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Ruth King

Trump’s Big Bomb Let’s hope the right people noticed this blast against Islamic State.

As demonstration effects go, it would be hard to top the bomb the U.S. dropped Thursday on Islamic State in Afghanistan. The 21,000 pound GBU-43, or “mother of all bombs,” landed on Islamic State installations in eastern Afghanistan.

What happened at the receiving end of the bomb isn’t known, nor would White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer say whether President Trump personally gave authorization, which isn’t needed to deploy the GBU-43. But like the 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles that struck a Syrian airfield last week, the right people no doubt noticed this display of American purpose.

At the top of the list would be Islamic State, which Mr. Trump has promised to eliminate. The terrorist group has seized territory in Afghanistan’s Nangahar Province, near the border with Pakistan. The Afghan army, supported by the U.S., has taken significant losses in its attempt to dislodge ISIS. The commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John Nicholson, called the GBU-43 smart bomb the “right munition” to “maintain momentum” against ISIS.

Momentum is an important concept in this fight. The armed forces of Iraq, for example, are on the brink of recovering Mosul from Islamic State and have taken huge casualties to do so. But it will be difficult to consolidate an achievement like that unless other nations are willing to make similar commitments to support the fight, whether in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan or Yemen.

Momentum routinely wilts beneath the politics and factions across the Middle East. The strike against Syria and now the use in Afghanistan of the biggest non-nuclear bomb in the active U.S. arsenal makes clear America’s resolve to our allies. Islamic State won’t be defeated without buy-in from those allies.

We may also assume that the missile-launching crowd in Pyongyang noticed the deployment of the GBU-43. Far be it from us to suggest that the U.S. drop one on a North Korean nuclear factory. But in the space of a week, Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, Bashar Assad, Xi Jinping and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, wherever he is hiding, have learned that the U.S. considers it to be in its interest to push back hard against its adversaries’ aggression.

The Kushner-Cohn Ascendancy The Trump White House has more conservatives than Steve Bannon.

All new Presidencies are works in progress, though the Trump Administration is less fully formed than most. Amid a shaky early start, leaks and personal feuds, power seems to be shifting away from chief White House strategist Steve Bannon and toward President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn. This makes sense if it helps Mr. Trump put his White House in order and puts results over melodrama.

The transition from running a boutique family business to an election campaign to the most powerful and complicated government on the planet has a steep learning curve. Mr. Bannon, the former Breitbart website publisher, was an architect of Mr. Trump’s populist insurgency, and he entered the West Wing with the President’s ear.

Yet Mr. Trump told the New York Post’s Michael Goodwin this week that “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late.” He followed up with Journal reporters, noting that “I do my own policy, I’m my own strategist” and calling his aide-de-camp “a guy who works for me.” The Time magazine cover story in February billing Mr. Bannon the “shadow president” probably didn’t help his standing with a boss who doesn’t like to be upstaged.

Mr. Bannon was also the author of the Administration’s early miscalculations, including a divisive inaugural address and especially the immigration executive order. The travel ban was overbroad and poorly drafted, got blocked by the courts, energized Democrats and created dozens of media hardship stories.

Mr. Bannon is also getting blame—perhaps more than he deserves—for the ObamaCare repeal-and-replace failure. He couldn’t deliver the ornery conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus, despite issuing a typically blunt ultimatum that they had no choice. But most of the fault lies with the Freedom Caucus’s refusal to compromise that is giving Mr. Trump doubts about the utility of working with conservatives.

Consumers of media may have whiplash from Mr. Bannon’s ebbing influence. Only weeks ago pundits were characterizing Mr. Bannon as the White House’s Rasputin, or Trotsky, but apparently the revolution will be postponed. In recent days sometimes you could almost mistake Mr. Trump for a normal Republican President.

All of this is empowering Messrs. Kushner and Cohn, who are preaching competence and calm. The real-estate heir and former Goldman Sachs No. 2 are expanding their portfolios and Mr. Cohn is running the economic decision-making process.

Trump’s Comprehensive Volte-Face View all posts from this blog By: Srdja Trifkovic

During the presidential campaign and in the immediate aftermath of his election victory, Donald Trump had made a number of conciliatory remarks about Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and the possibility of substantial improvement in relations between Washington and Moscow. On the campaign trail he also made the well-publicized statement that NATO was obsolete, and last July he declared that “Crimea is none of our business.” He had also promised to end regime-change operations, advised Obama to stay out of Syria, and indicated that President Bashar al-Assad staying in power was not to be discounted.

