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Deepwater Horizon and Everyday Heroes Director Peter Berg’s latest film brings viewers up close to a gripping catastrophe, and also to a hidden world of some of America’s finest. By Kyle Smith

Posted By on October 4th, 2016

The climactic images of an American flag rippling against darkness and fire in the brilliant new film Deepwater Horizon recall many a war film, or indeed the writing of The Star Spangled Banner itself, near Fort McHenry as the War of 1812 raged. But this is not a war film. Or is it?

The civilians who populate the Deepwater Horizon rig off the coast of Louisiana are military-like types — practical engineers, men who solve problems in real time under immense pressure, some of it literal and lethal. They make their living with their hands, wear casual clothing, drink bad coffee out of paper cups, and power America.

In short, these are manly men, played by manly actors like Mark Wahlberg and Kurt Russell, as two of the many technically savvy guys who keep America’s oil flowing. As we flick on a light switch or pump gas into our cars, rarely do we think about how our carbon-based energy system works, or the ingenuity, skill, and courage of those who bring us cheap, abundant fuel. Deepwater Horizon urges us to spare a thought for these people, most of them men, who make the country work, often at huge risk to themselves. Until the world figures out a way to operate on puppy dog dreams and unicorn sighs, carbon-based fuels will remain the foundation of our existence, the sine qua non without which earth-mother poets, sullen America-hating vegan performance artists, and the private jets that shuttle Al Gore to ecological conferences would find it difficult to operate.

Eleven men died in the explosion of the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 26, 2010, and dozens more were lucky to escape with their lives. And yet the media simply shrugged at the human toll of this event and rushed off to cover the damage to marine life in the resulting oil spill of 210 million gallons. Today, the media reaction looks like a bit of an overreaction –nature has a way of erasing even man’s biggest mistakes, and life in the Gulf of Mexico has largely bounced back — but such topics are outside the scope of the movie.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

In debate No. 2, Trump owes it to the ‘deplorables’ to focus on the issues and exert some self-control. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 4th, 2016

“Trump owes it to these forgotten Deplorables to prepare for the last two debates and to talk about them, and not himself. If he doesn’t, he will wreck their hopes, betray their trust, and walk away a loser as few others in history.But if Trump fights Hillary with a coherent plan that is the antithesis of the last eight years, rather than harping about his business reputation and obsessing with the trivial, he still might win a conservative Congress, a cadre of loyal conservative cabinet officers, a rare chance to remake the Supreme Court in a fashion not seen since the 1930s — and at 70 years of age make all his prior celebrity achievements of the past seem as nothing in comparison.”

In the first debate, Hillary stuck out her jaw on cybersecurity, the treatment of women, sermons on the need for restrained language, and talk about the shenanigans of the rich — and Trump passed on her e-mail scandals, her denigration of Bill’s women, her reckless smears like “deplorables,” and her pay-for-pay Clinton Foundation enrichment, obsessed instead with the irrelevant and insignificant.

In fact, the first presidential debate resembled the final scene out of the Caine Mutiny. Trump was melting down like the baited Captain Queeg (Humphrey Bogart), in his convoluted wild-goose-chase defenses of his arcane business career. Watching it was as painful as it was for the admiral judges in the movie who saw fellow officer Queeg reduced to empty shouting about strawberries.

Hillary Clinton egged him on in the role of the know-it-all, conniver of the same movie, the smug lieutenant Tom Keefer (Fred MacMurray), who had goaded Queeg, playacted sophisticated and learned — but ultimately proved a vain, empty, and unattractive vessel.

In sum, conservative viewers tuned in, in hopes of seeing Trump as Bull Halsey, the heroic admiral of the Navy’s Third Fleet in WWII, and they got instead Hollywood’s Captain Queeg.

Trump’s detours de nihilo, the constant unanswered race/class/gender jabs by a haughty Hillary, and Trump’s addictions to broken-off phrases, and loud empty superlative adjectives (tremendous, awesome, great, and fantastic) won’t win him the necessary extra 3–4 percent of women, independents, and establishment Never Trump Republicans. Trump’s bragging that he has “properties” in your state or that he found a way to creatively account his way out of income taxes does not come off as synonymous with a plan to make you well off, too.

Moderator Lester Holt did what all mainstream debate moderators of a now corrupt profession customarily do: Before the debate he leaked that they might possibly be conservative, feigned fairness, and then reestablished his left-wing credentials by focusing solely on fact-checking Trump, so that he wouldn’t be targeted later by leftist elites whose pique could lead to temporary ostracism from the people and places Holt values.

