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The Incorrigible Mr. Comey By Julie Kelly

Posted By on November 29th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/29/the-incorrigible

As I wrote last week, the Republican Congress largely has failed to hold accountable the masterminds behind the biggest political scandal in U.S. history: The unprecedented weaponization of our law enforcement and intelligence apparatus to spy on a presidential campaign and sabotage an incoming administration.

The man primarily responsible for executing the scheme, former FBI Director James Comey, exited the Trump Administration as a martyr and a hero. Republican lawmakers blasted the president for his (totally justified) firing of the deceptive FBI director in May 2017, lauding his public service and reputation even as the disturbing details of the way his agency spied on the Trump campaign and hid the probe from Congress were coming into view.

After successfully escaping any accountability for his actions, it’s no surprise that Comey now is threatening to thwart Congress once again. On Thanksgiving morning, Comey responded on Twitter to a subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee: “Got a subpoena from House Republicans. I’m still happy to sit in the light and answer all questions. But I will resist a ‘closed door’ thing because I’ve seen enough of their selective leaking and distortion. Let’s have a hearing and invite everyone to see.”

Now, it would take way too much space to mock the irony of Comey’s concerns about leaking and distortion. We know Comey’s top deputies were illegally leaking information to the press right up until the time he was fired. He also arranged for a friend to leak personal memos he wrote about his private interactions with the president to the press.

But here is the most galling part of Comey’s response: The man who once led the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world is threatening to defy a legally issued congressional subpoena unless the interview is conducted on his terms.

And the reason isn’t that Comey has nothing to hide—it’s that he has plenty to hide and he knows a public setting would provide him precisely the cover he needs.

He “Can’t Answer in an Open Setting”
During open testimony on Capitol Hill last year, Comey repeatedly invoked the defense, “it’s classified” as a way to avoid publicly disclosing crucial information about his agency’s conduct in 2016 and 2017. He dodged questions about the infamous Steele dossier, a thoroughly discredited political document produced by an opposition research firm that had been hired by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee to dig up Russia-related dirt on Trump. Comey cited the dossier as key evidence on his October 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain a warrant to spy on Trump campaign aide Carter Page.

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Have a Very Intolerant Day Celebrate the International Day of Tolerance with intolerance to the UN. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 29th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272062/have-very-intolerant-day-daniel-greenfield

November 16 is National Button Day, National Fast Food Day and International Tolerance Day: if you’ve never heard of International Tolerance Day, that just shows how intolerant you are.

International Tolerance Day was celebrated at the World Tolerance Summit at the Armani Hotel in Dubai. A photo of the event shows three Arab Muslim men in burnooses sitting under the Summit’s subtitle, “Prospering from Pluralism: Embracing Diversity through Innovation and Collaboration.”

The UAE is an Arab Muslim entity. Good luck obtaining citizenship if you aren’t an Arab Muslim. Leaving Islam is forbidden, but the government has a special site encouraging infidels to convert to Islam.

Diversity is great. As long as it’s limited to Muslim men. Pluralism is fantastic. But you’re not allowed to leave Islam. And tolerance is applied equally to Muslim men and other Muslim men on Tolerance Day.

Like most terrible global ideas, International Tolerance Day was invented by the UN. Or specifically by UNESCO around the time that Bosnia and Herzegovina joined up before becoming enmeshed in a genocidal war. Because nothing says tolerance like genocidal ethnic conflicts at the United Nations.

Key conferences were held in Russia, Korea and Turkey: three countries in a permanent state of war.

The Turkey tolerance conference featured a renewal of Turkey’s emergency law after over 10,000 Kurds were killed by Turkish authorities. After the Korean tolerance conference, North Korea sent armed infiltrators across the border. And during the Moscow tolerance conference, Chechen Islamic terrorists attacked a hospital and took thousands of hostages. The 1995 score read: Intolerance 3, Tolerance 0.

But that’s always the way it is at the UN where tolerance is on the menu, but never on the plate.

International Tolerance Day led to the Year of Tolerance in 1995. It wasn’t very successful as the Bosnian War was still going on, the First Chechen War was underway, and the Taliban were wrapping up their takeover of Afghanistan. The Turks were tolerantly killing the Kurds, the Kurds in Iraq were killing each other, Bill Clinton decided to bomb the Serbs, and the United Nations retreated from Somalia.

