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Ruth King

‘Aqui no’: Not here, say the voters of Colombia By Silvio Canto, Jr.

Another country and another group of voters who sent the experts to that place that we can’t say in a family blog.

Let’s go to Colombia first:

A Colombian peace deal that the president and the country’s largest rebel group had signed just days before was defeated in a referendum on Sunday, leaving the fate of a 52-year war suddenly uncertain.

A narrow margin divided the yes-or-no vote, with 50.2 percent of Colombians rejecting the peace deal and 49.8 percent voting in favor, the government said.

The result was a deep embarrassment for President Juan Manuel Santos. Just last week, Mr. Santos had joined arms with leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC, who apologized on national television during a signing ceremony.

The surprise surge by the “no” vote — nearly all major polls had indicated resounding approval — left the country in a dazed uncertainty not seen since Britain voted in June to leave the European Union. And it left the future of rebels who had planned to rejoin Colombia as civilians — indeed, the future of the war itself, which both sides had declared over — unknown.

Both sides vowed they would not go back to fighting.

So what happened in Colombia?

Let me introduce you to my good friend Daniel Duquenal who lives next door in Venezuela. I agree with him that President Santos, who was President Uribe’s defense minister, made a huge mistake in bringing Cuba (not an honest broker) into the middle of these negotiations:

Then came the choice of Havana and Castro’s guidance to negotiate with its allies, the communist FARC.

Let’s play ‘who lost more money’: Trump or Hillary? By Jack Hellner

Hillary says she can’t understand how anyone in business could ever lose $1 billion in a single year, yet somehow, according to an inspector general’s report, the State Department misplaced $6 billion of taxpayer money because of inadequate internal controls. Most of the sum was lost during Hillary’s four years.

Hillary’s losses cost the taxpayers much more than Trump’s. She didn’t just lose $1 billion in one year; she lost an average of over $1 billion for four straight years.

Do we want someone to be president who has been so careless with public funds – who, according to the FBI, was extremely careless with classified information? The FBI director couldn’t be sure that she understood the nation’s security laws, and apparently that is the only reason she wasn’t charged.

Nevada’s School Choice Victory Unions lose their attempt to kill education savings accounts.

Children won a big victory in Nevada on Thursday as the state Supreme Court upheld the state’s revolutionary education savings accounts (ESAs), the nation’s first universal school choice program. Note to Donald Trump: This is worth celebrating.

ESAs allow parents who withdraw their kids from public schools to use state funds to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, curriculum and school supplies. Each account in Nevada is funded at 90% to 100% (more for low-income and disabled kids) of the average statewide per pupil expenditure. Parents can roll over funds from year to year, and there is no cap on the number of participants.

About 8,000 parents applied for accounts last year but were blocked from tapping the funds because of lawsuits by the American Civil Liberties Union and other friends of the teachers unions. Those groups argued that the ESAs violate the state constitution’s requirement that the legislature operate a “uniform system” of public schools and prohibition on using public funds for sectarian purposes.

A 4-2 majority rejected their arguments, ruling that ESAs do “not alter the existence or structure of the public school system” in part because the funds once placed in the accounts “belong to the parents and are not ‘public funds.’” The court added that “it is undisputed that the ESA program has a secular purpose,” and the state constitution “does not limit the Legislature’s discretion to encourage other methods of education.”

While the state won on the core issues, the court did hold that the legislature violated a constitutional mandate to appropriate funds for public schools “before any other appropriation is enacted.” That’s because the legislature diverted money from last year’s education appropriation bill to fund ESAs.

The Apology of Donald J. Trump To those who don’t get why Clinton isn’t ahead by 50 points—here’s the answer. Bret Stephens….see note please

I’m not sure what Stephens is trying to do here…but if he is continuing his fatwa against Trump he fails…..If Trump did deliver this speech I would applaud enthusiastically….and i be that was not Stephens’ intent…..Just as Dorothy Rabinowitz’s fulsome endorsement of Hillary brought more people to Trump’s defense so will this column….rsk

“What follows is a draft of a speech Donald Trump is scheduled to deliver Tuesday, Oct. 4 in Prescott Valley, Ariz. We haven’t confirmed its authenticity because, like the rest of the corrupt media, we’re totally dishonest.

Thank you, everybody, thank you. It’s good to be back in Arizona. And you know we’re going to win, right? The polls say we’re going to win in Arizona, and we will.

The polls also say we’d lose the general election if it were held today. But they’re wrong. So wrong. You know how pollsters work? They guess who will show up to vote on election day, and then they poll these “likely voters.”

But let me tell you something. The pollsters have no clue. None. They don’t have a clue who the electorate is, and they don’t have a clue of what’s going on in America. Believe me, folks, on election day they’re going to find out.

