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Ruth King

Justin Trudeau’s Canada Embraces a World Without Borders By Salim Mansur

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/justin_trudeaus_canada_embraces_a_world_without_borders.html

The Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to sign the UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration at an intergovernmental meeting in Marrakech, Morocco, on December 10, 2018.

Few Canadians are aware of what this UN Global Compact represents; even fewer have been consulted, and without any mandate except for a parliamentary majority, Justin Trudeau is committed in signing Canada into an agreement with far-reaching consequences — not only for Canadians. Canada agreeing to abide by the agreement will also have consequences for Americans, as among migrants entering Canada might well be those intending to sneak into the United States across the world’s longest open border.

The UN Global Compact spells out, in 34 pages of fine print, requirements for member-states to adopt as policy accommodating unfettered mass migration from the global South to the North.

Human migration is as old as human history. But in modern times, especially in the period following the end of the Second World War, resulting in massive dislocation of the European population, settlement of migrants was arranged and conducted by national governments with support of their citizens. The Global Compact, instead, is a UN top-down arrangement to deal with the migration problem turned into the most disruptive global crisis in recent years. This time, the crisis is the result of the massive failure of UN-engineered policies of socio-economic development of post-colonial societies in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America.

What we have witnessed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War in 1992, is a spike in wars, genocide, failed states, and terrorism. These have cumulatively resulted in mass migration as an escape from the collective failure of people in those countries to build and administer an orderly society, despite trillions of aid dollars provided by countries of the North, directly or through the UN agencies.

And despite this record of the failure of UN-driven development policies, the UN remains insistent on demanding more of the same in its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Global Compact is a critical part of this agenda, based on the notion that “Migration contributes to positive development outcomes.”

There is little or no evidence of migration from the global South providing for positive development in the developing countries of that global South. Instead, the Global Compact turns migration into a human rights issue and confers “rights” on migrants that are the same as those of the citizens of the host countries, “rights” those governments are obliged to “respect, protect and fulfil.”

ISIS Finds a Niche in Northern Iraq In a remote, mountainous buffer zone between Iraqi troops and Kurdish ones, the terror group digs in. By Jonathan Spyer

https://www.wsj.com/articles/isis-finds-a-niche-in-northern-iraq-1544053966

Makhmur District, Iraq

The Qara Chokh mountain range in northern Iraq is remote, parched and inhospitable. That’s what makes it attractive to the core of Islamic State, which has survived the four-year U.S.-led war against its caliphate. ISIS is now regrouping near here and in similar hard-to-reach corners of Iraq and Syria. The terror group isn’t finished.

“It’s more than 15 years that there is al Qaeda here,” says Lt. Col. Surood Barzanji, an officer of the Kurdish Peshmerga’s 14th Brigade, currently tasked by the Kurdish Regional Government with maintaining security in the mountain area. “They changed their name to Daesh”—the Arabic acronym for ISIS—“and now there is another one coming. A new one.” We look across the Hussein al-Ghazi Pass toward an imposing warren of caves where, he says, ISIS fighters are living. Two miles away, the first checkpoints of the Iraqi Security Forces are visible. In the no man’s land between Kurdish and Iraqi forces, Islamic State finds its niche.

Later, in a Peshmerga briefing room on the mountain, Col. Barzanji traces the route ISIS men use to reach their haven in the caves. It begins on the western side of the Tigris River, south of Mosul around the town of Hamam Alil. This region of Iraq is known to local residents, Peshmerga and Arab fighters alike as “Kandahar”—like the famously violent province of Afghanistan—because of the strength of support there for the Sunni jihadist cause.

“They cross the Tigris and they head southeast,” says Col. Barzanji, “passing through the villages here” via the Great Zab river and finally to the sanctuary of the Qara Chokh caves. “The villages along the way were Daesh supporters. One place, Tel al-Reem, there’s nine emirs”—commanders—“from Daesh that came from there. So the fighters pass through those areas and the villagers leave food for them. They come through on foot or on motorcycles.”

Once in the caves on the steep mountain, the fighters are relatively safe. Finding water is their main challenge. Iraqi forces have poisoned the one natural well, limiting the number of men able to live there.

