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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

More Than an Idea—a Nation By Christopher Roach

Both the far Left and the neoconservative Right were appalled by Donald Trump’s reported skepticism about taking in immigrants from “shithole countries.” The usual script ensued; he was called vulgar, impolitic, insane, and, of course, racist. Today not only are all men created equal, but apparently, all nations, all cultures, and all lifestyles are as well.

Trump, like the wise fools of Shakespeare, yet again, stumbled upon a forbidden truth. What he said was certainly true factually: some countries are profoundly dysfunctional, which is why their people want to leave, and why pro-immigration groups are aghast at sending them back. But what Trump said was also a true moral expression: why should a nation absorb immigrants who will do our existing people more harm than good?

The Left’s commitment to mass immigration is fairly rational and self-interested. They are future welfare state clients, and they undermine the political power of native-born Americans, who tend to support a more limited concept of American government.

The “nation-as-idea” also has a great deal of more idealistic support among mainstream “conservatives.” Lindsey Graham intoned that America is an “idea,” defined fundamentally as “a land of immigrants—it is who we are …” The sanctimonious NeverTrumper Rick Wilson said, “don’t bother calling yourself a conservative if you don’t believe there’s a way where people who come and embrace the proposition of this country can become Americans. Because we’ve worked very hard in this country to accept people from around the world and of varying backgrounds.”

While immigration has certainly been part of the American story, can it really be the defining principle of this or any nation?

Non-European immigration—save for slavery—did not begin significantly until the 1960s. All immigration was restricted significantly from 1924 until 1965. And prior generations of mostly European immigrants did not find a generous welfare state or acceptance of their attachments to their native tongue and habits. In most cases, these habits were stamped out through a not-entirely-gentle process of assimilation and, being European, through high rates of intermarriage. For a purported defining concept of the country, it is a late arrival: “nation of immigrants” was a phrase hardly uttered before the 1960s.

A Nigerian immigrant addresses President Trump’s alleged comment on s-hole countries By Thomas Lifson VIDEO

Be prepared for frank sentiments about the terminology that Senator Dick Durbin alleges that President Trump employed in a private conversation. The comments below originally appeared on a forum for people from the Igala Tribe in Nigeria but were loaded onto YouTube yesterday. The Igala people I have known have been very smart, and successful in this country.

Warning: The same vulgar term alleged to have been used by President Trump is frequently employed.

I wonder what Maxine Waters would say if she watched this?

The Humanitarian Hoax of Common Core: Killing America With Kindness – hoax 19 by Linda Goudsmit

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Obama, the humanitarian huckster-in-chief, weakened the United States for eight years presenting his crippling Common Core advocacy as altruistic when in fact it was designed for destruction. His legacy, the Leftist Democrat Party with its “Resistance” movement, is the party of the Humanitarian Hoax attempting to destroy the capitalist infrastructure of American democracy and replace it with socialism.

Common Core is a deliberate information war targeting American children. It is a deceitful campaign to undermine established American Judeo-Christian cultural norms celebrating patriotism, the meritocracy, and American sovereignty. The Leftist/Islamist axis is promoting collectivism in preparation for one-world government. This is how it works.

Serious educational reform enacted by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 was designed to provide high standards and measurable goals to improve individual outcomes in education. Federal funding was correlated to test performance. Rather than improving education the net effect of NCLB was education reformatted to teach to the tests. Education critic Alfie Kohn argued that the “NCLB law is ‘unredeemable’ and should be scrapped – its main effect has been to sentence poor children to an endless regimen of test-preparation drills.” There were loud calls for reform.

Enter Common Core State Standards (CCSS) launched under Obama in 2009 deceptively marketed by a propaganda campaign emphasizing the positive benefits of national standards and uniformity in curriculum guidelines with measurable effectiveness for American public education K-12. Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are mistakenly understood to be a derivative of the No Child Left Behind Act – they aren’t.

Obama’s 2009 Race To The Top program was introduced as a competitive grant program that awarded points to states for satisfying performance-based evaluations of teachers and principals based on measures of educator effectiveness. Sound familiar? It should because measurable effectiveness = student test scores. Even though Race to the Top did not mandate adoption of Common Core, to receive federal stimulus money states had to “commit” to adopting Common Core standards. Forty-two states now operate public and private education under the Common Core program.

