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Ruth King

Anti-Semitism’s Collaborators By Kevin D. Williamson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/anti-semitism-louis-farrakhan-democratic-party/

The ‘It’s anti-Zionism, not anti-Semitism’ dodge doesn’t wash.

The Democrats have a couple of problems: One is that they have spent many years complaining about being labeled “socialists” only to see their party come to be dominated by self-proclaimed socialists such as Senator Bernie Sanders (the gentleman from Vermont is a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination but is not a member of the party) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, in spite of her pricey education, does not give the impression that she could be relied upon to spell bourgeoisie.

“Don’t call us socialists!” they used to say.

Now?

“Don’t call us anti-Semites!”

Well.

If the Democrats have a minor socialist problem, they have a major problem in the form of Jew-hating weirdos, preeminent among them the Reverend Louis Farrakhan of the so-called Nation of Islam. Farrakhan has been an out-and-proud Jew-hating weirdo for many decades now, but Democrats still feel the need to make gestures of obeisance before him: Anti-Trump leaders such as Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour of the Women’s March have embraced Farrakhan and courted his favor. Barack Obama came a-calling in 2005 when he was ramping up his political career. The Congressional Black Caucus has consulted him. Bill Clinton stood alongside him at Aretha Franklin’s funeral, implicitly elevating the cult leader. California Democrats Barbara Lee and Maxine Waters attend Farrakhan’s public events, and Obama-administration veteran Eric Holder recently posed for a picture with him.

Ten Years Into Obama’s Russia ‘Reset’ By Claudia Rosett

https://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/and-so-we-arrive-at-the-tenth-anniversary-of-obamas-russian-reset/

What became of that big mislabeled button?

Today brings the tenth anniversary of that famously mortifying scene in which President Obama’s first secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, presented Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, with a big red plastic button meant to symbolize a “reset” in U.S.- Russia relations. As Lavrov pointed out at the time, the gift was mislabeled, adorned not with the Russian word for “reset” (perezagruzka), but the Russian word for “overcharge” (peregruzka).

These days, the Russian Foreign Ministry keeps the button on display (still mislabeled) in a diplomatic museum on the ministry’s premises — less a souvenir of U.S.-Russian camaraderie than a symbol of American folly.

Obama’s plan was to reverse the cooling of U.S.-Russian relations that had set in under his predecessor, President George W. Bush. The problem, however, lay not with the U.S., but with a resurgently aggressive Russia under the reign of Vladimir Putin, to whom an aging Boris Yeltsin had turned over the powers of the Russian presidency on New Year’s Eve, 1999. By the time Obama took office, in 2009, Russia’s rising threat was already spelled out in such horrors as the 2006 murder in London of a former Russian agent, Alexander Litvinenko, his tea spiked with radioactive polonium-210. During Bush’s final year in office, in 2008, Russia had launched a war with the neighboring country of Georgia. The time had come for the U.S. superpower, leader of the Free World, to draw a line.

Schumer Calls for Bipartisan Panel to Craft Climate Change Legislation By Bridget Johnson

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/schumer-calls-for-bipartisan-panel-to-craft-climate-change-legislation/

WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) introduced a resolution today urging colleagues to create a panel on climate change like the one created by Democrats in the House.

The move comes after Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) vowed Tuesday to get Dems on the record soon on the Green New Deal plan to drastically cut emissions.

“The Green New Deal continues to be an interesting discussion for, particularly, Republicans and we will, of course, give our Democratic friends who’ve been advocating this proposal an opportunity to debate it and vote on it on the Senate floor sometime in the next couple of weeks,” McConnell said.

Schumer decried that today as a “political stunt” but said McConnell’s move has unintended consequences: “For the first time in a long time the Senate is finally debating the issue of climate change — and it’s about time, if you ask me.”

“Climate change is an urgent crisis, an existential threat to our country and our planet. The last four years have been the warmest four years on record. Sea levels are rising. Marine life and fishing communities are being destroyed. Wildfires have roared across the West and more powerful hurricanes have buffeted our coastlines. Over the next few decades, climate change will affect every part of American life: our health, our economy, our national security, even our geography,” Schumer said. CONTINUE AT SITE

4 Different Lies James Clapper Told About Lying To Congress By Madeline Osburn

http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/06/four-different-lies-james-clapper-told-about-lying-to-congress/

Five years ago to this month, former director of national intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress, and he has been scrambling to make excuses for the ongoing lies and leaks ever since.

