For Real ‘Collusion,’ Look At Obama’s Dirty Dealings With Iran Obama’s scheming with the Mullahs reveals a troubling pattern. Ari Lieberman

By now it should be readily apparent to all, even those afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome, that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative is a spent force or as leftist political commentator Van Jones put it, “a big nothingburger.” Nearly a year has passed since the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller and not a scintilla of evidence demonstrating collusion has been forthcoming. Moreover, the investigation itself has been plagued by scandal and partisanship placing a cloud of taint over the entire inquiry. Nevertheless, Mueller’s Russia probe will continue to putter along and after wasting millions of taxpayer dollars (as of December 2017, the cost has reportedly reached a staggering $7 million) the former G-Man will get a trickle of indictments and plea bargains on peripheral figures for matters wholly unrelated to the original investigation. Democrats will then pat themselves on the back and Mueller will go back to obscurity.

Democrats and their allies in the establishment media have cleverly succeeded in temporarily deflecting America’s attention away from the real collusion story, one with real substance and far greater ramifications. A persuasive case can be made that former president Barack Obama colluded with a sworn enemy of the United States, the Islamic Republic of Iran. With each passing day, another disquieting facet of the Obama administration’s dealings with the Islamic Republic is revealed and when taken in totality, paints a disturbing picture of the administration’s underhanded efforts to placate and appease the mullahs and their proxies, including Hezbollah.

The Obama administration’s current dealings with Iran began with an outright fabrication to the American people. On August 5, 2015 Obama asserted that negotiations with the Iranians commenced in 2013. Obama argued that the ascent of the “moderate” Hassan Rouhani offered the United States an opportunity to engage with the Iranians. This was in fact, a bald-faced lie. Circumventing the State Department and using Sen. John Kerry (whose Iran connections are a matter of public record) as its point man, the administration began engaging with Iran in 2011 when the toxic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was president. For the record, Ahmadinejad is a rabid Holocaust denier. Four years later, Obama sealed his infamous Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, alternatively known as the Iran deal, which gave the Iranians $150 billion worth sanctions relief while simultaneously providing them with a legal pathway toward acquiring nuclear weapons.

The flow of lies and deceit continued from there. The JCPOA was, to put it mildly, a flawed agreement, one in which the benefits flowed one way. Charles Krauthammer aptly described it as the worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history. But there were alarming elements of the agreement, chiefly secretive side arrangements between Iran and the IAEA, which were so patently egregious and absurd that even Obama understood that it would render the agreement a hard sell. Under these side arrangements, Iran’s highly opaque Parchin military facility was off limits to international inspectors undermining Obama’s claim that the agreement provided for anytime, anywhere intrusive inspections. Consequently, Obama tried and failed to keep this information from Congress.

Al-Qaeda Bomb Instructions are a Free Download at Barnes & Noble By Bridget Johnson

Key propaganda texts from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula are posted for free download on the Barnes & Noble website, including the inaugural issue of a magazine linked to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.

Reviews posted on the e-books indicate that they’ve remained on the bookseller’s website for years, despite clearly indicating in the titles that al-Qaeda materials are being offered.

There are two listings for “Al-Malahem Media Foundation presents A Special Gift to the Islamic Nation The first Magazine issued by al-Qaida in the English language.” That refers to the 2010 debut of AQAP’s English-language Inspire magazine; the site notes that the free Nook book is “digitized from 2010 volume.”The first issue of Inspire includes the infamous “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” article from “The AQ Chef” that sparked the trend of publishing detailed, open-source instructions to jihadists on constructing explosive devices. “We are conveying to you our military training right into your kitchen to relieve you of the difficulty of traveling to us,” states the article. “…In one or two days the bomb could be ready to kill at least ten people. In a month you may make a bigger and more lethal bomb that could kill tens of people.”

The step-by-step picture instructions walk would-be jihadists through constructing an explosive device with ingredients including matchstick heads and sugar, details how to fill it with projectile shrapnel, and shows how to wire it up with a timer.

