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Ruth King

Trump Dominates the DNC The GOP candidate clearly frightens the Democrats to death. Matthew Vadum

PHILADELPHIA — Democrats put in plenty of good words for Hillary Clinton during their convention yesterday but they focused most of their energy on trying to assassinate the character of Donald Trump.

The Left is now going after the Republican nominee with brass knuckles. The latest Democrat attack line accuses Trump of committing treason for asking Russia or any other governments that may have Clinton’s mountain of missing emails in their possession to return them to the United States.

Meanwhile, the prospect of Democrat unity going into the November election fades with every passing hour. Hatred, discord, and disgust are everywhere. The Bernie Sanders people don’t trust the Hillary Clinton people. The Hillary Clinton people are growing increasingly angry at a good chunk of the Bernie Sanders people for not falling in line and backing the nominee. Just as internal dissent is roiling the Republican Party, a civil war is brewing among Democrats. In the end most Democrats will probably support their nominee. The question is what fraction of the party will sit the election out, defect to Trump, or embrace the Green or Libertarian parties. The burning hatred of Hillary is still palpable in many state delegations.

All the convention talking points about how brilliant, kind, compassionate, visionary, selfless, humble, and tough Clinton is are wearing thin as the delegates keep clapping their hands like trained seals in the Wells Fargo Center. Democrats want to take the focus off Hillary, who is both a terrible candidate and a terrible person and throw the spotlight on the sometimes erratic Donald Trump.

That is the current state of the party that invented the politics of personal destruction and that during the Obama years has been laser-focused on fundamentally transforming, that is, destroying, what’s left of America.

Amidst the continuing heatwave, delegates were still deeply divided, caught up in factional fights during Day Three of the Democratic National Convention here. Disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporters were still protesting and booing during speeches Wednesday.

And on the way out the door Sanders stuck it to the party with which he briefly aligned himself. After getting what he wanted from Democrats, the self-described socialist abruptly announced he is leaving the party. Despite his pleas from the convention floor for party unity and an impassioned endorsement of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, Sanders said at a Bloomberg News-hosted breakfast that he will return to the U.S. Senate as an Independent.

“I was elected an Independent,” he told reporters.

So that apparently closes the book on Bernie’s adventures in the Democratic Party.

The Trump-bashing fest was long and loud.

Ex-Saudi general issues scathing critique of Palestinian terror groups see note please

Oh Puleez! Scathing? Hardly…he gratified their goals by discussing ” Jerusalem and Palestine” and spoke of their “cultural and media occupation.” Spare me the pieties of these faux friends…..rsk
Eshki posited that PIJ and Hamas leaders have a flawed understanding of normalization.Former Saudi Arabian General Anwar Eshki, who visited Israel and the Palestinian Territories ( real name is Judea and Samaria, Israel…rsk)last week, issued a scathing critique of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and Hamas for claiming his visit amounted to normalization.

Speaking to the Egyptian news site, al-Youm al-Sabaa, Eshki, who currently serves as chairman of the Middle East Center for Strategic and Legal Studies in Saudi Arabia, said that he did not visit Israel as Israeli newspapers reported, but rather “Jerusalem and Palestine”, and added that PIJ and Hamas leaders were wrong to suggest otherwise. “[My visit] infuriated some leaders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas because they based their decisions on what Israeli newspapers published, which proves that they are living under a cultural and media occupation,” he said.

Eshki posited that PIJ and Hamas leaders have a flawed understanding of normalization. He said that normalization is the establishment of normal relations between two peoples and two countries and that the dialogue meetings he held with various Israelis and Palestinians do not reflect that.

He also accused Hamas and PIJ leaders of hypocrisy, saying they have shook hands with and hugged Israelis at international conferences and asked him and his center to develop plans to improve their relations with Israel. Moreover, Eshki argued that many of PIJ’s and Hamas’s allies are partaking in “real normalization”. He said the relationship between Turkey and Israel and the comments of an Iranian minister that Saudi Arabia, not Israel, is the real enemy, embody the true concept of normalization.

