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Ruth King

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Kamala Harris To Cut Staff And Restructure Campaign To Save Sinking Presidential Bid By Tristan Justice

By on October 30th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/30/kamala-harris-to-cut-staff-and-restructure-campaign-to-save-sinking-presidential-bid/

Kamala Harris, according to a memo obtained by Politico on Wednesday, is reportedly letting go of “dozens” of campaign staff at her Baltimore headquarters and will send some to Iowa as she hopes to save her presidential ambitions.

Harris’ decision to double-down on Iowa comes after her campaign posted poor fundraising numbers for the third quarter, struggling to garner the necessary resources and support required to be a competitive candidate. Politico reports that the “overhaul will touch nearly every face of Harris’ operation,” with staff layoffs and reassignments coming from New Hampshire, Nevada, and California, the senator’s home state.

High-level campaign staff, including Campaign Manager Juan Rodriguez will also see their salaries cut.

Harris’ latest decision to re-focus her efforts on Iowa comes after the California senator already announced in September that the month of October would be focused on the critical first-in-the-nation caucus state, spending 15 of the month’s 30 days so far in the Hawkeye state.

“I’m f-cking moving to Iowa,” Harris was caught joking to Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono.

The campaign pledged a third-place finish in the state to stay competitive in the primary, a campaign promise that Harris’ latest moves signal might have been a bad bet as she finds herself polling worse there than she did at the beginning of the month.

According to Real Clear Politics’ latest aggregate of polls, Harris is only polling with 2.7 percent support, trailing behind six other candidates and tied with Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and billionaire Tom Steyer.

Harris entered the race as a top-tier candidate. With a breakout moment at the first Democratic primary debate calling out former Vice President Joe Biden for his previous opposition to bussing, Harris was once seen as a candidate on the rise before seeing a steady decline in support starting in July.

Nationally, Harris is at 5 percent support in Real Clear Politics’ aggregate of polls, behind Biden, Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

CHARLOTTE’S NEWS WEB

By on October 30th, 2019

https://spectator.org/the-bell-is-about-to-toll/

The Bell is About to Toll
R. Emmett Tyrrell III, Spectator.org

It has taken a long time, but finally the Justice Department is training its guns on what heretofore was unthinkable, unless you are a career civil libertarian. For years the civil libertarians have been warning us that the intelligence community posed a threat to democracy, as we know it in these United States. Every so often they would point to some excess of the FBI or the CIA and tell us that the lights were going out in democratic America. Does not the Washington Post run atop its front page the maudlin line, “Democracy Dies in Darkness”?

www.statedepartmentwatch.org/2019/10/29/breaking-comeys-friend-just-turned-on-him-admits-everything/

BREAKING: COMEY’S FRIEND JUST TURNED ON HIM – ADMITS EVERYTHING
StateDepartmentWatch.org

(Gateway Pundit) – The Gateway Pundit reported on May 25th that the infamous Trump Tower meeting in early January 2017 may have initiated the Trump obstruction investigation.

Then we reported on August 3rd that text messages from Peter Strzok to Lisa Page showed that the Mueller Special Counsel in its first month was already working on an obstruction trap for President Trump to step in.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democracy Dies in Derangement Too By Charles Lipson

By on October 30th, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/10/30/democracy_dies_in_derangement_too_141613.html

Because our country is so deeply split and so distrustful of its basic institutions, it needs solid, dispassionate reporting now more than ever. We are not getting it.

Americans know this, and we’re angry about it. Polls show we don’t trust the media any more than we trust Congress, the president, universities, or big business. And we don’t trust them at all. That’s deeply troubling since those institutions should be the secure foundations of our public life. Only one is still trusted by more than half the population — the military. Our men and women in uniform certainly deserve our trust and respect, but it’s grim news for a democracy when only the armed forces merit it.

The media has added to this sulfurous climate of distrust and division. Take the country’s most important newspaper, the New York Times. After badly misjudging voter sentiment during the 2016 election, the Times publicly promised to reevaluate its biases, take occasional trips across the Hudson, and try harder. That lasted about a week.

The Times soon joined every other media organization in the race to discredit Donald Trump’s election, imply it was the product of Russian interference, and paint him as an illegitimate intruder in the White House. Although they were right to investigate Russian interference, they were wrong to pump up a thinly based conspiracy story that served their political aims.

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Ankara’s Mountain Turk Headache & the Crocodile Tears of Academia by Gerald A. Honigman

By on October 30th, 2019

Once again, it’s taken tragedy and scores of thousands of dead, wounded, and displaced Kurds to awaken most of the rest of the world to the plight of these thirty-eight million truly stateless people in the Middle East. Decades ago, at least some folks learned that they were not just something that Little Miss Muffet ate while sitting on her tuffet. That occasion required thousands of Kurds (not curds) getting gassed to death by Arabs, and many more scores of thousands being slaughtered by them as well in Iraq’s Anfal Campaign and afterwards.

