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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Imams in the U.S and Canada: Which Should be Backed? by A. Z. Mohamed

While freedom of speech is permissible in the U.S., for centuries, hateful and violent rhetoric targeting Jews has been invariable in the religious and political discourse of Muslims, and is now as common in US and Canadian mosques, as in the Middle East.

While many Muslims seem never to tire of complaining about “Islamophobia” against their communities, they seem to have no problem disseminating hate speech — and sometimes hate acts — against other groups.

Statistics show that blacks, gays and Jews are far more disproportionately targeted for hate crimes in both the U.S. and Canada than Muslims are. When did anyone in North America last hear of ministers in churches or rabbis in synagogues calling for the death of Muslims?

Progressive Muslims and their imams should be promoted, consulted, and celebrated.

Since U.S. President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel on December 6, 2017, at least three U.S. imams have called for the death of Jews — not Israelis: Jews — in Friday sermons at mosques across the U.S., which treasures freedom of speech, no matter how distasteful — unless it is “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” or “likely to incite or produce such action.”

In Canada, however, there is no freedom of speech — meaning that “hate speech” is regarded as a crime that can be prosecuted. A few years ago, imams who did call for death of Jews in Canada resulted in some of these imams being investigated or prosecuted.

It is important to know what is being said, and by whom.

On Friday, December 8, 2017, for example, a sermon delivered in a Raleigh, North Carolina mosque, a U.S.-based Syrian imam, Abdullah Khadra, cited an anti-Jewish hadith (saying or act of Muhammad) that says, “By the end of time,” Muslims will exterminate all Jews. The sermon was recorded and transcribed by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

Hillary’s Money Laundering Scheme Why is the media ignoring the DNC’s new $84 million campaign finance scandal? Matthew Vadum

While it obsesses over an aging porn star, Russians, discredited ex-FBI officials, and pimple-faced gun-grabbers, the mainstream media has been ignoring an explosive federal lawsuit unearthing a huge illegal money-laundering conspiracy said to have been masterminded last election cycle by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign.

It is yet another facet of the plot by which Clinton, possibly in league with then-President Obama, broke the law in an attempt to rig the election. Throughout his agonizingly long presidency, Obama serially abused his powers as the nation’s Chief Executive to undermine his political opponents.

Against this backdrop, the DNC and Hillary’s campaign “allegedly used state chapters as strawmen to launder as much as $84 million in an effort to circumvent campaign donation limits, and the Federal Election Commission ignored complaints exposing the practice,” according to a Fox News report that has been gathering dust since April 16.

The civil proceeding, filed against the FEC earlier this month in the nation’s capital, spells out a vast left-wing criminal conspiracy while providing detailed evidence from FEC filings to support the claim that Democrats orchestrated the scheme to do an end-run around federal campaign limits.

The Stop Hillary PAC, also now known as the Committee to Defend the President (CDP), filed a complaint in December with the FEC stating that the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) sought funds from high-profile donors and then “sent that money through state chapters and back to the DNC before ending up with the Clinton campaign.”

The complaint went nowhere and the political action committee got tired of waiting.

Donald Trump and the Star Chamber of Horrors By Michael Walsh

Fifteen months into his administration, Donald Trump remains the object of a dedicated attempt by the Democratic Party, the media, NeverTrump Republicans, and rogue members of the deep state to take him down. From the night he was elected, lifelong members of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party and the embedded bureaucracy have refused to accept the results of a national election, and have instead waged a campaign of “lawfare” against a man they consider an interloper—a situation unique in the annals of American democracy.

From Hillary Clinton to James Comey to Robert Mueller to Stormy Daniels, to various minor federal judges, to CNN and MSNBC, the list of Trump’s enemies continues to grow.

Their tactics are breathtakingly simple—and amazingly brazen. As the past year-plus of Robert Mueller’s tedious investigation has proven, there is no very great crime behind Trump’s very great fortune of having been elected the 45th president of the United States. The entire notion of Russian “collusion” (not in itself actionable in the first place) was cooked up in the witches’ cauldron that was Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The resulting brew was liberally dispensed to the cadres of media operatives pretending to be dispassionate reporters in order to assuage the failed candidate’s rage over losing what she thought—what she was assured by her friends at the CIA and the FBI—was a fixed fight.

