NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Now They are Going After Jewish Summer Camps By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Posted By on November 2nd, 2016

Camp owners were shocked by the comparison of Jewish campers emulating IDF exercises with Hamas terrorist training camps.http://www.jewishpress.com/news/us-news/ny/now-they-are-going-after-jewish-summer-camps/2016/11/02/

Camp Mesorah is a co-educational Modern Orthodox sleep-over camp sprawling across more than 100 acres in New York State’s Catskill Mountains. The camp focuses on sports, Torah, Jewish unity and love for Medinat Yisrael. Some people can’t stand that last part – especially any suggestion that the Israeli Defense Forces should be respected and emulated.

Why? Because the IDF, you know, is a military force and if Jewish campers in upstate New York emulate IDF troops while engaging in team-building and obstacle courses, that really is akin to glorifying torture and violence. In fact, “it’s like the Hamas camps.” At least that’s what some non-affiliated busybodies are claiming.

It’s absurd, but that’s how some Israel-denigrators – even Jewish ones – play the game. Even when it comes to attacking a team-building summer activity for Jewish campers.

Founded in 1990, Mesorah hosts approximatly 800 campers throughout the summers, starting from rising fourth graders through the tenth grade. Nearly one hundred of those Mesorahans come from Israel, and the camp has strong Zionist roots. Campers are encouraged to learn about and learn to love Israel, and making Aliyah is viewed as a positive aspiration. As Joseph Stansky, Mesorah’s co-owner, told the JewishPress.com on Tuesday, “many campers have IDF t-shirts and sweatshirts which they bought at novelty shops on Ben Yehudah [Street in Jerusalem].”

A brief visit to the camp’s website reveals hockey rinks and basketball courts, baseball diamonds and tennis courts, a lake for boating, and two shuls, a kollel, learning gazebos and a library. The owners have brought the camp into the digital age with a section on the website for parents and other family members to regularly see pictures and videos of the campers. There are also promotional videos for interested families.

The promotional videos are rolled out one at a time over the course of the post-summer year, in anticipation of the next summer’s season. One video rolled out just after the Jewish holidays this year focused on the camp’s “IDF-Paintball Program,” which shows campers in camouflage gear engaged in an intensive (by American Jewish camp standards) obstacle and team building course. Many of the campers are wearing their IDF t-shirts.

POLITICS Comments turned off

WikiLeaks Reveals Clinton Poll Oversampling Scheme By Frank Salvato

Posted By on November 2nd, 2016

As we approach Election Day, there will be an incredible amount of talk about the polls. Mainstream media pundits will expound on the lead that Hillary Clinton has and how it is something that, in the short time left, can’t be overcome by Donald Trump. But is this “lead” that Hillary Clinton is said to possess and accurate reflection of the electorate?

Emails released by WikiLeaks last week prove that the Clinton team applied an enormous amount of pressure (as if it were needed) on the mainstream media into systematically and deliberately over-sampling Clinton-friendly demographics in their polling. The emails, that originated with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, included a detailed 37-page manual on how to go about most effectively skewing the polling results so as to give the Clinton campaign the numbers they needed to claim a lead.

It was their game plan all along to propagandize huge leads in the polls – through the Clinton-friendly mainstream media – to depress voter turnout for Donald Trump. A simple reading of Podesta’s email and the attached manual prove this beyond any doubt.

This is the inherent danger in a politically corrupt; a politically biased mainstream media. By creating “scientific polls” that, through the use of oversampling, skew the perception of a candidate’s popularity, they are manipulating the masses into thinking there is no reason to show up at the polls. To date, or at least until WikiLeaks exposed the scheme, the Clinton team strategy was working.

This scheme of the Clinton campaign to propagandize the polling data just before Election Day, quite successful until it was exposed, is exactly what Donald Trump and his surrogates are talking about when they make the argument that “the system is rigged.”

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The Clintons — At the End of All Things Epic greed, power, and pride: Where’s the bottom? With Bill and Hillary, there’s no telling. By Victor Davis Hanson —

Posted By on November 1st, 2016

What was the Clinton telos? The end point, the aim of all their lying, cheating, criminality, dishonor, and degradation?

Given the latest Wiener scandals coming on top of the latest WikiLeaks scandals, we wonder, what did the Clintons really wish to end up as — and why? Are they Goethe’s Faust or tortured souls crushed by the weight of their money bags in Dante’s Fourth Circle of Hell?

For a few criminals, remorse comes with old age; but for the Clintons, near-70 was to be the capstone, the last chance to trump all their prior shenanigans. They were artists of amorality, and the election of 2016 was to be their magnum opus.

