no respect for any law other than Allah’s, so I don’t care about the law to be honest… I care for the law of Islam. I don’t care for the law of any man.” — Imran Waheed, a 41-year-old psychiatrist working for the National Health Service in Birmingham, and also working as an expert witness to British courts.

July 1. Mubarek Ali, a 35-year-old former ringleader of a Telford child sex abuse gang, was sent back to prison after breaching the terms of his parole. In 2012, Ali was sentenced to 22 years in prison for child prostitution offenses, but he was automatically released in 2017 after serving only five years. Telford MP Lucy Allan said that there are “many questions to be answered” about why Ali was released, and also about how the justice system treats so-called grooming cases:

“Now he is back in jail, justice demands that he must serve the remainder of his sentence in custody; anything less would show a casual disregard for the nature of his crimes and for the victims whose lives he changed forever.”

July 2. Abdul Rauf, a 51-year-old imam from Rochdale, was imprisoned for one year and five months after admitting to assaulting more than 20 children at a mosque. Inspector Phil Key, of Greater Manchester Police, said:

“Abdul Rauf is a nasty, bully of a man who beat the children in his classes until it became normalised. The children were left cowering and holding onto their ears, their arms and their legs after he repeatedly used violence as a punishment. The parents of the children had no idea that they were leaving their children in the care of a man who would leave them writhing in pain and covered in marks and bruises.”

Has Israel advanced US interests? Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

General Omar Bradley, the first Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs-of-Staff, said in July, 1950, in the aftermath of Israel’s War of Independence: “The Israeli army would be the most effective force south of Turkey, which could be utilized for delaying action [extending the strategic hand of the USA]….” General Bradley’s assessment was rejected by the State Department and the Pentagon, which opposed the 1948 establishment of the Jewish State, contending that it would be decimated by the Arabs, a burden upon the US and probably an ally of the USSR.
Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan wrote in the Washington Post, on August 15, 1979: “The fall of [the Shah of] Iran has increased Israel’s value as perhaps the only remaining strategic asset in the region, on which the US can only rely….Only by full appreciation of the critical role the State of Israel plays in our strategic calculus can we build the foundation for thwarting Moscow’s designs on territories and resources vital to our security and our national wellbeing…. Israel is not a client but a very reliable friend…. American policy-makers downgrade Israel’s geopolitical importance as a stabilizing force, as a deterrent to radical hegemony and as military offset to the Soviet Union….”

In 2018, General Bradley’s and President Reagan’s assessments are vindicated, as the pro-US Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman, as well as Jordan and Egypt, seek further strategic ties with Israel. They view Israel as a most effective ally in the face of lethal threats posed by the anti-US Ayatollahs, ISIS and Muslim Brotherhood terrorists, irrespective of the unresolved Palestinian issue – which they never considered a crown jewel – and their fundamental reservations about the existence of an “infidel” Jewish State in “the abode of Islam.”

Somali Refugees Busted in Tucson Immigration fraud is at the heart of a terror case . . . again.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271095/somali-refugees-busted-tucson-michael-cutler
Once again, immigration fraud has compromised U.S. national security. Fortunately, this time, the discovery was made before a deadly terror attack.

The issue of immigration fraud was the focus of both an extensive article and a booklet I wrote on the topic, Immigration Fraud, Lies That Kill.

This time an alien couple stands accused of fraud when they entered the United States as refugees, and then applied for legal immigrant status, but they hid their ties to Al-Shabab, an Islamic militant group operating primarily in Somalia who itself has links to al-Qaeda.

The case we will examine today, less than one month before the 17th anniversary of the terror attacks of 9/11, was brought to fruition by the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) as a result of the diligent work of the FBI and a division of ICE known as HSI (Homeland Security Investigations).

As you read my commentary think about the globalists – particularly the leaders of the Democratic Party who refuse to work with ICE, creating “Sanctuary Cities” and “Sanctuary States” and are now demanding that ICE be utterly and totally dismantled.

Then: “Islamic Europe? Ridiculous!” Now: “Islamic Europe? Inevitable – and Terrific!” European elite changes its tune – to enable surrender.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271087/then-islamic-europe-ridiculous-now-islamic-europe-bruce-bawer

One week back in 2007, I was paid a not inconsiderable sum of money to fly first class from Oslo to Washington, D.C., on the Tuesday and to fly back on the Thursday, so that I could give a hour-long lunchtime talk on the Wednesday to an audience of American and international diplomats. Given that I had been compensated so well and given, as it was explained to me, that I had been accorded the star spot, the sole solo turn, in the middle of a day-long conference consisting otherwise of panel discussions about Western Europe, I foolishly expected a friendly reception.

My first doubts in this respect began to arise only moments after the event kicked off. Sitting through the morning’s panels, I heard one highly credentialed individual after another – professors, politicians, and retired and active diplomats from various countries – join in predicting a glowing future for Western Europe. Socially and economically, they all agreed, prospects looked a lot brighter for Western Europe than for America. Not a single one of the dozen or so panelists diverged from this consensus.

#AbolishICE “Abolished” Mollie Tibbetts The greatest monument to Mollie is not a tombstone, but a wall. David Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271119/abolishice-abolished-mollie-tibbetts-daniel-greenfield

In July, as the left chanted “Abolish ICE,” calling for the end of immigration enforcement, a Mexican illegal abolished Mollie Tibbetts. The two stories came together in August as Cristhian Bahena Rivera led law enforcement to the body of the 20-year-old college student that he had buried in a cornfield.

On the same day that Mollie was murdered, the House voted on a resolution supporting the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) for fighting to keep Americans safe.

34 Democrats and one “Republican,” Rep. Justin Amash, an anti-Trump fanatic who votes with the Dems where it counts, voted against ICE and immigration enforcement. 133 Democrats voted “Present,” including Pelosi and Hoyer. Only 18 Democrats voted in support of H.Res. 990.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, the Dem Minority Whip, called support for ICE a “sham and a distraction” from the more important issue of “the safety of those who come here seeking asylum.”

But there was no asylum for Mollie and other American women from the illegal migrant murderers.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of the first to call for abolishing ICE and replacing it with a pro-illegal organization, responded to Mollie’s murder by gazing blankly at the camera, and saying, “I know this is hard” for her family and people in Iowa, but that the “real problems” lie in the suffering of illegal aliens.

The Bombs of August By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/23/the-bombs-of

On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped a uranium-fueled atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, another U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 repeated the attack on Nagasaki, Japan, with an even more powerful plutonium bomb.

Less than a month after the second bombing, Imperial Japan agreed to formally surrender on Sept. 2. That date marked the official end of World War II—the bloodiest human or natural catastrophe in history, accounting for more than 65 million dead.

Each August, Americans in hindsight ponder the need for, the morality of, and the strategic rationale behind the dropping of the two bombs. Yet President Harry Truman’s decision 73 years ago to use the novel, terrifying weapons was not considered particularly controversial, either right before or right after the attacks. Both cities were simply military targets.

Hiroshima was the headquarters of a Japanese army unit, and a key manufacturing center and port. Nagasaki—a secondary target after clouds and smoke obscured the city of Kokura—was the site of a huge Mitsubishi munitions plant.

Yet the sheer destructive power of the two bombs—the 15-kiloton “Little Boy” Hiroshima bomb, and the 21-kiloton “Fat Man” Nagasaki bomb—ensured catastrophic civilian casualties well beyond soldiers and munitions-plant workers. During the blasts, and long afterward due to radiation showers, perhaps 150,000 Japanese were killed.