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Ruth King

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Putting the Cartel Before the Hearse

By on November 6th, 2019

http://stiltonsplace.blogspot.com/

By now you’ve heard the story of the Mormon family who had three women and six children massacred by drug cartel members while traveling through Mexico to attend a wedding. The story is heartbreaking…and a legitimate source for righteous anger.

To that end, President Trump has made the offer to Mexico to basically go to war with the cartels, using American troops to wipe this scourge from the Earth. Which is a very refreshing change from the way Barack Obama dealt with the problem by sending automatic weapons to the cartels.

We discussed this a lot at Hope n’ Change way back in 2011, but will serve up a refresher for those who have forgotten details…or never heard them.

“Fast and Furious” was a program administered by the ATF under attorney general Eric Holder’s direction and almost surely Barack Obama’s endorsement. The program helped smuggle more than 1700 weapons to Mexican criminals and drug cartels just “to see where they’d surface.”

Theoretically, this would provide valuable information which would allow the ATF to shut down the gunrunners. But unsurprisingly, “theory” went out the window, the program flew out of control, and the AK-47s and armor-piercing shells were used to murder dozens (if not hundreds) of people including a U.S. Border Patrol agent and a Customs Enforcement agent.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Running Out Of Other People’s Money, New York And Federal Versions

By on November 6th, 2019

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-11-5-running-out-of-other-peoples-money-new-york-and-federal-versions

I’m old enough to remember a time when government officeholders thought that a significant part of their job was prioritizing various options for public spending, in recognition that overspending on lower priorities would mean that nothing would be left for higher priorities. Somewhere along the line, that old-fashioned idea has fallen away. The new fad is an unending tidal wave of proposals for new government programs and spending initiatives which will, any day now, bring perfect justice and fairness to the world. Which ones will we implement? All of them!

But what about Margaret Thatcher’s famous observation that “eventually you run out of other people’s money.” Dramatic examples of that principle at work can be observed, for example, in Venezuela; but then, Venezuela seems to be just too far away for most Americans to pay attention. So how about looking closer to home, like in New York?

The budgeting process in New York City under the reign of uber-progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio and a like-minded City Council has been one where any idea that sounds like it might be “doing good” promptly gets funded. And thus the budget for a city of 8.5 million people has gone from $75 billion in de Blasio’s first budget five years ago, to $93 billion in the current fiscal year. (That’s well over $10,000 per capita, if you want to compare it to your city’s budget.) The New York Times from June 15 provides some instances of things added in this year’s version:

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Not Running for GOP Reelection? Get Off the ‘Impeachment’ Committees Liz Sheld

By on November 6th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/05/morning-greatness-not-running-for-gop-reelection-get-off-the-impeachment-committees/

If you aren’t running for reelection, you need to be removed from any House “impeachment” adjacent committee

There are numerous members of the House sitting on the committees involved in the Democrats’ “impeachment” tribunal who are not running for reelection. They need to go. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy must send in reinforcements and move these congressmen somewhere else. He needs to send a message that the voters will be represented in this clown show assault on Trump and the best way to do that is to show the Democrats/resistance media and the public that the politicians in this process will be accountable for their actions by the voters who put them into power.

Let take a walk down memory lane. The House Democrats signed a secret Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the House Oversight Committee under the late Elijah Cummings and Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) and the batty Maxine Waters of the Financial Services Committee. There may be other Democrat committee chairs involved in some agreement, we don’t know because it’s secret. According to an official with knowledge of the MOU arrangement :“We’d describe (the MOUs) as an agreement to conspire and coordinate their efforts to attack and investigate POTUS. This is not how committee’s normally operate. Dems aren’t interested in legislating. Only attacking POTUS.” This description checks out. If you are not running for relection and you sit on these committees, it’s time to pack your bags. McCarthy needs to man up and send in the clean up team to fill these spots.

There are 15 GOPers in the House who have tapped out of 2020.  Here is a list of representatives who are candidates for redeployment to the House Underwater Basket Weaving Committee:

Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah) is on the Armed Services, Natural Resources committees
Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Georgia) is on the Budget, Transportation and Rules committees
Rep. Paul Mitchell (R-Michigan) is on the Armed Services, Transportation committees
Rep. Susan Brooks (R-Indiana) is on the Energy and Commerce committee
Rep. Pete Olson (R-Texas) is on the Energy and Commerce, Science committees
Rep. Martha Roby (R-Alabama) is on the Judiciary, Appropriations committees
Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas) is on the Intelligence Committee (HPSCI), Armed Services, Agriculture committees
Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) is on the Intelligence Committee (HPSCI)
Rep. Kenny Marchant (R-Texas) is on the Ethics, Joint Economic, Ways and Means committees
Rep. John Shimkus (R-Texas) Energy and Commerce committee
Rep. Bill Flores (T-Texas) Budget, Energy/Commerce committees
Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) Judiciary, Foreign Affairs committees
Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) Armed Services committee
Rep. Francis Rooney (R-Florida) Foreign Affairs, Education committees
Rep. Greg Walden (R-Oregon) Energy/Commerce committee

Let’s go, McCarthy. It’s the right thing to do.

