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Ruth King

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The Political Class Is ‘Exhausted’ Julie Kelly

By on August 30th, 2019

amgreatness.com/2019/08/29/the-political-class-is-exhausted/

There is a small slice of the American populace who, by their own admission, are exhausted.

No, I do not refer to new moms caring for cranky infants or emergency room nurses working the night shift or tactical officers patrolling the ’hood or farmers plowing their soybean crops.

Our bone-weary countrymen populate opinion magazines, newsrooms, editorial boards, and cable networks up and down the Acela corridor. Their fingertips, nearly stripped of all flesh from excessive tweeting, have lost agility. Heads droop over coffee-stained laptops; they can’t even muster enough energy to brush off the morning’s donut crumbs from the keyboard.

Cognitive fatigue has set in: “How do you spell Haberman again,” they mumble to themselves as they struggle to search the pages of the New York Times. Slippered feet shuffle aimlessly under the desk of their home office. Makeup artists in the MSNBC green room desperately try to conceal dark circles sagging under the eyes of barely-functioning hosts and guests.

Now, one can understand the fatigue associated with a prolonged hangover after a two-year bender on Trump-Russian collusion that came up empty. One can certainly sympathize with talking heads and columnists who want to crawl under the covers after being wrong about nearly everything since 2016. And, really, having to interview Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) for the umpteenth time would take its toll on any mere mortal.

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Jim Comey’s Higher Virtue The righteous former FBI director thinks the rules don’t apply to him.

By on August 30th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jim-comeys-higher-virtue-11567121926

Beware the righteous man with power. That’s the great lesson of James Comey, as the 79-page report released Thursday by the Justice Department Inspector General makes clear. The former FBI director willfully violated multiple rules as he sought revenge against Donald Trump while pursuing his own self-interest in the name of higher virtue.

The report focuses on how Mr. Comey handled seven memos he wrote in 2017 about his interactions with Mr. Trump. IG Michael Horowitz finds that in treating his memos as personal documents rather than official FBI records, improperly storing them at home, failing to inform the bureau he had them, or leaking them to the press, Mr. Comey ignored FBI and Justice protocols and broke his employment agreement.

“By not safeguarding sensitive information” and “by using it to create public pressure for official action,” Mr. Comey “set a dangerous example” for every FBI employee, the IG says. Mr. Comey admitted that he violated the rules to cause the appointment of a special counsel after Mr. Trump fired him in May 2017.

“Comey said he was compelled to take these actions ‘if I love this country . . . and I love the Department of Justice, and I love the FBI,’” the report says. But the IG concludes that if everyone violated the rules “to achieve a personally desired outcome” as Mr. Comey did, “the FBI would be unable to dispatch its law enforcement duties properly.”

Translated from the bureaucratic prose: Mr. Comey thought he was above the rules because he wanted to save the country from Mr. Trump. No doubt J. Edgar Hoover felt a similar afflatus as he wiretapped Martin Luther King.

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Sneaky, Leaky James Comey The inspector general takes apart the former FBI director’s excuses for his actions. By Kimberley A. Strassel

By on August 30th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sneaky-leaky-james-comey-11567121062

Of all the tall tales James Comey has told, none compare to the line he fed President Trump at their infamous January 2017 dinner. As recounted in the former Federal Bureau of Investigation director’s memo about that evening, “I said I don’t do sneaky things, I don’t leak, I don’t do weasel moves.”

The Justice Department’s inspector general begs to differ. In a new report about Mr. Comey’s handling of those memos, Michael Horowitz demonstrates that Mr. Comey in 2017 was consistently leaky and sneaky. The report refutes any claim that the then-director was justified in taking these actions. He repeatedly, and knowingly, broke the rules.

For more than two years, we’ve heard Mr. Comey’s characterization of his actions, popularized by an adoring media: He felt compelled to memorialize his private discussions with the president, to protect the FBI. He had no choice but to use an intermediary to leak memo contents, to save the nation by forcing the appointment of a special counsel. He was entitled to do so because the memos were his personal papers, and by that time he was a “private citizen.”

