POLITICS Comments turned off

DJT the SOB Trump is not ‘crude but effective’; he’s just crude. By Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on March 4th, 2016

‘He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” That observation is attributed (possibly erroneously) to Franklin D. Roosevelt, expressing his feelings about Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza García. That’s the American version of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and it has produced mixed results as a foreign-policy guideline: Saddam Hussein, the Afghan muhajideen, and the Pakistanis were our sons of bitches right up until they weren’t. Moammar Qaddafi was our son of a bitch for about five minutes, and a fat lot of good it did him.

Strange thing: A fair number of purported Republicans annoyed at enemy-of-my-enemy thinking as a rule of thumb for international affairs have embraced it as a model for choosing a president. This isn’t going to work out well for them.

Donald Trump is not your son of a bitch. He’s just a son of a bitch.

To long for a strongman to rule over us with a whip hand is unworthy of Americans, but Americans are human beings, too, and they suffer from a common human affliction: They desire to be dominated by a strong man. The man on the horse offers them protection for their vulnerability, direction for their directionlessness, strength for their weakness. All he demands in return is servility, which devotees of Der Apfelstrudelführer — singing hilariously homoerotic hymns to his purported status as “alpha male” — are all too happy to provide.

It has provided an embarrassing display: Ann Coulter, who affirmed that she’d be happy to support Trump even if he “wants to perform abortions in White House” — actual quote, there — huffed that Marco Rubio was being unseemly when he criticized her man on his own terms. Sean Hannity, who purported to be a Catholic, repeated ancient Martin Luther-era slanders against the papacy and the Catholic Church when the pope seemed to criticize the great man.

“Abject” is not a strong enough word for Laura Ingraham’s performance. Point to Trump’s corruption and his support of odious politicos ranging from Chuck Schumer to Nancy Pelosi to Harry Reid to Herself, and they’ll scoff: “He was a businessman — what do you expect?” Well, George Soros is a businessman, too — what do you expect? Point to Trump’s inconsistencies — the so-called conservative does not believe in free enterprise, property rights, the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, or the rest of the Bill of Rights — and people who denounce George Will for once having had dinner with Barack Obama when he was president-elect will weep that you’re a “purist.”

Donald Trump has lied about practically everything a human being can lie about — ask his wives and children — but he did tell the truth about one thing: He really could shoot people down on Fifth Avenue (assuming that the TV tough guy actually knows how to operate a firearm) and none of these unsouled minions would bat an eye, their eyes being exhausted from batting them at Der Apfelstrudelführer.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Donald ‘D-Minus’ Trump: Headed to a Courtroom Near You By Deroy Murdock

Posted By on March 4th, 2016

Donald “D-minus” Trump won big on Tuesday evening, but lost big on Tuesday morning. Before scoring victories in seven primaries, Trump suffered a legal setback that could explode in his face later this election year.

Donald “D-minus” Trump won big on Tuesday evening, but lost big on Tuesday morning. Before scoring victories in seven primaries, Trump suffered a legal setback that could explode in his face later this election year.

A four-judge Appellate Court panel in Albany rejected Trump’s motion to dismiss Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s (D., N.Y.) $40 million fraud lawsuit on behalf of some 5,000 students who spent up to $35,000 at Trump University. They learned little, and now ask — as Billy Joel once did — “Is that all you get for your money?” The judges unanimously cleared this case for trial. Thus, the potential Republican presidential nominee soon could address twelve Manhattan jurors under oath, rather than 12,000 Michigan voters under blue skies.

“I’ve won most of the lawsuits,” Trump told CNN February 25. “I could settle it right now for very little money, but I don’t want to do it out of principle.”

However, the Washington Post gave Trump’s denial three out of four Pinocchios for being “mostly false.” Trump has won specific court rulings. Regardless, he faces three suits that denounce him for highly shady business practices.

New York State’s case accuses Trump of “engaging in persistent fraudulent, illegal and deceptive conduct in connection with the operation of Trump University.”