So, of course, he audited Trump and exempted Clinton, as if Trump’s businesses were as overtly crooked as the play-for-pay Clinton syndicate, or Trump’s supposed insensitivities to a pampered beauty queen (with a checkered past) were morally equivalent to Hillary’s denigration of Bill’s women who had claimed sexual assault or her eerie post facto chortling over getting a defendant, accused of raping a 12-year-old girl, off with lesser charges.

Most newsreaders know little more than how to news read. So we should not have been surprised that Holt’s audits of Trump on the legality of stop-and-frisk, or Holt’s denial that violent crime was up, was about as accurate as Candy Crowley’s hijacking of the second 2012 debate to rewrite what Barack Obama said into what she thought he should have said. Trump, in fact, was right that his microphone did not work properly and right that the media was biased — but wrong that bringing any of that up mattered in analyses of his debate performance.

The Clinton debate formula should have been clear: Bait and prod Trump to go into egocentric rants about his businesses, or a beauty queen, or another non-story, and then let the moderator massage the playing field, and let Hillary fill in dead time with empty platitudes (we are all racists/we need more solar panels/the wealthy don’t pay their fair share), and unfunded promises, while pandering along race, class, and gender lines.

Trump has to find a way to blow apart that script — largely by repressing his ego and simply not talking about any of his businesses or going down into the Clinton muck. Period.

Who cares about an ancient writ or a spat with a contractor?

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Radical Islamists Gaining Strength in Kashmir by Jagdish N. Singh

Posted By on October 4th, 2016

The separatist leaders in Kashmir, as often happens with opponents (such as the Palestinians or Iran) seem to take any willingness to negotiate as sign of weakness, and start pursuing their own agendas with even more aggression.

Their agenda of the separatists has consistently been one of radical Islamist rule in Kashmir.

“They [the separatists] are not ready for it [a political solution]. They are not ready even to open their doors. They enjoy fuelling violence and getting innocents killed,” said Ram Madhav, General Secretary of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party.

The refusal of Kashmiri separatist leaders to meet an all-party Indian parliamentary delegation led by India’s Home Minister, Rajnath Singh, that visited Kashmir on September 4-5 to strike a political solution for the strife-torn state, was hardly surprising. The separatist leaders in Kashmir, as often happens with opponents (such as the Palestinians or Iran) seem to take any willingness to negotiate as sign of weakness, and start pursuing their own agendas with even more aggression.

“They [the separatists] are not ready for it [a political solution]. They are not ready even to open their doors. They enjoy fuelling violence and getting innocents killed,” said Ram Madhav, General Secretary of the ruling Bharatiya Janata party.

If New Delhi is serious about establishing peace in the Kashmir Valley, it is futile to waste any more time with separatist leaders belonging to the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC), a united front of 26 political, social and religious organizations all committed to the cause of Kashmiri independence from India. It would be naïve to entertain any hope of a positive response from them.

The history of the behaviour of APHC leaders and similar groups shows that they evidently have little interest in the values of peace, secularism and development, which are dear to India and all democratic societies. Their agenda has consistently been one of radical Islamist rule in Kashmir. Their approach during the current crisis there merely confirms this pattern. They continue to spread a message of hatred and violence against the Indian authorities by portraying them as “anti-people.”

These separatists are allegedly aligned with the establishment in Islamabad, Pakistan, to foment unrest in Kashmir. APHC leader Ali Shah Geelani holds an Indian passport, only to indulge in an anti-India rhetoric . On August 14, 2015, another separatist, Asiya Andrabi, hoisted the Pakistani flag in Jammu and Kashmir. Both Geelani and Andrabi addressed a Jama’at-ud-Da’wah rally in Pakistan, led by Hafiz Saeed, a co-founder of Lashkar-e-Toiba and chief of Jama’at-ud-Da’wah, which has had sanctions placed against it by the United Nations as a terrorist outfit promoting an anti-India agenda.

These leaders also seem to have financial interests in being close to Pakistan. Recently, the separatist Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s son, Nayeem Geelani, has come to the attention of India’s National Intelligence Agency, for having transferred a large amount of money into the bank account of reported terrorist, Syed Salahuddin, based in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Palestinian Murderers and their Western Enablers by Guy Millière

Posted By on October 4th, 2016

The Palestinian Authority not only celebrates murderers: it produces new ones every day — and does so knowlingly and voluntarily. For this it uses textbooks, television and radio programs, and articles in newspapers, all paid for with money from Western governments.

