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John Oliver Eviscerates the Facts on Voter ID By Christian Schneider

Posted By on February 19th, 2016

As Shakespeare wrote in King Lear, “Jesters do oft prove prophets.” But this maxim retains the possibility that the best jesters are also sometimes fools.

On Sunday, one of America’s most famous funnymen, Last Week Tonight host John Oliver, ridiculed states that would require voters to show picture identification to cast a ballot. Over the course of his 14-minute bit, Oliver pulled out every predictable talking point against voter ID, including the idea that “studies show” that such laws “disproportionately impact African-American and Latino voters.”

Naturally, Oliver’s frequently funny tirade was hailed by his progressive fans for doing all sorts of violence to an esoteric concept. (“John Oliver decimates public funding for stadiums! John Oliver decapitates patent trolling! John Oliver sets fire to, disembowels, then urinates on the pharmaceutical pricing framework!”)

On Tuesday, however, it was the state of Wisconsin that had the last laugh. Just one business day after Oliver predicted mass disenfranchisement due to voter-ID laws, Wisconsin held its first election with the voter-ID requirement. And according to a study by the University of My Eyeballs, turnout increased 55 percent statewide over the last similar spring-primary election.

In 2013 — the last contested statewide supreme-court election — around 364,000 voters turned out in Wisconsin. On Tuesday night, that number skyrocketed to about 564,000 voters. Even the 2011 Supreme Court primary, which took place during the electric Wisconsin public-union battle, drew only around 420,000 voters — well short of Tuesday’s total.

And the turnout bump wasn’t due to rural Caucasians flocking to the polls en masse. In the city of Milwaukee, which is 53 percent ethnic minority, the vote nearly doubled, from 34,000 to 65,000. Earlier, local election watchers had predicted a turnout of about 30,000.

Further, there were scant reports of people denied the right to vote on Election Day. One short story in a local Madison progressive paper reported that a college student was unable to vote because the student lacked an in-state driver’s license. What the story did not mention was that the student was entitled to cast a provisional ballot, which would have allowed him to prove his residency by Friday of this week.

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That Time Trump Sued a Writer — and Lost Big By Ian Tuttle

Posted By on February 19th, 2016

Tim O’Brien did not set out to write a conclusive assessment of Donald Trump’s wealth. But it was those three pages in a 275-page book that occasioned what is, even in the annals of frivolous Trump lawsuits, a special display of petty, thin-skinned litigiousness.

In October 2005, O’Brien, then a business reporter for the New York Times, published a book about Donald Trump, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald. The book was not a hatchet job. Not only did O’Brien interview friends and employees and business associates and political rivals and much of the rest of the Who’s Who of the World of Donald, he also chatted with the man himself — repeatedly. They met for formal interviews in Trump’s various homes and offices. Trump drove O’Brien around in his Ferrari and in his Mercedes. They watched Pulp Fiction together on Trump’s gold-laden private jet. It all went into the book, from which emerges a portrait of a complex, fickle, charming, self-obsessed, cinematic American original.

Of course, no book about Trump can avoid the quasi-impenetrable question of his wealth. In 2004, O’Brien had co-authored a piece for the Times detailing Trump’s financial woes — he had recently filed for the third of what would be four Chapter 11 bankruptcies — and quoted anonymous sources who reported that Trump’s wealth was not nearly what he claimed; in fact, it was in the hundreds of millions, they said. (Contemporaneous reports in the Washington Post and Time magazine suggested the same.) Trump, meanwhile, notoriously unreliable in his own estimates, offered figures ranging from $1.7 billion to $9.5 billion. In TrumpNation, O’Brien cited those numbers, alongside “three people with direct knowledge of Donald’s finances” who estimated his wealth was “somewhere between $150 million and $250 million.” Trump denied it, in his usual colorful fashion: “You can go ahead and speak to guys who have four-hundred-pound wives at home who are jealous of me, but the guys who really know me know I’m a great builder.”

Despite his having included all of this information, including Trump’s denial, Trump accused O’Brien of cherry-picking his information to hurt Trump’s reputation. He sued him for $5 billion in damages.

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Our Foreign Policy Problems Go Well beyond Iraq By Jonah Goldberg —

Posted By on February 19th, 2016

We get it already. The Iraq war was a mistake.

Indeed, on this point pretty much everyone agrees. Jeb Bush, the brother of the president who launched the war, has said so. So has Hillary Clinton, the only presidential candidate in either party to have actually voted to invade Iraq (though she refused to admit her vote was a mistake until fairly recently).