Efforts to flush the jihadists out continue. Coalition aircraft strafed the mountain a day before our arrival, firing 12 rockets. Four ISIS members were killed and a pickup truck destroyed in another coalition airstrike here on Nov. 14. On Oct. 31, according to the coalition media office, some 20 ISIS fighters were killed on the mountain following airstrikes and a ground assault by Iraqi special-operations forces. But the jihadists remain, moving back and forth from the caves through the friendly villages and the countryside. In early November they set off an improvised explosive device near the mountain, killing four Iraqi federal policemen.

Qara Chokh is only one district in what some observers call ISIS’ “mountain state.” A recent report from the Institute for the Study of War found ISIS maintains similar networks of support and de facto control in the Hamrin Mountains in Diyala Province, the Hawija District, eastern Salah al-Din Province, Daquq and south of Mosul city—all in Iraq’s central Sunni heartland.

The report, entitled “ISIS’ Second Resurgence,” puts the number of fighters available to Islamic State in Iraq and Syria at 30,000. It also estimates that ISIS has smuggled as much as $400 million out of Iraq and invested it across the region. The terror group’s traditional revenue generators, including kidnapping, extortion and drug smuggling, still continue within Syria and Iraq. CONTINUE AT SITE

MARILYN PENN: WHEN SALLY MET STORMY

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/topic/politics/

Let’s start with some brief statistics about the explosion of pornography online: porn sites receive more hits than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined – 35% of all downloads are porn related; 90% of boys and 60% of girls have seen internet porn before the age of 18; 83% of boys and 55% of girls have seen same-sex intercourse online; child-porn is one of the fastest growing businesses; pornography is a global $97 billion industry.

Now let’s go to the NYT article of Dec 4th detailing Sally Quin acting as hostess to Stormy Daniels at Politics & Prose, a Wash DC bookstore co-owned by a former Hillary adviser. The occasion was a coming-out party for the porn star’s new book, whose title I won’t mention, because unlike Sally and the NYT, I am averse to increasing the interest in pornography and the financial benefits to its performers and producers. But Sally and the Times go by the adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and Stormy was hailed by Ms. Quin as a woman who has “…turned ethics and values and morals around, upside down in this country. You – Stormy Daniels the porn star – are the one who is the ethical person.”

The Times didn’t stop there – its journalist went on to interview some in the audience: “attractive woman, I was hoping she might remove her clothes. Write that down,” by Dan Schwartz, 73, and Marjorie Perloff, 75 thought Stormy was “an articulate porn star, that’s what makes her special.” Some might claim the enormous size of her breast implants might be more responsible for that but Sally summed it up with her vote of approval: “I’ve watched Stormy’s porn and it’s really good.”

This little event attended by Washington liberals took place while the country is in spasms over male sexual harassment of females, toppling celebrities and moguls with charges dating back to the last century, agonizing over the supposed increase in rape and harassment on college campuses and castigating Victoria’s Secret for setting up beautiful women as unrealistic standard bearers for young women. It would take a psychiatrist to parse this cognitive dissonance but Sally and the people who agreed to be quoted were trounced by the reaction of the guest of honor herself whose comment was “how –cked up is that? Yo.” Indeed

Jason Chaffetz: Why is Michael Cohen prosecuted when Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder and Lois Lerner were not?

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/jason-chaffetz-why-is-michael-cohen-prosecuted-when-hillary-clinton-eric-holder-and-lois-lerner-were-not

With a Republican president in place and soon-to-be Democrat-run House, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has conveniently remembered that they have the ability to prosecute people who lie to Congress. This was a power they had inexplicably forgotten about during the 10 years that Democrats were benefiting from witnesses who lied.

No doubt there should be consequences and accountability if you testify to Congress under oath and blatantly lie or violate the law. But the DOJ seems to have different standards based on which party’s political fortunes will be impacted. It is this unequal application of justice that is dividing the country and threatens peace.

Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former attorney, struck a plea deal with the DOJ for lying to Congress. But what about all the other egregious cases of misconduct interacting with Congress? Why weren’t those pursued or prosecuted?