And so the Big Lie—that Trump had collaborated with Vladimir Putin to change the course of an American election—was born.

There was and is nothing to it, of course. But that hasn’t stopped the Democrats, whose sterling moral history of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition has prepared them for just this moment. After all, they had managed to drive Richard Nixon from office in 1974, less than two years after a 49-1 state electoral landslide, turning a minor, botched burglary—with the help of the Washington Post—into a constitutional crisis.

In the case of Trump, they didn’t even have the fig leaf of the “Plumbers” at the Watergate on which to hang their “conspiracy so vast” McCarthyism, but that didn’t matter. Sure, to believe the “Russian” narrative, one would have to credit multiple impossible things simultaneously: that Trump and Putin were even capable of pulling it off; that the Russians somehow changed vote totals in states where Hillary barely deigned to campaign; that they stole John Podesta’s emails from a DNC server and handed them over to Julian Assange and Wikileaks; and that they bought ads on Facebook that changed credulous minds on the spot. Still, two generations of reporters—those raised on James Bond/supervillain movies and those who, thanks to Marvel comics, think people really can fly—regurgitated it proof-free.

The Double Standards of the Mueller Investigation By Victor Davis Hanson

The country is about to witness an investigatory train wreck.

In one direction, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation train is looking for any conceivable thing that President Donald Trump’s campaign team might have done wrong in 2016.

The oncoming train is slower but also larger. It involves congressional investigations, Department of Justice referrals and inspector general’s reports—mostly focused on improper or illegal FBI and Department of Justice behavior during the 2016 election.

Why are the two now about to collide?

By charging former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI, Mueller emphasized that even the appearance of false testimony is felonious behavior.

If that is so, then the Justice Department will likely have to charge former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe with perjury or related offenses. A report from the Office of the Inspector General indicates that McCabe lied at least four times to federal investigators.

Former FBI Director James Comey may also have lied to Congress when he testified that he had not written his report on the Hillary Clinton email scandal before interviewing Clinton. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan lied under oath to Congress on matters related to surveillance.

Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin likely lied when they told FBI investigators they had no idea that their then-boss, Hillary Clinton, was using an illegal private email server. Both had communicated with Clinton about it.

Mueller is said to be investigating whether Trump obstructed justice by requesting that Comey go easy on Flynn.

If so, then the Justice Department will have to look at Comey himself and DOJ officials who obstructed a federal court. On at least four occasions, they were not honest about the deeply flawed Christopher Steele dossier being the source of information used in applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Kanye Exposes Liberals and Progressives as the New Reactionaries By Roger L Simon

When Kanye West again declared himself a Trump supporter on Twitter, going so far as to publish a photo of his POTUS-autographed MAGA hat, literally millions of Americans immediately got the vapors. (Either that or the Twitter gestapo got their revenge — unless the sudden disappearance of huge numbers of the rapper’s followers is merely an “inconsistency”?)

Many declared West had “gone off the deep end,” gone crazy, although the man was demonstrably more brilliant and more creative than 99.9% of his decriers.

That these same people are the most slavish and pathetic conformists is the least of this. What these attacks on Kanye demonstrate in bold face is what has lurked beneath the surface for a long time — liberals and progressives are the reactionaries of our time.

It is also a further demonstration of a near complete lack of intellectual curiosity or emotional imagination, an inability to grasp the “remote” possibility that a highly intelligent black man could possibly think differently from them. Something must be wrong with him. (Could anything possibly be wrong with them? Nah!)

But why reactionaries?

When I was a young fellow traveler with the New Left (circa 1965), it was the worst accusation you could make. A reactionary was someone who was living in the past, taking us backwards, what the Trotskyites called the Stalinists — and vice-versa.

Back then, a group of people, Tom Hayden and others, anxious to breathe new life into a Marxist ideology seriously tarnished by Stalin’s supposedly-accidental”excesses,” promulgated, in the Port Huron Statement, a socialism “with a human face.”

