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January 2020

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

New Lawsuit Claims Rod Rosenstein Led Task Force that Spied on Sharyl Attkisson’s Computers

By on January 10th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/09/new-lawsuit-claims-rod-rosenstein-led-task-force-that-spied-on-sharyl-attkissons-computers/

In a federal lawsuit filed this week, Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein has been implicated in yet another improper government spy operation.

In the new complaint, Attkisson v. Rosenstein et.al., investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson names former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosentein and four other Justice Department officials as the government agents who of illegally survielled her electronic devices.

According to the complaint—filed in United States District Court in Baltimore, Maryland—Rosenstein led “a multi-agency task force in Baltimore that conducted surveillance of the Attkissons’ computer systems” and “used USPS IP addresses on other occasions to conduct operations.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Intelligence Community’s Inspector General Is the Link Between FISAgate and Impeachment Julie Kelly

By on January 10th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/09/intelligence-communitys-inspector-general-is-the-link-between-fisagate-and-impeachment/

The American public must know more about Michael Atkinson’s ties to the same agency and same culprits who launched the phony Russian collusion scheme.

As impeachment remains stalled for now, Democrats in the House of Representatives still refuse to release the closed-door testimony of a key witness in the concocted drama: Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community.

Atkinson, you may recall, launched the impeachment saga when he determined that the accusations by the “whistleblower” about Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president last summer were so alarming as to deem the complaint a matter of “urgent concern.” (It wasn’t.)

Atkinson sent two letters to the House Intelligence Committee demanding immediate attention to the bogus complaint.

“I have not been authorized to disclose . . . basic information to you, in addition to the important information provided by the Complainant that is also being kept from the congressional intelligence committees,” Atkinson warned September 17, a week after the U.S. aid had been released to Ukraine.

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FOREIGN POLICY, MEDIA Comments turned off

False Analogies: The Heart of Fake Foreign Policy News Under Trump, we’re starting to see the jihadist terror for what it really is. Bruce Thornton

By on January 10th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/false-analogies-are-heart-fake-foreign-policy-news-bruce-thornton/

The false analogy fallacy occurs when superficial similarities between events being compared are outnumbered by fundamental differences. This cognitive bad habit has always existed, but has become more prevalent since Vietnam and the increasing politicization of mass news on network and cable television, social media, and especially the internet. The specious analogy between a recent, short-lived attack on our embassy in Baghdad, and the 2012 Benghazi fiasco during Obama’s watch, is a recent example.

Useful analogies are predicated on the permanence of a flawed human nature driven by greed, power, or irrational hatreds. One of the greatest historians ever, Thucydides, explicitly said he wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War in order to provide “an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” That’s why he called his history a “possession for all time.” Similarly the Roman historian Livy, writing at the end of nearly a century of savage civil wars, intended to show “what to imitate,” and to “mark for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in the result.” Without those aims, history is just antiquarianism or another form of high-brow entertainment.

And politics, which thrives on false analogies. The war in Vietnam left us two malign cultural consequences. The first was the antiwar Democrats and their media subsidiary transformed a military victory into a defeat. This created the Left’s paradigm for every U.S intervention abroad as prima facie a neocolonialist, unjust, racist war against national self-determination in order to profit arms manufacturers, the “merchants of death,” and other capitalist “malefactors of great wealth.” Following this ideological deformation came the “another Vietnam” false analogy, and the “Vietnam syndrome”: fear of casualties, self-doubt about our goodness, and angst over “quagmires” and “escalation.”

Leftist Democrats, opportunistic presidential candidates, and the usual media suspects all exploited the Vietnam false analogy to demonize the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hungary Takes On the Feminist Goliath—and Wins By David Solway

By on January 10th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/hungary-takes-on-the-feminist-goliath-and-wins/

Feminism is a social and political movement. It is not an academic discipline on par with, say, mathematics, economics, business administration, engineering or physics. Gender studies, feminism’s academic wing, does not constitute an appropriate subject for an academic degree. At best it is a subset of a complex of ideas, issues, and events properly canvassed by the History Department, along with a myriad other themes and developments in the study of Western civilization.

