NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Comey’s Fake Confession FISA criminality puts the squeeze on fired FBI boss and longtime Clinton crony. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/comey-croons-whos-sorry-now-lloyd-billingsley/

“Sure, I’m responsible, that’s why I’m telling you, I was wrong,” former FBI boss James Comey told Chris Wallace of Fox News on Sunday. “I was overconfident as the director in our procedures. And it’s important that a leader be accountable and transparent.” Wallace wondered if Comey had played down the use of the Steele dossier.

“If I was then I’m sorry that I did that,” Comey said, citing “significant questions about the reliability of some of the sub-source reporting.” Even so, the FBI committed no wrongdoing only “real sloppiness.” DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz “did not find misconduct by any FBI people,” only  “mistakes and negligence.”  All this from the man who branded FBI spying on Trump as “nonsense,” a claim he repeated in the interview.

“Comey is about two years too late,” former Rep. Trey Gowdy told Maria Bartiromo of Fox News. “We could have used him as head of the FBI helping Republicans figure out what was happening with FISA instead of thwarting us and obstructing us.” President Trump was also quick to respond.

“So now Comey’s admitting he was wrong,” Trump tweeted. “Wow, but he’s only doing so because he got caught red-handed. He was actually caught a long time ago.” And as the president wondered, “So what are the consequences for his unlawful conduct. Could it be years in jail?” And “Where are the apologies to me and others, Jim?” At this writing no apology has appeared, and Trump is right that Comey’s unlawful conduct goes back some distance.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Brexit Won. Now It’s Up to Trump to Win in 2020 Then we have a chance to undo the damage done by the technocratic tyrants. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/brexit-won-now-its-trump-win-2020-bruce-thornton/

In 2016 two political earthquakes struck the establishment consensus that has dominated the West since World War II. On June 23 the Britons voted to take England out of the EU. Nearly five months later political neophyte Donald Trump won a stunning upset over Hillary Clinton and become President. These two votes were portents of a major shift away from technocratic rule by elites, and a restoration of national sovereignty and citizen political autonomy.

Both elections, however, over the last three-and-a-half years have been met with concentrated and passionate resistance by each country’s ruling elite, including political quislings from supposedly conservative parties. Tory Remainers, including PM Theresa May, used every delaying tactic to undo the June vote, and along the way showed their disdain for the grubby masses who dared to challenge the ruling class. And they also energized the Labour Party and its anti-Semitic, jihadist-hobnobbing leader, socialist Jeremy Corbyn.

In this country, NeverTrumpers Republican fifth-columnists continue to undermine the President and give comfort to a Democrat party now dominated by its most left-wing elements. And they too have exposed their elitist disdain for the “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” who comprise ordinary Americans living outside the Acela Corridor cocoon. In the latest attempt to poison the well of the 2020 election, the House voted to impeach President Trump just a few days after the British election. In both countries, elites refused to honor the results of legal elections, then turned to media, academic, and celebrity calumny of voters, along with judicial and political skullduggery, to undo the outcome and hamstring their political enemies, the Brexiteers and Trump.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

I Accuse the Leadership of the Democratic Party of Responsibility for Violence Against Jews By David P. Goldman

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/i-accuse-the-leadership-of-the-democratic-party-of-responsibility-for-violence-against-jews/

Violence against Jews now accounts for 58% of all crimes of religious hatred reported to the FBI. It isn’t just the Jersey City massacre: Violence against Jews by blacks is now endemic in Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn. This is the direct result of anti-Semitic agitation by hatemongers like Louis Farrakhan. The Democratic Party tolerates congressmen in its ranks with public ties to Farrakhan. When Farrakhan calls for the murder of Jews, and black political leaders propitiate this foul demagogue, deranged fringe elements will turn violent.

From The Daily Caller:

At least seven House Democrats are known to have direct ties to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a notorious anti-Semite and racist who has called Jews “satanic” and said white people “deserve to die.”

California Reps. Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee, Illinois Rep. Danny Davis, Indiana Rep. Andre Carson, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison, New York Rep. Gregory Meeks and Texas Rep. Al Green have all attended meetings with Farrakhan while in Congress, according to photos, videos and witness accounts of the meetings reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

I accuse the leadership of the Democratic Party of responsibility for the murders of my brethren in Jersey City. It is a howling disgrace that Rep. Keith Ellison was until 2018 Deputy Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Where are the demands that elected officials and party leaders repudiate Farrakhan?

A majority of British Jews used to vote Labour. This time around more than 90% voted against the Jew-hater Jeremy Corbyn. When will American Jews display the same concern for their own self-preservation?