In his first ten weeks in the White House President Trump has made U-turns on all key fronts. In the course of a single day—Wednesday, April 12—he made no fewer than four public statements which repudiate his previous positions. Standing next to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at an East Room news conference, Trump declared that NATO was “no longer obsolete.” Only days after unleashing cruise missiles against Syrian government forces he described Bashar al-Assad as a “butcher” over alleged chemical weapons attacks on civilians, sounding like an avid advocate of regime change. In an interview that aired also on Wednesday, Trump said that Putin was partly to blame for the conflict in Syria and denounced the Russian president for backing Bashar. At a White House press conference later in the day he said that “right now we are not getting along with Russia at all; we may be at an all-time low in terms of relationship with Russia.” Asked whether Syrian forces could have launched the chemical attack without Russia’s knowledge, Trump replied that it was possible but unlikely.

When asked by CNN’s Jim Acosta about apparent reversals, White House press secretary Sean Spicer replied, “Circumstances change.” Trump’s embrace of establishmentarian positions was confirmed in an interview with the New York Post last Tuesday in which he openly criticized his political chief strategist Steve Bannon, whose political future now seems uncertain. Bannon was excluded from the National Security Council last week, in a move that was widely interpreted as a victory for supporters of the bipartisan imperial consensus.

MY SAY: VOGUE ON SYRIA

Anna Wintour, world famous garmentologist, Hillaryac and Obama supporter is editor of Vogue Magazine.

In 2011 the magazine tucked among its ad pages featuring $20,000.00 pocketbooks and other expensive must have accessories, a column praising Asma-al Assad, the wife of Bashar al Assad titled “A Rose in the Desert.”

Here is what the article said about Syria:

“Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.” It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark. ”

Rather Vague on Syria wouldn’t you say?????rsk

Barack Obama’s presidency will be defined by his failure to face down Assad The US president’s indifference to chemical warfare led to the trail of violence that reached as far as Europe

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad 17 December 2016

On Friday, near Palmyra, 14 tanks and an anti-aircraft system were destroyed in an air strike on Isis. Palmyra recently fell to the jihadists after the Syrian regime and its allies diverted forces to Aleppo, leaving the ancient city under-defended.

This was a repeat of events last year when, on the advice of the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani, the regime deployed troops away from Palmyra to the strategically significant metropolis of Aleppo. The planes struck Palmyra on the same day Suleimani was photographed treading the city’s rubble. But the planes weren’t Russian or Syrian: they belonged to the US-led international coalition. While the US has its own reasons for battling Isis, in this case it was picking up the slack from the regime.

Palmyra has only symbolic significance for Assad. Aleppo was the prize, and, with the world watching impotent, the regime was able to starve and bludgeon its population into surrender. The regime was aided by Russian bombers and special forces, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah mercenaries, and a horde of sectarian militias from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – but, above all, it was aided by American indifference.

In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine earlier this year, President Obama said he was “very proud” of the moment in 2013 when, against the “overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom”, he decided not to honour his own “red line”, allowing Assad to escape accountability for a chemical attack that had killed more than 1,400 civilians.

Obama may be alone in this judgment. A year earlier, seemingly on a whim, he had set a red line on the use of chemical weapons at a time when none were being used. The red line was, in effect, a green light to conventional killing. But the regime called Obama’s bluff – and, predictably, he backed down. No longer fearing punishment, the regime escalated its tactics.

Nearly four times as many people were killed in the two years after the chemical attack as had died in the two years before. Obama’s abandonment discredited Syria’s nationalist opposition and empowered the Islamists. It helped Isis emerge from the shadows to establish itself as a major force. Together, these developments triggered a mass exodus that would displace over half the country’s population. And as the overflow from this deluge started trickling into Europe, it sparked a xenophobic backlash that has empowered the far right across the west.

These, however, weren’t the only consequences of Obama’s retreat. The inaction also created a vacuum that was filled by Iran and Russia. Emboldened by his unopposed advances into Ukraine and Syria, Putin has been probing weaknesses in the west’s military and political resolve – from provocative flights by Bear bombers along the Cornwall coast to direct interference in the US elections.

The post-second-world-war international order is on the verge of collapse. In January, when Obama leaves office, he will be leaving the world a lot less stable than even his predecessor.

But in his valedictory press conference, last Friday, Obama defended his policy on Syria – albeit with logic whose fractures even his eloquence could not conceal. Inverting cause and consequence, he cited Russian and Iranian presence in Syria as his reason for not confronting Assad (neither was there in August 2013); he cited the disunion among rebels as the reason for not supporting them (they fragmented because they were denied meaningful support); and he cited the fear of deeper American involvement as his justification for restraint (even though a year later it would lead to a far bigger deployment across two states).

The administration’s response to the neoconservative depredations of the past decade was to revert to old dogmas: the dogmas of “realism”. Under the influence of doctrinaire realists, Obama concluded that the Arab world was not ready for democracy; it needed “strongmen”. The strongmen would protect the west against the twin threats of terror and migration. This logic led the US to back Nouri al-Maliki’s sectarian government after the controversial 2010 election in Iraq; it also led it to tolerate Assad. Syria was defined narrowly as a counterterrorism problem.