Let’s look back at how a very similar case was handled just a few short years ago. After FBI Director James Comey announced there would be no charges against Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or any of her associates for a variety of potential unlawful acts, Comey testified before the House Oversight Committee. I was the Chairman of the committee at the time.

When I asked Comey specifically if he had reviewed Secretary Clinton’s testimony before the Benghazi Select Committee, he confirmed the FBI never reviewed nor considered that testimony. As Chair of Oversight, I along with JudiciaryChairman Bob Goodlatte sent a formal request to the DOJ. We never even got a response. Note the contradiction: Cohen is forced into a plea deal and Clinton’s lies to Congress were not even reviewed.

The inconsistency always seems to conveniently favor the Democrats and penalize those connected to Donald Trump.

Sen. Hirono: Democrats Have a Hard Time “Connecting” With People Because Of “How Smart We Are” By Ian Schwartz

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/12/06/sen_hirono_democrats_have_a_hard_time_connecting_with_people_because_of_how_smart_we_are.html

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) said Democrats have a difficult time “connecting” with voters because of “how smart we are” that “we know so much.” Hirono was interviewed by journalist Dahlia Lithwick at the ‘Bend Towards Justice’ conference in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.

“We’re really good at shoving out all the information that touch people here (points to head) but not here (points to heart),” Hirono said of Democrats.

“I’ve been saying it at all of our Senate Democratic retreats that we need to speak to the heart not in a manipulative way, not in a way that brings forth everybody’s fears and resentments but truly to speak to the hearts so that people know that we’re actually on their side,” the Senator said.

“We have a really hard time doing that,” Hirono lamented, “and one of the reasons it was told to me at one of our retreats was that we Democrats know so much, that is true. And we have kind of have to tell everyone how smart we are and so we have a tendency to be very left brain.”

Keeping the Mentally Ill Out of Jail An innovative Miami-Dade program shows the way. Stephen Eide

https://www.city-journal.org/miami-dade-criminal-mental-health-project%E2%80%8B

Barbaric conditions in mental institutions were a common target of journalistic exposés during the asylum era of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These days, though, most accounts of gross maltreatment of the mentally ill concern jails, not hospitals. Deinstitutionalization emptied America’s asylums in the name of providing more humane treatment, but that approach has left many seriously mentally ill people on the streets, where, untreated, they can spiral into disorder and violent behavior—often putting them behind bars. This year, Alisa Roth’s book Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness and a series of articles by the Virginian-Pilot on mental illness in American jails have detailed the many ways in which incarceration tends to worsen serious mental illness.

For starters, jails are full of criminals. Serious offenders often harass, harm, and degrade those locked up for more minor offenses, including the mentally ill. Jails are noisy, and the population is highly transient (the standard stay is less than a month), making for “an especially unstable and disorienting social environment,” in Roth’s words. Effective treatment depends on an accurate diagnosis, but that can be a complicated process under ordinary circumstances (there’s no brain scan or blood test for mental illness), and even worse for a newly arrived jail inmate who may never have seen a psychiatrist before. When the mentally ill have trouble following jail rules, their difficulties can come across to corrections officers as insubordination.

Their propensity to break rules and commit additional crimes behind bars helps explain why mentally ill inmates often stay in jail far longer than typical inmates. They behave erratically, so it’s hard for them to mix with the general inmate population; but putting them in solitary confinement is unlikely to improve their condition. Recovery from mental illness requires not only therapy and medication but also meaningful opportunities for recreation and employment tailored to needs and capabilities. These aren’t likely to be abundant in jail, since, among other reasons, the unpredictability of release dates frustrates the development of plans for care. Incarcerated Americans have a constitutional right to mental-health care, thanks to Supreme Court and federal court rulings, but, far too often, those guarantees don’t equate to real-world benefits.