In March 2013, Sen. Ron Wyder asked Clapper under oath if the U.S. government was collecting “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper paused and said, “No, sir. … Not wittingly.” Three months later, Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing that the National Security Agency was in fact collecting in bulk domestic call records and other various internet communications on millions of Americans.

This was the first of many “untruths,” as Clapper likes to call them. Here are other lies Clapper has cooked up since trying to explain his false statements under oath.1. He Lied Because He ‘Simply Didn’t Understand’ The Question

In an apology letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein written about four months after the hearing, Clapper said he gave the “clearly erroneous” answer because he “simply didn’t think of” the call-record collection.

Even though Clapper had received the committee’s questions the day before his testimony, he maintains he did not realize that Wyden was asking about Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and was answering a question regarding a different program, specifically Section 702 of FISA.

“I didn’t realize what he was talking about,” Clapper said at the University of Chicago last May. He repeated the lie again to CNN’s John Berman on Tuesday after news broke that the Trump administration is planning to end the NSA’s spying program.

It’s not about collusion; it’s about obstruction … and impeachment By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/432808-its-not-about-collusion-its-about-obstruction-and-impeachment

“There was no collusion!”

As President Trump demonstrated in his feature-length CPAC speech, he is that rare combination of bottomless energy, canny comic timing, disregard for norms, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The last manifests itself in manic refutation of the Democrat-media narrative that the Trump campaign was in a traitorous conspiracy with the Kremlin. At this point, if you ask the president what time it is, or to pass the salt shaker, he’ll tell you, “There was no collusion!”

Mr. Trump has always said this, even as evidence of non-criminal but indecorous Trump-Russia contacts mounted (the Trump Tower New York meeting with Kremlin-operative Natalia Veselnitiskaya, the Trump Tower Moscow project, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s ties to Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs). Plainly, though, “no collusion” has become a mantra now because the president expects that special counsel Robert Mueller’s reputedly imminent report will conclude that there was no criminal collusion — no Trump-Russia espionage conspiracy to steal the 2016 election.

The White House is attempting to shape expectations: Even if the special counsel’s report catalogues unsavory conduct and connections, it will be portrayed as exoneration if there was no “collusion” in the sense of criminal collaboration.

Not so fast.

U.S. Government Media Network Fires Journalists Over Report Critical of Soros

https://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2019/03/u-s-government-media-network-fires-journalists-for-report-critical-of-soros/

At the request of a scandal-plagued Democratic senator tried for bribery and corruption, the head of the government’s international media networks is abusing his office to punish employees behind a broadcast critical of leftwing billionaire George Soros. U.S.

Agency for Global Media (USAGM) Chief John F. Lansing, an Obama appointee, is utilizing Stalinist techniques to retaliate against the journalists and producers involved in the Spanish-language segment which aired in May 2018 on Television Martí and was available for months online. Eight reporters and editors at the taxpayer-funded media outlet have been fired and Lansing has ordered a review of all content to address “patterns of unethical, unprofessional, biased, or sub-standard journalism.”

An employee at the Miami, Florida-based Martí headquarters said in a local newspaper report “the environment that has been created by the upper hierarchy of the Agency for Global Media is repressive. People write with fear. Adjectives are no longer used.”

Television Martí—and its radio counterpart—operate under the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB) and comprise one of the USAGM’s five international multimedia networks. The others are Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting. The media outlets get about $685 million a year from American taxpayers and reportedly reach 345 million people worldwide in 59 languages.

The Big Lie About ‘Russian’ ‘Hacking’ Diana West

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-big-lie-about-russian-hacking_2825871.html

Hearing Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) address former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen in committee last week was another grating reminder of how unproven theories—fantasies, even—become Big Lies: through constant, brazen repetition. At a certain point, they cut channels through the public mind and run through history evermore as “conventional wisdom.”

We now teeter at this point with the unproven theory—a.k.a. Big Lie—that “the Russians” “hacked” the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Something happened at the DNC in 2016, all right, and that “something” led to the WikiLeaks publication of thousands of DNC emails, and the swift disgrace and resignations of top DNC officials, including DNC “chair” Wasserman Schultz, over revelations of DNC favoritism toward Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.

