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Hanukkah: A Beacon Across Generations By David Goldman

Posted By on December 13th, 2015

One of the most stirring moments in Western cinema is the lighting of the beaconsin Peter Jackson’s film version of “The Return of the King,” summoning the riders of Rohan to the aid of the beleaguered city of Minas Tirith. The fire is kindled from mountaintop to mountaintop as the long vigil of lonely watchmen ends with a signal across distance and darkness, giving the free peoples of the West the courage to rise together against the evil gathering in Mordor. The blood surges and the heart pounds as the tiny points of light become visible across far-off mountain ranges.

Tonight Jews around the world complete the eight days of the Feast of Hanukkah, lighting eight candles in the windows of their homes. To the Jewish people, dispersed across the world for two millennia before the founding of the State of, the flames of the Hanukkah menorah beckon to us like Tolkien’s signal fires, but across time rather than space.

Hanukkah(“Dedication”) remembers the cleansing of the Temple at Jerusalem after a Jewish army expelled the invaders of the Greek Seleucid dynasty in 165 B.C.E. But it is more than remembrance: the candles we light in Jewish homes during the eight days of the festival rekindle the Eternal Flame of the Temple itself, the symbol of the Shekhinah, God’s indwelling on earth. We are grateful for the military victory against the Seleucid invaders and mention it in our holiday prayers, but it was short-lived. The Hasmonean dynasty that ruled Israel for the next century degenerated and Israel became a de facto Roman protectorate in 65 B.C.E. Our revolt against Roman oppression ended with the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. and our long exile. The Temple was destroyed, and the rabbis of antiquity declared that the Sekhinah went into exile with the Jewish people. The eternal flame of the Temple was extinguished by the Romans but rekindled in every Jewish home. In the poverty, persecution and humiliation of exile, Jewish families became a Temple in exile, and the rededication of the Temple’s light of 165 B.C.E. became an act of rededication in every home.

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The Media’s Delinquency & Manipulation of the Primaries By Frank Salvato

Posted By on December 13th, 2015

We are still a little under two months away from the first Presidential Primary. If you are listening to the mainstream media, the GOP nomination is all but sewn-up and the establishment Republican apparatus has agita. What’s got the inside-the-beltway crowd so nervous and frustrated? Well, Donald Trump is up 13.1 points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls that survey the sentiments of Republican voters. This, in and of itself, is a good reason to break out the Prylosec® if you are an establishment Republican operative. But the GOP rank-and-file really needs to take a step back and understand what has been done to them so that they can truly have their voices heard come election time.

This election cycle has been unofficially titled the “Election of the Outsider” and rightly so. The public sentiment regarding politicians – especially the agenda-driven professional class of politician – is on par with that of journalists and lawyers. If the Mariana Trench could be filled with all of them the collective attitude of the nation would skyrocket. But what We the People are being led to believe is an “accurate accounting” of our collective sentiment has been manipulated to a great extent. Again, as in the non-vetting of Barack Obama in the lead-up to the 2008 General Election, the mainstream media is grossly negligent in doing its job.

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Sweden: Shambles in Asylum Heaven by Ingrid Carlqvist

Posted By on December 13th, 2015

In Sweden, only the people who say they are not applying for asylum are checked.

To avoid having to show any papers, a terrorist going to Sweden to commit acts of terror only has to tell the border police that he is seeking asylum. He will immediately be driven to the closest Immigration Service facility. And while the Immigration Service tries to figure out who he is, he can plan his attacks in the peace and quiet of the Swedish countryside.

“The truth is that persons with evil intent know exactly what to do when they come here. That information spreads like wildfire. These new border controls are there for the sole purpose of reassuring the public. They have absolutely no effect on the influx of migrants.” — Border policeman at the Öresund Bridge (between Denmark and Sweden).

Despite many Swedes drawing a sigh of relief when the government announced that immigration was to be limited, the new policy does not really entail any difference at all.

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INTERMISSION

Posted By on December 12th, 2015

There will be no postings until Monday December 14th,2015

POLITICS Comments turned off

Former Aides: Hillary Served Clinton Foundation at State As America’s top diplomat, she mainly promoted the Clintons’ private charities. By Deroy Murdock

Posted By on December 11th, 2015

If not a smoking gun, veteran journalist Edward Klein exposes a smoldering pistol in his new book about Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton. Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary cites three of her former State Department colleagues who saw Clinton weave her diplomatic duties with her financial interests in the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative. They also report that Clinton let her foreign-policy responsibilities take a back seat to her presidential ambitions. These three sources insisted on anonymity.

“The Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative have very distinct logos. . . . Often, when I went into the secretary of state’s conference room, I saw those logos on papers that were strewn all over the big table,” one of Clinton’s college interns told Klein.

This observer’s low rank gave him surprisingly high-level exposure to Clinton and her confidantes. “It was like I was the invisible man,” he said. “Nobody gave me a second look. They obviously didn’t think it mattered what a young intern saw, so they didn’t make an effort to hide anything from me.”

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The Anti-Science, Anti-Nuclear Left Atomic energy is indispensable in reducing greenhouse gases, but climate-change activists don’t want to hear it. By Robert Bryce —

Posted By on December 11th, 2015

Among the favorite claims of climate-change activists is that anyone who dares to disagree with their worldview is a “denier,” and that those who reject their orthodoxy about the workings of the Earth’s atmosphere are “anti-science.”

