HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Bolton Calls Former Aide To NSC To Help Drain The Swamp Why the deep state is in hysterics over the appointment of Fred Fleitz. Kenneth R. Timmerman

Posted By on June 4th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270328/bolton-calls-former-aide-nsc-help-drain-swamp-kenneth-r-timmerman

National Security Advisor John Bolton, a Baltimorean who is no stranger to political street fights, has brought on board as his chief of staff former FoxNews political analyst Fred Fletiz.

No sooner had the announcement hit the wires, than the pit bulls of the Left went on the attack.

New York magazine called him, an “anti-Muslim wingnut.” The Council on American Islamic Relations, which has been identified in federal court documents as the U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, demanded his immediate removal. The Southern Poverty Law Center, itself identified as a hate group for its vilification of anything conservative, fumed that his appointment was “alarming” and identified him as the Vice-president of an “anti-Muslim hate group,” a referenced to the Center for Security Policy, which the SPLC has long vilified for its work to expose the advocates of Sharia law in America.

So much vitriol, so quickly, should tip us off. Why are these harridans of the Left so hysterical over the appointment of a man well-known to FoxNews viewers for his measured and well-informed views?

Simple. Because Fred Fleitz understands the bureaucracy. He knows where the bodies are buried. And he knows how the Deep State operates.

I have had the pleasure of knowing Fred for nearly fifteen years. When John Bolton was serving as Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, Fleitz was detailed to his office from the CIA, where he had long served as an analyst specializing in weapons of mass destruction.

As I wrote in Shadow Warriors: Traitors, Saboteurs, and the Party of Surrender (Crown Forum, 2007), Fleitz helped unmask a disgraceful effort by partisan staffers at the State Department’s Intelligence and Research to feed Bolton false intelligence on a little-known biological weapons program in Castro’s Cuba.

Leading this effort was a certain Christian Westermann, whom Fletiz unmasked as promoting pro-Castro intelligence analysis fed into the system by Ana Belen Montes, a convicted Cuban spy.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Politically Correct Pedophilia By Boris Zelkin

Posted By on June 4th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/04/politically-correct

It’s practically a cliché when an old guy or a conservative complains about declining moral standards. But with the news of a professed pedophile now openly seeking a seat in Congress and placing his pedophilia front and center as part of his platform, I feel fairly secure in passing judgment on our society. Something is very wrong here.

Nathan Larson, 37, who has gone on record to proclaim that he is a pedophile and rapist is running for a congressional seat in Virginia. Larson’s political platform includes the legalization of child pornography, marital rape, incest, abolition of child protective services, and a repeal of the 19th Amendment.

When asked by Huffington Post reporters whether he merely writes about pedophilia or engages in it, he proudly proclaimed, “It’s a mix of both.” He also admitted to running and posting in chat rooms dedicated to promoting rape and pedophilia. In one of these, using the administrator pseudonym “Lysander,” Larson noted:

I just want to bang my daughter, actually, but even if it were legal, I’m not sure it would happen, since i don’t have custody. After sex with kids is legalized, parents (or other guardians) will still be gatekeepers to some extent, and a lot of them will want to bang their own kids and not share with others.

Charming. Thankfully, he lost custody of his child. But his first wife committed suicide after he reportedly abused and raped her repeatedly.

The Huffington Post could barely contain itself as Trump’s name came up. The article concluded with a quote in which Larson compares himself to President Trump: “A lot of people who disagreed with someone like Trump . . . might vote for them anyway just because the establishment doesn’t like them.” (I’d love to see what was left out of those ellipses). The article seems to attempt to smear Trump supporters with the brush of this one reprobate.

Larson calls his platform “quasi-neoreactionary libertarian.” I have no clue what that means, but I’m fairly sure that Ron Paul and Gary Johnson would want nothing to do with this guy. Regardless where and to whom Larson lends his “support” or compares himself, or with what party he claims to affiliate, reasonable people—regardless of politics or party—would agree he is beyond the pale.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

A Clueless “Final Year” By Roger Kimball

Posted By on June 4th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/03/a-clueless-

Remember the Duck Rabbit? That’s the famous image that, seen one way, looks like a duck but, seen from another angle, looks like a rabbit. The image has provided fodder for children’s books and also philosophers, its inherent ambiguity being catnip to both light fancy and epistemological lucubration.

