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Real Collusion: the Clinton and Podesta Record By Daniel John Sobieski

Posted By on April 5th, 2017

So now it appears that short-lived national security advisor Mike Flynn made speeches before various Russian entities and was paid for it. To those suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome this is further evidence of collusion with the Russians. Collusion to do what is to ever said, though it was probably Putin who kept Hillary from campaigning in Wisconsin, made Debbie Wasserman Schultz sabotage Bernie Sanders, and forced Donna Brazile to leak CNN debate questions to Team Clinton.

Speaking of the Clinton News Network, CNN has been reduced to fact-checking jokes about Team Trump members using Russian dressing on their salads:

Proving that the rabidly partisan journalists at CNN have way too much time on their hands, reporter Michelle Krupa on Wednesday actually fact checked a White House joke about Russian salad dressing. During his daily briefing on Tuesday, Press Secretary Sean Spicer teased, “If the President puts Russian salad dressing on his salad tonight, somehow that’s a Russia connection.”

The humor-challenged CNN sprung into action. On CNN.com, Krupa wrote, “Thing is, Russian dressing isn’t Russian.” Wait for it, here is the devastating bombshell:

The mayo and ketchup concoction — often dressed up with horseradish and spices — was created in Nashua, New Hampshire.

It was grocer James E. Colburn who invented the spread in 1924, according to “New Hampshire Resources, Attractions and Its People, a History,” by Hobart Pillsbury. The Washington Post cites the 1927 text, which says Colburn sold the condiment to “retailers and hotels across the country, earning ‘wealth on which he was enabled to retire.'”

Democracy and our republic are safe. Another Team Trump lie has been exposed. For all the righteous indignation about Michael Flynn’s dealings as a private citizen with Russia, one would have thought he was Bill Clinton, making speeches to foreign entities seeking influence with his Secretary of State wife for ungodly sums while donations poured into the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments and individuals to pay, among other thigs, for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding dress and lifestyle.

One would have thought for all the outrage against Flynn and other members of Team Trump, maybe the chattering class has Flynn confused with John Podesta, the doofus whose password was “password” and may have violated federal disclosure laws for not disclosing he was paid to sit on the board of various Russian entities:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, may have violated federal law when he failed to fully disclose details surrounding his membership on the executive board of Joule Unlimited and the “75,000 common shares” he received. The energy company accepted millions from a Vladimir Putin-connected Russian government fund.

Podesta joined the executive board of Joule Unlimited Technologies — a firm partly financed by Putin’s Russia — in June 2011 and received 100,000 shares of stock options, according to an email uncovered by WikiLeaks. Podesta’s membership on the board of directors of Joule Unlimited was first revealed in research from Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

White House Officials Divided on Islam, ISIS, Israel and Iran by Soeren Kern

Posted By on April 5th, 2017

The decision to select Army Lieutenant General Herbert Raymond “H.R.” McMaster to replace retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn as national security advisor is setting into motion a cascade of other personnel decisions that, far from draining the swamp, appear to be perpetuating it.

Trump has decided to retain Yael Lempert, a controversial NSC staffer from the Obama administration. Analyst Lee Smith reported that, according to a former official in the Clinton administration, Lempert “is considered one of the harshest critics of Israel on the foreign policy far left.”

Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, who served as the NSC’s Iran director during the Obama administration, is now in charge of policy planning for Iran and the Persian Gulf at the Trump State Department. Nowrouzzadeh, whose main task at Obama’s NSC was to help broker the Iran Nuclear Deal, is a former employee of the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), a lobbying group widely believed to be a front group for the Islamic dictatorship in Iran.

“The people who are handling key elements of those conflicts now are the same people who handled those areas under Obama, despite the results of the last election. No wonder the results look equally awful.” — Lee Smith, Middle East analyst.

The people U.S. President Donald J. Trump has chosen to lead his foreign policy team may complicate efforts to fulfill his inaugural pledge to eradicate “radical Islamic terrorism” “from the face of the Earth” — a Herculean task even under the best of circumstances.