And that was the last Year of Tolerance.

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The West Shouldn’t Support A Nigerian Government That Enables Islamic Terrorism Against Christians By Dan DeCarlo

Posted By on November 29th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/29/west-shouldnt-support-nigerian-government-enables-islamic-terrorism-christians/
Few Americans are aware of how Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, enables the mass ethnic cleansing of persecuted Christians.

Although it has occasionally made headlines due to the rise of the violent Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram in its northern hinterland, Nigeria is still largely misunderstood and major events in the country remain under-reported in the American media. There are significant U.S. values and strategic interests at stake in Nigeria’s forthcoming election, including questions about the persecution of Christians, the future of U.S. military cooperation in Nigeria, and the spread of Islamist terrorism.

Nigeria is Africa’s largest democracy, with approximately 200 million people and expected to grow to more than 300 million by 2050. The country has long had a history of religious tension and conflict between the mostly Muslim north and predominately Christian south.

This conflict has intensified over the past several decades, engendered by the rise of a new radical Islamism, which has preached a brutal campaign of international holy war against unbelievers. In recent months, Nigeria has witnessed shocking anti-Christian violence, resulting in thousands of deaths and maimings.
Americans Largely Ignorant About What’s Happening

Few Americans are aware that the United States is in the process of selling a dozen light attack aircraft to the government of current President Muhammadu Buhari––a government that has continually soft-peddled and enabled a campaign of violence and ethnic cleansing carried out by Islamic militants against Nigeria’s Christian population.

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Trump and China’s Most Valuable Export One way or another, the President can win on intellectual property. By James Freeman

Posted By on November 29th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-chinas-most-valuable-export-1543525958

Investors are still guessing whether and how the United States and China will settle their differences when President Trump sits down to dinner with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping this weekend. But even if Mr. Xi won’t agree to stop stealing U.S. technology, Mr. Trump can get Chinese help in enhancing American intellectual property.

A Reuters report today suggests that for now the White House is focused on playing defense:

The Trump administration is considering new background checks and other restrictions on Chinese students in the United States over growing espionage concerns, U.S. officials and congressional sources said.

In June, the U.S. State Department shortened the length of visas for Chinese graduate students studying aviation, robotics and advanced manufacturing to one year from five. U.S. officials said the goal was to curb the risk of spying and theft of intellectual property in areas vital to national security…

Every Chinese student who China sends here has to go through a party and government approval process,” one senior U.S. official told Reuters. “You may not be here for espionage purposes as traditionally defined, but no Chinese student who’s coming here is untethered from the state.”

Having practiced its surveillance techniques on associates of the Republican party in the U.S., perhaps America’s intelligence community can now gather important information about espionage directed by the Communist party in China.

But the U.S. can play offense, too, by untethering Chinese tech talent from the state. For Chinese students who don’t appear to pose any threat, the U.S. should seek to recruit more of them to study in the U.S. and ultimately to create new intellectual property here. Whether native or foreign-born, innovators are treated less well in China than they used to be.

The Chinese regime’s official publication People’s Daily says that billionaire Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma is a member of the Communist party. Li Yuan reports in the New York Times that for businesspeople in China calling themselves communists is “often a matter of expediency. Party membership provides a layer of protection in a country where private ownership protections are often haphazardly enforced or ignored entirely.”

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‘Here we go’: Stormy Daniels claims she really didn’t give Michael Avenatti permission to sue Trump for her By Monica Showalter

Posted By on November 29th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/here_we_go_stormy_daniels_claims_she_really_didnt_give_michael_avenatti_permission_to_sue_trump_for_her.html

Obviously, she wants something.

Stormy Daniels is back in the news, following the ignominious loss of her court case against President Trump, where she was ordered to pay the latter’s legal costs. Now she says the actual lawsuit against Trump and the fundraising for her legal costs were all done without her permission. According to Fox News:

Adult-film actress Stormy Daniels claimed Wednesday that her attorney, Michael Avenatti, sued President Trump for defamation without her approval and launched a second fundraising campaign to raise money “without my permission or even my knowledge … and attributing words to me that I never wrote or said.”

