Displaying posts categorized under

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Security Debate Draws Attention to U.S. Border With Canada U.S. strengthens surveillance at northern border By Chester Dawson

WESTBY, Mont.—The U.S. border with Canada is attracting greater scrutiny as debate rages in the U.S. presidential campaign about security on its southern border with Mexico, and concern grows over global terrorism and vulnerability to illegal crossings.

The U.S. government has been steadily beefing up surveillance of the northern border with new technology designed to help monitor areas too remote for round-the-clock patrols by field agents. Much of the change comes from the gradual rollout of new technologies that were promised in the aftermath of a security reassessment following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D., N.D.) this year called on the Department of Homeland Security to pay closer attention to the northern border and not view it as an “afterthought.” Last year, she co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R., N.H.) to step up funding for recruiting more border agents to specifically target more remote areas along the border with Canada.

Some lawmakers in northern border states cite Canada’s greater willingness to accept refugees from war-torn areas such as the Middle East as a potential threat to the U.S. In particular, they note the Canadian government has resettled more than 25,000 Syrians since November 2015, more than double the 10,000 Syrian refugees that the U.S. has agreed to take in by September. A U.S. Senate homeland security hearing addressed the topic in February, but there have been no reported U.S. border incidents involving Canada’s Syrian refugees.

“I do worry about it,” said Mike Cuffe, a state legislator in Montana who lives about 4 miles from the border in the town of Eureka.

Mr. Cuffe harbors concerns about the possibility of terrorist infiltration from the north, but says that must be balanced with other issues such as the hit to commerce and road congestion caused by backups at a border crossing with Canada that once was guarded by little more than wooden sawhorses at night.

“A threat to one country is a threat to the other,” said Christine Constantin, a spokeswoman for the Canadian Embassy in Washington, adding that Canada has a “zero tolerance” policy for refugees with security concerns.

“No terrorists have been successful in attacking the homeland coming through America’s northern border,” she said. CONTINUE AT SITE

FBI’s Clinton email probe found evidence of effort to evade federal records law by John Solomon and Kellan Howell

http://circa.com/politics/accountability/fbis-hillary-clinton-email-probe-found-evidence-of-effort-to-evade-federal-records-law

New government sources have come forward to say that the former Secretary of State’s email abuse was “systemic and intentional” and began as soon as she took office in 2009 – according to a new report by John Solomon at Circa News. The FBI was building a solid case that Clinton violated the federal records law numerous times, but ultimately there was a decision to hide the email scandal that raises significant questions about the decision not to indict. Secretary Clinton kept the private server in order to avoid public scrutiny under the FOIA. When asked to turn over all private emails, sources confirm that about 15,000 emails from Mrs. Clinton’s private account were not given up. Of course, intentionally concealing, removing or destroying federal records violates the Federal Records Act and carries a fine and imprisonment up to three years. More than that: Violators “shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.” The decisions to hide the private email server were intentional and meant to go around the Federal Records Act.

The abuse was so bad that witnesses in the FBI investigation were forced to plead the fifth to avoid self-incrimination. John’s confirmed an agent was “scolded” by a supervisor and told never to raise the issue again.

THIS IS THE REPORT

Though it was not their primary mission, FBI agents who investigated Hillary Clinton’s email collected significant evidence suggesting she and her team violated federal record-keeping laws, including persisting to use a private Blackberry and server to conduct State Department business after being warned they posed legal and security risks, government sources tell Circa.The evidence was compelling enough to convince FBI Director James Comey that the Clinton team had not complied with record-keeping laws and to cause at least one witness to raise their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during an investigative interview, the sources said.

In public, the FBI recommended not filing criminal charges against Clinton on national security grounds. But in private, the Bureau chose to defer to the State Department on whether to recommend anyone to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution on records law violations, the sources said, speaking only on condition of anonymity.

Each email transmission of a government document that was not preserved or turned over to the State Department from Mrs. Clinton’s tenure could theoretically be considered a violation of the Federal Records Act, the main law governing preservation of government records and data.

Other federal laws make it a felony to intentionally conceal, remove or destroy federal records as defined under the Act, punishable with a fine and imprisonment of up to three years. A single conviction also carries a devastating impact for anyone looking to work again in government because the law declares that any violator “shall forfeithis office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.”

The Art of the Steal By Joan Swirsky

Hillary doesn’t want a fair fight. Or even an unfair fight. She wants to cripple the GOP so it can’t fight at all. It’s the ultimate rigged election….

We’re a little more than two months from the November 8th election and everyone knows that all Democrats, a good number of Republicans and conservatives, and almost the entire media have been agonizing over and militating against the fact that billionaire businessman Donald Trump is the last man standing in a contest that pits him against Crooked Hillary for the presidency of the United States.

But why are no professional political commentators—on TV, radio, or in print—explaining exactly why Mr. Trump is such a mortal threat? After all, he has proven himself to be an upright citizen, a wildly successful businessman, the bestselling author of over a dozen books, a philanthropist, the father of five respectful and loving children the eldest of whom are also impressively contributory members of society, the representative of every value Republicans and conservatives traditionally stand for—low taxes, fewer regulations, secure borders, a strong military, strict conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, et al—and significantly a person who has never been accused of being complicit in the deaths of U.S. servicemen, under the ominous investigation of the FBI, or operating an international money-laundering slush fund that compromises the national security of the United States.

Here is the answer: It’s all about the deal!

Underneath the veneer of “service” our elected politicians purport to be driven by, underneath the “ethical standards” our financial centers pretend to operate, and underneath the gauzy illusion of objectivity the media pretend they represent, the so-called culture of the D.C.-Wall St.-media complex is all about cozy arrangements that inevitably line the pockets of those engaged in the following kinds of local, regional, national and international deals, to name but a few:

under-the-table deals
pay-to-play deals
greasy-palm deals
foundation slush-fund deals (sound familiar?)
mutual back-scratching deals
hush-hush deals
access-to-power deals
good-stories-in-the-media deals (sound familiar?)
bad-stories-in-the-media-about-your-political-enemies deals (yep)
sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll deals
immense wealth-producing lobbyist deals
On and on…

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.