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October 2018

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Taliban Try to Kill U.S. Commander Days After Lauding Talks with U.S. Envoy By Bridget Johnson

By on October 18th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/taliban-try-to-kill-u-s-commander-days-after-lauding-talks-with-u-s-envoy/

The commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan escaped unhurt today after a gunman opened fire on officials leaving a high-profile meeting that included Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller.

The Taliban claimed on their website that “amid the series of ongoing Al Khandaq crushing operations, mujahideen carried out” the attack. Al Khandaq is the name of the Taliban’s spring offensive launched in April.

“At Kandahar palace today: Afghan-on-Afghan incident, as initial reports indicate. 3 Americans wounded. Gen. Miller uninjured, attacker reportedly dead,” tweeted the official account of Resolute Support, the NATO mission in the country.

According to Afghanistan’s TOLO News, “The incident happened when officials were leaving the governor’s office and while on their way to a helipad.”

“Sources also say the attack was initiated by at least one of the governor’s bodyguards,” TOLO added.

Kandahar’s anti-Taliban police chief Gen. Abdul Raziq, 39, was killed; TOLO described him as “a fierce patriot … committed to stamping out terrorism.” His father and uncle were killed by the Taliban in 1994; he became the provincial police chief in 2011, after his predecessor was murdered in a suicide bombing.

Raziq had, by his estimation last year, survived about 29 assassination attempts. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Victimization of Glenn Simpson By Julie Kelly

By on October 18th, 2018

It takes some kind of convoluted thinking to turn Glenn Simpson into a victim.

After all, the Fusion GPS chief is one of a handful of people primarily responsible for concocting and peddling the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax for the past three years. There is not an investigation or a news article or a human target related to the Trump-Russia scheme that doesn’t have Simpson’s fingerprints on it. When the complete story of the biggest political scandal in U.S. history finally is written, Glenn Simpson will be the prologue.

But his pals in the elite media see Simpson as a martyr, a victim of congressional investigators hounding an innocent guy just trying to make a buck. News coverage about Simpson’s refusal to answer questions on Capitol Hill bordered on laughable—if not satirical—and willfully overlooked big parts of Simpson’s tale of self-inflicted woe.

Members of both the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees called Simpson back this week to testify amid new information that disputes his previous statements to Congress. After defying their request, he was served with a subpoena to appear; for nearly an hour on Tuesday morning, Simpson invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Now before I get too deep into the headlines from the elite media, let’s think back just six months ago when Michael Cohen took the Fifth in connection with the Stormy Daniels lawsuit. Reporters and pundits exploded with glee, insisting Cohen’s move was a “huge development” that could lead to more trouble for the president.

But Simpson’s constitutional tactic, on the other hand, was met either with sympathy or silence. The Washington Post downplayed Simpson’s appearance simply as part of the “probe into how FBI and Justice Department officials conducted themselves during investigations of Trump’s Russia ties and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.” (Nah, Washington Post, Congress actually is trying to figure out who lied, who misled a FISA court, who illegally leaked classified information and who was part of an unprecedented, politically-motivated FBI investigation into a presidential campaign. These are, like, real crimes, not trivial matters like whether or not they returned emails on time. But whatevs.)

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Could Trump Win 20 Percent of the Black Vote in 2020? By Victor Davis Hanson

By on October 18th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/18/could-

The provocative Donald Trump certainly seems to be disliked by a majority of African-American professional athletes, cable news hosts, academics and the Congressional Black Caucus. Yet there are subtle but increasing indications that his approval among other African-Americans may be reaching historic highs for a modern Republican president.

Some polls have indicated that Trump’s approval rating among black voters is close to 20 percent. That is far higher than the 8 percent of the African-American vote that Trump received on Election Day 2016.

A recent, admittedly controversial Rasmussen Reports poll showed African-American approval of Trump at 36 percent.

Even 20 percent African-American support for Trump would all but dismantle Democratic Party presidential hopes for 2020. Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election with 88 percent of the black vote. That was about a six-point falloff from Barack Obama’s share of the black vote in 2012.

But far more importantly, an estimated 2 million of the African-American voters who cast ballots for Obama in 2012 simply did not show up at the polls in 2016 to vote for the off-putting Clinton.

Even a small drop in African-American turnout or anything less than the usual 85 percent to 90 percent supermajority for a Democratic presidential candidate on Election Day can prove fatal. Why?