Moreover, such programs have no business infesting legitimate areas of study to the extent that an astronomer must sign an affidavit attesting to his involvement in social justice projects or an engineer proclaim his fealty to the feminist manifesto if he is to be considered for promotion. The same proviso applies to any applicant for a university position. It should be obvious that gender programs and initiatives have nothing to do with mapping the universe, finding a cure for cancer, investigating quantum entanglement or stochastic electrodynamics, studying the economic effects of the Protestant Reformation, assessing the impact of political theories from Plato and Aristotle to the present, resolving truss and anchorage problems in suspension bridge engineering, tracing the history of epic poetry from Homer to Michael Lind’s The Alamo, or any canonical field of authentic endeavor. The fact that a bogus discipline, which has no reason for existing sui generis, can spread outward to influence and dilute genuine subjects is beyond comprehension.

Enter Hungary. In an effort to restore curricular and administrative sanity to university education, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party have passed legislation to abolish Gender Studies as an area of official study. Hungary’s Deputy Prime Minister Zsolt Semjen has stated that such programs “ha[ve] no business in universities” as they represent “an ideology, not a science,” with a market profile “close to zero.” Similarly, Orban’s Chief of staff Gergely Gulyas said, “The Hungarian government is of the clear view that people are born either men or women. They lead their lives the way they think best [and] the Hungarian state does not wish to spend public funds on education in this area.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Horror Flight 752 – and a Mullah Cover-Up Evidence mounts that the Kiev-bound Boeing 737-800 was downed by Iranian surface-to-air missile. Ari Lieberman

By on January 10th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/horror-flight-752-and-mullah-cover-ari-lieberman/

At 6:12 a.m., Kiev-bound, Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 took off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport. Less than five minutes later, the Boeing 737-800 was a smoldering wreck. All 176 passengers and crew members perished. Among the dead were 82 Iranian citizens, 63 Canadians, 11 Ukrainians, 10 Swedes, four Afghans, three Brits and three Germans. Some of those on board had dual citizenship.

Almost immediately following the tragic incident, Iranian aviation authorities made two announcements. First, they declared that the plane crashed because one of the engines caught fire. Second, they said that they would not transfer the black boxes, which contain critical data, to Boeing officials, National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) officials or to any Americans. On Thursday morning, Iranian officials announced that they had retrieved the black boxes but that they were severely damaged, and data was missing.

There is ample reason to conclude that the Iranian authorities are lying through their teeth on this one and are engaged in a massive and pernicious cover-up. Preliminarily, all the evidence points to the fact that the plane was actually shot down by a Russian manufactured, Iranian anti-aircraft missile, though Iranian officials have dismissed this allegation as “scientifically impossible.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tucker Carlson looks at the horrors in Pelosi’s own district of San Francisco. By Andrea Widburg

By on January 10th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/tucker_carlson_looks_at_the_horrors_in_pelosis_own_district_of_san_francisco.html

Over the course of this week, on every episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Tucker has looked at one aspect of the insanity that is San Francisco. Once one of America’s greatest and most beautiful cities, it is now simultaneously one of its most expensive and its most decayed and dangerous. As a native San Franciscan, I find it painful to watch my natal city become a crazed and unlivable one.

Thursday’s episode was especially poignant, because it interviewed an old friend of mine going back to our high school days, Nyna Armstrong. Nyna is a brilliant woman, a hard worker, and a committed conservative. She’s also raised two wonderful daughters, both of whom serve this country. She is the kind of person that helps make America and American cities great.

Because of her job, Nyna is forced to live in the Bay Area. And because of the cost of living in the Bay Area, she’s chosen to live on a boat. It’s a nice boat, but it’s still not a house. Living there, however, is affordable and it keeps Nyna far from the city’s increasingly crazy, violent, and drug-addled residents.

If you’re interested in seeing what Leftist governance does to a city, I highly recommend Tucker’s other videos, which are all quite short:

American Dystopia: San Francisco in Decline

San Francisco small business owner struggles to run a store where customers can steal with virtual impunity

San Francisco residents turn to private police to keep neighborhoods from imploding

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A War Powers Act House Democrats want to hamstring Trump, not the Iranians.

By on January 10th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-war-powers-act-11578615012?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Fans of the movie “Animal House” will recall the scene when the brothers of Delta House declare that it’s time for a “really futile and stupid gesture.” House Democrats chose to do something similar with their vote Thursday to block President Trump from using military force against Iran.

“Last week, the Trump Administration conducted a provocative and disproportionate military airstrike targeting high-level Iranian military officials,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday in announcing the floor vote. “Today, to honor our duty to keep the American people safe, the House will move forward with a War Powers Resolution to limit the President’s military actions regarding Iran.”

