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Stopping the Caravan By Mark Krikorian

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/stopping-the-caravan/Only Congress can fix this.

Can we stop the caravan?

As Rod Dreher notes, the sight of thousands of Central Americans making their way en masse to the United States forces us to ask: “How far would we go to defend the sovereignty of our nations from invaders who want to cross our borders not with weapons to conquer, but nevertheless to settle here?”

The president’s threat to deploy the military to the border to stop the caravan conjures images of gunning down unarmed border infiltrators. This is precisely the kind of confrontation that some of the radicals cheering the caravan would love to see.

But this isn’t a military problem. It’s a law-enforcement problem, and one that ordinary civilian law enforcement can solve if provided with the right tools — which it does not have right now. The current rules regarding asylum and the treatment of alien minors, and the inadequate level of funding for detention of people applying for asylum (to make sure they can’t run off when their cases are rejected), effectively force immigration authorities into a catch-and-release policy, where aliens crossing the border are given a court date and then let go. This is a powerful incentive for more people to follow.

The incentive is so powerful that the current caravan is just the most photogenic part of the problem; fiscal-year 2018 statistics show that a slow-motion caravan confronts the border every day, with a daily average in September of more than 500 illegal aliens traveling in family units apprehended on the border (and soon released). Many others walk up to an immigration inspector at a legal crossing point on the Mexican border (“port of entry” is the technical term) and simply utter the magic word “asylum” and get in.

What to do? Deploying troops won’t do any good because they can’t arrest people; it would be just like the National Guard deployments under the Bush, Obama, and current administrations, where troops assisted the Border Patrol in reconnaissance and the like, which is fine as far as it goes but doesn’t solve anything. And they’re obviously not going to open fire on unarmed people. Even land mines and machines guns atop concrete border walls wouldn’t matter much, since most of those arriving would simply go to a legal port of entry. (About one-third of last spring’s caravan actually made it all the way to the border, and of those, the large majority went to ports of entry.)

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European Human-Rights Court: Defaming Muhammad Not Protected Speech By Jack Crowe

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/european-human-rights-court-defaming-muhammad-not-protected/

Defamatory statements about the prophet Muhammad are not covered by free-speech protections, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Thursday.

The Strasbourg-based court found that insulting the prophet “goes beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate” and “could stir up prejudice and put at risk religious peace.”

In its ruling, the court rejected an Austrian woman’s claim that her previous conviction for characterizing Muhammad as a “pedophile” violated her free-speech rights, finding instead that the Austrian court had “carefully balanced her right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected.”

In a series of public seminars, the women cited Muhammad’s marriage to a six-year-old girl, which, according to Islamic lore, was consummated when she was nine, as evidence of his pedophilia.

Muhammad “liked to do it with children,” the woman said during one of the seminars. “A 56-year-old and a 6-year-old? . . . What do we call it, if it is not pedophilia?”

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Mad Cows and Hate Crimes By Madeleine Kearns

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/scotland-government-anti-hate-campaign-virtue-signals/

The Scottish government aims to protect people from real harm and also from those dreadful haters who might participate in wrongthink.

My blood is no use in America. What I mean is, as a native of the British Isles, born amid an epidemic of “mad cow” disease, I am theoretically a carrier of this brain-wasting affliction and, accordingly, forbidden from donating my sanguine elixir to U.S. blood banks — on the off chance it’s madly bad (or is that badly mad?).

At first, I thought this rather far-fetched. But when my visiting mother presented me with the Scotsman from last Friday — front page: “four cattle have been slaughtered in efforts to contain the first case of ‘mad cow’ disease in Scotland in a decade” — I reconsidered.

Incidentally, there is a strange quirk in Scots law protecting the bovine. According to the Licensing Act of 1872, it remains illegal to be drunk and in possession of a cow. But I digress. The Scotsman report reassured: “Authorities have said the public should not worry as no infected meat entered the food chain.”

Of course, this slaughter, like restrictive blood donation, is a precautionary measure intended to protect the general public from risk of serious harm. This is an obvious point, perhaps, but it is an important one by way of contrast.

