NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Carter Page Seeks Justice While the Real Trump-Russia Perps Sweat By Julie Kelly

Posted By on October 17th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/17/carter-page

If you are the karma-believing type, this week is filled with events that should nourish your political soul. A few of the masterminds behind the bogus Trump-Russia collusion tale finally are getting some payback—and one of their targets is going to court to get his reputation back.

Two years ago this week, the Obama Administration’s FBI sought and received an order to spy on Carter Page, a private citizen who briefly volunteered for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. On October 21, 2016, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved an application to wiretap the former Naval officer amid suspicions he was a working for Russia and engaged in “clandestine intelligence activities…on behalf of a foreign power.”

Although the information was presented to the secret court as legitimate intelligence from reliable sources, it actually was nothing more than manufactured political dirt on the Trump campaign commissioned by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The shady opposition research was produced by Fusion GPS, a consulting firm headed by Glenn Simpson, retained in mid-2016 by the DNC and Clinton team to sabotage Trump’s campaign.

The sketchy allegations about Page’s ties to Russia—contained in the so-called Steele dossier—made several unsubstantiated but explosive claims; it nonetheless was peddled to top law enforcement officials, lawmakers, and journalists as credible material just weeks before the election.

During the same time period, the dossier’s author, ex-British spy turned hired gun Christopher Steele, and Simpson personally were meeting with reporters to seed the story that the Trump campaign nefariously was conspiring with the Kremlin to influence the election. News articles about the FBI’s interest in Page began appearing in the media in late September, and continued until Election Day.

Thus, the Trump-Russia election collusion “crime” was born.

Now, two years later, Page is seeking redemption while the perpetrators of the case against him run for cover. On Monday, Page filed a lawsuit in federal court against the DNC and Perkins Coie, the connected law firm that was the payment conduit between the DNC, Clinton campaign and Fusion. (Law firms are hired in order to circumvent election reporting laws that would reveal which political consulting shops are being paid.) Two Perkins Coie principals are individually named as defendants.

Page’s defamation lawsuit accuses the parties of “directly expos[ing] Dr. Page to public hatred, contempt, ridicule and obloquy, which severely deprived him of public confidence, and injured him severely in all his occupations, and tended to scandalize both his colleagues and friends.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: FLORIDA: MARIA SALAZAR (R) FOR CONGRESS DISTRICT 27

Posted By on October 17th, 2018

She is running against Clinton clone Donna Shalala….rsk

After graduating the University of Miami with a B.A. in Communications, Maria Elvira acquired a Master’s in Public Administration from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Maria Elvira’s passion for promoting news transparency and communicating salient national affairs continued as she served as Miami’s local reporter for Univision Network’s flagship station, Channel 23. With 35 years of experience of breaking-news coverage under her belt, Maria Elvira has now become one of the nation’s most recognized Latin American political affairs journalists for the U.S. Hispanic community. Her established reputation as a leading television news reporter comes from a culmination of accomplishments and awards throughout her career, including:

Winner of 5 Emmy Awards in broadcast journalism
News Anchor – MEGA TV, Telemundo, CNN español
Host – Maria Elvira Live TV Show
Senior Political Correspondent – Telemundo
Central American Bureau Chief – Univision
White House and Pentagon Correspondent – Univision
First and only U.S. Spanish-language T.V. journalist to interview Fidel Castro one-on-one
Bestselling Author – “If God is With You, Who Could be Against You?”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Kanye West and the Fugitive Slave Law Exposing the Left’s ferocious hate for blacks who dare to think for themselves. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on October 17th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271643/kanye-west-and-fugitive-slave-law-bruce-thornton

After rapper Kanye West’s appearance with Donald Trump at the White House, the progressives unleashed their cable news and twitter bloodhounds to pursue West and drag him back to the Democrat plantation. Commentators who relentlessly police language for racial slurs no matter how barely detectable, suddenly were reveling in old demeaning insults like “minstrel show” and “token,” new ones like “Negro” (which I’m betting few of us know is now a slur), and idiotic ones like being a spokesman for “white supremacy.”

