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Mattis on Moscow Trump doesn’t seem to mind advisers who disagree with him.

Posted By on January 13th, 2017

Perhaps you’ve heard that the dark night of fascist conformity is about to descend on America in the form of the Trump Administration. We’ll let you know when it arrives. But meantime the news at this week’s various confirmation hearings was how often the nominees disagreed with the President-elect who nominated them.

Take Donald Trump’s choice to run the Pentagon, retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, who spent three hours Thursday in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Mr. Trump has gone out of his way to praise Vladimir Putin and suggest the U.S. and Russia can find a new and better relationship.

Gen. Mattis offered a more skeptical view. “I’m all for engagement, but we also have to recognize reality and what Russia is up to,” he told the Senators. “There are a decreasing number of areas where we can engage cooperatively and an increasing number of areas in which we will have to confront Russia.”

He added, rightly in our view, that Mr. Putin “is trying to break the North Atlantic alliance” and that Russia ranks among the main threats to the U.S. The general vowed to continue the new military deployments on NATO’s eastern front and said he supports a permanent U.S. presence in the three Baltic states on the northwest Russian border.

In other examples, Rex Tillerson, Mr. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, said that as Exxon CEO he supported the Pacific free trade deal, which Mr. Trump wants to kill. Mike Pompeo, the CIA nominee, disavowed harsh interrogation techniques, though Mr. Trump said in the campaign that he might revive waterboarding against terrorist detainees.

Presidents get the last word on policy. But these differences ought to reassure Americans that Mr. Trump is assembling a cabinet of serious men and women who know their own mind. And whatever one thinks about Mr. Trump’s views, he doesn’t seem to mind advisers who are willing to disagree with him. Presumably those advisers have enough self confidence that they won’t be shrinking violets when they debate the hard questions of governance.

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Dumpster Diving for Dossiers The team that created the Trump file went digging for divorce records in 2012. By Kimberley A. Strassel

Posted By on January 13th, 2017

Washington and the press corps are feuding over the Trump “dossier,” screaming about what counts as “fake news.” The pity is that this has turned into a story about media ethics. The far better subject is the origin of the dossier itself.

“Fake news” doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s created by people with an agenda. This dossier—which alleges that Donald Trump has deep backing from Russia—is a turbocharged example of the smear strategy that the left has been ramping up for a decade. Team Trump needs to put the scandal in that context so that it can get to governing and better defuse the next such attack.

The more that progressives have failed to win political arguments, the more they have turned to underhanded tactics to shut down their political opponents. (For a complete account of these abuses, see my book, “The Intimidation Game.”) Liberals co-opted the IRS to crack down on Tea Party groups. They used state prosecutors to launch phony investigations. They coordinated liberal shock troops to threaten corporations. And they—important for today’s hysteria—routinely employed outside dirt diggers to engage in character assassination.

This editorial page ran a series in 2012 about one such attack, on Frank VanderSloot. In 2011 the Idaho businessman gave $1 million to a super PAC supporting Mitt Romney. The following spring, the Obama re-election campaign publicly smeared Mr. VanderSloot (and seven other Romney donors) as “wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records.”

This national shaming, by the president no less, painted a giant target on Mr. VanderSloot’s back. The liberal media slandered him daily on TV and in print. The federal bureaucracy went after him: He was ultimately audited by the IRS and the Labor Department. About a week after the Obama attack, an investigator contacted a courthouse in Idaho Falls demanding documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot’s divorces, as well as any other litigation involving him. We traced this investigator to an opposition-research chop shop called Fusion GPS.

Fusion is run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson. When we asked how he could justify dumpster-diving into the divorce records of private citizens, he said only that Mr. VanderSloot was a “legitimate” target. He refused to tell us who’d paid him to do this slumming, and federal records didn’t show any payments to Fusion from prominent Democratic groups or campaigns. The money may well have been washed through third-party groups.

Why does this matter? Guess who is behind that dossier against Mr. Trump: Fusion GPS. A Republican donor who opposed Mr. Trump during the primaries hired Fusion to create a file on “the real estate magnate’s past scandals and weaknesses,” according to the New York Times. After Mr. Trump won the GOP race, that donor pulled the plug. Fusion then seamlessly made its product available to “new clients”—liberals supporting Hillary Clinton. Moreover, it stooped to lower tactics, hiring a former British spook to help tie Mr. Trump to the Russians. (Fusion GPS did not respond to a request for comment.)

No media organization has so far been able to confirm a single allegation in the dossier. Given Fusion’s history and tactics, trying arguably isn’t worth the effort. Truth was never its purpose.