Victor Davis Hanson:A reminder that abstract progressive ideologies impose life-and-death consequences on millions

https://www.city-journal.org/california-wild-fires

California was, until recently, clouded under a blanket of smoke for weeks. Stanford University, where I work, sent students and faculty home early for Thanksgiving. The campus is more than 200 miles southwest of the 150,000-acre Camp Fire that just incinerated the Sierra Nevada foothill town of Paradise, and yet the entire Bay Area has been buried under collateral haze for days. I am a fifth-generation native Californian and remember many horrific Sierra Nevada fires, but never anything remotely comparable to the blazes of 2018.

Here in Fresno County, in the San Joaquin Valley, positioned between the Coast Range and Sierra Nevada mountains, the stagnant air for weeks has remained as polluted as China’s. When the normal northerlies blew, we were smoked in from the Camp Fire, 250 miles to the north. When the rarer southerlies took over, some of the smoke from the 100,000-acre Woolsey fire in the canyons of Malibu arrived from 230 miles distant.

July and August were nearly as incendiary as November. The huge, 450,000-acre Mendocino County conflagrations, the horrific Shasta-area Carr fire (nearly a half-million acres), and the nearby Ferguson fire in the Madera foothills all combined to make the air nearly unbreathable for two months throughout the Central Valley. Yet Californians in the irrigated center of the state were the lucky ones, breathing smoke rather than seeing fires overwhelm their homes and communities.

What is going on in California? Governor Jerry Brown, most of the Democratic-majority state legislature, the academy, and the administrative state have rushed to blame man-made global warming for the undeniable dry spell from May to mid-November that turned mountain canyons into tinderboxes. Usually autumn rains keep hillsides wet enough to prevent sudden combustions when the late autumn winds kick up. Not this year. Yet, if California has been arid and rainless these past months, two years ago we experienced near-record snow and rain that started in early fall and continued into late spring. Last year, we saw near-normal levels of precipitation.

If our life-giving reservoirs of the state’s vast California Water Project and federal Central Valley Project are currently not full, it is mostly because millions of acre-feet of stored water were released to flow into the San Francisco Bay estuaries and the delta — contradicting most of the original mandates of the water projects of providing flood control, power generation, lake recreation, and irrigation for California residents. Our ancestors rightly had assumed that two-thirds of the state’s people would continue to live where one-third of the state’s precipitation fell, requiring vast water transfers aimed exclusively for municipal and irrigation needs, admittedly at the expense of nineteenth-century whitewater rivers, flood plains, and riparian landscapes. Protecting the delta smelt population in San Francisco Bay, or restoring ancient salmon runs in the San Joaquin River, were not the concerns of these farseeing water engineers, who never imagined that their envisioned third-generation water projects would either be cancelled outright or would fail to keep pace with California’s burgeoning growth.

Sweden’s Ugly Ultraliberalism and the Jews By Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld

https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/sweden-liberalism-jews/

For anyone curious to see just how ugly ultraliberalism can get, Sweden is the ideal case study. The deep presence of anti-Semitism in Sweden reveals that the country’s image as a near perfect liberal democracy is false. So serious is the problem that the country is in dire need of a national anti-Semitism commissioner who can point out the threats coming from neo-Nazis and Muslims, the flaws of the police and the justice system, and other failures of the authorities to deal with anti-Semitism. But Sweden’s purported love of free speech is unlikely to extend so far as to give a mouthpiece to such a person.

In this century, only one Jewish community in all of western Europe has decided to dissolve itself because of nonstop threats from neo-Nazis: the community in the town of Umea, in northeastern Sweden. Jews in Sweden account for less than 0.2% of the population, but they are the targets of profound hatred. This does not comport very well with Sweden’s image as a near-perfect liberal democracy.

Major anti-Semitic threats to Swedish Jews have come out of parts of the Muslim community. In 2017, a movie was shown on Bavarian television about the visit to Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest city, by the German Jewish author Henryk Broder and the Egyptian writer Hamad Abdel Samad. They met several local Jews, including the town’s American rabbi. He told them the shrinking community had installed bullet-proof windows at the synagogue, but even that precaution didn’t keep them safe. A bomb went off in front of the synagogue and another was thrown into the chapel of the Jewish cemetery, which was totally destroyed. The rabbi himself is regularly harassed when walking on the street. Objects thrown at him have included an apple, a lighter, a glass, and a bottle. In an indication of the lack of police control, when Broder and Samad came to Malmö, they were told by police not to open the windows of their car when they were driving through a Muslim neighborhood.

