NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Checkered Past of the FBI Cyber Contractor Who ‘Spied’ on Trump Paul Sperry

Posted By on February 18th, 2022

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/02/17/the_checkered_past_of_the_fbi_computer_contractor_who_spied_on_trump_816761.html

Long before FBI computer contractor and Clinton operative Rodney L. Joffe allegedly trolled Internet traffic for dirt on President Trump, he mined direct-marketing contact lists for the names and addresses of unwitting Americans to target in a promotional scam involving a grandfather clock.

Not just any clock, mind you, but a “world famous Bentley IX” model, according to postcards his companies mailed out to millions of people in the late 1980s claiming they’d won the clock in a contest they never entered. There was just one hitch: the lucky winners had to send $69.19 in shipping fees to redeem their supposedly five-foot mahogany prize.

Tens of thousands of folks forked over the fees, only to discover the grandfather clock that arrived was nothing as advertised. It was really just a table-top version made of particle board and plastic and worth less than $10. Some assembly was required.

The scheme generated thousands of complaints, sparking federal and state investigations. Joffe and his then-California partner, Linda M. Carella, were eyed by federal postal authorities and several state attorneys general for allegedly operating a multi-state mail-order scheme. Joffe settled several state lawsuits by agreeing to refund hundreds of thousands of dollars mainly to elderly victims, according to several published reports at the time.

Joffe and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment. But in a phone interview, Carella told RealClearInvestigations that Joffe ran the operation. “I was just the secretary, the receptionist,” Carella, 76, said from her home in Florida, where she is now retired. She did say she picked up the returned postcards and checks from mailboxes.

Carella said she quit after the investigation: “I said I don’t want anything more to do with this … I have not seen Rodney since then.” But Joffe pressed on with his direct-mail marketing business before packing up for Arizona a few years later. Federal and state tax lien records reveal Joffe — who also sent out mailers for skin care and other beauty products — owed more than $110,000 in back taxes on his property in Los Angeles in 1995.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who Are Those ‘Techies’ Who Spied on Trump? ‘Benevolent posse’ or partisans for Hillary Clinton? John Durham has the answer. by Kimberley Strassel

Posted By on February 18th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-are-those-techies-who-spied-on-trump-clinton-2016-election-durham-data-fusion-gps-joffe-11645139606?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

The usual suspects are already circling the wagons around the techie “experts” who spied on Donald Trump. If their defense feels tired, it’s because we’ve been through it before. It’s Christopher Steele all over again.

Special counsel John Durham destroyed the last shreds of Mr. Steele’s credibility last year, proving that the paid-for-hire spook had relied on fabrications for the infamous dossier the Federal Bureau of Investigation used in its Trump probe. The special counsel is now dismantling that other big claim of Trump-Russia “collusion”—the Alfa Bank narrative. The wonder is that the press and others are stepping up for another humiliation—when the disturbing actions of the creators of the Alfa narrative are already so easy to document, and in their own words.

The Alfa story came to life in October 2016, when Franklin Foer of Slate was gulled into writing that a largely anonymous “benevolent posse” of “computer scientists,” “spurred by a sense of shared idealism,” had discovered data showing secret communications between the Trump Organization and Russia-based Alfa Bank. Cybersecurity professionals instantly ridiculed the data as nonsense, and the FBI dismissed it, but the liberal media kept it alive. In October 2018, the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins devoted a 7,600-word panegyric to the “self-appointed guardians of the Internet” who continued to flog the claims.

In recent court filings, Mr. Durham explains that these tech experts—including Rodney Joffe, formerly of Neustar, Inc.—were in cahoots with the same crew as Mr. Steele, using the same playbook. They worked with Democratic lawyers at Perkins Coie and opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, with the goal of dredging up “derogatory” information on Mr. Trump that would please “VIPs” in the Clinton campaign. The techies did so, the Durham indictment says, in part by mining protected internet data that had been supplied to a government contractor—allowing them to snoop on the White House as well as Trump Tower and Mr. Trump’s Manhattan apartment.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Palestinian Leaders’ Five-Star Jihad by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on February 17th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18237/palestinians-five-star-jihad

Hamas leaders are not sitting among their people in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank. It is easier and safer for them to call on the Palestinians to send their children to carry out terrorist attacks against Israel while they are relaxing in the comfort of their hotel rooms, villas and gyms in the Qatari capital of Doha. The Hamas leaders are not going to send their own sons and daughters to engage in the jihad against Israel.

The Iranian-backed Hamas and PIJ are the two largest groups in the Gaza Strip. Instead of investing their resources and efforts in improving the living conditions of their people, the Hamas and PIJ leaders have brought on them one disaster after the other. They have brought war and destruction on the people of the Gaza Strip by firing thousands of rockets towards Israel, forcing Israel to fire back to defend itself.

Instead of building schools and hospitals, the Hamas and PIJ leaders have chosen to invest tens of millions of dollars in a network of tunnels along Gaza’s border with Israel, to attack and kill Jews.

