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Against Trump By The Editors NRO

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

Donald Trump leads the polls nationally and in most states in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. There are understandable reasons for his eminence, and he has shown impressive gut-level skill as a campaigner. But he is not deserving of conservative support in the caucuses and primaries. Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones.

Trump’s political opinions have wobbled all over the lot. The real-estate mogul and reality-TV star has supported abortion, gun control, single-payer health care à la Canada, and punitive taxes on the wealthy. (He and Bernie Sanders have shared more than funky outer-borough accents.) Since declaring his candidacy he has taken a more conservative line, yet there are great gaping holes in it.

His signature issue is concern over immigration — from Latin America but also, after Paris and San Bernardino, from the Middle East. He has exploited the yawning gap between elite opinion in both parties and the public on the issue, and feasted on the discontent over a government that can’t be bothered to enforce its own laws no matter how many times it says it will (President Obama has dispensed even with the pretense). But even on immigration, Trump often makes no sense and can’t be relied upon. A few short years ago, he was criticizing Mitt Romney for having the temerity to propose “self-deportation,” or the entirely reasonable policy of reducing the illegal population through attrition while enforcing the nation’s laws. Now, Trump is a hawk’s hawk.

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The Battle for the Soul of the Right By Rich Lowry

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

At the moment, the Republican establishment is relevant to the presidential-nomination battle only as an epithet.

Less than two weeks from the Iowa caucus, the fight for the Republican nomination isn’t so much a vicious brawl between the grass roots and the establishment as it is a bitter struggle between traditional conservatism and populism that few could have foreseen.

Conservatism has always had a populist element, encapsulated by the oft-quoted William F. Buckley Jr. line that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But the populism was tethered to, and in the service of, an ideology of limited-government constitutionalism.

The fight between Ted Cruz and Donald Trump is over whether that connection will continue to exist, and whether the conservatism (as represented by Cruz) or the populism (as represented by Trump) will be ascendant. Cruz did all he could as long as possible to accommodate Trump, but now that the fight between them is out in the open, the differences are particularly stark.

Cruz is a rigorous constitutionalist. He’s devoted much of his career to defending the Constitution and has argued numerous cases before the Supreme Court. Trump has certainly heard of the Constitution, but he may know even less about it than he knows about the Bible.

Cruz is an advocate of limited government who is staking everything in Iowa on a principled opposition to the ethanol mandate. As a quasi-mercantilist and crony capitalist, Trump isn’t particularly bothered by the size of government and is happily touting his support for a bigger ethanol mandate.

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Hillary Clinton’s E-Mail Scandal: Far Graver than First Thought By Deroy Murdock

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

When Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal erupted last March, fair-minded people might have given her the benefit of the doubt. Distracted and perhaps overeager, the spanking-new secretary of state plowed into her duties and had her staff divert e-mails to her home-based computer server. This would be more convenient, she claimed, and would let her avoid the hassle of schlepping multiple handheld devices. Besides, “there is no classified material” on her server, she said, soothing journalists who covered this matter. “I did not receive nor send anything that was classified,” she reassured the media last July.

Things are now so much worse than they first appeared.

A top Clinton aide rebuffed a senior State Department official who tried to give Clinton standard computing gear. As the Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross has reported, State’s executive secretary, Stephen D. Mull, wrote Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, on August 30, 2011.

“We are working to provide the Secretary per her request a Department issued Blackberry to replace her personal unit which is malfunctioning,” Mull explained. He thought it was on the fritz, “possibly because of [sic] her personal email server is down.”

Deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin dismissively replied: “Let’s discuss the state blackberry, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

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Another Hillary Clinton Lie: Police See Black Lives as ‘Cheap’ By Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

Hillary Clinton again affirmed the tissue of lies and slander that is the Black Lives Matter movement during the Democratic presidential debate on Sunday. Asked if it was “reality” that police officers see black lives as “cheap,” Clinton unhesitatingly answered: “Sadly, it’s reality.” “There needs to be a concerted effort to address the systemic racism in our criminal-justice system,” she added. “We have a very serious problem that we can no longer ignore.”

If Clinton is elected president, we will probably continue to “ignore” the one “very serious problem” that we do have with regard to policing, crime, and race — and that is black crime. The magnitude of black crime dwarfs the fatal shootings by police officers that, according to the Black Lives Matter movement, so oppress the black community. In fact, if we are going to have a “Lives Matter” crusade, it would more appropriately be labeled “White and Hispanic Lives Matter.” Twelve percent of white and Hispanic homicide victims are killed by the police, compared with 4 percent of black homicide victims, as newly revealed in a Manhattan Institute Reality Check. You would never know that truth from the Black Lives Matter movement, however, which makes out the police to be a full-time black-killing machine.