The number of complaints about hate crimes in Malmö reached a record in 2010 and 2011. It did not lead to any convictions.

The sham that is the Mueller investigation By Howard J. Warner

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/the_sham_that_is_the_mueller_investigation.html

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has finally provided his team’s sentencing recommendation for three-star general Michael Flynn. He has acknowledged that Flynn has provided 19 separate interviews with the Mueller team. The heavily redacted report provides no information concerning the testimony that Flynn provided. Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during the investigation of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election.

Flynn has had to sell his home to pay his legal bills during this process. His 33-year career serving our country seems to have meant little to the prosecutors trying to get him to turn on Trump. Although we have no direct evidence for his sudden decision last year to plead guilty and cooperate, many believe that this was done to protect his son from being prosecuted. This is the type of prosecutorial overreach that borders on ethical violations. It certainly makes us wonder: what is prosecutorial discretion?

Shockingly, the basis for this investigation includes citation of the Logan Act of the 19th century, limiting foreign negotiations by the general public. Most observers believe that the transition team is not subject to this law, which has rarely been used and never successfully when challenged in court. Unfortunately, the FBI investigators reported that they did not believe that Flynn was intentionally lying when questioned about his interaction with then-Russian ambassador Kislyak.

The report includes recognition that he did not register when doing work for the government of Turkey. This is usually corrected by paper changes, not prosecution. Further, all the information that led to the inquiry was collected through government communication-gathering. Though the government is required to minimize the mention of names of U.S. citizens, this information was leaked to damage Flynn and ultimately Trump.

So far, most of the Mueller prosecutions have been process crimes and not ones with any connection to Russian collusion. This includes George Papadopoulos and Michael Cohen. This makes one wonder why Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein began this inquiry in the first place. It is hard to dismiss all the unequal justice, including the questionable FISA warrant on Carter Page, begun with a phony Russian dossier.

Unsavory Allies, From Stalin to the Saudis FDR cooperated with one of history’s most murderous dictators.FDR cooperated with one of history’s most murderous dictators. By Winston Groom See note please

https://www.wsj.com/articles/unsavory-allies-from-stalin-to-the-saudis-1543966304

More recently, the Clinton administration’s most frequent foreign visitor was Yasser Arafat, a mass murderer and terrorist, and both Presidents Bush were obsequious to the tyrants of Saudi Arabia…and no one in Congress or the media got too exercised….rsk

The media, Democrats and even some Republicans have been full of moral indignation over the Trump administration’s failure to punish Saudi Arabia for killing writer Jamal Khashoggi.Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia says “the president’s failure to hold Saudi Arabia responsible in any meaningful way” is an “example of this White House’s retreat from America’s leadership on human rights and protecting the free press.”

President Trump has balked at all of this, noting that the Saudis are valuable allies against Iran. The “Death to America”-chanting fanatics who make up the Iranian regime are the world’s foremost sponsors of terrorism, and they are committed to building nuclear weapons that could reach not only Israel but also Europe and the U.S.

The president’s critics must be a bit short on American history. During World War II, the U.S. and President Franklin D. Roosevelt were in bed comfortably with one of the most murderous dictators in history. Joseph Stalin didn’t kill one citizen of the Soviet Union. He killed millions, before and during the war. He was quoted saying: “The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.” Maybe, frighteningly, he was right.

Stalin played a double game with the Nazis until Hitler stabbed him in a the back by attacking the Soviet Union in June 1941. When the U.S. entered the war six months later, FDR sought out Stalin as an ally and provided the Soviets with an endless supply of military equipment—all interest-free under the Lend-Lease Act.

Hollywood papered over Soviet crimes. “Mission to Moscow,” a 1943 Warner Bros. movie, portrayed the Soviet people as happy and prosperous under Stalin’s benevolent rule. The purges and show trials were depicted as efforts to rid the country of German agents. The film’s producer called it “an expedient lie.”