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November 2018

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Dear Suburban Mom By Julie Kelly

By on November 3rd, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/02/

Hey girlfriend, what’s up? Love the new Moncler vest… aubergine is the hot color this fall. How’s Olivia doing with those college applications? And good luck on Jacob’s big lacrosse tourney this weekend!

Listen, we need to talk. I know you’re not really into politics. Even though a lot of us voted for Donald Trump in 2016, you did not: Since Election Day, you’ve bragged about how edgy it was to vote for Evan McMullin. But you also thought it was edgy when you got your hair cut like Kate Gosselin in 2006.

We all make mistakes.

So there’s a super important election on Tuesday and the media is convinced that we suburban moms will vote Democrats back into power. And looking at some of the polls, I’m afraid they might be right. Democrats only need to flip 23 Republican House seats, and lots of them are located in the suburbs. Just 23 more seats until we get Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Again.

Now, maybe that doesn’t scare you. Maybe you think it will be totally trendy to run those Trump-loving Republicans out of office and show them who’s boss. Maybe Alyssa and Oprah and the gals on “The View” have convinced you that voting for a Democrat is the only way to keep your Cool Chick Card.

But hear me out. I know you hate taking advice from someone who doesn’t buy soy milk and organic bison meat, but if you would have listened to me about the Rumchata shots at the club’s summer party, you wouldn’t have jumped into the water hazard on the 18th hole.

Caution, my friend.

Because despite what Democrats are telling you now, just remember one thing: They hate you.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

FBI Arrests Iraqi Refugee in Tucson for Building Car Bomb, Teaching Others By Patrick Poole

By on November 3rd, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/fbi-arrests-iraqi-refugee-in-tucson-for-building-car-bomb-teaching-others/

The FBI arrested 30-year-old Ahmad Suhad Ahmad in Tucson, Arizona, last week following a two-year investigation.

According to the limited information contained in the two-page criminal complaint, Ahmad had told a confidential source in December 2016 that he knew how to detonate a bomb using a cell phone — a technique he said he learned during the war in Iraq.

In April 2017, the same confidential source asked Ahmad if he knew how to make a car bomb for a target in Mexico, and if he could show him how to build one. Ahmad agreed.

A week later Ahmad showed the source an image on his cell phone of explosive materials and instructions written in Arabic, which he promised to translate into English. He also met with other sources and undercover FBI agents about planning to build the bomb.

On April 26, 2017, Ahmad traveled with the sources and the FBI undercover agents to an apartment complex in Las Vegas. He brought with him a number of items to build the bomb, including a circuit tester, electrical tape, and Permatex epoxy. The undercover agents also brought items from a list provided by Ahmad.

Over the course of several hours, he built the bomb and explained to the others how to do it. He showed one of the agents where to place the blasting caps and the explosives.

He then supervised the building of a second device. Once completed, he explained how the bombs operated.

CONTINUE AT SITE

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Evidence piles up about caravan’s criminals, terrorists, and human shields By Monica Showalter

By on November 3rd, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/evidence_piles_up_about_caravans_criminals_terrorists_and_human_shields.html

As candy-coated accounts from lefty activists saturate the airwaves to assure Americans that “we have nothing to fear from the migrant march,” and President Trump’s warnings about criminals within the invading army are dismissed in the press as “without evidence,” the Department of Homeland Security put paid to the nonsense with a new report warning that the migrant army of mostly unemployed military-aged males has at least 270 convicted criminals within its ranks.

According to the Washington Examiner:

“We continue to be concerned about individuals along the caravan route. In fact, over 270 individuals along the caravan route have criminal histories, including known gang membership,” the statement said. “Those include a number of violent criminals – examples include aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, armed robbery, sexual assault on a child, and assault on a female.”

A DHS spokesperson told the Washington Examiner the 270 had previously been convicted, not just charged.

“We also continue to see individuals from over 20 countries in this flow from countries such as Somalia, India, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. There is a large segment of this population that we know nothing about and we must be prepared to defend our border and enforce our laws to protect the citizens of our country,” the department said.

Two hundred seventy criminals are merely those the Department of Homeland Security knows about based on their past convictions. The ones who haven’t been caught and convicted of crimes likely raise the number to something quite a bit higher.