The Palestinian Authority also financially rewards the murderers’ families and the murderers themselves. These financial rewards are also paid for with money from Western governments.

How can Western politicians explain that they condemn the murders and still fund the incitement to kill? How come they keep giving money that rewards murdering Jews “by all available means”?

How can they define as “moderate” an organization such as the Palestinian Authority that admits sending terrorists to kill Israelis and that teaches children, on its Facebook page, how to stab Jews to death? And how can they consider it urgent to give such an organization its own State?

Israeli Jews know they can only rely on themselves. They know that others, such as France, are holding knives that are sharpened.

The sport of murdering Jews does not stop. On June 30, at dawn, in Kiryat Arba, a young Arab broke through a window, and stabbed a 13-year-old American-Israeli girl, Hallel Yaffa Ariel, to death.

The young Arab who stabbed Hallel Yaffa Ariel was shot dead just after the assault. His mother said she was proud of her son. The Palestinian Authority (PA) said he was a hero and a “martyr.”

This year alone, 24 Israeli Jews were murdered, many gruesomely. Every time one of the murderers was shot, his family declared how proud they were, and the Palestinian Authority celebrated him. New murderers are preparing new attacks.

What sort of society is it where parents say they how proud they are that their children are murderers? And what sort of leadership is it that celebrates killers?

Further, what sort of Western journalists and “human rights” groups are those that fail to voice their outrage at the murder of a sleeping 13-year-old girl?

These journalists and human rights groups voice their outrage at people killed in European soccer stadiums, musical theaters and editorial rooms, but never, it seems, for Israeli Jews killed over so many years.

Why also is it that they never speak of the moral depravity of the Palestinian Authority?

POLITICS Comments turned off

Tony Thomas: Hillary, the Alleged Rapist’s Enabler

Posted By on October 4th, 2016

She presents herself as the champion of all women everywhere, but there are more than a few exceptions — starting with the cavalcade of underlings, willing and unwilling, who have enjoyed or endured her priapic husband’s attentions. Whenever their names emerge, she leads the charge to silence them.
On September 14, 2015, this message occupied pride of place on Hillary Clinton’s campaign site: “I want to send a message to every survivor of sexual assault: Don’t let anyone silence your voice. You have the right to be heard.” By February 4, 2016, the quote had been stealth edited to and “You have the right to be believed, and we’re with you” had been deleted.

Hillary Clinton presented herself as defender of liberal womanhood at last month’s presidential debate. She berated Trump: “This is a man who has called women pigs, slobs and dogs.”[1]

Trump should have responded: “This is a woman whose President-husband paid $US850,000 to settle a lawsuit by Paula Jones alleging sexual harassment.[2] This is a conniving woman who has disparaged and harassed women who were sexually assaulted by her husband.”

I’d like to issue a trigger warning now that my corroborative detail may be sordid and upsetting to unsophisticated Quadrant readers. The Clinton couple exist in a miasma of sexual sleaze. Bill has indulged his sexual appetites with third-party women before, during and after his presidency. Hillary winks at it. Victims of Bill’s predations also claim Hillary has led campaigns to discredit them.

Interviewed after the debate, Trump claimed he had held back on Bill because he didn’t want to parade Bill’s vices in front of the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea, who was in the audience.[3] I’d therefore give him credit as a gentleman, especially as Chelsea is no impressionable teen but a married woman, now 36, who owns an apartment stretching across an entire block of lower Manhattan.

Here are a few names of Bill’s other women, on whom he either forced himself or exploited their subordinate status in ways rightly banned in private enterprise and academia: Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jone, Monica Lewinsky, Christy Zercher, Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, Carolyn Moffett. All were Democrat supporters, all took enormous risks in going public and taking on the super-powerful Democrat machine. Their lives and reputations typically suffered irreparable damage. Who knows how many others stayed fearfully silent?

No lesser a reporter than Watergate’s Carl Bernstein wrote of Hillary’s response when Gennifer Flowers alleged she had a long-term affair with Bill. Hillary’s response, Bernstein said, was to throw herself into efforts to discredit Flowers. This included trying to persuade horrified campaign aides to bring out rumors that George Bush (Sr) had not always been faithful to wife Barbara. Nice one, Hillary!