PASSOVER MESSAGE FROM FAMILY SECURITY MATTERS BY RUTH KING

All of us at Family Security Matters wish all our readers and supporters a sweet and happy Passover

This week Jews will gather with friends and family to celebrate Passover. We will recount the hardships of slavery in Egypt and the harsh oppression by the Pharaoh. We will rejoice in the rescue by Moses who demanded freedom for our people. We will recite the ten plagues that were unleashed on the Egyptians when the Pharaohs refused to free the Jews .The Pharaoh finally relented but when the Jews were leaving he sent an army to capture them and return them to enslavement. We will cheer when we retell how the waters of the Red Sea miraculously parted giving the Jews an escape, and the waters returned drowning the pursuing army.

Then, we will have a moment of silent prayer in memory of the martyrs of the Warsaw Ghetto who courageously rebelled on Passover in April of 1943 and held off the well-armed Nazis for over a month.

Finally, we will recount another miracle- the return of the Jews to Israel in 1948 when the seas again parted- this time for the steel hulls of vessels bringing besieged and beleaguered and traumatized survivors of the Genocide of World War 2 to safety and succor in the Jewish state of Israel.

Then we will eat, drink and be merry.

But, the story of Passover continues with great consequences:

The book of Exodus says that after crossing the Red Sea, Moses led the Jews into the Sinai, where they spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness. After travelling through the desert for nearly three months, they camped before Mount Sinai and it was there that God made a covenant with Moses and revealed the Ten Commandments on two stone tablets that codified the mandate to create a just and humane society and govern the lives of Jews and all decent people and nations. There are actually 613 commandments which cover every aspect of life-even hygiene and diet, but the Decalogue- the Ten Commandments are the most famous.

Think about that. At a time and place of local mores that sanctioned and celebrated murder and pillage and tyranny, these laws set forth principles of morality which have lasted for millennia.

Until 2005 The Ten Commandments were prominently displayed in courts, schools, churches and public grounds. In 2005 rulings on the presentation of religious symbols and sacred text on Texas public property, the US Supreme Court justified displays like the Ten Commandments but with the caveat that such displays must be clearly secular and not cross the line into proselytizing.

However, in a ruling on the display of the Ten Commandments in Kentucky courthouses, the justices ruled 5 to 4 that public officials were not motivated by a secular purpose in ordering the courthouse display but sought to advance religion in violation of the separation of church and state.

The debate continues with the ACLU pitted against all public displays of the Ten Commandments and determined citizens of all religions who fight to uphold their rights to display them. There are prominent jurists and scholars who continue to argue on that subject. In spite of these controversies, The Ten Commandments continue to inspire all the world’s religions and all decent societies- religious as well as secular.

Here, in this great nation we live in freedom from intimidation, oppression and harassment because those founding fathers who sought to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” were religious Christians who were informed and guided by the Bible and the Ten Commandments which were revealed more than 3,000 years ago to Moses and the Jewish people on their way to their homeland in Israel.

Notre Dame Students Say Vice President Makes Them Feel “Unsafe” Daniel Greenfield

It’s spring.

That means robins gotta chirp, chipmunks gotta hop and crybullies gotta bully while crying that they feel unsafe because other people who disagree with them exist. This latest tragedy takes place at Notre Dame which thought that it could pacify campus crybullies by inviting Pence instead of Trump. Surely not even campus crybullies could claim that Mike Pence makes them feel triggered.

Right.

Vice President Mike Pence’s scheduled commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame has prompted a protest by senior students who say that Pence’s presence on campus will make them “feel unsafe.”

Students Immane Mondane and Jourdyhn Williams have started a #NotMyCommencementSpeaker campaign against Pence’s May 21 address.

#NotMyEnglishLanguage.

“For me personally, [Pence] represents the larger Trump administration,” Mondane told the university’s newspaper. “His administration represents something, and for many people on our campus, it makes them feel unsafe to have someone who openly is offensive but also demeaning of their humanity and of their life and of their identity.”

Well there we go. The VP is offensive. Therefore we can’t have him on campus or it will traumatize local leftists.

Meanwhile Obama, whose administration represented the denial and demeaning of much of the country, had to be invited. Otherwise that would make the same folks feel unsafe. Meanwhile safe space culture is making students feel unsafe about expressing their views on campus left the crybullies accuse them of making them feel unsafe.

Sessions Gets Serious About Border Enforcement The Obama-era lawlessness, failure to enforce our immigration laws, is over. Matthew Vadum

The Obama administration’s hands-off approach to border security is a thing of the past, Attorney General Jeff Sessions dramatically declared at a border crossing as he vowed to bring felony charges against those who unlawfully enter the U.S. multiple times.