The warning is clear for black dissidents, and has been since the “high-tech lynching” of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whose scolding of the Senate Judiciary Committee put it best:

This [hearing] is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.

The Thomas hearings in 1991 exposed just how far the once-noble Civil Rights Movement had degenerated into the illiberal identity politics that now defines the Democrat Party, and informs its electoral strategy of bundling various victim-groups into a coalition. While the Civil Rights Movement wanted the nation to honor its classical liberal ideals of inalienable rights like equal opportunity and equal justice, and its Judeo-Christian heritage that a dehumanizing segregation besmirched and betrayed, identity politics scorns those ideals as instruments of an oppressive Western Civilization. Virtues like self-reliance and personal autonomy that racists once claimed to be impossible for black people, are now similarly discarded for being racist excuses for black poverty and social disorder created by systemic “white privilege” and endemic “racism.”

Instead, the federal government became the plantation of the mind, its powers to regulate and redistribute eroding the virtues of self-sufficiency and responsibility, which are the necessary foundations of true freedom. The equality of opportunity became the equality of result, one engineered by federal agencies and policies like affirmative action or minority set-asides or federal dollars promiscuously pumped into black neighborhoods without thought for the moral hazard that accompanied this largess. The consequence, of course, was the dependence that erodes freedom and encodes inferiority. For as the African proverb says, “The hand that gives is always above the hand that receives.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

Big Tech Snuffing Free Speech; Google’s Poisonous ‘Dragonfly’ by Judith Bergman

Posted By on October 17th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13129/google-censorship-china

If the big social media companies choose what to publish and what not to publish, they should be subject to the same licensing and requirements as media organizations.

Google has decided it will not renew a contract with the Pentagon for artificial intelligence work because Google employees were upset that the technology might be used for lethal military purposes. Yet Google is planning to launch a censored search engine in China that will empower a totalitarian “Big Brother is watching you” horror state.

Freedom Watch filed a $1 billion class-action lawsuit against Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, claiming that they suppress conservative speech online.

A Media Research Center report found that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube stifle conservative speech and that in some instances staffers have admitted that doing so was intentional.

Chinese officials prevented a journalist, Liu Hu, from taking a flight because he had a low “social credit” score. According to China’s Global Times, as of the end of April 2018, authorities had blocked individuals from taking 11.14 million flights and 4.25 million high-speed rail trips.

The internet, especially social media, has become one of the primary places for people to exchange viewpoints and ideas. Social media is where a considerable part of the current national conversation takes place.

Arguably, big tech companies, such as Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, therefore carry a responsibility to ensure that their platforms are equally accessible to all voices in that national conversation. As private commercial entities, the social media giants are not prima facie legally bound by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, and are free to set their own standards and conditions for the use of their platforms. Ideally, those standards should be applied equally to all users, regardless of political or other persuasion. If, however, these companies choose what to publish and what not to publish, they should be subject to the same licensing and requirements as media organizations.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey: Enabling Mass Illegal Migration into Greece by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on October 17th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13127/turkey-greece-migration

Turkish authorities repeatedly have threatened Europe with an influx of migrants. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s threats should not be ignored.

Ever since the migrant crisis started to escalate in 2011 — with the onset of civil war in Syria — those who were critical of mass, unchecked immigration have been called “racists,” “bigots” or “Islamophobes.”

Today, however, the continued chaos in many European countries caused by immigration, and accompanying increase in crime — including murder and rape committed by Islamist extremists — appear to have proven the critics right.

Greece is currently facing a serious surge in undocumented migrant arrivals in the Evros region, an entry point for migrants illegally trying to enter the country from Turkey. Arrivals have roughly doubled since 2017, and Athens is holding Ankara responsible.

