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Ruth King

Australia Strikes Deal to Resettle Refugees in U.S. U.S. to vet refugees; most are from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran and Sri Lanka By Robb M. Stewart (Huh?????)

MELBOURNE, Australia—Some of the hundreds of refugees being held in Australia-backed Pacific island camps are to be resettled in the U.S. under a one-time deal between the countries.

The U.S. government has agreed to accept refugees being held in Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Sunday. Mr. Turnbull didn’t disclose how many were likely to resettled by the U.S. or on what terms, but he stressed the arrangement wouldn’t be repeated or be extended to asylum seekers not already in the camps.

The conservative government has maintained a tough line on asylum seekers who have sought to cross the dangerous waters between Asia and Australia but has moved to empty the offshore immigration detention centers that critics have called Australia’s “Guantanamo Bay.” Negotiations in recent months with various countries to resettle the refugees became more urgent in April when Papua New Guinea’s highest court ordered the closure of Manus, ruling that hundreds of asylum seekers were being held there illegally on Australia’s behalf.

Mr. Turnbull said it had fallen to his government to “stop the boats,” close onshore Australian detention centers and remove children from detention. The deal with the U.S. to handle refugees being held offshore adds to earlier arrangements with Papua New Guinea and Cambodia to accept asylum seekers from the camps.

“Our priority is the resettlement of women, children and families. This will be an orderly process [and] it will not be rushed,” Mr. Turnbull said of the U.S. deal.

The process with the U.S. is due to begin in the coming days and will be administered with the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR. U.S. authorities will conduct their own assessment of refugees and decide which people would be resettled in the U.S., and refugees would need to satisfy standards for admissions, including health and security checks, the Australian government said. CONTINUE AT SITE

Protests Against President-Elect Donald Trump Continue Across the U.S. Police estimate 25,000 people in New York; 8,000 demonstrators swarm downtown Los Angeles By Pervaiz Shallwani, Kate King Trisha Thadani

Tens of thousands of people around the country took to the streets Saturday to protest the election of Donald Trump, the fourth straight day of demonstrations against the Republican president-elect.

In New York, an estimated 25,000 people covered a 20-block stretch of Fifth Avenue outside Trump Tower, the 58-story skyscraper fortified by the New York Police Department and U.S. Secret Service agents.
Two people were arrested, both for trying to hop over a police barricade, a senior police official said. The charges against the two people weren’t immediately clear.

Demonstrators have converged on Trump Tower daily since Mr. Trump was elected Tuesday.

Saturday’s protest was the largest to date but also orderly, compared with earlier protests, the police official said. On Wednesday, police arrested 65 people, almost all for not following orders to stay out of the street.

In Los Angeles, about 8,000 people swarmed into the city’s downtown in one of the largest anti-Trump gatherings on the West Coast.

Throngs of people—including many families and children—filled Wilshire Boulevard, a major city thoroughfare, for a slow planned march downtown. The protesters held signs with slogans that have become familiar in the past few days: “Not My President” and “Reject Hate.”

Some demonstrators wore safety pins—a gesture that has become a global symbol to the marginalized that they are “safe” with the person wearing the pin.

Unlike past nights in L.A. when protesters blocked freeways and dozens were arrested, the afternoon protest was peaceful. Los Angeles Police said they made no arrests as of early evening, and most protesters had gone home, though some said they planned to continue the march.

Donald Trump Boosts Europe’s Anti-Establishment Movement “What America can do we can do as well.” by Soeren Kern

“America has just liberated itself from political correctness. The American people expressed their desire to remain a free and democratic people. Now it is time for Europe. We can and will do the same!” — Geert Wilders, Dutch MP, head of the Party for Freedom (PVV), and now on trial in the Netherlands for free speech.

“2016 is, by the looks of it, going to be the year of two great political revolutions. I thought Brexit was big but boy this looks like it is going to be even bigger.” — Nigel Farage, MEP and leader of the UK Independence Party.

“The political class is reviled across much of the West, the polling industry is bankrupt and the press just hasn’t woken up to what’s going on in the world.” — Nigel Farage.

“In a democracy, when the people feel ignored and despised, they will find a way to be heard. This vote is the consequence of a revolt of the middle class against a ruling elite that wants to impose what they should think.” — Laurent Wauquiez, leader of the French opposition party The Republicans.

Donald Trump’s electoral victory has come as a shock to Europe’s political and media establishment, which fears that the political sea change underway in the United States will energize populist parties in Europe.

Anti-establishment politicians, many of whom are polling well in a number of upcoming European elections, are hoping Trump’s rise will inspire European voters to turn out to vote for them in record numbers.

Commenting on Trump’s victory, Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, wrote: “America has just liberated itself from political correctness. The American people expressed their desire to remain a free and democratic people. Now it is time for Europe. We can and will do the same!”

