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An Early Result of Election 2016: Angry Voters After stormy campaign, many are doubtful that Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will unify the country By Janet Hook

Posted By on November 7th, 2016

Throughout the tumultuous and unpredictable 2016 presidential campaign, one thing has been constant: Voters have been seething with frustration over the state of American politics.

As Election Day approaches, they are even more disgusted than ever, after a protracted campaign that descended to new depths of vulgarity and vitriol.

Consider the scene in Eau Claire, Wis., on a recent fall day. Taunts flew across police barricades lining a street, with thousands of Donald Trump supporters on one side waiting to get into a rally for the Republican nominee and hundreds of anti-Trump protesters on the other.

“It worries me. There is too much ugliness on both sides,” said Soren Staff, a 25-year-old Hillary Clinton supporter who stood behind one barricade. “Eau Claire has never been a really divided place. We’re usually Wisconsin nice.”

A Trump supporter on the other side of the street expressed a similar sentiment.

“I’m ready for the campaign to be over,” said Drew Suttles, 22, who was in line for the Trump rally. “It has brought out a lot of bad things. You’re sitting in a bar and people start arguing. People don’t respect your opinion.”

The 2016 election was supposed to be about change. But regardless of who wins the White House, Congress is likely to remain narrowly divided between the parties and prone to gridlock. Even if Democrats win control of the Senate, winning a House majority as well is a long shot.

If Mr. Trump wins, he will have done so without the full support of Republicans in Congress, many of whom ran away from him. If Mrs. Clinton wins, she will face a Senate where many members will have saved their seats by promising to serve as a “check” on her presidency, meaning their mandate will be to oppose rather than work with her. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Clinton’s For-Profit Chancellorship Laureate, Bill and a case study in modern crony capitalism.

Posted By on November 7th, 2016

No matter who wins on Tuesday, political reformers should focus on the lucrative ties between big business and big government. Consider the $17.6 million that Laureate International Universities paid Bill Clinton to be its “honorary chancellor” from 2010-2015.

We wrote about this in “The Clinton For-Profit Standard” (Sept. 7), and Laureate CEO Doug Becker criticized us in a letter for suggesting that Mr. Clinton may have been hired to provide political protection. Recently released emails via WikiLeaks provide a little more, er, color on the Clinton-Laureate relationship.

Clinton factotum Doug Band wrote a memo in 2011 to lawyers at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett showcasing Laureate as one of the relationships that his company Teneo cultivated for the Clinton Foundation. “Laureate is a Foundation relationship that evolved into a personal advisory services business relationship for President Clinton,” the memo says. “I have managed this relations and, since 2011, Teneo partners have helped this relationship, which is very time-consuming.”

We can only imagine. The memo says Laureate donated $1.35 million in 2009 and 2010 to the Clinton Global Initiative, plus another $50,000 for CGI University in 2011.

As the Washington Post reported, Laureate was invited to a State Department dinner related to higher education with academic leaders world-wide in August 2009. Another email that was released in a public records request last year shows that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Laureate should be invited to that dinner because it is “the fastest growing college network in the world.” Oh, and Mr. Becker is someone “who Bill likes a lot.”

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The Political Mr. Comey The FBI director gives Democrats the conclusion they demanded.

Posted By on November 7th, 2016

It looks like our contributor, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, was right last week. FBI Director James Comey’s review of newly discovered Hillary Clinton-related emails was never going to change his legal judgment because the FBI and Justice Department handling of the case was never serious in the first place.

The Justice Department never went to a grand jury in the case, which was needed to gather all appropriate evidence and vet the legal charges. Judge Mukasey’s judgment was vindicated on Sunday when Mr. Comey sent a letter to Congress saying that the FBI had reviewed the new emails and “we have not changed our conclusion that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.”

To rehearse Mr. Comey’s actions: In July he publicly exonerates Mrs. Clinton in an extraordinary press event, two weeks before she is to be nominated for President, though that is not his responsibility. He thus liberates Attorney General Loretta Lynch from her decision-making obligations as the nation’s chief prosecuting official. Later we learn Justice cut needless and generous immunity deals with Mrs. Clinton’s advisers.

Then 11 days before Election Day Mr. Comey sends a letter to Congress saying the FBI has found new email evidence. He comes under ferocious Democratic assault for meddling in the final days of the campaign. His boss, President Obama, joins the criticism and says Mrs. Clinton has already been exonerated. Then two days before the election Mr. Comey sends another letter exonerating Mrs. Clinton again. And Washington’s political class wonders why Americans don’t trust government?

