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Ruth King

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Kerry Drums Up Business for Iran While Treasury Warns Against It by Elliott Abrams

By on November 4th, 2016

On October 31, Secretary of State Kerry continued his remarkable campaign to drum up business for Iran. Speaking at Chatham House in London, here is part of what he said:

Iran deserves the credit of having met its part of the bargain, and it’s important for us and the rest of the world to meet ours, to make sure that the lifted sanctions are in fact not still impeding the ability to be able to do business, and to grant that Iran gets the benefit of the bargain that they made. And that is just plain, simple, good faith in international relations

…. Because it’s important for people to understand that we have worked hard to make sure that we have lived up to every component of what is required of us here. And I wish that some of the larger banks were, in fact, ready to make loans and engage in opening accounts, because they can. They’re allowed to, but they’re still remaining somewhat risk averse for various reasons….

[W]e agreed to lift certain sanctions. So OFAC, the Office of Financial Accountability has come out and made it very, very clear that if you do due diligence in the normal fashion, no extra due diligence, just normal due diligence for whoever it is you’re opening an account or for ever – whatever lending you’re about to do, and later it turns out it was some unforeseeable entity that pops up, you will not be held accountable for that. And so what we’ve done is we’ve been trying to reduce the level of risk so that people will begin to engage in a broader range of lending. Why are we doing that? Because the deal we made was that sanctions would not continue to interfere with their ability to do a normal course of business, and regrettably because of some of the uncertainties about OFAC or some of the uncertainties about who’s doing what, it hasn’t been. And we’re trying to change that.

I must say though that we’ve made good-faith efforts way beyond what we agreed to do, I mean, like this meeting. I mean, I never anticipated I’d be sitting in the banks to try to get them to do this. But we have reached out way beyond what anything within the four corners of the agreement in order to try to make sure that it delivers in full.

Despite the innumerable ways in which Iran has demonstrated bad faith–from its continuing support for terrorist groups to its detention of American sailors in January to its arming of the Houthi rebels in Yemen with missiles with which they have attacked American ships–Kerry wants us to bend over backwards to help their economy. It isn’t enough to remove sanctions that prevent banks from lending to Iran; Kerry has become a cheerleader now urging banks to make more loans whatever the risks. This is not in fact giving Iran the benefit of the bargain it struck, which exists in the letter of the JCPOA agreement. It is going much further. In fact it is going so far that Kerry is now giving banks bad advice–advice that is directly contradicted by U.S. Treasury officials.

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The Jew, the Zionist and antisemitism at the House of Lords : David Collier

By on November 4th, 2016

“It is absolutely true that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism as we have seen it before. This is a new breed. A mixture. It is dangerous and it is scary because this anti-Zionist movement cannot survive without carrying the antisemitism along with it. So for the Jewish Zionist, the vast majority of Jewish people in the world, we become targets. Until someone in a position of power puts a stop to this, preferably through an accepted definition of antisemitism, the vast majority of Jews remain ‘legitimate’ targets of hate crimes.”

Yesterday there was an event at the House of Lords, put together by the Palestine Return Centre (PRC). The evening was hosted by Jenny Tonge.

There were no tickets remaining, but I had to go. The PRC and I have history. It was at one of their events that Gerald Kaufman told tales of Jewish money and Israeli conspiracies. Jenny Tonge needs little introduction. I wanted in. A little back story, a tale or two spun along the way, and I had successfully gate-crashed a party at the Houses of Parliament. Soon I was sitting in the front row of committee room 2A.

As it turned out Tonge was tame, but there was still much to shake me. I go to so many of these events and I am still trying to formulate a complete picture of what it is I am seeing. For example, there is more antisemitism in the air than there was 18 months ago. Much more. I see it on campus, I saw buckets of it at a recent event at Lichfield. I saw it last night at Westminster. A definite increase. But why?

There is no point being directed by anger, nor to lose yourself in the creation of an irrational inhuman enemy. These methods merely provide a lazy way out, a system of avoiding uncomfortable moments of self-reflection. Theirs is a line that can be drawn. Drawn between the civil war in 1948 and those who sit in the House of Lords today demanding an apology from the British government. We can draw the line further back, even beyond the 1917 letter they created this event to discuss.