More than a dozen elections will be held in Europe during the next twelve months, beginning with a re-run of the Austrian presidential election scheduled for December 4. Polls show that Norbert Hofer, of the anti-immigration Austrian Freedom Party, is on track to win that race.

Also on December 4, Italians will vote in a referendum on reforming the constitution. Observers say Trump’s victory will make it more difficult for Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, one the few world leaders publicly to endorse Hillary Clinton, to prevail. They say Renzi’s open support for Clinton will hurt Italy’s relations with the United States. Renzi has said he will resign if he loses the referendum, which calls for curbing the role of the Senate. Most opinion polls show the “no” camp ahead. Renzi says the move will simplify decision-making, but opponents say it will reduce checks and balances.

Iran Breaches Nuclear Deal – Again. What’s Next? by Majid Rafizadeh

President Obama is ignoring Iran’s latest violations, and the UN and IAEA reports as well.

In fact, the administration, and State Department spokesman Mark Toner, are defending Iran on this issue, and appear willing to give critical concessions to Iran in the next round of talks in Baghdad this week.

In other words, Iranian leaders would be capable of more freely continuing their nuclear ambition without probing from the IAEA or the international community.

Iran has not yet allowed the IAEA “probes of various high-profile Iranian sites. The International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano is investigating whether Tehran has secretly worked on developing nuclear weapons.

Although the nuclear agreement heavily favors Iran and the main UN Security Council sanctions against Iran have already been lifted, Tehran continues to cheat and violate the terms of this weak nuclear pact.

Turning a blind eye to Iran’s violations will only further empower and embolden Tehran to pursue its nuclear and hegemonic ambitions; ignore UN resolutions and international laws; scuttle US foreign policy objectives, and damage security interests.

One of the terms of the JCPOA accord, which never had any legal legitimacy and which Iran never signed, is that Iran should restrict the amount of specific nuclear materials it possesses during the nuclear deal. According to a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), however, Iran has violated the deal by holding more heavy water, used to produce nuclear weapons, than it is supposed to have.

This is not the first time Iran has violated the terms of the flimsy nuclear agreement with no consequences. In February 2016, Iran exceeded its threshold for heavy water as well. In a previous article, other violations and reports of Iran’s recent cheating and breaches of the nuclear agreement are laid out.

America’s Kristallnacht : Edward Cline See note please

I admire Ed Cline and agree with everything he writes, but the word “Kristallnacht” evokes Nazis and genocide…the ultimate expression of racism. The idiots of the post election rioters -and I saw them very close up on Friday night- are disappointed pseudo rebels without real cause. They are thugs but they are not like the Nazis……rsk
Had Hillary Clinton won the election, would the anti-Trump rioters have behaved any differently?No.

Instead of protesting Trump’s election, they’d be celebrating Hillary’s victory with the same appetite for destruction and brutality and carnage. They would be celebrating it in the best Nazi tradition, such as the Night of the Broken Glass., or Kristallnacht in the character of Novemberpogrome. Businesses would be targeted for destruction and looting (see the glass being broken by hooded thugs) and physical attacks on Trump supporters would be common, and ignored by a compliant news media. The Nazis were celebrating the ascendency of the Nazis in German political life. The “Social Justice Warriors” could just as well be celebrating Clinton’s ascendancy to the White House.

“What difference would it make?”

The pretext for the attacks in 1938 was the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan in Paris. The attacks were planned and carried out by the Nazi Party to target Jews, the whipping boy blamed for Germany’s economic and other problems. They were targeted, Saul Alinsky style – long before he wrote Rules for Radicals – and isolated and persecuted.

The pretext – and the etymological root of the term pretext, means that the demonstrators then and now were and are acting out a prepared script – is pretending to be “outraged” and “disgruntled” and in violent opposition to Donald Trump’s winning the 2016 presidential election. When multiple mass rallies abruptly occur in multiple cities across the country, from coast to coast, and even in Britain (as Kristallnacht occurred in Germany in 1938) it means that these are no more “spontaneous,” for example, than the Muslim riots and demonstrations against the Mohammad image cartoons. These are all pre-arranged and planned for maximum effect and shock value, to scare the powers that be into concessions.

Some of the rioters are now claiming they are practicing their First Amendment rights. But freedom of speech does not include rioting and terrorizing individua

The first major defeat of political correctness : Fiamma Nirenstein

The chronically guilty mind (it is believed) becomes attached to guilt as a badge of inherent superiority,” writes the psychoanalyst Deborah Tyler in The American Thinkerwhere she examines the psychodynamics of Obama and Hillary Clinton’s politics.