Republican presidential candidates now routinely win 55 percent to 60 percent of the so-called white vote, and about 70 percent of voters are white. That lopsided margin may widen further, given that progressive Democrats are not making any effort to recapture turned-off white working-class voters.

With continually diminishing white support, Democrats must increasingly count on massive minority turnout and bloc voting—especially among African-American voters, who make up about 12 percent of the electorate.

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Fed Judge: Hillary’s Top Crony Committed Perjury in Email Investigation Daniel Greenfield

By on October 18th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271675/fed-judge-hillarys-top-crony-committed-perjury-daniel-greenfield

The FBI didn’t investigate Hillary Clinton’s email crimes. It covered them up by helping destroy the evidence while handing out immunity agreements like candy. It was one of the worst abuses of power in an administration already swimming in abuses of power.

At the heart of it all were Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills.

Mills was Hillary’s right-hand woman who had been accused of playing a role in various cover-ups. Including this one.

In a combative exchange at a hearing Friday in Washington, D.C., a federal judge unabashedly accused career State Department officials of lying and signing “clearly false” affidavits to derail a series of lawsuits seeking information about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server and her handling of the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth said he was “shocked” and “dumbfounded” when he learned that FBI had granted immunity to former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills during its investigation into the use of Clinton’s server, according to a court transcript of his remarks.

“I had myself found that Cheryl Mills had committed perjury and lied under oath in a published opinion I had issued in a Judicial Watch case where I found her unworthy of belief, and I was quite shocked to find out she had been given immunity in — by the Justice Department in the Hillary Clinton email case,” Lamberth said during Friday’s hearing.

The Department of Justice’s Inspector General (IG), Michael Horowitz, noted in a bombshell reportin June that it was “inconsistent with typical investigative strategy” for the FBI to allow Mills to sit in during the agency’s interview of Clinton during the email probe, given that classified information traveled through Mills’ personal email account. “[T]here are serious potential ramifications when one witness attends another witness’ interview,” the IG wrote.

Mills was wrongly allowed to act as if she were Hillary Clinton’s lawyer.

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The Incredibly Fake End of Elizabeth Warren A long pathetic narrative of lies, cowardice and fraud. Daniel Greenfield

By on October 18th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271663/incredibly-fake-end-elizabeth-warren-daniel-greenfield

Elizabeth Ann Warren has been many things in her life. All of them fake.

She represented an insurance company in an asbestos case before becoming a consumer rights crusader. She was paid $350,000 to teach a single course before deciding to fight student debt. She was a Republican, then became a socialist, and then announced, “I am a capitalist to my bones.”

She’s also the fake minority professor who plagiarized the recipes of a French chef for the Pow Wow Chow cookbook and killed her shot at 2020 with a DNA test which claimed that she wasn’t lying about her Cherokee background because she might have a 1/1,024th ancestry from somebody from Peru.

Like a snake, Senator Elizabeth Warren has shed her beliefs as easily as her minority status.

Warren went from being a Cherokee to the whitest woman in the Senate, the same way that she swung from her, “You didn’t build that” speech to, “She believes in markets. She loves markets.”

The truth about Senator Herring is that she’s always been a liar, a coward and a fraud.

Her presidential hopes didn’t end in 2018. They ended in 2015 when instead of challenging Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren cut a deal with her to be considered as her VP and get some of her key allies into administration positions in the second Clinton administration that never came into being.

Hillary didn’t pick Warren as her running mate. The jokes would have written themselves. And after losing the election, she was in no position to appoint Warren’s allies to anything except cleaning up her broken wineglasses.

Elizabeth Warren began getting ready for 2020, but she had already missed her last and only shot.

While Liz was playing the inside game, maneuvering for power within a future Clinton administration, her radical backers went looking for someone else to challenge Hillary. They settled on an obscure socialist senator from Vermont who was even angrier, more awkward and more radical than Warren.

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Trumpaganda? The eerie Trump Derangement Syndrome escalating in academia. Jack Kerwick

By on October 18th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271654/trumpaganda-jack-kerwick

All of the Democrat talking heads in the media—i.e. 95% or so of the American media—lost what was little left of their brains this past week when Kanye West joined and applauded President Trump in the White House.

Popular culture celebrities, like “journalists” and pundits, are overwhelmingly left-of-center. But one particularly famous among these, celebrates a Republican president—and Donald Trump, of all people!—and it is one celebrity too many for Democrats.

