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August 2018

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In McGahn Report, the New York Times ‘Attempts’ to Find Corruption Andrew McCarthy

By on August 20th, 2018

The president’s critics are trying to build an obstruction case based on reading Trump’s mind.

The thing to bear in mind is that the president of the United States does not “attempt” to fire anyone in the executive branch. The chief executive either fires an inferior executive official or he does not. “Attempt” does not enter into it.

Yet “attempt” is the foundation on which the New York Times’ Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman build their blockbuster report this weekend about the decision by President Trump — apparently on the advice of his first team of lawyers — to waive executive privilege and attorney-client privilege so that prosecutors on the staff of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III could interview White House Counsel Donald F. McGahn II.

I will in another column address the significance of the waiver. (To my mind, it bolsters the already strong argument that the president should not agree to be interviewed by the special counsel.) For now, let’s keep our eye on the ball: the question of whether there is an obstruction case against the president. The Times report is lengthy, but here is the critical passage:

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Robert Mueller Shouldn’t Even Ask Trump for an Interview By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on August 20th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/robert-mueller-donald-trump-inte

With testimony from the president’s top lawyer, the special counsel is in no position to claim he needs to speak with Trump.

For months, these columns have contended that, on the question whether President Trump should agree to a request by Special Counsel Robert Mueller III for an interview, the burden of persuasion has been imposed on the wrong party. That is, the president should not even be asked to submit to questioning at this point; the prosecutor must first establish that the president (1) is implicated in a serious crime and (2) has information or evidence that the prosecutor is unable to obtain from any other source.

That argument is bolstered by this weekend’s New York Times report that, with the president’s consent, Mueller’s team has conducted 30 hours of interviews with White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II. Having secured testimony from the president’s top lawyer, the special counsel is in no position to claim that he needs the president’s own testimony.

The president’s consent to make McGahn available to prosecutors is extraordinary, as it involves waiving both executive privilege and attorney–client privilege. As to the latter, some claim that there is no real waiver involved because McGahn purportedly represents “the presidency” in the abstract, not the actual incumbent. (The Times pushes this line, claiming that McGahn “viewed his role as protector of the presidency, not of Mr. Trump.”) This is nonsense. McGahn’s client is the president in the latter’s official capacity — in contrast to Trump’s private lawyers (Rudy Giuliani and Jay Sekulow).

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Democrats Are Fielding Even More Anti-Semitic Candidates For Congress Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib is representative of the Democratic Party’s march beyond the embrace of candidates who criticize Israeli policy or its current government to a much uglier place.Warren Henry

By on August 20th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/20/democrats-fielding-even-anti-semitic-candidates-congress/

Last week, J Street, the lefty group created to counter the bipartisan American Israel Public Affairs Committee, withdrew its endorsement of Rashida Tlaib, the Democratic candidate in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District. The unprecedented move followed Tlaib’s endorsement of a “one-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and comments supporting the left-wing boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) movement.

Tlaib is running unopposed in the general election, blunting the effect of the de-endorsement. But Tlaib is representative of the Democratic Party’s gradual march beyond the embrace of candidates and officials who criticize Israeli policy or its current government to a much uglier place in politics.
BDS Is Definitely Anti-Semitic

To put this trend into context, consider that the U.S. State Department has adopted a “working definition” of anti-Semitism, as a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The “working definition” provides illustrations of anti-Semitism, including “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

The founders and leaders of the BDS movement support a “one-state solution” that destroys Israel as Jewish state. The movement is the intellectual descendant of the 1945 Arab boycott, which did not distinguish between Jews and Israel. It is based on the premise that Israel is a racist apartheid state requiring the sort of action once taken against South Africa.

Accordingly, when Tlaib compares the two-state solution to the idea of “separate but equal,” even the J Street doves begin to worry. Tlaib carefully claimed she merely supports the free speech of the BDS crowd, which is a very weak claim.