Nearly three years have passed, however, and no one has produced forensic evidence of a DNC “hack” by “the Russians”—and that includes special counsel Robert Mueller, whose 2018 indictment of a dozen or so Russians presents zero evidence to support his accusations. Not even the FBI discovered any “hack” evidence at the DNC because, in part, the nation’s federal law enforcement body never examined the DNC’s computer servers.

Phony Constitutionalists Despise This Freshman Senator By Mark Pulliam

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/05/phony-

Newly elected U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who handily defeated incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill in November, is a former Supreme Court clerk who served previously as Missouri’s attorney general. At age 39, he is the youngest member of the Senate. Generally regarded as a rising star, the cerebral Hawley was named to the Senate Judiciary Committee, a plum assignment for a freshman. Yet just months after taking the oath of office, Hawley was blasted—twice—by the Wall Street Journal, which not only accused him of “bad judgment” but nastily remarked about his youth and physical appearance (referring to him, oddly, as having “a lean and hungry look”).

What apostasy did Hawley commit to warrant such opprobrium? Did he sell out to Planned Parenthood, endorse the Green New Deal, or betray the Republican platform?

No, Hawley had the temerity to express concern about a pending judicial nominee to the D.C. Circuit, widely viewed as the second-most-important court in America, next to the Supreme Court.

Hawley questioned the judicial philosophy of Neomi Rao, President Trump’s choice to replace Brett Kavanaugh on the appellate court that often serves as a stepping stone to the high court (as it did for Kavanaugh, Chief Justice John Roberts, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas, and the late Antonin Scalia). Hawley stated he had reservations about Rao’s position on Roe v. Wade—the notorious activist ruling that invented a constitutional right to abortion out of whole cloth—and also concerns about her opposition to the doctrine of “substantive due process.”

For this, the Wall Street Journal berated him for applying a “litmus test,” “inhaling rumors,” and attempting “to make himself a hero of the anti-abortion right.”

North Korea: How the Discussion Was Changed by Peter Huessy

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13840/north-korea-discussion

It may be the North Korean leadership wants only to survive, keep its nuclear weapons, and work to secure sufficient funds to take care of its ruling elite — and wait for the day that US forces leave the peninsula.

What if North Korea regarded its nuclear program as the very leverage necessary to bargain concessions from the US and South Korea? What if the goal were to secure an extremely important concession — the removal of US military forces from the Korean peninsula, a goal long-sought, put on the table before North Korea even acquired nuclear weapons?

The Trump administration took office after eight years of “strategic patience,” which led only to more North Korean missiles, nuclear bombs and weapons shipments to terror states. The proponents of these policies — having failed miserably — now lecture the Trump administration about what America’s North Korean policy should be. They seem, however, unwilling to see that the very nature of the discussion has now been changed — to a necessary focus on North Korea’s nuclear capability and not on the US military presence or ostensible US “hostile policy” in the region.

The rationale for the summits between US President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Chairman Kim Jong-Un may well be misunderstood by the critics of the American administration. By meeting with the North Korean leader, the administration is seeking to change the “accepted” narrative about the Korean peninsula and Western Pacific, just as it has with respect to the Middle East.

Whether the administration can be successful is an open question, but changes already secured in the Middle East give support to the administration’s strategy and goals.

How Islamic “Aid” Organizations in Turkey Feed Jihadists in Syria by Uzay Bulut

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13838/aid-organizations-jihadists-syria

It appears that many radical Islamists in Turkey have established an international network to sustain the jihadist terrorists in Syria.

Because this network operates under the guise of “charity,” European governments are having difficulty monitoring its activities — particularly in jihadist-controlled territory — and holding the perpetrators to account.

“We get most of our donations from abroad through the bank accounts we share on social media,” Fukara-Der’s president Hasan Süslü said in a 2014 interview. “And most of the donations are from the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.”

Turkish police recently raided the homes of, and detained, more than a dozen nationals suspected of “joining conflicts in Syria, providing logistics and money, and recruiting for [terrorist] organizations.”

Four days after the raids, which were carried out on January 13, all thirteen detainees were released — eleven of them pending trial and the other two on judicial control. The Turkish government-run Anadolu Agency, which reported on the detentions, later removed the story from its website and social media pages.

Among the detainees was Hasan Süslü, president of the NGO Fukara-Der (Aid and Solidarity Association for the Poor), suspected of aiding Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) — a coalition of al Qaeda-affiliated groups, formerly known as the al Nusra Front, and currently the dominant jihadist force in Idlib in northern Syria.