In July last year Bernstein on CNN TV said of Hillary’s penchant for “fudging”, i.e. lying,[4] She “has become a kind of specialist at it. Why has she become a kind of specialist? It has to do I think with the peculiarity of the Clinton situation. It had partly to do with the history of Bill Clinton and women in which she’s had to defend him. It’s been very difficult to do with the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” Sorry, Carl, but this supposed champion of downtrodden women didn’t have to defend Bill, she could have defended his victims. Bernstein’s biography also documents how Hillary undertook an “aggressive, explicit direction of the campaign to discredit” Gennifer Flowers.

How does the Bill/Hillary marriage since 1975 work? One needs to trawl back to 1979 for Hillary’s only candid description:

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Yes Virginia, Aliens Are Registered or Voting… and in Pennsylvania, by the Thousands By J. Christian Adams

Posted By on October 4th, 2016

Wouldn’t it be nice if just once, some of the people whom Soros pays to tell us that voter fraud doesn’t exist admitted they were wrong? What if government documents were produced to show at least 1,000 instances of voter fraud showing aliens registering or voting in a key swing state? Would they recant?

That’s asking too much. They earn their salaries by pretending voter fraud is a myth, and convincing others in the media to parrot their lies.

So today we learn that in the key swing state of Virginia, voter registration rolls have been polluted with an excess of a thousand aliens, and most certainly far more. This detailed study by the Public Interest Legal Foundation, or PILF, (which I assisted on) documents more than one thousand aliens on the voter rolls. It provides the government documents with the names.

Here’s the most frightening part: the sample is only eight Virginia counties and doesn’t include the behemoths of Arlington and Fairfax Counties. I’ll get to why that information is being concealed by election officials in a moment below.

In just eight Virginia counties, 1,046 alien non-citizens successfully registered to vote. Mind you, these are just the aliens who were accidentally caught because when they renewed their driver’s license, the told the truth they were a non-citizen.

That’s because of Motor Voter. Motor Voter, or the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, mandates that anyone who applies for a driver’s license must be offered voter registration. To register, they must merely mark a checkbox that they are a citizen and sign the form. It’s a yes-no question, and thousands are lying — just in Virginia.

Virginia has no citizenship verification requirements like other states do, so the vulnerabilities in Motor Voter are amplified. Voter ID is no solution either. These aliens are getting registered to vote when they are getting their photo ID cards!

Some groups like it this way. Soros-fueled organizations have brought lawsuits to stop states from verifying citizenship of registrants. The Advancement Project and Demos are the answers to the Jeopardy question: Who would ever be against verifying the citizenship of voters?

Another question – why would they fight steps to prevent foreign influence on American elections? – raises even more ominous possibilities.

The Virginia report by PILF contains the responses of just eight Virginia counties to public inspection requests under Motor Voter for list maintenance documents demonstrating aliens who have been removed from the rolls.

The report only reflects the eight counties who complied with the request, and only reflects the aliens who were caught. Without question, many many more aliens remain on the rolls who haven’t been caught. But at least now we have the names of people who were removed from the rolls by the hundreds for citizenship problems.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Hidden Costs of Wind and Solar Energy By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on October 4th, 2016

A new report from the Department of Energy (DOE) painted a rosy picture for renewable energy, but Americans must not forget that any breakthroughs have come with a cost. The United States may produce more wind and solar energy than in previous years, but that increase must be understood in the context of government subsidies for those industries.

“Alternative energy technologies have been heavily subsidized for decades and even with the generous support from taxpayers, they haven’t penetrated the market as promised,” Nick Loris, research fellow in energy and environmental policy at the Heritage Foundation, told PJ Media on Monday. “If these technologies are as promising and cost-competitive as proponents of their use say they are, they shouldn’t need preferential treatment from the government.”

The DOE report shows “6 Charts that Will Make You Optimistic About America’s Clean Energy Future.” The charts show increasing energy output at decreasing cost for wind power and solar power, and they also show decreasing cost and increasing purchases for electric cars and LED light bulbs.

“The Department of Energy’s information tells a bit of a different story when you look closely,” Dan Simmons, vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research (IER), told PJ Media on Monday. Simmons noted that while the cost of land-based wind energy fell overall since 1980, it actually increased more than 40 percent from 2002 to 2010.

In July, National Review’s Robert Bryce reported that the wind energy industry has received $176 billion in local, state, and national subsidies since 2000. Despite this, according to the DOE graph, wind was actually cheaper in 2002 than it was in 2015.

“It appears that tens of billions in subsidies for wind made wind more expensive,” Simmons quipped.