I thought of that teasing graphic confection when I encountered “The Final Year,” Greg Barker’s HBO documentary about the last 12 months of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy. At first I thought it was intended to be a duck: a sympathetic portrait of its main characters: President Obama himself, of course, but also Secretary of State John Kerry, our ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. But the more I watched, the more the rabbit theme intruded: the more, I mean, that it struck me as a devastating portrait of mandarin entitlement gone horribly wrong.

I am really uncertain what Greg Barker intended. He indulges in no editorializing. The camera follows the principals around the world and simply captures their speeches and conversations: Samantha Power and John Kerry, President Obama at the U.N., Obama on his final trip to Greece, Ben Rhodes padding about the White House and elsewhere. It’s all presented in a very straightforward way to outline the Obama Administration’s ambitions as well as its frustrations as world events—the mess in Syria, the unbelievable election of Donald Trump—unfold around them.

The main characters are given plenty of on-air time to explain what they hope to accomplish and also to describe the forces, domestic as well as international, that they see as frustrating their aims.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Scandal on the Other Foot By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on June 4th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/04/the-scandal-on

Consider the following alternate reality.

Imagine that it is now summer 2024. A 78-year-old lame-duck President Trump is winding down his second term, basking in positive polls. His dutiful vice president in waiting, Mike Pence, is at last getting his chance to run for president. Imagine also that Pence is a shoo-in, facing long-shot, hard-leftist, and octogenarian Senator Bernie Sanders. Polls show an impending Pence landslide.

Team Trump is nevertheless horrified about the slight chance that the nation could conceivably elect an ossified, self-proclaimed socialist. It accuses Sanders of wanting to turn upside down free-market capitalism, and to nullify the entire eight-year Trump agenda.

Allies abroad in 2024 are especially worried about the neutralist Sanders, who has promised to recalibrate all of America’s alliances.

Worrisome to lame-duck President Trump are also the supposed machinations of the Iranian theocracy. Furious over Trump’s prior cancellation of the Iran deal in 2018, eager to have crippling sanctions at last lifted, and hoping that a Sanders presidency might restore Obama-era détente, Iranian operatives are reportedly not shy about their preference for a Sanders presidency.

The Iranians are rumored to have hired operatives to hack into various Republican email accounts in efforts to embarrass the Pence candidacy—and to have facilitated third parties to release the embarrassing email exchanges.

The 2024 Pence campaign in response is furious that throughout the campaign cycle, such leaks have disseminated information that Pence aides had rigged the rules of the Republican Party’s nominating process to eliminate Republican primary rivals. They are worried that the hacked emails will reveal that debate questions were given to Pence in advance by a sympathetic Fox news analyst and later Republican National Committee head. And the leaked emails reveal that conservative journalists were sending their stories in advance to be checked by Pence officials. The Iranians insist that they have not hacked any Republican-related email accounts.

As a reaction to such unproven rumors of Iranian collusion, a sympathetic Trump administration decides to intervene to thwart a supposed clear and present danger to U.S. national security.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

I’m Running to Restore Yale Values My alma mater provides comfort to student mobs, and half the faculty back ‘trigger warnings.’ By James Kirchick

Posted By on June 4th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/im-running-to-restore-yale-values-1528054042

I love Yale. It’s where I pursued a passion for sketch comedy, started writing a newspaper column, came out of the closet, and gained the critical-thinking skills that equipped me for a career in journalism. But recent events leave me worried that my alma mater is changing for the worse.

A sign that something had gone terribly wrong came in October 2015, when a viral internet video revealed a student mob shrieking at Nicholas Christakis, then master of Yale’s largest residential college. That these students were treating a professor with such disrespect was bad enough, but the impetus for their outrage was an innocuous email written by his wife, fellow professor Erika Christakis, doubting Yale needed to warn students about “appropriate Halloween wear.” Yale’s failure to stand up for the Christakises—he stepped down as master, she left the university—left me ashamed. When the university rewarded two of the mob’s leaders with a prestigious prize, something was deeply amiss.

Further developments have only confirmed my worries. Yale ditched the title “master” on the ludicrous grounds that it is racist; a survey finds half the faculty approves of “trigger warnings” for readings and classroom discussions, and the number of campus administrators continues to swell while the cost of attending has increased to $70,000 a year.