How Trains Are A Prime Target for Terrorists : Abigail Esman

On July 18, a young man stormed through a train outside of Wurzburg, Germany. Crying “Allahu Akbar,” (God is greatest) he brandished an axe high into the air, then slashed at the men and women seated around him. Within minutes, the car, as one person described it, ” looked like a slaughterhouse.”

Then he fled.

By the time the day had ended, five people had been seriously wounded: four on the train, and a woman who had the misfortune of walking her dog at the moment he passed by. She remains in critical condition.

A day later, the Islamic State took credit for the attack, calling the killer, a 17-year-old refugee who was ultimately shot and killed by German police, a “soldier for ISIS.” It was the first full-scale Islamic terrorist attack in Germany.

But it was not the first Islamic terrorist attack on a train. Far from it: starting with the 2004 commuter train bombings in Madrid and the July 7, 2005 bombings of the London Underground, trains and metros have been a common target for extremist groups. Some efforts, like the bombing of the Brussels metro station this past April, succeeded; many more have failed. But the attempts, successful or not, betray a gaping hole in international security, and one that may not be easy to repair.

In fact, a 2007 report from the Council on Foreign Relations noted that “security professionals see trains as some of the likeliest targets.” Consequently, when it comes to the possibility of a major attack on U.S. or European railway or metro systems, former Homeland Security officer Sean Burke told Boston’s WCVB news, “We have to expect it. That’s the bottom line.”

Such an attack, if large enough, could be devastating. While air traffic remains substantial, five times as many people ride trains as fly in the United States, and in Europe, the rapid, efficient and low-cost trains often offer the best transportation options between countries, especially in an era of long airport security lines and early check-ins. Moreover, freight shipments, including highly toxic industrial chemicals, travel the same routes as passenger trains, frequently passing through densely populated areas. Because of this situation, the Council on Foreign Relations reported in 2007 that former White House Deputy Homeland Security Adviser Richard Falkenrath considered such trains “the single greatest danger of a potential terrorist attack in our country today.'”

Yet security on both continents is weak, and in Europe, often at the bare minimum; one will rarely find a policeman or other security personnel at a train station in the Netherlands, for instance. Even on international trains, like the high-speed Thalys between the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, customs and immigration officials are few and far between. Rarely is anyone asked for ID (let alone a passport), and there are, as in the U.S., no security screenings even at major rail stations like Paris’ Gare du Nord and Berlin Hauptbanhof.

Which may in part explain why the real identity of the axe-wielder in Bavaria is still uncertain: at a July 20 press conference in Berlin, officials admitted that his name is still uncertain since he, like many other asylum seekers, entered the country without a passport or other identifying papers. Indeed, Time reports that, “Authorities have discovered that he could be from Afghanistan or Pakistan, and that the information he provided to officials in Germany could be partly or entirely false.”

EXCLUSIVE: How Hillary Clinton Mainstreamed Al-Qaeda Fundraiser Abdurahman Alamoudi By Patrick Poole

Right now, prisoner #47042-083, Abdurahman Alamoudi, sits in his cell in a federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky.

It’s a long way down from being one of Hillary Clinton’s favorite colleagues. Alamoudi organized White House events during the Bill Clinton administration. Under Hillary’s supervision, he held official positions: Alamoudi was strategically placed at the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department.

That is, until he was arrested and convicted in a bizarre Libyan intelligence/al-Qaeda assassination plot to kill the Saudi crown prince.

Later, he was identified by the Treasury Department as an Al-Qaeda fundraiser who had operated inside the United States.

Hillary Clinton and Abdurahman Alamoudi were no mere acquaintances. According to an affidavit filed in court by Georgetown professor John Esposito, Alamoudi was asked by Hillary Clinton to arrange the first White House Ramadan iftar dinner in 1996:

Hillary – Alamoudi iftar (Esposito)

It appears that no media outlet has ever asked Hillary Clinton about her relationship to Alamoudi.