The influx from places such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Bangladesh and African countries into Turkey reportedly has been on the rise in recent months, with 1.5 million people from Muslim countries waiting on the Iranian border to enter Turkey. This has sparked fears in Athens that they could be heading for Greece.

According to a fact sheet released last month by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), “Sea arrivals [in Greece] peaked this month with 4,000 people. Land arrivals through Evros also increased to 1,400.”

As a result, the Greek city of Thessaloniki is in crisis. According to a recent article in The Greek Reporter, “Dozens of migrants have turned Aristotelous square in the center of Thessaloniki to a makeshift camp,” with many “sleeping in the open.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Don’t Ditch Riyadh in a Fit of Righteousness Khashoggi’s murder must be condemned. But Saudi Arabia still serves U.S. interests. By Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on October 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-ditch-riyadh-in-a-fit-of-righteousness-1539645239

The murder (if that’s what it was) of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, was a horror in itself, and a greater horror still in what it threatens to unleash. The Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the ayatollahs of Iran are huddled over the corpse, hoping to turn a political profit from the death of an innocent man.

Mr. Khashoggi was a thorn in the flesh of the hyperactive crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad Bin Salman, a man who faces a concatenation of problems the likes of which the House of Saud has rarely seen. Iran, hostile, arrogant and ambitious, has ruthlessly carved a “Shia crescent” from Baghdad through Damascus to Beirut. A gusher of American oil and natural gas has diminished OPEC. Turkey, sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and harboring dreams of restoring its old Ottoman glory, seeks to displace Saudi Arabia as the voice of the Sunni world. Russia has reasserted itself in the region. And inside Saudi Arabia, a growing population with high expectations demands more opportunity and better governance from a traditional monarchy largely unprepared for the 21st century.

It was out of this turmoil and fear that the MBS phenomenon emerged. At home and abroad, the Saudis attempted a series of frenzied initiatives, including a war in Yemen and the privatization of Aramco, to improve their position. Meanwhile, MBS stroked gullible American elites into the belief that he was a democrat.

It worked for a while; gullibility is America’s most plentiful natural resource. But after Mr. Khashoggi’s death, even the most naive observer can see that the crown prince is at best a modernizing autocrat, using dictatorial power to drag his country into the future: Peter the Great, not Thomas Jefferson. At worst, he could end like Phaethon, the Greek demigod who lost control of his horses while foolishly trying to drive the chariot of the sun. CONTINUE AT SITE

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Russian Pensions and the Risk of War Putin raises the retirement age, inflaming the street. Will he find an external enemy to shore up support? By Leon Aron

Posted By on October 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-pensions-and-the-risk-of-war-1539730575

In the streets of more than 80 Russian cities, thousands of men and women have turned out for antigovernment rallies in the past few months. They aren’t the usual malcontents—the middle class, intelligentsia or students—but rabotyagi, blue-collar working stiffs. Both the cause of the rallies and their political context reveal the impoverishment of Russia and the fragility of Vladimir Putin’s regime, despite its outward appearance of toughness. The West, however, shouldn’t gloat; facing problems at home, Mr. Putin could try to create new problems abroad.

The demonstrators are protesting Mr. Putin’s pension law, introduced in June. The law is meant to save the Russian treasury $15 billion a year by 2024 by gradually increasing the retirement age to 65 from 60 for men, and to 60 from 55 for women. At first glance, the reform doesn’t seem dramatic enough to stir such passions. Russian pensions are skimpy anyway, averaging around $220 a month. That’s barely above the Russian poverty line of $171 and among the lowest rates in Europe.

Yet for millions of Russians, an extra five years of work is a hard blow. At $592 a month, the average Russian salary is puny. That’s why Russia today can have near-full employment, while 14% of the population, or 20 million Russians, are in poverty, as per official statistics. Independent experts from the Higher School of Economics in Moscow estimated last year that 41% of Russians have trouble paying for clothing and food. For many, the choice is between near-poverty while working or near-poverty while staying home.