Using a pressure cooker instead of a pipe “is the most effective method,” al-Qaeda advises. CONTINUE AT SITE

Lib Media confirms: 2017 cooling proves global warming By Ed Straker

What are you to do if you are a liberal journalist and you get the news that 2017 was actually cooler than the year before it, 2016? You can’t write a headline that reads, “Earth getting cooler,” because the enviro-nuts will storm your offices with pitchforks, and Al Gore, the grand imam of the environmentalist doomsday cult, will issue a fatwa ordering that steps be taken to stop you from exhaling carbon dioxide.

So what does a liberal writer do? The answer: Disguise the truth.

The New York Times headline was “2017 Was One of the Hottest Years on Record.” Reading it, an uninformed person would think 2017 was hotter than ever, without quite lying about the facts.

Here’s the WaPo’s misleading headline: “The planet just had its hottest 4 years in recorded history.” Again, not an out-and-out lie, but a misleading statement meant to disguise the most recent cooling.

Here’s what claims to be the data on historical climate temperatures, from the NYT article:You can see the inconvenient fact of the cooling in 2017 compared to 2016. Liberal writers explain it away by saying that even if 2017 wasn’t the warmest on record, it is still on that sharp upward trajectory.

The only problem is that the chart itself is a lie. Climate data has been manipulated to falsely show warming.

Israel – A Successful Powerhouse in the Collapsing Middle East Daniel Krygier

Economic indicators for Israel showed another successful year in 2017 as, for the first time ever, Israel’s GDP per capita has surpassed that of major industrialized countries such as Britain, Japan and France.

http://en.mida.org.il/2018/01/15/israel-successful-powerhouse-collapsing-middle-east/

Israel stands out among the nations that won their independence after the Second World War. Despite facing more challenges than virtually any other country, Israel has transformed from a poor and fragile socialist backwater to a first world Start-Up nation of cutting-edge technologies and knowledge during seven brief decades, while fighting for its existence.

The failures of the Arab boycott and later the Boycott Divestment Sanction (BDS) campaign movement to destroy Israel’s economy are no less spectacular than the Muslim Arab failures to defeat Israel in the military battlefields. Israel’s economy is far stronger today than when BDS was launched in 2005.

The Economist publishes an annual global report with numerous data on the countries of the world. In its newly released report, Israel’s GDP per capita has, for the first time ever, surpassed $40,000. According to the Economist’s data, Israel’s GDP per capita grew from $38,127 in 2016 to $44,019 in 2017.

Israel’s economy expanded by 4.4 % during 2017, the highest growth rate among advanced economies. By contrast, the GDP per capita of France was almost $41,000 and nearly $40,000 for Japan.

Private consumer spending rose 3.0% in 2017, 1.1% per capita. Per capita spending on semi-durable goods (clothing etc.) grew 4.7%. Per capita spending on current consumption (housing, food, services, etc.) was up 2.2%. The account deficit in the government sector totaled NIS 8 billion in 2017, making up 1.1% of the GDP, down from NIS 15.6 billion in 2016.

The contrast between first world Israel and the surrounding third world Arab world is larger today than ever before. Israel’s GDP per capita is almost 20 times the GDP per capita of impoverished Egypt and five times larger than semi-developed Lebanon.

Like any human project, Israel is a never-ending work in progress and much work remains to integrate Haredi Jews and Israeli Arabs into Israel’s knowledge economy.

Properly addressing Israel’s high costs of living requires more economic and legislative reforms and breaking up inefficient oligopolies that keep the prices artificially high. However, by any standard, the reborn Jewish state is a remarkable success story that overcame tremendous odds and obstacles.

According to Professor Jonathan Adelman, author of the book The Rise of Israel – a history of a revolutionary state, Israel’s current success was far from certain and required two Zionist revolutions.

The first Zionist revolution was Socialist democratic and lasted roughly from the first modern Aliyah in 1882 to the defeat of the Israeli Labor party in the 1977 national election.