Under the Clinton administration, Alamoudi was tasked with founding and developing the Defense Department’s first-ever Muslim chaplain program. Alamoudi himself handpicked the Pentagon’s Muslim chaplain corps.

As I reported in 2010, one of those chaplain trainers was al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

The State Department, during the Clinton administration, appointed Alamoudi as a goodwill ambassador and sent him on six official taxpayer-funded trips to the Middle East. Remarkably, after Alamoudi’s 2003 arrest a federal agent testified in an affidavit about a recording of Alamoudi complaining to an audience that the 1998 al-Qaeda bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania did not kill enough Americans.

Years before he was helping Hillary Clinton arrange official dinners at the White House, Alamoudi had already been known to the FBI for al-Qaeda fundraising.

18 Different Ways You Can #FeelTheBern Outside the DNC By Tyler O’Neil

PHILADELPHIA, PA — Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders may have endorsed Hillary Clinton in the race against Donald Trump, but his supporters are more rabid than ever. On Tuesday, the second day of the Democratic National Convention, after Sanders gave his speech to support Clinton, a group of Sandersnistas made their voices known.

The “Bernie or Bust” crowd actually moved to be more visible to the Democratic delegates as they entered the convention to cast their votes for the nominee.

Here are the 16 photos and videos that best capture the “Bernie or Bust” movement, right as the Democrats were officially nominating Hillary. Enjoy!
18. Hillary is a Mother Fracker!

Who Is Putin’s Real Ally? By Roger L Simon

“Wait a minute. According to the sainted Times, one-fifth of U.S. uranium production now belongs to the Russians thanks to Ma and Pa Clinton?! If you wanted to talk treason, wouldn’t that be the textbook definition? Do the folks at the Democratic National Convention know about this?”

Oh, the vapors, the vapors! Donald Trump has done it again. He has a gone a bridge too far for the 150th time, but on this occasion taken us all the way across the Bering Straits to the very edge of the Gulag Archipelago. He has urged Vladimir Putin to reveal the contents of Hillary Clinton’s gazillion missing emails the FBI somehow couldn’t find.

Traitor! Traitor! yell the well-intentioned, like former SecDef Leon Panetta. This selfish yellow-haired plutocrat must be disqualified from the presidency!

Never mind that Putin would need no encouragement whatsoever from any outsider to hack the wide-open server of the former secretary of state, nor would the intelligence services of at least a dozen other first-world countries (they all do it—we were listening to Merkel’s cell phone ourselves, it will be recalled), not to mention the who-knows-how-many non-state actors and twelve-year-old high-tech whippersnappers with the skill to do this.

Never mind that Trump was undoubtedly far less interested in making friends with Putin than in calling attention to the obvious relationship between Hillary’s home-brew server and the similarly wide-open server of the DNC that Mrs. Clinton claimed to know nothing about. Her media lackeys on 60 Minutes made sure no one paid attention (hello, Scott Pelley!).

Meanwhile, discussion is curiously mute on a far more substantive alliance with Putin by, yes, the Clintons themselves that could actually change the balance of power in the world in a way far more dangerous than Trump mouthing off about Vladimir. It probably already has.

Michelle Obama and the Content of Her Character By Eileen F. Toplansky

Michelle Obama’s 2016 speech to the DNC stands in sharp contrast to an essay written in the early 1990s by Glenn Loury titled “Free at Last? A Personal Perspective on Race and Identity in America.” Loury recounts how, as a young black man growing up on the South Side of Chicago, he lacked the courage to stand up for a friend named Woody, who had “a Negro grandparent on each side of his family but looked like a typical white boy.” Woody never chose to pass as a white person yet, when both young men attended a political rally and Woody stood to speak “[h]e was cut short before finishing his first sentence by one of the dashiki-clad brothers-in-charge, who demanded to know how a ‘white’ got the authority to have an opinion about what black people should be doing. That was one of [the] problems, the brother said, we were always letting white people ‘peep our hole card,’ while we were never privy to their deliberations in the same way.” Loury explains that a