The inspector general calmly and coolly dismantles these claims. There’s good reason to suspect Mr. Trump was the focus of the bureau’s counterintelligence probe from the start, since that is the only way to explain the FBI’s outrageous decision to hide the probe from the president. The inspector general reports that Mr. Comey’s first briefing of the president-elect, on Jan. 6, 2017, was partly done in the hope that “Trump might make statements about, or provide information of value to,” that probe. That may be the real reason everyone on the FBI leadership team agreed “ahead of time that Comey should memorialize” what happened.

Mr. Horowitz’s report methodically skewers Mr. Comey’s claim that his memos were “personal” and therefore his to keep and use.  CONTINUE AT SITE

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Mandatory Teacher Training Denigrates Christianity, Exalts Islam Christian scriptures described as “corrupted” while the Koran contains the “pure” word of God. Sara Dogan

By on August 30th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274787/mandatory-teacher-training-denigrates-christianity-sara-dogan

A Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan revealed deeply concerning information on a mandatory two-day teacher training session on Islam conducted for public school teachers in the state which denigrated Christianity while presenting Islam in an exclusively positive light.

“We found that the teachers were subjected to two days of Islamic propaganda, where Islam was glorified, Christianity disparaged, and America bashed—all funded by Novi taxpayers,” explained Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel at the Thomas More Law Center. He noted that the school district had not sponsored teacher trainings on Christianity, Judaism, or other religions over the past five years, but solely on Islam.

The “cultural competency” expert hired by the Novi Community Schools District in Michigan is Huda Essa of Culture Links LLC, a hijab-wearing woman of Arab descent. After examining numerous documents relating to Essa’s presentation including audio transcripts from her talk, the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) found that “information on Islam she provided to Novi teachers was riddled with falsehoods and errors of omission that were clearly meant to deceive.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Mexico Bleeding Mexican murder rate hits unprecedented all-time high. Stephen Brown

By on August 30th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274735/mexico-bleeding-stephen-brown

It is a very tragic story currently unfolding in America’s southern neighbor where deadly violence is now almost a way of life.

According to data released by Mexico’s National System for Public Security, murders this year in the Latin American country are at an all-time high. Statistics show there has been more killings in the first six months of 2019 than ever before in the country’s history. (Mexicans started keeping records on their country’s murder rate in 1996.)

The total number of victims for the first half of 2019 comes to more than 17,000 people, a new record. This represents a 5.6 per cent increase in killings over the same time period last year. And also amounts to about 90 people slaughtered per day.

Three thousand murders were recorded in June, 2019, alone, which is an increase of 232 over the same month last year. This is the most murders ever recorded for a single month.

These figures do not include victims of other serious crimes such as, for example, kidnapping, attempted murder or extortion.

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The Jihad on Christian Cemeteries A hate that pursues “infidels” even after death. Raymond Ibrahim

By on August 30th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274765/jihad-christian-cemeteries-raymond-ibrahim

Although the Islamic persecution of actual, living Christians is certainly more deplorable, Islamic attacks on inanimate Christian symbols are often more indicative of the existential hate borne for the other.

Consider, for instance, the phenomenon of Muslims desecrating and destroying Christian cemeteries and their crosses.  While the act itself is largely “symbolic”—in that no living person gets hurt—it is also reflective of a committed, viral hatred that transcends subjective circumstances.  In other words, whereas the persecution of this or that Christian can be motivated by particular circumstances—conflicts, sexual attraction, convenience, gain, etc.—attacks on inanimate Christian symbols reflect an objective, transcendent hatred for Christianity and its followers, one that needs no “reason” and gains nothing in its expression.

From one end of the Islamic world to the other—in Arab, African, and Asian nations, and increasingly in the West—this sort of hate is becoming a regular occurrence.  A brief list follows; it is ordered by desecrations committed by formal terrorists (“ISIS,” etc.), informal terrorists (Muslim mobs), and Muslim governments:

Libya: In March 2012, a video of a Muslim mob attacking a commonwealth cemetery near Benghazi, where WWII British officers were buried, appeared on the Internet. As the vandals kick down and destroy headstones with crosses on them, the man videotaping them urges them to “Break the cross of the dogs!” while he and others cry “Allahu Akbar!” At one point, he chuckles as he tells an overly zealous desecrater to “calm down.” When another Muslim complains that he is unable to kick down a particular stone, wondering if it is because “this soldier must have been good to his parents,” the man videotaping replies, “Come on, they are all dogs, who cares?” Finally the mob congregates around the huge Cross of Sacrifice, the cemetery’s cenotaph monument, and starts hammering at it, to more cries of “Allahu Akbar.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Next Revolution: The Green New Deal By Paul Krause