I look around and feel sorry for the Arabs in the room. They have tied their flag to yet another pole that will only bring additional wasted years, more bloodshed. I cast my mind back to the Arab families I knew so well. Families, friends, in Ramallah, Nablus, Jericho and Bethlehem. In Qalqilya and Tulkarm. These are the choices of the people representing them? It is 16 years since the outbreak of the second ‘intifada’. Since all those bridges were burnt. Another generation wasted. How can you not have sympathy for a desperate people who depend so totally on this, the hopeless cast of a thousand who lead them?
The PRC event

Almost immediately I realised I was not the only Zionist in the room. Jenny Tonge publicly welcomed someone from ‘Israel radio’. I am not sure why she did this. Tonge used the opportunity to score points, by thanking the reporter for the publicity his articles had brought her in the past. Reveling in her own notoriety. But she had also passed warning to everyone present that Zionist ears were in the room. From that moment I knew Jenny Tonge would be on her best behaviour.

The event was to launch the ‘apology for Balfour’ campaign and the central thrust was to discuss activity over the next twelve months. Within a week we can expect to see the launch of an online petition – target 100,000 signatures by late Spring. There are also plans to have a large public demonstration in Trafalgar Square at the time of the 100th anniversary.

Then came the speakers. One introducing himself as a ‘British Palestinian’. What a ‘British Palestinian’ is I have no idea. They are born here. They are British passport holders, not refugees. This one Karl Sabbagh was born in Worcestershire in the early 1940’s, so whatever his family did, they did out of their own self interest. His mother was British, of American and Irish parentage. Karl is willing the international community to create an alliance of power to remove the ‘invaders’ and replace the Jewish state. A mirror image of the Zionist monster he imagines in his head. Karl Sabbagh is on a strange personal mission.

The first two talks were nothing special. The same fare I have heard 1000 times. Balfour was ‘a mistake’. The telling of a narrative held together by sticky tape with a C.S Lewis or Enid Blyton signature. The third talk was by Betty Hunter, Honorary President of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Enough said. There was also a ‘special guest’ speaker, who had not been on the programme. Yakov M. Rabkin, ‘a professor of history at the Université de Montréal’. A rabid anti-Zionist Jew.

Then the audience gets to speak. We leave the scripted, careful talk behind, and open up the room for comment. There were four incidents that I need to describe, to expand on this issue of growing antisemitism. But first, the groundwork:

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The “Cultural Revolution” Comes to American Academia by David Lewis Schaefer

By on November 4th, 2016

David Lewis Schaefer is Professor of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches courses on political philosophy and American political thought. Among his books are The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (1990) and Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition (2007).

One of the hoariest of twentieth-century academic clichés – Harvard philosophy professor George Santayana’s remark that “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it” – still has bite. As a political scientist and classroom teacher I see evidence of this truth on a regular basis. It was alarming to me to have discovered only recently that practically none of my students had ever heard about the Munich Agreement of 1938, in which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain “appeased” Hitler’s demand for cession of the Czech Sudetenland and then returned home to announce that he had brought “peace in our time”—while in reality paving the way for what Winston Churchill subsequently called “the unnecessary war”.

Knowing about something isn’t a cure-all. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are old enough that they must at least have learned of Munich in their schoolbooks, but their policy toward Vladimir Putin and his Russia have been one long Munich. And once again an aggressive despot has taken appeasement as a license to acquire his neighbors’ lands. But though Clinton and Obama emulate Chamberlain, my students don’t hear Neville echo in their heads when they look at the daily headlines. Their historical ignorance cripples their ability to judge today’s politics and world affairs.

