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Terrorism Response Highlights Split Between Political Parties Republicans say national security is priority for government, Democrats name economy and gun violence By Dante Chinni

Posted By on January 13th, 2016

The revival of terrorism as a prominent fear is also laying bare divisions between the two political parties over what issues should top the government’s priority list, with Republicans citing national security and Democrats remaining focused on the economy and gun violence.
The differences mark a change from the past two presidential campaigns, in which both parties were most concerned with economic growth.
Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey data show how different the concerns of one party’s primary voters are from the other’s. In December polling, GOP primary voters overwhelmingly said national security and terrorism were the top issue for the federal government to address. Some 58% of GOP voters cited it, compared with only 26% of Democrats.
Democratic primary voters instead named the economy and jobs as the top issue for the government to address, with 33% citing it.
The parties’ differing views of the government’s top priority were reflected in other ways: Republican primary voters were more concerned than were Democrats with being the victim of a terrorist attack, 30% to 23%. Democratic primary voters, by contrast, were more concerned than their GOP counterparts of being a victim of gun violence, 37% to 18%.

The results suggest the violence in San Bernardino, Paris, Charleston and elsewhere left Republicans primary voters seeing an enhanced threat from terrorism from abroad, while Democratic primary voters worry about long-running domestic gun violence.
Another difference surfaced in how to respond to the growth of terrorism and to other world events. Among Democratic primary voters, 66% said the country needs to focus more on solving problems at home and agreed with the statement that “America cannot be the world’s policeman.’’

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran Releases Detained U.S. Sailors, Revolutionary Guard Says Boats wandered into Iranian waters following an equipment malfunction By Aresu Eqbali in Tehran and Asa Fitch in Dubai

Posted By on January 13th, 2016

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on Wednesday said it had released 10 U.S. sailors detained after their boats wandered into Iranian waters following an equipment malfunction.

“After technical examinations, interaction with our political and national security officials and clarification that their entrance into [our] waters was unintentional… it was decided that they should be released,” an IRGC statement said.

The U.S. didn’t immediately confirm the sailors’ release.

The sailors were set free in international waters under the supervision of IRGC vessels, the Iranian statement added.

Two 20-to-25-foot-long Navy boats were taken into custody late Tuesday in Iranian waters near Farsi Island in the Persian Gulf. U.S. officials said they were investigating the possibility that a mechanical issue led them to drift into Iranian territory during a trip from Kuwait to Bahrain.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Obama Legacy Project The U.S. is more divided in more ways than it’s been since the 1960s.

Posted By on January 13th, 2016

As he begins his final year in office, President Obama’s legacy project is already in high gear. This includes Tuesday night’s State of the Union, which is best understood as the start of a campaign to persuade Americans that the last seven years have been better than they believe. He needs to start early because this reality makeover won’t be easy.

Start with the economy, which Mr. Obama’s Boswells are attempting to reframe as a “boom.” Mr. Obama certainly inherited a deep recession, but recessions always end and deep ones usually rebound faster and higher. The test of economic policy is the pace and quality of the recovery, and this one has been the slowest since World War II.

The jobless rate has fallen to 5%, but in May 2007 under George W. Bush it was 4.4%. Today’s rate has been able to fall as low as it has in part because so many working-age Americans have left the workforce; the labor participation rate of 62.6% hasn’t been this low since 1977. Real incomes for most households have only recently begun to rise above what they were at the end of the recession in June 2009.

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Death of an Anti-Israel Resolution Jonathan Marks

Posted By on January 13th, 2016

Historians this Saturday, at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, resoundingly rejected an anti-Israel resolution. The final vote was 111-51 against the resolution which, among other things, would have committed the AHA to “monitoring Israeli actions restricting the right to education in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”

The proposal that an association of American academics devoted to the study and promotion of history and historical thinking would monitor the actions of a sovereign state in the Middle East gives one an idea of the arrogance of the crafters of the resolution. What next? Shall they constitute themselves as a peacekeeping force? Another piece of the resolution, a call for the “reversal of Israeli policies that restrict the freedom of movement,” without any regard for Israeli security needs, gives one an idea of the moral and intellectual seriousness of the resolution. But I will not dwell on the resolution’s defects because they have been so well covered by the Alliance for Academic Freedom, by the historian Jeffrey Herf and by the blogger William Jacobson.

