POLITICS Comments turned off

Brazile: Democratic Party Told Me ‘Shut up, Donna’ and ‘I Said Hell No’ By Nicholas Ballasy

Posted By on April 3rd, 2018

WASHINGTON – Former Democratic National Committee Interim Chairwoman Donna Brazile urged African-Americans to stop “giving up” their votes to Democrats without demanding an “agenda” from the party that “matches their needs,” describing their political power as “enormous.”

Brazile said she had to stand up to her own party and say “hell no” after its leaders told her to “shut up.”

“We have to stop giving up our votes. I have done just about everything in the Democratic Party but run for office – everything that they have asked me to do. I have done it. I have registered millions of people in my lifetime. I have knocked on so many doors that I cannot even see the black of my own knuckles. I have carried their water,” Brazile said during her keynote address at the Stateswomen for Justice Luncheon last week, which was organized by Trice Edney Communications.

“I have put their platform within my heart to support. I have championed their issues. And when it came time for me to say what I believed was important, they said ‘shut up, Donna’ and I said ‘hell no, I am not shutting up,’” she added.

Brazile was critical of Democrats such as President Obama and former DNC chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) in her book Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House, which was released in November.

“We had three Democratic parties: the party of Barack Obama, the party of Hillary Clinton, and this weak little vestige of a party led by [Wasserman Schultz] that was doing a very poor job getting people who were not president elected,” Brazile wrote in the book.

“[Obama] left it in debt. Hillary bailed it out so that she could control it, and Debbie went along with all of this because she liked the power and perks of being a chair but not the responsibilities,” Brazile also wrote. “As I saw it, these three titanic egos – Barack, Hillary, and Debbie – had stripped the party to a shell for their own purposes.” CONTINUE AT SITE

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

California: A ‘Sanctuary’ for Criminals The state threw out the rule of law, but Orange County will join the resistance. By Michelle Park Steel

Posted By on April 3rd, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-a-sanctuary-for-criminals-1522793743

I was born in South Korea and raised in Japan. My family moved to the U.S. when I was a teenager and worked through the legal immigration process. It was difficult and time-consuming, but we achieved our version of the American Dream—like the millions who came before us.

Today this system is being threatened as California moves closer to becoming a sanctuary state, with local law enforcement under order to disregard federal law and protect illegal aliens. That’s why, as a member of the Orange County Board of Supervisors, I voted to join a federal lawsuit against Senate Bill 54, the sanctuary law Gov. Jerry Brown signed last year.

The law prohibits state and local law-enforcement officials from informing federal authorities when an illegal alien who has committed a crime is being released from custody. Instead of protecting American citizens, politicians in Sacramento have prioritized the safety of alien criminals. They are provided privileges that American citizens don’t receive—all while endangering innocent people. CONTINUE AT SITE

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Fuel Economy Fraud Pruitt is right to rewrite rules that are mostly honored in the breach.

Posted By on April 3rd, 2018

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday took the Obama fuel economy rules off autopilot. This is good news for consumers, automakers and the U.S. economy, but the Trump Administration’s big test will be negotiating around the political potholes.

Corporate average fuel economy (Cafe) standards are a vestige of the 1970s gas shortages. Like the Nixon-era price controls, the fuel standards were intended to reduce gas consumption. But the environmental left long ago hijacked the rules to impose their vision of an electric-car future.

In 2012 the Obama EPA turned up the Cafe dial and mandated a fleetwide average of 54.5 miles a gallon by 2025 with a midpoint review in 2017. After President Trump won the election, Obama EPA chief Gina McCarthy blazed through the review and upheld the 2012 targets no matter the economic and technological obstacles.

Passenger cars were about half of U.S. vehicle sales in 2012 when gas averaged $3.60 a gallon. But last year they made up only about a third of the fleet mix, and their share has been declining amid lower gas prices. This will make it nearly impossible to hit future targets even with cleaner technologies. By the Obama EPA’s own projections, fewer than 1% of gas-burning vehicles would meet its 2022 target.

