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Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The State Taxathon Public unions are behind tax increase initiatives from coast to coast.

By on October 27th, 2016

State government revenues have swelled 30% in the last five years. That’s a bigger raise than most workers have received, but public unions and their friends are asking voters for more at the ballot box on Nov. 8.

In California unions are seeking to extend a 2012 ballot referendum that raised taxes on individuals making more than $250,000 and bumped the top rate on income above $1 million to 13.3% from 10.3%. Proposition 55 would postpone the income surtax’s scheduled sunset by 12 years to 2030. Ergo, another “temporary” tax increase becomes permanent.

A mere 1% of California earners account for about half of the state’s income-tax revenues and a third of the budget. Since 2012 California’s coffers have grown by nearly 40% thanks to large capital gains. About two-thirds of the new revenues have gone to schools, but for the teachers union it’s never enough.

A recent Field Poll shows voters favoring the tax extension by two to one. Opponents have raised $3,000. Labor groups and hospitals—Medicaid would get a dedicated share of the revenues—muzzled the opposition by vilifying donors to the antitax campaign in 2012 and dumping $60 million into this year’s initiative.

Maine is following California’s leftward lead with an initiative to impose a three-percentage-point surcharge on household income exceeding $200,000 per year—regardless of whether the taxpayer files as an individual or jointly. If enacted, Maine would lay claim to the second highest top individual rate in the country at 10.15% after California’s 13.3%

The Maine Heritage Policy Center estimates that the tax would cost 4,000 private jobs and $265 million in real disposable income by reducing economic activity. Some would shift next door to New Hampshire where the income tax is zero. The Pine Tree State was one of only five states last year to lose population, and the tax hike would make it harder to recruit and retain professionals in high-demand fields like health care. The average salary of a physician in Maine is $210,760, and about half of pass-through business income was reported on returns with income greater than $200,000.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Clinton’s Shadow Diplomat: Thomas Pickering and Russia’s Pipeline Sales to Iran and Syria Christine Brim ****

By on October 26th, 2016

“Clinton’s Shadow Diplomat” is a hard-hitting investigative report from the Center for Security Policy, exposing the ties of former Ambassador Thomas Pickering to a Putin-linked Russian company that sold oil and gas pipelines to Iran and Syria when Pickering was on its Board of Directors. The report reveals Pickering’s overlapping roles: as Clinton’s Foreign Affairs Policy Advisor, as an Advisory Board member for two Iranian advocacy groups, as a paid Director for a Russian firm selling pipeline to Iran and Syria, as a paid consultant to Iranian aircraft contractor Boeing, and as a Senate committee hearing witness, all with a common goal of ending economic sanctions on Iran and reversing U.S. Iran policies.

As meticulously documented in “Clinton’s Shadow Diplomat,” Pickering was a paid Director for the Russian-owned company Trubnaya Metallurgicheskaya Kompaniya (TMK) from June 30, 2009 to June 26, 2012. TMK is majority-owned by Russian billionaire oligarch Dmitry Pumpyansky, a close Putin ally.

The investigation discovered extensive proof of TMK’s business dealings in Iran and Syria while Pickering was on the Board, including a financial offering disclosure, catalogs, marketing materials, websites, press releases, legal documents, reports from the steel industry press and Iranian customer websites. Sales of oil and gas pipelines to Iran were specifically prohibited under U.S. laws and executive orders.

According to TMK’s records, Pickering attended 143 of the 145 TMK Board meetings. Pickering is estimated to have been paid over half a million dollars for his service to TMK, based on TMK’s compensation rules.

“Clinton’s Shadow Diplomat” documents TMK’s relationships with three Iranian customers, all listed by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) as “Specially Designated Nationals” during the years Pickering served on the Board: the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), Petropars, and Pars Oil and Gas Company.