Instead, let me focus on what can be learned from this important win.

First, there is still an audience for the view that the integrity of scholarly organizations demands that they avoid becoming vehicles for political activism. As Herf put it last year, after a similar resolution failed a crucial procedural vote:

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FBI’s Clinton probe expands to public corruption track By Catherine Herridge, Pamela Browne

Posted By on January 13th, 2016

The FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private email as secretary of state has expanded to look at whether the possible “intersection” of Clinton Foundation work and State Department business may have violated public corruption laws, three intelligence sources not authorized to speak on the record told Fox News.
This new investigative track is in addition to the focus on classified material found on Clinton’s personal server.
“The agents are investigating the possible intersection of Clinton Foundation donations, the dispensation of State Department contracts and whether regular processes were followed,” one source said.

Clinton, speaking to the Des Moines Register, on Monday pushed back on the details of a second investigative track. According to reporter Jennifer Jacobs, Clinton said Monday she has heard nothing from the FBI.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Marxism Failed in the World, but Conquered Western Academia by Philip Carl Salzman

Posted By on January 13th, 2016

One of the great lessons of the 20th century, paid for with the suffering and blood of hundreds of millions, is that communism was a failure in both economy and governance. This was demonstrated repeatedly with the fall of the Soviet Union, the switch in China from communes and central planning to capitalism, the vast slaughter of the Khmer Rouge, the breakdown of the Cuban economy, and the starving prison house that is North Korea.

The one place that Marxism has succeeded is in conquering academia in Europe and North America. Marxism-Leninism is now the dominant model of history and society being taught in Western universities and colleges. Faculties of social science and humanities disguise their Marxism under the label “postcolonialism,” anti-neoliberalism, and the quest for equality and “social justice.” And while our educational institutions laud “diversity” in gender, race, sexual preference, religion, national origin, etc., diversity in opinion, theory, and political view is nowhere to be seen. So our students hear only the Marxist view, and take it to be established truth.

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MATTHEW TYRMAND: POLISH DEMOCRACY IS IN EXCELLENT HEALTH

Posted By on January 13th, 2016

The reports of the death of Polish democracy, to paraphrase the oft told line of the eminent American writer, satirist, and political critic Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated.

Contrary to the alarmist media reports emanating from the media mandarins of the mainstream Western press, most Poles on the ground, constituting a silent majority as clearly indicated by the recent Presidential and Parliamentary elections, want to reassure those in the West that in Poland today the threats to democracy being “spun” by the global media complex are grossly mischaracterized and even wholly manufactured.

Democracy in Poland is the healthiest it has ever been in the post-1989, modern era.

The mainstream Western press apparatus however, taking its cues from the Polish mainstream press and those connected to the last government – freshly ejected from office due to its brazen, systemic corruption and its agenda of deeper EU integration – continues to criticise the recently and democratically elected new government and to deliver egregiously incomplete accounts of the actions on the ground; well parsed to ensure no inconvenient truths make it to the Western reader.

This active “spin” is meant to obfuscate the truth about the last eight years as well as to “poison the well” for those elected with the largest democratic mandate in modern Polish history, the former opposition party, Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc– PiS).

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Benjamin Weingarten: See No Islam, Hear No Islam New York’s document purge won’t alleviate the jihadist threat, but might increase it.

Posted By on January 13th, 2016

As part of a recently announced legal settlement with representatives of the Muslim community, the NYPD has agreed to purge materials critical to understanding the threat to New York City from domestic Islamic terrorism. The plaintiffs in Raza v. City of New York and Handschu v. Special Services Division charged that the NYPD had targeted Muslims for surveillance solely because of their religious affiliation. Among other things, the settlement stipulates that the NYPD must remove from its website a comprehensive 2007 report authored by senior analysts Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Bhatt.