Specifically, Schneiderman states that Trump & Co. “used the name ‘Trump University’ even though they lacked the charter necessary under New York law to call themselves a University.” State officials told them in 2005 that they were breaking the law. Nonetheless, “Trump University did not change its name until May 2010 and never received a license to operate in the state. As a result, many students believed they were attending a University, when they were not.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UN Passes Toughly Worded Piece of Paper against North Korea Why the Security Council’s latest sanctions resolution will be unlikely to deter Pyongyang. by Joseph Klein

Posted By on March 4th, 2016

The United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution on March 2nd that imposes tough new sanctions and tightens some of its existing measures against North Korea (the DPRK). Resolution 2270 (2016) is the Security Council’s strongest response to date to the rogue North Korean regime’s ongoing nuclear and ballistic missile-related test activities in violation of a series of prior Security Council resolutions. The triggering events leading up to this latest resolution were North Korea’s January 2016 nuclear test and February rocket launch. These provocations were too much even for China, North Korea’s closest trading partner, which cooperated constructively with the United States to reach consensus on the resolution’s text after several weeks of negotiations.

President Obama issued a statement following the vote that highlighted his belief in the importance of the resolution: “Today, the international community, speaking with one voice, has sent Pyongyang a simple message: North Korea must abandon these dangerous programs and choose a better path for its people.”

In reality, the latest resolution is just a piece of paper that is unlikely to change North Korea’s behavior. U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, acknowledged that “the true measure of Resolution 2270 will be whether the rigor with which states implement these sanctions matches the rigor we can anticipate the DPRK will apply to attempting to evade them – that’s what they do.”

In fact, unless the United States and its principal allies in the Asian Pacific region and elsewhere are prepared to vigorously enforce the resolution’s terms, including broader restrictions on trade and financial transactions, a more comprehensive arms embargo and the new mandatory cargo inspection regime, North Korea will be more emboldened than ever. Just hours after the Security Council passed Resolution 2270, North Korea showed what it thought of the resolution by firing six short-range projectiles into the sea.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hamas Supplying ISIS w/Bombs, Guns and Communications Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 4th, 2016

There have been plenty of protests that Israel is “strangling” Gaza with its blockade. That Gaza is an “open air prison” or even a “concentration camp”. The truth is that Hamas is facing restrictions because it’s a terrorist organization that keeps trying to kill people.

The following letter published by Memri also reveals that it’s allied with ISIS in the Sinai is supplying guns and bombs to ISIS.

Anyone who calls for ending restrictions on Gaza is calling for more weapons to be transferred to ISIS. They are a traitor and a terrorist supporter in every possible sense of the word.

On February 24, 2016, a letter from an Islamic State (ISIS) fighter to ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi was posted on social media. In it, the fighter strongly protests the close ties and cooperation between ISIS’s Sinai province and Hamas, particularly Hamas’s military wing.

The letter lays out a variety of Islamic objections to the problem that Hamas has not sworn allegiance to the Caliph of the Islamic State, making them apostates, but Hamas and ISIS in the Sinai nevertheless maintain a close working cooperation. It also lists some of the details of the cooperation between ISIS in the Sinai and Hamas.

“1. Sinai province is smuggling weapons for Hamas in Gaza, because of the province’s fighters’ expert knowledge of the [smuggling] routes from Libya, Sudan, and Egypt.

“2. Sinai province depends very much on Hamas and Al-Qassam for weapons and for explosives and ammunition. There are direct and continuous supply routes from Hamas to Sinai province. The Al-Qassam factories operate assembly lines for manufacturing explosive devices and bombs for the Sinai province, but do not stamp the Al-Qassam logo on them, as they usually do.

The Al-Qassam factories produce most particularly the rather famous Kassam rockets, but other weapons as well. So Hamas is supplying bombs for ISIS attacks on Egyptian forces (so you can see why Egypt has been cracking down so hard on Hamas), but it’s possible that some Hamas weapons filter beyond ISIS in Egypt to core ISIS as well. Certainly to ISIS in Libya.

This is a serious problem that merits investigation, much like the IEDs that Iran supplied to Jihadis in Iraq which killed so many American soldiers.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Clinton, Libya and Israel Will Obama’s disastrous foreign policy live on? Caroline Glick

Posted By on March 4th, 2016

The messages from Washington ahead of Vice President Joe Biden’s arrival in Israel next week show President Barack Obama’s hostile policies toward Israel will maintained until he leaves office.

In recent weeks, the administration has warned various government ministers that any construction of housing for Jews in Jerusalem will be viewed with hostility by the administration. In contrast, the administration is pressuring Israel to permit construction of homes for Arabs in its capital city and harshly opposes all moves by the government to destroy illegal construction in Arab neighborhoods and in Judea and Samaria.