I also recently found that literally none of the 43 students enrolled in my introductory political philosophy class this semester, or some 20 in American Political Thought II last spring, had ever heard of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against Soviet rule – the 60th anniversary of which we should all be commemorating this week. (I have long had occasion to make reference to the uprising when teaching Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, because, as I learned from the late Harry Jaffa, and as a 1956 refugee who, remarkably, wound up teaching Civil War history at Gettysburg College partly confirms in an op-ed in the October 26 Wall Street Journal, a reading of that address was the last thing listeners could hear on Radio Free Hungary – before the broadcast was ended by the sound of machine-gun bullets as Soviet troops broke into the station. Only once I learned that my students had never heard of the uprising did I realize why my telling them that fact had had so little visible impact on them over the years.)

Since the College of the Holy Cross, where I teach, is highly selective in its admissions policies, I must assume that this lack of historical awareness is typical of my students’ generation – and of its immediate predecessors. It might help explain the appeal of Bernie Sanders’s socialism to the millennial generation – who naively equate it with the welfare-statism of the democratic Scandinavian nations that maintain vigorous systems of private business enterprise. They apparently know nothing of the despotism that socialism has consistently entailed, from the Paris Commune to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela and the Castro brothers’ Cuba. But how could they know of the political history of socialist states? The decline of the study of political history was the theme of a recent op-ed in the New York Times, while my undergraduate teacher of diplomatic history, Walter LaFeber, lamented in the Chronicle of Higher Education decades ago, late in his career, that that discipline had effectively disappeared from the college curriculum.

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Hotbeds of Groupthink: The Shrinking Viewpoint Diversity on Our Campuses Democrats outnumber Republicans by as much as 33.5 to 1, and it’s likely to grow even more unbalanced as older faculty retire. By Elliot Kaufman

By on November 4th, 2016

A new academic study reveals left-wing dominance of top university faculties around the country — that’s not news. However, the study, published in Econ Journal Watch, also suggests that the dominance is likely to grow even stronger.

For professors younger than 36, the ratio of registered Democrats to Republicans was an astonishing 22.7 to 1 at 40 top universities. The study sampled professors across the fields of economics, history, communications, law, and psychology, using information from Voter Lists Online’s Aristotle database.

“We found that younger faculty have higher [Democrat to Republican] ratios than do older faculty,” said Mitchell Langbert and Daniel Klein, two of the study’s three authors (Anthony Quain in the third). “The trend will continue.”

Moreover, the political registration of assistant professors is the most imbalanced of all categories, with a Democrat to Republican ratio of 19.3 to 1. Emeritus professors’ registrations are the least skewed at 8.6 to 1. These statistics suggest that top universities will only become less politically diverse as older professors retire and younger professors take over the commanding heights of their institutions.

Among all professors, the study found a Democrat to Republican to ratio of 11.5 to 1. Broken down by field, the results are even more depressing. Top history departments have a ratio of 33.5 to 1. Journalism and psychology are also extremely lacking in intellectual diversity, with ratios of 20 to 1 and 17.4 to 1, respectively. Law schools have a ratio of 8.6 to 1, while economics departments are the least skewed, at 4.5 to 1.

Hearing both sides of an argument is essential to learning and forming opinions. “One-sided ideological orientation leads to one-sided teaching, which leads to intolerance of alternative views,” write Langbert and Klein in an e-mail to me.“The ability to disagree requires practice, but neither students nor their professors practice balanced disagreement in universities, because faculty meetings are increasingly held in halls of mirrors.”

Jason Willick, a staff writer for The American Interest magazine, tells me of his similar concerns, “I worry that [the academic process] won’t work as well when it comes to politically charged research areas if all of the people involved belong to the same [political] tribe. Both liberals and conservatives are tribal and less likely to question the assumptions of others in their tribe.”

This study confirms the findings of a number of recent studies. One found there to be approximately three times the number of Marxists as Republicans in the social sciences. Another found that professors of sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, and literature were “less likely to hire” a person whom they knew to be an NRA member than a Communist. Two in five sociologists said they were less likely to hire a person they knew to be an Evangelical Christian.

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No, Election Fraud Is Not as Unlikely as a Lightning Strike It’s a favorite Democratic talking point. It’s also completely false. By Hans A. von Spakovsky & Jason Snead

By on November 4th, 2016

Speaking at a partisan fundraiser in Florida last month, President Barack Obama touched on a number of issues near and dear to the hearts of liberals. It was part stump speech, part farewell-tour stop — and part chance to knock efforts at ensuring election integrity one last time.