Every Intelligence Committee Democrat votes against letting full House see facts about Trump campaign by Dan Calabrese

WHAT ARE THEY AFRAID OF????????RSK

Remember how hard the Justice Department and the FBI fought to not have to turn over documents concerning their pursuit of a warrant to wiretap Trump campaign official Carter Page in 2016? Remember how the House Intelligence Committee subpoenaed the documents in August, but had to deal with constant foot-dragging and excuses until Paul Ryan had to threaten them with a contempt of Congress charge to finally get access to the documents?

If you’re any sort of critical thinker, it made you wonder what they were hiding – especially since it appears they may have used the fake Steele dossier to convince the FISA court to issue a warrant to wiretap Page. That would mean a Democrat administration got permission under false pretenses to spy on a Republican presidential campaign. That’s bigger than Watergate.

FISA warrant application

Well. The House Intelligence Committee finally got to see the documents it wanted, including the FISA warrant application. So if the Steele dossier was in fact the primary basis for that wiretap warrant, the committee members are now aware of it. But they didn’t get to keep copies. They were only allowed to view them and take notes. As a result, some committee members drafted a memo summarizing the facts they learned from viewing these documents. And on Thursday, the committee voted to make these memos available to all House members.

That measure passed, but guess who voted against it. Yep. Every Democrat on the committee:

Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes also moved Thursday to release to the public his committee’s interview with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson. Every Democrat joined Republicans in voting for that public disclosure. Yet every Democrat voted against letting the rest of the House see a memo that will list the facts about the FBI’s use of FISA warrants to surveil members of the Trump campaign in 2016. Strange. What are Democrats afraid of?

Ranking Democrat Adam Schiff has been a loud voice for accountability regarding the Trump-Russia probe, but his outrage evaporates regarding the role that Fusion GPS and its Democratic financiers may have played in persuading the FBI to seek a warrant to eavesdrop on American civilians. What were the FBI’s reasons and the evidence it used to seek such an extraordinary writ?

All of this is relevant to the House’s recent vote to extend Section 702 that allows law enforcement to monitor foreigners. Mr. Nunes provided two closed briefings to Republicans last week as they prepared to renew Section 702, and he assured Members that he’d seen no evidence that government had abused 702 powers. But he also said he had seen evidence that law enforcement misused powers involving the surveillance of U.S. citizens as part of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign.

White Supremacy and “White” Culture By Tom McCaffrey

Surrendering it to the likes of Black Lives Matter and the Donna Rileys of the world would mean the end of the United States as a country of individual liberty and its economic counterpart, capitalism.

“Rigor [in engineering education] accomplishes dirty deeds… disciplining, demarcating boundaries, and demonstrating white male heterosexual privilege,” says Donna Riley, head of engineering education at Purdue University. “Scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing.” (Engineering Studies, Dec, 2017)

To make any sense of this, one must visit the fever swamps of “white supremacy” scholarship. In the good old days, “white supremacy” referred to the ideology of groups like the Aryan Nation and the Ku Klux Klan. No more.

“White supremacy… is the presumed superiority of white racial identities… in support of the cultural, political, and economic domination of non-white groups.” (Progress in Human Geography, Nov, 2015) In other words, “white supremacy” refers nowadays to the imposing of “white” culture on non-whites by America’s white majority.

According to this view, the injustice of the Indian wars, of slavery, and of the Jim Crow era continues unabated today in the form of forced white cultural supremacy—forced, for example, by demanding rigor in engineering education. So, it appears, the whole edifice of American culture, and, by implication, of Western civilization, is a conspiracy by whites to keep non-whites (and women, homosexuals, etc.) oppressed.

The first casualty of such a view is the idea of objective truth. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and private property, for example, are no longer universally valid ethico-political principles grounded in human nature. (“We hold these truths to be self-evident.”) They are, rather, white constructs designed exclusively to serve white ends, at the expense of non-whites.

Does a Red Thread Run Through the Anti-Trump “Coup”? by: Diana West

Let’s take a closer look at Fusion’s “academic expert on Russia,” Nellie H. Ohr, the mystery woman, intriguing for her marriage to DOJ official Bruce Ohr, her fluency in Russian, her ham radio operator’s license, and, finally, the possibility that she had a hand in the anti-Trump “dossier.”

