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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

All the Lies: They’ve Turned Us Into a Rotting Banana Republic Jed Babbin

What makes us any different from Venezuela now?

It’s a matter or record. Americans now populate the largest, wealthiest and most powerful banana republic in the world. The differences between Obama’s America and Maduro’s Venezuela are defined only by degree.

The defining characteristics of banana republics are a matter of history. First, the law is not enforced against a chosen class in a banana republic, usually the allies of the autocrat in charge. Second, foreign policy is always performed in the autocrat’s interests and often in disregard of the nation’s actual interests. This describes how America functions in the era of President Obama.

The newly-released FBI documents on the investigation of Hillary Clinton make it clear beyond argument that the fix was in and that the FBI never had any intention of recommending that she should be prosecuted for her crimes.

That is very hard to write. I have had very good friends among the agents of the FBI, men of unshakeable dedication to the fair enforcement of the law. But that is no longer the FBI’s goal, as just a few references to the documents published last week reveal.

First, you had to notice that the FBI agreed that there would be no videotape of its interview of Clinton. Not only would there not be a videotape, but no court reporter would be present to record a transcript. That itself is highly unusual, but there is far more, and far worse.

Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, had to have participated in sending classified material to Clinton on her private and unsecured “clintonemail.com” email system. Yet when the FBI questioned Clinton, Mills was permitted to attend as one of Clinton’s lawyers. That is not only unethical under the Bar’s unenforced ethics standards, but obviously a huge violation of the most elementary of FBI procedures that requires witnesses — and possible suspects — to be questioned separately in isolation from one another.

Clinton told the FBI that she relied on others’ judgment in sending her sensitive information on the unsecured email system. She also claimed that as a result of a head injury she didn’t recall key events such as being trained by the State Department on handing classified information or retaining records in accordance with federal law.

Another Labor Day in the era of low labor participation By Silvio Canto, Jr.

Buckle your seat belts because President Obama’s approval ratings are actually over 50%. I’d love to ask those people a simple question: Do you follow the news?

How does he do it? I guess a little help from a “blind love” media is probably behind that.

The latest jobs reads a lot like the last jobs report. This is from CNBC:

In addition to the below-expectation number, wage growth actually took a step back, with hourly earnings up just 3 cents and an annualized pace of 2.4 percent. The average work week declined 0.1 percent to 34.3 hours.

That was largely because the biggest jobs gains came in bars and restaurants, which added 34,000 positions.

Social assistance grew by 22,000, professional and business services added 22,000 and Wall Street-related positions grew by 15,000. Health care also contributed 14,000.

Let’s hear it for the bars and restaurants. I hear that they are doing quite well around Wrigley Field or wherever the Cubs go for a series these days.

On a more serious note, high paying jobs, such as in manufacturing or construction were reduced a bit. More bad news: hours worked the lowest since 2011.

Revolution against ‘rich parasites’ at utopian Burning Man Festival as ‘hooligans’ attack luxury camp By Nick Allen,

It is supposed to be a utopian vision of peace and love but this year’s Burning Man Festival has been marred by “hooligans” carrying out a “revolution against rich parasites”.

The festival plays out each year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert where 70,000 people build a city in a week, burn a giant wooden effigy of a man, and then restore the arid playa to its original state.

In recent years it has become popular with Silicon Valley millionaires, and billionaires. Luxurious so-called “plug-n-play” camps have sprung up which use hired staff like cooks, builders and security, and allow international jetsetters to drop in for quick visits.
Many traditional “Burners” claim that is a betrayal of the sprit of “radical self-reliance” that is a cornerstone of the festival, which began in 1986.

As anger boiled over one camp called White Ocean, which hosts high profile DJs on a state-of-the-art stage, became the focus of anger.

The camp first made an appearance at Burning Man three years ago and its founders included the British DJ Paul Oakenfold and the son of a Russian billionaire.

While the camp was holding its “White Party”, at which revelers dress all in white and listen to techno music, it was attacked by vandals who flooded it with water and cut power lines.

In a dismayed post on Facebook camp leaders said: “A very unfortunate and saddening event happened last night at White Ocean, something we thought would never be possible in our Burning Man utopia.

“A band of hooligans raided our camp, stole from us, pulled and sliced all of our electrical lines leaving us with no refrigeration and wasting our food, and glued our trailer doors shut.

“They vandalised most of our camping infrastructure and dumped 200 gallons of potable water flooding our camp.”
The camp leaders said they felt like there had been an effort to “sabotage us from every angle” because “some feel we are not deserving of Burning Man”.