Many automakers have met EPA’s targets so far by selling small and electric cars at a loss, and some have shifted production to lower-cost Mexico. Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne has estimated that his company loses $14,000 on each Fiat 500e.

MEDIA Comments turned off

3-in-4 Americans Say Media is Fake News

Posted By on April 3rd, 2018

CNN rather recently pushed its whole apple/banana nonsense whose theme was that it was real news. And pro-Trump outlets were fake news. But only the media is allowed to call others, “Fake news”. And so it threw the expected self-righteous tantrum when Sinclair did the same thing that CNN had been doing. But the public isn’t buying it. It knows fake news when it smells it.

More than 3-in-4 Americans believe that traditional major TV and newspaper media outlets report “fake news,” including 31% who believe this happens regularly and 46% who say it happens occasionally. The 77% who believe fake news reporting happens at least occasionally has increased significantly from 63% of the public who felt that way last year.

Just 25% say the term “fake news” applies only to stories where the facts are wrong. Most Americans (65%), on the other hand, say that “fake news” also applies to how news outlets make editorial decisions about what they choose to report.

That’s an accurate understanding. Distorted reporting is just as dishonest. The Sinclair/CNN case is a typical example. The media manufactures fake scandals by applying biased double standards. It embargoes certain major stories, like the photo of Barack Obama with Louis Farrakhan, while inflating anything and everything about President Trump into a major scandal.

BOOKS, EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Anti-Israel Hate on American Campuses A new book shines a disturbing light on the university, the suppression of free speech, and the poison of the BDS movement. Noah Beck

Posted By on April 3rd, 2018

About six months after Andrew Pessin posted on his Facebook profile a defense of Israel during its 2014 war against Hamas, the once popular Connecticut College philosophy professor was subjected to an academic smear campaign. The school paper published articles defaming him. The administration hosted condemnations of Pessin from across the campus community on the school’s website, and tolerated other anti-Semitic activities that only worsened the climate for Jews and Israel supporters. Pessin received death threats and, in the spring of 2015, took a medical leave of absence. The Connecticut College administration offered no meaningful protection or support to Pessin, and never issued any apology for its role in his abuse.

The Pessin affair was part of a growing trend of anti-Israel hostility on U.S. campuses, but at least his story has a somewhat happy ending. Pessin resumed teaching last fall after an extended paid sabbatical, and – together with a colleague – convinced the school to establish a Jewish Studies program. Moreover, he has edited a new book with Fordham University’s Doron Ben-Atar on the general campus trend: Anti-Zionism on Campus: The University, Free Speech, and BDS. Ben-Atar, who is part of Fordham’s American Studies program, protested at a faculty meeting about the 2013 passing of a resolution calling for a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) targeting Israel, only to find himself soon being investigated for unspecified charges, resulting in a Kafkaesque campaign of intimidation and vilification. This volume of essays, by faculty and students who have confronted anti-Israelism on their campuses, documents and analyzes how this movement masks an underlying anti-Semitism that creates a hostile environment for Jews while undermining free speech and civility.

Writer Noah Beck interviewed Pessin via email.

Q: Your book catalogues the many underhanded tactics used to promote the anti-Israel agenda on college campuses, which should help Israel advocates prepare for what awaits them. Did your personal ordeal inspire you to create a potential resource for campus Israel advocates? Or did you have the idea for such a book even before what happened to you?

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

DACA Declared Dead As Border Anarchy Intensifies Mysterious group deploys “caravan” of illegal aliens headed for US border. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on April 3rd, 2018

A caravan of more than 1,000 young Central Americans is marching through Mexico heading for the United States. This caravan is the project of Pueblo Sin Fronteras but establishment news reports provide little information on the group, whose website reveals no founder, staff, board of directors or funders.