Her answer also seems disingenuous, not only because she supports a one-state solution, but also because she is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Last year, the DSA overwhelmingly endorsed the BDS movement, with many chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” afterward.
It’s Not Just Rashida Tlaib, Either

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

In Papers Saying Papadopoulos Lied, FBI Reveals It’s Either Lying Or Incompetent To say that George Papadopoulos’ lies (or inaccurate memory of the events, as his wife puts it) prevented the FBI from questioning, detaining, or arresting Joseph Mifsud is unbelievable. Margaret Cleveland

By on August 20th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/20/papers-saying-papadopoulos-lied-fbi-fbi-shows-either-also-lying-incompetent/

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office filed a sentencing memorandum Friday in its pending criminal case against George Papadopoulos, the former Donald Trump campaign advisor who pled guilty in October 2017 to making false statements to the FBI. Papadopoulos is scheduled to be sentenced next month.

Mueller’s team provided the court a detailed background of Papadopoulos’ criminal offense in the sentencing memorandum and suggested Papadopoulos’ lies justified a sentence of 0 to 6 months of incarceration. While much of the ten-page memorandum merely rehashes facts previously known, one passage includes a significant new admission that proves the FBI is either incompetent, or incompetent at lying.
Let’s Run Through the Context First

Before we get to why, a quick refresher. In early March 2016, Papadopoulos learned he would serve as a foreign policy advisor to the Trump presidential campaign. Later that month, Papadopoulos met a professor while traveling in Italy, Joseph Mifsud.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Chinese Infiltration in American Schools By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on August 20th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/chinese_infiltration_in_american_schools.html

In April of 2017, Rachelle Peterson of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) published an in-depth study titled “Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education.” Her findings reveal China’s Trojan horse under the guise of intellectual sharing.

The Confucius Institutes are funded through an agency called the Hanban, which has direct ties to the Chinese government, thus ensuring that China gets to weigh in on topics. There is outright suppression on certain subjects – e.g., praising the Dali Lama, the status of Taiwan, and the persecution of members of Falun Gong.

With “China footing the bill, critics say Confucius Institutes are ready-made platforms for … promoting an overly rosy image of China while discouraging discussion of the ‘three Ts’: Tibet, Taiwan and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.” In fact,”[t]he Chinese director of one Institute explained that if a student asked about Tiananmen Square, she would ‘show a picture and point out the beautiful architecture.'”

Moreover, any discussion of China’s oppression of 10 million Muslim Uyghurs in its Xinjiang province, where up to one million Muslim Uyghurs have been detained in camps, would be verboten.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trusting the Untrustworthy by Linda Goudsmit

By on August 20th, 2018

Sir Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747-1813), a Scottish jurist and historian, provides an explanation for why great societies do not survive for more than 200 years:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship (bondage).”

Our forefathers founded the United States of America as a republic and not a democracy to avoid this existential threat. So, what happened?

The Bern happened. Snowflakes and millennials discovered leaders in representative government who would provide the largesse from the treasury that they could not vote for directly. Bernie Sanders promised them the cradle-to-grave government support of socialism and its attendant breakdown of representative government – they trusted the Bern and they were all in. After Hillary and the DNC managed to deny Bernie the candidacy Hillary’s campaign moved further left politically to pick up Bernie’s constituents.

Hillary tailored her message toward Bernie’s followers and in the aftermath of her shocking loss to candidate Donald Trump her followers disavowed the American electoral system entirely. They have withdrawn their trust because they don’t like the outcome. This is unprecedented in American history. For 242 years the American public has accepted election outcomes and moved on. As in any competition there is a winner and a loser and everyone moves on to try again next time.

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BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

EDWARD CLINE: A REVIEW OF ROBERT SPENCER’ “THE HISTORY OF JIHAD”

By on August 20th, 2018

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2018/08/review-history-of-jihad.html

The initial three quarters of Robert Spencer’s The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS, is so packed with information about the 1,400-year jihad waged by Islam against the world that one can only read it with continuous, stunned astonishment. You wind up asking yourself: did so many millions die or become enslaved by the sword of Islam, AKA the “religion of peace”?