The leaders of Hamas and PIJ left scorched earth behind them and chose to lead luxurious lives in Doha, Istanbul and Beirut. Strangely, however, instead of hiding their faces in shame, they are calling from their gyms, jets, and jacuzzis for the Palestinians to pursue the fight against Israel.

Some Palestinians, it seems, refuse to be duped by the deception of the Hamas and PIJ leaders. These Palestinians have finally realized that their leaders care only about their personal interest and the well-being of their families and are enjoying the good life in Doha and Istanbul.

Above all, the Palestinians need to boot out the thieves who masquerade as their leaders, the butchers responsible for the deaths of the young men and women in the Hamas-incited jihad against Israel. The Palestinians will never move forward with their lives as long as their leaders are relaxing in hot tubs in Qatar and Turkey while sending them orders to bathe themselves in yet more Jewish blood.

The leaders of the Palestinian terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are continuing to urge Palestinians to take to the streets to engage in the jihad (holy war) against Israel.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: WHY THE RENEWED ATTACKS ON DONALD TRUMP?

Posted By on February 17th, 2022

There is a new flurry of efforts to discredit Donald Trump….finances, accounting, visitor logs, more January 6 “revelations” etc.

The most risible  “pottie- mouth” rumor that he stuffed critical documents into the toilet seems to have been flushed by the media.

Could the reason be that the Durham revelations vindicate his often stated suspicions about chicanery in elections and the waste in time and money and public attention in the  “Russiagate” misinformation episode?

Or, could it be that an increasing number of pivotal states are re-examining and revealing real election interference?

Hmmmmmm…..rsk

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hillary Finally Responds to Durham Bombshell, Calls It ‘a Fake Scandal’ By Matt Margolis

Posted By on February 17th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/02/16/hillary-finally-responds-to-durham-bombshell-calls-it-a-fake-scandal-n1559864

According to a motion filed Friday by Special Counsel John Durham, lawyers for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign allegedly paid a technology company to “infiltrate” servers that belonged to Trump Tower and, later, the Trump White House “for the purpose of gathering derogatory information about Donald Trump.”

“Trump & Fox are desperately spinning up a fake scandal to distract from his real ones. So it’s a day that ends in Y,” Hillary tweeted on Wednesday. “The more his misdeeds are exposed, the more they lie.” Hillary included a link to an article from popular culture and fashion magazine Vanity Fair, which she claims debunks the allegations because that’s the best she could come up with after five days.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hillary Clinton’s Greatest Masterpiece Will the people ever learn how false information was seeded throughout the government and media in a conspiratorial effort to destroy a sitting president? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on February 17th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/16/hillary-clintons-greatest-masterpiece/

Hillary Clinton’s never-ending shenanigans in 2015-2016 could be summarized as an attempted slow-motion coup. 

Four years of national hysteria, a divided nation, and dangerous new tensions with Russia were some of the wages of Clinton’s machinations.

Clinton hired a British national and ex-spy, Christopher Steele, to compile dirt on her election opponent, Trump. She hid her likely illegal campaign payments to him through at least three paywalls—the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm, and the opposition research firm Fusion GPS. 

Partisans in the FBI helped her, by variously spying on minor officials affiliated with the Trump campaign, like George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. To expedite its improper surveillance, a corrupt FBI hierarchy presented fraudulent documents to a FISA court that authorized the illicit surveillance. 

Clinton’s orbit of former subordinates and friends seeded the lies in the dossier throughout the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA. 

During the Trump transition, the FBI also tapped into the communications of national security advisor designate General Michael Flynn. The illegally leaked surveillance put an end to his service to the Trump Administration and ruined his life. 

The country went through 22 months and $40 million in legal expenses under special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the Clinton-inspired Russian collusion hoax.

When it was all over, Mueller’s “dream team” found no such actionable Trump-Russian collusion. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Progressives’ Reverse Midas Touch in Education By Adam Vicari

Posted By on February 17th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/02/the_progressives_reverse_midas_touch_in_education.html

Every 3 years, an international assessment of the academic performance of 15-year-old students in the academic fields of reading, science, and mathematics, known as the Program for International Student assessment (PISA) is administered.  79 countries around the world participate in the assessments, most of them developed, economically prosperous first world or developing second world nations. 

As of the latest PISA assessment in 2018, the United States churned out some alarming results.  Of the 79 countries, the average score (of reading, writing, and math) for the United States was 495, which put us at a ranking of 25th internationally.  For Mathematics, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (the organization that administers the assessments) data, the United States ranked 37th internationally, for science, we ranked 18th internationally, and for reading, we ranked 13th internationally.  Thus, for all 3 assessments, we didn’t even break the top 10 in terms of student achievement in 2018. 

We are better than this, we have been better than this, and, if we reclaim the public education system from the Marxists, cretins and left-wing airheads running it currently, we will be better than this.  Now, many may wonder: what are the root causes of these dismal results? 