Life expectancy for Russian men is under 67, not even two full years past the new, higher-than-ever retirement age. Many men fear they’ll literally be worked to death. “With this pension reform, with everything pushed back, I feel like I’ll never get out,” a railway worker said last month.

The protests exposed a fissure in what might be called Mr. Putin’s contract with the Russian people: You stay out of politics and I’ll give you stability. The contract held up in past tough times, most notably in 2008-09, when the Russian economy contracted almost 8% after oil prices fell. Then, difficulties could be blamed on external factors. No such excuses exist today. Incomes have declined for four consecutive years, and the pain is self-inflicted—Russians feel that Mr. Putin’s regime has stabbed them in the back. CONTINUE AT SITE

MOVIES AND TELEVISION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

New British TV Show about a ‘Trans Child’ Is Deeply Irresponsible By Madeleine Kearns

Posted By on October 16th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/transgender-focused-british-television-show-deeply-irresponsible/

When dealing with subjects of life-altering (even life-ending) gravity such as sex-changes and suicide, and especially when exploring how they affect children, what might an appropriate narrative be? Surely a cautious, evidence-based one?

But that’s not the narrative by the creators of Butterfly, a new TV drama in the U.K., which tells the story of an eleven-year-old boy who wants to become a girl. In the TV show, Max who believes himself to be Maxine slits his wrists and declares that a transgender identity the only solution to his misery. His family supports his decision to transition.

There is compelling evidence to suggest that the uptick in gender dysphoria in youth may be partly due to social contagion. Similarly, “suicide clusters” are also well recognized as having a social-psychological component. Two very good reasons to be cautious when broaching such subjects in mainstream media, then.

Understandably, therefore, Butterfly has sparked considerable protest from many parents and specialists who consider such a storyline to be deeply irresponsible. Indeed, the National Health Service’s only gender specialist clinic has expressed concern, calling the story “not helpful” and pointing out that it “would be very unusual for a child of that age to attempt suicide.”

Nevertheless, certain transgender campaign groups, such as Mermaids U.K., who were heavily consulted during the making of the series, prefer to throw caution to the wind. Mermaids, incidentally, receive considerable public funding: £35,000 from the Department for Education and £128,000 from Children in Need. They also provide mandatory training for teachers on how to help “transgender youth.”

Meanwhile, many parents are now asking themselves how it is that such a radical propaganda is cropping up on their TVs and in their schools.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

French city won’t honor hero police officer slain by ISIS over concerns of offending Muslims

Posted By on October 16th, 2018

https://americanmilitarynews.com/2018/10/french-city-wont-honor-hero-police-officer-slain-by-isis-over-concerns-of-offending-muslims/

A French police officer who heroically saved a hostage from an ISIS terrorist will not be honored in public over fears of offending Muslims.

Arnaud Beltrame, a police officer from Marseille, France, negotiated with an ISIS terrorist during a Mar. 2018 hostage situation in which he traded himself for a female hostage and was later stabbed to death. Attempts to name the city’s 15th district after Beltrame were recently rejected over concerns of offending the Muslim community, Voice of Europe reported Saturday.

Stephane Ravier, Marseille’s 7th district National Rally mayor, said that the proposal was refused during a Marseille town council meeting.

“Leftist elected officials, socialist and communist, refused that a place in the 15th district be named after Arnaud Beltrame, in the first time, they’ve said, under fallacious pretext, that this place wasn’t prestigious enough, before telling the truth in these terms: we are on the field, we witnessed that the population has changed and if we give the name of Arnaud Beltrame in this district, the population will take that as a provocation,” Ravier said.

The 15th district in Marseille, much like the overall city, has a wide population of immigrants, many of whom are practicing Muslims. The area is also said to contain a large population of jihadists. The attack that ended Beltrame’s life took place just five months after an ISIS terrorist killed two women in the same area.