The investigation also shows TMK’s relationships with three Syrian customers listed by OFAC as “Specially Designated Nationals” in 2011, while Pickering was on the Board: the Syrian Gas Company, the Syrian Petroleum Company, and the Al Furat Petroleum Company. U.S. persons are generally prohibited from conducting any kind of business with “Specially Designated Nationals.”

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BOOKS, FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Book That Obama Won’t Read, But Hillary Clinton Should Sixty years after the Suez Crisis, two new histories of the Egypt-Israel conflict try to garner lessons on the Mideast and American power in a changing world By Adam Kirsch

By on October 26th, 2016

On a list of the most important historical episodes of the 20th century, the Suez Crisis of 1956 wouldn’t make the top 10, or even the top 20. Insofar as it was a war, it was a fizzle: Israel invaded Egypt with a small force, conquered some of the Sinai desert, and then gave it back a few months later. As a diplomatic incident, Suez was more significant, altering the balance of power between Britain, France, and the United States. But it hardly compares to a major Cold War confrontation like the Cuban Missile Crisis of a few years later, which threatened the survival of the world. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/215931/book-hillary-clinton-should-read

Yet the appearance of two new books on the subject of Suez—Ike’s Gamble by Michael Doran and Blood and Sand by Alex von Tunzelmann—suggests that the events of October 1956 continue to have a symbolic significance out of proportion to their actual scale. That is because Suez serves as a convenient marker for the twilight of European colonialism and the rise of American empire. At the same time, it encapsulates a number of the themes of America’s experience in the Middle East, down to the present day: the difficulty of identifying allies and enemies, the uncertainty about how deeply to get involved, and the dangerous law of unintended consequences.

Von Tunzelmann, a British popular historian and journalist, and Doran, an American Middle East specialist and occasional White House adviser, have produced very different books covering some of the same ground. Blood and Sand focuses on the two weeks of the crisis itself, from Oct. 22 to Nov. 8, with hour-by-hour updates on the action as it unfolds across several continents. (Sections are introduced by the kind of datelines familiar from Jason Bourne movies: “1500 Washington DC//2000 London//2100 Paris.”) And Von Tunzelmann interweaves the Suez affair with scenes from another crisis that, coincidentally, broke out at exactly the same time—the rebellion against Soviet rule in Hungary. The effect is a cinematic, you-are-there style of history-writing, which plunges the reader into the chaos of events, but does little to explain their deep background or ultimate consequences.

Doran, on the other hand, fits the Suez crisis into a broader argument about American policy in the Middle East during the Eisenhower administration. He draws on a wider range of primary sources, and crucially, he puts those sources themselves into question, showing how the biases and beliefs of the participants in the Suez drama shaped the way its history has been told. Indeed, Ike’s Gamble is a revisionist history, in which Doran takes issue with precisely the mainstream interpretation of Suez that is found in Blood and Sand.

To understand the lessons these writers draw from Suez, it’s necessary to recall the events themselves. The Suez Crisis lasted only about two weeks. But its roots are very deep—in the founding of Israel in 1948, the British occupation of Egypt in 1881, or even the building of the Suez Canal itself, in 1869. The canal, which connects the Mediterranean with the Red Sea, was from the beginning a crucial strategic asset for the British and French empires, because it greatly shortened the journey between Europe and Asia. The company that controlled the canal was jointly owned by the British and French governments, and it remained in their hands until the 1950s.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

WikiLeaks Exposes Podesta-Steyer Climate McCarthyism How the Center for American Progress campaigned to suppress speech By Robert Bryce

By on October 26th, 2016

The latest WikiLeaks dump contains plenty of insider dirt on John Podesta, the founder of the Center for American Progress and the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton. Perhaps the tawdriest story to be exposed by Podesta’s pilfered e-mails is the bragging by an employee of ThinkProgress, an arm of the Center for American Progress, about how they got Roger Pielke Jr.’s scalp.

