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Ruth King

Donald Trump Taps Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo as CIA Director The congressman is one of the harshest critics of the Iran nuclear deal By Felicia Schwartz see note please

JUST FOR THE RECORD: This is where Mike Pompeo stands on Israel

Withhold UN funding until voluntary and program-specific. (Aug 2011)
Rated -5 by AAI, indicating an anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record(May 2012)
Oppose Arms Treaty that limits gun trade to Israel & Taiwan. (Nov 2012)
President-elect Donald Trump said Friday he will nominate Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which would place the former Army officer and five-year member of Congress at the helm of the spy agency that has been heavily involved in global counterterrorism operations since the 2001 terror attacks.

Name: Mike Pompeo Age: 52Education: U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Harvard Law School

Background: After graduating from West Point, Mr. Pompeo served as a cavalry officer “patrolling the Iron Curtain” before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and he served with the 2nd Squadron, 7th Cavalry in the Fourth Infantry Division, according to the biography on his congressional website. He went to Harvard after he left active duty, later returning home to Kansas to run two small businesses before he was elected to the House in 2010 as part of the tea-party wave. He is a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, and he was a member of the special committee investigating the 2012 attacks on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya.

Outlook: Mr. Pompeo would take the reins of the CIA as Mr. Trump said on the campaign trail he wanted to bring back the practice of harsh interrogation methods including waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse,” as well as refilling the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with prisoners.
Those views have prompted some concern among former military officers and intelligence officials. The current CIA director, John Brennan, in 2014 publicly distanced the agency from its use of the controversial interrogation techniques after a scathing Senate report found them to be ineffective.

While in Congress, Mr. Pompeo emerged as a staunch critic of the Obama administration’s pursuit of an agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. After Republicans failed to scuttle the deal, Mr. Pompeo became active in the push to hold Iran to account for noncompliance and repeatedly has pledged to work to undo the deal. At the CIA, he would have more access to secret information about Iran’s activities since the deal took effect earlier this year. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Emerging Trump Cabinet The first three picks go to loyalists amid signs of political outreach.

Donald Trump’s transition seems to be emerging from its early turmoil, and on Friday he filled three important jobs with campaign loyalists. More encouraging is that he appears to be looking for figures of stature outside his inner circle.

The President-elect has a penchant for rewarding political loyalty, and that has paid off for Jeff Sessions as Mr. Trump’s choice for Attorney General. The Alabama Republican was the first sitting Senator to endorse Mr. Trump, and he and aide Stephen Miller refined the candidate’s populist message and defended him through the squalls.

If there’s any doubt that Mr. Trump will follow through on his immigration promises, the choice of Mr. Sessions puts that to rest. He opposes illegal and most legal immigration, including H-1B visas for high-skilled professionals. He’ll oversee the civil-rights division and immigration courts, and let’s hope Mr. Sessions’s governance will be more tolerant than his anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Then again, Mr. Sessions is an accomplished lawyer who has served as a U.S. Attorney and state AG. His opposition to President Obama’s executive immigration orders were grounded in his separation-of-powers constitutionalism more than mere politics. He has also joined with Democrats in pursuing criminal-justice reform.

Progressives are nonetheless already smearing Mr. Sessions as a racist, but that’s what they say about every Southern Republican. In 1986 a Joe Biden-Ted Kennedy special derailed the young lawyer from Mobile for a federal judgeship with innuendo and hearsay. Modern liberals may be surprised to learn that Mr. Sessions helped to desegregate Alabama public schools as U.S. Attorney, and he won a death-penalty conviction for the head of the state KKK in a capital murder trial. The 1981 case broke the Klan in the heart of dixie.

ALT-LEFT DELETE : RUTHIE BLUM

The term “alt-right,” which nobody had heard of until the unexpected emergence and rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election campaign, has become all the rage, literally and figuratively. Indeed, it is now the angry go-to explanation in every analysis of the Republican candidate’s ostensibly miraculous victory on November 8. And it is the key buzzword of the fever-pitched brouhaha surrounding Trump’s appointment of Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon as his chief strategist.

