HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Central American Countries Are Helping Middle Easterners Illegally Enter The United States Panama and Costa Rica are chokepoints on the migrant trail followed by people from other continents seeking easier U.S. entry through our porous border with Mexico. Todd Bensman

Posted By on January 2nd, 2019

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/02/central-american-countries-helping-middle-easterners-illegally-enter-united-states/

In December 2018, the Center for Immigration Studies dispatched Senior National Security Fellow Todd Bensman to Panama and Costa Rica to investigate President Donald Trump’s widely ridiculed assertions that suspected terrorists had been apprehended among Middle East migrants through Latin America. Panama is a geographic chokepoint, or bottleneck, through which migrants from countries of the Middle East, who are moving out of South America, must push on their way to the U.S. border.

The following article is based on Bensman’s on-the-ground research over two weeks. His video reports, photos, and writings from the trip can be found here.

Golfito, Costa Rica — It was here in March 2017, at the main aluminum structure of a government migrant camp, that federal Costa Rican police arrested Ibrahim Qoordheen of Somalia as a suspected al Shabaab terrorist operative on his way to the U.S. southern border.

Qoordheen had been smuggled from Zambia to Brazil, passed through Panama, and was making his way north through Costa Rica when the Americans had him arrested here, 20 miles inside Costa Rica, according to an American intelligence official with knowledge of the case who spoke on condition of anonymity. The Golfito camp, with a capacity of 250, was set up as a two-day rest station for South America-exiting migrants whom the governments of Panama and Costa Rica register and help move through northward to Nicaragua.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Mary Poppins Returns, with a Socialist Subtext By Armond White

Posted By on January 2nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/mary-poppins-returns-with-a-socialist-subtext/

Mary Poppins returns, we’re told, but only Baby Boomers will care. Roma offers the nanny Millennials can relate to. Who is this white British twit with a cinched overcoat and bumbershoot who goes about ordering around her betters and consorting with working-class inferiors? No one asked for Mary Poppins’s return to modern consciousness, but her reappearance unmistakably proves that Hollywood Boomers are desperate to justify their own mediocrity through nostalgic sentiment.

Also unmistakable is the nasty political undercurrent that prevents this reboot from being escapist fun. Take the new politically instructive songs in Mary Poppins Returns. Sure, they’re the usual Marc Shaiman pastiche — cliché Broadway compositions (from the composer of the lame musical Hairspray) that lack the memorable delight of Richard and Robert Sherman’s songs for the original Mary Poppins in 1964.

Incapable of a charming tongue twister, or relatable lyrics about medicine in sugary spoonfuls, Shaiman assimilates the #Resistance mood that has overtaken Broadway and Hollywood. Though pretending to be innocuous family entertainment, the knock-off tunes have a faintly repressive, pedantic note, especially in Shaiman’s balloon-song finale “Nowhere to Go but Up.” To careful listeners, it sounds like showbiz Stalinism: “The past is the past / It lives on as history / Let the past take a bow / Forever is now.” Why should a family-movie ditty recall the essence of Soviet erasure of history?

That erasure also reeducates memories of the first Mary Poppins film in which a subservient female nanny, who shows up weirdly out of nowhere, supports the bumbling male head of a stuffy British banking household. She sustained England’s class system almost supernaturally — or supercalifragilisticexpialidociously. Now Mary returns for no better purpose than commercial repackaging. (Meanwhile, minor characters play out a Socialist subtext, campaigning for underpaid workers.)

POLITICS Comments turned off

Andrew Cuomo: ‘Joe Biden Has the Best Case’ of 2020 Dem. Hopefuls By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on January 2nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/cuomo-joe-biden-has-the-best-case-of-2020-dem-hopefuls/

New York governor Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday that Joe Biden has the most “credibility” of the many prospective candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

“I think of all the names that are out there, I think Joe Biden has the best case,” Cuomo told radio station WAMC. “I think Joe Biden has the best case because he brings the most of the secret ingredient you need to win for a Democrat, which is credibility.”

Cuomo, who himself was rumored to be exploring a presidential run until he ruled it out several weeks ago, also said he expected the primary field to be crowded.

“I think there’s going to be a big field,” Cuomo said in response to questions about the candidacy of Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who announced that she was forming an exploratory committee earlier this week. Other possible Democratic candidates include Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, and Kirsten Gillibrand.