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the main point of Mr. Comey’s many political interventions has always been to protect Mr. Comey’s job and political standing. Certainly Mrs. Clinton will have cause to be grateful to Mr. Comey if she wins on Tuesday. The price to the country is the damage he has done to the reputation of the FBI as an apolitical law-enforcement agency.

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The Clinton Email Scandal: It’s the Cover-Up That Is Getting Her By Frank Salvato

Posted By on November 7th, 2016

A recent exposé by FOX News Channel’s Bret Baier and his Special Report team, exposed and chronicled a damning timeline and some internal practices that prove the Clintons – both Bill and Hillary – did, in fact, have a “pay-to-play” scheme in place entangling the Clinton State Department and the Clinton Foundation. It also proves that senior staff within the Clinton campaign knew there was damaging information held within the emails trafficked over Hillary Clinton’s private unauthorized server, including correspondence between Clinton and President Obama.

These revelations alone, regardless of what FBI Director James Comey believes is actionable within either of the FBI investigations, had the potential to end Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations. Alas, the mainstream media is so intent on providing cover and refuge for all of Hillary Clinton’s unethical and criminal acts – by Comey’s own description in his first announcement, that she is getting the pass of the millennium.

Since the re-institution of the original criminal investigation by the FBI and the revelation of a second investigation by multiple FBI offices targeting the Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton has dropped like a rock in the polls. This decline is especially felt in several of the critical swing states, including Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Comey’s statement today that he is standing by his earlier decision not to recommend prosecution of Hillary Clinton for additional instances of mishandling classified information will most likely have no effect on the polls at all, although it will give the Clinton team a closing argument centered on deflection and ambiguity. The fact remains – and it is undeniable – Hillary Clinton mishandled classified information and is being treated in the aftermath as being above the law.

One of the key issues in the email and unauthorized (read: illegal) server scandal is Clinton’s initial and consistent claims to transparency where her communications were concerned. In her first statement on the matter she insisted – in no uncertain terms – that she wanted to combine her personal and government devices for “convenience.” Since then we have learned that she had over a dozen communications devices, some of which her team destroyed…with hammers.

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My Lecture on “Politically Correct” That the Red-Green Axis (Marxist-Islamic) Tried to Shut Down : Diana West

Posted By on November 6th, 2016

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3427/My-Lecture-on-Politically-Correct-That-the-Red-Green-Axis-Marxist-Islamic-Tried-to-Shut-Down.aspx

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3422/Abroad-in-America-October-2016.aspx

Behold, my own personal protesters (above) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, snapped en route to the parking lot of a lecture hall where I was to give a speech on October 18. My topic? The origins and impact of the Marxist-Bolshevik-Fabian-Socialist-Democrat-Progessive-Alinskyite-micro-aggression-trigger-warning censorship movement against truth and tradition that is opaquely known as “politically correct.”

Ironic, no?

Actually, we’re way past ironic, and deep into the danger zone where the ideological and the doctrinaire dominate discourse — but also make people cower. As I explained nearly ten years ago in my first book, The Death of the Grown-Up, this same “politically correct” movement to silence speech and political discourse generally has made common cause with the Islamic blasphemy law movement to supress all criticism, including factual discussion, of Islam as “hate speech.” Under Islamic law, such “hate speech,” a.k.a. “blasphemy,” is punishable, and, even in our own time, often punished, by death. In Western society, this Red-Green axis increasingly draws strength to become more and more dictatorial, even as sharia expands its control and influence on law and custom in Europe and beyond.

Last week in Chapel Hill, I saw how the mechanism works up-close, when I, too, became a target for suppression.

There were three distinct phases to this campaign by local groups and individuals of the Marxist and/or Islamic variety to shut down my appearance — as well as appearances by all future speakers hosted by Issues Confronting Our Nation (ICON), the lecture series that sponsored my talk.

The strategy was to demonize and thus delegitimize me as a point of pressure to bear on the management of the venue, Extraordinary Ventures, to convince them to cancel my appearance and sever its standing business relationship with the ICON lecture series forevermore. However outrageous, such thuggish tactics have been successful before, as cancellations of many other events attest (up to and including Milo Yianappolous’s appearance this week at the University of Maryland, canceled over a hastily imposed security fee). Hallelujah, the strategy failed in Chapel Hill last week. However, as I will explain, this was not necessarily a zero-sum-game.