Yet none of that matters to the candycoat press, which keeps repeating the mantra about all migrants just looking for “a better life.” Sexual assault on a child? The Catholic Church would love to get such “don’t worry” coverage from the press on that one. Assault on a female? Obviously, “believe all women” doesn’t apply when the convicted perpetrator is illegal. You’re on your own, ladies.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turtle Bay Truth Embargo The U.N. condemns the U.S. while giving Cuba a pass on human rights.

By on November 3rd, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/turtle-bay-truth-embargo-1541202078

The United Nations has again proved its worth as an unfailing barometer of human rights—though not in the way the world body intended.

It came in Thursday’s 189-2 vote against the trade embargo on Cuba, blamed by regime apologists for most of Cuba’s many ills. Israel alone sided with the U.S. The resolution on the embargo pops up every year. And every year since 1992 the U.S. has voted against it—except in 2016 when the U.S. abstained because the Obama Administration was cozying up to Havana.

This year U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley tried something different. Instead of simply voting no, the U.S. tried to inject some balance by proposing several amendments that highlighted the many egregious outrages of the Cuban regime. These range from its denial of fundamental freedoms of assembly and expression to the harassment and intimidation of government opponents to the jailing of citizens who dare complain about human-rights violations. All eight amendments failed by overwhelming margins, with only Israel and Ukraine consistently voting with the U.S.

Ms. Haley noted who bears the real costs of this high-minded preening. “It’s one more time that countries feel they can poke the United States in the eye, but you’re not hurting the United States when you do this,” she said. “You’re literally hurting the Cuban people by telling the regime that their treatment of their people is acceptable.”

People can come down on different sides about the merits of an economic embargo. But when the U.N. condemns the U.S. while giving Cuba a pass, Turtle Bay reveals its own moral bankruptcy.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Growth Dividend for Workers The October jobs report shows the shared gains of a stronger economy.

By on November 3rd, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-growth-dividend-for-workers-1541201213

Don’t think tax reform and deregulation matter for working people? Consider the evidence from Friday’s gangbuster jobs report for October that showed the tangible dividend for workers from faster economic growth resulting from better economic policy: More jobs to choose from and higher pay to boot.

That’s the essence of the news that the marvelous machine called the American economy created 250,000 new jobs last month, including 246,000 in private industry. Average hourly wages rose again and are now 3.1% above a year ago, the fastest increase in a decade. (See the nearby chart.) This is the growth dividend that Republicans promised if the dead weight of Barack Obama’s policies could be lifted from the backs of American business and workforce.

The economy has now added 218,000 jobs on average over the last three months, up from 210,000 over the last year, as the unemployment rate held steady at 3.7%. That’s remarkably strong labor growth for an expansion that is nine years old at what some economists claim is already full employment.

Apparently thousands of Americans have been waiting for the right job, or a better paying one, because the civilian labor force grew by 711,000 in October and four-fifths of them found jobs. Job growth was especially robust in leisure and hospitality (42,000), health care (35,600), manufacturing (32,000) and transportation and warehousing (24,800).

Hurricane Florence, which struck the Carolinas in September, has caused some noise in the data. But the big job gains in October offset tepid payroll growth in September. Labor force participation ticked up 0.2 percentage points last month to 62.9%, which is at the higher end of its range in recent years.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt—A Review by Nick Cohen

By on November 2nd, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/02/an-

A review of An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt by Pascal Bruckner. Polity (November 2018), 204 pages.

It is embarrassingly easy to write about the collapse of the Left in the twenty-first century. The explosion in identity politics that has led to the automatic use of “white” as an ethnic insult in condemnations such as “white privilege” and “white, straight men” has made race as defining a factor in left-wing politics as it is in extreme right-wing politics. Meanwhile, the willingness to excuse antisemitsm, misogyny, tyranny, and obscurantism, as long as the antisemitic, misogynistic, tyrannical obscurantists are anti-Western, has called into question whether leftists—or at least the noisiest voices on the Left—have lost all connection to their better values.

I have said as much many times, and in his new book the French political theorist Pascal Bruckner says it again. Bruckner once struck me as the best the French intelligentsia had to offer. In 2007, he provoked an intellectual scandal with the “Racism of the Anti-Racists”, an essay for Sign and Sight, in which he excoriated liberals who denied Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other Muslim dissidents the rights they took for granted. Meanwhile, I admired his Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism enough to call it “a brilliant defence of liberalism and a deservedly contemptuous assault on all those intellectuals who have betrayed its best values.”

