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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Hitting Trump Before He’s Sworn In Democrats are fine with becoming “the party of no.” Matthew Vadum

Democrats and left-wing activists are planning to vigorously attack President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees before Trump even takes office at Noon on Jan. 20.

The purpose of this early resistance to the incoming Trump administration is not only to deprive Trump of political legitimacy but also to undermine his authority and make it impossible for him to govern.

All this talk of a vast Russian conspiracy to hack U.S. computer networks to put Trump in the White House is also part of the leftists’ scheme. So was Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein’s goofy fundraising campaign disguised as recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

Commie agitprop director Michael Moore is encouraging angry left-wing mobs to come to Washington, D.C., and riot in the streets of the nation’s capital on Inauguration Day in an effort to prevent or at least cast a shadow over Trump’s assumption of the powers of the presidency. Moore’s idea is to do as much damage as possible to Trump before he even gets sworn in. It worked against George W. Bush.

Feminists are planning a Women’s March on Washington for Trump’s first full day as president. Organizers hope 200,000 people will show up but that number seems very optimistic.

“We plan to make a bold and clear statement to this country on the national and local level that we will not be silent and we will not let anyone roll back the rights we have fought and struggled to get,” said Tamika Mallory of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.

President Obama is part of this too. He is planning to stay behind in Washington after Inauguration Day in order to obstruct Trump’s efforts to undo his destructive legacy.

So with just one decisive election that reduced Democrats nationwide to their lowest ebb since at least 1920, the left-wingers who spent the Obama years denouncing Republicans as the “party of no” have suddenly decided being the “party of no” is fine by them.

BREAKING: FortLauderdale Terrorist EstebanSantiago Joined My Space As “Aashiq Hammad”, Recorded Islamic Music

Fort Lauderdale Airport terrorist Esteban Santiago registered on MySpace under the name “Aashiq Hammad” and recorded Islamic religious music on the site, 3 years before he ever deployed to Iraq as a U.S. soldier, destroying the lying mainstream media’s narrative that he was just a mentally disturbed veteran and that “Islam had nothing to do with it.”

Here’s how we know all that:

A search of public records database Nexis reveals that Puerto Rican Esteban Santiago has a brother named Bryan Santiago and two e-mails registered to his name:

naotaemail

The second e-mail, “Naota33@hotmail.com”, is how GotNews exclusively visually identified Santiago before every mainstream media outlet and discovered he was posting on an explosives/weapons forum about mass-downloading Islamic terrorist propaganda videos in 2007 yesterday.

Today, we discovered the first e-mail, “Naota017@gmail.com”, in the MySpace database that was leaked earlier this year. This is the raw data we found:

211355052:naota017@gmail.com:aashiqhammad:0x313afa5189c150b7b0f3e6d39e0fa223f88ec42b:

The middle entry “aashiqhammad” can be added to the MySpace URL to discover the profile that was registered to the e-mail address “Naota017@gmail.com”.

Sure enough, Esteban Santiago registered a MySpace account under the name “Aashiq Hammad”:
myspace1

Archive here.

“Aashiq Hammad” lists Penuelas, Puerto Rico as his location, just like Esteban Santiago’s records in Nexis.

And take a look at the three songs recorded by “Aashiq Hammad.” The first one is titled “La ilaha illAllah”, which is Arabic for “There is no God but Allah,” and the first half of the Muslim declaration of faith, the Shahadah:
myspace2

Archive here.

If the location and e-mail weren’t enough proof, “Aashiq Hammad” also has Bryan Santiago — Esteban’s brother — as a connection:
myspace3

Archive here.

myspace4

The song “La ilaha illAllah” by “aashiq” is indeed just an Arabic recitation of the Muslim declaration of faith “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.” We recorded the song and you can download and listen to it for yourself here.

“Intentional” recitation of the Shahadah is generally considered sufficient to convert to Islam. Listen to that song. It sure sounds like Esteban Santiago was “intentional” about what he was saying!

And the best part?