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

How Putin Outfoxed Trump, Pence and Erdogan by Malcolm Lowe

By on November 6th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15121/putin-outfoxed-trump-pence-erdogan

President Donald Trump claimed the entire credit for this outcome. But in reality it was the culmination of a scheme that Russian President Vladimir Putin had been planning since at least January 2019.

The drama of recent weeks began with joint Turkish-US patrols along the Syrian side of the border and ended with joint Russian-Turkish patrols. This switch already indicates who intimidates Erdogan and who does not.

Above all, the “Joint U.S.-Turkish Statement” nowhere defined the length or even the depth of the “safe zone,” allowing Erdogan to understand it to mean – as in the various Turkish statements at the UN – the entire length of the border and a variable depth enabling the settlement of one or two or three million Islamist Syrian refugees.

Assad and Putin may be scheming to recapture Afrin in same style as they have used to regain most of western Syria, namely, Assad regime infantry backed by heavy Russian bombing. Only this time the SDF will be available to serve as infantry.

Note the opinion of Robert Pearson, a former US Ambassador to Turkey, speaking on Middle East Forum Radio on October 23, that “Sooner or Later, Putin Will Force Turkey out of Syria.”

On October 17, brandishing President Donald Trump’s threat to destroy the Turkish economy, US Vice President Mike Pence visited Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Feigning a spirit of compromise, Erdogan agreed on a memorandum with Pence that effectively gave Erdogan the green light to complete his ethnic cleansing of the Syrian Kurds.

On October 22, Erdogan went to visit Russian President Vladimir Putin. This time, Erdogan feigned full satisfaction with a joint memorandum that limited his ethnic cleansing to an Arab-majority stretch of Syrian territory adjacent to the Turkish border, where few Kurds live anyway, while conceding the protection of all other Syrian Kurds to Putin.

Trump claimed the entire credit for this outcome. But in reality it was the culmination of a scheme that Putin had been planning since at least January 2019, when he promoted a meeting between representatives of the Syrian Kurds and of the Assad regime.

In short, the two meetings ended with the US administration claiming its strategic wisdom precisely as it surrendered its former substantial influence in Syria and established Russian supremacy in Syria. Before we examine the details, however, a brief geography lesson is needed.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Should Europe Bring Back the Fighters Who Left for ISIS? by Alain Destexhe

By on November 6th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15118/europe-return-isis-fighters

This debate about repatriation is another example of how confused the West has become when trying to apply its moral principles. The real victims here are the people who were murdered, injured, raped, tortured or displaced by ISIS. Their children, if still alive, will have to live with the consequences of ISIS terror.

If European governments have to choose between supporting a Yazidi rape survivor and her unwanted child or a woman who willingly left Europe to spit in the face of Western societies and the values of her country of origin to join ISIS, they should choose the former. Sorry, do-gooders. These deserters should not be allowed back to Europe.

After the Turkish offensive into Syria, European governments are confronted again with the thorny problem of what to do with the “foreign fighters”.

Foreign fighters are Muslim extremists who left their countries of residence to join ISIS and fight against Western civilization and values. Most of them are men, but many women joined them to support the Caliphate. Many of these women later became pregnant with the children of ISIS terrorists.

Since the fall of Mosul and Raqqa, most of the surviving fighters are currently being detained in Iraqi or Kurdish jails. Some are also in detention in northern Syria, a territory whose future is uncertain. Most women (and their children) live in refugee camps, often in miserable conditions.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Democrats’ Real Impeachment Target: Far More Than Trump Thomas McCardle

By on November 6th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/06/the-democrats-real-impeach

The statement President Donald Trump made that rendered his impeachment inevitable was not on July 25, 2019, when he said to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it.”