The five-page resolution declares that Mr. Trump must first get the permission of Congress if he wants to take up arms against Iran. But get this: The resolution is nonbinding, which means it won’t even go to the President’s desk. “This is a statement of the Congress of the United States. I will not have that statement be diminished by whether the President will veto it or not,” Mrs. Pelosi explained.

Mrs. Pelosi prefers to diminish the House statement by making it irrelevant by her own design. Democrats don’t even have the courage to vote on a binding resolution under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which says Congress must authorize the use of force within 60 days after hostilities begin. Democrats want to go on record against war with Iran as long as their vote doesn’t mean anything. They’re conscientious objectors to their own conscientious objections.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

Did You Know That “Obama’s Iran Deal Granted An Amnesty To The World’s Leading Terrorist Mastermind” – Qassem Suleimani – Reported The Telegraph In 2016 By Jim Hayek

By on January 10th, 2020

https://americantruthtoday.com/left-news/2020/01/08/did-you-know-that-obama-s-iran-deal-granted-an-amnesty-to-the-world-s-leading-terrorist-mastermind-qassem-suleimani-reported-the-telegraph-in-2016

Every day comes with new revelations making it impossible to continue justifying the defense of former President Obama’s blatant giveaway of the JCPOA and his defense of terrorists. Yet, our media continues trying…

This article from July 15, 2016 laid it all out so clearly… including the reaction if a future president were to take corrective measures to protect American interests.

As head of the Quds Force in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Qassem Suleimani is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading terrorists. Now Barack Obama has effectively granted him an amnesty.

Qassem Suleimani,[Soleimani] the head of the elite Quds Force in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, fully deserves his reputation as one of the world’s leading terrorist masterminds.

For a decade a more he has been the driving force behind an array of Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups, from Hizbollah to Hamas, which have orchestrated a reign of terror throughout the Middle East.

From a purely British perspective, he was responsible for training and equipping the Shia militias in southern Iraq who killed scores of British troops during the dark days of Iraq’s sectarian conflict following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and was reported to have trained the Taliban in the art of making deadly roadside bombs that killed and mutilated our Service personnel serving in southern Afghanistan.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum: Israel is Not Going it Alone

By on January 9th, 2020

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-Wrong-Israels-not-going-it-alone-after-all-613699

What a difference a new decade makes. The first to admit it might be IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi, who just over two weeks ago expressed disappointment with Washington’s Mideast activities, or lack thereof.

In his first major speech on Israel’s military preparedness and future challenges, Kochavi – who assumed his role exactly a year ago – issued a veiled criticism of US President Donald Trump, particularly in relation to Iran.Reiterating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s mantra about the real and present danger posed by Tehran’s fierce pursuit of nuclear warheads and ongoing development of long-range precision missiles with the ability to reach Israel, Kochavi said, “It would be better if we weren’t the only ones responding militarily” to the concrete threat.

In fairness to Israel’s top man-in-uniform, there were signs suggesting that Jerusalem would have to go it alone in any actual confrontation with the Islamic Republic.

In the first place, the IDF has been fighting solo for years against Iranian proxy groups such as Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, with the former directly commanded and controlled by the mullahs in Tehran, and the latter receiving moral and financial support from the same source.

Secondly, in October Trump announced that he was pulling US troops out of northern Syria. It was a move that not only concerned many of his supporters at home and abroad, but promptly ushered in a Turkish invasion of the area, which included the mass murder of America’s Kurdish allies.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate Change Advocacy: Application Of Science, Or Religious Cult? Francis Menton

By on January 9th, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-1-7-climate-change-advocacy-application-of-science-or-religious-cult

Each day you listen to unceasing climate change advocacy, always claiming the mantle of “science.” But you can’t help noticing the steady drumbeat of the standard narratives used by religious cults. The end of days is nigh. You have grievously sinned. Your sin is taking you down the road to damnation. Yet salvation is at hand. But only if you and all humanity immediately repent and follow the gospel of your new climate change priests. If not, the apocalypse of judgment day shall soon be upon you.

Of course these narratives pervade the rhetoric of the fanatics seeking to be messianic leaders of the climate movement, from the Greta Thunbergs to the Al Gores. But over in the more sober organs of elite thought leadership, surely the climate advocacy must be based on actual science. Right?

If you are struggling with that question, perhaps you should take a look at some of the recent coverage of the wildfires in Australia that has appeared in our elite media. Today I will pick on a couple of my usual suspects, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Both of those have featured multiple pieces over the past several days the gist of which is that Australia’s wildfires are the punishment for its grievous sins of failure to follow the true climate change gospel.

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