That threefold disparity in the rate of officer-involved victimizations is the result of black crime: The number of blacks killed by other blacks is so massive that it overshadows all other homicides. In 2014, 6,095 blacks were killed nationwide, according to the FBI, 93 percent of them by other blacks. That is a sum greater than the number of white and Hispanic homicide victims combined (5,397 in 2014, according to the FBI), even though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. In 2015, 258 blacks were killed by the police, according to the Washington Post’s open-source database of police killings — representing 4 percent of all black homicide deaths. Officers killed 493 whites and 169 Hispanics — representing 12 percent of all white and Hispanic homicide deaths in 2014. The vast majority of all victims of fatal police shootings — white, black, and Hispanic — were armed or threatening the officer with other forms of potentially lethal force. But the black dominance in violence shows up in cop-killings as well: Forty percent of all police officers murdered from 2005 to 2014 were killed by blacks.

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El Chapo’s Capture Puts ‘Operation Fast and Furious’ Back in the Headlines By Ian Tuttle

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

Obama-administration scandals never resolve. They just vanish — usually, under a new scandal.

So it was with one of this president’s earliest embarrassments, “Operation Fast and Furious,” designed to help the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) dismantle drug cartels operating inside the United States and disrupt drug-trafficking routes. Instead, it put into the hands of criminals south of the border some 2,000 weapons, which have been used to kill hundreds of Mexicans and at least one American, U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

Now, Fast and Furious is back in the news. Earlier this month, a raid on the hidey-hole of drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman recovered not only the notorious drug lord, but a (“massive”) .50-caliber rifle, capable of stopping a car or shooting down a helicopter, that originated with the ATF program. Rest easy, though: Only 34 such rifles were sold through the program.

The news comes just days after a federal judge rejected President Obama’s assertion of executive privilege to deny Congress access to Fast and Furious–related records it requested back in 2012 as part of an investigation into the gun-walking operation. Despite the IRS scandal, Benghazi, and a host of other accusations of malfeasance against this White House, it remains this president’s sole assertion of executive privilege.

Three-and-a-half years later, the question is still: Why?

In November 2009, the ATF’s Phoenix field office launched an operation in which guns bought by drug-cartel straw purchasers in the U.S. were allowed to “walk” across the border into Mexico. ATF agents would then track the guns as they made their way through the ranks of the cartel.

At least, that was the theory. In reality, once the guns walked across the border, they were gone. Whistleblowers reported, and investigators later confirmed, that the ATF made no effort to trace the guns.

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The ‘New Cuban Missile Crisis’ Mystery Deepens By Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

A Hellfire is in Cuban hands. The State Dept. explanation? Several people at several firms made the mistake of their lives … on the same package.

A U.S. Hellfire anti-tank missile — a weapon launched from Predator drones in anti-terrorism operations, among other uses — found its way into the hands of Cuba’s government in 2014.

But the route it took, twice crossing the Atlantic, was less mysterious than the U.S. government’s public response to the discovery that front-line American military equipment made it to Havana — or beyond.

The Wall Street Journal reported that a missile shipped by Lockheed Martin to Spain for a NATO exercise was supposed to be put on a flight from Madrid to Frankfurt and then back to the United States. Wrote the Journal:

[The cargo] was clearly marked as containing material subject to rigorous export controls, and that shipping information would have made clear to anyone handling it that it wasn’t regular cargo.

U.S. regulations require that such cargo be loaded by DOD personnel onto U.S. carriers. Yet there were apparently commercial shipping companies involved:

… [One] operated by Air France, which took the missile to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris … and headed to Havana.

Further:

At some point, officials [U.S. military personnel] loading the first flight [in Frankfurt] realized the missile it expected to be loading onto the aircraft wasn’t among the cargo, the government official said.

Working backwards, they discovered the shipment had been handled by commercial carriers and then placed on a non-U.S. plane.

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Clinton Emails So Sensitive, Senior Lawmakers Had to Up Their Security Clearances to View Them By Debra Heine

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

Some of newly revealed emails on Hillary Clinton’s private, unsecured server are so sensitive that senior lawmakers on the oversight committees did not have high enough security clearances to read them, according to sources on Capitol Hill. Fox News reports today that lawmakers had to fulfill additional security requirements in order to read material in her emails described by Mrs. Clinton as “innocuous.”