The president just doesn’t think there is such a thing as election fraud. As he informed the assembled Floridians, “You are much likelier to get struck by lightning than to have somebody next to you commit voter fraud.”

We can’t guess how many fraudsters were in the audience that night. But we know one thing for sure: The Left loves this old lightning-strike chestnut.

It’s a claim that was debunked more than four years ago, yet progressives keep trotting it out anyway. So, it’s time to debunk it again, by turning to the National Weather Service and The Heritage Foundation’s voter-fraud database, which contains hundreds of cases of election fraud, all of which have been proven in courts of law and resulted in criminal convictions or overturned elections.

In 2012, Florida suffered five fatalities from lightning strikes. But in the election that year, Jeffrey Garcia, chief of staff to then-Democratic representative Joe Garcia, ordered the congressman’s political campaign to illegally request absentee ballots for 1,800 voters without their consent. Jeffrey Garcia pleaded guilty to orchestrating this massive fraud and was sentenced to 90 days’ incarceration.

In that same year, Massachusetts — home to senator and election-fraud denier Elizabeth Warren — did not suffer a single lightning-related fatality, yet it did endure the criminal antics of Enrico “Jack” Villamaino, a Republican candidate for the state House of Representatives. Villamaino conspired with his future wife to alter the party registrations of 280 registered Democrats in the town of East Longmeadow, and then request absentee ballots in their names. His goal was to secure additional votes for himself in the Republican primary, at the cost of nearly 300 voters’ right to participate in the Democratic primary.

In 2013, Texas suffered only two lightning fatalities. But it did see Weslaco city commissioner Guadalupe Rivera attempt to secure reelection through illegal means. Rivera initially beat his rival, Letty Lopez, by a scant 16 votes, but Lopez sued alleging fraud. A judge determined that at least 30 illegal ballots had been cast, enough to swing the election. A new election was ordered, and Lopez won. Rivera subsequently pleaded guilty, along with an accomplice, to the charge of “assisting” voters by filling out ballots on their behalf without consulting them, or in a manner contrary to their wishes — in other words, robbing citizens of their right to vote.

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Europe’s New Blasphemy Courts by Douglas Murray

By on November 4th, 2016

Europe is currently seeing the reintroduction of blasphemy laws through both the front and back doors, initiated in a country which once prided itself on being among the first in the world to throw off clerical intrusion into politics.

By prosecuting Wilders, the courts in Holland are effectively ruling that there is only one correct answer to the question Wilders asked. They are saying that if someone asks you whether you would like more Moroccans or fewer, people must always answer “more,” or he will be committing a crime.

At no point would it occur to me that anyone saying he did not want an endless flow of, say, British people coming into the Netherlands should be prosecuted. Nor would he be.

The long-term implications for Dutch democracy of criminalising a majority opinion are catastrophic. But the trial of Wilders is also a nakedly political move.

The Dutch courts are behaving like a religious court. They are trying to regulate public expression and opinion when it comes to the followers of one religion. In so doing they obviously aspire to keep the peace in the short term, but they cannot possibly realise what trouble they are storing up for our future.

Europe is currently seeing the reintroduction of blasphemy laws through both the front and back doors. In Britain, the gymnast Louis Smith has just been suspended for two months by British Gymnastics. This 27-year old sportsman’s career has been put on hold, and potentially ruined, not because of anything to do with athletics but because of something to do with Islam.

Last month a video emerged online of the four-time Olympic medal-winner and a friend getting up to drunken antics after a wedding. The video — taken on Smith’s phone in the early hours of the morning — showed a friend taking a rug off a wall and doing an imitation of Islamic prayer rituals. When the video from Smith’s phone ended up in the hands of a newspaper, there was an immediate investigation, press castigation and public humiliation for the young athlete. Smith — who is himself of mixed race — was forced to parade on daytime television in Britain and deny that he is a racist, bigot or xenophobe. Notoriously liberal figures from the UK media queued up to berate him for getting drunk or for even thinking of taking part in any mockery of religion. This in a country in which Monty Python’s Life of Brian is regularly voted the nation’s favourite comic movie.