That song was recorded in 2007, 3 years before Esteban Santiago went to Iraq as a U.S. soldier in 2010, destroying the lying mainstream media’s narrative that he was a “mentally disturbed veteran”, although even they admit Santiago went into an FBI office in 2015 and told agents he was being forced to watch ISIS videos by voices in his head (or something).

2007 was also the year that “Naota33” was posting on an explosives/weapons forum about mass-downloading Islamic propaganda videos, as GotNews exclusively revealed yesterday.

Santiago was definitely mentally disturbed, but if he was calling himself “Aashiq Hammad”, recording Islamic religious music online, and downloading Islamic terrorist propaganda all in 2007, 3 years before his first deployment to Iraq, what do you really think is the root cause here?

You won’t hear this stuff from the lying mainstream media. Keep the GotNews mission alive: donate at GotNews.com/donate or send tips to editor@gotnews.com. If you’d like to join our research team, contact editor@gotnews.com.

Stay tuned for more.

Our researchers shut down Facebook’s biased left-wing trending news team. They discovered never before seen footage of a young Barack Obama whining about white privilege in Kenya. They debunked and destroyed Hillary Clinton’s narco baby mama Alicia Machado, who quit giving interviews because of us. If you’d like to hire our research team, email us at editor@gotnews.com.

Sharpton Promises ‘Season of Civil Disobedience’ in Response to Sessions Nomination By Nicholas Ballasy

WASHINGTON — National Action Network president Rev. Al Sharpton promised a “season of civil disobedience” in reaction to the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) for attorney general in the Trump administration.

Sharpton, an MSNBC host, said activists have planned a march in Washington on Jan. 14 during the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend to protest the Sessions nomination. Sharpton recalled spending 90 days in jail for protesting on U.S. Navy land against military exercises on the island of Vieques in 2001 when George W. Bush was president, adding that civil disobedience usually works because it changes policy.

“We’re not just doing this to be doing it. We do it because it can lead to change and, believe me, there will be a season of civil disobedience particularly around the Sessions nomination,” he said Friday on a conference call with other civil rights organizations’ leaders such as Cornell William Brooks, president and CEO of the NAACP, and Janet Murguia, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza.

Sharpton offered a preview of the mass march, explaining that activists plan to outline their intent to visit senators’ offices and make some house calls to “make them understand” they will be held accountable for voting in favor of Sessions, whose confirmation hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee are scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday.
Sponsored

“Make them understand that if they think they are voting based on some courtesy of a Senate colleague and will not face a real backlash in their own states, then they have another thing coming. This is not going to be some regular ceremonial procedure that they’re going to be able to bluff their way through,” he said.

“We intend to make this a critical stand in terms of where people are with civil rights and voting rights in this country. No one will be given a pass to say ‘I had to vote for my colleague.’ This is an affront to everything the civil rights and voting rights community has stood for historically and a vote for Sessions should be held accountable and punishable by the voters,” he added.

In Spy-Agency Revamp, Michael Flynn Shows His Influence Donald Trump’s pick for national-security adviser has been skeptical of the intelligence community By Gordon Lubold and Shane Harris

In 2010, then-Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, at the time the top U.S. military intelligence official in Afghanistan, slammed the U.S. spy apparatus he helped to oversee as bloated and out of touch. Four years later, he was fired as the head of the military’s largest intelligence agency—in his view for speaking truth to power about the inadequacies of the nation’s national security preparedness.

Today, Gen. Flynn, who retired in 2014 as a lieutenant general, is in a position to again push his views of how America should protect itself, this time as President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for national security adviser.

Gen. Flynn and senior Trump advisers are eyeing potential structural changes to components of the U.S. intelligence community. The Wall Street Journal reported this past week that transition team officials have discussed paring back the authorities of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and reducing the size of its staff, and also discussed possible changes at the Central Intelligence Agency.

The effort is still the subject of internal discussions, and the Trump transition team has made no formal plans, people familiar with the discussions said. Sean Spicer, a Trump spokesman, said Thursday that discussions have been “tentative,” and denied there were plans for an overhaul.