Phase 1 began five days before my arrival in Chapel Hill with emails and Facebook messages to the venue management, smearing my work as “hatred,” “paranoia,” “xenophobia,” etc. Previous ICON speakers Roy Beck, Jim Simpson, Mark Krikorian, and John Guandolo were similarly tarred as “racist” and “bigoted” in this same poisonous effort to pressure EV to stop doing business with ICON.

In one email, the protesters said my work contributed to “the anti-Shariah movement throughout the country”; actually, they said I had contributed to the hysteria that led to the anti-Shariah movement throughout the country — but I’ll take the compliment as it was not meant.

Bonus: I was able to put the email to good use in a PowerPoint slide for my lecture on PC.

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‘Hacksaw Ridge’ Review: Saving Grace in the Firing Line Mel Gibson’s film about Desmond T. Doss, the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor, is a tale of patriotism and faith By Joe Morgenstern

Posted By on November 6th, 2016

Impassioned patriotism and religious conviction constitute the core of “Hacksaw Ridge,” a stirring—and surpassingly violent—dramatization of the life of Desmond T. Doss, the first conscientious objector to receive the Medal of Honor. As an unarmed combat medic in World War II, Cpl. Doss saved the lives of at least 75 fellow infantrymen during a horrific battle on the Japanese-held island of Okinawa. He’s played by Andrew Garfield, whose extraordinary performance turns inner torment into ardent resolve, and a desperate heroism seldom seen on screen.

The film was directed by Mel Gibson. It’s his first in that capacity in a decade, and at least two films in one, perhaps three. In a beautifully textured, extensively fictionalized preface— Andrew Knight and Robert Schenkkan share credit for the script—Desmond struggles, as a child growing up in small-town Virginia, with his own violent urges focused mainly on the drunken, abusive father he loathes and adores. In basic training he’s persecuted for his pacifist refusal to carry a weapon; the sequence is long, derivative and weakened by floridly literary writing for a drill sergeant played by Vince Vaughn. In subsequent battle scenes, as powerful as they are shocking, Desmond’s faith takes him only so far. He’s terrified by the danger, all but overwhelmed by the carnage, yet he carries on, lowering the wounded to safety at the foot of a steep escarpment and repeating, as a litany, “Please, Lord, help me get one more.”

Through it all there’s also a sense of Mr. Gibson struggling to confront the dynamics of his turbulent career: the penchant for graphic violence that has both distinguished and afflicted such films as “The Passion of the Christ” and “Apocalypto”; the enthrallment with martyrdom that informed “Braveheart” (one fleeting shot finds Desmond, wounded himself, suspended on a litter at the face of the ridge in what could be seen as a state of grace); and, unavoidably, given the dramatic inventions of the preface, the fraught relationship he has had, sometimes in public, with his own father. Remarkably, “Hacksaw Ridge” coalesces into a memorable whole. The movie was shot in Australia by Simon Duggan, and the mostly Australian, uniformly excellent cast includes Teresa Palmer as Desmond’s girlfriend and then wife, Dorothy; Hugo Weaving as Tom, Desmond’s father; Rachel Griffiths as his mother, Bertha, as well as Sam Worthington and Richard Roxburgh as officers in Desmond’s beleaguered rifle company.

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ARMOND WHITE REVIEWS “HACKSAW RIDGE”

Posted By on November 6th, 2016

Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge is much more than a war movie. Titled after the 1945 Battle of Okinawa on the Japanese bluff known as Hacksaw Ridge, it tells the true-life story of Desmond Doss, a religious conscientious objector who nevertheless saved dozens of fellow soldiers’ lives while serving as a battlefield medic during the final days of World War II. Doss received a Medal of Honor from President Truman, but, ironically, the movie is the work of a famously Christian filmmaker who was publicly excoriated by the mainstream (i.e., secular) media, which lashed out against his 2004 The Passion of the Christ (discussed in my 2014 NRO article “The Year the Culture Broke”).

With Hacksaw Ridge, Gibson openly responds to what has now become a routine character-assassination attempt by the media; he envisions the Battle of Okinawa as a test of morality and religious faith. Doss, a Virginia-born Seventh-day Adventist (portrayed by Andrew Garfield), claimed conscientious-objector status based on his personal Christian pacifism. Gibson shows how that pacifism derived from Doss’s background: Having grown up as a violence-addicted son of a bitterly traumatized WWI veteran (Hugo Weaving), Doss as an adult becomes a devout pacifist who clashes with military tradition to win his right to service. What he encountered in fulfilling his faith and duty is movingly depicted in the film, but it’s the emotional undercurrent that makes Hacksaw Ridge extraordinary.