The point of the dossier—as with the dredging into Mr. VanderSloot’s personal life, or the smearing of the Koch brothers, or Harry Reid’s false accusation that Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes—was to gin up the ugliest, most scurrilous claims, and then trust the click-hungry media to disseminate them. No matter how false the allegations, the subject of the attack is required to respond, wasting precious time and losing credibility. Mr. Trump should be focused on his nominations, his policies, disentangling himself from his business. Instead his team is trying to disprove a negative and prevent the accusations, no matter how flimsy, from seeping into voters’ minds. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Billionaire George Soros Lost Nearly $1 Billion in Weeks After Trump Election Hedge-fund manager’s ex-deputy, Stanley Druckenmiller, profited by bet on market rally By Gregory Zuckerman and Juliet Chung

Posted By on January 13th, 2017

Billionaire hedge-fund manager George Soros lost nearly $1 billion as a result of the stock-market rally spurred by Donald Trump’s surprise presidential election.

But Stanley Druckenmiller, Mr. Soros’s former deputy who helped Mr. Soros score $1 billion of profits betting against the British pound in 1992, anticipated the market’s recent climb and racked up sizable gains, according to people close to the matter.

The two traders’ divergent bets are a stark reminder of the challenges even acclaimed investors have faced following Mr. Trump’s unexpected victory. Many experts had predicted a tumble for stocks in the wake of the election, but instead the Dow Jones Industrial Average has climbed about 9% since Election Day.

Stocks have fallen broadly in the past couple of sessions, hurt in part by a reversal for smaller companies and the financial industry. A decline in both sectors helped push the Dow industrials down more than 150 points in the past two sessions.

For the past couple of years, hedge funds and other professional investors have complained that placid conditions made it difficult to generate trading profits. Brevan Howard Asset Management LLP and Moore Capital Management, both multibillion-dollar hedge-fund firms, are among those that managed to turn a losing year into a winning one after the election, according to people familiar with them.

Last year, Mr. Soros returned to trading at Soros Fund Management LLC, which manages about $30 billion for Mr. Soros and his family. Mr. Soros was lured back by perceived opportunities to profit from economic troubles he was anticipating in China, within the European Union and elsewhere, according to people familiar with the matter.

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Roger Franklin Fake News: Fauxfax and Their ABC

Posted By on January 13th, 2017

If you believe the Age, SMH and our national broadcaster, FBI Director James Comey is in a whole lot of trouble for nobbling Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House. Actually, the cited document suggests it is the failed candidate and her cronies who are in the hottest water.
The business of journalism is actually pretty simple — or should be — especially when it comes to re-writing press releases. Your garden-variety hack reads the hand-out from a company, government agency, PR outfit or whatever, re-writes it and submits the copy to an editor who casts an eye over the offering and, allowing that there is nothing glaringly stupid about it, places the reporter’s effort in the paper or, these days, on the news organisation’s website. If there is a problem, an eye-smacking incongruity or doubts about the veracity of the source, checks are instituted and corrections made. That’s the theory, anyway.

Idiots could do it, one would think. But that expectation, alas, is beyond the wit and means of the click-baiters at the Age, Sydney Morning Herald and ABC, all of which today (January 13) published a Reuters report that asserted, as the Fairfax headline put it, “FBI, [sic] director James Comey’s actions during US election to be probed“.

The shame of this story is that it is no better than 10% correct. Its original sin is the confirmation bias of the editors who chose to run it as is.

First, the headline’s errant comma suggests grammatical incompetence, once regarded as a damnable journalistic vice, but difficulty with the language is the most petty of the account’s flaws. Of much greater concern is that the Reuters wire copy is not merely wrong but reekingly so by virtue of its misrepresentation by omission. A competent foreign-desk editor, one who keeps abreast of his or her assigned beat, would have spiked it at a glance. Actually, make that “editors”, because the national broadcaster is no better and quite possibly more culpable, as its story is longer but every bit as guilty of distortion by what is left out.

The press release from the US Department of Justice’s watchdog Office of the Inspector General can be found here. A Google search require precisely .75 of a second to locate it. Below, interspersed with explanations, are reproductions of its key points.

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Michael Galak :Pees and Cues

Posted By on January 13th, 2017

Trump’s alleged kinky escapade in a Moscow hotel never passed the sniff test, despite the whiff of uric acid his detractors claimed to discern in that improbable briefing paper. Nevertheless, in emptying a chamber pot of suspicion on the incoming president, it served its purpose.
It was almost official as of a day or two ago: Donald Trump is a urine fetishist beholding to Vladimir Putin, who has in his vault surreptitiously filmed footage that will make the incoming president now and forever the Kremlin’s servant and tool. Laughable nonsense and now largely discounted in its most explicit details, there remains a distinctly Russian angle to the farce best summarised by the Western saying ‘no smoke without the fire’. Smoke smears and sullies those over whom it is blown, and this would seem to have been the intent of those who so eagerly believed and propagated the monstrous absurdity of pee parties in the presidential suite of Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton.