One the main arguments against Bannon — at times a self-described promoter of the alt-right message — is that he, like the neo-Nazi Trump-supporting trolls on Twitter, is an anti-Semite. Though this is patent nonsense, as the evidence raised to prove it is flimsy at best, it is one of those labels that enables both liberals and anti-Trump conservatives to kill two birds with one stone: Bannon and the man who elevated him to a highly important and coveted post.

The intellectual pitfall for mainstream conservatives here is plain. Whatever their position on Bannon, they are aware that Trump’s stunning victory not only in the race for the Oval Office, but in that of both houses of Congress — cannot be attributed to a fringe group of right-wingers with no formal homogeneous ideology. Within this loose category are white supremacists who hate Jews, blacks, gays and any member of the Right who has a nuanced view of everything from immigration to abortion. But these are a tiny minority in America as a whole, and played less of a role in the election of Trump than they and their detractors would love to imagine.

Others who are lumped into that label are people — like myself — who consider the decline of American power to be a danger both domestically and internationally, and desperately wanted the new style of Democrats — those who radicalized the party of Scoop Jackson into oblivion — out of office. We are right-wingers who believe in individual enterprise and ideological freedom. We believe that the federal government should not be dictating the rules of personal moral engagement or funding our choices. We want academia to be a place for the advanced study of humankind in all its facets and history — a space for the education and maturation of each new generation of young adults who will be faced with the often unpleasant task of making their way in the world with nothing but a set of tools in their satchel to give them a sense of their otherwise good fortune to be doing this in the United States, and not in Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela or Mexico, to name but a few examples.

Obama’s Never-Ending Lecture Tour Walter Russel Meade

WASTED WORDS

President Obama, who has done less for Europe than any American President since Calvin Coolidge, cannot stop telling Europeans what to do. As Obama sets out on his final European tour as President, with his political party back home in a state of near collapse, and with Putin inflicting yet another painful humiliation on the least successful American President in the history of the modern Middle East, nothing seems able to shake his serene confidence that he knows more than other people, sees farther than they do, and that other people are eager to gather up his pearls of insight.
Here is the Wall Street Journal on Obama’s trip to Greece:

President Barack Obama urged Europe to resolve lingering issues from its debt crisis, saying on Tuesday that leaders should favor growth over austerity, as part of their response to the rising populism in Western countries exemplified by the election of Donald Trump.
Mr. Obama made the appeal after meeting with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who said it is time for Greece to receive significant debt relief from Europe.Mr. Obama said European leaders should follow economic policies that ease some of the voter backlash against globalization, as they grapple with political trends similar to those behind Mr. Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election.

Not everything Obama is recommending to Europe is bad, but his words no longer have a significant impact from a continent battered first by his failures in foreign policy and now by the collapse of his legacy at home. Obama will be remembered by historians as the man who turned over the White House to Donald Trump, the man who let Putin unleash the forces of Hell in Syria and Ukraine, and the man who honored European values but made the world steadily less safefor them.
That Putin took the occasion of Obama’s final tour to open a widenew air offensive in Syria and withdraw from the ICC even as his allies celebrated victories in Estonia, Moldova and Bulgaria only underlines what a foreign policy disaster the 44th President has been. Many world leaders like Obama; some pity him; few respect him as a leader (rather than as a man); none fear him. Most are too busy coping with the consequences of his failures to spend a lot of time thinking about him at this point in his presidency. Even Germany, whose cheering crowds once greeted Obama as an enlightened internationalist in the mold of John F. Kennedy, has gradually lost faith in the President.The early signs of struggle and factionalism in the Donald Trump transition, meanwhile, are leading many foreigners to suppose that the next American President will be another inconsequential bumbler. We must hope that they are wrong; not even the power of the United States can survive a long string of failed Presidents unscathed.

No Trojan Horses Inside the Tower By:Srdja Trifkovic

Contrary to the MSM pack’s pitch of the week, there is no “disarray” inside Donald Trump’s transition team, no “Stalinesque” purges, and most certainly no successful insinuation of “adults” (Deep State operatives) into the list of early major appointees. They are all excellent.
Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions as Trump’s attorney general, Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo as his chief of the CIA, and retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn as the national security adviser will be loyal team players who share the incoming President’s vision of America’s future in general, and her true geostrategic interests in particular. The discredited MSM’s hysterics notwithstanding, the former two will be duly confirmed by the GOP controlled Senate. (Flynn needs no confirmation.)