An analysis of the political appointments to the different agencies within the U.S. national security apparatus shows that the key members of the president’s foreign policy team hold widely divergent views on the threat posed by radical Islam — and on the nature of Islam itself. They also disagree on approaches to Iran, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the European Union, Russia, globalism and other national security issues.

The policy disconnect is being exacerbated by the fact that dozens of key positions within the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies remain unfilled. The result is that the administration has been relying on holdovers from the Obama administration to formulate and implement U.S. foreign policy.

Current foreign policy advisors can be roughly divided into several competing factions and ideological schisms: career staffers versus political appointees, civilian strategists versus military tacticians, Trump supporters versus Obama loyalists, politically correct consensus-seekers versus politically incorrect ideologues, New York moderates versus populist hardliners, Palestinian sympathizers versus advocates for Israel, proponents of the Iran deal versus supporters of an anti-Iran coalition — and those who believe that Islamism and radical Islamic terrorism derive from Islam itself versus those who insist that Islam is a religion of peace.

The winners of these various power struggles ultimately will determine the ideological direction of U.S. policy on a variety of national security issues, including the war on Islamic terror.

During his presidential campaign, voters were promised a radical shift in American foreign policy, and the consensus-driven foreign policy establishment in Washington was repeatedly blamed for making the world less stable and more dangerous.

Although much can change, the current incarnation of the national security team indicates that the administration’s foreign policy, especially toward the Middle East and the broader Islamic world, may end up being more similar than different to that of the Obama administration. Those hoping for a radical change to the politically correct status quo may be disappointed.

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Suicide Bomber Identified in Russia Subway Blast; Death Toll Raised to 14 Authorities identified the attacker based on genetic evidence and surveillance camera footage; no group has claimed responsibility By Nathan Hodge

Posted By on April 5th, 2017

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia—Russian authorities identified a 22-year-old man from the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan as the suicide bomber who caused a deadly subway-train blast in Russia’s second-largest city on Monday, underscoring Moscow’s concerns about radicalization in Central Asia.

In a statement Tuesday, Russia’s Investigative Committee identified the attacker as Akbarjon Jalilov.

The explosion occurred Monday on a train between Sennaya Ploshchad, a busy downtown subway intersection, and Technological Institute station.

According to the statement, forensic experts found genetic traces of Mr. Jalilov on a bag containing an explosive device that was found and disarmed at Ploshchad Vosstaniya, another subway station not far from the site of Monday’s explosion. Investigators also drew their conclusions based on surveillance-camera footage, the statement said.

Russian Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova said Tuesday morning that 14 people had been killed and 49 remained in hospital.

Earlier Tuesday, the Investigative Committee said that an explosive device could have been detonated by a man whose fragmented remains were found in the third carriage of the subway train.

Rakhat Sulaimanov, the official representative of the Kyrgyz security agency, said the person responsible was likely a native of Kyrgyzstan who then became a Russian citizen. Mr. Sulaimanov said Kyrgyz security services were in contact with Russian authorities over the matter, but declined to provide further details.

No group has claimed responsibility for the blast. It occurred during a visit to the city by Russian President Vladimir Putin, raising official concerns that the attack was timed to his stay. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Fake News and the Digital Duopoly Google and Facebook have created a dysfunctional and socially destructive information ecosystem.By Robert Thomson *****

Posted By on April 5th, 2017

‘Fake news” has seemingly, suddenly, become fashionable. In reality, the fake has proliferated for a decade or more, but the faux, the flawed and the fraudulent are now pressing issues because the full scale of the changes wrought upon the integrity of news and advertising by the digital duopoly—Google and Facebook —has become far more obvious.

Google’s commodification of content knowingly, willfully undermined provenance for profit. That was followed by the Facebook stream, with its journalistic jetsam and fake flotsam. Together, the two most powerful news publishers in human history have created an ecosystem that is dysfunctional and socially destructive.

