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Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Republicans, Yet Again, Do Right by Black Americans By Deroy Murdock

By on November 2nd, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/republicans-do-right-by-black-americans/

The party that freed the slaves continues to liberate black Americans today.

‘What the hell do you have to lose?” candidate Donald J. Trump queried black Americans in 2016, as he asked for their votes with characteristically blunt eloquence. Eight percent of black voters bought his pitch. While this seems like a rout, Trump outperformed Mitt Romney by one-third; 6 percent of blacks backed 2012’s GOP nominee. Trump’s total was astonishing, given that the Left/media slandered him as the guy who brings the lighter fluid to a cross burning.

So, what do blacks think of Trump today? Rasmussen’s tracking poll Monday found Trump’s approval among blacks at a record-high 40 percent, versus 50 percent nationwide. How could this be? The Trump-hating Left/media’s attacks have been ruthless, relentless, and more one-sided than a flounder. Answer: President Trump and Republican leadership have made black Americans better off than they were two years ago.

• Black unemployment was 8.6 percent in October 2016. Last month, it hit 6.2 percent, marginally above May’s lowest-ever 5.9 percent.

• The Labor Department counted 18.1 million blacks employed in October 2016 versus 19.3 million last month. In short, 1.2 million more black Americans have found work since Donald J. Trump was elected.

• Blacks below poverty fell from 21.8 percent in 2016 to 21.2 percent in 2017, the latest and historically lowest such reading.

This great news flows from Republican policies: abundant tax relief, robust deregulation, and a pro-business tone in Washington that is healing Obama’s “You didn’t build that!” public abuse of American enterprise.

The party that freed the slaves has done even more to liberate black Americans today:

• The GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which every single Democrat in Congress opposed, includes Opportunity Zones. These areas “offer tax incentives for businesses to invest in economically distressed communities, making them a powerful vehicle for economic growth and job creation,” a White House statement explains. Across America, 8,761 communities have been declared Opportunity Zones, not unlike the Enterprise Zones that the late Congressman Jack Kemp (R., N.Y.) advocated during the Reagan era. “Through these tax incentives, we will jumpstart our American communities, create momentum for economic recovery, and attract investment to diverse areas across our Nation.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Administration to Reimpose Last of Sanctions Lifted by Iran Deal By Mairead McArdle

By on November 2nd, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-administration-to-reimpose-last-of-sanctions-lifted-by-iran-deal/

The Trump administration will reimpose the rest of the sanctions lifted under the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with early next week, officials announced Friday.

“This part of the campaign about which we’re speaking today is simple: It is aimed at depriving the regime of the revenues that it uses to spread death and destruction around the world,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a call with reporters.

The 2015 nuclear deal, which was also signed by the U.K., France, Germany, China, and Russia, gave Tehran billions of dollars in relief from sanctions in exchange for a promise to curb its nuclear program. President Trump pulled out of the deal in May, and allowed two periods of 9o and 180 days to let companies phase out their business with Iran.

After the first period, which ended in August, the U.S. reimposed sanctions affecting transactions with U.S. dollar banknotes and trade in gold and precious metals, graphite, and cars. On Monday, the administration will reimpose the more hefty batch of sanctions, affecting the energy, shipping, shipbuilding, and financial sectors.

Eight countries will be granted a waiver from oil and gas sanctions and will still be able to import Iranian oil temporarily, Pompeo said. A list of those countries will be published Monday.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

U.S. job growth soars; annual wage gain largest since 2009 Lucia Mutikani

By on November 2nd, 2018

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy/u-s-job-growth-surges-annual-wage-gain-biggest-since-2009-idUSKCN1N70AJ

U.S. job growth rebounded sharply in October and wages recorded their largest annual gain in 9-1/2 years, pointing to further labor market tightening that could encourage the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates again in December.

The Labor Department’s closely watched monthly employment report on Friday also showed the unemployment rate was steady at a 49-year low of 3.7 percent as 711,000 people entered the labor force, in a sign of confidence in the jobs market.

Sustained labor market strength eased fears about the economy’s health following weak housing and business spending data. President Donald Trump cheered the robust jobs report, which came less than a week before the midterm elections that will decide who controls the U.S. Congress.

“These are incredible numbers,” Trump tweeted.