Picture this, if you will: The Reverend David Robertson, a Protestant minister at St. Peter’s Free Church in Dundee and author of the delightful TheWeeFlea blog, was riding his bicycle through the lively Scottish city when one of the following signs caught his attention.

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How A KGB Double Agent Saved Britain And Won The Cold War For The West Historian Ben MacIntyre’s new book, ‘The Spy and the Traitor,’ tells the thrilling story of how the KGB’s Oleg Gordievsky helped check the Soviet Union as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan fought communism.By Tony Daniel

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/26/how-a-kgb-double-agent-saved-britain-won-the-cold-war-for-the-west/

In his new book The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, veteran espionage historian Ben MacIntyre confirms a troubling decision—or lack thereof—that some had suspected for years. This is the fact that in 1983 the man overseeing both British spy services MI6 and MI5, head of British Civil Service Robert Armstrong, knew that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s main opponent in the upcoming election was a KGB agent and did not tell her.

Labor Party leader, member of Parliament, and former employment secretary Michael Foot had been a paid KGB agent for decades, and was still on the KGB books as an agent of influence when he headed the British Labor Party and ran against Thatcher for leadership of England in 1983. Foot would have become prime minister if Labor had won.

MI6 told MI5, its domestic sister agency, and MI5 told Armstrong, but Armstrong kept Foot’s duplicity to himself. Nobody informed Thatcher. According to MacIntyre:

[Armstrong] did not tell Margaret Thatcher or her other top advisers; he did not tell anyone in the Civil Service, the Conservative Party, or the Labour Party. He did not tell the Americans, or any other of Britain’s allies. He did not tell a soul. Having been passed the unexploded bomb, the cabinet secretary put it in his pocket, and kept it there, in the hope that Foot would lose, and the problem would defuse itself. [MI6 operative] Veronica Price was blunt: ‘We buried it.’

With what seems in hindsight a misguided sense of higher duty and a display of undemocratic arrogance, Armstrong put the British Commonwealth in the position of possibly electing a genuine KGB agent as prime minister—a fact its intelligence services knew and did nothing about. MacIntyre confirms this state of affairs from multiple sources. Thankfully, Thatcher and the Tories won in 1983.

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What We Know About The Suspected Package Bomb Sender So Far By Bre Payton

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/26/know-suspected-package-bomb-sender-far/

A man has been arrested in connection to the packaged bombs sent to prominent Democratic leaders Friday morning. Authorities say DNA evidence linked 56-year-old Cesar Altieri Sayoc, of Florida, to the dozen packages with explosive devices sent earlier this week to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, George Soros, Joe Biden, CNN contributor John Brennan, among others, CBS news reports.

A van reportedly confiscated by the FBI that is believed to belong to Sayoc displayed numerous decals depicting targets on liberal leaders, including Clinton. Sayoc reportedly used to work as a stripper and “lived like a gypsy,” the Washington Examiner reported.

“He really couldn’t find his niche in life, and I guess he found it now,” Sayoc’s former employer Tony Valentine told the Examiner. “Back in the ’90s, he was running around from Minnesota to the Carolinas to Florida. He was like a gypsy.”

Sayoc is a registered Republican who has been arrested numerous times, including an arrest in 2002 for attempting to use a bomb. NBC News reports Sayoc was living out of his van and showering at the gym. A cousin of the suspect called him “a lost soul,” according to The Guardian.

“He’s been in the strip clubs since he was 22, that was his life,” the relative told The Guardian. “He was a male dancer and he wanted to be a wrestler. He was taking steroids. He was all buffed up….He was built like a rock.”

Democratic strategist Rochelle Ritchie claims Sayoc threatened her via Twitter after she appeared on Fox News.

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How to Think About the Caravan Column: A challenge to American sovereignty that exploits our humanitarianism Honduran caravan Getty Images BY: Matthew Continetti

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://freebeacon.com/columns/how-to-think-about-the-caravan/

King Leonidas had his 300. President Trump has his 800. That’s the number of soldiers Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has ordered to the southern border to greet the caravan of illegal immigrants originating from Honduras. The band of families and singles, traveling en masse to avoid exploitation by smugglers and coyotes, now numbers 10,000 souls, according to one report. It may take them weeks to reach the United States. A second caravan is already taking shape behind the first. It won’t be the last.

