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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

The $50 Billion Illinois Favor Factory Hums Along by Adam Andrzejewski

It’s been two years since Illinois state government had a full-year budget. Now, more than 70,000 vendors are owed $8.2 billion. Yet, despite the legislative deadlock and seemingly fiscal insolvency, more than $50 billion in state payments flowed to providers and other entities in FY2016.

So, who actually got paid and for how much while others waited in the long line of unpaid bills?

Recently, our organization at American Transparency (website: OpenTheBooks.com) filed our annual Freedom of Information Act request with Illinois Comptroller Leslie Munger (R) for the state’s checkbook payments. Here’s what we found: 56,738 recipients received fast-tracked payments of $50,125,427,171.

We plotted the recipients by ZIP code – review your neighborhood or look across the entire country. Just zoom-in, click a ZIP code pin, and scroll down to see the results rendered in the chart below the map.

The top 25 accounts paid by the Comptroller received $21.8 billion. The vast majority of the payments were for social safety-net healthcare providers ($5.9 billion); the Teachers Retirement System pension payment ($3.224 billion); Cook County ($2.7 billion); Chicago Board of Education ($2.1 billion); Regional Transportation Authority ($1.7 billion); and transfer payments to the state treasurer or banks.
Here are some of the entities receiving the large state payments in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2016:

The Media’s Dirty Clinton Ties, Buys and Lies The media is scalping its own for Hillary Clinton. Daniel Greenfield

Where does media bias come from?

Anyone who really wanted to know had that question answered when much of the media took a break from attacking Trump to attack the Associated Press. What does the AP have in common with Trump? Both were hurting Hillary Clinton’s chances to score payoffs from dictators, arms dealers and tycoons with terrorist ties for the next four to eight years.

The Associated Press got in trouble with the rest of the media for digging up dirt on the Clinton Foundation. Instead of just repeating the usual Clinton denials, it actually ran the numbers and noted that more than half the “ordinary folks” who got meetings with her had donated to her Foundation.

Instead of reporting on the AP story, the media went to war on its own. It wasn’t just the usual suspects like Vox and Slate who have a reputation for attacking any actual reporters who stray off the reservation and actually do their jobs. This time all the big boys were on the job.

CNN called in AP’s Kathleen Carroll to barrage her with classic ‘Have you stopped beating your wife’ loaded questions like, “Did you feel the pressure to publish something even though so many critics have said it didn’t amount to much?” A better question might be why CNN didn’t inform viewers that its parent company was a Clinton Foundation donor. But that would be practicing journalism.

Instead CNN offers gems like, “AP’s ‘Big Story’ on Clinton Foundation is big failure”. A high school paper could have come up with a cleverer putdown, but in this brave new world in which media companies donate to front groups for presidential campaigns and then denounce stories exposing their corruption there are no more new ideas, just organized spin sessions.

If you didn’t like the AP headline, try Vox’s “The AP’s big exposé on Hillary meeting with Clinton Foundation donors is a mess.”

Yes, they are all reading from the same script.

The New York Times initially blacklisted the story. Then it came out with a call for Hillary Clinton to cut ties with the Clinton Foundation. That’s like asking Al Capone to cut ties with the mob.

But the Times might have started out by cutting its own ties to the Clinton Foundation.

Carlos Slim, the Mexican-Lebanese billionaire who keeps the lights burning at the New York Times HQ, gave the Clinton Foundation anywhere from 2 to 10 million dollars. Then there’s the six figure sum that Hillary picked up for delivering one of her comatose speeches about something or other in a robotic monotone.

It wouldn’t do for his Manhattan investment property to undermine his Washington D.C. investment property.

The Times tremulously urged Hillary to cut ties with the organization she had used to fuel her political ambitions, worrying that, “If Mrs. Clinton wins, it could prove a target for her political adversaries.”

Could prove? If the New York Times occasionally bothered to report the news, it would have noticed that it already had. But the Times isn’t worried about ethics, legality or national security. Instead it, incredibly, asks Hillary to act to protect her agenda and reputation from her own crimes.

That’s like asking an embezzler to quickly burn his second set of books before the cops catch him.

The New York Times doesn’t give a damn if foreign interests buy the White House. Its only concern is to protect Hillary from Republican attacks. And this overt bias is actually downright moderate.