silence then fell over the room. The indignant brother asked if anyone could ‘vouch for this white boy.’ More excruciating silence ensued. Now was my moment of truth; Woody turned plaintively toward me, but I would not meet his eyes. To my eternal disgrace, I refused to speak up for him. He was asked to leave the meeting, and did so without uttering a word in his own defense.

In recalling this painful memory of “betraying someone he had known for a decade,” Loury describes how “…this desire to be regarded as genuinely black… dramatically altered [his] life. It narrowed the range of [his] earliest intellectual pursuits, distorted [his] relationships with other people, censored [his] political thought and expression, informed the way [he] dressed and spoke, and shaped [his] cultural interests. Some of this was inevitable and not all of it was bad, but in his experience the need to be affirmed by one’s racial peers can take on a pathological dimension.”

So what does this have to do with Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama? She and her husband have never evolved from their strident, all-consuming race-consciousness and “addiction to indignation.” As a student, “Miss Robinson wrote a senior thesis entitled ‘Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.'” Some excerpts from the thesis include the following:

“Predominantly white universities like Princeton are socially and academically designed to cater to the needs of the white students comprising the bulk of their enrollments.”
“[My Princeton experiences] “will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant.”
“I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second.”
“In defining the concept of identification or the ability to identify with the black community… I based my definition on the premise that there is a distinctive black culture very different from white culture.”

Peter O’Brien: Blinded By The Sun

The solar-powered plane that recently concluded its much delayed and long overdue round-the-world flight was predictably touted as further ‘proof’ that green energy has come of age. The real-world appraisal is dour: a PR stunt to obscure the fact that ‘alternative technologies’ are going nowhere.
Just the other day, we were told history was made when the aircraft Solar Impulse 2 landed in Abu Dhabi after what was described as the first round-the-world flight by a solar powered plane. The epic journey commenced in March, 2015, and since that time the plane had spent a total of 23 days in the air. This was an achievement for which the aviation world waited a long time, quite literally, to applaud — both in the short and much longer-term.

On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright conducted what is generally credited as the first sustained powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft, covering 39 metres. By 1905, the Wrights were able to cover 24 miles in 39 minutes 23 seconds. By 1916 the aeroplane had been matched the synchronised machine gun and become a potent instrument of war. A bare 65 years after the short hop at kitty Hawk, NASA put a man on the moon. The rapid progress was fuelled primarily by human imagination, wonderful new commercial opportunities and, of course, by two world wars. It was an extraordinarily rapid pace of development.

In 1925, John Logie Baird demonstrated his first prototype of a modern television set. His breakthrough, of course, relied on earlier technologies, the most important of which was the cathode ray tube first demonstrated in 1907. In 1928, the world’s first television station WGY commenced operation in Schenectady in upstate New York.

In 1932 the BBC commenced regular programming. TV broadcasts in London were on the air an average of four hours daily from 1936 to 1939. There were 12,000 to 15,000 receivers. Some sets in restaurants or bars might have 100 viewers for sport events. Broadcasts were suspended during the war and resumed in 1946. By the 1960s TV had become a ubiquitous part of modern life and by now its quality has improved exponentially.

A third example of technological advancement and commerce began in 1946, when ENIAC, the world’s first electronic general purpose computer was unveiled. It weighed 27 tons, occupied 167 square metres of space, used 150kw of electricity. Its construction cost almost US$7 million in today’s money, not least for its five million hand-soldered joints! It could multiply two 10 digit numbers in .0028 seconds. ENIAC was, of course, based on vacuum tubes and crystal diodes, which imposed a serious physical limitation on future progress. This impediment was overcome in 1955 with the development of the first fully transistorized computer, the Harwell Cadet, at the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment. The development if the integrated circuit in 1958 then opened the way to the rapid development of the microcomputer. The world went from ENIAC to Apple Mac in just 38 years! And the pace of technological advance in computing since then has been astronomical.