The other day, in Colombia—I’m talking about the country in South America—they held a vote. A referendum. President Santos staked his reputation on a, quote-unquote, peace deal with the terrorists of the FARC.

Now the FARC, they’re the worst people in the world. They’ve killed tens of thousands of people. They make their money through drug trafficking and kidnapping. They’ve been terrorizing Colombians for 50 years.

Along comes Santos, and he makes this terrible deal that says to the FARC: We’re not going to send you to jail. We’re going to sentence your leaders to community service. We’re even going to guarantee you seats in the Congress.

And all the polls said the deal was going to win in a landslide. Obama and Kerry lined up behind it. Santos told Colombians they had no choice, that it was the only road to peace.

Guess what? The polls were wrong. The Colombians knew a bad deal when they saw one. They weren’t going to let killers get away with their crimes. The only deal they want with the FARC is the same deal Reagan got from Russia: We win, they lose.

Folks, it was the same story with the Brexit vote in June. All the polls said the Brits wouldn’t vote to leave the European Union. They did. All the experts said the sky would fall if the Brits voted to go. It didn’t. These geniuses said that Britain was too small to be the master of its own destiny. The British people believe otherwise, and I’m with them!

What happened in Britain, in Colombia, it’s going to happen here. Because, like them, we’re sick of it.

We’re sick of hearing ObamaCare is working when even the New York Times admits it’s a total disaster. We’re sick of hearing how great the economy is when it’s floating on a big wave of cheap credit that benefits Wall Street at the expense of savers. We’re sick of hearing how great the Iran deal is, then watching our sailors being humiliated while we secretly fork over pallets of cash.

You know what we’re also sick of? Liberal hypocrites.

I’m not supposed to say the name I’m about to say. Well, two words: Alicia. Machado.

The Schneiderman Rules America’s worst Attorney General abuses his office to aid Clinton.

We wrote Monday that many liberals believe that defeating Donald Trump justifies anything, and right on time comes the egregious Eric Schneiderman. The New York Attorney General delivered his own personal October surprise for Hillary Clinton by announcing a supposed scandal over Mr. Trump’s charitable foundation.

Mr. Schneiderman’s office, in a letter sent Friday and released Monday, ordered the Donald J. Trump Foundation to cease raising money in New York. According to the letter, the Trump outfit is not correctly registered in the state to solicit funds.

The AG gave the foundation 15 days to turn over reams of paper, including audited financial statements and annual financial reports going back many years. Mr. Schneiderman warned in his letter that failure to comply will be deemed a “fraud upon the people of the state of New York.”

The announcement is Mr. Schneiderman’s latest misuse of his prosecutorial authority to attack his political enemies. The AG’s office first announced it was “investigating” Mr. Trump in mid-September—the better to begin a round of bad headlines—and has also been touting its inquiry into Trump University. While it’s possible the Trump Foundation has violated in some way “section 172 of Article 7-A New York’s Executive Law,” it’s notable that the best Mr. Schneiderman could drum up by way of “fraud” was a paperwork technicality.

The bigger point is timing. Mr. Schneiderman’s cease-and-desist order, coming a month before a general election, smells like partisan politics. The AG has endorsed Mrs. Clinton and sits on the Democratic nominee’s New York “leadership council,” which the Clinton campaign describes as the “in-state leadership” for her campaign, charged with “amplifying the campaign’s national voice to New York families” and “aiding the campaign with rapid response.”

Mr. Schneiderman’s prosecution of her opponent certainly qualifies as “rapid.” He could easily have waited until Nov. 9 to divulge his investigation and unveil his order. If the Trump Foundation has been deficient with its paperwork for as long as the AG’s office says, a few more weeks of delay would hardly hurt.

“To the public it will appear that Schneiderman acted not in the interest of his client, the State, but for whatever influence his announcement might have on the election outcome,” NYU School of Law Professor Stephen Gillers told LawNewz.com, and Mr. Gillers is no conservative. CONTINUE AT SITE

Court Blocks Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s Plan to Limit Syrian Refugees Plan delayed pending outcome of a lawsuit filed by an Indiana resettlement agencyBy Joe Palazzolo see note

NO DOUBT TIM KAINE WILL POUNCE ON THIS ISSUE IN THE DEBATE….RSK
Gov. Mike Pence’s plan to restrict the settlement of Syrian refugees in Indiana remains on hold following the decision of a federal appeals court, which called it discriminatory and based on “nightmare speculation.”

The ruling by the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Monday delayed implementation of Mr. Pence’s directive pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by an Indiana agency that helps resettle refugees in the state.