Enforcement action against criminal aliens will now be given the highest priority. President Obama said much the same thing over his years in office, promising to deport the worst members of the illegal alien community. He did little to carry out his pledge.

The announcement by Sessions comes two weeks after he said the Trump administration was moving forward with cutting off federal law enforcement grants to local governments that shield illegal aliens, especially violent felons, from federal immigration authorities.

Sessions is hoping that with more than $4.1 billion in U.S. Department of Justice grants at stake in the current federal fiscal year ending Sept. 30, sanctuary jurisdictions won’t be able to afford to continue flaunting federal immigration law. The U.S. government is also threatening to rescind monies already granted from such governmental units.

The so-called sanctuary city movement is a key component of today’s left-wing activist repertoire. Its supporters are the soft-headed souls who carry protest signs emblazoned with the red-herring of a slogan “no human being is illegal” and who apply all the usual smear-adjectives – including racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic – to anyone who supports having secure borders.

Sessions is pressing ahead with plans to make it easier to hire new immigration judges to hear cases at the border and to keep those individuals accused of violating immigration laws detained in facilities at the border, presumably for the sake of efficiency.

Sessions said 25 judges have already been deployed to detention centers on the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Politico. Another 50 judges will be “on the bench” later this year. A separate 75 judges will be added in fiscal 2018 at a cost of $80 million.

The “Resistance” Democrats are a Terrorist Party The Democrats have committed to overthrowing our government. Daniel Greenfield

What does #Resistance really mean? It means the overthrow of our government.

In this century, Democrats rejected the outcomes of two presidential elections won by Republicans. After Bush won, they settled for accusing him of being a thief, an idiot, a liar, a draft dodger and a mass murderer. They fantasized about his assassination and there was talk of impeachment. But elected officials gritted their teeth and tried to get things done.

This time around it’s “radically” different.

The official position, from the Senate to the streets, is “Resistance.” Leftist media outlets are feeding the faithful a fantasy that President Trump will be brought down. There is fevered speculation about the 25th Amendment, a coup or impeachment due to whatever scandal has been manufactured last.

This fantasy is part clickbait. Leftist media outlets are feeding the worst impulses of their readers. But there is a bigger and more disturbing radical endgame.

The left can be roughly divided into moderates and radicals. The distinction doesn’t refer to outcome; both want very similar totalitarian societies with very little personal freedom and a great deal of government control. Instead it’s about the tactics that they use to get to that totalitarian system.

The “moderates” believe in working from within the system to transform the country into a leftist tyranny. The “radicals” believe that the system is so bad that it cannot even be employed for progressive ends. Instead it needs to be discredited and overthrown by radicalizing a revolutionary base.

Radicals radicalize moderates by discrediting the system they want to be a part of. Where moderates seek to impose a false consensus from within the system, radicals attack the system through violent protests and terrorism. Their goal is to set off a chain of confrontations that make it impossible to maintain civil society and polarize the backlash and chaos into consolidating the left for total war.

That is what “Resistance” actually means.

Copy, Paste, Enter Stanford University A qualified black student could fill the slot taken by the pro-black applicant whose ‘essay’ was a lame display of duplication. By Deroy Murdock

Ziad Ahmed is one lucky young man. Earlier this month, Stanford University invited him to join its Class of 2021. While this alone is a huge and rare honor, what generated headlines was the essay on Ahmed’s application. Asked “What matters to you, and why?” the Princeton, N.J., high-school senior wrote: “#BlackLivesMatter.” And then he repeated it 100 times.

“I didn’t think I would get admitted to Stanford at all, but it’s quite refreshing to see that they view my unapologetic activism as an asset rather than a liability,” Ahmed told Sarah A. Harvard of the website Mic. Ahmed, a Muslim American of Bangladeshi descent, pointed out why his essay was nothing more than an exercise in mindless duplication:

“The insistence on an explanation is inherently dehumanizing,” he said. “Black lives have been explicitly and implicitly told they don’t matter for centuries, and as a society — it is our responsibility to scream that black lives matter because it is not to say that all lives do not matter, but it is to say that black lives have been attacked for so long, and that we must empower through language, perspective, and action.”

Now that prose, whether you consider Black Lives Matter a civil-rights organization or a band of racial arsonists who inspire fatal attacks on law-enforcement officers, would have been worthy of a college-admissions application. Instead, Ahmed, who interned on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, produced something reminiscent of the sets of standards that Bart Simpson writes on the chalkboard at Springfield Elementary School. For instance:

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

Ahmed’s “essay” also recalls a shocking scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 thriller The Shining. Mentally disturbed author Jack Torrance (menacingly portrayed by Jack Nicholson) has been very busy writing his new novel on his typewriter. It turns out that page after page after page of his manuscript reads:

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.