Collate the FBI reopened investigation, WikiLeaks Podesta trove, revelations about the Clinton Foundation, the e-mail–server scandal, the DNC disclosures, and the various off-the-cuff campaign remarks of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and one then ponders what was the point of the Clinton shakedowns, the loss of reputation, the crude lawbreaking, as they neared their seventh decade. To paraphrase Barack Obama, in his progressive sermonizing on making enough money, did the two ever think they had enough money, enough honors, enough power already?

The Hillary/Bill fortune — generated by pay-for-play influence peddling on the proposition that Bill would return to the White House under Hillary’s aegis and reward friends while punishing enemies — hit a reported $150 million some time ago, a fortune built not on farming, mining, insurance, finance, high-tech, or manufacturing, but on skimming off money. The Clintons are simply grifters whose insider access to government gave them the power to make rich people richer.

Long gone was the Scrooge-like need to write off used underwear as charitable tax deductions or to play 4-trillion-to-one odds in rigging a $100,000 cattle-futures profit on a $1,000 “investment,” or Hillary’s decade-and-a-half as a corporate lawyer masquerading as a children’s advocate. How pathetic the minor league Whitewater cons must seem now to the multimillionaire Clintons — such a tawdry ancient example of amateurish shakedowns when compared with the sophistication of real profiteering through the humanitarian-sounding, high-brow, corrupt Clinton Foundation.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Obama Won’t Vote With America at the UN Under Obama, the United States won’t defend the United States. November 1, 2016 Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 1st, 2016

A generation ago the Communist tyranny in Cuba demanded that the United Nations condemn America for the embargo. The brutal Castro regime’s rant accused the United States of threatening “nuclear annihilation,” “countless acts of sabotage and plans to assassinate Cuban leaders.”

On a cold day in October, the European left-wing activist serving as UN Ambassador announced to applause that her administration would no longer be voting to defend the US at the UN.

“UN Member States have voted overwhelmingly for a General Assembly resolution that condemns the U.S. embargo and calls for it to be ended. The United States has always voted against this resolution. Today the United States will abstain,” Samantha Power said.

“Thank you,” she added, acknowledging the applause.

Under Obama, the United States would no longer defend the United States. A generation ago the Communists had been in Cuba. Now they were in Washington D.C.

Instead of defending America, Obama’s chosen representative agreed that our Communist enemies had a point about our lack of human rights and our imperialist foreign policy.

“Let me be among the first to acknowledge – as our Cuban counterparts often point out – that the United States has work to do in fulfilling these rights for our own citizens. And we know that at times in our history, U.S. leaders and citizens used the pretext of promoting democracy and human rights in the region to justify actions that have left a deep legacy of mistrust,” she said.

If the Cuban representative had been in her place, he could not have done much better. Communist Cuban propaganda was now being parroted by Ambassador Power. If the Castro dictatorship wanted to save money, it could shut down its propaganda department and outsource the labor to Washington D.C.

The Cuban ambassador boasted that Cuban Communists had “rid ourselves of US imperialism” and proclaimed that, “We will never go back to capitalism.” He declared that the resolution was a powerful message to “the peoples of the world.” The message is indeed unmistakable.

Ben Rhodes, the close Obama adviser who sold the media on the Iran sellout, curtly tweeted his justification, “No reason to vote to defend a failed policy we oppose.”

Who is this “we”?

POLITICS Comments turned off

How Trump Happened How the #NeverTrumpers sunk themselves. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on November 1st, 2016

The chorus of NeverTrumpers is wailing ever louder as election day and Hillary’s supposed victory approach. After more than a year of complaining about Trump crashing their political soiree, the Republicans attacking Trump still don’t seem to get how their own behavior contributed to the perception that they are out-of-touch elites disdainful of the Republican masses.

A recent example comes from premier NeverTrumper Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal. In his column Stephens bids farewell to a Republican Party stupid enough to nominate Trump, contrasting it with his imagined Golden Age of Republican policy excellence that Trump and his followers have destroyed. One policy in particular, immigration, reveals the distance between the political and pundit elite and the voting masses that helped make Trump the nominee:

At a 1980 Republican primary debate in Houston, candidates George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan were asked whether the children of illegal immigrants should be allowed to attend public schools for free. Mr. Bush said they should. “We’re creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law,” he lamented.

Reagan agreed. Instead of “putting up a fence,” he asked, “why don’t we . . . make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then, while they’re working and earning here, they pay taxes here.” For good measure, Reagan suggested we should “open the border both ways.”

Where, in the populist fervor to build a wall with Mexico and deport millions of human beings, is that Republican Party today?