The “H” stands for Hauke, Ohr’s maiden name. On reading through a Washington Post obituary of Kathleen A. Hauke, Nellie’s mother, and a guide to the papers of her parents, Kathleen A. and Richard L. Hauke, both Ph.D.s, which are archived at the University of Rhode Island, a sketch of the Hauke family’s life of the mind takes shape.

Clearly, Nellie grew up in a family on the intellectual Left — i.e., the mainstream of American academia. Her mother, an English professor, was active, if not activist, in black-white racial issues of the late 1960s and 1970s, including interracial adoption and “promoting racial equality in education,” a kindly-sounding idea, which, via coercive means of “promoting,” has atomized our society into a sum of non-working parts — yes, the opposite of “a more perfect union.” Whoever conceived of the project, there was something devilishly clever about turning college admissions offices into key enforcement centers of racial and other quotas of a state-mandated order. As we might finally admit, from Berekely to Yale to Mizzou, it is here where generations of cadres have received Marxian indoctrination under cover of cap and gown, the indispensable legions of ideological victory in a “Cold War” Americans still insist they won.

In this same pioneering spirit of “promoting,” perhaps, Kathleen A. Hauke devoted herself to studying black/African American authors and writers on the same Left, even communist, wavelength, from Langston Hughes to South African writer Richard Rive. One notable biographical detail was Kathleen’s first visit to South Africa in 1954, via freighter, when she was just 19 years old.

Her main academic interest, however, was a black American journalist named Ted Poston. She wrote or edited three books on Poston, including a 2000 collection of his journalism, which is described as having “infused” his newspaper, the New York Post, “with a black viewpoint on topics as varied as the paranoia engendered by McCarthyism and the light-stepping magic of Bill Bojangles Robinson” (emphasis added). A highlight of Poston’s pre-“McCarthyism”-youth came when he, along with Langston Hughes and others, journeyed to the USSR in 1932, the height of the Stalin’s mass-starvation of “collectivized” Ukrainians, to be wined and dined by the Soviets as they worked on a Comintern movie about the plight of the “American Negro.” It was never completed.

Nellie’s father, Richard L. Hauke, was a botany professor. His listed works are mainly scientific, but his biographical notes highlight his interests in creationism, bioethics and, circa 1983-1985, “nuclear winter.”

In these days of “global warming” (it was 7 degrees when I woke up), it’s easy to forget the mass hysteria over “nuclear winter” that gripped the 1980s, the final decade, they say, of the Cold War. This was the heyday of the Reagan administration, and Soviet strategists were thus concentrated on thwarting Reagan’s program to modernize US and NATO arsenals (plus ca change …). Talk about “Russian influence,” that cartoonishly misunderstood mantra of today: It was the “active measures” of Brezhnev-Andropov-Chernenko-Gorbachev’s Kremlin that drove the Western disarmament movement known as the “peace movement,” or “nuclear freeze movement,” across Europe and the US, sparking outrage via “disinformation” against neutron bombs and “Star Wars” and “war-monger” Reagan along the way.

Foolish and Dangerous Jews By Eileen F. Toplansky

In Eastern European folklore, “the city of Chelm functions as an imaginary city of fools, similar to that of the Greek Abdera, the English Gotham, and the German Schilda.” In fact, the “Chelm tales describe outlandish naiveté and futility.” Ruth von Bermuth argues that “Chelm … functioned for more than three centuries as an ironic model of Jewish society, both utopia and dystopia, an imaginary place onto which changing questions about Jewish identity, community, and history repeatedly have been projected.”

When reading these stories, one is amazed at the characters who seem so unaware of their folly. The tales showcase how common sense is often absent as so-called wise men cite unusual solutions that never work. They are stubbornly foolish and show contempt for logical problem-solving.