Mr. Pence, the Republican vice presidential nominee, is among a group of conservative governors who have tried to block or delay the arrival of refugees fleeing the war-torn Arab country, arguing that Islamic State terrorists could be hiding among them.

“No evidence of this belief has been presented, however,” wrote Judge Richard Posner for a unanimous three-judge panel. “It is nightmare speculation.”

Mr. Pence has sought to limit the number of Syrian refugees in Indiana through state contracts with private resettlement agencies. Indiana reimburses such agencies, using federal grants, for providing social services to resettled refugees. Last year, Donald Trump’s running mate forbade reimbursements for costs associated with Syrian refugees.

Exodus Refugee Immigration Inc., which expected to resettle 100 or more Syrian refugees in Indiana this year, sued Mr. Pence to block his plan. A federal district judge agreed in February to pause the plan for the duration of the lawsuit, ruling that Exodus was likely to win its case alleging discrimination.

Indiana officials appealed the ruling to the Chicago-based Seventh Circuit, which on Monday also predicted that Exodus would prevail.

Anyone seeking refugee status in the U.S. must undergo multiple layers of screening by the federal government, following screening by a United Nations office, a process that can take up to two years. Judge Posner acknowledged that Syrian refugees pose specific concerns, because many were born elsewhere and moved to the country before its civil war, making them difficult to screen.

As a condition of using federal money for resettlement, federal law requires states to service refugees regardless of race, religion, nationality or sex.

Andrew Browne :For China, ‘Clouds Are Fading Away’ in the Philippines Duterte’s abrupt diplomatic and military shift from Washington heartens Beijing, threatens U.S. alliance

With the exception of the Vietnam War, America’s alliance system in East Asia has helped keep the peace for more than half a century.

Now it is in trouble. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s progression from abusive name-calling to a more broadly articulated anti-American hostility has been swift and stunning. It threatens one of Washington’s crucial Asian alliances and sets back U.S. President Barack Obama ’s signature “pivot” to the region.

China is jubilant over Mr. Duterte’s cooling relations with Washington after it clashed for years with the Philippine leader’s predecessor.

“The clouds are fading away,” China’s ambassador to Manila, Zhao Jianhua, said at a Chinese National Day reception. “The sun is rising over the horizon, and will shine beautifully on the new chapter of bilateral relations.”

At first it looked like a fit of pique: One month ago, Mr. Duterte called Mr. Obama a “son of a whore” over U.S. criticism of his war on drugs that has strewn the country with thousands of corpses. His rage quickly hardened.

A few days later Mr. Duterte proposed removing American military advisers from the troubled southern region of Mindanao. Then he declared he was shopping in China and Russia for military supplies readily available in the U.S. Mr. Duterte will lead a Philippine business delegation to Beijing this month.

The FBI’s Defense of How the Clinton Interview Was Conducted Is Full of Holes The Bureau was clearly hamstrung by the Obama administration’s goal of avoiding prosecution. By Andrew C. McCarthy

In a nutshell, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department permitted Hillary Clinton’s aide Cheryl Mills — the subject of a criminal investigation, who had been given immunity from prosecution despite strong evidence that she had lied to investigators — to participate as a lawyer for Clinton, the principal subject of the same criminal investigation. This unheard-of accommodation was made in violation not only of rudimentary investigative protocols and attorney-ethics rules, but also of the federal criminal law.

Yet, the FBI and the Justice Department, the nation’s chief enforcers of the federal criminal law, tell us they were powerless to object.

Seriously?

In his testimony this week before the House Judiciary Committee, FBI director James Comey inveighed against critics who have slimed the Bureau as “weasels” over its handling of the Clinton e-mails investigation. I am not one of those people. After a quarter-century in the trenches with the Bureau as a prosecutor, I am one of those hopeless romantics who love the FBI and harbor real affection for the director himself.

I genuinely hate this case. I don’t mind disagreeing with the Bureau, a not infrequent occurrence in my former career. But I am hardwired to presume the FBI’s integrity. Thus, no matter how much irregularities in the Clinton investigation have rankled me, I’ve chalked them up to the Bureau’s being hamstrung. There was no chance on God’s green earth that President Obama and his Justice Department were ever going to permit an indictment of Hillary Clinton. Jim Comey says he didn’t make his final decision to recommend against prosecution until after Mrs. Clinton was interviewed at the end of the investigation, and that he did not coordinate that decision with his Obama-administration superiors. If he says so, that’s good enough for me. But it doesn’t mean the director made his decision detached from the dismal reality of the situation. And whatever one’s armchair-quarterback view on how he should have handled it, that reality was not of his making.