The answer is: there are several causal factors. The fact that American children do not go to school year-round and have a 3-month gap in their education during the summer does not help, and neither does the fact that most inner-city schools have dismal performances, which negatively impacts the overall scoring in the United States. 

However, the American educational system has suffered devastating blows to in the past few years through the depredations of the left.  Left wing Marxists have systematically destroyed the public education system in America within half a decade.  It was a Blitzkrieg unparalleled since World War II and Americans are still reeling from its effects. 

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Peace With Some Arab Neighbors? Intriguing developments with the UAE and Bahrain. Joseph Puder

Posted By on February 17th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/has-israel-finally-secured-peace-its-arab-joseph-puder/

The Jewish state’s dream of warm peace with its Arab neighbors has eluded it for more than 72 years. In September 2020, President Donald Trump helped engineer the Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. The very treaty signing on the White House lawn projected human warmth, and signaled a warm peace. Subsequently, Sudan and Morocco joined the normalization of relations with Israel.

It is true that peace, as opposed to war, came much earlier than September 2020. Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979 and with Jordan in 1994. These peace treaties, however, were essentially between governments, coldly exchanging territory for peace. Israel gave up the entire Sinai Peninsula; it received a cold peace in return. The late Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak avoided visiting Israel. In his 30-year reign as Egypt’s dictator, he visited Israel only once, and only for three hours, to attend the funeral of the assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. He did not encourage Israeli-Egyptian trade or tourism. 

Although Mubarak fulfilled the security commitments under the Camp David Accords, he deliberately perpetuated the cold peace. Mubarak was motivated by the desire to reduce Egypt’s massive military burden, and cement Egypt’s relationship with the US. He also sought to return Egypt to the bosom of the Arab world that expelled Egypt from the Arab League and leadership in the Arab world following Anwar Sadat’s Camp David Peace Accords with Israel. Israelis were not welcomed in Cairo, and the majority of the Egyptian population has been hostile to Israel and peace. The Egyptian media in particular has displayed frequent bursts of anti-Semitism. Israel’s consolation was that it didn’t have to allocate burdensome resources in manpower and treasure.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Boris Johnson’s Foreign Policy Magical Thinking Meeting aggression with bluster and sermonettes only produces more aggression. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on February 17th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/boris-johnsons-foreign-policy-magical-thinking-bruce-thornton/

Last week British Prime Minister Boris Johnson published an op-ed about the brewing conflict between Ukraine and Russia. And, no surprise, it comprised a catalogue of “new world order” idealism of the sort we’ve watched crash and burn for the last three decades. Vladimir Putin would not be impressed were he to read it, any more than he’s worried about the modest increases in NATO forces near his borders, since the U.S. Commander-in-Chief already announced that we will not go to war over Ukraine. Plus the NATO countries are still disunited over how to respond should Putin go kinetic.

Once again, the hard questions of what threatens our interests and how to meet those threats are ignored in favor of bankrupt idealism and magical thinking.

Amidst all the virtue-signaling and braggadocios rhetoric, Johnson offers this strange sentence that epitomizes that idealism: “If I may adapt some famous words: All nations are created equal, they are endowed by international law with certain inalienable rights, and first among these is the right not to have their territory seized, or their foreign policy dictated at gunpoint, by a powerful neighbor.”

Talk about a false analogy. No, nations are not all “created equal” and  do not have “unalienable rights,” but only such rights as are created by treaties with other nations, not by shared universal “norms” or “values.” Nor, as Johnson implies, is “international law” like “nature and nature’s God” that the Founder believed make certain human rights unalienable, a feature of our inherent humanity, not a gift of earthly power. International law, in contrast, is the contingent product of treaties negotiated by sovereign nations that enter into such agreements in order to further their national interests. They do not reflect universal morality or values, and so are regularly violated, or simply abandoned, as those interests shift.

HISTORY, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

An Undiscovered Coronavirus? The Mystery of the ‘Russian Flu’ Scientists are grasping for any example that could help anticipate the future of Covid, even a mysterious respiratory pandemic that spread in the late 19th century.

Posted By on February 16th, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/14/health/russian-flu-coronavirus.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab

By Gina Kolata

In May 1889, people living in Bukhara, a city that was then part of the Russian Empire, began sickening and dying. The respiratory virus that killed them became known as the Russian flu. It swept the world, overwhelming hospitals and killing the old with special ferocity.

Schools and factories were forced to close because so many students and workers were sick. Some of the infected described an odd symptom: a loss of smell and taste. And some of those who recovered reported a lingering exhaustion.

The Russian flu finally ended a few years later, after at least three waves of infection.

Its patterns of infection and symptoms have led some virologists and historians of medicine to now wonder: Might the Russian flu actually have been a pandemic driven by a coronavirus? And could its course give us clues about how our pandemic will play out and wind down?

If a coronavirus caused the Russian flu, some believe that pathogen may still be around, its descendants circulating worldwide as one of the four coronaviruses that cause the common cold. If so, it would be different from flu pandemics whose viruses stick around for a while only to be replaced by new variants years later that cause a new pandemic.