Though no reader of this column needs any reminding of it, the fact is that academia, too, is a bastion of Democratic Party politics. Fortunately, there are some excellent campus watchdog organizations that regularly expose the ideological fanaticism that pervades today’s colleges and universities.

The University of Illinois-Champaign supplies us with an especially revealing illustration of the politicization of education. Beginning on October 22, the school will roll out its new journalism course:

“Trumpaganda: The War on Facts, Press, and Democracy.”

The course description is rich. It purports to explore “the Trump administration’s disinformation campaign” and “its ‘running war’ with the mainstream news media,” as well as “their implications for American democracy and a free press.”

The course description also asserts that when Trump was a presidential candidate, he “employed the most common propaganda device, name-calling, to define, degrade, discredit and destroy his primary opponents as well as the ‘fake’ news media.” Two years into his presidency, the President’s “rhetorical attacks on mainstream media continue” as he labels them “‘the enemy of the people.’”

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Paul Collits : Russell Kirk, ‘American Cicero’

By on October 18th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/10/russell-kirk-american-cicero/

It behooves us to honour the codifiers of conservative core values. Among that pantheon of great thinkers, Kirk’s prodigious output warrants both reflection and genuflection — not least right now in Australia, where what passes for conservativism could use a refresher course in fundamental principles.

Tomorrow, October 19, marks the centenary of the birth of Russell Amos Augustine Kirk (left), who died in 1994. Kirk’s name may not be familiar to many Australians, even to Australian conservatives, but he is uniformly regarded as being the father of modern philosophical American conservatism, revived almost miraculously after World War II at a time of liberal ascendancy.

Kirk stands as a public intellectual (a term often misapplied these days) alongside those two modern British giants of conservative thought, Sir Roger Scruton and Michael Oakeshott. And he stands beside William F. Buckley Jr as the American most influential in steering conservatism towards modern America and modern America towards conservatism.

Kirk was an historian, a cultural critic, a literary critic, a classics scholar, a Burke scholar, a novelist, an academic, an essayist extraordinaire, a commentator, a fellow traveller with the Southern agrarians. A small town American rural town dweller. A self described (as noted by Kirk’s biographer Bradley Birzer) “gothic romantic” and “Bohemian Tory”. In Scruton’s words, a mind “turned away from the world.” Wishing for an “aristocracy of scholars.” Sounds promising.

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Augusto Zimmermann : Brazil’s Crime

By on October 18th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/10/brazils-crime/

It is not the jaw-dropping murder rate or endemic corruption which marks every aspect of public life and office in the South America nation, for they are but symptoms of the greater affliction: decade upon decade of left-wing government. Reformer Jair Bolsonaro aims to change that.

I had the chance to meet Mr Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s leading presidential candidate, about two decades ago. He is now on the verge of a significant victory in a run-off to be held on October 28. Back in those days, Bolsonaro was a city councillor in Rio de Janeiro and I was starting my professional career as a legal academic. His wife, one of my law students, invited me to join them for lunch at the City Council. I spoke with Bolsonaro for about 30 minutes and my interaction with him was rather pleasant and insightful. He clearly demonstrated love for his family and for the country. The brief conversation was enough to convince me that he was a different politician — completely different from the usual Brazilian politician normally inclined to embrace a leftist view of the world.

Bolsonaro has always been labelled ‘far right’ by the Brazilian media. This is a label usually given to anyone who opposes such things as the radical feminist lobby and/or the LGBTQI agenda. Bolsonaro apparently is very ‘far right’ because he also sees a few positive aspects in the military regime that ruled over the country from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Above all, he is called a ‘fascist’ because he wishes to fight crime and to introduce policies that can somehow address the breakdown of law and order in Brazil. Above all, Bolsonaro is deeply hated by those who reject his correlation between the rampant levels of criminality and the disorder caused by the incapacity of successive let-wing governments to protect the people from dangerous criminals.

While the current democratic period was initially hailed as the commencement of a new era of human rights, Brazil has faced an explosion of crime and violence over the last three decades. From 1985 (the last year of the military regime) to 2018, the number of Brazilians murdered as a result of criminal activity has grown by 257%. Homicide is currently the major cause (58%) of early death for Brazilians. In today’s Brazil, notes Joseph A. Page, a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center

Violent crime can strike at any time and in any place. Crowded city streets offer no refuge, as muggers prey on pedestrians and occupants of motor vehicles while onlookers go silently about their business. Those not wealthy enough to convert their dwellings into fortresses can never be certain that one day intruders might not force their way in and commit violence against them.