An unauthorized march on a border—any border—is a challenge to national sovereignty. And it is precisely the idea of sovereignty that one of the groups supporting the caravan, Pueblo Sin Fronteras, wants to undermine. The confrontation is all the more emphatic when the men at the head of the column bear the flag not of the country they seek to enter but that of their homeland. Americans who oppose illegal immigration and are concerned at the mounting crisis in our border states, where thousands of family units and unaccompanied children are detained as an inundated bureaucracy decides their fates, look to Trump, Mattis, and the Army for relief.

Prepare to be disappointed. The soldiers aren’t going to the border to stop the caravan. They’re going to assist Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Health and Human Services, and other authorities as they take in the newcomers. There is little the government can do to turn back the tide. Why? Because the same rule of law challenged by illegal immigration also incentivizes and protects the illegal immigrants within the caravan. It’s a paradox—one inflaming this most polarizing of issues at a moment of political decision.

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Nolte: NBC News Hid Information that Would Have Cleared Kavanaugh of Avenatti Rape Allegations

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2018/10/26/nolte-nbc-news-hid-info-wouldve-cleared-kavanaugh-avenatti-rape-allegations/

On September 16, Kavanaugh and his loved ones were dropped into a pit of hell due to allegations of sexual assault from Christine Blasey Ford. Although her story quickly fell apart during public testimony, for the three-plus weeks that would follow, in an effort to derail his confirmation, Democrats and their allies in the establishment media did everything in their power to personally destroy this man as a drunken serial rapist.

NBC News and Avenatti played a huge role in this obscene smear campaign. One notable example was NBC breathlessly publishing and airing an assault allegation against Kavanaugh that was quickly exposed as a hoax. NBC did not even bother to independently corroborate this allegation prior to airing it. A Democrat handed NBC the smear, and NBC ran with it.

To make matters worse, we now know NBC News withheld crucial information that undermined the allegations made by Swetnick, the Avenatti client who accused a high school-aged Kavanaugh of spiking punch bowls at house parties so he and his buddies could engage in serial rapes.

And we know NBC deliberately withheld this crucial information because NBC is now admitting it had this information all the way back on September 30.

On September 30, a week prior to Kavanaugh’s confirmation, during the most intense days of this scandal, when Kavanaugh’s confirmation was still very much in doubt, here is what NBC did not want the public to know…

If you recall, although he withheld the name, Avenatti tweeted out a sworn statement from a woman who backed up Swetnick’s outrageous rape allegations. In her statement, this second woman swore that she, too, had witnessed Kavanaugh spike punch bowls and take sexual advantage of girls.

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Bombgate and the new species of political theatre If the goal was to embarrass Donald Trump or coax voters away from the GOP in the midterms, I’ll bet you a Nate Silver dollar it won’t work Roger Kimball

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://spectator.us/bombgate-political-theatre/

Andrew McCarthy, writing in National Review Online a couple of days ago, was certainly correct that it would have been outrageous and irresponsible to have suggested, at that early juncture of this still-unfolding episode, that the pipe ‘bombs’ were hoaxes devised by leftist activists to make it appear that nebulous right wing activists are targeting famous critics of Donald Trump, from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, all the way down the food chain to Senator ‘Spartacus’ Booker and Mad Maxine Waters.

But the fact that McCarthy’s column is titled ‘Why No One Trusts the Media’ tells you that his prudent restraint is redolent of that device rhetoricians denominate apophasis or praeteritio. ‘After all,’ quoth McCarthy, ‘there is no evidence that the atrocious but thankfully unsuccessful targeting . . . was carried out by political leftists. There is no proof that any Democrat was hoping to cast suspicion on Republican supporters, to suggest to voters, less than two weeks before the midterms, that Trump and GOP rhetoric incites violence. To intimate, in the absence of any proof, that left-wing agitators may be responsible would be a condemnable smear.’ And it is surely premature, not to say unjustified, to say that Mark Antony pimped his wife, had unnatural relations with Octavian, and is guilty of bribery, extortion, and desecration.