It’s almost noble compared to the Washington Post, another Clinton Foundation donor, which fired off one attack after another. There was this cheerfully breezy masterpiece which read like North Korean propaganda written by a Portland hipster, “AP chief on patently false Clinton tweet: No regrets!”

The Post’s fact check, which is just the paper’s editorial position plus 5 minutes on Wikipedia, panned the AP story. Or rather it panned the tweet which promoted the story. If you can’t argue the facts, you can always pound the table. Or complain about the wording that the intern used to tweet the table.

Hillary at Bay By James Lewis…..

The sicker Hillary Clinton looks on the campaign trail, the more the Media Left tells us to deny the evidence of our eyes. Mrs. Clinton has suffered two strokes near, if not inside, her brain; but strokes are seldom localized affairs, and behind the scenes her doctors must be telling her to stop any physically demanding campaign activities.

Hillary is in effect suspending her active campaigning to do almost exclusively fundraisers.

We are seeing a woman who should be checking into Walter Reed Hospital to take full-time rest and recovery under intensive medical care, but who has to be physically propped up at some pubic appearances.

The nation is looking at a practice that would not be permitted for a racehorse.

Dr. Drew Pinsky, MD, and a medical colleague have reported that Hillary’s known prescriptions include Coumadin, a useful but out-of-date blood thinner, used to prevent strokes and cardiac events. It is impossible for the public to know, but she may be being treated by an older physician, who is more comfortable using Coumadin. Alternatively, she could have been on that drug for many years.

Democrat politicians are hardly the most likeable characters, but this comes too close to medically sanctioned torture, much more cruel than anything at Abu Ghraib.

The media-political establishment that has ruled America since the Watergate resignation of Richard Nixon is now in deadly crisis. This chaos can no longer be covered up, which is why all the pathetic media donkeys are loudly braying that everything is just hunky-dory, folks, don’t pay no attention, ya’ hear now?

The fact that “50” Bush-era intelligence types signed a statement against Donald Trump and therefore for Hillary’s election, is unprecedented in my memory. The DC Permanents always pretend to be non-partisan, and this is the first public breach of that front that I can remember — at least since FBI Assistant Director Mark Felt came out in public as Deep Throat, the big Watergate leaker.

Daniel Pipes: Trump’s Muslim Immigration Policy Is Evolving for the Better

Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes joined Breitbart London Editor Raheem Kassam on Wednesday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM to talk about Republican nominee Donald Trump’s Muslim immigration policy.

Kassam opened the discussion by mentioning Trump’s announced trip to Mexico on Wednesday to meet with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, which Pipes described as “a very high-risk undertaking.”

“The sides begin so far apart that unless they have some kind of groundwork in place, some kind of preliminary draft agreement on what they’re going to say, it could work out to the detriment of Donald Trump,” Pipes explained.

Kassam quoted Nigel Farage’s observation that Trump was approaching politics with a “businessman’s strategy of trial and error,” which doesn’t work in politics, because “people always hold you to your previous positions.” Pipes offered a similar observation in a Washington Times article several weeks ago, concluding that Trump was learning “slowly and erratically from his mistakes.”

“There clearly was a learning curve,” Pipes told Kassam on Wednesday morning, adding:

I focused not so much on the Mexican question, but on the Muslim question. He came out with this extraordinary statement that there should be a complete shutdown and closure to Muslims entering the United States. He said that back in December, and he doubled down on it, repeated it, elaborated on it.

And then, starting in the middle of June, he started walking away from it, and he started talking about extreme vetting, and then he started talking about not taking in people from certain territories, which he implied would include places like France and Germany where there is a lot of political violence.

And finally he settled on his formulation – which is in fact, I think, the only workable one – which is that you keep out the Islamists. You keep out the nasties. You keep out the people who want to do you harm.

The Truth About Jew-Hatred is Never Slander UCLA student Robert Gardner: no innocent. Matthew Vadum

It ought to be axiomatic that if you join a group marinated in anti-Semitism and devoted to the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel you are likely at some point to be identified as a hater of Jews.

But after getting involved with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at UCLA, student Robert Gardner claims to be shocked at being called out publicly for promoting Jew-hatred.