Rumor, innuendo, gossip, slander, defamation, mudslinging – call it what you will, but do not overlook the intended result: to de-legitimize a president before he can begin to implement his agenda. That such an improbable tale gained traction can be explained by something the best liars understand as if my instinct: start with verifiable and accepted facts as your lie’s foundation, then weave mischief amongst them.

Thus we begin with the fact that Trump visited in Moscow in 2013 and stayed at the same hotel as did Obama and his family in 2009. Now add another known fact: that the honey trap has been a favourite means of ensnarement since Adam was persuaded by Eve to eat that fateful apple. The KGB raised the gambit almost to an art form.

Consider, for example, the compromising of French Ambassador Maurice Dejean, who was ‘caught’ during an illicit tryst with his KGB lover by her ‘husband’. Damaged goods, he was dismissed by Charles De Gaulle, his wartime friend. Then there was Sir Geoffrey Harrison, British ambassador to Moscow and the tall, elegant and dignified epitome of of the stiff-upper-lip Englishman. He was entrapped by his chambermaid but confounded the spooks by reporting the fling to his superiors before the KGB could blackmail him. Given the provenance of the honey trap, what could be more natural on the part of those predisposed to oppose Trump than to react on cue to the allegation, even though unsourced, that he, too, had tumbled into its tender embrace?

Judging by the jubilation of Russia’s elite at news of the Trump victory — the relationship with Obama and Clinton having long ago descended to the septic — why would this not be so, even minus a soggy hotel mattress? You can see a hint of that disdain in one of the official photos of Mrs Clinton and Putin meeting in the Kremlin. Putin sits in a chair adjacent to his guest, thighs splayed so wide it as if he is putting his genitals on display – classic body language of the Alpha-male both dominating and displaying his contempt for the female of the species. Clearly, theirs was no entente cordial.

Russian influence within potentially hostile governments is well known, Alger Hiss and the Cambridge Five being but two examples. So why not a compromised and cooperative Trump as well? Accept that premise, as did his piss-takers earlier this week, when social media ran riot with jokes (“Obama, you’re out. Trump urine“), and all his future dealings with Russia must by necessity be viewed beneath a cloud of darkest suspicion.

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Kellyanne on Fire By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on January 13th, 2017

Up until this morning, Kellyanne Conway seemed to be the coolest head advising Donald Trump and re-interpreting him for public consumption. No matter which t.v. channel she appeared on, she had that relaxed smile and even-toned voice that seemed to indicate moderation above all. She reminded us of how he modified some of his rashest statements to indicate that once a winner, he was after all, capable of self-reflection. We began to believe that he was sincere in his desire to bring Americans together after a blistering and polarizing campaign.

And now comes the news that Kellyanne will be the first sitting White House official to address the Anti-Abortion march in person, in Washington at the end of this month, a mere week after the president takes office. Is there a more inflammatory issue for American women? No one would deny Kellyanne the right to support whatever cause she believes in but is this public endorsement a sign of good judgment? After hearing Mike Pence state categorically that whatever his personal beliefs were, Roe v Wade is the law of the land and not likely to change in the near future, is this really a smart way to start bringing democrats and republicans together? Isn’t this the most specifically self-defeating preface to getting confirmation for Supreme Court nominees? Now that Trump has been elected, it’s hard to see who benefits from this unique and aggressive demonstration of total partisanship.

Since there’s no chance that Kellyanne accepted this invitation without Trump’s approval, it’s more than disappointing to the many women who voted for him and were both impressed and swayed by her judicious persona, that this is their opening salvo to the majority of women in our nation. I suspect that I speak for many others when I confess that they have just begun to lose me at “hello.”

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NO THANKS TO YOU MRS. ROBINSON: MARILYN PENN

Posted By on January 13th, 2017

Am I the only one who was taken aback at our president’s gaffe? There were Michelle, Malia and Michelle’s mother Marian Robinson seated together wiping their tears as Barack Obama proceeded to laud the women in his life at his farewell speech. First came his wife to whom he offered a beautiful tribute to her performance as First Lady, as mother to their children and as best friend to him. Then came Malia who, along with her absent younger sister Sascha, also was treated to superlative praise for growing up so perfectly in a difficult, hothouse environment. And then the camera briefly panned to Mrs. Robinson, First Grandmother of the United States (FGOTUS), the 79 year old mother-in-law of our president and the woman who relocated to the White House in order to facilitate the first couple’s ability to raise their young children while still performing the myriad duties their jobs entail. Awkward moment as the camera quickly moved away and no presidential gratitude was expressed at that public finale.

The president then went on to thank many more people who assisted in his eight year reign, from cabinet level down to the interns. Marian Robinson’s name still was never uttered. As a grandmother myself, I offer these famous lyrics to this gracious, unselfish , dedicated mother-in-law whose efforts are reflected in her graceful, intelligent and poised teen-aged granddaughters – no greater proof is needed.

