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POLITICS

At Hillary’s 50th Reunion at Wellesly College By Doris O’Brien

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/06/at_hillarys_50th_reunion_at_wellesly_college.html

If Hillary Rodham Clinton insists she’s not running for president in 2020, why is she running… all over the place? Well, for one thing, Her Heinous has always believed in the value of high visibility as a means of enhancing her political chances  When she’s out of sight it’s  almost like she’s out of her mind.

To that self-serving purpose, she and Bill arranged  a cross-country tour of joint speaking engagements that began last year.  It was to be a means of keeping their power-presumptive connubial image front and  fresh in the public eye, but flopped almost from the start.  And recently a Broadway show based on her 2016 rpresidential run hit rock bottom in sales, closing after a shortened run.

But there is one audience that will always come through enthusiastically for  Mrs. Clinton.  Even before she came into national prominence, Hillary found comfort in  knowing  that  she could   always return  in triumph to the place where her  venture into  politics began:  Wellesley College, her alma mater in Massachusetts

As Hillary became increasingly famous, her welcome on campus grew even more jubilant. As the younger classes graduated and began to vote, the army of her dedicated collegiate “sisters” mushroomed, and the reciprocal affection flourished.  During the period when Bill Clinton was president, Hillary invited everyone in her Wellesley Class of ’69 to attend a state dinner at the White House.  If there were any Republicans among them, they were not turned away.  Neither, presumably, were they fools enough to discuss politics at the swank event.

For Wellesley alumnae, reunions occur  every five years based on  the last number of  their graduating  class.  As a result I have always shared the same “reunion cycle” with both Hillary and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright .  Both of them are younger than I am – and that, alas, is not their only distinction.  In addition, they share the  right  — or left, really — politics with  the majority of  our alma mater’s grads and undergrads.    And as American institutions of higher learning  deliver a more liberal doctrinaire, the likelihood of finding conservatives on campus  has diminished greatly.   

Clue Hidden in Website Code Fuels Speculation on Rep. Omar’s Marital History By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/clue-hidden-in-website-code-fuels-speculation-on-rep-omars-marital-history/

Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) has long dismissed the accusation that she married her brother in order to skirt U.S. immigration law, but a clue uncovered in the source code of her sister’s website suggests that the freshman congresswoman may have perjured herself to hide her ex-husband’s whereabouts when filing for a divorce in 2017.

Omar, in an effort to obtain a no-fault divorce from her then-husband Ahmed Elmi, testified under oath in 2017 that she had not seen or heard from Elmi since 2011 and was unable to locate him because they had no mutual acquaintances, and that she did not know the names of any of his immediate family members. But website code reviewed by the Daily Caller suggests that Elmi designed a website for Grit Partners, a health-care-consulting company run by Omar’s sister, Sarah Noor, that same year.

The Grit Partners website includes code, generated by the web-design platform Squarespace, that links to the company’s Twitter and Instagram accounts. Elmi’s name is included in that code: “screenname: Ahmed Elmi” and “UserName: ahmednelmi,” the code reads.

Islamist Candidate Khurrum Wahid Comes in 3rd in FL Election 1400 voters may have ignored his terror-linked background.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274096/islamist-candidate-khurrum-wahid-comes-3rd-fl-joe-kaufman

On June 18th, over 7300 voters in Coral Springs, Florida went to the polls in a Special Election to cast their votes for the individual they wanted as their new City Commissioner. The former Commissioner, Dan Daley, left the seat vacant, after he won his own Special Election, for Florida State House. Out of the six candidates in the Commission race, one, Khurrum Wahid, raised far more money than any of the others. But for many voters, Wahid, a terror-linked lawyer, represented a danger to society, and therefore, he was soundly rejected.

Khurrum Basir Wahid, a South Florida attorney, has made a name for himself by representing high-profile terrorists, including the most violent of al-Qaeda operatives. And while Wahid has every right to act as legal counsel to such miscreants, when viewing the rest of his terror-related and disturbing activity, it would be a grave error not to view Wahid as a threat as well.

One of Wahid’s former clients is Hafiz Khan, a Miami imam who received a 25-year prison sentence, in August 2013, for his role in shipping $50 thousand to the Pakistani Taliban for the specific goal of murdering American troops overseas. Khan was not the only individual charged in the crime. His son, Izhar, spent 20 months in a Miami federal detention center for his alleged participation in the terror financing scheme.