Both companies could have done far more to highlight that there is a hierarchy of content, but instead they have prospered mightily by peddling a flat-earth philosophy that doesn’t distinguish between the fake and the real because they make copious amounts of money from both.

Depending on which source you believe, they have close to two-thirds of the digital advertising market—and let me be clear that we compete with them for that share. The Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates they accounted for more than 90% of the incremental increase in digital advertising over the past year. The only cost of content for these companies has been lucrative contracts for lobbyists and lawyers, but the social cost of that strategy is far more profound.

It is beyond risible that Google and its subsidiary YouTube, which have earned many billions of dollars from other people’s content, should now be lamenting that they can’t possibly be held responsible for monitoring that content. Monetizing yes, monitoring no—but it turns out that free money does come at a price.

We all have to work with these companies, and we are hoping, mostly against hope, that they will finally take meaningful action, not only to allow premium content models that fund premium journalism, but also to purge their sites of the rampant piracy that undermines creativity. Your business model can’t be simultaneously based on both intimate, granular details about users and no clue whatsoever about rather obvious pirate sites.

Another area that urgently needs much attention is the algorithms that Silicon Valley companies, and Amazon, routinely cite as a supposedly objective source of wisdom and insight. These algorithms are obviously set, tuned and repeatedly adjusted to suit their commercial needs. Yet they also blame autonomous, anarchic algorithms and not themselves when neofascist content surfaces or when a search leads to obviously biased results in favor of their own products.

Look at how Google games searches. A study reported in The Wall Street Journal found that in 25,000 random Google searches ads for Google products appeared in the most prominent slot 91% of the time. How is that not the unfair leveraging of search dominance and the abuse of algorithm? All 1,000 searches for “laptops” started with an ad for Google’s Chromebook—100% of the time. Kim Jong Un would be envious of results like that at election time. CONTINUE AT SITE

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Susan Rice Keeps Her Mask On The press corps buys her story that ‘unmasking’ was no big deal.

Posted By on April 5th, 2017

Susan Rice returned to the friendly confines of MSNBC Tuesday to respond to softball questions about the news that the Obama national security adviser had “unmasked” the identity of at least one member of the Trump transition team who was surveilled by U.S. intelligence. Her answers make it all the more imperative to hear her under oath before Congress.

Ms. Rice didn’t deny that she had sought the name of a Trump transition official in intelligence reports, though she said she hadn’t done so “for any political purposes.” We’ll take this as confirmation that President Obama’s confidante was receiving summaries of surveilled foreign officials that included references to, or conversations with, Donald Trump’s team.

Ms. Rice insisted that unmasking was a routine part of her job and is necessary to understand the context of some intelligence reports. Perhaps, but why specifically did she need to see intel summaries dealing with Trump transition plans and policy intentions? And what was the context for seeking the name of any Trump official? Unmasking is typically the job of professional intelligence analysts, not senior White House officials.

Ms. Rice was also at pains to say that unmasking is not the same as leaking to the press and that she “leaked nothing to nobody, and never have.” But she hasn’t been accused of leaking the name of the Trump official. She is responsible for unmasking a U.S. citizen, which made that name more widely disseminated across the government and thus could have been more easily leaked by someone else. Michael Flynn lost his job as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser because of leaks about his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S.

Meanwhile, Democrats and the Beltway press are rallying to defend Ms. Rice by claiming that it isn’t news for a senior White House official to unmask the name of a political opponent of an incoming Administration. Thanks, guys. If you want to cover only one side of the Trump-Russia-intelligence story, we’ll be happy to cover both.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Intellectual Whiplash on Israel By Lawrence J. Haas

Posted By on April 5th, 2017

The same administration that’s defending Israel in refreshingly bold fashion at the United Nations is discussing Israeli-Palestinian peace this week with a Palestinian leader who promotes the murder and kidnapping of Israelis and who spent 15 years in prison for throwing a grenade at an Israeli Army truck.