Take Bush senior’s statement first. It repeats basically the same clichés that the bipartisan Gang of Eight recycled in 2013 during their push for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, another euphemism for amnesty. All those hard-working, family-values illegal immigrants are embryonic conservatives, we were told, who just need legal status and social recognition so they can “come out of the shadows,” as John McCain said, and start voting Republican. The political apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: son Jeb ended his presidential ambitions by calling illegal immigration an “act of love.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Democratic Panic The renewed criminal investigation into Hillary’s misdeeds — and how it could affect the election. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on November 1st, 2016

Democrats are in panic mode a week out from Election Day as they try to spin away the FBI’s newly announced discovery of a hoard of two-thirds of a million potentially sensitive emails apparently related to Hillary Clinton’s catastrophic tenure as America’s top diplomat.

Partisan hack James Carville is spewing wild conspiracy theories.

I think it is an outrage and I think the fact that the KGB is involved in this election is an outrage and I think the American people ought to take their democracy back regardless of what the press wants to do and the excuses they want to make for [FBI Director James] Comey. That’s what I think.

He added, “this is in effect an attempt to hijack an election. It ought to be called for what it is.”

Just this past July, Comey was praised by Democrats far and wide for his wisdom in opting not to pursue Clinton. There is evidence federal officials tried to hinder various investigations of Clinton and the endlessly corrupt Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, which functions as a bribe processing center for would-be president Hillary Clinton.

But Democrats have suddenly flipped sides, denouncing Comey as an enemy of the republic now that he has opened an investigation into the newly discovered emails.

Carville, long known as the “Ragin’ Cajun,” is apoplectic because he thinks these emails could change the dynamics of the election.

The old Clinton hand may be right.

Investigators found 650,000 emails on a laptop computer they believe was used at home by disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D) and his wife, longtime senior Hillary aide Huma Abedin. The computer is reportedly the same device serial pervert Weiner used to send sexual messages to an underage girl.

“Underlying metadata suggests thousands of those messages could have been sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter,” reports the Wall Street Journal. Some of the information emailed may have been classified.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Phony War Against CO2 Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide has helped raise global food production and reduce poverty. By Rodney W. Nichols and Harrison H. Schmitt

Posted By on November 1st, 2016

National polls show that climate change is low on the list of voters’ priorities. For good reason: In the U.S., and for much of the world, the most dangerous environmental pollutants have been cleaned up. U.S. emissions of particulates, metals and varied gases—all of these: ozone, lead, carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen and sulfur—fell almost 70% between 1970 and 2014.

Further reductions will come from improved technologies such as catalytic removal of oxides of nitrogen and more-efficient sulfur scrubbers. This is a boon to human health.

But a myth persists that is both unscientific and immoral to perpetuate: that the beneficial gas carbon dioxide ranks among hazardous pollutants. It does not.

Unlike genuine pollutants, carbon dioxide (CO2) is an odorless, colorless gas. Every human being exhales about two pounds of CO2 a day, along with a similar amount of water vapor. CO2 is nontoxic to people and animals and is a vital nutrient to plants. It is also a greenhouse gas which helps maintain earth at a habitable temperature.

Fear of excessive warming from more CO2 in the atmosphere, including that released from human activity, has caused some people to advocate substantial and expensive reductions in CO2 emissions. But observations, such as those on our CO2 Coalition website, show that increased CO2 levels over the next century will cause modest and beneficial warming—perhaps as much as one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit)—and that this will be an even larger benefit to agriculture than it is now. The costs of emissions regulations, which will be paid by everyone, will be punishingly high and will provide no benefits to most people anywhere in the world.

In 2013 the level of U.S. farm output was about 2.7 times its 1948 level, and productivity was growing at an average annual rate of 1.52%. From 2001 to 2013, world-wide, global output of total crop and livestock commodities was expanding at an average rate of 2.52% a year.

This higher food security reduces poverty and increases well being and self-sufficiency everywhere, especially in the poorest parts of the developing countries. Along with better plant varieties, cropping practices and fertilizer, CO2 has contributed to this welcome increase in productivity. CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Meltdown at Justice Attorney General Lynch abdicated her duty in the Clinton probes.

Posted By on November 1st, 2016

Fewer than three of 10 Americans trust government to do the right thing always or most of the time, Gallup reports, and the years since 2007 are “the longest period of low trust in government in more than 50 years.” The details emerging about the multiple investigations into Hillary Clinton explain a lot about this ebbing public confidence in institutions such as the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation.
***

Start with Attorney General Loretta Lynch. A cavalcade of former Justice heavyweights are now assailing FBI director James Comey for reopening the Clinton email file, and Justice sources are leaking that the director went rogue despite Ms. Lynch’s counsel not to alert Congress so close to an election.