As stated by the US Justice Department, “Izhar is a Pakistani Taliban sympathizer who worked with [his father Hafiz] and others to collect and deliver money for the Pakistani Taliban… Izhar… provided and attempted to provide material support and resources… knowing and intending that they be used in preparation for and in carrying out… a conspiracy to murder, kidnap, and maim persons in a foreign country.”

Partisan Gerrymandering: Courts Should Keep Out of the Debate By Hans A. von Spakovsky & Michael Watson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/partisan-gerrymandering-supreme-court-cases-maryland-north-carolina/

Surprise: The supposedly nonpolitical bill to change how districts are drawn would … help Democrats.

For the past few years, liberals have been pushing the courts to declare that partisan redistricting — the consideration of politics when drawing the boundaries of legislative districts — violates the Constitution. In fact, we are awaiting a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court on this issue in two cases out of Maryland and North Carolina.

We hope that the Court will refuse to involve itself in the political thicket of the redistricting process. Engaging in politics does not violate the Constitution. Besides, the solution to gerrymandered districts should come from state legislatures, not the courts.

The allocation of representatives in a state legislature or in the U.S. House of Representatives is a fundamental political question that cannot be resolved without political considerations. Democrats know this, which is why they are demanding major revisions to the way elections are held for the U.S. House of Representatives in their H.R. 1 bill — major revisions they could exploit to increase their political power. Funny, they never complained about partisan redistricting that favored the Democrat party when they controlled a majority of state legislatures.

H.R. 1, the For the People Act of 2019, passed the House in March on a party-line vote. It would take away the constitutional authority of state legislatures to draw the boundaries of their congressional districts and would require states to set up supposedly “independent” redistricting commissions. The Democrats and their allies claim that this provision would ensure that congressional redistricting, when considered on a statewide basis, would not “unduly favor or disfavor any political party.”

It wouldn’t? A purportedly “independent” redistricting commission already draws congressional districts in California, and that state’s “citizens redistricting commission”—explicitly “grandfathered” by H.R. 1 — drew more unrepresentative districts than did partisan Republicans in Texas.

Elizabeth Warren Demands Reparations for Same-Sex Couples By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/trending/elizabeth-warren-demands-reparations-for-same-sex-couples/

True to form on the intersectionality front, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, introduced a bill to extend the idea of reparations to LGBT people. While far more limited in scope than frequent calls for slavery reparations to black Americans, the proposal blames the U.S. government for withholding benefits same-sex couples allegedly should have received before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).

On Friday, Warren re-introduced S. 1940, the Refund Equality Act, which would allow same-sex couples to amend past tax returns. According to a report from the Joint Committee on Taxation, the bill would direct $57 million in refunds. The funds would go to same-sex couples in states that had legalized same-sex marriage before the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act in 2013. Warren introduced an earlier version of the bill in 2017.

“The federal government forced legally married same-sex couples in Massachusetts to file as individuals and pay more in taxes for almost a decade,” Warren said in a statement on the legislation. “We need to call out that discrimination and to make it right — Congress should pass the Refund Equality Act immediately.”

“It wasn’t until marriage equality became law that gay & lesbian couples could jointly file tax returns—so they paid more in taxes,” Warren tweeted Saturday.

“Our government owes them more than $50M for the years our discriminatory tax code left them out. We must right these wrongs.”Such claims echo the argument for slavery reparations. According to that argument, the government allowed and fostered the horrific practice of race-based slavery, which stripped black people of their right to the fruits of their own labor. While slavery was abolished, the government did not return the property unjustly stolen from black people. The wealth inequalities among black and white Americans are a result of this horrific injustice, so the argument goes. Therefore, the government must pay their descendants the debt it owes them.

New Documents Released Regarding Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Possible Bigamy and Incest By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/trending/new-documents-released-regarding-rep-ilhan-omars-possible-bigamy-and-incest/

The Minnesota Campaign Fiance Board has released new documents in the case of campaign finance violations against Rep. Ilhan Omar which shed a little more light on charges made during her 2018 campaign that she married her brother, a British citizen, so he could enter the United States, but then married another man in 2017 before divorcing her first husband.

An investigation by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune revealed that Omar legally corrected the error, but questions surrounding her relationship with her first husband persist.