Sessions (69)—the first Senator to support Trump last February—said he was honored to “enthusiastically embrace President-elect Trump’s vision for ‘one America,’ and his commitment to equal justice under law.” To Sessions this will mean no amnesty, no “dreamers,” no “sanctuaries,” and no exceptions. He knows that illegal aliens have no constitutional rights, and he will act upon that knowledge. After that Jihadist’s gay club slaughter in Orlando last June he pointed out—en passant—that more than 90% of recent Muslim immigrants are on food stamps and almost 70% on cash welfare. A good man. He has “sparked controversy” indeed, but only within the devastated ruins of the Duopoly. He will breezily sail through the nomination process (and forget his alleged “racist remarks”): Even Ted Cruz (a rumored rival for the post) called his nomination “great news for all of us who revere the Constitution and the rule of law.”

Mike Pompeo, top-of-the-class West Point valedictorian and a Harvard Law School graduate, was a beneficiary of the Tea Party 2010 midterm blitz. He is skeptical of the Iran nuclear deal (a minor flaw) who knows the score on the September 2011 Benghazi affair (a major insight into the Deep State’s self-defeating shenanigans). Pompeo will not fine-tune intelligence analysis to conform with the Beltway “foreign policy community” imperial consensus. He will let the pros do their job: Had they been able to do so in 2002-2003, there would have been no Iraq disaster. He is, of course, another “troubling” and “controversial” choice as far as the losers are concerned, but that does not matter any longer. He will be confirmed.

Arab Democracy’s Failures Elude So-called Experts by Andrew E. Harrod

Given American policymakers’ ignorance of Islam, “I am just worried about people like me running around with big theories trying to set foreign policy,” stated famed intellectual historian Francis Fukuyama in Washington, D.C. His confession occurred at “Democracy in the Arab World: The Obama Legacy and Beyond,” a recent conference that did little to alleviate the knowledge deficit among hackneyed Islamism apologists.

Fukuyama’s luncheon address at the downtown JW Marriot luxury hotel focused on the cultural factors that aided the development of modern societies. While China benefited from the appearance 2,300 years ago of the “first modern, relatively impersonal state,” Fukuyama said, the “Arab world [is] where I think the fundamental problem is” for human progress today. Although he worried that the U.S. had not made an effort to understand Muslim societies comparable to its Cold War study of Russia, Fukuyama’s own knowledge of Islam was spotty. He described an often repressive and all-encompassing sharia law as a mere “balance to political power.”

Referencing the late scholar Ernest Gellner, Fukuyama maintained that “contemporary Islamism is basically just a different version of European nationalism in the nineteenth century.” Just as Europeans transitioning from intimate rural communities to urban anonymity during industrialization sought a new identity, Islamists invoke a “universal umma that extends all the way from Morocco to Jakarta.” Similarly, this Islamism appeals to alienated second-generation European Muslim immigrants. Left unexamined was whether the cosmic worldview of a faith like Islam has considerably more ideological content, and can incite far more zeal, than nationalist allegiances, particularly in an increasingly globalized world.

At least Fukuyama didn’t minimize jihadist terrorism, unlike the preceding panelist, anti-Israel commentator Peter Beinart. He decried the “rise of ISIS and a massive increase fueled by cable news [coverage] of the threat of terror that emerged in 2014” and reflected upon President Barack Obama’s shared view that the “threat of terrorism had been exaggerated.” Obama rejected former President George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism” as the “new Cold War, the new World War II; there was fascism and communism, and now there was jihadism.”

In contrast to totalitarianism’s past appeal to, and rule over, millions, few “believed that you could build a new prosperous world based on the ideas of Osama bin Laden,” Beinart declared. His sanguine analysis ignored that faith-based jihadists have eternal timeframes capable of minimizing material setbacks. Contrary to the Third Reich’s twelve-year nightmare and the Cold War’s long twilight victory, Pope Francis’s warning of a “third [world] war … fought piecemeal” with jihadist movements and regimes worldwide has no end in sight.