“I think the problem for the Democrats is going to be this: It is going to be credibility,” Cuomo said. “I think that the main issue for the Democrats is not going to be the articulation of the negative. It is going to be the articulation of the positive.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Mitt Romney’s Naïve Incoherence By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 2nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/mitt-romneys-naive-incoherence/

Mitt Romney is a fine and decent person, whom I voted for without regret, then or now, and who strangely just published a scathing op-ed in the Washington Post about President Trump days before assuming office as Utah’s newly elected junior senator. But why in the world would he reserve his invective for January, rather than in October, when it surely would have had greater force?

As far as Romney’s calls for Trump to be less ad hominem in his retaliatory remarks, he may be right, both in terms of presidential behavior and political wisdom (given that Trump needs to capture 5-8 percent additional support from suburbanites and minorities). And he is correct to draw attention to reckless federal spending and this apparent bipartisan custom of borrowing a near trillion dollars a year. Let us hope that Romney’s proven financial sobriety will help galvanize the congress to prune reckless deficits.

But that said, I fear that much of Romney’s invective is utterly incoherent. The departures of many top-cabinet officials in some cases were regrettable, in some understandable, but most were likely because Trump ran on an agenda neither traditionally Republican nor Democratic. Trump was the first president without either political or military experience. So there always was also going to be difficulty (and paradoxes) in matching his outsider policies with experienced insider administrators. We should, however, remember that the tenures of Department of Defense secretaries (four in the respective Obama and Truman administrations) and White House chiefs of staff (four respectively for Reagan and Clinton, five for Obama) are historically not always particularly long.

Romney is, euphemistically, accurate in stating that he opposed Trump (“Donald Trump was not my choice for the Republican presidential nomination”). And he explains, admirably so, that he hoped that “his [Trump’s] campaign would refrain from resentment and name-calling. It did not.” And Romney was further disappointed that “on balance, his [Trump’s] conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions this last month, is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office.”

But, ironically, all such long-standing repulsion at Trump’s behavior (even if it did crest in December as Romney alleges) raises the question, again, why would Romney have accepted Trump’s endorsement for his senate run in 2018, especially given the fact that he probably did not need it to be elected in Utah?

POLITICS Comments turned off

Elizabeth Warren: Dead phony walking By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on January 2nd, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/elizabeth_warren_dead_phony_walking.html

Elizabeth Warren obviously has no concept of the damage she already has done to her future in national politics by revealing her DNA test results showing that she has less Native America DNA than the average citizen of this country. How else could she have issued her bizarre Instagram video announcing her presidential campaign? The live-feed video she posted to Instagram (but did not archive) lives on and has made her into a national joke, confirming that deep down, the genuine, authentic Elizabeth Warren is a phony.

The estimable William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection dubs the video her “Dukakis Tank Moment,” a judgment shared by Boston Herald columnist Jaclyn Cashman.

Warren’s cringeworthy event – streamed on Instagram Live on New Year’s Eve – is a friendly chat with her followers.

“I’m here in my kitchen – and um – I thought maybe we’d just take some questions and I’d see what I can do,” Warren said.

At which point she not-so-casually said she would grab a beer. Seems innocuous enough. Beer has a time-honored place in presidential politics. But this resident of Cambridge’s la-di-dah Linnaean Street and erstwhile Harvard elitist is really an extra oaky chardonnay kind of lady. Her poor husband was so befuddled – apparently not fully clued in on the stunt – that when she offered him one he declined. More of a 20-year-old tawny port sipper, no doubt.

The most authentic thing about the video, in fact, was its bogusness: Warren once again trying to pretend she is something she is not.

It is widely believed that the stunt in which presidential candidate Dukakis rode in a tank with a tanker’s helmet on – an effort to prove his toughness on national security – backfired, as he looked completely unnatural.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Romney Revival Project Who’s buying the latest repositioning from Utah’s new senator? By James Freeman

Posted By on January 2nd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-romney-revival-project-11546463147

Just before taking his seat as Utah’s newest U.S. Senator, former presidential candidate and Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is condemning the character of President Donald Trump. But given Mr. Romney’s history, some members of the press corps are withholding the strange new respect customarily accorded to Republicans who criticize the President.