It was fatal for them. In general, recognizing one’s own faults and therefore one’s limits is a springboard for overcoming problems caused not only by ourselves, but also by others.

Trump, a man quite devoted to self-admiration and to the glorification of his actions, make us feel a little worried when he points his finger at Hispanics, immigrants, Islamic terrorists… And yet this was one of the basic tenets of his presidential campaign to move away from the guilt propagated by the Obama administration as the basis of American policy, which imbued its internal and external ethics.

Guilty, responsible, sons and fathers who all share the blame: Americans couldn’t stomach feeling this any longer, geez, given the multitude of troubles they already have.

We are all accustomed to fustigating ourselves: the war? We cynically chose it. Drone strikes? We don’t know if they kill innocent civilians. Immigrants? They’re the result of our imperialist policy. Islamic terrorism? A result of the ideological and social discrimination called Islamophobia that we’ve directed at Muslims; Racial and ethnic inequality, especially between whites and diverse groups? The effect of our racism that always in turn leads to discrimination, violence, and police brutality; sexism and homophobia? These are all vices of capitalist society vis-à-vis a peaceful and innocent world, a left wing world that doesn’t harbor prejudices (and the reverse is true); pollution, climate change, and adulterated foods? The upshot of fierce exploitative policies, including refrigerators, heating, longer life expectancy and a general improvement with regard to living conditions.

Whatever kind of president Donald Trump will be, there are many social and cultural reasons that have decreed an end to the control of the democratic elite associated with Obama’s Chicago-style politics. That said, we must consider the explosion of anger that people wanted to express while sweating, working, fuming and hearing over and over that they are guilty, plus all the dogmas of a political correctness that crucifies them to historical slavery, which forces them to consider themselves responsible for all the troubles of the world, a public danger, a colonial invader instead of that great American friend who runs to the rescue back when it defeated Nazism and many other evils at the cost of so many lives.

And what the heck! Can the leading thinker be Oliver Stone, who has rewritten America’s history by claiming that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed for futile reasons, that Truman was insane because of his unresolved “gender issues,” that Kennedy was killed by the Republicans because he wouldn’t go to war with the USSR… Gradually, we arrive up to the 9/11 attacks as self-inflicted by America upon itself.

The Pendulum Swings Leftward for the Democrats – And That’s Good News for Donald Trump

1. The Parties and the Pendulum

For the Democrats, the news is bad—and it’s about to get worse. Why? Because the ideological pendulum is swinging the Democrats to a far-left place, and a political party doesn’t win from the wings.

To be sure, no ideological swing is permanent, but for the next four years, it seems likely that the Democrats will push themselves leftward, to un-electability at the presidential level.

I’ll get to this pendulum-swinging in a moment, but first, let’s establish the current partisan baseline: In addition to Donald Trump winning the White House, the House Republicans will have 238 seats in the next Congress, and Senate Republicans will have 51. Meanwhile, out in the states, the GOP will control 33 governorships and 67 legislative chambers.

To further illustrate the hole that the Democrats find themselves in, here’s a chart from The Washington Post, which shows that in the last eight years, Democrats have lost 10.2 percent of their Senate seats, 19.3 percent of their House seats, 20.3 percent of their legislatures, and 35.7 percent of their governorships. We can add: These are the lowest Democratic numbers since 1928.

In the caustic words of Post reporter Philip Bump, “That whistling sound you hear is the party Thelma-and-Louise-ing.” Movie fans will recognize that as a reference to the ending scene in the 1991 movie Thelma and Louise, in which the title characters drive off a cliff, plunging to their death.

So what happened? It seemed like only yesterday that the MSM, and the chattering classes overall, were certain that Hillary Clinton was destined for a decisive victory, possibly even a landslide. Yet now, not so much.

So today, the Democrats have something they didn’t particularly wish for: the opportunity for an “agonizing reassessment.” The problem is that such reassessments don’t always end up improving the situation—sometimes they make things worse.

As former CNN pundit Bill Schneider liked to say, an election defeat gives the losing party a chance to “fix” whatever went wrong. The big question, of course, is, “What needs fixing?” And now the post-mortem “autopsy” reports as to the needed fix are coming, one might say, fast and furious.

To be sure, a few Hillary loyalists declare that their woman lost because of “sexism,” or some other retrograde “-ism.” Many more Clintonites blame FBI Director James Comey; shadowy Clinton operative Sidney Blumenthal has gone so far as to claim that the election was a “coup d’etat” staged by “a cabal of right-wing agents of the FBI in the New York office attached to Rudy Giuliani.” Okay, so that’s the thinking of a few Clintonite dead-enders.