The UT-Austin Censorship of Caroline Glick Hurts Israel By: Daniel Greenfield

In October, J Street at UT-Austin complained that Texans for Israel used a logo featuring Israel’s map without marking off the parts that the anti-Israel group feels rightly belong to Islamic terrorists.

Then J Street went a step further. J Street Austin had been campaigning against the Center for Security Policy. When it targeted Caroline Glick, it went after a proud pro-Israel voice, which triggered all its alarm bells. Glick has masterfully argued that Israel needs to consolidate the territory it liberated from occupation by its invading neighbors.

When J Street Austin went after the Center for Security Policy, it cited the widely discredited and criticized Southern Poverty Law Center hate group ranking. And then it led the attack against an invitation for Caroline Glick to speak.

First Israel’s map came down. Then Glick’s invitation.

Glick had warned about this troubling phenomenon earlier this year.

On a growing number of campuses in the United States, the only Jews who can safely express their views on Israel are those who champion Israel’s destruction.

That turned out to be the case at UT Austin.

The cancellation of a Tuesday event featuring conservative Israeli-American journalist Caroline Glick has led pro-Israel students at the University of Texas at Austin to take action against what they say is a liberal Jewish “monopoly” on views permitted to be voiced about the Jewish state, The Algemeinerhas learned.

“I’m sick and tired of having my voice stifled by [Jewish groups] Hillel, Texans for Israel (TFI) and AIPAC,” said David Palla, a former member of TFI who is spearheading a breakaway group to counteract a “radical change in Israel advocacy messaging on campus,” following the merger of TFI with a burgeoning chapter on campus of the left-wing organization J Street – under the auspices of Hillel.

According to Palla, this partnership resulted in a map of the state of Israel being removed from TFI’s logo.

Meet the first Jewish governor of Missouri, a former Navy SEAL

(JTA) — Eric Greitens, a former Navy SEAL whose seven military awards include the Bronze Star, has become the first Jewish governor of Missouri.

Greitens, 42, a Republican, also is a former Rhodes scholar and the founder of The Mission Continues, a nonprofit that helps veterans integrate themselves back into their communities through volunteer work.

On Tuesday, Greitens — who emphasized he would rid the state capital, Jefferson City, of “bad ethics” — defeated Democrat Chris Koster with 51 percent of the vote. His opponent, the state’s attorney general, received 45 percent.

“Tonight, we did more than win an election; we restored power to the people and we took our state back!” Greitens told supporters at a hotel in Chesterfield, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

A former Democrat, Greitens positioned himself as a conservative who wasn’t a “career politician.” It was his first run for office.

“I became a conservative because I believe that caring for people means more than just spending taxpayer money; it means delivering results,” he wrote in an opinion piece for Fox News in July 2015.

Greitens, a Purple Heart recipient, served in Iraq from 2003 to 2007. His fourth book, “Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life” — a collection of inspirational letters to a fellow Navy SEAL struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder — was published in March 2015.

A Trump Administration Is a Catastrophe in the Eyes of a U.N. Climate Conference Obama’s climate policies, or war on coal, helped change several states from blue to red. By Rupert Darwall

Update: After filing the following report this morning from this year’s session of the U.N.’s annual climate meeting, the author went to attend the day’s “conference of the parties” as he had been doing all week, only to be arrested by armed U.N. police and detained for trying to gain entry with a blocked pass. His phone was confiscated and examined, and he was asked whom he had been calling.

Marrakech — Make no mistake. Donald Trump’s election is the worst setback to the climate-change negotiations since they began a quarter-century ago with the first meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee, which produced the 1992 U.N. framework convention on climate change. On Tuesday, at this year’s climate conference in Marrakech, French president François Hollande threw down the gauntlet to the president-elect, declaring last year’s Paris Agreement “irreversible from a legal point of view.” The U.S. must respect the climate commitments it had made, Hollande demanded, whose popularity earlier this year dropped to a record low of 17 percent.