Nonfarm payrolls increased by 250,000 jobs last month as employment in the leisure and hospitality sector bounced back after being held down by Hurricane Florence, which drenched North and South Carolina in mid-September.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Hezbollah in America: ‘Unit 910’ Exposed in Court Proceedings Remarkable information is revealed in Ali Kourani’s federal trial. By Todd Bensman

By on November 2nd, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/hezbollah-in-america-unit-910-exposed-in-court-proceedings/

Brooklyn-based Ali Kourani faces trial for multiple charges related to his work as a double agent for the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hezbollah; specifically for its “External Security Organization” known as “Unit 910.” Kourani’s federal trial is tentatively set for March 2019.
Ali Kourani

As a card-carrying, read-in intelligence operative for Hezbollah’s noxious foreign terrorism wing, Ali Kourani was expected to do far more than videotape a Manhattan armory and gather names of Jewish businessmen from LinkedIn to knock off one day (as reported in Part I of this series). He was expected to keep his killing skills sharp.

In Part I, I revealed part of what Kourani — a U.S.-educated engineer with an MBA — told FBI agents in a series of confessionary interviews about his alleged double life with Hezbollah’s foreign terrorist service Unit 910. He said it recruited him to become a U.S.-based asset in 2008 during a visit to Lebanon, where his extended family clan was deeply enmeshed with the group (this included two brothers and his father, who once illegally entered the U.S. through the U.S.-Mexico border).

Kourani allegedly told of how, at just the time he qualified for U.S. citizenship in 2008, he received some initial cloak-and-dagger tradecraft training and was sent to his new homeland, America, with his first easy assignments. He was to apply for U.S. citizenship so he could get a cherished U.S. passport, videotape an armory and FBI office, and gather names of local Jewish businessmen or high-ranking Israeli Defense Forces veterans worth killing. He also sent back to Lebanon intelligence about how passengers disembark from planes at John F. Kennedy International Airport, how U.S. Customs officers screen and collect luggage, and the locations of security personnel, cameras, and magnetometers.

But much more was to come after he achieved citizenship in 2009, and he would need to prepare.

Kourani told the FBI he understood that in the event of war with Israel, he could be called home to fight; that this was expected of all Unit 910 agents throughout the United States, Canada, in Latin America, and across the globe. Kourani believed he and many of the others were overseen by a ranking Hezbollah handler in Lebanon known only as “Fadi.” In July 2011, according to the court records, Fadi summoned Kourani to the homeland for more and better weapons training. CONTINUE ATE SITE

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pompeo: Sanctions ‘Just a Part’ of Iran Regime Behavior-Change Plan By Bridget Johnson

By on November 2nd, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/pompeo-sanctions-just-a-part-of-iran-regime-behavior-change-plan/

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said this morning that snapback sanctions on Iran will be “just a part of the U.S. government’s total effort to change the behavior of the Ayatollah Khamenei” and the regime in Tehran.

Sanctions on Iran’s energy, shipbuilding, shipping and banking sectors that were lifted as a result of the P5+1 nuclear deal will go back into effect Monday, Pompeo told reporters on a call.

Eight countries, though, are receiving waivers that will allow them to keep buying oil from Iran without coming under U.S. sanctions: Pompeo did not identify the countries, but Bloomberg reported that four are Japan, India, China and South Korea.

“We expect to issue some temporary allotments to eight jurisdictions, but only because they have demonstrated significant reductions in their crude oil and cooperation on many other fronts and have made important moves towards getting to zero crude oil importation. These negotiations are still ongoing,” Pompeo said. “Two of the jurisdictions will completely end imports as part of their agreements. The other six will import at greatly reduced levels.”

He stressed that “our actions today are targeted at the regime, not the people of Iran who have suffered grievously under this regime”; the U.S. “will maintain many humanitarian exemptions to our sanctions, including food, agriculture commodities, medicine and medical devices.”

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said the U.S. has “gone after the financial networks that the Iranian regime uses to fuel its terrorist proxies in Hezbollah and Hamas, to fund the Houthis in Yemen, and to support the brutal Assad regime in Syria.”

On Monday, Treasury will add more than 700 names to the list of blocked entities, he said, which includes “hundreds of targets previously granted sanctions relief under the JCPOA, as well as more than 300 new designations.”

Senate Republicans including Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) want the administration to cut off Iranian banks from conducting global transactions using the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, and are expected to introduced legislation to force President Trump’s hand after the election. CONTINUE AT SITE

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

U.S. Troops May Use Force Against Caravan Members Who Initiate Violence Trump gets tough on illegal aliens and would-be invaders. Matthew Vadum

By on November 2nd, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271831/us-troops-may-use-force-against-caravan-members-matthew-vadum

U.S. troops that are confronted by the illegal migrant caravans now in Central America that are approaching the nation’s southern border will be authorized to use force to defend themselves, President Trump said Thursday as he promised a new executive order next week that will prevent those entering the country illegally from making asylum claims.