Radicalization in the West identified homegrown Islamic terrorism as the primary extremist threat to New York City. As then-police commissioner Ray Kelly noted in a preface, the report’s aim was to assist policymakers and law enforcement officials around the country by providing a thorough understanding of the danger posed by domestic terrorists. It also sought to help intelligence and law enforcement agencies better understand the radicalization process. Based on a rigorous analysis of almost a dozen jihadist plots across the U.S. and Europe, the report identified the enemy’s ideology on its own terms. The report didn’t say that jihadism had nothing to do with Islam; nor did it suggest that Islam was a “religion of peace.” Its sole concern was assessing the jihadist threat, not undertaking an Islamic exegesis.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary Clinton to Hispanic TV: American police are as dangerous as ISIS Jim-Kouri

Posted By on January 13th, 2016

While her lapdogs in the news media claim Hillary Clinton has changed her negative attitudes about the military and law enforcement, she has once again pandered to minority voters by attacking American police officers by comparing them with ISIS terrorists, according to officials with the National Association of Chiefs of Police. (See videos below.)

The Democrat’s presidential heir apparent Hillary Clinton participated in a Townhall event on Monday for Univision’s afilliated network Fusion where she answered questions about white privilege and terrorism. Hillary Clinton said “white terrorism” and “police violence” are just as big a threat today to blacks and Latinos as are the Islamist terrorist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Question: “The danger of ISIS is clearly a major threat to American safety, but personally, I know many minorities who are much more concerned with racist attacks at the local level than radical Islamists, so just — question to put it plainly since often, issues of race are tiptoed, do you believe that white terrorism and extremism is as much a threat to some in this country as something like ISIS?”

Clinton’s Answer: “Yes, I believe there are all kinds of underground movements and efforts in our country that try to use violence or assert beliefs that I find often lead to violence,” Clinton said before outright accusing some police officers of being terrorists. I think that when you have police violence that terrorized communities, that doesn’t show the respect that you’re supposed to have from respecting people in your authority, that can feel, also, terrorizing.”

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CAROLINE GLICK: IN PAKISTAN THEY TRUST

Posted By on January 13th, 2016

It is a testament to the precarious state of the world today that in a week that saw North Korea carry out a possible test of a hydrogen bomb, the most frightening statement uttered did not come from Pyongyang.

It came from Pakistan.

Speaking in the military garrison town of Rawalpindi, Pakistani Army chief Gen. Raheel Sharif said that any Iranian threat to Saudi Arabia’s territorial integrity will “wipe Iran off the map.”

Sharif made the statement following his meeting with Saudi Arabia’s defense minister and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. According to media reports, Salman was the second senior Saudi official to visit Pakistan in the past week amid growing tensions between Iran and the kingdom.

Salman’s trip and Sharif’s nuclear threat make clear that following the US’s all-but-official abandonment of its role as protector of the world’s largest oil producer, the Saudis have cast their lots with nuclear-armed Pakistan.

When last October, the USS Harry Truman exited the Persian Gulf, the move marked the first time since 2007 that the US lacked an aircraft carrier in the region. Nine years ago, the US naval move was not viewed as a major statement of strategic withdrawal, given that back then the US had some one hundred thousand troops in Iraq.

While the USS Truman returned to the Gulf late last month, its return gave little solace to America’s frightened and spurned Arab allies. The Obama administration’s weak-kneed response to Iran’s live-fire exercises on December 26, during which an Iranian Revolutionary Guards vessel fired rockets a mere 1,370 meters from the aircraft carrier as it transited the Straits of Hormuz, signaled that the US is not even willing to make a show of force to deter Iranian aggression.

And so the Saudis have turned to Pakistan.

It would be foolish to view Sharif’s nuclear threat as mere bluster.