In a statement to The Daily Beast, Daniels said that “Avenatti has been a great advocate in many ways,” but she added: “in other ways Michael has not treated me with the respect and deference an attorney should show to a client.”

“For months I’ve asked Michael Avenatti to give me accounting information about the fund my supporters so generously donated to for my safety and legal defense,” Daniels said. “He has repeatedly ignored those requests. Days ago I demanded again, repeatedly, that he tell me how the money was being spent and how much was left.”

Apparently, there wasn’t a problem with the fundraising to pay her legal bills (to Avenatti) before the judge’s ruling against her came down. And if she went along anyway, well, we have another instance of “here we go,” which is Daniels’s most defining quote. Apparently, she goes along with anything so long as she gets paid, and on this one, she gets to pay instead. Thus the woman the New York Times hails as a “new feminist hero.”

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Kremlin Surprised by Abrupt Cancellation of Trump–Putin Meeting By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on November 29th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/donald-trump-vladimir-putin-meeting-cancelled-abruptly/

The Kremlin was caught off guard by President Trump’s sudden cancellation of a planned meeting between with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Russian state news agencies said Thursday.

Trump had planned to sit down with Putin at the G-20 summit in Argentina, but canceled the meeting in a tweet Thursday, citing Russia’s Sunday capture of three Ukrainian ships and 24 sailors.

“Based on the fact that the ships and sailors have not been returned to Ukraine from Russia, I have decided it would be best for all parties concerned to cancel my previously scheduled meeting in Argentina with President Vladimir Putin,” Trump wrote.

On Sunday, Russian and Ukrainian forces clashed off the Crimean peninsula, which was annexed by Russia in 2014. Russian border guards opened fire on three Ukrainian ships and captured their crews as they sailed in the Sea of Azov, which is shared by the two nations. Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko has asked for NATO ships to be sent to the region to “provide security.”

“Foreign military ships entered Russia’s territorial waters without responding to any requests made by our border guards. Therefore, all actions were taken in strict compliance with the law,” Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said of the incident.

The cancellation means the Russian president will have “a couple of more hours” for “useful meetings” with other leaders, Peskov was quoted as saying Thursday.

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Latest Climate Report Feeds into Alarmist Fearmongering By Nicolas Loris

Posted By on November 29th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/national-climate-assessment-doomsday-scenarios-fearmongering/

The doomsday scenarios in the National Climate Assessment are close to impossible.

The latest National Climate Assessment, released just last week, aims to plant yet another seed of climate catastrophism into the mind of the public. Predictably, its worst-case scenarios got huge play in the media. After all, disaster sells.

But the doomsday scenarios that animated talking heads throughout the weekend aren’t just highly unlikely; they’re close to impossible. For example, the report speculated that climate “inaction” could result in as much as a 10 percent drop in U.S. gross domestic product by 2100. Admittedly, a lot can happen in 82 years. But a 10 percent drop in GDP is more than twice the loss suffered during the Great Recession.

How could things get so bad? Well, put garbage in, and you’ll get garbage out. The study, funded in part by climate warrior Tom Steyer, calculates these costs by assuming that the world will be 15 degrees Fahrenheit warmer by 2100. That mind-boggling assumption is even higher than the worst-case scenario predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In other words, it is completely unrealistic.

Other scary projections in the National Climate Assessment rely on a theoretical climate trajectory known as Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP 8.5) — one of four trajectories that climatologists use to estimate the effects of different greenhouse-gas concentrations.

To put it plainly, RCP 8.5 assumes a combination of extreme factors — all bad — that are not likely to all coincide. It assumes “the fastest population growth (a doubling of Earth’s population to 12 billion), the lowest rate of technology development, slow GDP growth, a massive increase in world poverty, plus high energy use and emissions.”

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CNN Refuses To Condemn CNN Pundit’s Anti-Semitism By David Harsanyi

Posted By on November 29th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/29/cnn-refuses-to-condemn-cnn-pundits-anti-semitism/

A few years ago, I was admonished by a prominent CNN anchor upset that The Federalist had published an article he claimed was anti-Semitic. The column in question, written by an Orthodox Jew, warned that his co-religionists had become fixated on the largely powerless alt-right while allowing left-wing anti-Semitism to go unchecked in American institutions.