After an “investigation,” the British sports authority has now deemed Smith’s behaviour to warrant a removal of funding and a two-month ban from sport. This is the re-entry of blasphemy laws through the back door, where newspapers, daytime chat-shows and sports authorities decide between them that one religion is worthy of particular protection. They do so because they take the religion of Islam uniquely on its own estimation and believe, as well as fear, the warnings of the Islamic blasphemy-police worldwide.

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Obama’s Weighs Options for His Final Stab at Israel In his twilight months in office, Obama seeks to undermine America’s closest ally. Ari Lieberman

By on November 4th, 2016

Israelis and the pro-Israel community at large will breathe a collective sigh of relief when Obama leaves office. During Obama’s tenure, relations with Israel were caustic at best. Barely five months after taking office, he publicly launched a scathing attack against Israel – where he perversely insinuated a moral equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian actions – and did so in one of the most virulently anti-Semitic countries on the planet. He later skipped over Israel despite the fact that Israel was a mere 20-minute plane ride away. That was Obama’s opening salvo against America’s closest ally. It was only downhill from there.

Obama utilized high-level administration sources to leak negative information about Israel to sympathetic members of the press. In one such instance, an administration official –probably Ben Rhodes – referred to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “chicken-Sh*t.” In another instance, Obama voiced concurrence with French president, Nicholas Sarkozy, when Sarkozy characterized Netanyahu as a “liar.”

Often, the Obama administration would subject Israeli dignitaries to humiliating treatment during official state visits. Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, was shamefully transformed into a persona non grata. In the most notorious incident, Obama left Netanyahu out in the cold while having dinner with Michelle and his daughters. One commentator dryly noted that Obama treated Netanyahu as though he was the president of Equatorial Guinea.

Ultimately, Obama crossed the line and received significant pushback from Democratic lawmakers and donors. Obama got the message and toned down the rhetoric but his deep-seeded animus against Israel never dissipated and relations with Israel’s prime minister remained toxic.

Tensions surfaced again during Israel’s counter insurgency campaign against the Gaza-based terror group Hamas. Obama held up a shipment of Hellfire missiles to Israel and then tried to strong-arm Israel into accepting a suicidal ceasefire agreement brokered by Turkey and Qatar, two despotic nations that support Hamas and gave aid and comfort to Islamic State terrorists.

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Clinton’s Web Of Deception The unraveling of Hillary’s corrupt sphere of influence. Michael Cutler

By on November 4th, 2016

The 2016 elections are in the final stretch and were shaken to the core by the latest revelations from FBI Director James Comey on Friday, October 28, 2016 as reported by NBC News on October 30th, “FBI Obtains Warrant for Newly Discovered Emails in Clinton Probe — as Reid Accuses Comey of Hatch Act Violation.” Once again the Clinton scandal is creating turmoil in a presidential election that has gone way beyond “unconventional.” Indeed, Tom Clancy could not have scripted this year’s presidential election and intrigues.

While Comey’s recent remarks regarding the Clinton investigation have been extremely vague, the issue to focus on is how Hillary’s use of a private computer server, private e-mail account and non-secure digital devices to store, send and receive classified materials may have drawn others into her tangled web of deception.

The current focus of the Clinton quagmire is on whether or not the laptop computer shared by Weiner and his estranged wife contains sensitive information. If that laptop had been hacked both Weiner and Abedin could have been vulnerable to blackmail. This was an issue raised by Congressman Louie Gohmert, Texan Republican and former judge in a Fox News Business interview on October 31, 2016 in a segment that was posted under the title, “Rep. Gohmert: Clinton is a potential victim of blackmail.”

Additional individuals may also have been drawn into this web of deception through these e-mails as well. A chain is as strong as its weakest link. The weak links begin with Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin and may now include Anthony Weiner and perhaps others. Meanwhile, there is no way to yet determine how many other weak links are “out there” petrified that WikiLeaks or perhaps, a hacker may yet disclose their improper dealings with the Clintons or their foundation.