Yesterday, it was the turn of John Kerry. In his last speech as secretary of state to a climate conference, Kerry gave an impassioned performance, making up in authenticity what it lacked in coherence. “No one should doubt that the majority of Americans are determined to keep the commitments we have made,” Kerry declaimed to loud applause. Then why didn’t the Obama administration seek congressional approval for the Clean Power Plan and send the Paris Agreement to the Senate for its advice and consent? “The United States is right now on our way to meeting all of the international targets that we’ve set, and because of the market decisions that are being made, I do not believe that that can or will be reversed.” If so, it shouldn’t matter whether the Trump administration annulled the Clean Power Plan.

“No one can stop the new climate economy because the benefits are so enormous,” Kerry continued. Tell that to out-of-work coal miners in Appalachia or to voters in rust-belt states who handed the presidency to Donald Trump. Moments later, the same Kerry was saying that government leadership was “absolutely essential.” Time was running out. Do we have the collective will to save the planet from catastrophe? Kerry asked. “It won’t happen without leadership.”

At an emotional level, it was what the participants at the Marrakech conference craved. But the contradiction between the inevitability of wind and solar power sweeping all before them and the veiled accusation that president-elect Donald Trump would be guilty of a moral betrayal if he backed off the commitments made by his predecessor showed that politics trumps arguments about inevitability. Even so, the unreality of the unstoppable clean-tech revolution was evident in Kerry’s remarks. Developing countries wanted access to affordable energy, the secretary of state acknowledged.

More often than not, that means coal. Most of the huge growth in electricity demand in southeast Asia is going to be met by coal, Kerry warned, negating the benefits of the new investment in renewables. Financing new coal-fired power stations was a form of suicide, Kerry declared. What was he or any other American politician going to do about it? Asian countries are going to do what they’re going to do, and there’s very little America can do to stop them. Without realizing it, Kerry’s argument demonstrates the sense of putting America first when it comes to energy policy.

The Return of American Nationalism Trump’s victory should usher in policies rooted in patriotic assimilation and the national interest. By John Fonte & John O’Sullivan *****

Donald Trump’s election is above all else a rebellion of the voters against identity politics enforced by political correctness, and it opens the way to a new politics of moderate levels of immigration, patriotic assimilation, and, in foreign policy, the defense of U.S. sovereignty. In the past few months, Trump put together a winning electoral coalition that stressed the unity and common interests of all Americans across the full spectrum of policy, from immigration to diplomacy.

Because of Trump’s electoral success, this combination of policies rooted in the national interest and patriotism has suddenly begun to sound like common sense. That was not so only yesterday, when political correctness made it hard even to examine such ideas as “multiculturalism.” In February, David Gelernter stated that the “havoc” that political correctness “has wreaked for 40 years [has been made] worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it.” Indeed, he noted, “only Trump has the common sense to mention the elephant in the room. Naturally he is winning.” Defeating political correctness — or, in positive terms, expanding real freedom of speech — made it possible to raise other issues that worried the voters but that a bland bipartisan consensus pushed to the sidelines.

Once that happened, it became clear that the room was simply packed with elephants: multiculturalism, diversity, bilingualism, identity politics, political correctness itself, and much more, extending to the wilder shores of gender politics. All of these were involved in the progressive project of “fundamentally transforming” America. All of them acquired corporate and establishment support almost magically. But the major driver of this project was mass immigration without assimilation. Since the fight over the Gang of Eight immigration bill in 2013, patriotic and populist opposition to amnesty and to increases in low-skilled immigration has intensified. But Republicans in general, and presidential candidates in particular, were late to the party. Except for Senator Jeff Sessions, who led the fight in Congress, and Donald Trump, who did so in the primaries, professional Republicans at all levels — donors, consultants, candidates, and incumbents — were bullied away from raising the issue, for fear of being thought unrespectable. Even some conservatives felt the same.

And then Trump’s bold grasp of the immigration issue propelled him to the GOP’s presidential nomination. Though other issues are important here, no other single one explains his rise as clearly or as simply. So conservatives had (and have) to deal with it.

In its relatively brief life, American conservatism has been built on three groups: economic conservatives (fiscal restraint, limited government); social conservatives (faith, family values); and national conservatives (immigration, law and order, the social fabric — i.e., national cohesion as well as national security). All of these factions are the grandchildren of the early years of National Review: Hayekian libertarians, Kirkian traditionalists, and Burnhamite nationalists concerned at times with national strategy, at others with combating national decay. All are key to it.