By on August 30th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/the_next_revolution_the_green_new_deal.html

The Green New Deal is all the rage on the Left. Psychopaths who hide their lust to dominate others claim that this is for the “salvation of the planet.” They present themselves as benign saviors to mask their tyrannical intentions. The Green New Deal isn’t about combating “climate change.” It is about finalizing total control over societies and, of course, the earth.

Proponents of green communism are now fearmongering about the danger of ancient diseases that we’re not prepared to deal with. These petty tyrants who blush and gush at the prospects of enslavement while speaking of liberty and equality are hoping to scare people into surrendering their self-reliance and self-rule. For that is the true intent of presenting the apocalyptic scenario of species extinction. If the green communists can scare people into believing the apocalypse is nigh, the frightened, they hope, will foolishly turn to the government to save them.

Of course, this enslavement to the state is not even to a national one. It would be to a transnational statist supraorganism. Our enslavement would be to a global collective of managers, or, if we lived in the 1920s, we would rightly call it a global soviet.

Since “globalism” (in its corporatist-managerial form) is on the backslide, the global communists who know no loyalty to nation, tribe, or family, need to switch the flagship of global domination from the oft-derided corporate-tech alliance to the more superficially benign transnational environmental lobby. Many people have grown skeptical of globalization by corporations and Silicon Valley startups. Most people, however, are ignorant of the dangerous intent of green communism and its lust to destroy whomever it regards are deplorables while also enslaving all other peoples and nations to its dictatorial soviet.

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Arab migration shaped Palestinian society  Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on August 30th, 2019

 “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative’

 https://bit.ly/2ZqxY8h

Mahmoud Abbas promotes an egregious historical fabrication, claiming that the Palestinians are descendants of the original Canaanite peoples.

Moreover, Mahmoud Abbas’ school curriculum – which glorifies suicide bombers – reiterates this falsified history.  It claims that the multitude of archeological findings of 3,000 year old Jewish roots in the Land of Israel “constitute an attempt to liquidate the Palestinian heritage…especially in Jerusalem… misrepresenting the city as a Zionist entity….” (6th grade Social Studies volume 1, page 24; 7th grade Social Studies volume 1, pages 61-62). 

However, the name “Palestine” is not related to Arab/Muslim culture.  It is a derivative of the Philistine people (Plishtim, Polshim – invaders – in Hebrew), who were expelled from the Greek Aegian Islands in 1300 BC and invaded the southern coast of Judea (Land of Israel) in 1200 BC. In 136 CE – upon crushing the Jewish Bar Kochba rebellion – the Roman Emperor Hadrian renamed Judea, calling it Palestina (a derivative of the Philistines, who were an aggressive enemy of the Jewish people), aiming to erase the Jewish Homeland, Judaism and the Jewish people from human memory.

Contrary to Mahmoud Abbas’ claim, most Arabs in British Mandate Palestine were migrant workers and descendants of the 1832-1947 wave of Arab/Muslim immigration from Egypt, the Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, North Africa, Bosnia, India, Afghanistan, etc.  While the British Mandate encouraged Arab immigration, it blocked Jewish immigration.

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ADL FAILS TO PROTECT JEWS and HURTS AMERICA

By on August 29th, 2019

Conference of Jewish Affairs 90 Washington Valley Road, Suite 1261 Bedminster, NJ 07921

(212) 252-6861   conferenceofjewishaffairs@gmail.com

For Immediate Release

Contact: Rabbi Aryeh Spero (212) 252-6861

ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE IS, ONCE AGAIN, FAILING THE JEWISH PEOPLE.

AS ATTACKS AGAINT JEWS IN NY INCREASE IN VIOLENCE AND NUMBER, ADL FAILS TO NAME THOSE GROUPS BEHIND THE ANTI-SEMITIC ATTACKS.