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The ‘1619 Project’ Gets Schooled The New York Times tries to rewrite U.S. history, but its falsehoods are exposed by surprising sources. By Elliot Kaufman

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-1619-project-gets-schooled-11576540494?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

‘So wrong in so many ways” is how Gordon Wood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the American Revolution, characterized the New York Times’s “1619 Project.” James McPherson, dean of Civil War historians and another Pulitzer winner, said the Times presented an “unbalanced, one-sided account” that “left most of the history out.” Even more surprising than the criticism from these generally liberal historians was where the interviews appeared: on the World Socialist Web Site, run by the Trotskyist Socialist Equality Party.

The “1619 Project” was launched in August with a 100-page spread in the Times’s Sunday magazine. It intends to “reframe the country’s history” by crossing out 1776 as America’s founding date and substituting 1619, the year 20 or so African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Va. The project has been celebrated up and down the liberal establishment, praised by Sen. Kamala Harris and Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

A September essay for the World Socialist Web Site called the project a “racialist falsification” of history. That didn’t get much attention, but in November the interviews with the historians went viral. “I wish my books would have this kind of reaction,” Mr. Wood says in an email. “It still strikes me as amazing why the NY Times would put its authority behind a project that has such weak scholarly support.” He adds that fellow historians have privately expressed their agreement. Mr. McPherson coolly describes the project’s “implicit position that there have never been any good white people, thereby ignoring white radicals and even liberals who have supported racial equality.”

The project’s creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is proud that it “decenters whiteness” and disdains its critics as “old, white male historians.” She tweeted of Mr. McPherson: “Who considers him preeminent? I don’t.” Her own qualifications are an undergraduate degree in history and African-American studies and a master’s in journalism. She says the project goes beyond Mr. McPherson’s expertise, the Civil War. “For the most part,” she writes in its lead essay, “black Americans fought back alone” against racism. No wonder she’d rather not talk about the Civil War.

To the Trotskyists, Ms. Hannah-Jones writes: “You all have truly revealed yourselves for the anti-black folks you really are.” She calls them “white men claiming to be socialists.” Perhaps they’re guilty of being white men, but they’re definitely socialists. Their faction, called the Workers League until 1995, was “one of the most strident and rigid Marxist groups in America” during the Cold War, says Harvey Klehr, a leading historian of American communism. CONTINUE AT SITE

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Lessons From the Tory Landslide A vindication for the Burkean idea that nationalism can advance liberalism. By Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-from-the-tory-landslide-11576540523?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Last week’s U.K. general election revealed two political dynamics that the rest of the world should study closely.

The first is very old: Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.  Jeremy Corbyn and the tightly knit clique of pro-Hezbollah, pro-Maduro doctrinaire Marxists and viscerally anti-Semitic conspiracy fans clustered around him mistakenly thought the British working class was hungry for revolutionary social change. They have received their just reward.

The second dynamic, which helped propel Boris Johnson to the greatest Tory majority since Margaret Thatcher’s 1987 landslide, will haunt his premiership and determine its outcome. More than a personal triumph for a man whose political career last year appeared over, more than a historic recasting of the British electoral map, more than the ignominious collapse of the Liberal Democrats, more than the triumph of Scottish nationalism, the election result demonstrates the power of the most disruptive force in global politics today.

Mr. Corbyn misdiagnosed that force as a rejection of capitalism. It’s more subtle. Voters around the world want the prosperity and opportunity that global capitalism provides, but many fear and reject the social consequences of the free market. Large-scale immigration, job losses to automation and foreign competition, the unequal distribution of capitalism’s rewards, and the financial instability and risk associated with innovation are all massively disruptive and inspire backlash—a global surge of populism and identity politics. From Hungary and Turkey to India and beyond, voters are embracing politicians who attack classic liberal political and economic values and vow to defend the cultures and communities this avalanche of change seems to threaten.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Trump Administration Picks Mexican Partnership over Terrorist Designation to Fight Cartels Though Country’s Top Cop Was on Sinaloa Payroll

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://www.judicialwatch.org/corruption-chronicles/trump-picks-mexican-partnership

President Donald Trump picked a horrible time to postpone designating Mexican drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO), a misguided decision made at the request of the divisive leader of a country with record-high crime and a failing economy. Days after declaring the cartels would finally be classified as FTOs by the U.S. Trump did an about-face to appease Mexican President Manuel Lopez Obrador, assuring that instead Mexico and the U.S. would “step up our joint efforts to deal decisively with these vicious and ever-growing organizations!”