A poster from David Horowitz Freedom Center (which publishes FrontPage) that was distributed where Gardner attends classes listed his name under the heading: “The following students and faculty at UCLA have allied themselves with Palestinian terrorists to perpetrate BDS and Jew Hatred on this campus.”

Quite predictably, some left-wing campus groups and UCLA’s diversity-groupthink commissar have condemned the posters. They are, after all, usually the ones doing the slandering and intimidating. This specific poster is merely an exercise in what the Left calls consciousness-raising.

UCLA Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, Jerry Kang, says the posters constitute “thuggish intimidation” and absurdly characterized them as promoting “guilt by association, of using blacklists, of ethnic slander and sensationalized images engineered to trigger racially tinged fear.”

Gardner, a twenty-something political science and urban planning major, bristled at being publicly associated with racist hatred. He recently told the Los Angeles Times that the accusations on the poster are false, explaining that he does not support terrorists or hate Jews.

The newspaper reports:

The African American senior likened Israeli crackdowns on Palestinian protesters to police violence against black Americans. So he joined Students for Justice in Palestine and an international movement known as BDS, which advocates boycotts, divestment and sanctions against companies deemed players in Israeli human rights violations.

Gardner assures reporters that SJP explicitly condemns all unlawful violence, but he says he is “worried about people coming to campus to attack me.”

“I’ve received death threats online, and people have followed me,” or so Gardner claims.

Maybe Gardner should have examined SJP a little more closely before he got involved in its ugly campaigns.

Students for Justice in Palestine isn’t some innocuous group that meets up at Starbucks to harmlessly shoot the breeze about Middle East affairs: it’s a hate group. And a powerful one at that.

As John Perazzo reports in the DHFC pamphlet, “Students for Justice in Palestine: a campus front for Hamas terrorists”:

Chicago’s Murder Rate Spirals Out of Control By Jack Dunphy

We turn our attention once again to the city of Chicago, where, as of this writing, 2,858 people have been shot and 487 have been killed so far this year (both numbers will surely be higher by the time you read this). The website HeyJackass.com tabulates these and other figures related to crime in Chicago, and it reports that on average someone is shot every two hours and murdered every twelve. But these averages are for the year overall; we are now in the prime shooting season of summer, and the averages for August approximate to someone being shot every ninety minutes and murdered every eight hours. August, says the Chicago Tribune, has been the most violent month in Chicago in 20 years.

Despite these grim numbers, there persists among many the notion that it is the city’s police officers who bear the greatest share of blame for all that ails Chicago. Propagating this myth most recently is this same Chicago Tribune, which on Friday published a story about the 435 police shootings that occurred in Chicago between 2010 and 2015.

The story begins by noting that over the six years examined, a Chicago police officer fired at someone every five days, killing 92 people and wounding 170. “While a few of those incidents captured widespread attention,” says the Tribune, “they occurred with such brutal regularity — and with scant information provided by police — that most have escaped public scrutiny.”

Given the statistics cited in the opening paragraph above, it would seem it is not the police who are shooting people with “such brutal regularity.” Indeed, many of the Tribune’s readers, aware that they live in a city where someone is shot every hour and a half and murdered every eight, might not be all that disturbed – and might even welcome it – when the police manage to shoot at some evil-doer every five days.

But of course it is not merely the number of police shootings that so discomfits the enlightened ones at the Chicago Tribune, it is the skin color of those who are shot. In the second of a series of bullet points near the top of the story, we are informed that “about four out of every five people shot [by police] were African-American males.” Such use of racial data is at minimum misleading if not dishonest, but at least the Tribune made an effort at offering some context in the story for those who bothered to read beyond the first few paragraphs. Police shootings, says the story, “were more common on the South and West sides, in crime-ridden blocks profoundly shaken by decades of drugs, gangs and unrelenting poverty.” Even less subtle with the racial angle was Time magazine, which on its website cited the Tribune story under this headline: “Majority of Chicago Police Shooting Victims are Black Men or Boys: Report.”

And from this bit of information the uninformed reader is expected to conclude the number of officer-involved shootings is excessive, most especially those involving black males. “For years,” says the Tribune, “examining the full scale of the problem in Chicago was impossible because the city refused to release most details about police-involved shootings.”