AND TONIGHT… ADL WILL GIVE COVER TO ANTI-SEMITIC, ANTI-ISRAEL CONGRESSWOMAN RASHIDA TLAIB 

BY APPEARING WITH HER AT DEARBORN, MICHIGAN ADL-ENDORSED EVENT:

August 28, 2019 — This past weekend brought another series of dangerous assaults against Jews in Brooklyn, first in Crown Heights and later in Williamsburg. The attacks came on the heels of an already accelerated pace of violent attacks targeting Jews in the New York City area. Police reports indicate that anti-Semitic assaults are up 55% this year, which is atop an already increased rate from the previous years.

All evidence indicates that the bulk of the New York City attacks are coming from members of the Black, Hispanic, and Muslim community. Perhaps that is why the national ADL, under the new leadership of Jonathan Greenblatt, has been relatively silent in identifying and bringing to light these individuals, in contrast to its vociferous and specific condemnation when the perpetrators are labeled by the ADL “right-wing” or “white” individuals. Further, there have been attacks recently against rabbis and others in Berlin, severe physical attacks, by those speaking Arabic or those chanting Allahu Akhbar.

We understand that condemning perpetrators from minority groups that have expressed hostility to Jews is an uncomfortable endeavor for the ADL given its on-going political alliance with many of the leaders of these groups. Acknowledgment of anti-Semitism within these groups runs counter to the ADL template. Nevertheless, the national ADL must be honest by equally spotlighting and condemning perpetrators no matter what their background.

Public condemnation is a vital mechanism in focusing leaders of groups on ostracizing violent members and denouncing bigoted attitudes within their respective community. Ignoring realities and not holding people accountable allows the prejudice to remain.  Having a lower level regional ADL office express alarm or focus simply on hate and intolerance is woefully inadequate, especially now that anti-Semitism coming from prominent segments of those groups has reached a tipping point.

Now, the ADL in the Detroit metro area has signed-on to and endorsed an event against “hate” at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, knowing full well that many of the participants – including Rashida Tlaib — and groups are notoriously anti-Israel and have expressed anti-Jewish feelings. The ADL was willing to partner with these groups in behalf of what it considers a greater concern, namely condemning what it labels hateful to Islamic groups.

Conference of Jewish Affairs believes that the purpose of the ADL, with its budget of over $65 million* a year, should be, as was its historic mission, to prioritize the safety and security of Jews.  Indeed, many groups the ADL calls minorities are no longer minorities in relation to a shrinking Jewish community, which now, population-wise, is far smaller than those groups. Fighting general bigotry and intolerance is very worthwhile, but cannot supersede what should be the ADL’s foremost mission of defending Jews, no matter who their attackers. 

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

False Crucibles – David Kamioner *****

By on August 29th, 2019

amgreatness.com/2019/08/28/false-crucibles/

Every generation in modern American and, indeed, Western history has had its crucibles. We’ve had the Great War, the Depression, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, and various economic crises and foreign policy challenges. There always have been existential threats to our society requiring maximum exertion.

Through that hardening effort and the concurrent sacrifice, such effort requires, many generations have risen to the occasion. They have gone through their own bloodletting, their own walk through fire, to ensure their survival and the success of our nation and people. In this way, the inner steel of generations of young Americans was tempered.

But not so much for this one.

Pop Culture Familiarity Breeds Contempt

Through a combination of great material affluence and relative economic and military superiority, the young of today did not have to face the life-and-death struggles endured by their recent ancestors.

Given that, there is  a profound narcissistic boredom and we are living with the resulting intellectual lethargy. They have searched for and found the false crucibles of cultural nihilism, political animism, and masochistic socialism.

A sizable number of this generation does not want to grow up, does not wish to mature. It is natural that they would embrace the childish cultural and political norms more usually associated with angst-filled college sophomores.

They engage in a deep conformity to these ersatz deities, startlingly afraid to dig deeper and past the leftist indoctrination of the recent past, lest they arrive at a philosophical or political location that would make them unpopular among their peers and with their institutional leftist superiors. Few have the courage to be an outlier in relation to a popular culture that demands fealty as the price for being considered au courant.

Though these predominantly twentysomethings have come to consider themselves rebels against a supposed white male oligarchy, they parrot the same tired dried out nihilistic clichés and irrational platitudes made intellectually stylish by white males themselves only a couple generations prior. They are offering nothing but warmed-over 1960s schtick.

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