Trump-Russia: Not Mueller’s First Botched Investigation By Daniel Ashman

Controversy surrounds Robert Mueller and his investigation into the Trump-Russia collusion mirage. Some maintain that he is the ultimate professional dedicated to following the truth, but others say he is a political hack.

There is no need to wonder about how Mueller operates. His history has made it quite clear. One needs only to study his actions as FBI director when he managed the FBI’s most important investigation ever.

In September of 2001, an entity began mailing anthrax through the U.S. postal system, hitting such prominent targets as NBC and Senator Tom Daschle’s office. The terrorist attacks killed five and left others hospitalized. The world panicked.

Under Mueller’s management, the FBI launched an investigation lasting ten years. The bureau now brags about spending “hundreds of thousands of investigator hours on this case.” To fully appreciate the Mueller response – whom his people investigated, targeted, and found guilty – it is appropriate to first build context.

The anthrax letters began just a week after the 9/11 attack. Simultaneous to planning the airplane hijackings, al-Qaeda had also been weaponizing anthrax. One of their scientists who ran an anthrax lab in Afghanistan also housed 9/11 hijackers. In fact, one of the hijackers, Ahmed al Haznawi, went to the emergency room in an American hospital with a skin lesion, which a team of bioterrorism experts from Johns Hopkins confirmed was probably due to anthrax. Meanwhile, the 9/11 hijackers were also trying to obtain crop-dusting airplanes.

So how did Mueller’s investigative team handle the case?

Mueller issued a statement in October of 2001, while anthrax victims were still dying: the FBI had found “no direct link to organized terrorism.” The Johns Hopkins team of experts was mistaken, the FBI continued; Haznawi never had an anthrax infection. The crop-dusting airplanes they needed were possibly for a separate and unrelated anthrax attack.

A few weeks later, the FBI released a remarkable profile of the attacker. FBI experts eschewed analysis of the content of the letters, where it was written in bold block letters, “Death to America, Death to Israel, Allah is Great.” Instead, they focused on a “linguistic analysis,” stating that the letter’s author was not “comfortable or practiced in writing in lower[]case lettering.” They therefore concluded that the author was likely an American.

The investigators hypothesized that the attacker was a lonely American who had wanted to kill people with anthrax for some undefined time period but then became “mission-oriented” following 9/11 and immediately prepared and mailed the deadly spores while pretending to be Muslim.

Earmarks Are Inherently Corrupt. Congress Has No Business Resurrecting Pork Barrel Politics By Tom Coburn

Tom Coburn, M.D., was the Republican Senator from Oklahoma from 2005-2015 after being in the House from 1995 to 2001. He is the honorary chairman of Open the Books- https://www.openthebooks.com/

Months of headlines detailing misconduct inside Congress have apparently not been enough to shame Washington away from soliciting even more scandals.

Congressmen resigning in disgrace for unethical and potentially criminal activity. A secretive congressional account doling out millions of dollars, with little transparency or accountability as to who is getting the money or for what purpose.

While this sounds a lot like the recently exposed congressional hush fund used to cover-up harassment claims, it is actually a description of life in Congress in the not so distant past during the era of earmarking.

An earmark, more commonly derided as pork, is a provision inserted into a bill or accompanying report at the request of a member of Congress that directs funds to be taken from the Treasury and given to a specific recipient, circumventing the standard merit-based and competitive procedures typically used to award federal assistance. Earmarks can, and did, financially benefit politicians, their family members, and campaign donors.

As a member of both the House of Representatives and Senate, I have witnessed earmarking up close and know it is inherently corrupt. Earmarks were abused as a form of currency to buy and sell the votes of politicians and to reward political supporters. Convicted super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff affectionately called the earmark system “the favor factory.” Amidst criminal investigations and embarrassing headlines, public outrage forced Congress to shut down the favor factory in 2010.

Taxpayers are not nostalgic for a return to the days of bridges to nowhere and pork barrel politics. In fact, most are angry that Congress has done little to cut wasteful spending or address our growing national debt, which now tops $20 trillion.

But instead of tackling these, the House of Representatives is holding hearings about returning to the days when politicians could freely spend money we did not have on things we did not need that benefitted the well-connected few.

Politicians are rationalizing earmarking as a constitutional prerogative of Congress and arguing that pork makes it easier to pass bills, while offering assurances this time will be different because the make-up of Congress is different and the process will be more transparent.
“If there is one thing I learned during my time in Congress, it is never to underestimate the dumb things politicians will dream up to spend other people’s money on.”