It was on Feb. 6, 2019, when he said to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the assembled members of Congress during his State of the Union, “America was founded on liberty and independence, and not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”

Ronald Reagan was as much an enemy of socialism as any president, but even he never looked the domestic opposition in the eye and explicitly declared war against the Democratic Party’s militant left for all the world to hear. But then, by the end of Reagan’s presidency in the late 1980s, even the oldest member of The Squad was still in high school; the few hard leftists among House Democrats were no threat to the power of their party’s leadership, as The Squad and its following are today.

In response to Trump throwing down the gauntlet, Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s strategy has been to conduct private depositions to determine the specifics of their preferred narrative, then burn it into the brains of Americans in the impeachment of this president, with an eye toward winning big in 2020 – regaining the White House, and possibly even the Senate, and retaining the House.

As they shift to public testimony, the impeachment resolution House Democrats passed last week deprives the chamber’s minority party of important powers, and the president of self-defense rights – a stark contrast to the precedents of both the Nixon and Clinton proceedings.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blasted it as “no due process now, maybe some later,” adding that “‘only if we feel like it’ is not a standard that should ever be applied to any American and it should not be applied here to the president of the United States.”

Using Alinsky’s Weaponry To Combat Socialism

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ISRAEL, POLITICS Comments turned off

Sen. Warren’s Proposal to Divide Jerusalem is Not Only Immoral, But Dangerous What a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem would really mean. Richard L. Cravatts

By on November 6th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/senator-warrens-proposal-divide-jerusalem-not-only-frontpagemagcom/

As Democratic candidates for the presidency continue to move further to the left in an effort to distance themselves from the policies and politics of President Trump, the two frontrunners, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have increased the rhetoric against what is normally an untouchable topic for Democrats and Republicans alike: the United States’ relationship with the sole democracy in the Middle East, Israel. While no candidate could expect to survive the political cost of walking away from Israel completely— diplomatically and financially—Sanders and Warren have recently been spouting positions with regard to Israel that show they apparently feel they can make that support conditional and can change the way the U.S. has traditionally been a trustworthy diplomatic partner with shared strategic goals. 

At the J Street conference this week in Washington, D.C., for example, Sanders suggested to the attendees of the liberal Jewish Middle East policy group that, while the $3.8 billion in aid the U.S. commits to Israel each year should remain intact, he wondered out loud if this aid could be conditional. “My solution is to say to Israel: you get $3.8 billion dollars every year, if you want military aid you’re going to have to fundamentally change your relationship to the people of Gaza,” Sanders said. “In fact,” he added with breathtaking audacity, “I think it is fair to say that some of that should go right now into humanitarian aid in Gaza.” Perhaps Sanders has forgotten that the humanitarian crisis he alludes to in Hamas-controlled Gaza is largely the result of the terrorist group’s diverting of funds meant for schools, hospitals, food, and infrastructure in Gaza and using them instead for the construction of terror tunnels, rifles, bombs, and some of the 15,000 or so of rockets and mortars that have been launched from Gaza since the 2005 disengagement and have rained down of southern Israeli towns with the sole purpose of murdering Jews.

Not to be outdone in dangerous rhetoric about Israel’s future relationship with the United States, Senator Warren delivered a videotaped speech to the J Street conferees, announcing that if she becomes president she will push for the oft-discussed two-state solution, “the best outcome for U.S. interests,” as she put it. It will be “the best outcome for Israel’s security and future, and the best outcome for ensuring the Palestinian’s right to freedom and self-determination,” at the same time “ensuring an end to Israeli occupation.”  There is nothing new about that proposal; what was new, and shocking, about Warren’s speech was her strident addition to the two-state plan, namely, that Jerusalem—the spiritual and ancestral home of Judaism for some 3000 years—would be carved up into two capitals, one Israeli and one Palestinian. “I will make clear,” she announced in her professorial tone, “that in a two-state agreement, both parties should be able to have their capitals in Jerusalem.”

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

In Praise of Traditional Gender Identity A gay man’s moral defense of heterosexuality. Jason D. Hill

By on November 6th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/praise-traditional-gender-identity-jason-d-hill/

We are witnessing a moment in Western civilization when heterosexuality is under assault. It is being reconstructed and used as a scapegoat for every neurosis one twists in agony over on a psychologist’s couch, and every setback one experiences in the name of some vague concept called “intersectionality.” We are living in a precarious moment when masculinity is denounced as toxic and rapacious, a moment when people are forgetting that it was mostly men who risked their lives to create Western civilization.