The Kurds’ plight, while a bit more severe than in most other cases, was not atypical of the response of Arabs and Arabism have historically had to any of the region’s other scores of millions of non-Arab peoples daring to assert rights in the region Arabs claim solely to be “purely Arab patrimony”… https://ekurd.net/arabism-zionism-journeys-2019-01-12 .

The reason for this new examination of an old problem has to do–this time–with not only (but still including) Arab, but also the Turks’ Kurdish “headaches” in the age of nationalism. Ankara’s current, ongoing invasion and slaughter in Syrian Kurdistan is just the latest manifestation of this.

With all of the above in mind, some serious background information–missing in most other accounts–is thus in order…

Now, I know…perhaps I’m really not supposed to talk about such things.

I mean, after all, didn’t a Turkish Sultan give refuge to Jews when Christendom was expelling, inquisitioning, ghettoizing, humiliating, demonizing, forcibly converting, massacring, blood libeling, etc. and so forth…them ?

Yes, there’s some truth here.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The J Street Democrats Ben Shapiro

By on October 30th, 2019

https://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2019/10/30/the-j-street-democrats-n2555560

This week, four of the top candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination — Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro and Bernie Sanders — gathered at the J Street Conference to explain why the United States ought to pressure the state of Israel to make concessions to terrorists, why the Obama administration was correct to appease the Iranian regime and why American Jews ought to value the opinions of Bernie Sanders over those of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the future of Jewish safety. Two other top Democrats — Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden — sent video messages in support of the group.

By contrast, when the American Israel Public Affairs Committee held its annual conference in March, not a single Democratic presidential candidate showed up. The Democrats are, by and large, simply too ashamed to stand with an actual pro-Israel group, although prominent congressional leaders still show up to mouth nostrums about bipartisan support for Israel.

But the heart of the Democratic Party has moved against Israel. That’s because Israel is economically successful, while its enemies are not; Israel is liberal, while its enemies are not; Israel is the tip of the spear of Western civilization in an area known for its tribalism and brutality. This means that according to the radical left, Israel is an exploitative country hell-bent on domination, despite its lack of territorial ambition — Israel has signed over large swaths of land won through military victory to geopolitical enemies, and offered much more repeatedly.

So the Democrats built up and gave credence to J Street, a Trojan horse group dedicated to undermining American support for Israel and justifying left-wing hatred of the Jewish state. J Street was founded by Clinton operative Jeremy Ben-Ami and Israeli far-left political figure Daniel Levy in late 2007. One of its chief sources of funding — a source obscured in the early years by its founders — was anti-Israel radical George Soros.

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Israel Blocks Terrorists, Palestinians Block Critics by Bassam Tawil

By on October 30th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15077/palestinians-internet-censorship

On the one hand, leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) condemn Facebook for “surrendering to Israeli pressure” and taking action against those who incite terrorism and hate speech. On the other hand, the same PA leaders keep pressuring Facebook to silence Palestinians who demand an end to financial and administrative corruption in the PA.

“[E]very time Fatah posts a new terror message on Facebook encouraging violence or presenting murderers as role models, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are given more motivation to kill Israelis. Facebook still chooses to do nothing to stop it.” — Itamar Marcus, Jerusalem Post, September 11, 2019.

What Abbas and his senior officials apparently fear is that the current wave of anti-corruption protests sweeping Lebanon and other Arab countries may reach the West Bank. They appear nervous that their critics and political rivals will use social media to encourage Palestinians to revolt against corruption and tyranny.

For these leaders, when they turn to Facebook to clamp down on criticism and voices calling for reform and democracy, that is good government. However, when Israel tries to silence those who seek to spill more Jewish blood — well, that is criminal.

For the past few months, Palestinians have been accusing Facebook of “waging war on Palestinian content” by suspending dozens of accounts belonging to Palestinian activists and groups suspected of anti-Israel incitement and promotion of terrorism. The Palestinians even went as far as accusing the social media giant of being in collusion with Israel to “suppress the Palestinian narrative and conceal the reality of Israeli crimes.”

In the context of the campaign, the Palestinians used the hashtag #FBblocksPalestine to “reveal the double-standard policy of Facebook management in dealing with Israeli and Palestinian incitement on its site,” according to the Palestinian NGO Sada Social Center.

Earlier this month, Facebook further angered Palestinians when it deleted the page of the Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Information Center. Several Palestinian journalists, political activists and Hamas officials accused Facebook of serving as a “tool of suppression” in the hands of Israel.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The BBC Thought Police by Andrew Ash

By on October 30th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15004/bbc-thought-police

“The need for sensitivity in talking about religious, political or social issues has now been taken to absurd proportions… making it difficult to say anything worthwhile. The aim of Thought for the Day has changed from giving an ethical input to social and political issues to the recital of religious platitudes and the avoidance of controversy, with success measured by the absence of complaints. I believe Guru Nanak [the founder of Sikhism] and Jesus Christ, who boldly raised social concerns while stressing tolerance and respect, would not be allowed near Thought for the Day today.” – Lord Indarjit Singh, The Times, October 4, 2019.

So here is another thought for the day: Why should the BBC — or the rest of the mainstream media — rely on journalistic accuracy, when a sensationalist misquote will do?