The emails in question, as Fox News first reported earlier this week, contained intelligence classified at a level beyond “top secret.” Because of this designation, not all the lawmakers on key committees reviewing the case have high enough clearances.

A source with knowledge of the intelligence review told Fox News that senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, despite having high-level clearances, are among those not authorized to read the intelligence from so-called “special access programs” without taking additional security steps — like signing new non-disclosure agreements.

These programs are highly restricted to protect intelligence community sources and methods.

Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III identified “several dozen” additional classified emails this month — including classified intelligence from “special access programs” (SAP).

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Al-Qaeda Bomb Expert the Latest Terrorist Released from Guantanamo By Rick Moran

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

A man whose bomb designs were responsible for killing many Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan was released from the Guantanamo prison camp and sent to Bosnia, the Pentagon announced today.

The government also acknowledged that Tariq Mahmoud Ahmed al-Sawah could possibly make his way back to terrorism, but that prospect isn’t likely because he cooperated.

Uh-huh.

The Hill:

The review board set up by President Obama to review remaining detainee transfers decided to release him last February.

The Pentagon also announced the transfer of Abd al-Aziz Abduh Abdallah Ali al-Suwaydi, a 41-year-old Yemeni, to Montenegro.

Al-Suwaydi admitted to being an explosives trainer, according to his files posted by the Times.

Thursday’s transfers mark the 15th and 16th of January. They are part of the president’s bid to release as many detainees as possible in order to bring the remaining detainees to the U.S. and close the prison.

The latest transfers bring the total number of detainees remaining at the prison to 91. One more detainee is scheduled to be transferred this month.

I suppose there’s an alternate universe somewhere where America has a president who isn’t concerned about his legacy and cares more about national security than his place in the history books.

But it isn’t this America. The blood and treasure expended to get these terrorists locked up in the first place should count for something. Sacrifices were made, lives lost so that some of the worst of the worst would be prevented from going about their business of threatening and killing Americans.

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Libya’s Chaos: Threat to the West by Mohamed Chtatou

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

ISIS badly needs Libya for its operations in North Africa: to spread its paramilitary brigades, to organize its terrorist networks and, most importantly, to prepare its political pawns, after the chaos, to take over power.

“Over the last four years, Libya has become a key node in the expansion of Islamic radicalism across North Africa… and into Europe. If events in Libya continue on their current path, they will likely haunt the United States and its Western allies for a decade or more.” — Ethan Chorin, Foreign Policy.

ISIS taking control of North Africa, the soft underbelly of Europe, would amount to it getting ready to recapture, by terror and force, al-Andalus from the Catholic Christians of Spain.

In 2011 when Libya’s former ruler, Muammar Gaddafi, was murdered by the mob of militiamen, many people believed it was the beginning of a new, free, democratic country. Libya, however, did not become free or democratic. Instead, it became fractured, violent, tribal and divided. Rather than starting a new life, Libya was sliding slowly toward some sort of hell.

Over the years, as violence became a daily casual occurrence, Libya almost became synonymous in the news with disorder, and on its way to becoming yet another failed stated, like Somalia.

In spite of that, hope emerged anew with the attempt of the United Nations to negotiate a national agreement through UNMSIL (United Nations Support Mission in Libya).

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Senate looks to override Obama veto of GOP effort to block EPA power grab By Rick Moran

Posted By on January 22nd, 2016

Republicans in the Senate are looking for Democratic votes to override a presidential veto of a GOP backed measure that would have prevented the EPA from regulating most of the waters in the US.

The legislation is aimed at a new EPA rule that would give the agency jurisdiction over small streams and tributaries that comprise about 80% of the water in the US.

The Hill:

The Senate will vote Thursday on a long-shot effort to override President Obama’s veto that preserved his contentious water pollution rule.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) filed for the vote Wednesday, less than a day after Obama announced that he had vetoed the GOP’s attempt to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation.

The rule, dubbed the Clean Water Rule or “Waters of the United States,” would extend federal power under the Clean Water Act to small bodies of water such as streams and wetlands. It is highly controversial, with Republicans calling it a massive power grab and Democrats saying it’s needed to protect vulnerable waterways from pollution.

McConnell slammed Obama for his veto earlier Wednesday.