Here’s what we know as of Friday morning, October 26 2018, at about 10:30. A dozen, apparently make-believe bombs, none of which has detonated, and at least some of which could not be detonated, have been sent by nobody knows whom to an A and B list of prominent Trump haters. This has precipitated round-the-clock, flood-the-zone coverage. ‘Hundreds’ of journalists have signed a letter condemning President Trump’s ‘attacks on the press.’ CNN even ran a chyron referring to recipients of the fantasy bombs as ‘Trump’s targets.’ And a man in Florida called Cesar Sayoc has just been arrested in connection with the envelopes.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Ohio Man Arrested Attempting to Join ISIS Affiliate in Afghanistan 19-year-old Naser Almadaoji was arrested at the Columbus airport trying to leave the country. By Patrick Poole

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/ohio-man-arrested-attempting-to-join-isis-affiliate-in-afghanistan/

Federal prosecutors say that 19-year-old Naser Almadaoji of Beavercreek, Ohio, was arrested on Wednesday attempting to fly to Kazakhstan via Washington, D.C., and Germany, where he intended to be smuggled into Afghanistan to join the ISIS affiliate there.

Almadaoji’s arrest at the John Glenn International Airport in Columbus, Ohio, was the culmination of an investigation that began in February of this year after he was questioned by immigration officials on his return from a trip to Egypt and Jordan.

He later began communicating online with someone he believed to be an ISIS operative, who was actually an FBI confidential source. He told the confidential source that he wanted to join up with ISIS in Afghanistan because he wanted “weapons experts training, planning, executing, hit and run, capturing high-value targets, ways to break into homes and avoid security guards.”

Almadaoji attended Beavercreek City Schools in southwest Ohio near Dayton until September 2015, at which point he withdrew from school.

According to U.S. Attorney for Southern Ohio Benjamin Glassman, Almadaoji came to the U.S. from Iraq about a decade ago. Glassman also said that at some point Almadaoji made a video of himself pledging allegiance to ISIS “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Arkansas Dem Under Fire After Profane and Intimidating Confrontation with Female Opponent By Debra Heine

Posted By on October 26th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/election/arkansas-dem-under-fire-after-profane-and-intimidating-confrontation-with-female-opponent/

A Republican candidate in Arkansas says her opponent for a state Senate seat, Democrat Greg Leding, physically intimidated her after a debate earlier this week, getting in her face, spewing profanities, and promising her she will be defeated.

At least one Republican Party employee has called the altercation at the Fayetteville forum an “assault,” the Arkansas Times reported, as Leding, the incumbent, put his hand on challenger Dawn Clemence before stomping off.

Leding immediately issued the following statement, according to 40/29 News:

My opponent called out to me from the stage. So she wouldn’t have to lean down to talk, I joined her on the stage. I apologize for patting her shoulder as we parted.

Leding tried again with a statement that was distributed by the Democratic Party:

After the forum, I left the stage. My opponent made some additional comments to me, so I hopped back up on stage, joining her at its edge. I’ve worked very hard to serve all the people who live in the district I represent—work that has consistently included legislation and advocacy for women, teachers, students, firefighters, working families, and more—and that work’s been misrepresented in this campaign. I was frustrated, but it’s not acceptable to act on that. I apologize to Mrs. Clemence.

In these closing weeks of the campaign, I’ll continue to hold public events, keep walking door to door, and keep working hard for all Arkansans.

Not impressed, Clemence responded with the following statement:

When you encroached on my personal space, pointed your finger in my face, and placed your hands on me, you demeaned the office you currently hold and the one in which you seek.

Clemence released a copy of her notes about the altercation that she wrote down when she got home. She said Leding stormed off the stage after the debate and then came back to confront her, pointing his finger and calling her “a f*cking liar.” She wrote that when she said he needed to defend his record, he jumped up on the stage and “blew up in my face.”

He used his body to move her backwards, she wrote. “Very threatening! CONTINUE AT SITE