Mr. Romney states in an op-ed for the Washington Post that Mr. Trump “has not risen to the mantle of the office.” Mr. Romney presents himself as being moved by recent events to make his latest declaration of principle. Writes Mr. Romney:

The Trump presidency made a deep descent in December. The departures of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, the appointment of senior persons of lesser experience, the abandonment of allies who fight beside us, and the president’s thoughtless claim that America has long been a “sucker” in world affairs all defined his presidency down.

Certainly a duly-elected President has the right to choose his subordinates. And if Mr. Romney was truly moved to condemn an “abandonment of allies,” wouldn’t he at least go to the trouble of naming them and spending at least a portion of the op-ed describing the details of their predicament? From the context it seems likely he was referring to the Kurds or others fighting against remaining ISIS forces in Syria, but the rest of the op-ed addresses various threats around the world and what Mr. Romney sees as a fraying of alliances with friends in Europe and Asia.

It’s also hard to believe that Mr. Romney is suddenly and deeply offended by Mr. Trump’s recent comment that Americans are no longer “suckers.” For better or worse, the idea that the U.S. government has been shouldering too much of the world’s defense burden has been a central part of the Trump message for years. It’s especially hard to believe that Utah’s newest senator thinks this insult is beyond the pale given that in 2016 Mr. Romney said that candidate Donald Trump was “playing the members of the American public for suckers.” Will Mr. Romney now apologize to the roughly 63 million Americans who voted for the Republican candidate in the last presidential election?

Aaron Blake of the Washington Post is among the media folk who aren’t sure they should take the latest Romney declaration at face value. Mr. Blake writes in the Post:

Romney criticized Trump in more severe terms than just about anybody in 2016, even after Trump was the de facto GOP nominee. But he’s also been happy to play ball and accept his help. As the GOP presidential nominee in 2012, he flew out to accept an endorsement from Trump, then in the throes of birtherism. After Trump was elected president, Romney interviewed to be Trump’s secretary of state.

When Romney decided to run for Senate, he accepted Trump’s endorsement again and backed off his previous criticisms of the leader. At a debate three months ago, Romney was asked three times whether he still thought Trump was a fraud and a phony. “I’m going to talk about the future,” he responded.

His op-ed seems, in part, to be an effort to explain his many about-faces. CONTINUE AT SITE

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Congo’s Crooked Contest The government shuts down the internet as votes are being counted.

Posted By on January 2nd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-congos-crooked-contest-11546453926

A long history of misrule has made the Democratic Republic of Congo one of the world’s poorest and most dangerous countries. The Congolese people had reason for optimism this summer when President Joseph Kabila agreed to step down. This makes the hijinks surrounding Sunday’s election particularly dispiriting.

This was only the fourth multiparty election since independence in 1960, and it is the central African nation’s best chance at a peaceful transfer of power. After delaying elections for years, in August Mr. Kabila agreed to abide by the constitution and forgo another presidential run. That left his chosen successor, Emmanuel Shadary, to face off against some 20 candidates. The opposition largely coalesced around Martin Fayulu and Felix Tshisekedi, and Mr. Shadary trailed in polls.

It’s hardly been a fair contest. The government used an Ebola outbreak as a pretext to bar voting in opposition strongholds, and security forces broke up opposition rallies. Thousands of voting machines were destroyed in a fire last month. Millions of the DRC’s 46 million registered voters were unable to cast a ballot.

Both sides have claimed victory, though it’s unlikely Mr. Shadary pulled off a legitimate win. The government has since shut down SMS, the internet, and some radio services. It claims this was meant to stop the spread of fake news. Pardon Congolese who suspect this is a fake excuse for disrupting nongovernment communications ahead of the release of preliminary results on Jan. 6.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Britain’s Islamic Demise Edward Cine

Posted By on January 2nd, 2019

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2019/01/britains-islamic-demise.html

I used to think that the U.K. would resist Islam “on the beaches, and in the skies,” that is, fight the Islamic invasion of the country (by virtual invitation) by a hostile, inimical religious-political ideology and its adherents, valuing all the Enlightenment heights it had achieved – in freedom of speech, “democracy,” reason and a rational philosophy – and wished to retain everything that advanced man’s condition and freedom from tyranny.