“The president-elect’s top priorities will be to ensure the safety of the American people and the security of the nation, and he’s committed to finding the best and most effective ways to do it,” Mr. Spicer said.

But Mr. Trump’s aggressive skepticism of the intelligence community clearly echoes Gen. Flynn’s views on both the organization and the quality of national intelligence and the need for changes, according to officials familiar with the transition team and Gen. Flynn. As the president-elect’s closest adviser on national security, he briefs Mr. Trump on developments and sits in on classified presentations from U.S. intelligence officials.

The Trump transition team said Gen. Flynn wasn’t available to comment.

In a series of tweets, Mr. Trump has questioned intelligence conclusions that Russia-linked hackers intervened to help him win the election. Current and former intelligence officials have said that they see Gen. Flynn’s influence in those tweets and in Mr. Trump’s frequent allusions to the intelligence community’s botched 2002 analysis of Iraq’s suspected weapons program.

“I absolutely see Mike Flynn’s fingerprints on that,” said a former U.S. official with ties to the Trump transition who is familiar with Gen. Flynn.

Proposed changes to the Office of Director of National Intelligence have been offered for years by critics who said the office had grown too large and beyond its original scope. In that respect, some officials said Gen. Flynn’s proposals could be the latest iteration of longstanding proposals. Others also detect a whiff of revenge.

Gen. Flynn was removed as head of the agency by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, and Michael Vickers, the civilian head of Pentagon intelligence at the time, because of his poor management of the agency, said U.S. officials who were familiar with his removal. CONTINUE AT SITE

Agents and Agencies Donald Trump should push for intelligence reform. By Kevin D. Williamson —

The Wall Street Journal reports that Donald Trump’s recent public criticism of U.S. intelligence agencies presages an effort to reorganize the nation’s sundry spy bureaucracies. Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, denies that the president has any such plan in mind.

If he doesn’t, he damn well should.

The plan described in the Journal is not unlike the one described in National Review on December 9 by Fred Fleitz of the Center for Security Policy, which would scale back the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), a post-9/11 innovation intended to create a central authority to ensure cooperation and coordination within the herd of cats that is the intelligence community. Fleitz and others have argued that ODNI is just another ladle full of federal alphabet soup — CIA, DIA, NIC, etc. — doing very little more than adding a layer of bureaucracy.

Conservatives have a blind spot for spies, cops, and soldiers. The psychology here is pretty straightforward: A great many conservatives (myself included) who are habitually and instinctively skeptical of grand federal plans were insufficiently beady-eyed when it came to President George W. Bush’s big plans for Iraq, and some of that (again, speaking for myself first and foremost, but not, I think, for myself alone) is purely reactionary. When I see a bunch of dopey white kids with dreadlocks from Haverford College, the Workers World Party, and Chaka Fattah on one side of a barricade, I instinctively want to be on the other side. (This is especially true at the moment for Fattah, the longtime Philadelphia Democrat and Hugo Chávez fanboy who is headed to the penitentiary for corruption.) This is, to be sure, an imperfect heuristic.

There is a question of agents and a separate question of agencies. Many of us, especially conservatives, are inclined to respect and admire those whose profession consists in performing necessary violence: police on the beat in New York City, soldiers patrolling Mosul, and intelligence operatives who, if they are doing their jobs, will never hear the words “Thank you for your service.” But bureaucracies have lives and characters of their own, irrespective of the sort of men they employ. The public schools are made up mostly of good people, but they don’t work very well. One imagines that most IRS agents are scrupulous and dedicated. (The DMV people just hate us.) Out of the field of operations and into the cubicles and corner offices, the NYPD, the FBI, the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency are bureaucracies like any others, and suffer from familiar bureaucratic ailments.

What the ‘Women’s March on Washington’ Is Really About By D. C. McAllister

Nearly 200,000 people have signed up to participate in the Women’s March on Washington to protest the inauguration of Donald Trump. The protest, called “The Gathering for Justice,” includes an array of liberal causes, but at the center is the demand for equal rights for women.