The invitation to Jibril Rajoub, secretary of the Fatah Central Committee, to speak with U.S. officials is just the latest reason why, with regard to the administration, Israel-backers are suffering from a kind of intellectual whiplash – with positive developments followed by distressing ones, fueling an anxious uncertainty.

The embrace of Rajoub raises profound questions as to whether President Donald Trump has a coherent policy toward Israel or, as seems more likely, disjointed policies are emerging from competing power centers across the administration that view Israel and the U.S.-Israeli alliance in profoundly different ways.

Israel backers were enthused by Trump’s vow to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and his appointment of hardliner David Friedman as his ambassador, and they were thrilled by the efforts of Nikki Haley, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to challenge anti-Israel orthodoxy at Turtle Bay. Her recent full-throated challenge to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel left them overwhelmed.

At the same time, Israel backers were dismayed by Trump’s failure to mention Jews on International Holocaust Remembrance Day as well as his focus on Israeli settlements as a key obstacle to Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Now, they’re undoubtedly outraged that he’s legitimizing Rajoub as a potential partner for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

“The U.S. government does not endorse every statement Mr. Rajoub has made, but he has long been involved in Middle East peace efforts, and has publicly supported a peaceful, non-violent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” a State Department spokesman told The Washington Free Beacon. “We continue to press Fatah officials, including Rajoub himself, to refrain from any statements or actions that could be viewed as inciting or legitimizing others’ use of violence.”

That, to put it bluntly, is absurd. Rajoub is no peace activist who just needs to tone down his rhetoric. He’s a hardcore Israel rejectionist who honors “martyrs,” promotes murder and kidnapping, and envisions a Palestine that stretches from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, erasing Israel in the process.

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MELANIE PHILLIPS: THE SWAMP GROWS MORE FETID BY THE DAY

Posted By on April 5th, 2017

You know, if I hadn’t seen the unending denial and resistance of those in Britain who are dead against Britain’s exit from the European Union and want to stop it even now, I’d never have believed the extent and nature of the unremitting attempts to delegitimise and unseat in some way President Donald Trump.

Even so, I find those attempts hard to credit. A truly titanic struggle is going on in Washington DC by Trump’s opponents to destroy him – and by Trump himself to fight them off. So far he hasn’t done very well, mainly because… well, he hasn’t yet managed to see off his foes.

Trump has been dogged by persistent claims that he or his campaign team or his circle had alarmingly close connections to President Putin’s Russia. This McCarthyite red scare has been quite something to behold, coming as it has from the left which until now defined itself by its principled opposition to such red-baiting.

But let’s put that particular irony to one side. The fact is that, despite all the heat and noise about this, nothing at all has been found to link the Trump circle improperly to the Russians. The former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who endorsed Hillary Clinton and previously called Donald Trump a dupe of Russia, has said: “On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all. There’s no little campfire, there’s no little candle, there’s no spark. And there’s a lot of people looking for it.”

You don’t say. But the spark that has become a little flame is evidence that links the Obama administration to improper and possibly even illegal activity in trying to use intelligence-surveillance information against Trump and his circle. Trump claimed that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower shortly before last November’s presidential election. This claim was immediately scorned and held up as yet more proof that Trump lived in a world of alternative reality.

Then something rather extraordinary happened. The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes, said he had received information from an intelligence whistleblower that members of the intelligence community “incidentally collected” communications from the Trump transition team during legal surveillance operations of foreign targets. This, said Nunes, produced “dozens” of reports which eventually unmasked several individuals’ identities and were “widely disseminated”.

Nunes was promptly accused of Republican partisanship and protecting Trump, particularly since he told the President of this development before telling his committee – although he also said he had told the House Speaker, Paul Ryan, before briefing the President.