It didn’t hit me at the time to mention that a perfect example of this trend could be found on CNN. Marc Lamont Hill, allegedly “one of the leading intellectual voices in the country,” according to the network, already boasted a long history of using anti-Semitic rhetoric, not only defending terrorists abroad but praising Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan here at home.

On Wednesday, Hill gave speech in front of the United Nations, advocating for violence against the Jewish State and dropping the well-known eliminationist phrase, “from the river to the sea,” a favorite of Hamas and other Islamic terror groups, to the applause of representatives from theocrats and tyrannies around the world.

No one uses this phrase accidentally — certainly not in this context. Certainly not someone smart enough to be considered one of the nation’s leading intellectuals. As Hill pointed out in his ham-fisted attempts to walk back these statements, “from the river to the sea” predates Hamas by 50 years. It also predates the idea of “occupied territories.” The expression, which has existed in various forms since the inception of Israel, was adopted by Yasser Arafat in 1964, before the West Bank came under Israel’s control after repelling an attempt to destroy it.

During the Oslo negotiations, when he finally dropped the idea, Arafat openly admitted that the phrase connoted complete Arab control of the lands between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. It has nothing to do, as Hill laughably contends, with the emergence of a multi-ethnic liberal democratic state. Rather, it is about pushing Jews into the sea.

You’d think this kind of bigoted rhetoric would be highly upsetting to CNN’s sensitive journalists, who are able to ferret out anti-Semitic dog whistles, sometimes real and often imagined, all over the place.

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Is Mueller team bludgeoning to get narrative it wants? By Mark Penn,

Posted By on November 29th, 2018

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/418879-is-mueller-team-bludgeoning-to-get-narrative-it-wants

Either Robert Mueller has the case of the century, tons of incriminating email and is now close to unveiling the collusion with the Russians that has been so widely repeated, or the investigation has come up empty-handed and he is now trying to bludgeon some peripheral figures into plea deals to give the appearance of collusion. It sure has created a lot of public confusion.

While we have to leave the door open to the first theory, recent actions of the special counsel sure look like a last-minute overreach to draw in fringe characters who did little more than make inquiries or tried to seem in the know about the purloined Clinton campaign emails.

To add to these mixed messages, a bombshell came out in the Guardian, that former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort allegedly met repeatedly in person with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Such activity would definitely have changed the whole complexion of the case. But with both Assange and Manafort’s denials and a full denial from Manafort’s attorneys, it is more likely the Guardian was “had” with fake Ecuadorian embassy notes. There would be cameras filming everyone going into the embassy, where Assange took asylum in 2012, and holding three in-person meetings would have generated lots of collateral emails and calls — you don’t just show up at an embassy out of the blue and knock on the door. Once examined, the story is, frankly, preposterous.

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Is There a 51 Percent Solution for Trump? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 29th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/29/is-there-

President Trump’s challenges are not really his economic policies and foreign affairs agendas. For the most part, they are supported by the American people and are resulting in prosperity at home and security abroad.

The economy continues to deliver near-record-low unemployment, wage gains, strong growth and unmatched energy production.

No nation can remain sovereign and secure with insecure borders. There are few ways to stop massive illegal immigration other than building a wall, insisting on employer sanctions and recalibrating legal immigration to be measured, diverse and meritocratic.

For all the hysteria over Trump’s foreign policy, many observers quietly concede that the U.S. is far tougher on Vladimir Putin and Russia now than Obama was in 2016: stronger sanctions, more help to the Ukrainians and greater NATO expenditures.

America had reached a point of no return with China. It either had to renegotiate its enormous trade imbalances and confront regional Chinese aggressions or simply acquiesce to China’s agenda of predetermined global superiority. Yet there were few levers other than temporary trade tariffs to force China to trade equitably and to follow global commercial norms.

The status quo that Trump inherited with North Korean nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles was an unsustainable proposition. So was an Iran deal that would have guaranteed eventual Iranian nuclear capability.

Yet Trump cannot consistently reach 50 percent approval in the polls. And, like most presidents, he experienced a rebuke in the House during his first midterm elections.