POLITICS Comments turned off

WHEN IT COMES TO TAXES AND CHARITY HILLARY LIVES IN A GLASS HOUSE

Posted By on October 4th, 2016

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2016/08/12/almost-all-of-hillary-clintons-charitable-donations-went-to-this-one-organization/
Almost All of Hillary Clinton’s Charitable Donations Went to This One Organization By Rick Moram (August 12, 2016)

According to tax returns for 2015 released by the Clinton campaign, 96% of the candidate’s charitable donations went to the Clinton Foundation.

Daily Caller:

The documents show that the power couple earned $10,745,378 last year, mostly on income earned from giving public speeches.

Of that, they gave just over a million to charity. But the contributions can hardly be seen as altruistic, since the money flowed back to an entity they control.

The other $42,000 contribution was to Desert Classic Charities. That group hosts an annual PGA golf event. Doug Band, a Clinton Foundation adviser and Bill Clinton’s longtime assistant, was on the board of directors of that organization through 2014, according to its IRS filings.

Desert Classic Charities effectively returned that donation back into the Clinton orbit. Its 2015 tax filing shows that it contributed $700,000 to the Clinton Foundation for work on obesity programs. The group handed out $1.6 million in grants that whole year.

The Clinton Foundation dispenses contracts to Clinton cronies like Doug Band while also paying for the non-political travel of the Clintons and staffers. It’s all perfectly legal — and disgustingly unethical. The Foundation is used as a slush fund that enriches friends of the Clintons while allowing foreign businesses and governments to purchase influence.

I doubt this story will get much play beyond the conservative net. It might cast Hillary in a bad light, and we can’t have that when the press now sees that it has a holy quest to keep Donald Trump from winning.

But you would think after what they wrote about Mitt Romney’s charitable giving, they’d at least give the appearance of balance:

Romney paid $1.9 million in taxes and gave $4 million in charity on income of $14 million. But many liberal commentators criticized the Republican because a majority of those charitable contributions went to the Mormon church. Another chunk went to a foundation controlled by his family.

The Nation, a far-left magazine, published an article entitled “Romney’s Ungenerous Donations.”

Mother Jones, another liberal publication, published several articles skewering Romney for giving to his own church.

“Romney Tax Tips: 10 Ways to Stiff the IRS,” is one such article. “Vetting Romney’s $3 Million in Charity” is another.

We’re used to this sort of media malpractice. Double standards are a specialty of the leftist press. But they’re all too busy denying there’s a problem with the Foundation to notice that Hillary Clinton believes that the #1 charitable cause in the world is herself and her husband.

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‘Aqui no’: Not here, say the voters of Colombia By Silvio Canto, Jr.

Posted By on October 4th, 2016

Another country and another group of voters who sent the experts to that place that we can’t say in a family blog.

Let’s go to Colombia first:

A Colombian peace deal that the president and the country’s largest rebel group had signed just days before was defeated in a referendum on Sunday, leaving the fate of a 52-year war suddenly uncertain.

A narrow margin divided the yes-or-no vote, with 50.2 percent of Colombians rejecting the peace deal and 49.8 percent voting in favor, the government said.

The result was a deep embarrassment for President Juan Manuel Santos. Just last week, Mr. Santos had joined arms with leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC, who apologized on national television during a signing ceremony.

The surprise surge by the “no” vote — nearly all major polls had indicated resounding approval — left the country in a dazed uncertainty not seen since Britain voted in June to leave the European Union. And it left the future of rebels who had planned to rejoin Colombia as civilians — indeed, the future of the war itself, which both sides had declared over — unknown.

Both sides vowed they would not go back to fighting.

So what happened in Colombia?

Let me introduce you to my good friend Daniel Duquenal who lives next door in Venezuela. I agree with him that President Santos, who was President Uribe’s defense minister, made a huge mistake in bringing Cuba (not an honest broker) into the middle of these negotiations:

Then came the choice of Havana and Castro’s guidance to negotiate with its allies, the communist FARC.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Let’s play ‘who lost more money’: Trump or Hillary? By Jack Hellner

Posted By on October 4th, 2016

Hillary says she can’t understand how anyone in business could ever lose $1 billion in a single year, yet somehow, according to an inspector general’s report, the State Department misplaced $6 billion of taxpayer money because of inadequate internal controls. Most of the sum was lost during Hillary’s four years.

Hillary’s losses cost the taxpayers much more than Trump’s. She didn’t just lose $1 billion in one year; she lost an average of over $1 billion for four straight years.

Do we want someone to be president who has been so careless with public funds – who, according to the FBI, was extremely careless with classified information? The FBI director couldn’t be sure that she understood the nation’s security laws, and apparently that is the only reason she wasn’t charged.