The only disagreements on the Republican side are about the degree and nature of the mistake. Catch Donald Trump in a glandular moment and he’ll say that George W. Bush knowingly sent thousands of Americans to their deaths based on a lie. Ask Trump when he’s in a more mature mood — or when he gets bad press for his slanders — and he’ll say he doesn’t know whether it was a lie.

The other GOP candidates agree that it was a mistake in hindsight, though most say, rightly, it was defensible at the time. Indeed, some of us believe that we could have turned a mistake into a success had Barack Obama not been in such a hurry to squander the hard-won victories of President Bush’s surge.

On the Democratic side, there’s a lot less nuance. Senator Bernie Sanders insists that Clinton’s vote for the war is all you need to know about her foreign-policy judgment. Clinton’s reply is, “One vote in 2002 is not a plan to defeat ISIS.”

Clinton is right, of course. But at this point, plans are less important than the will to put them into action. I suspect there’s no shortage of plans to get the job done sitting in Obama’s inbox. What’s missing is a presidential commitment to implementing them.

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Iran Promotes the Terrorist Behind the Deaths of 241 Americans How Obama has emboldened the Iranian terror state. Dr. Majid Rafizadeh see note please

Posted By on February 19th, 2016

That was a major policy and defense failure of President Ronald Reagan and his Sec. of Defense Caspar Weinberger…who cut and ran. Furthermore, Weinberger refused to send the injured to nearby Israel- a helicopter ride away- whose truma units in hospitals are the best in the world and dispatched the wounded to Germany…a longer trip that may have caused more deaths….rsk

In 1983 a horrific act of terrorism killed 241 American servicemen (220 Marines, 18 sailors, and three soldiers) in Beirut, Lebanon. The bombing marked the deadliest attack on Americans overseas since World War II.

All the evidence pointed the mastermind behind the crime as Brigadier General Hossein Dehghan, then commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and thirty years later in 2013 — under “moderate” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani — Hossein Dehghan was appointed Minister of Defense. In other words, Iran instigated one of the most horrendous terrorist acts against America and promoted the man who did it.

This year the same General Hossein Dehghan also seems to be in charge of the recent arrest of Americans sailors in an attempt to humiliate and mock the US. Iranian State TV showed one of the US Navy sailors crying in captivity and later showed Iranians cheering and celebrating in the streets at the humiliation the sailors went through.

Now Hossein Dehghan has shown up this week in Russia — just after the mullahs of Iran received billions of dollars from the Obama’s administration last week from sanction relief — and is spending billions of dollars to purchase offensive weapons that can only be used against conventional enemies like Israel and the United States.

Dehghan points out that Iran needs to “seriously focus on its air force and fighter jets” while adding “We are moving toward a contract. We told them that we need to be involved in the production (of the plane) as well.” According to a Russian source, “Iran would like to buy Russia’s latest S-400 Triumph anti-aircraft missile system and has made no secret of it.” On the eve of his visit to Moscow Dehghan openly said to the Iranian media they want to purchase the S-400s.

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The ‘Unholy Alliance’ Comes to Campus How the BDS Movement turns left-wing students into Jew-haters. Sara Dogan

Posted By on February 19th, 2016

Conservative author David Horowitz has long written about the “Unholy Alliance” that exists between Islamic extremists and the American Left. Now, a new series of photographs of campus propaganda posters reveals how this unholy alliance plays out on American campuses where students are incited to join the Islamic war against the Jews of Israel with appeals to their sense of “social justice” and desire to address historic wrongs such as racism, colonialism and the mistreatment of women.

Many naïve Jewish students are seduced into joining these anti-Israel coalitions out of a desire to help the oppressed but find themselves ensnared in a Hamas-directed campaign to commit genocide against the Jews themselves.

Campus leaders of the Hamas campaign are two groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), as well as its less outwardly political counterpart, the Muslim Students Association (MSA). Both were created by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose spiritual leader Yousef al-Qaradawi has called on Muslims to finish the job that Hitler started. The Brotherhood is godfather to the anti-Israel terror group Hamas, whose charter calls for the extermination of the Jews. SJP and MSA conduct annual anti-Israel hate-fests known as “Israeli Apartheid Weeks” during which they erect mock “apartheid walls” plastered with Hamas propaganda, including claims that Israel is an “apartheid” state which seeks to shed the blood of Palestinian children. A near-omnipresent image on these walls is a series of four false and genocidal maps purporting to show the Jewish infiltration and colonization of the Arab nation of “Palestine” from 1947 to the present.