Trump’s comments came the day after he released a hard-hitting video reminding voters of Democrat shortcomings on immigration policy. The ad features an expletive-spewing Luis Bracamontes, an illegal alien who was sentenced to death for murdering two cops in 2014 in Sacramento, California, when Barack Obama was president. “I’m going to kill more cops soon,” the smiling, remorseless killer is shown saying in the video.

“It is outrageous what the Democrats are doing to our Country,” Trump wrote Oct. 30 in a tweet that included the video.

Meanwhile, there are now four caravans of thousands of border-busting foreigners from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras that are headed for the United States. Many are violent or reportedly are suffering from communicable diseases. The first is currently near Matias Romero in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The second is around Huixtla in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The third and fourth caravans are near Escuintla, Guatemala, and Ahuachapan, El Salvador, respectively.

“Migrants seeking asylum will have to present themselves lawfully at a port of entry,” Trump said Nov. 1 at the White House, according to The Epoch Times. “Those who choose to break our laws and enter illegally will no longer be able to use meritless claims to gain automatic admission into our country.” Trump also called human traffickers “the lowest scum on earth.”

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Election Day: The Clear-Cut Choice Americans Face The stark contrast between the two parties. Bruce Thornton

By on November 2nd, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271820/election-day-clear-cut-choice-americans-face-bruce-thornton

This year’s midterm election offers the starkest contrast between the two parties in recent memory, making the choice of which to vote for obvious. We have reached a critical point in the long-developing transformation of our country from a democratic republic to the concentrated power and “soft despotism” of a technocratic elite. This year’s vote will determine whether Donald Trump’s pushback against that transformation will continue, or whether it will stall.

Democrats, of course, have been the main engine of that transformation. For over a century their politics and policies have relentlessly shifted further and further toward the progressive left. They have embraced and institutionalized the doctrines of technocracy based on a rejection of the Constitutional order and its philosophical assumptions that common sense, practical experience, virtue, and traditional wisdom are sufficient to make people capable of self-rule.

Democrats also rejected the Founders’ deep-seated fear of concentrated and centralized power, a lesson taught on every page of political history for 2500 years: No amount of technical training or knowledge can change a flawed human nature and its permanent vulnerability to the lust for power that always ends in tyranny. Hence the Founders’ separation and dispersal of power among the sovereign states and the three branches of the federal government. Protected by divided powers, the liberty of self-reliant and self-governing citizens became the bulwark against the self-aggrandizement of power by elites, and the tyranny that follows.

The more the Democrat Party moved toward progressive technocracy, the more it abandoned ordered liberty as the most important reason for government to exist in the first place. Instead it endorsed the grand narrative of modernity: The inevitable progress and improvement of people and society, based on “human sciences” presumably as successful as physics and mathematics at effecting improving changes, would create the brave new world that avoided the miseries and sufferings of the benighted past. Technological progress became the model for this dream, its success in the material world now to be achieved in the human, social, and political realm. Of course, such a regime required “experts” to be installed in the centralized bureaus and agencies of the federal government, and to be given the power over policy once the purview of the representatives elected by the sovereign people and accountable to them at the ballot box. Now divided and balanced power was scorned as an 18th century anachronism and systematically degraded.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The critical November 2018 mid-term election Yoram Ettinger

By on November 2nd, 2018

Trump: a coattail – or an anchor chained – President?

The November 2018 mid-term election will determine the future maneuverability of President Trump, and will shape the dominant worldview of the strongest legislature in the world, which is co-determining and co-equal to the executive branch, and Israel’s systematic and most effective ally in face of pressure by all US Presidents from Truman through Obama.

The coming mid-term election will be – once again – a referendum on the popularity of a sitting President: 49% approval rating (50% disapproval) of President Trump, according to a November 1 Rasmussen Reports; 40% (54% disapproval) according to an October 28 Gallup poll; 43.9% (53% disapproval) according to an October 31 RealClear Politics.

Will Trump be a coattail-President elevating the Republican party to mid-term election gains in the House and Senate, as has happened on rare occasions, such as the 1934 election (President Roosevelt), 1998 (President Clinton) and 2002 (President G.W. Bush)?

Or, will Trump be an anchor-chained President pulling the Republican party down to significant losses – and even to minority status in one/both Chambers – as has usually been the case: President Obama (2014 and 2010), President G.W. Bush (2006), President Clinton (1994), President G.H. Bush (1990), President Reagan (1986 and 1982), President Carter (1978), President Ford/Nixon (1974), etc.?