The title of Bruckner’s new polemic ought to have warned me that betrayal is not an exclusively left-wing vice. Far from being a principled defence of liberal and secular values, An Imaginary Racism: Islamophobia and Guilt is an unconscious illustration of how easily those who profess to hold enlightened ideals can slip into the ethnic favouritism and intellectual double-standards of the counter-Enlightenment.

Most liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims recoil from the word “Islamophobia.” TellMama, the main monitoring centre for violence and abuse against British Muslims, fought a doomed campaign to enshrine the use of “anti-Muslim hatred” instead. Hard won experience had taught its activists that “Islamophobia” was a weapon in the arsenal of the Islamist Right. Opposing bigotry with the language of bigots, who sought to re-define criticism of religion as racism, struck them as self-defeating to put it mildly.

TellMama keeps its office address secret. Its workers receive threats, not only from white racists, but also from Islamists. (They have taken advice from Jews who monitor antisemitic violence in Britain, and gay rights campaigners who monitor homophobia, and are thus damned in the eyes of the fanatical.) If all Bruckner wanted to do was to criticise the use of the term “Islamophobia” to incite violence against freethinkers and feminists who challenge clerical power, he would be performing a useful service—albeit one that has been performed many times before. But his book is representative of our debased times because it’s far from clear that Bruckner can extend his opposition to Islamism to cover the purveyors of anti-Muslim bigotry.

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BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Gulag Archipelago: A New Foreword by Jordan B. Peterson written by Jordan B. Peterson

By on November 2nd, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/01/the-gulag

Editor’s note: The following essay is Jordan B. Peterson’s new foreword to the new edition of The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Penguin, November 2018, 544 pages). Reproduced with the kind permission of the author.

Once we have taken up the word, it is thereafter impossible to turn away: A writer is no detached judge of his countrymen and contemporaries; he is an accomplice to all the evil committed in his country or by his people. And if the tanks of his fatherland have bloodied the pavement of a foreign capital, then rust-colored stains have forever bespattered the writer’s face. And if on some fateful night a trusting Friend is strangled in his sleep—then the palms of the writer bear the bruises from that rope. And if his youthful fellow citizens nonchalantly proclaim the advantages of debauchery over humble toil, if they abandon themselves to drugs, or seize hostages—then this stench too is mingled with the breath of the writer. Have we the insolence to declare that we do not answer for the evils of today’s world?…

The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions! His rule: Let that come into the world, let it even reign supreme—only not through me. But it is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie! For in the struggle with lies art has always triumphed and shall always triumph! Visibly, irrefutably for all! Lies can prevail against much in this world, but never against art…

One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.

–From the speech delivered by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the Swedish Academy on the occasion of his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

* * *

First, you defend your homeland against the Nazis, serving as a twice-decorated soldier on the Eastern front in the criminally ill- prepared Soviet Red Army. Then, you’re arrested, humiliated, stripped of your military rank, charged under the auspices of the all-purpose Article 58 with the dissemination of “anti-Soviet propaganda,” and dragged off to Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison. There, through the bars of your cell, you watch your beloved country celebrating its victory in the Great Patriotic War. Then you’re sentenced, in absentia, to eight years of hard labor (but you got away easy; it wasn’t so long afterward that people in your position were awarded a “tenner”—and then a quarter of a century!). And fate isn’t finished with you, yet—not by any means. You develop a deadly cancer in the camp, endure the exile imposed on you after your imprisonment ends, and pass very close to death.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Here’s The Key Clause In The Birthright Citizenship Debate, Briefly Explained When a person is in the United States illegally, he or she is still governed by and owes loyalty to a ‘foreign’ entity or government. Elad Hakim

By on November 2nd, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/02/heres-key-clause-birthright-citizenship-debate-briefly-explained/

President Trump recently disclosed plans to sign an executive order ending so-called “birthright citizenship” for babies of non-citizens born on U.S. soil. This would mark a major overhaul of immigration policy and almost certainly trigger a legal battle.

The 14th Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” While opponents to Trump’s proposed action opine that the constitutional language is cut and dry, this might not necessarily be the case.

Putting aside the question of whether Trump may end birthright citizenship by way of executive order, the main issue of contention revolves around the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” language in the 14th Amendment. Some opine that the 14th Amendment “was only intended to provide citizenship to children born in the U.S. to lawful permanent residents — not to unauthorized immigrants or those on temporary visas.” In other words, if a parent is in the country illegally and is, therefore, not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, then, by association, neither is his or her newborn child.