See where I’m going with this? Now consider other technologies, ones we are constantly told are on the very edge of becoming commercially viable.

Former Gitmo Detainee Shows Up in Venezuela Abu Wa’el Dhiab unexpectedly left his home in Uruguay, raising concerns By Taos Turner

A former Guantanamo Bay detainee who unexpectedly disappeared from Uruguay last month showed up in Venezuela on Tuesday, saying he wanted help traveling to Turkey, Uruguay’s Foreign Ministry said.

Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who was transferred by the Obama administration to Montevideo, Uruguay, in 2014, appeared at Uruguay’s consulate in Caracas and asked for assistance to fly to Turkey or some other country to be reunited with his family.

“He made it clear he has no interest in returning to Uruguay, but that he needs our country’s help,” the ministry said late Wednesday, adding that Venezuelan authorities were aware of the situation.

A spokesman for the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry in Caracas had said earlier that the office had no information about the former detainee’s arrival.

Uruguay’s foreign ministry said it wouldn’t fund Mr. Dhiab’s travel plans but that he could return to Montevideo, where his legal status as a refugee would still be valid.

Mr. Dhiab’s abrupt disappearance from Uruguay sparked weeks of speculation and concern about his intentions, leading several South American nations to try to determine his whereabouts. Brazil was especially interested as security is being heightened ahead of the Summer Olympic Games set to begin next week.

Once accused of being an al Qaeda militant, Mr. Dhiab is one of six former Guantanamo prisoners who were resettled in Uruguay as part a White House effort to close down the Cuba-based prison. The other five men remain in Uruguay.

Uruguayan officials have allowed the former detainees to move about freely.

Mr. Dhiab’s travel plans may raise additional concern, given Turkey’s porous border with Syria and its use as an entry point for volunteers looking to join Islamic State. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Other Clinton ‘Change’ No one in Philadelphia wants to talk about the Clinton Foundation.

Bill Clinton on Tuesday portrayed his wife as a “change maker” whose life has overflowed with good intentions and commitment to others. No one can spin a yarn like Bill, and for the believers it was a touching portrait. But if it’s true, why do the polls show that 68% of Americans don’t trust Hillary Clinton? That has to do with the rest of the story, which is how the Clintons have used politics to enrich themselves and retain power.

Nowhere is this clearer than at the words you didn’t hear Mr. Clinton speak: the Clinton Foundation. This supposedly philanthropic operation has become a metaphor for the Clinton business model of crony politics. The foundation is about producing a different kind of “change.”

No doubt the foundation does some charitable good, but this is incidental to its main purpose of promoting the Clinton political brand. Since its creation in 1997, the nominal nonprofit has served as a shadow Super Pac, designed to keep the Clintons in the national headlines, cover their travel expenses, and keep their retinue employed between elections.

The payroll has included Huma Abedin, who drew a State Department salary even as she managed politics at the foundation and is now vice-chairwoman of the Clinton campaign. Dennis Cheng raised money for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 bid, then became the foundation’s chief development officer and now leads Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 fundraising. Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s chief of staff at State, sat on the foundation board. And don’t forget Sid Blumenthal, the longtime Clinton Svengali who was secretly advising Mrs. Clinton at State while drawing a foundation salary. This may not be illegal but the charity here is for the Clintons’ benefit.
The funding for this political operation has come from nearly every country and major company in the world. These contributors have the cover of giving to charity, when everybody knows the gifts are political tribute to a woman determined to be President. Donations to a charity aren’t governed by the same caps or restrictions as those that go to a traditional Super Pac. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren somehow overlooked this in their Monday night riffs against money in politics. CONTINUE AT SITE