It was propaganda, of course, aimed at themselves as much as others, but this Generation of 1968 product was remarkably successful, beyond their wildest dreams, I would guess. Over the decades and into today, they were able to infiltrate just about every aspect of our culture, creating an atmosphere where — in nearly every aspect of our society — nothing was good as is or even relatively satisfactory. Therefore, the fight must always go on. Perpetually. CONTINUE AT SITE

Maine Democrats Vote Down Bill Banning FGM By Tom Knighton (!!!!!????)

If ever there was a bipartisan cause in this country, shouldn’t it be banning female genital mutilation? Well, a bill banning FGM in the state of Maine was just voted down — along party lines.

As Townhall’s Elizabeth Yore reports, “69 GOP (and 1 Dem) [voted] for the bill and 77 Dems and Independents [voted[ against an FGM bill that would criminalize female genital mutilation.”

Yore continues: “The Democratic House legislators who voted against this FGM bill curiously argued that ‘FGM doesn’t happen in Maine,’ despite the fact that Maine is one of only eight federal pilot programs to address the exponential growth of FGM in America. If little girls in Maine are not at risk for FGM, then why is Maine receiving more than $200,000 a year from the federal government to help prevent FGM?”

Even if the Democrats’ claim, that “FGM doesn’t happen in Maine,” was true, what is the objection to banning the practice before it arrives there? In reality, this common practice in the Muslim world is being committed in the United States by immigrant populations.

Keep in mind that Democrats are supposedly the “party of women.” They’re the party that likes to pretend all women think as a monolithic block. Why, then, would Democrats vote unanimously against a bill that outlaws a horrific practice which only victimizes women?

Honestly, I have no answer. CONTINUE AT SITE

Time to End the Resistance of the Swamp By Leo Goldstein

Donald Trump has promised us to drain the swamp – not to drown in it!

The ongoing Mueller “investigation” is not a legal matter. It’s a continuation of abuse of power by the Obama administration, which behaved as if Democrats were going to reign forever. The extent of their abuse started to come to light only after the elections.

After the 2016 elections, the culprits should have relied on traditional American forgiveness. President-Elect Trump fully demonstrated it when he graciously offered Hillary Clinton an opportunity to heal instead of being prosecuted. Unfortunately, the mainstream Democratic Party and its allies allowed the far-left elements to drag them into the “resistance” and escalation. Instead of a smooth transition of power, which has been an unbroken tradition since the founding of this country, they grabbed as much power as they could and directed it against Trump and his supporters. Thus, they have burnt their bridges.

The president and his trusted advisers are either being investigated or threatened with investigation. The best public servants appointed are flooded with death threats, and neither the FBI nor the DOJ does anything about that. Scott Pruitt and Ajit Pai are the first names that come to mind. These threats are backed by actions, such as the mass murder attempt in which Representative Scalise was injured. Violence against lesser known persons standing in the way of the Democratic Party agenda is not reported by the mainstream media. In a few days, it will be the anniversary of the shooting of the offices of Dr. John Christy and Dr. Roy Spencer, two outstanding climatologists whose research debunks climate alarmist claims.

We know who incited these crimes. We know who covered these crimes. We don’t know all connections between the instigators and the triggermen. And we will never know if the FBI and DOJ will continue investigating and prosecuting people for being Trump-supporters while turning a blind eye to the Democratic seditionists, oath-breakers, and other miscreants emboldened under Obama’s administration. Not to mention blackmail – a federal crime that is routinely ignored in the current political atmosphere and has been perfected by groups linked to the Democratic Party and used against businessmen, judges, and other men deemed Trump-supporters or potential supporters in their war against the elected government. The new Democratic Party and its allies openly collude with foreign governments and political parties against the U.S., as clearly shown by their behavior related to the Paris climate “accord.”

The Regressive State of America Federal income data offer a tragic lesson in bad policy: Connecticut.

The 50 American states have long competed for people and business, and the 2017 tax reform raises the stakes by limiting the state and local tax deduction on federal returns. The results of bad policy will be harder to disguise.