Conversely, others interpret this provision to mean “the legal obligation of all foreigners and immigrants to follow U.S. law.” Stated another way, if a child is born to an illegal immigrant in the United States, the baby is automatically a citizen because he or she is obligated to follow U.S. law. The country of birth is paramount.

John C. Eastman highlighted the flaw(s) associated with this latter argument by way of a simple example in an article in National Review. He wrote:

When a British tourist visits the United States, he subjects himself to our laws as long as he remains within our borders. He must drive on the right side of the road, for example. He is subject to our partial, territorial jurisdiction, but he does not thereby subject himself to our complete, political jurisdiction. He does not get to vote, or serve on a jury; he cannot be drafted into our armed forces; and he cannot be prosecuted for treason if he takes up arms against us, because he owes us no allegiance. He is merely a ‘temporary sojourner,’ to use the language employed by those who wrote the 14th Amendment, and not ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States in the full and complete sense intended by that language in the 14th Amendment.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Republicans, Yet Again, Do Right by Black Americans By Deroy Murdock

By on November 2nd, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/republicans-do-right-by-black-americans/

The party that freed the slaves continues to liberate black Americans today.

‘What the hell do you have to lose?” candidate Donald J. Trump queried black Americans in 2016, as he asked for their votes with characteristically blunt eloquence. Eight percent of black voters bought his pitch. While this seems like a rout, Trump outperformed Mitt Romney by one-third; 6 percent of blacks backed 2012’s GOP nominee. Trump’s total was astonishing, given that the Left/media slandered him as the guy who brings the lighter fluid to a cross burning.

So, what do blacks think of Trump today? Rasmussen’s tracking poll Monday found Trump’s approval among blacks at a record-high 40 percent, versus 50 percent nationwide. How could this be? The Trump-hating Left/media’s attacks have been ruthless, relentless, and more one-sided than a flounder. Answer: President Trump and Republican leadership have made black Americans better off than they were two years ago.

• Black unemployment was 8.6 percent in October 2016. Last month, it hit 6.2 percent, marginally above May’s lowest-ever 5.9 percent.

• The Labor Department counted 18.1 million blacks employed in October 2016 versus 19.3 million last month. In short, 1.2 million more black Americans have found work since Donald J. Trump was elected.

• Blacks below poverty fell from 21.8 percent in 2016 to 21.2 percent in 2017, the latest and historically lowest such reading.

This great news flows from Republican policies: abundant tax relief, robust deregulation, and a pro-business tone in Washington that is healing Obama’s “You didn’t build that!” public abuse of American enterprise.

The party that freed the slaves has done even more to liberate black Americans today:

• The GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which every single Democrat in Congress opposed, includes Opportunity Zones. These areas “offer tax incentives for businesses to invest in economically distressed communities, making them a powerful vehicle for economic growth and job creation,” a White House statement explains. Across America, 8,761 communities have been declared Opportunity Zones, not unlike the Enterprise Zones that the late Congressman Jack Kemp (R., N.Y.) advocated during the Reagan era. “Through these tax incentives, we will jumpstart our American communities, create momentum for economic recovery, and attract investment to diverse areas across our Nation.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Administration to Reimpose Last of Sanctions Lifted by Iran Deal By Mairead McArdle

By on November 2nd, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-administration-to-reimpose-last-of-sanctions-lifted-by-iran-deal/

The Trump administration will reimpose the rest of the sanctions lifted under the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with early next week, officials announced Friday.

“This part of the campaign about which we’re speaking today is simple: It is aimed at depriving the regime of the revenues that it uses to spread death and destruction around the world,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a call with reporters.

The 2015 nuclear deal, which was also signed by the U.K., France, Germany, China, and Russia, gave Tehran billions of dollars in relief from sanctions in exchange for a promise to curb its nuclear program. President Trump pulled out of the deal in May, and allowed two periods of 9o and 180 days to let companies phase out their business with Iran.

After the first period, which ended in August, the U.S. reimposed sanctions affecting transactions with U.S. dollar banknotes and trade in gold and precious metals, graphite, and cars. On Monday, the administration will reimpose the more hefty batch of sanctions, affecting the energy, shipping, shipbuilding, and financial sectors.

Eight countries will be granted a waiver from oil and gas sanctions and will still be able to import Iranian oil temporarily, Pompeo said. A list of those countries will be published Monday.

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