But Mr. Comey works for the Attorney General. If she thinks Mr. Comey was breaking Justice rules by sending Friday’s letter to Congress, then she had every right to order him not do so. If Mr. Comey sent the letter anyway, and he didn’t resign, Ms. Lynch could then ask President Obama to fire him.

Our guess is that she didn’t order Mr. Comey not to send the letter precisely because she feared Mr. Comey would resign—and cause an even bigger political storm. But the worst approach is to let a subordinate do something you believe is wrong and then whisper afterwards that you told him not to. The phrase for that is political cowardice.

Ms. Lynch’s abdication began when she and her prosecutors declined to empanel a grand jury. It continued in June after her supposedly coincidental rendezvous with Bill Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac. She could have told Hillary Clinton’s husband that the appointment was inappropriate, or refused to let him board her plane. She says the conversation was “social,” but she allowed the ex-President to create the appearance of a conflict of interest.

“The fact that the meeting that I had is now casting a shadow over how people are going to view that work is something that I take seriously, and deeply and painfully,” Ms. Lynch conceded at an Aspen forum in July. The Clinton campaign compounded the problem by gossiping to the press that Mrs. Clinton would keep Ms. Lynch on as AG if she wins.

Ms. Lynch also abandoned her post when Mr. Comey staged his July media event dissecting the evidence in the Clinton email case and exonerating the Democratic nominee. The FBI’s job is to build a case, not make prosecutorial decisions. Yet Ms. Lynch later told Congress that rather than make up her own mind on the evidence she would merely “accept the recommendation of that team” at the FBI “and there was no basis not to accept it.” CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

WHITE HOUSE DEFENDS COMEY

Posted By on November 1st, 2016

White House: Comey Not ‘Intentionally Trying to Influence’ Election By Bridget Johnson

“And that is a posture that I won’t change and it is a posture that speaks to the kind of institutional responsibilities that are investigated — that are vested here in the White House, which is preserving the independence and integrity of independent investigations conducted by the Department of Justice,” he said.

Earnest said he didn’t “have any independent knowledge of how those decisions were made” or what factors were considered to release information about a new path of investigation since “all the way back to July when Director Comey announced the results of the investigation and spoke at length to the public about his decision not to prosecute Secretary Clinton.”

“Included in that news conference were some rather harsh condemnations of the way that Secretary Clinton handled that situation,” he noted. “Director Comey also testified before Congress at some length, on camera, under oath, and — about the investigation, and some of that testimony provided fodder to Secretary Clinton’s critics.”

The press secretary said he would “neither defend nor criticize what Director Comey has decided to communicate to the public about this investigation.”

“What I will say is that the Department of Justice in our democracy is given expansive authority to conduct investigations.”

Earnest added it’s “important in the mind of the president that those authorities are tempered by an adherence to longstanding tradition and practice and norms that limit public discussion of facts that are collected in the context of those investigations.”

HOMELAND SECURITY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Former National Guardsman Pleads Guilty in ISIS Attack Plot By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on November 1st, 2016

A former Army National Guardsman arrested in July on charges of assisting an ISIS plot to attack the United States pleaded guilty last week to attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.

After Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, 27, of Sterling, Va., was taken into custody, his siblings accused the FBI of setting up the naturalized citizen from Sierra Leone.

“He is just another Mohamed that got set up,” his brother, Chernor Jalloh, told The Intercept in July. “He sympathizes with the oppressed abroad. … The FBI used his love for those being oppressed against him by inciting him in all manners that they deemed fit.”

Court documents said a member of ISIS who is now dead and was plotting an attack here introduced Jalloh and someone in the United States who was an informant for the FBI in March 2016. Jalloh had met the ISIS member and others during a six-month trip to Nigeria. Jalloh met twice with the informant and told this person that he’d decided not to re-enlist in the Virginia Army National Guard after hearing lectures from late star al-Qaeda recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki; he also told the informant that he’d frequently thought about conducting an attack in the U.S., according to the statement of facts filed with the plea agreement.

Jalloh said he was inspired by the July 2015 Chattanooga attack and the November 2009 Fort Hood attack.

Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office Paul M. Abbate said Jalloh “purchased a weapon following multiple attempts to procure assault rifles and handguns, believing they would be used in an ISIL-directed attack on U.S. soil.”

Jalloh bought an assault rifle from a Northern Virginia gun dealer on July 2; even though he test-fired the gun first, it was rendered inoperable before he took it home. He was arrested the next day.

“Jalloh also provided money on multiple occasions to support ISIL after attempting to join the terrorist group,” Abbate said. This included a $500 transfer that Jalloh thought was going to ISIS but went to an undercover FBI employee.

Jalloh faces up to 20 years in prison when he’s sentenced in February.