A case in point is Connecticut’s continuing economic decline, and now we have even more statistical evidence as a warning to other states. The federal Bureau of Economic Analysis recently rolled out its annual report on personal income growth in the 50 states, and for 2017 the Nutmeg State came in a miserable 44th.

The progressive paragon’s performance is even worse when you look at the details. The nearby chart shows that the state’s personal income grew at the slowest pace among all New England states, and not by a little. Governor Dannel Malloy’s eight-year experiment in public-union governance saw income grow by a meager 1.5% for the year, well below Vermont (2.1%). The state even trailed Maine (2.7%) and Rhode Island (2.4%), which are usually the New England laggards.

The only states to do worse than Connecticut were Alaska (0.4%), which is heavily dependent on oil and gas production, and Kansas (1%), Nebraska (1.4%), Iowa (0.3%) and North (-0.3%) and South Dakota (1.4%), all farm states that struggled with low commodity prices. National income growth was 3.1%.

The data are even more depressing if you strip out dividends and government transfer payments and consider only wages and salaries. Connecticut had essentially no growth (0.1%), which was worse than every state save Alaska (-1.6%). The figure for the U.S. was 3.3%. Total nonfarm earnings in Connecticut were also the second worst in the country after Alaska.

Lest you think this was a one-year anomaly, we looked at the personal income figures for every year since 2011. That’s the year Mr. Malloy took office, and the state rebounded well from the recession with 4.9% income growth, the best in New England.

Hospitals Pulling the Plug Against Families’ Wishes By Betsy McCaughey

Who decides whether your sick child lives or dies? You or the hospital? On Monday, the parents of 23-month-old Alfie Evans, who has extensive brain damage, were told their son’s life would be terminated by hospital staff. That night, the hospital turned off his ventilator. The hospital decreed “once all external signs of life have ceased,” doctors would confirm “that death has occurred.” Many hours have passed, and Alfie clings tenuously to life.

To avert this crisis, Alfie’s parents tried appealing to British courts, but judges ruled on April 20 that “the hospital must be free to do what has been determined to be in Alfie’s best interests.” Determined by whom? Not his parents, who wanted to maintain life support. “He isn’t suffering, he isn’t in pain, he isn’t diagnosed,” his father explains. “It’s a straight up execution.”

Alfie isn’t the first child sentenced to die by a British hospital. Last year it happened to 11-month-old Charlie Gard, and more recently to a toddler named Isaiah Haastrup. Can it happen in the U.S.? You bet. It depends on what state you live in.

Weaponizing the Government for Leftist Political War By D Hawthorne

James Comey is the deep state’s pathological equivalent of Sally Field. But focusing on his bitchy, vengeful, and sanctimonious personal psychodramas is a distraction from what really matters—the profound internal threats to liberty and equal justice under the law, enabled by Comey and other rogue actors.

Unraveling the Deep State Narrative: First of a Three-Part Series

The former FBI director deserved to be fired, is irrelevant moving forward, and will only marginalize himself further the more he talks and the more information comes out about how he tried to undermine a duly elected president.

While Comey’s interviews and book continue to get distracting press coverage, they are not the biggest news of recent days.

No, the big news is the cumulative significance of seemingly disparate but related events, including: the raid on attorney Michael Cohen’s office, home, and hotel and other Robert Mueller probe actions; the GOP establishment’s ongoing alignment with other statists; the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe; the apparent growing alignment between Inspector General Michael Horowitz (appointed by Obama) and Attorney General Jeff Sessions; the pardoning of Scooter Libby, an innocent man railroaded by a Comey-appointed special counsel; the release of the Comey memos that showed President Trump wanted all collusion charges investigated and did not obstruct justice; and the electronic communication used to open a FBI counterintelligence probe that showed no official intelligence information existed to justify starting the Trump-Russia collusion review.

These events were significant because of their connection to the Left’s escalating contempt for their fellow Americans and the increasing tendency to turn political disagreement into political war, or what Kim Strassel calls “the intimidation game,” in which the Left seeks to “[m]ake political opponents pay a high price for expressing their opinions” through harassment from government agencies, followed by investigations and prosecution, and then blackmail.