In August of 2016, the original story broke when Powerline blog covered it:

A reader has written us to point out that the Somali website  Somalispotposted information last week suggesting Omar’s involvement in marriage and immigration fraud. The post notes that Omar married Ahmed Hirsi in 2002. Hirsi is the father of Omar’s three children. Omar is depicted with Hirsi and their children on Omar’s campaign website  here.

The post further notes that Omar married her brother Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009, implying that the latter marriage assisted his entry into the United States. Her brother was a British citizen. “As soon as Ilhan Omar married him,” the post continues, “he started university at her [a]lma mater North Dakota State University where he graduated in 2012. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Minneapolis where he was living in a public housing complex and was later evicted. He then returned to the United Kingdom where he now lives.”

The Star investigation tried to untangle the convoluted skein of Omar’s personal life:

Omar has denied the allegations in the past, dismissing them as “baseless rumors” first raised in an online Somali politics forum and championed by conservative bloggers during her 2016 campaign for the Minnesota House. But she said little then or since about Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, the former husband who swept into her life in 2009 before a 2011 separation.

Since When Are Liberals against Investigating the CIA and FBI? By Jonathan S. Tobin

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/06/liberals-against-investigating-cia-fbi/Since Trump took office, of course.

Was there ever a time when Americans had unquestioning faith in federal law-enforcement agencies? Maybe in the days before Vietnam and Watergate, most citizens did believe that those in charge of the nation’s fate could be trusted. Before World War II, the FBI’s formidable public-relations machine actually produced a popular radio and television program lauding its efforts “in peace and war.” After the war, when the CIA became the country’s first full-time foreign-intelligence agency, few Americans understood much about what it was doing, and what little they did know was colored by the government’s propaganda efforts.

But ever since the upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s seemed to make cynicism about government our new national pastime, the notion that the intelligence community is above politics has been as outdated as the adulation once accorded to J. Edgar Hoover. It’s in that context that we should understand the recent debate about whether it’s appropriate to scrutinize the CIA and FBI’s role in the origins of the Russia probe. Though Democrats are now treating criticism of federal law enforcement as beyond the pale, their newfound faith is every bit as partisan as Republicans’ newfound skepticism. A sober look at the history of the past few decades reveals that, to paraphrase Clausewitz, in Washington, intelligence has always been a matter of politics by other means.

Attorney General William Barr’s decision to launch an investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation has caused some predicable anger among Democrats and other Trump-administration critics. This discomfort stems from what they regard as an attempt to flip the narrative from Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia to a dubious decision by the FBI to begin spying on the political opponents of Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration.

Given the failure of the investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller to prove the collusion allegations, Barr’s attempt to determine whether the unprecedented probe of a presidential campaign was an abuse of power seems reasonable. But Barr’s decision is a huge problem for Democrats who are hoping to pursue the impeachment of Trump by picking up the case that Mueller failed to make after two years of effort.

Mr. Biden: President Trump Is an Existential Threat to Your Legacy and Obama’s, Not to National Security Check out what the previous administration did to national security. by Fred Gedrich

https://spectator.org/mr-biden-president-trump-is-an-existential-threat-t

In a recent Iowa speech former U.S. Vice President and Democrat presidential aspirant Joe Biden claimed President Donald Trump and his policies are an existential threat to Americans. It seems quite odd that he would say such a thing, especially since many security-conscious Americans consider the Obama/Biden administration’s eight-year foreign policy record a colossal failure, which threatened Americans and tens of millions of others.

In 2008, then Senator and Democrat presidential nominee Barack Obama chose Senator Biden to be his presidential running mate. Obama considered Biden, with his 36-year U.S. Senate tenure, a leading foreign policy authority as well as a seasoned legislator and Washington hand well-experienced in D.C. ways. Before leaving office, President Obama awarded Vice President Biden the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his service to country and his administration.

When they took office in January 2009 many Americans believed the Obama/Biden administration would offer the country a welcome change in direction from the previous George W. Bush administration and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars which consumed it. Consequently, it raised expectations for a better and safer world, not only for Americans but everyone else. During their administration, Obama and Biden followed their global worldview impulses and displayed a willingness to make greater use of the United Nations and other international institutions in resolving the world’s most difficult problems. The centerpiece of their foreign policy and national security strategy was “strategic patience,” a concept built around not immediately reacting to global crises, and instead, looking to the international community to resolve them.