Since 1950, a sitting President’s party has lost an average of 24 House seats in the mid-term election, which is the minimum required for a Democratic House majority in 2019. The current balance is: 241 Republicans and 194 Democrats.

The Senate hurdle – facing the Democrats – is much higher, since the 35 Senate seats up for the coming November election consist of 9 Republicans and 26 Democrats, 10 of whom are in states won by President Trump in 2016 (only 1 Republican incumbent from a state won by Hilary Clinton in 2016), and 13 Democratic incumbents from states with a republican governor (no Republican incumbent from a state governed by a Democrat).

While sustaining the Republican majority in the House and Senate would maintain President Trump’s relative-freedom of operation, a loss of one/two Chambers would tie his hands internally and globally, commercially and militarily, due to the power of the US Legislature, which was deemed by the Founding Fathers as the “secret weapon” against a potential tyranny of the Executive.

The centrality of the US constituent and Congress

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Life Returning Slowly to Christian Homeland in Iraq by Kenneth R. Timmerman

By on November 2nd, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13211/iraq-christians-returning

“Something specific occurred here that requires a specific response. It is called genocide… It is important for these communities to understand that they have a superpower behind them. This is a White House priority. Our goal is to help those communities return to their historic lands.” — Max Primorac, Special Representative for Minority Assistance Programs at USAID, who is responsible for aiding Christians and Yazidis targeted by ISIS.

While roughly a third of the Christians who fled from ISIS in 2014 are returning, the future of their communities in northern Iraq needs political support and a surge of security and economic development. For Christians worldwide, this is our homeland. This is where we began. These are the people we need to protect and help to prosper.

QARAQOSH, Iraq — Christians are gradually returning to their historic homeland in northern Iraq, after three years of ISIS occupation.

The lucky ones managed to flee before the ISIS onslaught in the pre-dawn hours of August 6, 2014, and returned to find their houses intact. Most, however, are facing tremendous damage to their homes and families from a war that pitted neighbor against neighbor, community against community, tearing apart bonds forged over generations.

Yohanna Younis Towaya, 54, a prominent businessman and farmer, returned to find his home burned and looted. “One wall, next to my father’s house, was completely blown out but we repaired it,” he says. His father’s house, next door, he says, has been flattened by an allied air strike: ISIS fighters turned it into a fighting post.

Towaya says he doubts he will ever rebuild his father’s house, like the 116 such buildings in this once-thriving Christian economic center. “ISIS fighters are buried there beneath the rubble,” he says. “Sometimes, you can smell them.”

The smell of the unburied dead is pungent. You can smell it from here in the Christian heartland all the way into ancient Mosul, 12 miles to the west. The area was totally devastated in the final battle to crush ISIS hold-outs fighting from tunnels and underground bunkers.

No one really knows who provided ISIS with their tunneling machines, but there are many of them. On the outskirts of Qaraqosh, members of ISIS had dug a maze of tunnels beneath a Syriac Orthodox monastery at Qortaya to an ancient Assyrian mound 150 meters away. Those firing positions, high enough for an ordinary person to walk upright, allowed them to dominate the surrounding plains.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Twilight of the Green Follies By Alex Alexiev

By on November 2nd, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/twilight_of_the_green_follies.html

For more than two and a half centuries, human kind has lived under an irreconcilable dichotomy – the benevolent revolution we call the enlightenment, and the inevitable reactionary counter-revolution that followed it – a dichotomy that has continued to our days.

The enlightenment introduced a number of revolutionary concepts that demolished the church dogma that had dominated the Middle Ages. It established reason and empirical knowledge as the source of authority leading to the scientific revolution beginning with Copernicus and the heliocentric theory of the universe. In government, the enlightenment brought about the radical idea of individual liberty with John Locke’s call for “life, liberty and property.“ The revolution reached its apotheosis in the late 18th century with the American Constitution and its idea of “inalienable rights” given to us by our Creator and of a government based on the consent of the governed. All of this was based on the unshakeable belief in progress driven by man and the Judeo-Christian civilization’s fundamental belief in the primacy of man over nature.

Yet no sooner did these radical ideas gain wide currency in the West than the reactionary counter-assault materialized. It started with Jean-Jacque Rousseau, considered by many the father of the totalitarian temptation, and his idea of an all powerful state using coercion as means of imposing an imaginable “general will.” Since then, humanity has struggled to reconcile two ideologies that are fundamentally at odds: one based on the rights of the individual, the other espousing the unlimited power of the state. The latter one found its culmination in the bloody totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, best expressed in Mussolini’s dictum “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” And it is this veneration of the coercive powers of the state that fundamentally unites Nazism, fascism and communism despite other marginal differences.

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