So the Tribune labels this as a “problem” but doesn’t say why, other than to mention that over the six years studied, Chicago had more police shootings than Los Angeles, New York, Houston, or Philadelphia. It fails to mention the pertinent fact that Chicago has far more violent crime than any of the other cities listed. In the first half of 2015, for example, Chicago had 207 murders while New York City, with 5.5 million more people, had 164. So far this year, Chicago has experienced almost 100 more murders than Los Angeles and New York combined.

And if the Chicago Tribune feels the demographics of those shot by the police are somehow out of kilter, perhaps they should consider this: according to the U.S. census, the population of Chicago is 32.9 percent black, yet blacks make up 78.6 percent of the city’s murder victims. In Chicago and elsewhere, almost all murders are intra-racial, so we may safely conclude that blacks are similarly over-represented among Chicago’s killers. The fact that four out of five people shot by Chicago police officers seems far less startling now, doesn’t it? CONTINUE AT SITE

State Department Says 30-Odd Hillary Clinton Emails Could Be Linked to Benghazi Messages were among the 15,000 emails turned over by the FBIBy Byron Tau

WASHINGTON—The State Department said Tuesday it has found approximately 30 emails from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s account that could be related to the 2012 attacks on two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya.

The new documents were found among the roughly 15,000 emails forensically recovered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from Mrs. Clinton’s personal email server as part of its investigation into whether she or her aides mishandled classified information.

Those emails were turned over to the State Department in the wake of the FBI probe, which resulted in no charges against Mrs. Clinton earlier this year. The messages are expected to be made public in the coming months.

The State Department couldn’t say how many of the 30-odd emails previously have been made public, raising the possibility that some were among the 55,000 pages of emails already provided to the State Department by Mrs. Clinton’s attorneys and released to the public. The department also couldn’t say with any certainty that the identified messages were related to the Benghazi attacks.

“Using broad search terms, we have identified approximately 30 documents potentially responsive to a Benghazi-related request. At this time, we have not confirmed that the documents are, in fact, responsive, or whether they are duplicates of materials already provided to the Department by former Secretary Clinton in December 2014,” said State Department spokesman John Kirby.

Names—Like ‘America First’ or ‘Progressive’—Have Histories Neither Donald Trump nor anti-Israel boycotters can duck the political origin of their campaign slogans. By Cynthia Ozick

It was recently revealed that Donald Trump’s family, immigrants from Germany, chose early on to live a lie: They called themselves Swedes. There is more pathos than blame in this deceit. After all, they were by then established Americans residing in Queens, N.Y., far from the venomous swastikas of Munich. Understandably, they were in fear of stigma, much as today a Muslim immigrant from, say, Sri Lanka might dread being associated with the Islamists of Hamas.

Yet Mr. Trump’s heritage of self-conscious deception discloses something else. His choice of “America First” as a slogan to inspire is unlikely to have been made out of innocence, and still less out of ignorance. Historical amnesia—a later generation having forgotten the Lindbergh era and its prevailing nativism, including anti-Semitism—in this instance cannot apply. He knew the phrase well. Responsibility for the baleful implications of Charles Lindbergh’s cry of “America First” was exactly what those fake Swedes were hoping to evade.

Names, like families, have histories. Academics, particularly the historians among them, and writers (not omitting the journalists) who term themselves “progressives” are hardly invoking the admirable but nearly eclipsed Robert La Follette, the Wisconsin reformer of the early 20th century who founded an ephemeral American party of that name. Not unlike Mr. Trump when he pretends that “America First” is an expression new-born and pure, they mean to offer the label they flaunt as altogether free of the impress of the past.

It cannot be done, at least not naively. No name is a vacant well. For thinking citizens who are reluctant to toss history into Orwell’s memory hole, these self-defined progressives carry, willy-nilly, the tainted name of those earlier progressives, Stalin’s fellow travelers, who were willfully blind to the reality of the Great Promise and its gulags and show trials. What’s in a name? The date and place and meaning of its birth. And as a German is not a Swede, so is a progressive not a La Follette.

Jason Riley:Trump’s Immigration Shift Is a Winner The older whites cheering for walls and deportation don’t represent most of the GOP, let alone the country.

It’s anyone’s guess where Donald Trump really stands these days on illegal immigration. Even Donald Trump may not know for certain, which is why the Republican presidential nominee apparently feels compelled to clarify his stance in a speech scheduled for Wednesday.

