https://jamieglazov.com/2019/12/04/katie-hopkins-they-plotted-to-behead-me/
When a female Jihadi wants your head as a wedding present.
Anaideia was the Greek Goddess or spirit of ruthlessness, shamelessness and unforgiveness.
Apate was the goddess/personification of fraud, deceit, trickery, deception and guile.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/04/leninism
As the talk of socialism becomes more widespread on the Left, particularly within Democratic party politics, and as anger at President Trump boils over, the advocacy of political scientists will become even clearer: first, Progressivism, then socialism, and ultimately, Leninism.
Everyone knows the universities are on the political Left. Political science is part of that problem, though it isn’t nearly as corrupt as some other disciplines. While many professors hold their partisan biases close, those inclinations all too often appear in curricula and scholarship and inevitably reach the classroom.
A contrary example both of the theory and practice of politics, because its focus is on advancing the principles of the Declaration of Independence, are the panels and scholarship sponsored by the Claremont Institute—recently honored at the White House with the National Humanities Medal.
So Claremont has its work cut out for it. How far will the Left take political science? We all know as well, when the political Left wants legitimacy, it does not turn to the people but to academics, as it has in the impeachment inquiry. Factions within the political science profession, bored by the dominant behaviorist and quantitative approaches to the discipline, have agitated for more connection between scholarship and its policy implications.
One example is the journal Perspectives on Politics, launched in 2003 as a publication of the American Political Science Association, the professional association of political science founded in 1903 in the midst of the Progressive era. The journal’s distinctiveness lies in its avowed “attention only on work that in some way bridges subfield and methodological divides, and tries to address a broad readership of political scientists about matters of consequence.” What this amorphous language actually means is plain: In these pages, the Left is free to indulge its pleasures and fantasies.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-interagency-isnt-supposed-to-rule-11575505183?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
EXCERPT
“Last month’s testimony before the Intelligence Committee shed light on this club whose members are a permanent shadow government credentialed by family histories, elite schools and unique career experiences. This common pedigree informs their perspective of how America should relate to the world. The dogmatists of the interagency seem to share a common discomfort with a president who probably couldn’t describe the doctrine of soft power, doesn’t desire to be the center of attention at Davos, and wouldn’t know that Francis Fukuyama once decided that history was over.
The impeachment hearings will have served a useful purpose if all they do is demonstrate that a cabal of unelected officials are fashioning profound aspects of U.S. foreign policy on their own motion. No statutes anticipate that the president or Congress will delegate such authority to a secret working group formed largely at the initiation of entrepreneurial bureaucrats, notwithstanding that they may be area experts, experienced in diplomatic and military affairs, and motivated by what they see as the best interests of the country.
However the impeachment drama plays out, Congress has cause to enact comprehensive legislation akin to the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which created more-efficient structures and transparent processes in the Defense Department. Americans deserve to know who really is responsible for making the nation’s foreign policy. The interagency, if it is to exist, should have a chairman appointed by the president, and its decisions, much like the once-secret minutes of the Federal Reserve, should be published, with limited and necessary exceptions, for all to see.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/schiffs-surveillance-state-11575506091?m
The impeachment press is playing this as if the calls are a new part of the scandal, but the real outrage here is Mr. Schiff’s snooping on political opponents. The Democrat’s motive appears to be an attempt to portray Mr. Nunes, a presidential defender and Mr. Schiff’s leading antagonist in Congress, as part of a conspiracy to commit impeachable offenses.
“It is, I think, deeply concerning, that at a time when the President of the United States was using the power of his office to dig up dirt on a political rival, that there may be evidence that there were members of Congress complicit in that activity,” Mr. Schiff told the press on Tuesday. Complicit in what? Doing his job of Congressional oversight? Talking to Mr. Trump’s lawyer to get a complete view of the Ukrainian tale? Apparently Mr. Schiff now wants to impeach Members of Congress too.
This is unprecedented and looks like an abuse of government surveillance authority for partisan gain. Democrats were caught using the Steele dossier to coax the FBI into snooping on the 2016 Trump campaign. Now we have elected members of Congress using secret subpoenas to obtain, and then release to the public, the call records of political opponents.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/nadlers-impeachment-circus-joseph-klein/
The House Intelligence Committee approved its Democrat majority report on Tuesday claiming there was “overwhelming evidence” that President Trump committed misconduct in office and obstruction. The “overwhelming” evidence consisted of no more than an accumulation of hearsay and presumptions. It is contradicted by direct evidence that President Trump demanded nothing from Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also denied that there was any pressure exerted on him by President Trump, and he said recently that he “never talked to the President from the position of a quid pro quo.” On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee took over the impeachment circus. The House Judiciary Committee’s first public hearing consisted of a supposedly academic discussion by constitutional law experts on impeachment. Before kicking off the public hearing, Chairman Jerry Nadler summed up his not so scholarly approach in a closed-door session with Democrats as follows; “I’m not going to take any sh*t.” He just likes to dish it out like his comrade, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff.
The professors who testified before the House Judiciary Committee were Noah Feldman (Harvard Law School), Pamela S. Karlan (Stanford Law School), Michael Gerhardt (University of North Carolina School of Law), and Jonathan Turley (George Washington University Law School). Three out of the four experts called to testify were hand-picked by the Democrats, stacking the deck against President Trump. The Republicans’ single choice was Professor Turley, a Democrat himself but relatively open-minded compared to the Democrats’ choices.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/rep-matt-gaetz-just-brought-a-blow-torch-to-the-impeachment-hearings-and-set-a-glorious-bonfire/
Wednesday’s impeachment hearing in the House Judiciary Committee was comprised of exactly four law professors giving their opinions of what they thought President Trump meant when he spoke with the Ukrainian president last July. In five minutes, Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) laid down so much cover-fire and hit so many targets, that when he was done, his verbal “smoke” hung in the air.