Gibson disposes of the “anti-war film” cliché with a full-throttle War Is Hell scenario. His scenes of carnage and savagery have nearly surreal intensity. The black-gray, smoke-and-flames imagery of rugged terrain, bodies charred and mutilated in deadly piles, plus head-banging artillery noises and painful human howls express fascination and revulsion. It is a conscientiously masculine vision — male aggression chastened by a sense of horror. Obviously, this is not documentary horror remembered from actual wartime experience. Rather, Gibson vents the ambivalence he probably acquired as a thinking macho (being both a star of violent ’80s and ’90s spectacles and a perceptive, ambitious artiste). Hacksaw Ridge is sensitized by a wounded man’s humility and a thinking man’s sincerity. Thus, the film’s vision of Hell on Earth has peculiar authority.

It’s clear that Gibson is fully conscious of man’s inhumanity to man, maybe more than anyone else in Hollywood. He didn’t have to actually participate in combat to learn about human savagery; the mainstream media taught him that. But alongside the film’s dramatization of Doss’s family life and his courtship of Dorothy (Teresa Palmer), the lovely, bold-spirited nurse he married, Hacksaw Ridge anatomizes military aggression and its complex links to masculine character. Garfield’s Doss uncannily recalls Anthony Perkins’s pacifist performance in Friendly Persuasion. Other, variously wounded American GIs are memorably etched by Vince Vaughn, Sam Worthington, and Luke Bracey as men who sacrifice themselves while dealing with personal issues. (These conflicts are fleetly dramatized by screenwriters Robert Schenkken and Andrew Knight.)

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Clinton directed her maid to print out classified materials- !!!!! Paul Sperry

Posted By on November 6th, 2016

As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton routinely asked her maid to print out sensitive government e-mails and documents — including ones containing classified information — from her house in Washington, DC, e-mails and FBI memos show. But the housekeeper lacked the security clearance to handle such material.

In fact, Marina Santos was called on so frequently to receive e-mails that she may hold the secrets to E-mailgate — if only the FBI and Congress would subpoena her and the equipment she used.

Clinton entrusted far more than the care of her DC residence, known as Whitehaven, to Santos. She expected the Filipino immigrant to handle state secrets, further opening the Democratic presidential nominee to criticism that she played fast and loose with national security.

Clinton would first receive highly sensitive e-mails from top aides at the State Department and then request that they, in turn, forward the messages and any attached documents to Santos to print out for her at the home.

Among other things, Clinton requested Santos print out drafts of her speeches, confidential memos and “call sheets” — background information and talking points prepared for the secretary of state in advance of a phone call with a foreign head of state.

“Pls ask Marina to print for me in am,” Clinton e-mailed top aide Huma Abedin regarding a redacted 2011 message marked sensitive but unclassified.

In a classified 2012 e-mail dealing with the new president of Malawi, another Clinton aide, Monica Hanley, advised Clinton, “We can ask Marina to print this.”

“Revisions to the Iran points” was the subject line of a classified April 2012 e-mail to Clinton from Hanley. In it, the text reads, “Marina is trying to print for you.”

Both classified e-mails were marked “confidential,” the tier below “secret” or “top secret.”

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Americans Have a Chance to Dethrone the House of Clinton The Clintons and their minions deserve to be driven from public life. By Deroy Murdock

Posted By on November 6th, 2016

‘Drain the swamp!” GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump has insisted before huge crowds increasingly confident of a well-deserved, sorely needed, come-from-behind victory.

But this slogan doesn’t quite capture the urgency of the moment. This one does:

“Flush the toilet!”

Washington’s corruption under Barack Obama and the Clintons has devolved to fetid depths suggestive of the days before indoor plumbing. Step back and shudder at today’s unsanitary state of public affairs.

The Cosa Nostra–like tone that Hillary Clinton has set for herself and her associates suggests a preview for a new film: The Godmother.