The Democrats’ frenzied calls for Nunes to recuse himself as a result increased still further when it emerged that he had met his shadowy source on the White House estate. Proof positive, cried the Democrats, that Nunes had been caught red-handed. Really? Was it ever likely that the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee would expose himself to the obvious risk that peddling false information from a tainted source like that would inevitably become known and end his career?

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A Quick Guide to the Three-Ring Circus of Scandals By Charles Lipson

Posted By on April 5th, 2017

Washington is now consumed by three scandals, distinct but overlapping, each significant in its own right. With so many players, so little reliable, public information, and such different partisan emphases, it is hard to disentangle:

Russian interference in the 2016 election;
Collusion, if any, between the Kremlin and senior Trump people, before and after the election;
Surveillance, if any, of Trump transition officials by the Obama White House and intelligence agencies, and the internal dissemination of materials not related to national security.

The first—Russian interference—should concern all Americans, regardless of party. Our democracy depends on free, fair, and open elections, with no interference by foreign citizens or governments. Our laws bar them for good reasons. America’s leaders ought to be chosen by its citizens, and them alone, whatever the global ramifications.

The second issue—possible Trump collusion with Russia—is obviously related to the Kremlin’s overall involvement, but it is distinct. Russia needed no prompting from Trump to oppose Hillary Clinton and seek to harm her election prospects. Whether it actually received help is another matter.

The Democrats have deliberately blurred the lines between Russian involvement and Trump collusion, and so have many commentators. The effect is to claw away at the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, something he is capable of doing all by himself. The Democrats’ goals are increasingly clear. As the chairman of their national committee, Tom Perez, said last week, Trump “didn’t win this election.” That charge ought to chill the soul of every American.

Vladimir Putin has succeeded in casting doubt on a democratic election and thus on constitutional governance. He did it with tactics straight out of the Cold War, KGB playbook, updated for the information age: disinformation, fake news, and illegally hacked documents.

Russia’s efforts to develop financial ties to powerful figures follow the same pattern. Persistent leaks suggest such ties to senior Trump officials. Such influence-buying, whether by Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, or U.S. corporations, is, alas, common practice—and one that rightly troubles voters. That’s why the enormous speaking fees paid to the Clintons and donations to their foundations were so controversial. But even if the Russians did develop these financial ties to Trump associates, and even if their goal was to buy influence, those are not proof they worked together to influence the election.

That is exactly what we need to know. Beyond Russia’s efforts to meddle in the American election and muddle the results, did they work directly with Team Trump? If they did, those connections would be a body blow to the American Constitution and a scandal of the highest order.

Finally, now appearing in the third ring, is President Trump’s tweet that the Obama White House “wiretapped” him. The term is old-fashioned (no one wiretaps anymore), and the claim is typically inflated. But that does not mean it is bunk.

The serious charge is that the Obama White House deliberately spied on Trump officials. The spying was presumably directed at foreign targets but inevitably swept up Trump officials, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not.

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STUFF AND NONSENSE- EDWARD CLINE

Posted By on April 5th, 2017

I think one of the most astounding, arguably dense articles to be published anywhere on the issue of censorship vs. freedom of speech was published in one of the most unlikely quarters of the world, New Zealand. A correspondent sent me the text and link to an article titled: “Want equality? Curtail free speech.” It was written for “Stuff” by a fellow by the name of Jacob Van De Visser. “Stuff” was described by the correspondent, Lindsay Perigo, as IslmoMarxist.

Freedom of Speech? Stuff and nonsense! It’s a short article, so, instead of beginning with my own comments, I’ve reproduced the article here so you can guffaw or be astonished as you will. Mr. Perigo, in his own remarks, wondered if the piece was tongue-in-cheek satire because it is so blatantly irrational and hostile to freedom of speech

I’m not certain of its sincerity, either, but given the avalanche of anti-speech articles and the ubiquity of actions that have taken place before and after Donald Trump’s election (see the Gatestone column here about American campuses opposing or shutting down speech, except that which doesn’t violate student “safe spaces”) in November 2016, together with the tone and content of Stuff’s other articles, it is wholly consistent with the irrationality of what is occurring in the West.

