RUTHFULLY YOURS

We’ve all seen these kinds of games. The team gets pushed around all over the gridiron . . . but it wins anyway. The opposing squad marches up and down the field with apparent ease, piling up yardage, chewing up clock. But each time, something goes wrong at the critical moment: here a fumble near the goal line, there a tipped pass intercepted and returned for a touchdown. At the end of the game, you stare at the stat sheet in disbelief: Your guys have been outgained by a whopping 150 yards, the other team has held the ball almost 40 minutes out of 60. Yet, somehow, you won, 10–3.

Now, let’s be clear. A win is a win. It’s totally legit, and no one can take it away from you. And while not an every-Sunday occurrence, such contests happen often enough that they can’t be thought of as flukes. Could you say the winning team got outplayed? Maybe. It is equally fair, though, to say that at crunch time, when it got down to the game’s handful of decisive plays, the losing team came up small. For long stretches of the contest, it looked like they were in total control. But it was the plodding kind of control: uneasy, uninspiring, and, in the end, unable to get it done. The losers can talk all they want about piling up yardage, but everyone knows the rules — the game is won on points, not yards.

That is the kind of game Donald Trump just won over Hillary Clinton. For Democrats to belittle the outcome as illegitimate is absurd.

For one thing, it is laughably dishonest. Take the Electoral College. As experience teaches, social-justice warriors hale from the heads-we-win-tails-you-lose school. They don’t care how they win, just that they win. It was hardly out of the realm of possibility that Trump would secure a plurality of the 135 million or so votes cast, but that a few hundred thousand Clinton votes would flip a few battleground states, giving her the decisive Electoral College majority. Had that happened, you know as sure as you’re reading this that you’d have been hearing paeans to John Madison from the direct-democracy crowd — notwithstanding that, where the Constitution is concerned, Democrats tend to be strict destructionists.

Plus, Mrs. Clinton didn’t win a majority. Had she managed to prevail in the Electoral College, she would have been a president that most of the country voted against. As her husband can tell her, having won twice without ever capturing 50 percent of the vote, legitimacy does not hinge on raw vote totals. That is why, with just 43 percent of the vote in 1992, Bill Clinton garnered 370 electoral votes, significantly more than Donald Trump’s 306.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1237

Organizations that, in recent years, have received direct funding and assistance from George Soros and his Open Society Foundations (OSF) include the following. (Comprehensive profiles of each are available in the “Groups” section of DiscoverTheNetworks.org):

Advancement Project: This organization works to organize “communities of color” into politically cohesive units while disseminating its leftist worldviews and values as broadly as possible by way of a sophisticated communications department.
Air America Radio: Now defunct, this was a self-identified “liberal” radio network.
Al-Haq: This NGO produces highly politicized reports, papers, books, and legal analyses regarding alleged Israeli human-rights abuses committed against Palestinians.
All of Us or None: This organization seeks to change voting laws — which vary from state to state — so as to allow ex-inmates, parolees, and even current inmates to cast their ballots in political elections.
Alliance for Justice: Best known for its activism vis a vis the appointment of federal judges, this group consistently depicts Republican judicial nominees as “extremists.”
America Coming Together: Soros played a major role in creating this group, whose purpose was to coordinate and organize pro-Democrat voter-mobilization programs.
America Votes: Soros also played a major role in creating this group, whose get-out-the-vote campaigns targeted likely Democratic voters.
America’s Voice: This open-borders group seeks to promote “comprehensive” immigration reform that includes a robust agenda in favor of amnesty for illegal aliens.
American Bar Association Commission on Immigration Policy: This organization “opposes laws that require employers and persons providing education, health care, or other social services to verify citizenship or immigration status.”
American Bridge 21st Century: This Super PAC conducts opposition research designed to help Democratic political candidates defeat their Republican foes.
American Civil Liberties Union: This group opposes virtually all post-9/11 national security measures enacted by the U.S. government. It supports open borders, has rushed to the defense of suspected terrorists and their abettors, and appointed former New Left terrorist Bernardine Dohrn to its Advisory Board.
American Constitution Society for Law and Policy: This Washington, DC-based think tank seeks to move American jurisprudence to the left by recruiting, indoctrinating, and mobilizing young law students, helping them acquire positions of power. It also provides leftist Democrats with a bully pulpit from which to denounce their political adversaries.
American Family Voices: This group creates and coordinates media campaigns charging Republicans with wrongdoing.
American Federation of Teachers: After longtime AFT President Albert Shanker died in in 1997, he was succeeded by Sandra Feldman, who slowly “re-branded” the union, allying it with some of the most powerful left-wing elements of the New Labor Movement. When Feldman died in 2004, Edward McElroy took her place, followed by Randi Weingarten in 2008. All of them kept the union on the leftward course it had adopted in its post-Shanker period.