To reverse these worrying trends I have decided to mount a petition campaign to join Yale’s Board of Trustees.

Yale instilled in me the two basic values that guide me as a writer: freedom of expression and the pursuit of knowledge. I have traveled to many countries where people are physically attacked or imprisoned for speaking their minds. That taught me never to take America’s freedoms for granted.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Spain’s Abrupt Left Turn Rajoy finally falls, but his reforms helped the Spanish recovery.

Posted By on June 4th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/spains-abrupt-left-turn-1528054426?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=6&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

His many opponents finally caught up with Mariano Rajoy on Friday when a leftist coalition ousted the Spanish Prime Minister’s center-right government with a no-confidence vote in parliament. The risk now is that Madrid will unwind the reforms that have helped the country grow faster than its neighbors.

Mr. Rajoy’s Popular Party (PP) has itself to blame for Friday’s 180-169 defeat. Last month Spain’s National Court convicted 29 people, including the party’s former treasurer, of a kickback scheme. Mr. Rajoy denied knowledge of the operation, but the scandal has alienated PP voters and the party’s liberal-centrist Citizens coalition partner, whose leader, Albert Rivera, called for snap elections.

Mr. Rajoy ignored Mr. Rivera’s good advice and tried to hang onto power, giving an opening to Socialist Party leader Pedro Sánchez to cobble together a so-called Frankenstein coalition that few Madrid insiders thought possible. The crew includes far-left Podemos, Catalan pro-independence parties and the right-leaning Basque Nationalist Party, which had negotiated pension benefit increases for the region in Mr. Rajoy’s last budget.

Mr. Sánchez has promised to honor that budget, as well as keep Spain’s fiscal commitments to the European Union. But to do that he’ll have to keep Spain’s economic engine purring. That will be hard to do with Podemos in the coalition. The Spanish left wants to roll back the Rajoy Administration’s supply-side reforms, including tax cuts and the 2012 Derecho Laboral reform, which made it easier to hire and fire workers, as well as implement a new wealth and inheritance tax.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Italy’s Populist Flirtation Won’t Last The new right-left coalition will be hampered by the nation’s debt—and their own internal discord. By Josef Joffe

Posted By on June 4th, 2018

Mr. Joffe is an editorial council member at Die Zeit in Hamburg and a fellow of Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Everybody loves Italy for its savoir vivre and panache—not to mention Rome’s place as the cradle of Western civilization. Yet there is a darker side to the country’s vanguard role. In 1922 Italy gave the world fascism, more than a decade before Hitler’s storm troopers marched through Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. After World War II, Italy was the only Western country ever to include members of a pro-Soviet Communist Party in its governing coalition. In 1970, the Red Brigades invented modern European terrorism.

This March brings another nasty first: power to the populists of the left-wing 5 Star Movement and the far-right League. Radical parties have won seats in several European legislatures, but nowhere have they captured a majority. Forget Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, which can’t win more than a third of the French public. The outcome in Italy is historic: Europe’s fate may well be decided in Rome.

Imagine, in American terms, a coalition between Bernie Sanders and the tea party: an orgy of government spending on one side, tax cuts and small government on the other. Can’t be done? In Italy, non fa niente—it doesn’t matter. We can eat our pizza and have it too. While 5 Star seeks a guaranteed income of €780 (around $900) a month, the League will pursue its suggested flat tax of 15%.

Now do the arithmetic. Italy’s public debt has already surpassed 130% of gross domestic product, and European hedge-fund manager Joseph Oughourlian predicts that the new government’s goodies could swell the annual deficit by more than €150 billion.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Israel Day Parade By Jerold Levoritz

Posted By on June 4th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/the_israel_day_parade.html

With thirty thousand marchers in the Israel Day parade and one hundred thousand+ viewers, Sunday, June 3, was a glorious day. Jews and their well-wishers came from Maryland, Florida, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Israel, and colleges across the country to sing and dance their way up New York’s Fifth Avenue. It is an annual event that brings light and life to the Jews of the United States. Everyone was particularly happy because of the silly human tendency to prefer round numbers. This was Israel’s 70th birthday as a modern nation and was noticeably more rowdy and boisterous than last year’s 69th birthday celebration. Rain threatened but no one cared. More politicians came out and the amplified music had more bass notes and percussion. Marchers greeted bystanders and bystanders drew marchers to the side for hugs and good wishers. Baby carriages graced various groups as did some wheelchairs for the elders who insisted in participating. No one except the marching bands felt the need to move in lockstep. Some of the marchers danced their way up the avenue and then others took over. People who normally do not wear yarmulkes wore them proudly and no one was afraid — unlike Europe where Jewish leaders have urged Jews to wear hats to hide their identities.