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Democrats Blocked Bush Judicial Nominee for Entire Presidential Term Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on February 19th, 2016

When the left sputters about the importance of getting a prompt vote on an Obama nominee, let’s just remind them about Judge Priscilla Owen.

Owen was a moderate and she was highly rated. She was also no Alito, Bork or Thomas. But when she was nominated for the Fifth Circuit in the spring of ’01, Senate Democrats denied her a vote for four years until the spring of ’05. When the vote finally came up, Obama voted against her.

That’s the length of an entire presidential term. This wasn’t running out the clock on a lame duck presidency. Senate Democrats refused the “up and down vote” they’re demanding to a nominee for 4 years. They filibustered her and threw tantrums that would have embarrassed a six-year-old.

Both Owen and Estrada were originally nominated by President Bush May 9, 2001.

“They have been waiting almost two years for a vote,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said May 1 before the vote. “Both were rated ‘well-qualified’ by the American Bar Association. That is the highest possible rating that the American Bar Association gives. It is also, according to Democrats, the gold standard that they would use to judge whether nominees were qualified.”

Democrats also are subverting “the spoken will of the people,” Land said, noting that voters gave President Bush “an unprecedented mid-term gain in the Senate and the House” in 2002.

Instead of “bowing to the clearly expressed will of the people,” Land said, the Democrats have “carried their obstructionist tactics to new lows.”

And what crime did Owen commit?

Owen is a 10-year veteran of the Texas Supreme Court who won her last re-election campaign with 84 percent of the vote. When Bush nominated her for the federal bench, the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary unanimously gave her its highest rating.

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Israel’s Dangerous Consensus 99% of Mossad and Shin Bet officers are leftists? Caroline Glick

Posted By on February 19th, 2016

Recently I found myself in a chance conversation with a former head of the Mossad’s Directorate of Operations. The former master spy, whom I had never met before, knew that I am a journalist.

He was aware of my political views.

Directing his remarks at a friend of mine, he declared that 99 percent of Mossad and Shin Bet officers are leftists. He then added triumphantly that according to a former commander of the air force whose name he cited, 99% of the air force’s pilots are similarly leftists.

Initially, I dismissed his comments as obnoxious chest-beating by a man who felt like irritating a group of right-wingers.

But given the source, it is impossible to simply brush off what he said. And to be clear, far more troubling than the prospect that Israel’s security establishment is uniformly leftist is the notion that there is any intellectual or ideological uniformity of any kind in the ranks of our defense community.

But given our defense community’s record in recent years, there is ample reason to believe that there is more than a grain of salt in the spy chief’s boast.

Consider Israel’s handling of Gaza.

According to a number of senior officers, at the end of Operation Protective Edge in 2014, the IDF’s senior commanders convened in Tel Aviv to determine how to handle the Hamas regime going forward.

During Protective Edge, Israel learned a few things about Hamas and about the strategic balance of power between Israel and Hamas in the region and the world.

On the ground Israel learned that Hamas bases its offensive capabilities on civilian infrastructure.

Hamas placed its missiles, its communications centers and its operational commands inside civilian buildings including private homes, hospitals, clinics, schools, mosques and UN offices.

As far as the strategic balance and resources of both sides, during the war Hamas enjoyed the de facto backing of the Obama administration.

Throughout the war, the administration pressured Israel to accept Hamas’s cease-fire terms as dictated by its state sponsors Qatar and Turkey.

On the other hand, Israel was able to avoid bowing to the US’s pro-Hamas demands because throughout the conflict we enjoyed the open support of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In other words, during the war, Israel discovered that Hamas’s military strategy was based entirely on an implicit alliance with the West, which attacked Israel for targeting Hamas’s military infrastructure, which, again, was all based in civilian structures.

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How Obama Denied Conservative Judges a Vote Conservative nominees were blocked from 4 to 6 years Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on February 19th, 2016

On a hot day in June, the grandson of a bank president took to the floor of the Senate to denounce the daughter of sharecroppers. “I feel compelled to rise on this issue to express, in the strongest terms, my opposition to the nomination of Janice Rogers Brown to the DC Circuit,” Senator Obama said.

Born in segregated Alabama, Janice Rogers Brown had been a leftist like Obama before becoming conservative. When Obama rose to denounce the respected African-American jurist for her political views it had been almost a full two years since President Bush had nominated her in the summer of ’03.