Well, yes, they did. Whole populations were slaughtered, cities were destroyed, and nations, on all four continents, were erased as though they had never existed (Persia, for example, was never Iran). Spencer meticulously traces the bloody depredations and history of Islam from the 19th century clear back to Mohammad’s time in the seventh century, citing current and contemporary works on the conquests and triumphs of Islam by both Western and Islamic writers and chroniclers. The jihad never stopped, and rarely lost steam, but if it lost impetus, it was only because of infighting between sects of Islam, which temporarily sapped and diverted its energy and appetite for conquest and dominance. But jihad was rarely forgotten.

It continues in our age of jet planes and nuclear power to wreck death and destruction. It guarantees more if the West does not reverse its ludicrously pacific and “tolerant” appraisal of Islam and condemn it as a power-hungry totalitarian “religion,” which it has always been, especially in the actions of the possibly fictive character of Muhammad. Spencer recreates and details Islam’s history as no writer in the past has done before or is likely to replicate. Spencer’s book should become required reading for any government policymaker or foreign affairs specialist committed to understanding our nemesis.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Kofi Annan represented all that is wrong about the United Nations by Michael Rubin

By on August 20th, 2018

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/kofi-annan-represented-all-that-is-wrong-about-the-united-nations

Kofi Annan, United Nations secretary-general between 1997 and 2006, died on Saturday in Bern, Switzerland. Messages of sympathy after the loss of a high-profile public figure are understandable, but praise for Annan’s legacy is misplaced. Simply put, Annan’s U.N. tenure was marked by cravenness, corruption, and cover-ups.

He was in charge of U.N. peacekeeping in 1994 but dismissed warnings of an impending genocide in Rwanda. Annan’s apologists might cite a narrow definition of his bureaucratic mandate, but they ignore his decision to not inform the U.N. Security Council when evidence of plans for genocide surfaced. In short, if Annan had done what was morally right rather than easy, he might have saved a million lives. To do so, however, might have made waves and complicated his career.

Annan’s Rwanda experience should have been disqualifying enough, but the U.N. is more about quotas and regional rotations than it is about principle. In short, Annan was in the right place at the right time and so, in 1997, he became the U.N.’s secretary-general.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: IS ENGLISH STILL OUR NATIONAL LANGUAGE?

By on August 20th, 2018

Like I mean, like, why does this happen? Just trying to sound current. Here is my rant.

Saturday the mail brought me my new Medicare card which, thankfully, will no longer exhibit the social security number. The instructions were printed in both English and Spanish. Now, I am proud to be fluent in Spanish,a language I learned and speak since my birth. But, I am American and proud to speak English.

The cards was in a thicker than usual envelope because it contained two additional pages in:

Armenian, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Haitian Creole, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Tagalog, and Vietnamese,…..huh?

How come no Mongolian or Swahili? Where does this end? Living here and receiving all government handouts should come with the obligation to speak English. It did for me and millions upon millions of immigrants. rsk

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Denmark as a Model for American Socialists? by Lars Hedegaard

By on August 20th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12881/denmark-welfare-socialism

Danes actually pay for their brand of socialism through heavy taxation. In Denmark, everyone pays at least the 25% value-added tax (VAT) on all purchases. Income tax rates are high. If you receive public support and are of working age and healthy, the state will require that you look for a job or it will force a job on you.

In Denmark, it is uncomplicated for enterprises to fire workers, which gives them great flexibility to adapt to shifting market conditions. In fact, Denmark is more free-market oriented than the US.

“Very high taxes and the vast public sector clearly detract in the capitalism index and reduce economic freedom. But Denmark compensates by… relatively little regulation of private enterprise, open foreign trade, healthy public finances and more. This high degree of economic freedom is among the reasons for Denmark’s relatively high affluence.” — Mads Lundby Hansen, chief economist of Denmark’s CEPOS think tank.

Here are some facts to consider before American “democratic socialists” look to Denmark for guidance, as Senator Bernie Sanders did during the 2016 presidential campaign.

First of all, Danes actually pay for their brand of socialism through heavy taxation. In Denmark, everyone pays at least the 25% value-added tax (VAT) on all purchases. Income tax rates are high. If you receive public support and are of working age and healthy enough to work, the state will require that you look for a job or it will force a job on you.

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