All of us, gay or straight, are the legatees of traditions forged in the crucibles of those possessing traditional gender identities, where great wars were fought by men, and where the very emancipatory moral vocabularies non-traditional persons pursue to rescue them from the oppression they claim to live under — were created in a world mostly by men with traditional identities

One of the most annoying questions I am often asked is: How can you be gay and be a supporter of traditional gender roles and identities, and believe that heterosexuality and masculinity in the civilized Western democracies are becoming endangered phenomena? 

The question is annoying because it assumes that one’s sexual orientation is predictive of one’s political and moral values, and that such values form an unalterable part of one’s moral constitution.

I do not believe anyone decided to choose his or her sexual orientation. I think most of us found ourselves just naturally being attracted to someone of the opposite or same sex before or after puberty and grew into a sexual orientation. I’ve never met a single person who consciously chose his orientation the way, say, one chooses one’s favorite books, values, or belief systems after subjecting them to critical scrutiny. Attraction to another person even in adulthood seems to be a phenomenon that one is simply pulled toward. 

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HISTORY, MEDIA Comments turned off

The 1932 and 1939 Project: How the New York Times Covered up Murder and Genocide By Richard Moss

By on November 6th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/the_1932_and_1939_project_how_the_new_york_times_covered_up_of_murder_and_genocide.html

With the launching of the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” the paper of record seeks to reframe American history.  Formerly we had foolishly assumed the birth of the nation to be July 4, 1776, with the writing of the Declaration of Independence.  But no, the paper of record has another date in mind. 

It turns out to be 1619, with the importing of the first African slaves to America.  That moment, the Times believes, more accurately depicts the founding of the nation and its underlying precepts.  We now learn that our Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, or our disingenuous claim that “all men are created equal” do not define the nation.  Rather, it is that America is a uniquely racist and exploitative enterprise, a criminal operation, morally stained in its DNA, founded as it is on the institution of slavery.  Furthermore, we are to understand that all the advances and benefits that have accrued to our nation in its 243-year history, come not from our religious underpinnings, individual and private property rights, free markets, and our constitutional system of limited government, but rather — you guessed it — slavery.

Others have refuted the ideologic and political 1619 Project, so I will not retrace ground covered elsewhere. It makes more sense to declare a new project that I will describe as the “1932 and 1939 Project,” not as a new timeline and birthdate for the founding of the nation but rather as the origin of the despairingly predictable leftist propaganda machine that the media have become.  Why 1932 and 1939?  These are the years that the NY Times chose to ignore, cover up, and whitewash for ideological purposes what were among the worst genocides of the 20th century — the Ukraine famine and the Holocaust.

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The Michael Flynn smoking gun: FBI headquarters altered interview summary

By on November 6th, 2019

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-michael-flynn-smoking-gun-fbi-headquarters-altered-interview-summary

As a self-proclaimed adherent to Hanlon’s Razor, I once cynically viewed the frenzied focus on FBI actions during the 2016 Russian election-meddling investigation as partisan and overwrought. Hanlon’s Razor suggests that we never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence. Having proudly served in the FBI for 25 years, I bristled at insulting accusations of an onerous deep state conspiracy. Some obvious mistakes made during the investigation of the Trump campaign were quite possibly the result of two ham-handedly overzealous FBI headquarters denizens, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, clumsily seeking to impress each other with ever-increasing levels of loathing for then-candidate Donald Trump.

FBI employees are entitled to their own political views. But senior-level decision-makers who express them on government devices, while overseeing a supremely consequential investigation into a political campaign, simply do not possess the requisite judgment and temperament for the job.

Their stunning text message exchanges and talk of an onerous “insurance policy” in the event Trump were to win prove how ill-suited they were for their positions in James Comey’s cabinet. What other steps might they have taken that have yet to be discovered? The inspector general is soon set to release a report into FBI actions in the effort to surveil the Trump campaign. Attorney General Bill Barr’s Justice Department is conducting its own review, and U.S. Attorney John Durham recently expanded his investigation into the case as well, by converting the review into a full-blown criminal investigation. Barr has faced backlash from critics of his investigation, who ironically have referred to it as a witch hunt.

But as we anxiously await the expected reports, there recently appeared some fairly explosive allegations into potential investigator misconduct that have not received the attention they deserve. With her filing of a blistering Motion to Compel against federal prosecutors in the Michael Flynn case just made public, Sidney Powell has upended my adherence to Hanlon’s Razor. Powell is the attorney for former national security adviser and retired Army Lt. Gen. Flynn, who pled guilty to one count of lying to FBI agents during the special counsel investigation. Powell’s motion seeks to unravel a case many feel was biased from its inception.

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