It is important to note that these stories reveal a backdrop of the centuries-old pariah status of Jews in a majority of countries. They could not endure if they lacked two essential survival mechanisms. The first is the necessity of always looking over one’s shoulder anticipating the Cossack, the inquisitor, the Nazi, or any of the diabolical characters whose aim was to demean or destroy the Jews. The second factor was black humor, which sustained Jews through the pogroms, the concentration camps, and the Gulag. These were necessary because one of the “[d]efining characteristics of Jewish culture and identity is the awareness of historical and modern anti-Semitism.” Jews could never become too comfortable.

Despite the fact that safety is a Jewish religious concern, there are currently far too many liberal rabbis in America who seem content to ignore the avowed enemies of the Jewish people. Consequently, “on July 25, 2017, in what appeared to be an unprecedented event in American Jewish history, a group that came into existence as a front for a terrorist organization that murders Jews was invited to solicit donations at a synagogue.”

“Rabbi Howard Jaffe of Temple Isaiah in Lexington, Mass., hosted three Muslim leaders, whom he presented to his congregation as friends of the Jewish community. It was billed as an interfaith bridge-building affair.” In actuality, it was “a political rally where Islamist extremists pretending to be moderates sought to enlist Jews in their campaign to undermine U.S. government counter-terrorism efforts, while raising funds for a Hamas-connected group – all in the name of ‘social justice’ and interfaith harmony.”

Transparency for Fusion and the FBI Democrats vote to keep documents secret but Congress will see them.

The chance that Americans will learn what really happened between the FBI and Fusion GPS is growing with Thursday’s vote by the House Intelligence Committee to give every House Member access to key information. Soon the House should move to declassify all documents in the case that don’t jeopardize intelligence sources and methods so the public can get the complete story.

Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes also moved Thursday to release to the public his committee’s interview with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson. Every Democrat joined Republicans in voting for that public disclosure. Yet every Democrat voted against letting the rest of the House see a memo that will list the facts about the FBI’s use of FISA warrants to surveil members of the Trump campaign in 2016. Strange. What are Democrats afraid of?

Ranking Democrat Adam Schiff has been a loud voice for accountability regarding the Trump-Russia probe, but his outrage evaporates regarding the role that Fusion GPS and its Democratic financiers may have played in persuading the FBI to seek a warrant to eavesdrop on American civilians. What were the FBI’s reasons and the evidence it used to seek such an extraordinary writ?

All of this is relevant to the House’s recent vote to extend Section 702 that allows law enforcement to monitor foreigners. Mr. Nunes provided two closed briefings to Republicans last week as they prepared to renew Section 702, and he assured Members that he’d seen no evidence that government had abused 702 powers. But he also said he had seen evidence that law enforcement misused powers involving the surveillance of U.S. citizens as part of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign.

Trump Administration Accelerating Israeli Embassy Move U.S. will convert existing structure in West Jerusalem to an embassy By Felicia Schwartz and Jess Bravin

WASHINGTON—The Trump administration is accelerating efforts to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and has decided to modify an existing property to accommodate the new mission that will open next year, U.S. officials said.

The U.S. won’t be building a new structure, in a shift from what Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and others from the Trump administration have said in describing the move recently. Mr. Tillerson has also said previously that the move is at least three years away.

“The secretary’s primary focus is on security,” said Steve Goldstein, undersecretary of state for diplomacy and public affairs. “We will not be moving to a new facility…we are going to retrofit a building,” which will be ready in 2019.

People familiar with the plans say officials intend to reconfigure portions of an existing U.S. consular facility in West Jerusalem, an area Israel has held since 1948, so that it can be designated as the U.S. Embassy.

“There is no plan for anything temporary,” Mr. Goldstein said.

Jerusalem is contested by Israel and Palestinians.

While a 1995 U.S. law requires officials to move the embassy to Jerusalem, Mr. Trump’s predecessors routinely have exercised their statutory power to postpone the project.

Mr. Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December and directed the State Department to begin to move the U.S. embassy there.

State Department officials at first said this would involve locating property and building a new facility, which could cost as much as $1 billion and take several years. Under that scenario, it might not have opened until a second Trump term or beyond.

Many career diplomats and others have been dismayed by Mr. Trump’s decision, which some believe has infuriated Palestinians while producing no obvious benefit to American diplomatic objectives.