Meanwhile, most Democrats, and their barely-undercover allies in the MSM, are coming around to the view that Hillary was a deeply flawed candidate. Here, for example, is the analysis of Politico’s Glenn Thrush, writing that the failure of Clinton’s campaign was:

…proof that a conventional candidate can do practically everything by the numbers (win debates, raise the most cash, assemble the greatest data and voter outreach effort in history) and still fall to a movement impelled by raw emotion, not calculation.

MY SAY: FORGET HANGING CHADS

Not that many years ago one went to vote. One found the district. One stood and waited until the 107-year-old volunteers (bless them) found your name, and then you entered a booth, drew a curtain behind you and pressed little levers for your choices.

Now, for inexplicable reasons, you get a two-sided paper with little circles above each candidate that one must fill. You do this while standing behind a three-sided booth. Then you take this paper, covered by a manila folder, to another centenarian who removes the manila folder and tells you to place your paper in a scanner. Mine came back because the little circles were not filled in. Back to the first booth where you correct your error after waiting on line for an available booth, and then it is back to the scanner which, after a wait with your paper exposed to nosy onlookers, eats your paper of choices.

Where my sons vote six scanners were out of order and the wait was interminable. I was lucky. The younger volunteers, in their late eighties, recognized another superannuated woman and ushered me through.

Why did they replace an efficient system where you could do your patriotic duty in minutes behind the curtain with one that crowds the room with perplexed people wandering back and forth seeking the right booth and then the right scanner? I’ll never know. When I voted for Grover Cleveland it was so easy.

But why complain? My candidate won.

Hillary Clinton Won the Illegal Vote Written by: Diana West

About that popular vote victory the Left is claiming over Donald Trump.

The latest tallies show that after millions of Americans citizens, fraudsters and non-citizens voted for president, Donald Trump won 59,704,886 votes and Hillary Clinton won 59,938,290.

That’s 233,304 more votes in Hillary’s column. But is this margin of popular victory the will of legally registered American voters?

In 2014, three political scientists from Old Dominion University and George Mason University looked back at earlier elections to study whether any of an estimated 19.4 million adult non-citizens in the US voted in the 2008 election. After much surveying, sampling and extrapolating, their best guess — the “adjusted estimate” — was to suggest that a whopping 1.2 million non-citizens cast ballots, and cast mainly Democrat ballots, in the 2008 election that brought Barack Obama into the White House.

The impact of such fraud, they write, included the following:

We find that there is reason to believe non-citizen voting changed one state’s Electoral College votes in 2008, delivering North Carolina to Obama, and that non-citizen votes have also led to Democratic victories in congressional races including a critical 2008 Senate race [Al Franken’s] that delivered for Democrats a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

No doubt there remains number-crunching to do on the 2016 election, especially when it comes to states and districts that were won by narrow margins of victory. It seems eminently fair, however, to deduce that Clinton’s margin of popular victory, typically and fittingly, was illegal.

Trump’s Triumph Is One for the Ages Voters just saved America from disaster, and for that they should be thanked. By Deroy Murdock

Congratulations to President-elect Donald J. Trump.

Never having run for so much as city council, he tried his hand at politics and, in his very first campaign, scored Earth’s most powerful office. He did so by beating the amalgamated might of the Clinton and Obama machines — two of the most capable and accomplished political operations in U.S. history.

Trump did this while enduring the constant, scorching hostility of Hollywood, Broadway, and nearly the entire popular culture. He also survived a relentless headwind of scathing media coverage. Atop their brutal dispatches, some 430 “objective” journalists, the Center for Public Integrity reports, donated $381,814 (96.3 percent) to Clinton and $14,373 (3.6 percent) to Trump between January 1, 2015 and August 30, 2016.

Trump and his supporters were accused of hate, even as unhinged Leftists graffitied “Kill your local Trump supporter” in Boston, demolished with a pickaxe his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and subjected Republican party offices to vandalism and even arson.

Trump won, even though numerous Republican party elders, sitting officials, conservative activists, and center-Right intellectuals treated him with attitudes ranging from aloofness to the boundless, searing, ultimately baffling disgust of Never Trump. Party unity is usually a given for presidential nominees. Trump landed on top without it.

Trump also conquered on the cheap. He spent $270 million for his 59.8 million votes while Hillary poured $521 million into her 60 million ballots. That equals $4.51 per Trump vote versus $8.68 per Clinton ballot.

Agree or disagree with Trump, his relatively inexpensive defeat of these forces is a truly staggering accomplishment.

This stunned his supporters as much as anyone else.

When Fox News Channel declared at 2:40 a.m. that Trump secured Pennsylvania and, thus, the White House, hundreds of Young Republicans at Manhattan’s Turnmill Bar exploded with glee. They seemed as astonished as they were thrilled.

“I can’t believe this is happening!” one Trumpnik screamed with joy.