It was laughable when Trump posted the absurd explanation for shelving the FTO designation on social media a few days go. How could the U.S. effectively join forces with a famously corrupt Latin American government to combat the sophisticated and violent criminal enterprises that have practically taken over the country? A federal case unsealed this week helps answer the question and sheds tremendous skepticism on Trump’s delusional U.S.-Mexico “joint efforts” plan. Mexico’s former top law enforcement official, a presidential cabinet member who oversaw the country’s federal police, took millions of dollars in bribes to protect one of the country’s most notorious drug cartels, according to federal prosecutors. The disgraced Mexican Secretary of Public Security, 51-year-old Genaro Garcia Luna, has been charged with three counts of cocaine trafficking conspiracy and one count of making false statements.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Incredibly Incurious Mr. Comey The IG report shows investigators who didn’t investigate Steele.

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-incredibly-incurious-mr-comey-11576540870?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

James Comey has finally admitted some “sloppiness” over the surveillance warrant for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. The former FBI director should re-read Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report because it lays out a record of willful incuriosity about Christopher Steele and his dossier that is hard to credit as mere incompetence.

The report quotes Bill Priestap, a key FBI player in the 2016 Crossfire Hurricane probe into the Trump campaign, that the FBI had “concerns” about Mr. Steele’s “reporting the day we got it . . . [S]ome of it was so sensational, that we just, we did not take it at face value.”

But if the FBI was initially skeptical, it isn’t evident in the IG report. The report shows how the FBI avoided taking any action, or asking any question, that might have undermined its use of the dossier in its application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The Crossfire team obtained Mr. Steele’s dossier on Sept. 19, 2016. The FISA court didn’t grant its warrant on Mr. Page until Oct. 21, 2016, giving it weeks to explore Mr. Steele’s revelations. The former British spook had operated as a confidential FBI source since 2013, which meant he had his own “Delta” file, containing all information concerning sources.

EDUCATION, KRD NEWS Comments turned off

Three Jewish Students Assaulted by 11 Men at Indiana University

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://mailchi.mp/87869d6201ef/krd-news-3-jewish-students-assaulted-by-11-men-at-indiana-university?e=9365a7c638

Three Jewish students were badly beaten by a group of 11 men at the Indiana University, according to a security footage posted Sunday.

According to Indiana Daily Student newspaper, the fight broke out between members of the Pi Kappa Phi fraternity and the Jewish Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, the members of which apparently tried to enter a party at the Pi Kappa Phi house uninvited. In the footage, the three students are seen being badly beaten while the 11 men are reportedly heard saying “He’s a fucking douche,” and “F*** that kid,” during the fight. According to unconfirmed reports, the students were also called anti-Semitic slurs.

Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity said the three suffered concussions as a result of the assault.

Update: The fraternity has just been suspended. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

IG Report Proves Adam Schiff Has Been Lying About Spygate Since The Beginning Margot Cleveland

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/12/16/ig-report-proves-adam-schiff-has-been-lying-about-spygate-since-the-beginning/

IG Vindicated Nunes, Damned Schiff

Following the inspector general’s FISA report that proved nearly every sentence wrong in Rep. Adam Schiff’s last high-profile report, Schiff’s work should be deemed worthless.

On Friday, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee approved two articles of impeachment against President Trump: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The committee vote sends the question to the full House, with a vote expected later this week.

That fast timeline won’t allow for much consideration of the question, however, forcing folks to rely on House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s 300-page report detailing his committee’s “impeachment inquiry.” But following last week’ release of the inspector general’s report on FISA abuse that proved nearly every sentence wrong in Schiff’s last high-profile report (his self-titled “Correcting the Record—The Russia Investigation”), Schiff’s work product should be deemed worthless.

Schiff issued his “Correcting the Record” minority report on January 29, 2018, following the release of a memorandum by the then-chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), Devin Nunes. In his 10-page response, Schiff contradicted every point Nunes made. Schiff also contradicted reality.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Madrid Climate Conference Ends in Failure By Rupert Darwall

Posted By on December 17th, 2019

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2019/12/16/madrid_climate_conference_ends_in_failure_110499.html

Al Gore Talks—Donald Trump Vindicated

#TimeForAction was the slogan at this year’s Madrid climate conference that ended Sunday. #TimeForTalk would be more accurate. The talking was endless: more than 70,000 hours were spent failing to define a “market instrument,” something that was meant to have been decided at last year’s conference in Katowice, Poland. Even though the Madrid conference ran over into the weekend, making it the longest ever, the issue will be kicked into next year’s talks, in Glasgow, Scotland.

“I am disappointed,” United Nations secretary general António Guterres tweeted. He should be. Next year, countries are to submit their second set of five-year, nationally determined climate plans under the Paris Agreement. The Madrid conference was to have engendered a spirit of enhanced climate ambition, a kind of competition of climate virtuousness. All it could manage was a statement expressing “serious concern” about the widening gap between the participating parties’ collective efforts and the ambitious emissions trajectory required to keep the rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius.

Talk doesn’t cut greenhouse-gas emissions. The UN Environment Programme describes the last ten years as a lost decade, in terms of curbing global emissions.