Unadulterated happiness in the world is rather rare. The Israel Day parade was pure fun, full of politics, commercialism, national pride and universal values with only seconds of rancor and discord that you had to hunt and peck to find.

By the way, don’t bother trying to find coverage of the Israel Day parade in the MSM. No blood was spilled and so it was not a newsworthy event. Covering the joy of the Jews (or anyone) seems to be politically incorrect in this strange world we have fashioned.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Three Climate Change Questions Answered By Wallace Manheimer

Posted By on June 4th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/three_climate_change_questions_answered.html

A claimed nearly unanimous scientific consensus on fear of climate change has caused a push to substantially reduce or even eliminate the use of fossil fuel in favor of solar and wind. But three crucial questions are 1) is the scientific community really united?, 2) can solar and wind take over any time soon to provide the required vital energy for the maintenance of modern civilization in today’s world of 7 billion people?, and 3) has CO2 caused any harm yet? The answer to all three questions is no.

A major theme of this essay is that many assertions can easily be checked out by a simple Google search.

One of the most persistent false impressions, which the mainstream media have ingrained in us, is that 97% of scientists agree that CO2 is indeed doing irreparable harm. However, this figure was obtained not by a respected, impartial polling organization, but by believers for their own purposes.

Exactly what do the 97% agree on? Had the question been “Do you believe that the Earth’s climate is changing, and does mankind have an effect on the climate?,” the response would not have been 97%, but 100%. But had the question been “Is burning fossil fuel such a threat that there should be a major effort to stop?,” who knows? Probably less than 50%. That question was never asked on a large-scale survey, done by a respected polling organization and documented in a place easily available to the public.

To get an idea of how divided the scientific community is, a petition was circulated, led by Friedrich Seitz, the president of the National Academy of Sciences, disputing the ill effects of CO2. It garnered 32,000 signatures, over 9,000 by Ph.D. scientists. To justify the 97%, there would have to be another opposing petition signed by a million scientists.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

ISIS Group Claims More Than 10K Twitter Accounts Used for Propaganda in Past 16 Months By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on June 4th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/isis-group-claims-more-than-10k-twitter-accounts-used-for-propaganda-in-past-16-months/

A pro-ISIS group claims that several social media brigades loyal to the terror group have “distributed” nearly 10,000 Twitter accounts over the past 16 months.

In an infographic released last week, Dhakhirat al-Ansar said it had two kataeb, or brigades, working Facebook and four working Twitter.

There was also a much smaller percentage of activity with Gmail accounts, as the group claimed it “distributed” 346 accounts.

But the cyber-caliphate “brigades” claimed 9,635 accounts pushing ISIS content and 4,059 Facebook accounts.

Facebook announced in its first Community Standards Enforcement Preliminary Report released in mid-May that the company took action on 1.9 million pieces of content determined to be terrorism-related in the first quarter of this year, an increase from 1.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2017.

The social-media giant said the increase was “due to improvements in our ability to find violating content using photo detection technology, which detects both old content and newly posted content.”

In April, an Islamic State hacking unit released what they say was a 60-day status report on the extent of their operations on popular social media platforms.

The “Inghimasat dawlawiya team” — Inghimasi refers to a special-forces jihadist who draws out the attack and may return alive from a successful mission to attack again, while dawla means “state” — posted their stats in Arabic, French and English infographics and shared them through social media channels.

According to the hacking team, they “created and shared” 300 Twitter accounts over the past two months as the social media giant says it’s been cracking down on jihadist content.

The group also claims to have hacked 264 Facebook accounts over the past three months, though they don’t elaborate on which kinds of users they’re targeting. CONTINUE AT SITE