WHO DIED? JOAN SWIRSKY ****

I started watching Miss America and Miss Universe competitions when I was a little girl, mostly because I loved the gowns. To this day, I still tune in, especially toward the end, when all the gowns are on display. A couple of years ago, I saw my all-time favorite! As the expression goes: TDF––to die for!

I also love the Country Music Awards shows because it’s the only time I hear genuinely thrilling voices without the caterwauling and preposterous over-production that camouflages the dearth of talent in the pop-music industry.

But with rare exceptions, I never tune in to the orgies of self-congratulation, self-importance, and self-indulgence known as the Golden Globes, the Emmys, and the Academy Awards, not only because the presenters and winners are so insufferably narcissistic and vapid but because movies and TV shows have devolved to such a point—with notable exceptions, of course—that this past summer, according to The Los Angeles Times, Hollywood suffered its worst-attended summer movie season in 25 years!

Apparently, this is because the moguls who now run Hollywood and TV and the print media are so out of touch with mainstream America—unlike their bête noire, President Trump, who has his finger on the very pulse of America’s wants, needs, and desires—and so obsessed with leftwing politics, and so hysterical that all their efforts to undermine and sabotage and defeat and impeach him have utterly failed, that they’ve done what millions of losers have done in the past, i.e., doubled down on their efforts.

Who are these desperate people? They are not just the moguls, but all the lefties, including the pussy hat women who have now given up that symbol because it’s too pink and not sensitive enough to perhaps darker colors of the female sex organ and not transgender enough to be “fair” to all women. Can’t make this up!

CHOOSING COLORS

When our Founding Fathers chose the colors of the American flag over 240 years ago, they chose white to signify purity and innocence, red to signify hardiness and valor and the blood they spilled in the cause of freedom, and blue to signify vigilance, perseverance and justice.

On Israel’s flag, the blue lines symbolize the stripes on a traditional Jewish prayer shawl and the Star of David is the widely acknowledged symbol of the Jewish people and of Judaism.

Do Justice And The FBI Investigate Crimes Or Manufacture Them? Francis Menton

The big recent news in the fundamental corruption of the Department of Justice and the FBI is that various Congresspeople have now been allowed to see the FISA application submitted in 2016 seeking authority to surveil the Trump campaign, and multiple sources are now confirming that at least part of the basis for the successful application was the piece of Clinton campaign-financed phony opposition research known as the “Trump Dossier.” However, although the FBI allowed a viewing of the FISA application, it did not allow the making of copies. (Try that gambit next time the FBI subpoenas you for documents!) So we are now all awaiting additional details. My assumption is that there is lots more disgusting information to come about how our “law enforcement” agencies weaponized their powers to support the favored political candidate against the disfavored adversary. But meanwhile, rather than making speculations that may turn out to be wrong about what is to come, let me take this opportunity to educate readers about some of the other fundamental corruption of our exalted law enforcement agencies that gets far less attention.

Just a few weeks ago, in a post titled “The Reputation Of The FBI — And Of The Justice Department — In Tatters,” I advised readers that “you would be out of your mind ever to cooperate in any way with these guys.” Reasons included not only that they regularly misuse their powers for political purposes and prosecute things that are not crimes, but also “they are entirely likely to create an entrapment scheme to manufacture a crime to nail you.”

The word is that in the last few days Special Prosecutor Mueller has been seeking an interview with President Trump. Does my advice to not cooperate apply equally to the President in these circumstances? Sadly, it applies especially to the President. Let’s review the output of the Mueller investigation to date. When you look at it, the effort appears to amount to little more than the manufacturing of crimes that did not previously exist in order to nail disfavored people.

Anatomy of a Farce Fusion GPS founder’s testimony shows how we got the collusion narrative . . . and why it won’t go away. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Someone with fourth-hand knowledge that the bank was robbed claims that Smith conspired — er, I mean, colluded — with the local organized-crime family to rob the bank. Jones figures it must be true because he heard it from a trusted friend, a former cop — and you know those guys have great sources. Yet, Jones has no concrete evidence that it’s true. In fact, he can’t even prove that the mobsters had anything to do with the robbery, much less that Smith did.