Obama had arrived a few months earlier on his way to the White House and was eager to impress his left-wing backers with his political radicalism. He held forth complaining that Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who had gone to segregated schools and become the first African-American woman on the California Supreme Court, was guilty of “an unyielding belief in an unfettered free market.”

And he filibustered Judge Brown, along with other nominee, trying to deny them a vote.

“She has equated altruism with communism. She equates even the most modest efforts to level life’s playing field with somehow inhibiting our liberty,” he fumed.

Brown, who due to her family background knew far more of slavery than Obama, had indeed warned about the dangers of a powerful government. “In the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery. And we no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it. We demand more. Big government is not just the opiate of the masses. It is the opiate — the drug of choice — for multinational corporations and single moms, for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers and militant senior citizens.”

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Obama’s Syria Non-Strategy is Imploding : Fred Fleitz

Posted By on February 19th, 2016

Secretary of State John Kerry got the headline he was looking for last week when the press reported that the United States and Russia agreed on a cease-fire in Syria that would allow the delivery of food and humanitarian aid.

Kerry actually said a “cessation of hostilities” had been agreed to, not a cease-fire. Kerry also referred to this development as a “pause” in hostilities that would begin in one week “after consultations with Syrian parties.”

Kerry’s careful wording reflected the reality that the Syrian government and Syrian rebels have yet to accept this agreement. Kerry also omitted another glaring problem with this so-called cessation of hostilities: it will not apply to Russian air strikes.

The reason for this is that the agreement excludes attacks on ISIS and the al Qaeda-backed al-Nusra Front because they are terrorist groups. Russia is using this exception to justify continuing its bombing of other Syrian rebel groups by falsely claiming they are terrorists.

President Obama objected to Russia’s position by issuing a statement on Sunday calling on Moscow to cease “its air campaign against moderate opposition forces in Syria.”

The cease-fire agreement was the latest in a series of diplomatic initiatives by the Obama administration to make it appear that it is doing something about the Syria crisis. The agreement was in response to the stalled peace process begun by Kerry last fall that produced a vague outline for peace talks. This outline called for a peace process that would lead to “credible, inclusive, non-sectarian governance, followed by a new constitution and elections” to be administered under UN supervision.” It also was agreed that formal peace talks under UN auspices would begin on January 1st.

The peace talks outline left several major issues unresolved. There was no agreement on a cease-fire or the political future of Syrian President Assad. There also were disagreements over which groups would be designated terrorists and disallowed from attending the talks.

Instead of moving toward a peaceful resolution after the November peace outline, Russia and Syria intensified hostilities. Aided by Russian bombers and Iranian fighters, the Syrian army last month began an assault on the rebel stronghold of Aleppo, causing an exodus of 50,000 refugees. The residents of several rebel towns are facing starvation because of a new Syrian army strategy called “surround and starve.”

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The Dangerous Hope of Two-Staters by Barry Shaw

Posted By on February 19th, 2016

I am in bewilderment of those who have made a fifty year career, costing billions of dollars, in pursuit of an elusive Two-State Solution.

Personal disclosure. I was a member of this cult until the harsh reality of truth hit my hometown of Netanya in the form of post-Oslo Accord, Arafat-inspired, Palestinian terrorism.

I was fortunate. I was hit with a psychological smack in the head. I got off easily. Too many of our citizens were killed or badly injured by the incessant suicide bombings, car bombs and shootings that only stopped by Operation Defensive Shield which targeted the terrorist cells under Palestinian control.

It is shocking how persistent people are to pursue this Two-State Solution as if it is the only oasis in a barren, arid, desert. But this fifty year trek toward a shimmering distant mirage draws sloggers toward an unreachable goal. Had they looked left or right they may have discovered alternative routes to peace, rather than doggedly plod toward a fantasy.

Way back in January 1988, a New York Times article stated that “Gaza could be the Singapore of the Middle East.” So it could if Gazan Arabs weren’t so passionately and religiously bound to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The twisted tribal code of Arab honor leaves them with a sense of shame and inferiority when Israeli cooperation and assistance is offered to them. Rather than benefit and prosper they grudgingly accept largesse while plotting to chop off the hand extended to them in peace. The resentment can be seen in the ‘anti-normalization’ campaigning of BDS activists encouraged by a large segment of the Palestinian leadership.

Truth be told, the signs were there for all to see decades ago. Resear