But I no longer think that. Britain has become as bad and totalitarian as Angela Merkle’s authoritarian Germany. Soeren Kern of the Gatestone Institute has itemized Britain’s submission to Islam in the half year leading up to the beginning of June 2018.

The Muslim population of Britain surpassed 4.2 million in 2018 to become around 6.3% of the overall population of 64 million, according to data extrapolated from a recent study on the growth of the Muslim population in Europe. In real terms, Britain has the third-largest Muslim population in the European Union, after France, then Germany.

The rapid growth of Britain’s Muslim population can be attributed to immigration, high birth rates and conversions to Islam.

Islam and Islam-related issues, omnipresent in Britain during 2018, can be categorized into several broad themes: 1) Islamic extremism and the security implications of British jihadists; 2) The continuing spread of Islamic Sharia law in Britain; 3) The sexual exploitation of British children by Muslim gangs; 4) Muslim integration into British society; and 5) The failures of British multiculturalism.

It goes without saying, that everywhere it’s been tried, multiculturalism has failed – Sweden, France, and Germany being the outstanding instances. It can succeed in sinking roots and flourish only if national governments allow it to and water it with mandatory “toleration.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

New Documents Suggest The Steele Dossier Was A Deliberate Setup For Trump After nearly two years since the Steele dossier was published, it remains the cornerstone of the case for collusion. The dossier model has also given rise to similar operations. Lee Smith

Posted By on January 2nd, 2019

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/02/new-documents-suggest-steele-dossier-deliberate-setup-trump/

A trove of recently released documents sheds further light on the scope and logistics of the information operation designed to sabotage an American election. Players include the press, political operatives from both parties, and law enforcement and intelligence officials. Their instrument was the Steele dossier, first introduced to the American public two years ago.

A collection of reports compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele, the dossier is now engraved in contemporary U.S. history. First marketed as bedrock evidence that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election, the dossier’s legitimacy took a hit after reports showed the Hillary Clinton campaign paid for the work.

The revelation that the dossier was used to secure a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page compromised the integrity of the investigation the FBI had opened on Page and three other Trump associates by the end of July 2016. Nonetheless, that same probe continues today as the special counsel investigation.

The dossier plays a central role in Robert Mueller’s probe. In the unredacted portions of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s memo outlining Mueller’s scope are allegations that Trump adviser Paul Manafort colluded with Russian government officials interfering in the 2016 race. That claim is found in no other known document but the dossier. It is unclear whether further dossier allegations are in the redacted portions of the scope memo.

Further, with Mueller in charge, the dossier-won warrant on Page was renewed a third, and final, time in June 2017. It expired in September, when confidential human source Stefan Halper reportedly broke off regular communications with Page.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

What is Being Taught at the “Islamic University of Europe” in the Netherlands? by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on January 2nd, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13490/islamic-university-europe-netherlands

A 2012 Turkish YouTube video describes the “Islamic University of Europe” as a school “established in 2001 to build an aware and cultivated European Muslim identity in Europe and to promote Islam… and to bring to life the mentality that is ‘to serve humanity is to serve Islam.'” Bahçekapılı’s lectures are in keeping with this mission. One such lecture glorifies the eighth-century Muslim military invasion of Spain and the establishment there of the Islamic state of Al-Andalus (Andalusia).

The school’s former rector, professor Ahmet Akgündüz, has called the opponents of Turkish President Erdogan “enemies of Islam,” and has stated that stoning people to death is “one of the prescribed punishments within Islam.”

Europe might wish to look into what is being taught at Islamic schools, particularly those that receive government money.

A recent development in a two-year-old corruption scandal — involving the so-called “Islamic University of Europe” in the Netherlands — has renewed public interest in the institution, involving tax fraud.

Its rector, professor Nedim Bahçekapılı, has gone missing after Dutch prosecutors decided to arrest him as part of an investigation addressing the school’s “tax evasion of millions of Euros, corruption, and opening fraudulent classes.” The Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security said that the rector could not be found and is believed to have left the country.

Less attention has been paid, however, to the dangerous course content of the Rotterdam-based school, which, in 2016, was stripped by the Dutch Parliament of its “university” status for financial reasons.