Calling Trump names won’t stop him becoming US President By Simon Heffer

The liberal media are too quick to rubbish Donald Trump Credit:

Just two months before the free world elects its next leader – if you believe America leads the free world, that is – the world’s liberal media seem united on two things. The first is that Donald Trump is a monster. The second is that he will lose the US presidential election on November 8.

The first contention may well be true. I am not sure I would want Mr Trump to marry my daughter (if I had one), and he has said and done things both as a businessman and as a politician of which most civilised people would not be proud. However, as I have been writing here since last autumn, his defeat is no certainty.
It is one thing for an army of pundits, mainly in America but also here, to decide that because they think a man is vile, with opinions to match, he cannot win an election. But there is no logic behind that assertion. One need only look at some who hold high elected office in our own and other democracies to work that out. The present leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, for example – about to be returned to that position by a thumping majority – has feted the Irish Republican Army and associated with some of the vilest anti-semites.

Mr Trump defies gravity. Every time he says something that would end the career of a politician in most of the Western world, his poll ratings rise. A crude attempt to libel his wife has just spectacularly backfired. Mrs Clinton leads in the polls, but the gap is closing. After the conventions she led in a Fox News poll by 9 per cent. Now she leads in the same poll by 2 per cent. Her leads have particularly shrunk in swing states. The liberal establishment in America, while pretending Mr Trump is toast, quakes with fear at the thought that he just might pull it off.
Earlier in the summer The New Yorker, the parish magazine of East Coast liberalism, published an issue in which every cartoon ridiculed Mr Trump. Its readers were not entirely charmed, one or two pointing out that if Mr Trump really was irrelevant, what was the point in emphasising his existence in this way? Since then it has avoided saturation coverage, but most editions of the magazine include something painting Mr Trump as deeply undesirable, or highlighting elements of his campaign as if it were a freak show. The daily email the magazine sends its subscribers also routinely contains another exercise in solemn vilification of the Republican candidate. These boys are clearly worried.

“One or two readers of The New Yorker pointed out that if Mr Trump really was irrelevant, what was the point of an issue with every cartoon ridiculing him?”

And they are right. First, Mrs Clinton remains unappealing to a vast body of Americans, including to many Democratic party supporters. The question of the potential security breach for which she was responsible in using a private email server has harmed her character. The FBI documents just published exposing her carelessness with classified information reinforce the impression that when it comes to important regulations, there is one law for her and one for everybody else.

MY SAY: AN ANSWER TO IAN TUTTLE WHO ASKS “IF HILLARY WINS, WHAT SHOULD CONSERVATIVES DO?”

If she wins, all those conservative Never Trumpers- David French, Krauthammer, Bret Stephens, George Will, Kevin Williamson, and you Mr. Tuttle, to name only a few, should hang your heads in shame for enabling her victory. Your silly hopes for 2020 will have been dashed by a loaded Supreme Court, unlimited and unvetted immigration of Jihadists, and a completion of the fundamental transformation of America by an Alynsky acolyte. Most painful of all, no matter who wins, you and those other conservatives will have lost all your standing and influence….Have a nice day….rsk

“A Clinton restoration will leave Americans looking for alternatives — will conservatives be ready?

A new Washington Post/ABC poll, released on Tuesday, shows that Hillary Clinton’s post-convention era of good feelings lasted approximately three weeks. Despite months of relentless media coverage of Donald Trump, his endless string of campaign calamities (including a weeklong spat with the family of a fallen American soldier), and the increasingly widespread view that Trump is a bigot — the worst thing you can be in American public life — the two candidates are about equally unpopular. He’s viewed unfavorably by 60 percent of registered voters; she’s at 59 percent.

Which is to say that, if Hillary Clinton is elected in November, she is in for a miserable four years. Because none of the sources of her unpopularity are going away.

First are the scandals. Ongoing litigation surrounding Clinton’s e-mails and her use of a private e-mail server would stretch into her first term in office, and is certain to yield further embarrassing revelations (like this week’s discovery that Clinton failed to turn over several e-mails related to the Benghazi attacks), and it was recently reported that field offices of the FBI are considering investigating the e-mail scandal in conjunction with various U.S. Attorneys’ offices. Even if those inquiries turned up nothing, their presence would continue to prompt questions about how seriously Clinton is taking security and transparency concerns as president (having spent her several years as secretary of state evading both). And, of course, looming over all of this will be the question of the Clinton Foundation. Given everything we know already about the way the Clinton Foundation operated during Clinton’s tenure at the State Department, could we trust that the foundation and her White House would be truly separate? Hillary Clinton’s presidency would almost inevitably sit under a cloud of suspicion.