Radouane Lakdim, 25, stole a car and opened fire on police before entering a supermarket on Mar. 24, 2018. There, he fatally shot two patrons and took hostages, CNN reported at the time. He was armed with a handgun, a knife, and three bombs, and shouted “Allah Akbar” while committing the murders.

Beltrame, a lieutenant colonel with the National Police, successfully negotiated a trade of himself for a female hostage. He entered the supermarket with his phone on so authorities could overhear the terrorist’s communication and activities.
When gunfire was heard inside the supermarket after a three-hour standoff, police stormed in. The gunman was killed and Beltrame was fatally stabbed.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hal G.P. Colebatch Trump Derangement Syndrome (Part II)

Posted By on October 16th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/10/trump-derangement-syndrome-spreads-part-ii/

A Florida woman took a huge loss rather than sell her home to a Trump supporter, yet one more indication how deep the lunacy has spread. After Obama, when the Left thought it had won once and for all, bitter disappointment has spawned a sweeping, often violent and ominous hysteria.

Before my first collection of instances of Trump Derangement Syndrome had been published (Quadrant, September 2018) it had already been overtaken by a mass of new material, so virulent and widespread as to give the impression that the US and the Western world are in a kind of low-grade civil war.

The Trump Presidency has exposed deep and hitherto unsuspected levels of corruption, perhaps mere self-seeking, perhaps part of a larger, more treasonous agenda, in the “higher” Washington political class, including much of the media and parts of the Department of Justice and the FBI. Watching the current US political news brings to mind a passage in C.S. Lewis’s 1945 novel That Hideous Strength: “Here was a world of plot within plot, crossing and double-crossing, of lies and graft and stabbing in the back … and a contemptuous guffaw for the fool who lost the game.”

Trump, for all his faults, appears to be standing against this, ripping up the established rules, speaking plain and simple truths—as he promised, draining the swamp—which accounts for some of the frenzied attacks on him. But there is more to it. Trump Derangement Syndrome appears in people who have no stake in the power game and when it is even contrary to their own interests.

It is easy to believe that a large number of Trump’s enemies, Republicans as well as Democrats, for all the loud professions of patriotism, are really opposed to him because they want his anti-Left program to fail. Their greatest and most permanent and decisive victory would be to have Trump impeached, notwithstanding the fact that more than two years of frantic searching has failed to discover any grounds for impeachment.

The activities of Left-fascist thugs, attempting to physically attack and silence Trump supporters and conservatives in general, are coming to bear a chilling resemblance to the political climate in the latter days of the Weimar Republic. This is emphatically not because the Sydney Morning Herald in October 2016 claimed that “Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler Have More in Common than Slogans”; rather, it is the institutionalisation and acceptance of violence and lies on the Left as an acceptable method of ideology making.

As Daryl McCann has pointed out (Quadrant, September 2018), Madeline Albright has called Trump, on no evidence whatsoever, “the first anti-democratic president in modern history”. This is not only false, but something like the reverse of truth. However, when it comes to the establishment attacking Trump, reason, logic and obvious facts cut no ice. A case could be made that he is hated, feared and despised by the media and other privileged denizens of academia, the “arts” and the political class, simply because he is democratic. He has better democratic credentials than all but a handful of presidents, and has ushered in an economic boom which has been of the greatest benefit to low-income-earners. This ignoring of fact and evidence for the sake of ideologically-based abuse seems to me to be itself a great threat to democracy and, in the long run, perhaps even to civilisation.

It appears to grow from overwhelming rage and fear on the part of the Left at seeing its overarching project for the socialist/communist transformation—or, for some, the destruction—of America and the West radically and effectively opposed for the first time since the Reagan Presidency. The fact that with the Obama Presidency it had looked as if the Left’s project was receiving a mighty boost towards total victory must have made Trump’s victory even more unbearable.

Writing in the Washington Post, the late Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist by training, originally named the condition of Bush Derangement Syndrome—“the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush”. It has morphed into the more virulent and even more irrational Trump Derangement Syndrome.