A July 2014 e-mail from Judd Legum, an editor at ThinkProgress, to billionaire Democratic climate activist (and former coal-mine investor) Tom Steyer exposes the climate-change McCarthyism that the Left — and its myriad allies in the liberal media — use to discredit or silence anyone who doesn’t adhere to the orthodoxy of the climate catastrophists.

In the e-mail, Legum boasted to Steyer about how ThinkProgress had silenced Pielke by preventing him from publishing at Nate Silver’s then-new website, fivethirtyeight.com, on the issue of climate change. Legum was also asking Steyer, indirectly, for more money. Steyer and Podesta both sit on the board of the Center for American Progress. Between 2008 and 2014, Steyer gave the Center for American Progress some $3.85 million. I’ll come back to the specifics of that e-mail shortly.

First, some background. Pielke, a professor at the University of Colorado since 2001, holds degrees in mathematics, public policy, and political science. He has authored or co-authored seven books. He has won several awards for his academic work. For about two decades, he was a prolific writer and speaker on climate issues. In 2013, he testified before Congress and declared that there is “exceedingly little scientific support for claims found in the media and political debate that hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and drought have increased in frequency or intensity on climate timescales either in the United States or globally.” During that same testimony, he said that global weather-related losses have not increased since 1990 as a proportion of GDP. He went on, saying that there were also no observable increases in floods, tornadoes, or droughts.

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IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hillary and Weaponized Immigration How international terrorists would turn Clinton’s “compassionate” immigration proposals against us. Michael Cutler

By on October 26th, 2016

Hillary Clinton clearly shares the views and ideology and goals of open-borders/immigration anarchists.

On October 23, 2016 Breitbart reported, “Hillary Clinton and the United Nations on the Same Open Borders Page.”

That disconcerting report included this excerpt:

In a private, richly-paid speech that Hillary delivered to a Brazilian bank on May 16, 2013, she said: “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, sometime in the future, with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.”

The section of Hillary’s address to the foreign bankers was confirmed by a release from the hacker site WikiLeaks.

For her part, Hillary claimed that she doesn’t want completely open borders and pointed to the segment of her speech where she mentioned energy and claimed she was only talking about sharing an electric grid across international boundaries.

“If you went on to read the rest of the sentence, I was talking about energy,” she said during the last debate. “We trade more energy with our neighbors than we trade with the rest of the world combined.”

But this seeming obfuscation doesn’t reflect many of her past claims nor even the policy proposals on her own website.

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EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is The University Of Chicago A Safe Space? A phony champion of campus free speech destroys Freedom Center posters. David Horowitz

By on October 26th, 2016

There are many ways to suppress free speech, the right to which is the foundation of all our other rights, and our democracy as well. Many leftists would like to outright suppress the speech of those with whom they disagree. But given the fact that most Americans still believe that the First Amendment is important, they are forced to resort to other measures. One of these is to obstruct speakers who challenge them by disrupting their events and shouting them down. An even more effective and more common tactic is to slander those whom they disagree with and call them “extremists” and “racists” and the whole bag of “deplorables” that Hillary Clinton so imprudently identified.
Across the country campus activists are seeking to make universities “safe spaces” for facts and ideas that make them uncomfortable and which they can’t refute. The University of Chicago recently took a small but brave step to oppose the regressive environment of the university culture by announcing it did not support “trigger warnings” or “safe spaces” – both of which are antithetic to a university education and to a democratic society in general.

Unfortunately, the U of C’s ham-fisted response to the poster campaign conducted by my organization represents a giant step backwards. It is an indefensible attempt to make the university a safe space for supporters of terrorists in the Middle East and their hateful propaganda. To justify destroying our posters, the university administration said, “While the University of Chicago encourages the free exchange of diverse ideas and perspectives concerning a wide range of issues, these flyers are defamatory and inconsistent with our values and policies.” This is hypocrisy at its worst. The student government supported by the U of C recently passed a resolution to boycott the only democracy in the Middle East, and the only inclusive and tolerant state there. The BDS resolution was designed to isolate, delegitimize and strangle the Jewish state.