A Tough but Sensible Immigration Policy By The Editors

After two weeks spent waffling on immigration, and making noises on the subject largely indistinguishable from those of Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, Donald Trump has settled on a hawkish position — and a practical one. Trump’s crowd-pleasing antics aside, in his immigration speech in Phoenix, Ariz., on Wednesday he laid out a sensible, realistic path forward on genuine immigration reform.

Trump’s plan, even in its most primitive iterations, always has been based on the entirely commonsensical principle that America’s immigration policy should serve American interests. Taking this as a starting point, Trump laid out a ten-point policy that emphasizes securing the border, enforcing immigration laws, prioritizing the removal of criminal aliens, and creating the legal and economic disincentives necessary to reduce illegal immigration in the long term.

These are the right priorities. On border security, Trump renewed his commitment to a “physical” wall on the southern border (as well as, alas, his absurd promise that Mexico would pay for it), pledged to swell the ranks of the understaffed Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agencies, and vowed to deploy technology, such as below-ground sensors, to aid them. He also promised an end to the catch-and-release policies that have defined the Obama-era commitment (or lack thereof) to border security and to defund sanctuary cities (an initiative that would, of course, have to come out of Congress). And as Trump noted, about half of America’s illegal-immigrant population overstayed legally gotten visas, meaning that a comprehensive visa-overstay tracking system of the sort he is proposing is also crucial part of any real enforcement agenda.

Trump would add to this an expanded use of E-Verify, which would help prevent employers from exploiting illegal labor and so make it more difficult for illegal immigrants to find work. “Turning off the jobs and benefits magnet,” to use Trump’s words, would make the prospect of entering and residing in the country less enticing for foreigners. If immigration trends at the height of the Great Recession are any indication, a sizable number of illegal immigrants are likely to return home when jobs are not readily available.

GLOBALISM AND THE END OF THE AMERICAN DREAM: MICHAEL CUTLER

On August 22, 2016, U.S. News & World Report published the sobering article, “Dream On: Growing inequality has made the American ‘rags to riches’ story more myth than reality.”

While the Labor Department boasts about an unemployment rate of approximately 5 percent, the reality is that the statistic ignores the plight of tens of millions of working age Americans who have given up looking for work and are therefore not a part of the labor force.

Furthermore, that 5 percent unemployment figure does not note how many American workers are underemployed or working at part-time jobs.

The original concept of the “American Dream” depended on the growing middle-class where anyone who was willing to acquire a good education and work hard might write the next “American success story.”

Prior to World War II, the immigration laws of the United States were enforced by the Labor Department and were designed to shield American workers from foreign competition. The politicians of “The Greatest Generation” understood that for America to succeed, Americans needed to succeed.

Back then, major U.S. corporations saw in American school children their future employees and made certain to provide scholarships and training programs to entice American students to pursue studies in what is now referred to as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines.

Today, most major corporations have morphed into multinational companies that no longer say a “Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag and to the republic for which it stands…” but to the bottom line.

The result has been to make it more difficult for American workers to move up the economic ladder to attain their thin slice of “The American Dream.”

This is not limited to unskilled and semi-skilled workers either.

From matzo balls to footballs, two Jewish brothers recall their journey to the NFL By Victor Wishna

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (JTA) – At 6-foot-6 and 340 pounds, veteran NFL
offensive lineman Geoff Schwartz isn’t just a force of nature, but a
product of good ol’ Jewish nurture.

“My size comes from a childhood that included an excess of matzo ball
soup, latkes, and tons of white rice,” the 30-year-old jokes. “But of
course my brother’s similar physique suggests that genetics had plenty
to do with it.”

That would be his (only relatively) little brother, Mitch, 27, the
Kansas City Chiefs’ newest starting right tackle, who stands 6-foot-5
and weighs in at 320 pounds.

As it happens, Geoff and Mitch Schwartz aren’t the first pair of
Jewish brothers to play in the National Football League — they’re just
the first to do so since 1923.

“Once we heard the stat, we realized just how rare this really is,”
said Mitch, standing at the edge of the Chief’s indoor practice field
after morning drills. “So we both thought it was important to share
our story — for Jewish kids, and in general, about how we both wound
up where we are.”

Indeed, the story of how two nice Jewish boys grew up to be a couple
of “hogs” (an endearing and decidedly non-kosher nickname for
offensive linemen) could fill a book.