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Winds of War Brewing In Gaza Hamas tests the limits of Israel’s patience. Ari Lieberman

By on October 18th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271652/winds-war-brewing-gaza-ari-lieberman

On Wednesday, at approximately 3:40 a.m. Israeli time, sirens blared throughout the southern Israeli city of Be’er Sheva (Beersheba) shattering the stillness of the night. In what is considered to be a major escalation, Gazan-based terrorists fired a single rocket at the city, which is located approximately 25 miles from Gaza Strip. Miraculously, the projectile, which landed in a courtyard, caused no casualties but five people were treated for shock. Israel responded by hitting 20 military targets throughout Gaza. The Israeli Air Force also launched a precision strike against a group of terrorists in the midst of setting up a rocket launch from the northern Gaza Strip. The IDF later released video footage of the strike, which appears to have liquidated the rocket squad. The brazen and indiscriminate terrorist attack comes amid talk by Israel’s political echelon of the need to take decisive military action against Hamas, the entity that controls the Strip.

This past Friday, Palestinian terrorists, using violent demonstrations as cover, placed an explosive charge on the security fence marking the border between Gaza Strip and Israel and blew a hole through it. They then charged through the newly created opening toward the direction of a nearby Israeli outpost. An alert female Israel Defense Force soldier of the “Nesher” battalion quickly detected the infiltration and guided a response team to the area. All three infiltrators were liquidated. An additional four Palestinians were killed that day while engaged in violent Hamas-inspired, anti-Israel border rioting, rioting which has been occurring on a regular basis with no letup since May.

That same day, Israeli firefighters were forced to battle and extinguish 10 blazes sparked by incendiary balloons sent by Palestinians in Gaza and carried by wind patterns into Israel. Thus far, this form of eco-terror has devoured some 7,000 acres of forest and agricultural land. Large swaths of what were previously productive agricultural lands and lush greenery have been transformed into charred and blackened acreage. Israeli farmers on the Gaza periphery have lost millions of dollars as a result of what has been dubbed “kite terror.”

Just a day earlier, Israeli combat engineers detected and destroyed a Hamas terror tunnel that penetrated 200 meters into Israeli territory. It was the 15th such tunnel that Israel had destroyed since October 2017. Israel estimates that the cost of constructing the tunnel was $3 million, money that could have been spent on improving the lives of ordinary Gazans.

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UNESCO: Why the United States Needs to Watch Out by Shoshana Bryen

By on October 18th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13123/unesco-israel-united-states

The Old Testament is read by Christians with the same reverence as the New Testament. Jesus did NOT send the money changers out of the Al Aqsa Mosque.

UNESCO votes inform the way people think about history. One can disagree with Israeli policies and practices while agreeing that the Land of Israel is the historic space of the Jewish people. But when UNESCO erases that connection, there remains no reason to posit that there should be a State of Israel at all. Which leaves the Hamas and Fatah position that “Palestine from the River to the Sea” as the natural arrangement of things.

To the extent that Europeans (and some Americans) dismiss their traditional, biblically grounded understanding of the Middle East, Israel and the free world are less secure. UNESCO’s members understand that such dismissal by the West advances their goal toward the elimination of Israel. The United States should, too.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), regarding international interest in preserving historic sites in Israel, is a sham. Its work consists mainly of denying a Jewish connection to the land and its history. In a 2016 vote, UNESCO denied any connection between Israel and its historic Temple Mount and the Western Wall — a retaining wall which is all that is left of the ancient Jewish Temples (Solomon’s Temple, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE and the Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE).

In 2017, UNESCO’s resolution on “Occupied Palestine” announced that:

“…all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, the occupying Power, which have altered or purport to alter the character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem, and in particular the ‘basic law’ on Jerusalem, are null and void and must be rescinded forthwith…”

Two draft resolutions approved by UNESCO’s 59-member Executive Committee last week were merely “follow-ons.” First, that Hebron’s Old City and the Tomb of the Patriarchs (Cave of Machpela) are Palestinian heritage sites, and second that they are “in danger.” From Israel.

The votes were entirely consistent with previous UNESCO pronouncements and the list of “for”, “against”, and “abstain” was to be expected.

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