And here’s to you Mrs. Robinson,
Jesus loves you more than you will know, wo wo wo
God bless you please Mrs. Robinson
Heaven holds a place for those who pray, hey hey hey
hey hey hey

We’d like to know a little bit about you for our files
We’d like to help you learn to help yourself
Look around you, all you see are sympathetic eyes
Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home

Coo coo ca-choo, Mrs Robinson
Jesus loves you more than you will know, wo wo wo
God bless you please Mrs. Robinson
Heaven holds a place for those who pray, hey hey hey
hey hey hey

Of interest, Paul Simon originally wrote this song for Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman who was an activist for women’s rights and black rights. It seems entirely fitting that they be applied to a senior citizen who not only helped to raise her granddaughters locally but had the energy and will to accompany them on their international travels. Too bad that no one thought to have Obama sing these stanzas to her, urging the audience to join in He missed an opportunity that would have given proper credit to this woman’s extraordinary loving service – it would have been a memorable addition to his family’s place in American history.

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(Even More Horrific) Anti-Israel UNSC Resolution Expected If UNSCR 2334 upset you, 2335 is just a week away, and it is far worse. By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Posted By on January 13th, 2017

For years the United States, the country most even-handed towards Israel, has insisted that only the two parties at issue – Israel and the Palestinian Arabs – can make a final decision about their future relationship. But as the sun sets on the Obama administration, the administration is setting fire to that position. As well as to several others.

It has been two weeks since the United States allowed the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution blaming Israel for the lack of peace in the Middle East and punishing the Jewish State for continually refusing to place the neck of its people on the chopping block to the world’s favorite coddled victims – the Palestinian Arabs.

UNSC Resolution 2334, of course, was followed up by Secretary of State John Kerry’s turgid speech, a lowlight of which was his insistence that Israel can be either Jewish or Democratic, it cannot be both. Kerry’s speech castigated Israel for the failure to make peace and recommended serious repercussions only to Israel, which constitute rewards to the violent, terrorism glorifying and perpetuating Palestinian Arabs.

But something worse is coming.

Actually, two things.

Those who spend the bulk of their waking hours focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict are warning the Jewish State that the Paris Peace Summit slated to begin on Sunday will produce a document hog-tying the parties to the failed concept of the “Two State Solution.”

Oh, there is language in the document which pays lip service to the concept of a solution “not being imposed” on the parties, yet that is precisely what UNSC R2334, the Paris Peace Summit “Agreement,” and the upcoming UNSC Resolution seek to do.

The anticipated Paris agreement not only states that the Two State “Solution” (TSS) is the only way to solve the conflict, but it will demand that both sides will not only have to restate their commitment to the TSS, but they must “disavow official voices on their side that reject this solution.”

The Paris Agreement will do more.

It moves the goal post even further into the Palestinian Arab’s fantasy world than it ever has been before. The Agreement will state that the borders between the Palestinian state and Israel will be set on the 1949 Armistice Lines (the Green Line), and that there can be no changes unless the two parties agree to such changes.

Even the UN Resolution recognizing Israel, back in 1947, said that the Old City of Jerusalem should be an international city. Now it’s all part of “Palestine.”

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MORDECHAI NISAN MOMENT: ONLY ISRAEL WEST OF THE RIVER

Posted By on January 13th, 2017

http://jamieglazov.com/2017/01/12/mordechai-nisan-moment-only-israel-west-of-the-river/This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents the Mordechai Nisan Moment with Dr. Mordechai Nisan, the author of Only IsraelWest of the River.

Dr. Nisan discusses Only Israel West of the River, unveiling the road ahead — now that Oslo has been tested and failed.

Don’t miss it!

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Nicole Kidman: It’s Time to Support the President-elect

Posted By on January 13th, 2017

Meryl Streep made some pretty divisive remarks at the Golden Globes last weekend. While accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award, she decided to dedicate much of her speech to demeaning the next president of the United States, Donald Trump. Her comments were met with much applause and nodding heads at the awards show (except for these guys.)

It’s clear Streep did not speak for all of Hollywood. Nicole Kidman, an A-list actress in her own right, said it’s time we leave partisanship behind and get behind our new president.

“I would just say he’s now elected,” Kidman said in an interview this week with BBC News when asked her opinion of the president-elect, “and we as a country need to support whosever the president because that’s what the country’s based on.”

Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington are of the same mind. Last month, Wahlberg chided his fellow actors for living in a bubble and not being able to understand the everyday challenges of everyday people. As for Washington, he has suggested Hollywood think twice before they dive into political rhetoric because acting in front of a camera is nowhere near as challenging as fighting for our country.

To paraphrase these talented actors: Hollywood should stick to their day jobs.