How well did the Obama/Biden approach work? The 2016 U.S. Intelligence Community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment provides a glimpse of what the world looked like after eight years of pursuing Obama/Biden administration policies. It isn’t a pretty picture. For example, the Obama/Biden administration’s U.S. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, briefed Congress on the security threats identified by 17 U.S. intelligence agencies. Mr. Clapper, among other things,reported:

How Buttigieg Entered the Anti-Israel Echo Chamber And adopted Obama’s foreign policy. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274003/how-buttigieg-entered-anti-israel-echo-chamber-daniel-greenfield

Last year, Pete Buttigieg, then the mayor of a failing Indiana city with a small Jewish community, and with unlikely aspirations for higher office, visited Israel. He suggested that Israel’s approach to security offered “a very important lesson in that that hopefully Americans can look to”.

Buttigieg had joined an American Jewish Committee delegation of mayors and came back with a seeming understanding of Israel’s precarious security situation and the danger of simplistic solutions.

 “One of the first things that was very clear to us is that there is not a unified or single voice for the Palestinian people. Most people aren’t aware of the difference between what’s happening in Gaza, run by Hamas in a way that is contributing to a lot of misery there, but also totally different than an environment where you would have a negotiating partner across the table,” he observed.

Fast forward a year and Buttigieg is running for president and threatening to cut aid to Israel.

In his foreign policy address, he falsely claimed that “the Netanyahu government is turning away from peace” and warned Israel, while, referring to himself in the third person, that “President Buttigieg would take steps to ensure that American taxpayers won’t help foot the bill.”

What happened? There are two answers.

When Buttigieg was running a conservative city with an active Jewish and Christian community, where it’s not unusual to see churches flying the Israeli flag, it was safe for him to be more pro-Israel. On the campaign trail of a radical primary, where anti-Israel protesters dogged his steps, things changed.

But the bigger answer goes inside the foreign policy factory to see how the sausage gets made.

Buttigieg’s foreign policy team is headed by Doug Wilson. Wilson, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs and the highest-ranking gay Pentagon official, is an obvious choice. Wilson chairs the Board of Advisors at the Truman National Security Project making him the guy to talk to for 2020 Democrats like Buttigieg interested in developing a foreign policy position at the national level.

Will Dems’ Presidential Fate Repeat Past Wins, or Past Losses? Where the battle stands — and what may tilt the scales. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273997/will-dems-presidential-fate-repeat-past-wins-or-bruce-thornton

Many Republicans are feeling optimistic about Trump’s reelection in 2020. The Mueller investigation, on which Democrats’ pinned their hopes for mortally wounding the president, has crumbled like a bride’s first pie crust. AG Barr, unlike the lollygagging Jeff Sessions, is vigorously investigating the corruption in the FBI and DOJ that led to government agencies’ interference in an election in favor of Hillary Clinton, and then their attempts to engineer a bloodless coup to remove a legally elected president. The economy is roaring, with numbers on growth, employment, and productivity not seen in decades. And international rivals like Iran and China are now being confronted rather than coddled.

Meanwhile, the Democrats appear to have lost their political minds. They have sunk deeper into the swamps of zombie socialism, illiberal identity politics, 1984-style censorship, legalized infanticide, climate-change apocalypse, and proposals to dismantle the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. For Republicans, these excesses portend a variation on their party’s victories in 1972 or 1980. But Dems apparently believe they can reprise Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s triumphs in 1992 and 2008. Each of these elections recalls the circumstances and issues that so far are shaping 2020.

Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972 over George McGovern, who won only one state and lost his home state, was a decisive rejection of the Sixties on behalf of the “Silent Majority” angered over this attempted fundamental transformation of America. The sneering assault on traditional religion, customs, mores, and morals, one abetted by the media, popular culture, and universities, aroused a sleeping electoral giant. Nixon’s deft handling of the Vietnam War during his first term, which lead to a draw-down of U.S. forces––from over half a million in 1968 to a mere 50 in 1973–– and the end of the draft, took the war off the table despite the antiwar media’s earlier attempts to spin North Vietnam’s 1968 Tet Offensive, a disaster for the North, into an omen of American military defeat.