The application for the protest states that the purpose is “to come together in solidarity to express to the new administration and congress that women’s rights are human rights and our power cannot be ignored.”

The group’s mission and vision statement says the march is a response to the “rhetoric of the past election cycle,” which they say “has insulted, demonized, and threatened many of us—immigrants of all statuses, Muslims and those of diverse religious faiths, people who identify as LGBTQIA, Native people, Black and Brown people, people with disabilities, survivors of sexual assault—and our communities are hurting and scared.”

Organizers of the event, which are made up of typical liberal community organizers, from pro-abortion activists, to CodePink, to former associates of Al Sharpton, say it’s about more than a protest—it’s a movement and they want it to continue for years to come.

“We plan to make a bold and clear statement to this country on the national and local level that we will not be silent,” said Tamika Mallory, a gun-control activist and one of the main organizers of the march. “And we will not let anyone roll back the rights we have fought and struggled to get.”

But is this march really about the rights of marginalized groups and women, in particular? Exactly what are they protesting? What has happened that is threatening their “human rights”? They can talk about Trump’s rhetoric during the campaign, but does that translate at all into policy? In fact, are any of his policies, when you really examine them, racist, bigoted, sexist, or homophobic in any way? No, they’re not.

There was a time in the past when women actually marched for real rights. From the Suffrage movement to the Equal Rights Amendment marches in the 1970s, women had legitimate complaints and addressed actual issues that concerned them.

But not in 2016. Their rights are not being threatened by the Republican Party’s agenda or Trump. In fact, Trump is more pro-woman, particularly in business with proposals for maternity leave, than most other Republicans. One could argue that he is pro-life, which means he could turn back Roe v. Wade through a Supreme Court nomination, but killing the baby in your womb is not a human right. It’s actually the exact opposite. Getting free birth control is not a human right. Even getting free medical care, paid by the state, is not a human right. Becoming a citizen is not a human right either. Neither is a man using a woman’s bathroom. CONTINUE ON SITE

Shameless!!Obama grotesquely had himself awarded a Defense Dept. medal yesterday By Thomas Lifson

President Obama has another ironic award for his trophy shelf, to accompany his Nobel Peace Prize and all those participation trophies he got at Punahou for his basketball skills. His appointee and subordinate Ash Carter yesterday pinned a military medal – the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service – on his boss, as Warner Todd Huston reported for Breitbart.

Defense Secy Carter presents Pres Obama with Dept of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service. pic.twitter.com/a5DihpPRnA
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) January 4, 2017

The ceremony took place at Joint Base Myers-Henderson, before a crowd that had an awful lot of empty seats, almost as if the military service members who attended were there on orders.

I am sorry, but this stinks of a tin-pot dictatorship.

The #BlackLivesMatter Torture Film By Matthew Vadum

According to our leftist betters, a sickening graphic video showing a white man being brutally tortured in Chicago by four black attackers as they shout, “F— Donald Trump! F— white people!” isn’t evidence of racism or a hate crime.

In the left’s alternate universe, Pepe the Donald Trump-loving cartoon frog is racist. Kidnapping, torturing, and scalping an innocent white man because he is white is not racist. Black-hating mass murderer Dylann Storm Roof speaks for all white people, but the newly arrested black perpetrators in Chicago, Jordan Hill, Tesfaye Cooper, Tanishia Covington, and Brittany Covington, are all rogue actors.

No minorities are responsible for their actions. It’s society’s fault. It’s capitalism’s fault. It’s the fault of white privilege.

To be clear, I am referring to the #BlackLivesMatter kidnapping broadcast live on Facebook (since censored by the fake news commissars at Facebook and at YouTube) that shows a captive, reportedly mentally disabled young white male being physically abused by four young black assailants. Fortunately, Live Leak posted the full video, which runs 27 minutes and 39 seconds.

Black Lives Matter movement hero DeRay Mckesson rushed to Twitter Thursday morning to make excuses for his comrades-in-arms. “It goes without saying that the actions being branded by the far-right as the ‘BLM Kidnapping’ have nothing to do [with] the movement.”