It wasn’t only the mainstream media that freaked out over Donald Trump’s presidential victory. The prisoners at Gitmo “thought it was the end of the world” and “many” detainees asked for tranquilizers because they were so “distraught.”

One of the prisoner’s lawyers shared with CBS correspondent Margaret Brennan his client’s description about election night.

“He said that many detainees thought that it was the end of the world and felt terrible and that many detainees asked for tranquilizers, sleeping pills because they were so distraught.”

Obama has been emptying out the prison during his term as president and now prisoners are afraid they will not be released with the election of Donald Trump.

“Well, the pace of prisoner releases has picked up in recent months,” Brennan said. “But Donald Trump’s campaign pledge to stop this prison from closing has left the fate of many prisoners in limbo.”

Too bad.

Keith Ellison, who is campaigning to become Democratic National Committee chairman, met with Hamas fundraiser Mohammed al-Hanooti at a 2009 campaign fundraiser for Virginia House of Delegates candidate Esam Omeish. Ellison was the keynote speaker at the event.

Last week Chuck Ross at The Daily Caller reported on the appearance of Ellison at the Omeish campaign event, noting that Omeish had previously called for Palestinians to follow “the jihad way” against Israel.

Given that, it’s no surprise to find al-Hanooti, who styled himself as “grand mufti” of Washington D.C. and whom FBI documents identify as a top U.S. fundraiser for Hamas, at the campaign fundraiser.

Pictures posted to Flickr by Omeish show Ellision and al-Hanooti chatting at the event.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Mohammed al-Hanooti has been identified by federal prosecutors and top counterterrorism officials as a enthusiastic supporter of Hamas — serving as one of its top fundraisers — and also as an active supporter of terrorism and extremist Islamic ideology for several decades.
Sponsored

He also holds the rare distinction of not only being named by prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, the largest terror-finance case in American history, but also of being listed as a conspirator in the trial of “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel Rahman for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the planned follow-up attack on New York City landmarks.

A giant flaw in President Obama’s economic policy has been the politicized allocation of capital, from green energy to housing. Donald Trump suffers from a similar industrial-policy temptation, as we’ve seen this week with his arm-twisting of Carrier to change its decision to move a plant to Mexico from Indiana.

Carrier announced Wednesday that it will retain about 1,000 jobs in Indianapolis that would have moved to Mexico over the next three years, and on Thursday Mr. Trump held a rally at the plant and claimed political credit. The President-elect had made Carrier a piñata for his trade politics during the campaign, and post-election he lobbied Gregory Hayes, the CEO of United Technologies Corp. (UTC) that owns Carrier, to reconsider.

Everyone—even the Obama White House—is hailing the move as a great political victory, and in the short term it is for those Indianapolis workers, who make more than $20 an hour on average. But as U.S. auto workers have learned the hard way, real job security depends on the profitability of the business. Carrier wanted to move the production line to Mexico to stay competitive in the market for gas furnaces. If the extra costs of staying in Indianapolis erode that business, those workers will lose their jobs eventually in any case.

This isn’t to fault Mr. Hayes’s decision, since Mr. Trump made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. The state of Indiana threw in $7 million in tax incentives, but those weren’t decisive. Mr. Trump’s real hammer is his threat to impose a tariff on Carrier imports to the U.S. Carrier has a 30% share of the U.S. gas-furnace market, and a 35% tariff could kill the business. That’s the same sword Mr. Trump previously held over Ford Motor Co.

United Technologies also gets about 10% of its revenue from sales to the Pentagon, another source of government leverage. Then there’s the potential damage to the Carrier brand, especially its consumer air conditioner sales, if Mr. Trump decided to blast it from the bully—and we mean bully—pulpit. So United Technologies decided to take the small cost against earnings and invest to make the Indiana plant more competitive.

The company is also betting that Mr. Trump will fulfill his promise for tax and regulatory reform to make U.S. manufacturing more competitive. United Technologies does about 61% of its sales outside the U.S., and it has some $6 billion in cash overseas that would be taxed at a 35% rate if it brought the money home today. Carrier currently pays a 28% effective tax rate, so a tax reform that cut the corporate rate to 20% and only taxed earnings in the country where they are earned would more than make up for the Indianapolis concession.

UTC is also no corporate scofflaw. It pays $2 billion a year in taxes and offers to finance four years of college for every employee. Its exports are worth $10 billion a year, mostly in aerospace products, which support some 40,000 American jobs. CONTINUE AT SITE