Even liberals like Hillary Clinton and Larry Summers have denounced the BDS resolutions as anti-Semitic – Jew hatred. Evidently, the university is okay with that defamatory campaign. It even provides university facilities and funds to the campus hate groups that sponsored the resolution. Yet it condemns and destroys our posters whose sole purpose is to hold the individuals who did this accountable. What can a reasonable person conclude but that Jew-hatred is consistent with the U of C’s values and policies while opposing it is not?

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Parallels in Evil: Part II Edward Cline

By on October 26th, 2016

Do Americans really want this hellacious, nihilistic harridan laughing at them from the Oval Office?

Jeffrey Dean Morgan, as Negan, the “super” villain of Season 7 of The Walking Dead, has nothing over Hillary Clinton in terms of foul language. In fact, Clinton has a nonstop sewer of a mouth that puts Negan’s to shame. All the censors could permit Morgan to say on screen and repeat ad nauseam is the four letter term for feces.

Clinton has had no censor to control her mouth rage. In public appearances, she poses as a calm, clean-cut, well-bred, grandmotherly hostess about to serve you tea and nothing but the truth. But backstage, and in venues where cameras are not rolling, she is a harpy dedicated to befouling the minds of everyone she comes into contact with, which includes her campaign staff, her Foundation clients and donors, the Secret Service, and doubtless her husband, Bill, and daughter Chelsea. She makes “biker chicks” look like polished graduates of finishing school. She is about as “feminine” as a pig in a pantsuit.

A person, regardless of his gender, who uses that kind of language as an automatic, default means of expression has a festering ball of noxious grunge for a soul. Clinton has exhibited that soul many, many times, in public and off-camera.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Germany’s Migrant Rape Crisis: Where is the Public Outrage? by Soeren Kern

By on October 26th, 2016

Despite the mounting human toll, most of the crimes are still being downplayed by German authorities and the media, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments.

“The police are not interested in stigmatizing but rather in educating the public. The impression that we are engaging in censorship is devastating to the public’s confidence in the police. Sharing information about suspects is also important for developing prevention strategies. We must be allowed to talk openly about the problems of this country.” — Arnold Plickert, director of the GdP Police Union in North Rhine-Westphalia.

“The Press Council believes that editorial offices in Germany should ultimately treat their readers like children by depriving them of relevant information. We think this is wrong because when people realize that something is being concealed from them, they react with mistrust. And this mistrust is a hazard.” — Tanit Koch, editor-in-chief of Bild, the most-read newspaper in Germany.

On October 24, a YouGov poll found that 68% of Germans believe that security in the country has deteriorated over the past two or three years. Also, 68% of respondents said they fear for their lives and property in German train stations and subways, while 63% feel unsafe at large public events.

A group of Serbian teenagers in the northern German city of Hamburg were handed suspended sentences for gang-raping a 14-year-old girl and leaving her for dead in sub-zero temperatures.

The judge said that although “the penalties may seem mild to the public,” the teens had all made confessions, appeared remorseful and longer posed a danger to society.

The October 24 ruling, which effectively allowed the rapists to walk free, provoked a rare moment of public outrage over the problem of migrant sex crimes in Germany. An online petition calling for the teens to see time in prison has garnered more than 80,000 signatures, and prosecutors are appealing the verdict.

Thousands of women and children have been raped or sexually assaulted in Germany since Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed into the country more than one million mostly male migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey: Erdogan’s Stealth Jihad Against the West by Burak Bekdil

By on October 26th, 2016

Erdogan fights anyone and anything outside the sphere of his understanding of Sunni Islamism. His arguments typically reflect an Islamist’s angry inner thoughts, feelings of “defeat against the non-Muslim West” and a “powerful urge to reverse the world order in favor of political Islam.”