But just as Director Comey rightly objects to being regarded as a weasel, I don’t much like being regarded as an idiot . . . which is what I’d have to be to swallow some of this stuff.

The FBI absolutely has control over who may be present at an interview with a subject of an investigation. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the most basic one is that an interview never has to happen unless the FBI consents to it.

In his testimony, Comey kept stressing that Mrs. Clinton’s interview was “voluntary” — contending that since she was not required to submit to it, she could impose any conditions on her agreement to do so. That is nonsense. The interview was voluntary on both sides. The FBI is never required to indulge conditions that make a mockery of its serious business.

In this regard, Comey is like a guy who ties his own hands behind his back and then says he was powerless to defend himself. If Clinton declined to submit to an FBI interview unless Mills (or the similarly situated lawyer Heather Samuelson) was permitted to be present, the investigators could simply have handed her a grand-jury subpoena. They could then have politely directed her to a chamber where she would be compelled to answer questions — under oath and all by her lonesome, without any of her lawyer legion in attendance.

But, you see, in this investigation — unlike every other major criminal investigation in which the government tries to make the case rather than not make the case — the Justice Department declined to convene a grand jury.

Howard Dean: It’s Trump’s Fault That I Lied About Him Using Cocaine Daniel Greenfield ???!!!

This deranged rant has been brought to you by the human scream.

Dean then launched into a critique of the media saying, “I would like the media of this country to apologize.” He went on to suggest that his cocaine tweet was really a bid to teach the media a lesson. “I’m not unwilling to apologize for using innuendo. Donald Trump has used innuendo from the day he got into this campaign and you, media, have not called him on it.” Asked why he would want to “go low” like Trump Dean replied, “Stephanie, I did that on purpose so I could say just exactly what I said.”

So Howard Dean lied and accused Trump of using cocaine. Then he claimed that the media didn’t call out Trump for using innuendo. This occurred in some imaginary world because the media has been doing exactly that. Then Dean claimed that his lie had been an effort to expose this burning issue.

It was all a brilliant plan to critique the media. And it would have worked too if Howard Dean weren’t a deranged leftist with slightly fewer brain cells than Gary Johnson.

But the media is guilty of jumping up and down with outrage over things Trump says, but not when Hillary or Howard Dean say the same sorts of things.

France: The Ticking Time Bomb of Islamization by Yves Mamou

The last group, defined as the “Ultras”, represent 28% of Muslims polled, and the most authoritarian profile. They say they prefer to live apart from Republican values. For them, Islamic values and Islamic law, or sharia, come first, before the common law of the Republic. They approve of polygamy and of wearing the niqab or the burqa.

“These 28% adhere to Islam in its most retrograde version, which has become for them a kind of identity. Islam is the mainstay of their revolt; and this revolt is embodied in an Islam of rupture, conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism,” according to Hamid el Karoui in an interview with Journal du Dimanche.

More importantly, these 28% exist predominantly among the young (50% are under 25). In other words, one out of every two young French Muslims is a Salafist of the most radical type, even if he does not belong to a mosque.

It is unbelievable that the only tools at our disposal are inadequate opinion polls. Without knowledge, no political action — or any other action — is possible. It is a situation that immeasurably benefits aggressive political Islamists.

Willful blindness is the mother of the civil war to come — unless the French people choose to submit to Islam without a fight.

Recently, two important studies about French Muslims were released in France. The first one, optimistically entitled, “A French Islam is Possible,” was published under the auspices of Institut Montaigne, an independent French think tank.

The second study, entitled, “Work, the Company and the Religious Question,” is the fourth annual joint study between the Randstad Institute (a recruiting company) and the Observatory of Religious Experience at Work (Observatoire du fait religieux en entreprise, OFRE), a research company.

Both studies, filling a huge knowledge-deficit on religious and ethnic demography, were widely reported in the media. France is a country well-equipped with demographers, scholars, professors and research institutes, but any official data or statistics based on race, origin or religion are prohibited by law.

France has 66.6 million inhabitants, according to a report dated January 1, 2016 from the National Institute of Statistics (Insee). But census questionnaires prohibit any question about race, origin or religion. So in France, it is impossible to know how many Muslims, black people, white people, Catholics, Arabs, Jews, etc. live in the country.

This prohibition is based on an old and once-healthy principle to avoid any discrimination in a country where “assimilation” is the rule. Assimilation, French-style, means that any foreigner who wants to live in the country has to copy the behavioral code of local population and marry a native quickly. This assimilation model worked perfectly for people of Spanish, Portuguese or Polish descent. But with Arabs and Muslims, it stopped.

Now, however, despite all good intentions, the rule prohibiting collection of data that might lead to discrimination, has become a national security handicap.