Could not these additional individuals be subject to blackmail as well?

Let’s take a moment to understand how all of this began.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

European Media Jihad Against Geert Wilders As they lose their grip, the political and media elites are getting desperate. Robert Spencer

By on November 4th, 2016

The mainstream media in Western Europe and North America isn’t even pretending to be an objective news source anymore; instead, “journalists” are working openly to quell what looks increasingly, on both sides of the Atlantic, like a popular revolution against the hegemony of the self-appointed political and media aristocracy that seems hell-bent on driving Western civilization over the cliff. And so it’s time for another round of their Two-Minutes Hate against Dutch politician and freedom fighter Geert Wilders.

Wilders has yet again gone on trial in the Netherlands for “hate speech,” and this time the case against him is especially flimsy: as Europe is roiled by the criminal activity of Muslim migrants, he is being accused of “hate speech” for saying that the massive influx of immigrants from Morocco (from which most of the Muslim migrants in the Netherlands come) has to be stopped.

This trial could very easily backfire on the Dutch inquisitors, and make Wilders more popular than ever with the people of the Netherlands and Europe in general, as they are increasingly fed up with the political and media elites’ forcing them to accept a massive influx of Muslim migrants that ensures a future only of civil strife, bloodshed, and Sharia oppression.

Consequently, those elites are trying desperately to shore up their position. Wilders chanted “No more Moroccans” at a rally. The horror! To any sane person, this means “Stop the influx of Moroccan immigrants who only inflate crime rates and welfare rolls.” To the media, which at this point is quite insane, insofar as insanity means an inability or refusal to accept reality, this means “Genocide!”

And so, in this Deutsche Welle (DW) piece by freelance “journalist” Teri Schultz, we’re told that European Parliament lawmaker Cecile Kyenge, who was born in Congo, had “numerous racial slurs – not to mention, bananas, literally – thrown at her, along with suggestions she go back to ‘her country.’” Does this have anything to do with the crime and civil strife that are the foundations for Wilders’ position? Of course not, but Wilders, Schultz tells us, is (of course) “far-right,” that all-purpose and meaningless semaphore that serves only to signal to right-thinking Deutsche Welle readers that Wilders is, as far as the media elites are concerned, unsavory, and must be opposed and shunned, his positions left unexamined.

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You Can Smell Hillary’s Fear The War on the FBI is an act of desperation. Daniel Greenfield

By on November 4th, 2016

In the final stretch of the election, Hillary Rodham Clinton has gone to war with the FBI.

The word “unprecedented” has been thrown around so often this election that it ought to be retired. But it’s still unprecedented for the nominee of a major political party to go war with the FBI.

But that’s exactly what Hillary and her people have done. Coma patients just waking up now and watching an hour of CNN from their hospital beds would assume that FBI Director James Comey is Hillary’s opponent in this election.

The FBI is under attack by everyone from Obama to CNN. Hillary’s people have circulated a letter attacking Comey. There are currently more media hit pieces lambasting him than targeting Trump. It wouldn’t be too surprising if the Clintons or their allies were to start running attack ads against the FBI.

The FBI’s leadership is being warned that the entire left-wing establishment will form a lynch mob if they continue going after Hillary. And the FBI’s credibility is being attacked by the media and the Democrats to preemptively head off the results of the investigation of the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton.

The covert struggle between FBI agents and Obama’s DOJ people has gone explosively public.

The New York Times has compared Comey to J. Edgar Hoover. Its bizarre headline, “James Comey Role Recalls Hoover’s FBI, Fairly or Not” practically admits up front that it’s spouting nonsense. The Boston Globe has published a column calling for Comey’s resignation. Not to be outdone, Time has an editorial claiming that the scandal is really an attack on all women.

James Carville appeared on MSNBC to remind everyone that he was still alive and insane. He accused Comey of coordinating with House Republicans and the KGB. And you thought the “vast right wing conspiracy” was a stretch.

Countless media stories charge Comey with violating procedure. Do you know what’s a procedural violation? Emailing classified information stored on your bathroom server.

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