Gaetz established that all the professors supported Democratic presidential candidates and most had given them thousands of dollars. He asked them to raise their hands if they had any personal knowledge of any material facts from Congressman Adam Schiff’s impeachment report. All hands stayed down. And he noted that at least two of them had been calling for Trump’s impeachment for years:
https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/when-our-guardians-fail-us/
One symptom of a society in crisis is the unreliability or even corruption of its own auditors.
After all, when the watchmen have lost moral authority to watch, who can be believed or trusted? Or, as the Roman satirist Juvenal famously put it, “Who will guard the guardians?”
It was recently reported that FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith altered an email to bolster a suspicious FBI effort to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant authorizing the surveillance of Carter Page, a onetime employee of the Trump campaign.
If true, Clinesmith helped the FBI successfully delude the court into granting what was likely an illegal request to spy on the Trump campaign. Clinesmith was reportedly expelled from special counsel Robert Mueller’s legal team for cheering on opposition to the Trump presidency by writing “Viva la resistance!” in a text message discussion.
After FBI Director James Comey was fired, he leaked his own memos of private and confidential conversations with the president. Whether Comey would go to jail hinged on how the FBI would categorize his memos post facto — as merely “confidential,” or as “secret” or “top secret.”
Two of the adjudicators were Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, former Comey friends and FBI subordinates. The FBI eventually ruled that the leaking of the memos was not felonious. Page and Strzok, who were involved in an amorous relationship, were later dismissed from Mueller’s team for exchanging texts that showed bias and hatred toward Trump, the object of their team’s investigation.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/67139-schiff-show-roundup-democrat-fiction-2019-12-04
House Intelligence Committee Democrats released their 300-page report on their impeachment inquisition so far. It’s riveting reading if you like works of fiction very loosely “based on a true story.” The far more accurate version is the Republican prebuttal.
“President Trump’s scheme subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential reelection campaign,” argue Adam Schiff and other House Democrats in their report. Moreover, they aim to bolster their case on “obstruction” by saying, “It would be hard to imagine a stronger or more complete case of obstruction than that demonstrated by the President since the inquiry began.”
Democrats proceed to base their gripes in their longstanding narrative that President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election. They argue that his Ukraine endeavors were the same kind of corrupt conduct. “In making the decision to move forward, we were struck by the fact that the President’s misconduct was not an isolated occurrence, nor was it the product of a naïve president,” the preface to the report asserts. “Instead, the efforts to involve Ukraine in our 2020 presidential election were undertaken by a President who himself was elected in 2016 with the benefit of an unprecedented and sweeping campaign of election interference undertaken by Russia in his favor, and which the President welcomed and utilized.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/294982/everyones-trying-to-get-nukes
For more than 50 years, Israel’s national security has been guided by the Begin Doctrine, named after the country’s sixth prime minister. It holds that no regional enemy committed to destroying the Jewish state can be allowed to obtain weapons of mass destruction. To that end, Israel’s air force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 and Syria’s al Kibar plutonium-producing facility in 2007.
Today’s cascade of nuclear technologies across the Middle East, however, is raising serious questions about Israel’s ability to enforce this mandate going forward. The debate over the Begin Doctrine’s viability will not only have a profound impact on Israel, but also on security in the broader Middle East. Israel has proven more than once to be the only regional player willing to curtail by force the spread of nuclear weapons to rogue states, despite the international opprobrium the Jewish state has reaped for its actions. But current concerns inside Israel reflect just how much the threat of nuclear proliferation has increased in recent years as the countries of the Middle East have changed and transformed the region.
Israel views Iran as by far the most likely regional power to acquire nuclear weapons in the near term and has openly vowed to use military force to stop it. But a slew of other Mideast countries, some nominally Israel’s allies or strategic partners, have also made significant advances in their nuclear programs. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan openly warned in September that Ankara could seek to develop atomic weapons in response to its changing relationship with the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman, has said his country would match any nuclear technologies that Iran, Riyadh’s arch rival, acquires.
Israeli officials and analysts say that, as a result of these evolving threats, the tools required to enforce the Begin Doctrine will need to change. Israel deployed cyber weapons, in collaboration with the U.S., to attack Iran’s uranium-enrichment facilities in the late 2000s. The operation destroyed thousands of centrifuge machines, but Tehran’s overall nuclear-fuel production quickly returned to pace. Israel also signed on to the U.S. sanctions campaign that has used financial warfare to pressure Iran into giving up or constraining its nuclear activities. The strategy helped birth the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the Obama-helmed Iran nuclear agreement between Tehran and world powers, which President Donald Trump pulled out of last year with the backing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both leaders believed the deal offered, at best, only a short-term solution to the Iranian nuclear threat while forfeiting the sources of economic leverage that may have forced Iran to accept more permanent restraints.
But the standard tools of economic and military coercion, even including the high tech instruments of cyberwar, might not be enough any longer to prevent nuclear proliferation in the Middle East as countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia—both official U.S. strategic allies—grow their own nuclear programs. Israel has diplomatic relations with Turkey, which remains an active member of NATO and houses 50 American nuclear weapons at the U.S. military base in Incirlik. But the Israeli-Turkish relationship has been strained under Erdogan’s Islamist government and by conflicting approaches to the Syrian civil war on their respective borders. Israel has also developed a strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia, with the on-and-off foes, united by a common enemy, now sharing intelligence and technology to try and constrain Iran’s regional activities.