But Jones is an industrious investigative journalist. Long before the bank was robbed, he conducted months of in-depth research and came to a single, unalterable, unassailable conclusion: Smith is a really crappy guy. He is a grade-A louche with mafia business partners and a decades-long record of financial shenanigans that walk the razor’s edge of actionable fraud. Born into wealth, he puts on the airs of the self-made man. When he’s in town, hide the women away. If he says he’ll pay you for a job, get it in writing . . . and make sure he still needs you when it’s time to pay up. Better have a good lawyer on retainer, too, just in case. Smith’s books are undoubtedly cooked, but they’re better hidden than Jimmy Hoffa — and yeah, you can bet he knows something about that, too.

Here’s what totally infuriates Jones, though: Smith seems to skate from debacle to debacle not only unscathed but ever more audacious. If you knew what Jones knows, rather than what the public thinks it knows, you wouldn’t trust Smith to run a 7-Eleven — yet, Smith sees himself as White House material!

Do you feel the frustration, the indignation that Jones feels in our hypothetical? If you do, then you know what it’s like to be Glenn Simpson.

The former Wall Street Journal reporter is a superb investigative journalist. More notoriously these days, he is the founder of Fusion GPS. It was he, in cahoots with his friend and collaborator, former British spy Christopher Steele, who orchestrated the compilation and dissemination of the so-called Steele dossier — the fons et origo of the Trump–Russia collusion narrative. We now know the dossier was covertly commissioned by the Clinton campaign, which dealt with Fusion through a layer of lawyers.

Black Protest Has Lost Its Power Have whites finally found the courage to judge African-Americans fairly by universal standards?By Shelby Steele

The recent protests by black players in the National Football League were rather sad for their fruitlessness. They may point to the end of an era for black America, and for the country generally—an era in which protest has been the primary means of black advancement in American life.

There was a forced and unconvincing solemnity on the faces of these players as they refused to stand for the national anthem. They seemed more dutiful than passionate, as if they were mimicking the courage of earlier black athletes who had protested: Tommie Smith and John Carlos, fists in the air at the 1968 Olympics; Muhammad Ali, fearlessly raging against the Vietnam War; Jackie Robinson, defiantly running the bases in the face of racist taunts. The NFL protesters seemed to hope for a little ennoblement by association.

And protest has long been an ennobling tradition in black American life. From the Montgomery bus boycott to the march on Selma, from lunch-counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides to the 1963 March on Washington, only protest could open the way to freedom and the acknowledgment of full humanity. So it was a high calling in black life. It required great sacrifice and entailed great risk. Martin Luther King Jr. , the archetypal black protester, made his sacrifices, ennobled all of America, and was then shot dead.

For the NFL players there was no real sacrifice, no risk and no achievement. Still, in black America there remains a great reverence for protest. Through protest—especially in the 1950s and ’60s—we, as a people, touched greatness. Protest, not immigration, was our way into the American Dream. Freedom in this country had always been relative to race, and it was black protest that made freedom an absolute.

It is not surprising, then, that these black football players would don the mantle of protest. The surprise was that it didn’t work. They had misread the historic moment. They were not speaking truth to power. Rather, they were figures of pathos, mindlessly loyal to a black identity that had run its course.

What they missed is a simple truth that is both obvious and unutterable: The oppression of black people is over with. This is politically incorrect news, but it is true nonetheless. We blacks are, today, a free people. It is as if freedom sneaked up and caught us by surprise.

LEFTIST CLERGY SELL OUT THE JEWISH COMMUNITY TO HAMAS (VIDEO)

Dr. Charles Jacobs, whose fight against Islamists has made a tremendous impact in Boston and beyond, returns with another ‘Moment’ on the Glazov Gang. This one indicts leftist clergy for selling out the Jewish community to suit leftist agendas.

That means allying with anti-Semitic Islamist clergy to fight President Trump. It means crawling into bed with CAIR, with the Imam down the block who preaches a phony tolerance in interfaith settings, while shouting, “Death to the Jews” in his own mosque (as recent video revelations by MEMRI have shown.) It means pretending to fight anti-Semitism while allying with anti-Semites.

And not just bigots who say or shout things, but terrorists who actually go out and kill Jews. It even means money going to pro-Hamas groups.

Dr Jacobs offers a powerful message and a timely warning. When any clergy, Jewish or Christian, makes leftist politics into their religion, they will end up destroying their own religion and community.