It’s time for New Zealand to criminalize Islamophobia!

On March 23, New Zealand awoke to the horrific news of yet another terrorist attack, this time in London.

A deranged individual ploughed a car into innocent pedestrians and brutally stabbed a police officer to death before being shot. Five people died, including the attacker. [Italics mine]

The Twittersphere was soon abuzz with conjecture and accusation. Who was to blame? What were the motives?

I felt sick as I read comments saying “Islam is to blame” and “it must be another Muslim”.

The fact that the attacker was a Muslim is irrelevant. The issue is that Islamophobia was the first response.

If you are a Muslim, you continually have to defend your faith against people who accuse it of being a dangerous and violent set of ideas. Islam is the religion of peace; anyone who understands this knows it has no part in the ideology of ISIS.

Life is a constant fight for other minorities, too.

If you are a member of the LGBTQAA+ community, you must battle for your rights. You are forced to choose from just two bathroom choices when often you don’t fit either. Workplaces often fail to be inclusive to this community, refusing them places in the boardroom.

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Why France Is Revolting against the Ancien Régime by Michel Gurfinkiel ****

Posted By on April 5th, 2017

No political observer in his right mind would have expected at the beginning of 2016 a Brexit vote in Britain in June, the resignation of David Cameron, a dogfight between the two main Brexit supporters and propagandists within the Tory party, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, and eventually the rise of Theresa May. Nor would he have foreseen, for that matter, the election of Donald Trump in the United States on November 8.

Something similar is happening in France now — on a much larger and trickier scale. A few months ago, it was taken for granted that François Hollande’s ineffectual socialist administration would be succeeded after the 2017 election — on April 23 and May 7 — by a conservative government led either by former president Nicolas Sarkozy or former prime minister Alain Juppé: a simple matter of the swing of the pendulum, as is the rule among democracies. What the French are facing now, however, is an unprecedented upsurge of the National Front, the elimination of a generation of political leaders on almost all sides, and the collapse or near collapse of classic Left and Right parties. While many voters welcome the change, others are just in a state of shock. On March 18 — one month or so ahead of the first ballot — 34 per cent of the electorate and 43 per cent of voters under 35 had still not decided whether to vote or not.

On March 20, the five most prominent candidates debated for three and a half hours on TV. About 10 million people watched intently. It was indeed a great show — and probably a defining moment in the campaign.

All five candidates are rebels. Marine Le Pen, 48, the National Front leader, is a rebel by definition. She has managed to upgrade in many ways the party she inherited from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011, to purge it of many unsavoury elements, to trim its formerly racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric (including Holocaust denial) and to switch from Vichy nostalgia to a near-Gaullist statism. In fact, she has even been increasingly reluctant to use the name National Front, and has floated alternative labels, such as Rassemblement Bleu Marine (“Navy Blue Rally”, a play on words with her first name which means “Navy” in French).

For all that, she is still sticking to a binary, undemocratic and utterly revolutionary view of the world, positing a bitter fight between what she calls “the System” (the political and cultural elite, of both Right and Left, the “lobbies”, globalisation, multiculturalism, immigration, the European Union, the euro) and “the people” (the ordinary Frenchmen) whom she claims to represent exclusively. The implication is that either you side with the people and her against the System, and opt for a fully sovereign and autarkic France under her guidance, or you are, willingly or not, an enemy of the people. Interestingly enough, she used this logic against her own father, as he resisted the revamping and defascisation of the National Front, and did not flinch from expelling him from the party at the age of 86.

At the other end of the political spectrum, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 65, a former minister of vocational education, rebelled against the Socialist party in 2008 to found the more hardline Parti de Gauche (Left Party) and then the Front de Gauche (Left Front) in association with a diminutive Communist Party. He eventually started a new movement in 2016, France Insoumise (Indomitable France).