Now it does.

Muslim Terrorists and Jewish Anti-Semites Against Trump Moderate Saudi businessmen who fund terror warn of Trump’s “extremism.” September 2, 2016 Daniel Greenfield

“I was often the ‘designated yeller.’”

That’s how Hillary Clinton described her relationship with the Israeli prime minister. Yelling and cursing was her particular specialty.

One marathon Hillary yelling session allegedly lasted 45 minutes. Afterward the Israeli ambassador said that relations between the United States and Israel had reached their lowest point.

Her favorite name for Netanyahu was, “F____ Bibi.”

But it wasn’t just about her hatred of any particular Israeli leader. The same year that Hillary was yelling herself hoarse at a man who had fought terrorists on the battlefield, she addressed the American Task Force on Palestine, a leading terror lobby, and blasted Israel and praised Islamic terrorists.

Hillary told the terror lobby, “I may have been the first person ever associated with an American administration to call for a Palestinian state.” She praised Mahmoud Abbas, the PA terror dictator who had boasted, “There is no difference between our policies and those of Hamas.”

She celebrated Naomi Shihab Nye who had written of the Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli cities, “Oppression makes people do desperate things.” Echoing her, Hillary denounced the “indignity of occupation”. A few years later she accused Israelis of a lack of “empathy” in understanding “the pain of an oppressed people”.

Perhaps they were too busy mourning their dead to emphasize with the terrorists who were killing them.

But fighting for her political life, Hillary and Huma dug through her closet and threw on a blue and white pantsuit. Her campaign placed an editorial in the Forward headlined, “How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Probably by yelling “F___ Bibi” at him for another 45 minutes.

When Hillary Clinton promised to reaffirm her “Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu” it was in the pages of The Forward. And, striving to sell a rotten radical to skeptical Jews, the left-wing paper has decided to run a piece claiming that “Trump Would Be Israel’s Worst Nightmare”. As if anyone in Israel goes to bed dreaming of eight years of Hillary.

The Forward shares Hillary’s view of Netanyahu. And it violently loathes Israel.

New Batch of Hillary Clinton Emails Show Blurred Lines With Foundation Contacts Conservative group Judicial Watch points to request for diplomatic passport for charity official’s trip to North Korea By Byron Tau and Peter Nicholas

WASHINGTON—A new set of Hillary Clinton emails shows how politics, diplomacy and philanthropy would periodically converge during her tenure as secretary of state, with top aides drawing on Clinton Foundation contacts to cope with crises facing the U.S. government overseas.

A batch of emails released Thursday by the conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch, which received the documents from the State Department under a court order, includes an exchange from July 2009 involving Clinton Foundation official Douglas Band. In the exchange, Mr. Band asked Mrs. Clinton’s senior deputy, Huma Abedin, for diplomatic passports for himself and two others, saying theirs had lapsed. Ms. Abedin wrote back, “OK” and “will figure it out.”

Officials on Thursday said the passports were tied to a humanitarian mission: former President Bill Clinton’s trip to North Korea later that summer to help free captive journalists. The passports were never granted. Instead, the North Koreans agreed not to stamp the passports of Mr. Clinton and the aides, including Mr. Band, who traveled with him to help free Euna Lee and Laura Ling. A person familiar with the matter cited concerns about having a North Korean stamp on individual passports.

A previous cache of emails released last month showed Mr. Band seeking a meeting between Mrs. Clinton and the crown prince of Bahrain, calling him a “good friend of ours.” The Kingdom of Bahrain has donated between $50,000 and $100,000 to the foundation.

Critics have said such contacts underscore how the Clinton Foundation enjoyed special access to the highest reaches of the State Department during Mrs. Clinton’s watch. Now, in the final stretch of the presidential bid, Mrs. Clinton is facing growing scrutiny over the entanglements between the foundation and her work as the nation’s top diplomat.

Mrs. Clinton has been forced to defend arrangements in which key aides played overlapping roles. At various times during Mrs. Clinton’s four-year tenure, for example, Ms. Abedin worked for the State Department, the Clinton Foundation and Teneo, a private New York-based consulting firm co-founded by Mr. Band in 2011. Ms. Abedin is now co-chair of Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign.

“The idea that the State Department would even consider a diplomatic passport for Clinton Foundation executives is beyond belief,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

In reply, Clinton allies say the foundation has been driven solely by its charitable mission. They see the criticism as unfounded, citing the foundation’s work combating AIDS and easing poverty. CONTINUE AT SITE