In other words, it is the Obama administration’s policy to deny Jews our civil and property rights while it demands that Israel not assert its sovereignty over non-Jews.

Whether or not Obama’s anti-Israel policies will survive his tenure in office depends on who succeeds him. If Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton is elected to serve as the next president, there is no question that they will survive him.

During her four years as Obama’s secretary of state, Clinton was a full partner in Obama’s hostile policies toward Israel. Moreover, as her internal emails have shown, all of Clinton’s close advisers are hostile to Israel. The good news for Israel is that Clinton’s chances of election are not as great as they seem from the polls.

First of all, there is every reason to believe that in the coming weeks, the Republicans will unite.

Either party leaders will back front-runner Donald Trump, or his main competitors, Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, will join forces and win the nomination.

The latter alternative, which is gaining traction among Republican leaders and political commentators, involves Cruz, who is more popular with the party’s rank in file than Rubio, and has secured primary victories in four states whereas Rubio finished first only in Minnesota, leading a joint ticket.

But even if the GOP remains fractured, Clinton may still be too weak to win the White House in November. This is first and foremost the case because of the FBI investigation of her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Political Correctness Kills The hazardous effects of our silence on ourselves. William Kilpatrick

Posted By on March 4th, 2016

I got an instant chill when I looked at him. I got this grip in my stomach and then, of course, I gave myself a political correct slap…I thought, “My God, Michael, these are just a couple of Arab businessmen.”

That was ticket agent Michael Tuohey’s recollection of his encounter with Mohammed Atta at the check-in desk of U.S. Airways in Portland on the morning of September 11, 2001. For Tuohey, the fear of being politically incorrect was greater than his instinctive fear. Better to take the remote risk of a terrorist act than the more immediate risk of being thought a bigot.

It might be expected that 9/11 would have put an end to political correctness—at least in regard to Islam. But that was not the case. Instead, the forces of political correctness grew stronger and threw a protective ring around Islam, making it practically immune to criticism. You could, of course, criticize terrorist groups, suicide bombers and lone-wolf jihadists—as long as you added the caveat that their actions had nothing to do with Islam. But suggest that terrorists were inspired by Islam itself and you were sure to find yourself in hot water and maybe in a courtroom.

9/11 wasn’t the last time that a little less political correctness might have saved the day. Take the 2009 massacre at Fort Hood. Major Nidal Hasan’s jihadist sympathies were well known to fellow officers for years before he launched his murderous attack. Yet they failed to report him for fear of being branded as bigots. Even after the massacre, the Army, the media, and the administration worked vigorously to cover up Hasan’s devotion to Islam. His attack, we were told, was simply a case of workplace violence.

Meanwhile, over in England, another cover-up of Muslim misbehavior was already a decade old and wouldn’t be exposed for another five years. In the course of a fifteen-year period, more than 1,400 girls in the city of Rotherham were groomed, raped, and traded by Pakistani gangs. Police, city authorities, and child protection agencies knew about the rapes but said nothing out of fear that they would be subject to accusations of “racism” and “Islamophobia’ were they to implicate Pakistanis.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

White House Says It Has Not ‘Reached’ Determination That ISIS Slaughter of Christians Is Genocide Susan Jones

Posted By on March 4th, 2016

(CNSNews.com) – Asked on Monday if Islamic State terrorists are carrying out a campaign of genocide against Syria’s Christians, White House Spokesman Josh Earnest said the word genocide “involves a very specific legal determination that has, at this point, not been reached.”

He condemned the terrorists’ “willingness to target religious minorities, including Christians.”

Earnest noted that the Obama administration has long expressed its concerns over ISIS/ISIL’s “slaughter” of religious minorities in Iraq and Syria.

“You’ll recall, at the very beginning of the military campaign against ISIL, at the–some of the first actions that were ordered by President Obama, by the United States military were to protect Yazidi religious minorities that were essentially cornered on Mount Sinjar by ISIL fighters. We took those strikes to clear a path so that those religious minorities could be rescued.

“So we have long been concerned by the way that–that ISIL attempts to target religious minorities.

“We also know that they target Christians in the area, too. In that region of the world, Christians are a religious minority, and we certainly have been concerned–you know, that’s one of the many reasons that we’re concerned with ISIL and their tactics, which is that it’s an affront to our values as a country to see people attacked, singled out or slaughtered based on their religious beliefs.”