As word emerged on March 2, 2015, that Hillary maintained an outlaw e-mail system in her Chappaqua mansion’s basement, WikiLeaks reports, her campaign chairman, John Podesta, e-mailed her top aide, Cheryl Mills: “We’re going to have to dump all those e-mails.” Podesta now claims that the meaning of the word “dump” is to “release, distribute, or otherwise publicize.” This might be plausible, except that Team Clinton then erased some 33,000 “private” e-mails and used BleachBit software to guarantee that Hillary’s server, at least digitally, sleeps with the fishes. Hillary’s aides demolished her 13 communications devices — not the single one that she lied about having, for “convenience” — some with hammers.

Most of this happened while these public records were under congressional subpoena. This is called obstruction of justice.

Bryan Pagliano, the computer whiz who managed Hillary’s clandestine server, initially took the Fifth Amendment while under congressional scrutiny. But he twice couldn’t be bothered to show up in September, despite being subpoenaed by the House Government Oversight Committee.

Meanwhile, five different FBI offices are probing the Clinton Foundation on suspicion of public corruption. The Wall Street Journal called this “a sprawling cross-country effort.” Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier, citing “more than six” sources in the FBI “with specific knowledge of the Clinton investigations,” reported today that “they confirm that there is an active investigation into the Clinton Foundation that has been going on for more than a year. It is continuing, and for those investigators working it, it is a priority.”

While Clinton apologists call the foundation a font of beneficence, its 2014 IRS filings show that it spent a whopping 5.76 percent of its funds on actual charitable activities — far below the 65 percent that the Better Business Bureau calls kosher. That paltry figure also mocks Hillary’s Las Vegas lie, uttered at the final presidential debate on October 19: “We at the Clinton Foundation spend 90 percent — 90 percent of all the money that is donated on behalf of programs of people around the world and in our own country.”

The Clinton Slush Fund . . . uh . . . Foundation seems to be mainly a travel and full-employment program for Hillary’s government in waiting. It’s also a bribe pump that sucks in money and spews out favors.

As detailed in Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash, the IRS wanted information on some $20 billion in 52,000 accounts that well-heeled Americans deposited with the Union Bank of Switzerland. So, UBS gave $60,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Hillary then met in March 2009 with Swiss foreign minister Micheline Calmy-Rey and then intervened with IRS officials on UBS’s behalf. Like magic, IRS asked UBS for only 4,450 accounts — roughly 91 percent fewer than IRS first demanded.

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Hacksaw Ridge – A Tribute By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on November 6th, 2016

You will forget every past ugly incident involving Mel Gibson, every promise you made to protest his anti-semitism by boycotting his films as you sit stunned and shaken throughout the last half hour of Hacksaw Ridge The recreation of one of the horrendous battles for Okinawa is the closest thing in memory to an on-going visceral gut-punch that makes you feel the brutality, madness and devastating grief for countless soldiers fighting and dying for their country. Seeing this movie and then watching a news report of renewed fighting in Mosul points out the chasm between our sanitized sound-bite reports and the real experience of war. Perhaps if part of our requirement as citizens was the obligation to watch this film every week that we have soldiers in battle or in hot zones abroad, we might have the requisite respect for our veterans and a re-shuffling of our national priorities for who deserves the most acknowledgment and assistance first.

Ostensibly a bio-pic of Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who signed up to be a medic in World War II, the movie begins as an old-fashioned forties film about a Virginia country boy whose violent home-life becomes a pivotal catalyst for his personal redemption. There is a brutal alcoholic father with a military backstory who terrorizes his loving wife and beats his sons, encouraging them to fight each other until the moment when one realizes how close he came to being a killer. We then fast-forward to Desmond as a young man who has become a Seventh-Day Adventist determined to do his patriotic duty by enlisting in the army while refusing to carry a weapon or work on the Sabbath. There is his innocent and passionate first love for a beautiful nurse who agrees to wait for his return. There is the requisite bullying by his fellow soldiers and by a sadistic sergeant (an excellent Vince Vaughan) and a court martial with unexpected drama until we reach the heart of the film – the experience of war. It will not surprise you to read that this is transformative for everyone but you will be moved beyond expectation by the various way in which this happens

Hacksaw Ridge is a film that commemorates heroism in defense of principles as well as valor in battle. It is a paean to the elevation of principles in personal conduct as well as military behavior, to the reality of human fallibility and its converse – the spiritual value of earned forgiveness. Andrew Garfield’s performance as Desmond Doss is so real that you will feel his heart race and his eyes tear before either happens. Mel Gibson has been an excellent actor and filmmaker before but he has achieved a new rung of significance and accomplishment with this remarkable film that will get under your skin and haunt you powerfully and deservedly.