RUTHFULLY YOURS

ht/25/chautauqua-institutions-destruction/tp://joshfirst.com/blog/2018/07

It was safe, quiet, full of interesting people reading books or lecturing about the most recent book they had written. The on-site opera and orchestra provided just about everyone with any artistic taste with something.

Decades later, it has been completely taken over by the same people who have targeted every other American institution for capture and control, or destruction.

Chautauqua is now a summertime parade of communists, bigots, America haters, partisan political activists. Each speaker is treated to lavish welcome ceremonies as if they are the most gifted thinker on Planet Earth, when in fact they are the meanest, most close-minded political street brawlers in America.

The place reeks of radical, angry politics everywhere you turn. The air is poisonous with hate and tension, but always sold as love and open-mindedness.

I think the institution is still physically safe, for now, but my own kids have this sense that all is not well there. They have grown up going there every summer, and they report back feeling that same tension that anyone with different views feels there now. Unwelcome.

The last time I was there, or one of the last times, I sat at the Amp for a lecture by Donna Brazile. Of course she was presented as some kind of open-minded Deep Thinker, when in fact she is a narrowly partisan fighter and proven liar. Brazile helped fix Hillary’s illegal cheating “win” over Bernie Sanders in the Democrat primary.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-good-trade-news-1532560648

The meeting on trade Wednesday between President Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker had all the makings of a potential crackup, but in the event it provided the best economic news in weeks. Financial markets were clearly pleased, as stocks rose across the board before the closing bell on the statements by the two presidents after their White House session. Call it a relief rally.

The two sides essentially declared a tariff truce, pending negotiations on a larger trade deal between the 28-nation European Union and the U.S. Mr. Trump agreed to step back from his threat of 25% tariffs on European car imports, while the two sides pledged to resolve the current U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs and Europe’s retaliatory levies on U.S. goods.

Europe also agreed to buy more soybeans immediately, and much more liquefied natural gas from the U.S. in the future as its import capacity expands. U.S. LNG export capacity is expected to nearly triple by 2020 to 9.6 billion cubic feet a day, as more export terminals come online and the fracking boom continues.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/obama-administration-al-qaeda-affiliate-knowingly-funded/

The group had been on a list of terrorist funders for a decade when a government agency specifically approved funding for it.

The Middle East Forum has discovered that the Obama administration approved a grant of $200,000 of taxpayer money to an al-Qaeda affiliate in Sudan — a decade after the U.S. Treasury designated it as a terrorist-financing organization. More stunningly, government officials specifically authorized the release of at least $115,000 of this grant even after learning that it was a designated terror organization.

The story began in October 2004, when the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the Khartoum-based Islamic Relief Agency (ISRA), also known as the Islamic African Relief Agency (IARA), as a terror-financing organization. It did so because of ISRA’s links to Osama bin Laden and his organization Maktab al-Khidamat (MK), the precursor of al-Qaeda.

According to the U.S. Treasury, in 1997 ISRA established formal cooperation with MK. By 2000, ISRA had raised $5 million for bin Laden’s group. The Treasury Department notes that ISRA officials even sought to help “relocate [bin Laden] to secure safe harbor for him.” It further reports that ISRA raised funds in 2003 in Western Europe specifically earmarked for Hamas suicide bombings.

The 2004 designation included all of ISRA’s branches, including a U.S. office called the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA-USA). Eventually it became known that this American branch had illegally transferred over $1.2 million to Iraqi insurgents and other terror groups, including, reportedly, the Afghan terrorist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In 2010, the executive director of IARA-USA and a board member pled guilty to money-laundering, theft of public funds, conspiracy, and several other charges.

ISRA’s influence also spread to Washington. Former U.S. congressman Mark Siljander (R., Mich.) pled guilty in 2010 to obstruction of justice and acting as an unregistered foreign agent after prosecutors found that IARA-USA had paid him $75,000 — using misappropriated USAID grant money — to lobby the government, in an attempt to remove the charity from the government’s terror list.