“We are a collective of friends who decided to be in permanent solidarity with displaced peoples,” the site explains. None of the “friends” is named but “our dream is to build solidarity among peoples and turn down border walls imposed by greed.”

According to CNN, Alex Mensing is one of the “US collaborators who works for Pueblo Sin Fronteras,” but CNN did not explain that Mensing is a paralegal at the University of San Francisco’s Immigration and Deportation Defense Law Clinic. He did tell CNN that the caravaners’ goal is to seek asylum in the United States.

This has come to the attention of President Trump, who on Sunday tweeted: “Border Patrol Agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the Border because of ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release. Getting more dangerous. ‘Caravans’ coming. Republicans must go to Nuclear Option to pass tough laws NOW. NO MORE DACA DEAL.”

The president took heat from Mexican secretary of foreign affairs Luis Videgaray Caso, who told CNN, “Every day Mexico and the US work together on migration throughout the region,” and “upholding human dignity and rights is not at odds with the rule of law. Happy Easter.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Swedish crime prevention agency refuses to gather information on immigrant background of criminals By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on April 3rd, 2018

It is a fairly open secret that the immigrant refugees whom Sweden has admitted in large numbers in recent years have unleashed a crime wave, particularly violent rape. Some Swedish media have been willing to broach the topic quite recently.

Via Breitbart:

Researchers at Swedish tabloid Expressen found that 32 of the 43 men sentenced for gang rape are immigrants, with eight born in Sweden to parents who were both born abroad.

A further two of the offenders were born in Sweden to one immigrant and one Sweden-born parent with just one born in Sweden to parents who were both born in Sweden.

Finding that perpetrators were on average 21 years old when they committed the gang rape, with 13 of the offenders aged under 18, the investigation also revealed that 14 of the 43 men – or roughly a third – had been convicted of previous crimes in Sweden.

But the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, known as Brå, is refusing to collect information on the origins of criminals.

The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brå) has said that it will not gather ethnic or migrant background data on criminal suspects, claiming the data would not help its mission.

The statement came after an inquiry from Moderate Party politician Tomas Tobé who, like many others, has argued that the statistics agency should gather as much data as possible in order to paint a clearer picture of crime in the country, Helsingborgs Dagblad reports.

“It a betrayal to the victims to actively rule out also looking at the foreign background of the perpetrators. It is obvious that Brå does not dare to do this because they lack government support,” Tobé said.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Arab Leaders Abandon the Palestinians Facing threats from Iran and Turkey, they want peace—and to strangle Hamas. Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on April 3rd, 2018

On the surface it was business as usual in the Gaza Strip. Hamas bussed thousands of residents to the border with Israel to begin a six-week protest campaign ahead of the 70th anniversary of Israel’s independence—or, as the Palestinians call it, the nakba, or “catastrophe.” This protest would mark “the beginning of the Palestinians’ return to all of Palestine,” according to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

It didn’t. Stones were thrown, tires were set aflame, and shots were fired. When the smoke cleared, the borders were still in place and 15 Palestinians lay dead, with three more succumbing later from injuries. While families endured their private tragedies, familiar controversies swirled. The usual people denounced Israel in the usual ways, countered by the usual defenders making the usual arguments.

But what is happening in Gaza today is not business as usual. Tectonic plates are shifting in the Middle East as the Sunni Arab world counts the cost of the failed Arab Spring and the defeat of Sunni Arabs by Iranian-backed forces in Syria.