The reporter asked Earnest, “But you’re not prepared to use the word ‘genocide’ yet in this situation?”

“The — my understanding is the use of that word involves a very specific legal determination that has, at this point, not been reached. But we’ve been quite candid and direct, exactly, about how — how ISIL’s tactics are worthy of the kind of international, robust response that the international community is leading. And those tactics include a willingness to target religious minorities, including Christians.”

As CNSNews.com recently reported, Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress last week that he is having an “additional evaluation” done to help him determine whether the systematic murder of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East should be declared “genocide.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Palestinians: The Right Time to Take Big Steps? by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on March 4th, 2016

Despite the “official” surveys taken among Palestinians, which show support for Hamas, the residents of the West Bank are terrified that Hamas will gain control and destroy our lives and property, the way they did in the Gaza Strip.

The BDS organizations are trying to boycott products made in the West Bank, which only throws masses of Palestinians out of good jobs in an effort to force Israel into a hasty withdrawal that has no chance of taking place. The Israelis and everyone else remember all too well that the last Israeli withdrawals — from southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip — led to the terrorist takeover of the vacuums created.

Ikrima Sabri, the former Mufti of Jerusalem, often said that Palestinians were better off with the Jews in charge of Al-Aqsa mosque and Jerusalem, because in the future they could be removed and killed off, but if the Crusaders returned to Jerusalem — such as an international commission headed by the French — it would be harder to get rid of them.

During a visit to Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Israel’s Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu that now is not time to move forward with the “two-state solution” and the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Merkel, evidently seeing Israel as a dam protecting Europe from Islamist extremists, told Netanyahu that while the Germans recognized the terrorist threat faced by Israel, and that a peace process had to be advanced based on two states for two peoples, now was not the right time to take big steps.

POLITICS Comments turned off

FBI Investigating whether Hillary Shared Secret Passwords with Aides for Access to Classified Material By Debra Heine

Posted By on March 4th, 2016

In another exclusive for Fox News, intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reports that the FBI is investigating whether Hillary Clinton shared computer passwords with her closest aides to allow sensitive intelligence to “jump the gap” between the classified systems and Clinton’s unsecured homebrew server. The government forbids sending or storing classified information outside secure, government-controlled channels, and has prosecuted employees for violations.

An intelligence source familiar with the Clinton probe told Fox News that “if [Clinton] was allowing other people to use her passwords, that is a big problem.” The sharing of passwords is strictly prohibited in the Foreign Service Officers Manual.

Such passwords are required to access each State Department network. This includes the network for highly classified intelligence — known as SCI or Sensitive Compartmented Information — and the unclassified system, known as SBU or Sensitive But Unclassified, according to former State Department employees.

According to Herridge, there are several potential ways classified information could have gotten onto Clinton’s server:

Reading intelligence reports or briefings, and then summarizing the findings in emails sent on Clinton’s unsecured personal server.
Accessing the classified intelligence computer network, and then lifting sections by typing them verbatim into a device such as an iPad or BlackBerry.
Taking pictures of a computer screen to capture the intelligence.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Trump Gives Another Hint About Abandoning Supporters on All Things Immigration By Stephen Kruiser

Posted By on March 4th, 2016

Last week, I pointed out that Donald Trump is a bit too comfortable with standard Democrat talking points regarding illegal immigration.

In Thursday’s debate, he tip-toed to the left a little more.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump said Thursday he is softening his stance on visas for highly-skilled workers.

“I’m changing. We need highly-skilled people in this country,” Trump said during the Fox News Republican debate in Detroit. “If we can’t do it, we will get them in.”

Trump’s stance toward awarding H1-B visas is different from the one he takes on his campaign website, which argues that more visas for highly-skilled foreigners would “decimate American workers.”

“One of the biggest problems we have is people go to the best colleges … as soon as they’re finished, they get shoved out. They want to stay in this country,” Trump said at the debate. “They want to stay here desperately. They’re not able to stay here. For that purpose, we absolutely have to be able to keep the brainpower in this country.”

Trump said he was now in favor of the H1B-visa program – despite what his website still says.

“So you are abandoning the position on your website?” Fox News debate moderator Megyn Kelly asked.

“I’m changing it and I’m softening the position because we have to have talented people in this country,” Trump said.