Celebrated interfaith activist Lord Indarjit Singh has sensationally quit BBC Radio 4 after accusing it of behaving like the “thought police”. He alleges that the corporation tried to prevent him discussing a historical Sikh religious figure who stood up to Muslim oppression — in case it caused offence to Muslims, despite a lack of complaints.

The Sikh peer, who has been a contributor on Radio Four’s Thought For The Day programme for more than three decades, is also accusing Radio Four bosses of “prejudice and intolerance” and over-sensitivity in relation to its coverage of Islam, after he says he was “blocked” from discussing the forced conversion of Hindus to Islam, under the Mughal emperors in 17th century India.

The 87-year-old peer’s resignation comes as a blow to the show’s flagship segment, that has been a part of Radio Four’s Today programme since 1970, and has been described by Britain’s former chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, as “one of the last remaining places in the public square where religious communities are given a voice in Britain.”

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Cracks in the impeachment wall By J.R. Dunn

By on October 30th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/cracks_in_the_impeachment_wall.html

Is the solid Democratic front in favor impeachment beginning to crumble? It’s probably more correct to say that it never existed at all.

We got two clear signs this week that rank-and-file enthusiasm for the Pelosi/Schiff effort to rid the country of the Orange Menace is, shall we say, well-controlled.

New Jersey Democrat Jeff Van Drew stated that he was likely to vote against Pelosi’s resolution to “formalize” the impeachment inquiry when it comes up Thursday, or Friday, or sometime before the end of the Holocene.

Van Drew told NBC reporter Alex Moe that “I would imagine that I’m not voting for it.” 

To go straight to the point, Van Drew’s district was won by none other than Donald Trump in 2016, and Van Drew knows exactly which side his political toast is buttered on – that is, the one that hits the ground when dropped.

There are evidently at least a dozen other Democratic reps in much the same situation as Van Drew, though none of these has spoken up yet.

Steny Hoyer , the House Majority Whip, refused to commit to an actual vote on the matter, even though Mrs. Pelosi insists that it is, in fact, happening on Thursday. “We’re going to have to consider whether or not it’s ready to go on Thursday,” Steny said. “I hope that’s the case.”

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Calling Pelosi and Schiff’s bluff Betsy McCaughey

By on October 30th, 2019

https://nypost.com/2019/10/28/calling-pelosi-and-schiffs-bluff/

President Trump has repeatedly slammed the secret impeachment hearings in the Capitol basement as a “kangaroo court.” Speaker Nancy Pelosi got the message. On Monday, she announced the full House will vote to formally launch impeachment proceedings that will be out in the open, instead of in the dark.

Democrats have been trying to suggest they have the goods on Trump. But fact is, none of the witnesses they have called so far have any firsthand knowledge of presidential wrongdoing.

Behind closed doors and with no media allowed, House Democrats have tried to put on the ­appearance of a legal proceeding. At the end of each session, they leak what they claim happened. The media are all too willing to play along, printing the Democratic pols’ claims as if they were fact.

“Powerful testimony from multiple State and national security officials,” The Hill reports, adding up to a “scathing picture of Trump and his allies withholding nearly $400 million in security aid from Ukraine.”

Politico called the testimony of Bill Taylor, the acting envoy to Kiev, “explosive” — though Taylor’s prepared statement merely ­regurgitated what other State ­Department bureaucrats had told him. His source was the rumor mill. It’s called hearsay.

The New York Times reports “a rapidly moving investigation securing damning testimony.” That’s hardly the case. But soon the jig will be up. No matter how many “witnesses” Democrats parade into their hearings, it won’t matter if they have no firsthand knowledge. Even the Times concedes that to ­impeach a president, the House needs proof “tying him directly” to wrongdoing.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Media Self-Immolates Over Baghdadi Death to Smear Trump Samantha Strayer

By on October 30th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/29/media-self-immolates-over-baghdadi-death-to-smear-trump/

Media once again showed their relentless attempt to isolate the president, portraying him as a standalone blip in the universe without presidential precedent. It blew up in their faces.

Americans learned over the weekend that serial rapist, murderer, and ISIS terrorist chieftain Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi went up in a blaze of vainglory as he fled in fear from American special operations forces and detonated a suicide vest, blowing up himself and three children.

Reactions split along predictable lines. One side praised President Trump, U.S. military and intelligence operatives, and allies who assisted in the mission. They declared the world safer with Baghdadi dead.

The other side, however, lost its collective, freaking mind.

President Trump had hinted at “something very big” in a Saturday night tweet, setting off speculation that it had to do with Baghdadi. In his Sunday morning announcement to the nation, Trump explained what happened, who was involved, who was notified, and his expectations moving forward. He identified by name the Americans killed by Baghdadi and his men. He spoke for eight-and-a-half minutes and then answered questions from the press for another 40. He was accessible, transparent, and candid.

He was particularly clear about his reasons for authorizing the mission, and they were entirely consistent with what he has said and published in the past. With characteristic frankness and purpose, he described the manner of Baghdadi’s death:

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