He’s lying.

This is exactly what Black Lives Matter stands for. Its supporters lionize those who murder cops and white people. At their marches, they carry signs reading, “End White Supremacy.” America, they claim, is systemically racist. In other words, white people are racist and evil.

A Useful Trump Intelligence Shakeup The White House intel shop can be shrunk and its staff improved.

Donald Trump may or may not be planning to reorganize the 17 separate U.S. intelligence agencies, and the mere suggestion seems to be a breach of Beltway etiquette. But the intelligence services shouldn’t be immune from a bureaucratic shakeup, especially at the White House, and we have some suggestions.

The Journal reported this week that the Trump team believes the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) has become “bloated and politicized,” though incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer called the story “100% false.” The transition also said that Mr. Trump will nominate Dan Coats, a former Indiana Senator and political grownup, as DNI, perhaps to calm the uproar.

Mr. Trump’s opponents are portraying the reorganization as his payback to the intelligence community for concluding that Russia hacked Democrats to throw him the election, and Mr. Trump’s tweets don’t help. “The ‘Intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!” the President-elect tweeted this week, though he later called himself “a big fan!” of U.S. spooks.

This brawling is a shame because the truth is that the DNI has become the stagnant, permanent bureaucracy that critics predicted when the office was proposed in the panicked runup to the 2004 election. The 9/11 Commission identified multiple failures to coordinate activities and share information across the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and so forth, and the commissioners lobbied for the new DNI as a maestro in the war on terror.

We argued at the time that this “furniture reshuffle” would simply “create a new layer of bureaucracy to police the old layers,” and we hoped we’d be wrong. Better intelligence integration and management is a useful goal, but Congress whipped the DNI bill though with little strategic deliberation. CONTINUE AT SITE

Don’t Thank Big Government for Medical Breakthroughs New cures come from private research, not cash dumped into the National Institutes of Health. By Tom Stossel

Americans who want better treatments for their diseases should be pleased that the lame-duck Congress passed the 21st Century Cures Act, which will promote medical innovation. They should be wary, however, of the $4 billion budget boost that the law gives to the National Institutes of Health.

The assumption seems to be that the root of all medical innovation is university research, primarily funded by federal grants. This is mistaken. The private economy, not the government, actually discovers and develops most of the insights and products that advance health. The history of medical progress supports this conclusion.

Few findings in medical science significantly improved health until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During that period came breakthroughs such as anesthesia and antisepsis, along with vaccines and antibiotics to combat infectious diseases. The discovery of vitamins and hormones made it possible to treat patients with deficiencies in either category.

In America, innovation came from physicians in universities and research institutes that were supported by philanthropy. Private industry provided chemicals used in the studies and then manufactured therapies on a mass scale.

Things changed after World War II, when Vannevar Bush, who had led the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war, persuaded Congress to increase federal subsidies for science. The National Institutes of Health became the major backer of medical research. That changed the incentives. Universities that had previously lacked research operations suddenly developed them, and others expanded existing programs. Over time these institutions grew into what I call the government-academic biomedical complex.

Since then, improvements in health have accumulated. Life expectancy has increased. Deaths from heart attack and stroke have radically decreased, and cancer mortality has declined. New drugs and devices have ameliorated the pain and immobility of diseases like arthritis. Yet the question remains: Is the government responsible for these improvements? The answer is largely no. Washington-centric research, rather, might slow progress.

Many physicians have never lacked motivation to develop treatments for diseases. But the government-academic biomedical complex has recruited predominantly nonphysician scientists who value elegant solutions to medical puzzles—generally preferring to impress their influential peers rather than solve practical problems. Vannevar Bush believed that basic research, unrelated to specific ends, was the best approach to scientific progress. How something works became more important than whether it works. Aspirin, for example, came into use even though researchers weren’t sure exactly what made it effective. That approach would never work today. Instead of the messy work of studying sick patients, scientists now prefer experimenting with inbred mice and cultured cells. Their results accrue faster and are scientifically cleaner, but they arguably are less germane to health.