Erdogan is not honest even when he insists on a Muslim contingent in the UN Security Council. He would be angry if the UN, as he passionately suggests, agreed on a Muslim seat and gave it to Shiite Iran. No, he wants a Sunni seat.

That is at the core of Erdogan’s not-so-silent (and never-ending) war with the West: (Sunni) Muslim nations should be deciding on matters shaping world politics, not others.

Erdogan’s Turkey is a solitary nation. It does not belong to Europe, hence its failure to join the EU. Theoretically it is a NATO ally and a “strategic partner” of the US. In reality, it is hostile to Western civilization and the US is only a tactical partner — as long as it helps Islamists advance their political ambitions, not a partner with shared democratic values.

It is true that the worst enemy of Turkey’s Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is another Islamist who was Erdogan’s best political ally for several years. It is also true that Erdogan, publicly or privately, feels hostility against a number of Muslim communities in the Middle East, including secular and Alevi Muslims in Turkey, the Nusairi (Alawites) in Syria and the Shiite in Iran, Lebanon and Bahrain.

It is not a secret, either, that Erdogan does not admire Jews, to put it mildly. But essentially, his strict adherence to political Islam often reveals his war of domination with non-Muslim Western civilization in a broader context. Erdogan fights anyone and anything outside the sphere of his understanding of Sunni Islamism.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UK: Labour Party Still Shooting Itself in Both Anti-Semitic, Far-Left Feet by Denis MacEoin

By on October 26th, 2016

The Palestinian “resistance” is not a struggle to create a Palestinian state next to the state of Israel.No group or leader within the “resistance” movement has ever considered that their goal. Their position is summed up in the slogan chanted by many students and pro-Palestinian groups, “Palestine will be free, From the river [Jordan] to the [Mediterranean] sea”.

It is not, in fact, illegal in the slightest for the Jews to be in a country in which they have continuously lived for 3000 years. The only title to the land the Palestinians seem to have is that under the Ottoman empire, the land had been subject to Muslim governance; and if one applies Islamic law, rather than common law, any land that has once been under Muslim control must stay that way forever — including of course “el-Andalus,” all of southern Spain and Portugal.

Seamus Milne added that Palestinians in Gaza have the right to “defend themselves” and claimed: “It isn’t terrorism to fight back. The terrorism is the killing of citizens by Israel on an industrial scale.” No, the terrorism is the tens of thousands of rockets and missiles fired from Gaza into Israel for more than a decade.

Given that Gaza had long been unoccupied by anyone at that date and that Israel had never killed “citizens” on an industrial scale, we can see something at play totally at odds with reason, fact, and political knowledge. That something is creeping out from beneath an unpleasant rock, and that it has a deep connection with anti-Semitism, if it is not anti-Semitism in its purest modern form.

A central feature of Labour’s anti-Semitism is a staggering failure to understand the difference between traditional hatred of Jews from some religious and far-right sources, and modern expressions of that hatred through the medium of Zionism. The Labour enquiry into anti-Semitism entirely ignored several important definitions of anti-Semitism that included the singling out of Israel for condemnation, the use of double standards for Israel, and delegitimisation of Israel by negation of Zionism as the movement for self-determination of the Jewish people. The U.S. Department of State issued just such a new definition in 2010. Several of its clauses mention anti-Israel charges, including this: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, and denying Israel the right to exist”.[1]

The Palestinian “resistance” is not a struggle to create a Palestinian state next to the state of Israel. From the PLO to Hamas to the PFLP to Hezbollah, no group or leader within the “resistance” movement has ever considered that their goal. Their position is summed up in the slogan chanted by leftist students and pro-Palestinian groups across the world, “Palestine will be free, From the river to the sea”. The “river” is the Jordan and the “sea” is the Mediterranean, meaning that there is no room whatever for a Jewish state in the region. Self-determination, an ideal loudly proclaimed for practically every ethnic and cultural group in the world by people on the left, is denied for one community only: the Jews.

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