But when it comes to the technologies that can actually reduce the volume of carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere, it’s obvious that the climate-change jihadis are the ones who are anti-science. For proof of that, consider the energy plan put forward on Monday by Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont and presidential candidate, who has claimed that climate change is the greatest national-security threat facing the United States.

Sanders’s energy plan comes straight from the far-left playbook. It claims that the only thing needed to deal with climate change is renewable energy. On Sanders’s website, the plan carries endorsements from Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, who may be America’s most famous climate activist, as well as Annie Leonard, the executive director of Greenpeace USA.

The gist of Sanders’s plan, which is modestly titled “Combating Climate Change to Save the Planet,” is to create a “completely nuclear-free clean energy system for electricity, heating, and transportation.” It also declares that Sanders wants “a moratorium on nuclear power plant license renewals in the United States.”

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America’s Most Dangerous Demagogue Lives in the White House By David French —

Posted By on December 11th, 2015

There’s a demagogue loose in the land. He uses immigration and the war on terror to drive a wedge into the American populace. He traffics in absurd conspiracy theories about foreign influence, he mocks his political opponents, and he inspires friends and allies to lash out, lawlessly, against them. He compares patriotic Americans to jihadists, and he endangers our national security with his reckless rhetoric.

I’m speaking, of course, about the President of the United States. It’s been amusing to watch the media hyperventilate over Donald Trump’s comments when it has largely cheered or ignored our own president’s rhetoric — rhetoric that’s inspired serial violations of First Amendment freedoms, and been used as justification for executive overreach and deadly mistakes at home and abroad.

We knew of Barack Obama’s contempt for his political opponents in 2008, when he famously mocked Hillary Clinton’s blue-collar supporters, calling them “bitter” and saying they “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” But this was small potatoes compared to the rhetoric he’d employ once he was elected.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Trump Doesn’t Represent the Conservative Base By Jonah Goldberg

Posted By on December 11th, 2015

There’s a tendency in politics to mistake personal animosity for ideological animosity.

Consider Bill Clinton. His staggering dishonesty, tackiness, and scorn for the rule of law aroused a lot of anger from the Right. But he wasn’t really that left-wing.

Oh, he was certainly more liberal in his heart than he let on, but he also worked from the assumption that this was a center-right country, and that limited what he could get away with.

Clinton ran for president the first time by “triangulating” against the base of his own party. He took time off from the campaign to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man so mentally disabled, when he left for the electric chair, he told the guards that he was saving the pecan pie from his last meal “for later.” Clinton signed welfare reform (reluctantly), the Defense of Marriage Act (less reluctantly), helped to balance the budget, and proclaimed that “the era of big government is over.”

And yet, many conservatives insisted he was a no-good hippy left-winger.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama Chanukah Party Attacks Islamophobia, Calls for “Justice” for Palestinians “I stand here to light these lights to say no the darkness By Daniel Greenfield of Islamophobia”

Posted By on December 11th, 2015

Obama’s Chanukah parties have had issues in the past. But this time it teetered over into full-blown violently offensive territory. Obama’s own remarks were boilerplate inoffensive stuff. Israel’s President Rivlin, a political hack who desperately sucks up to the media, was equally insipid.

But the White House chose Susan Talve to light the Menorah. Talve is a member of the anti-Israel group T’ruah which is currently promoting assorted “soft BDS” programs. She’s also a Ferguson activist. Her behavior was deeply insulting to the religious Jewish community and made it clear that the White House was determined to hijack even a Chanukah party to promote an anti-Jewish agenda.

So the general conviviality of the Chanukah party was disrupted by a crazed rant from Susan Talve in which she seemed determined to jam as many leftist talking points as possible in her limited time. Instead of talking about Chanukah, Talve blathered on about getting, “guns off our streets” and to “clean up the fires of toxic nuclear waste”.

Talve screeched, “I stand here with my fierce family of clergy and black lives matter activists who took to the streets of Ferguson”.

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Hillary vs. the Benghazi Families Clinton’s most brazen lie yet. Arnold Ahlert

Posted By on December 11th, 2015

There is little doubt this presidential campaign season is unique, at least in one respect: for the first time in a long time, the despicable nature of the mainstream media’s double-standard is as much in focus as the candidates themselves. And perhaps nothing screams double-standard more than the calculated lack of attention on Hillary Clinton’s latest assertion that she never told the families grieving over the loss of their loved ones in Benghazi that an anti-Muslim video was to blame for the attacks.

We begin with where that assertion was made. Clinton floated this latest insult to those families and the American public within the friendly confines of ABC News’ This Week, hosted by pseudo-journalist and former Clinton toady George Stephanopoulos. The would be the same George Stephanopoulos that still passes muster in the corporate suites at ABC, despite having made three separate donations of $25,000 apiece to the Clinton Foundation in 2012, 2013 and 2014 respectively. Those donations remained under the radar, even when Stephanopoulos engaged in a contentious interview with “Clinton Cash” author Peter Schweizer, during which he rose to the Clinton’s defense. After being outed, Stephanopoulos apologized for the oversight, insisting he thought his contributions were “a matter of public record.” “However, in hindsight, I should have taken the extra step of personally disclosing my donations to my employer and to the viewers on air during the recent news stories about the Foundation,” Stephanopoulos confessed.