In headier times, pan-Arab nationalists like Gamal Abdel Nasser and lesser figures like Saddam Hussein dreamed of creating a united pan-Arab state that could hold its own among the world’s great powers. When nationalism sputtered out, many Arabs turned to Sunni Islamist movements instead. Those, too, have for the time being failed, and today Arab states seek protection from Israel and the U.S. against an ascendant Iran and a restless, neo-Ottoman Turkey.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Trump Presidency is bigger than the man Irwin Stelzer

Posted By on April 2nd, 2018

No one was more surprised at Trump’s electoral victory than the man himself, unless it was supporters of Hillary Clinton, a candidate who never did explain just why she wanted to be president and who continually badgered her team to come up with a theme for the pudding that was her campaign. How was it possible that this vulgar misogynist could beat Hillary Clinton, she the shatterer of glass ceilings; the defender of abortion on demand, financed if necessary by orders of Catholic nuns; and of young persons’ rights to choose their gender and their toilets regardless of gender; of the right of illegal immigrants to become American citizens. She was consort to beneficiaries of globalisation who filled her coffers with speaking fees, and representative of all that “deplorables”, as she called Trump supporters, find so offensive about the social agenda of the bicoastal liberal establishment. The Russians must have done it. Or the really dumb Founding Fathers who established an electoral system that gave voice to less densely populated states rather than rely entirely on the popular vote. No matter the cause, Trump is an illegitimate president.

Which means that the Democratic minority, with the support of an overwhelmingly liberal-establishment media, is not merely obligated to oppose those of his policies they deem not to be in the national interest, but to have him removed from office, preferably in handcuffs. The virulence of the attacks on the President makes the battle between Momentum and the Blairites seem tame by comparison. Trump’s response is to lash out indiscriminately at anyone who disagrees with whatever his whim-of-the-moment seems to be. His weapon of choice is the tweet, which a frustrated media must report, giving these short bursts of often incoherent, often nasty impulses an even wider audience. Trump supporters liken the tweets to FDR’s use of radio — the famous Fireside Chats — to go over the heads of a hostile press directly to the American people, but a better comparison would be to the “nya, nya, you’re one, too” response of a witless schoolboy to some disagreeable remark by a playmate.

So much for Trump the person, and why his natural propensity to lie — not so much to lie, but to invent an alternative “truth” in which he really, really believes — and to substitute invective for reason, is justified by his supporters. To that 35 to 40 per cent of the electorate, largely white, rural, poor or middle class, religious and male, Trump might be a sinful New York property developer claiming to be a billionaire, but, oddly, he is “one of us”, to borrow a descriptive once popular in Britain, eager to poke a finger in the eye of the elites who remain unaware of our existence and problems.

On to policy. It is important to distinguish Trump the Person from Trump the Policymaker. Trump the person believes that the current international trading system is rigged in favour of the rich, of what David Goodhart calls “the anywheres”, who couldn’t care less about Making America Great Again. This is the New York crowd that kept a thrusting Trump at arm’s length, and only now have found reason to invite him into their more tasteful, less gilt-covered apartments for dinner. Trump the campaigner promised to smash that system in favour of one that protects American interests.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Report: House Democrats Exempted Pakistani IT Aides from Background Checks By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on April 2nd, 2018

Not one of 44 House Democrats bothered with background checks for members of a close-knit group of Pakistani IT aides who ended up gaining “unauthorized access” to congressional data, a new report from The Daily Caller shows.

House security rules require members to start a background check for employees, but they can also put down that another member has vouched for the person.

The background check was waived for all five IT workers, who made headlines last year for what the House inspector general’s report described as activity with “nefarious purposes.”

Pakistan-born Imran Awan, who served as a tech aide in Congress for 13 years, managed to snag congressional IT jobs with salaries as high as $165,000 for his brothers Abid and Jamal, his wife Hina Alvi, and his friend Rao Abbas, who had just been fired from McDonald’s. Together the group was found logging into accounts of representatives who had not hired them, using representatives’ private usernames, and uploading data off of the House network, according to the inspector general’s report.

Abid was working for Representative Yvette Clarke (D., N.Y.) when $120,000 of computer equipment disappeared. Then-congressman Xavier Becerra, who hired Imran, had his server stolen after the inspector general listed it as evidence in an investigation.

Some of the inspector general’s investigators who reviewed the aides’ network activity mused that they may have been ignoring House security protocol simply to share job duties, but others felt it was something more sinister.