Given the centrality of immigration to Mr. Trump’s presidential run, this ambiguity is noteworthy. No one puzzled over where Ronald Reagan stood on tax cuts or defense spending 10 weeks before Election Day in 1980. Barack Obama’s health-care ambitions were unwavering and clear to all in August 2008. If you knew nothing else about Mr. Trump’s candidacy this year, it was that he vowed to wall off the southern border and remove every cotton-pickin’ foreign national here illegally. Until the past week or so, that is.

To be accurate, skepticism about Mr. Trump’s sincerity on deportation isn’t new. In February, BuzzFeed reported that the candidate had told the New York Times in an off-the-record interview that his views on expelling illegal immigrants were more flexible than he had let on. Asked about the story, Mr. Trump allowed that “everything’s negotiable” but declined the Times’s offer to Since then, Mr. Trump’s immigration shift has became more overt. In November he was proposing a “deportation force” to hunt down the undocumented. Last week, however, he said that giving millions of people the boot is impractical and that enforcement should focus on “the bad ones”—which is the Obama administration’s policy. For those who obey the law and contribute to society, Mr. Trump says that no citizenship should be offered and opposes “amnesty as such.” But if they “pay back taxes” he would be willing to “work with them.” Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio ought to sue for plagiarism.

The weekend brought more confusion. Mr. Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, told CNN that “there’ll be no path to legalization, no path to citizenship unless people leave the country.” But when Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway was asked by Fox News whether her candidate still supported mass deportation, she answered that his approach was “softening.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Some Observations From the Man Who Created Alt-Right An intellectual movement that Democrats want to use to smear Breitbart and Trump. Paul Gottfried

Editor’s note: Frontpage’s recent article by Matthew Vadum, The Alt-Right is Coming! Hillary Shrieks, exposed the dishonest nature of Hillary’s and the Left’s slanderous attacks on Trump, Breitbart and the “Alt-Right,” revealing that the situation is far more complicated than their smear campaign would suggest. For instance, Clinton and leftists blame individuals such Richard Spencer for the Alt-Right, but it was Dr. Paul Gottfried, Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, who actually invented the term for the movement. Below we are publishing Gottfried’s account of the narrative to help clarify matters for our readers.

Last week I was reminded by a call from Associated Press that I had invented the term “Alternative Right.” When I asked about how I had accomplished that, the woman on the other end of the phone referred to a speech I had given in November 2008 in which I urged the creation of an “Alternative Right.” The same caller said that I was considered the “godfather” of what had become Altright, something that the Democratic presidential candidate would be denouncing later in the week. Thereupon I tried to explain in what modest ways I may have inspired the movement that Hillary was about to go after (namely, in a quadrennial ritual in presidential races in which the Democratic candidate accuses her GOP rival of being the second coming of Adolf Hitler).

I pointed out that Altright authors, some of whom I knew, shared my revulsion for the neoconservatives and deplored their influence on the American Right. I also noted that Altright publicists believed that modern liberal democracies had become dangerously fixated on promoting equality; and I’ve made this observation repeatedly in my books. Finally, as someone who had published entire works on the European Right in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (and most recently a book on the career of fascism as a concept), I had provided the Altright with food for thought. This was the case, even if the writers in question didn’t bother to look at my qualifying phrases.

Except for being a very occasional contributor to vdare.com, I am not exactly part of the Altright stable of writers. Recently I expressed interest in an email in writing for Breitbart, which is rumored to have some connection to Altright. Alas, I may have to wait until Hell freezes over before hearing from this website. More importantly, I couldn’t recall until a few days ago that I had spoken to fifty attendants at the H.L. Mencken Club eight years ago on the subject of the “Alternative Right.” I am president of the Mencken Club, and in November 2008 gave an inaugural address, in which I called for an “Alternative Right” to combat the high degree of neoconservative control over the intellectual Right.

This speech may have been a rousing affair, but until someone in the national news service retrieved it a few weeks ago, I had forgotten about my oration. Although I still support the project mentioned in that speech, I’ve never had the means to bring it about. Indeed, I’ve been largely marginalized by both the entire Left and most of the Right since the late 1980s. My works (perhaps we should look at the bright side) do get read but mostly in translation in Poland, Russia, Romania and other Eastern European countries. To link me to the Altright may be more of a stretch than the person from AP was aware of.