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Sydney M. Williams Thought of the Day “Tomorrow’s Election”

Posted By on November 8th, 2016

A recent article in the “The Economist” was entitled “Milk Without the Cow:” Capitalism, in Putin’s understanding, is not about production, management and marketing. It is wheeling and dealing. It is not about workers and customers. It is about personal connections with regulators. It is finding and using loopholes in the law, or creating loopholes.” The article was from a book by Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.” I was struck by how closely those words describe the Clintons. They produce nothing – no consumer or industrial goods; no services like law or accounting; no hotels or casinos; they have created no patents or inventions. They do not manufacture, nor do they lend or invest money. They have not trod paths of entrepreneurs; yet they have become wealthy. In this, they are not alone. Public service has become a means to private wealth. But the Clintons have taken this model to new heights.

Truman once famously replied when offered a corporate board seat with a hefty salary: “You don’t want me. You want the office of the President, and that doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the American people and it’s not for sale.” The Clintons have no such scruples. Sixteen years after leaving the Presidency, eight years after leaving the U.S. Senate and three and a half years after leaving the State Department, the Clintons have a net worth of $50 to $60 million, and maybe more. They have exchanged dollars for access. It is not policy or public service that drives them; it is greed.

The Clintons have used their Foundation to up the ante on “pay-to-play.” They introduce the well-off who want access and/or favors to the politically connected who provide them. In doing so, they enrich themselves. They have dealt with some of the world’s most oppressive dictators. Additionally, they have asked for and received upwards of $200,000 from colleges and universities for hour-long Pablum-like speeches – fees four times what colleges charge for tuition and four times the average family’s annual income. As “honorary chancellor” of Laureate International University, a for-profit university, Bill Clinton became the highest paid college official in the United States – $17.6 million over five years, for little or no work. The Clintons have been “bought” by Wall Street banks, in exchange for tax and regulatory favors. Since leaving the White House (“dead broke,” as Hillary later said), it has been a quest for money that has driven them. Hillary reminds me of Scarlett O’Hara in the final scene in “Gone With The Wind,” but without having suffered the deprivations Scarlett did: “If I have to lie, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” Substitute “poor” for “hungry” and you have Mrs. Clinton.

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Clinton’s bid for hypocrite-in-chief Ruthie Blum

Posted By on November 8th, 2016

With Hollywood on her side, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton figured she could glitz up her yawn-eliciting campaign and wicked-witch-of-the-west persona with some light-hearted entertainment.

Putting their heads together to come up with “what millennials and blacks want,” her advisers came up with a few hot properties, among them the sex symbol Beyonce and her rapper husband, Jay Z.

Performers young and old have been threatening to leave America if Donald Trump wins the election on Tuesday. So, other than this serving as a reason for many of us to run to cast a ballot for Trump, it is likely that it was easy for Clinton to book the Grammy winners for her rally in Ohio on Friday.

As Trump pointed out after the event, however, even one of the music world’s most prominent power couples was unable to attract or even keep the attention of the audience at the concert-turned-political happening.

More significantly, Clinton made a major blooper by inviting Jay Z to the stage, particularly after spending so much time attacking Trump for being a racist and a misogynist. Because what the rapper did was belt out songs whose lyrics would have landed the rest of us in a prison of ostracism, if not worse.

Though it appears, from her fashion-forward version of the classical Clinton pantsuit, that Beyonce was told in advance to keep her usual display of cleavage in check, it is doubtful that the Clinton team thought to request a preview of Jay Z’s lyrics. Nor is it clear whether Clinton was actually listening to the words being shouted out on her behalf.

But then, she has a great knack for seeing and hearing no evil when those exhibiting it are in her political camp. This was true even when she herself was being mistreated and publicly humiliated by her man. In fact, she went as far as to call the women who came forward to recount stories of Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct and abuse “whiney” and “trailer trash.”

But, hey, what’s good for the goose — in this case, not only a woman, but a left-wing one, to boot — is forbidden to any Republican gander.

Given my own penchant for foul language, I am the last person to judge others who use profanity to express themselves — though, in my defense, profanity does not butter my bread; it merely prevents me from throwing my computer off the nearest ledge at least once every day, and has helped me get through this intolerable pre-election period without putting my fist through the TV.

However, I do feel fully justified in calling out the hypocrisy of the #neverTrump-ers, many of whom I happen to know personally, and therefore I am aware that they engage in the kind of behavior that would make The Donald blush.

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Michelle Obama and Political Correctness By Herbert London

Posted By on November 8th, 2016

For those who follow popular culture, the slide into debasement is palpable. From the f-bomb to pornographic exposure, America has become the land of anything goes. The once provincial, laced up nation, challenged by the liberal view of expression, has lost. Victorian notions of modesty are as outmoded as horse-drawn plows.

A couple of months ago an eleven-year-old tape of Donald Trump was aired in which he employed vulgar and uncouth language about women. It was inexcusable, notwithstanding the debasement in the culture. As one might guess, this matter became the focus of the Clinton campaign for president. First lady Michelle Obama said she was “shaken…to my core” by Trump’s comments and, alas she has a point.

However, if Trump’s lewd remarks are so meaningful, it is worth asking why she and the president have openly promoted rap “artists” who glorify misogyny, sexual objectification of women, date rape and cop killing. Kendrick Lamar was invited to the White House for President Obama’s 55th birthday party, the same Lamar who wrote “Bitch, Don’t Kill Me” and even raps about killing police officers. Another invitee, Rick Ross, glorifies date rape with lyrics, “Put molly all in her champagne | She ain’t even know it | I took her home and I enjoyed that | She ain’t even know it.” Molly, by the way, is slang for the date rape drug, Ecstasy.

Nicki Minaj, who often outdoes even the most vulgar of the rappers, has been invited to the White House with her husband despite lyrics such as “Make sure mama crawls on her knees keep him pleased rub him down be a lady and a freak.” This is the respectable side of Ms. Minaj.

Then there is the King and Queen of Rap, Jay Z and Beyoncé, who have been guests of the Obamas dozens of times. Jay Z in “Drunk in Love” wrote, “Slid the panties right to the side | Ain’t got time to take drawers off” and “We sex again in the morning, your breasteses is my breakfast.” This, by the way is the least profane of the lyrics.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Darkness in Ankara Erdogan takes aim at Turkey’s parliamentary democracy.

Posted By on November 8th, 2016

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s efforts to undermine Turkey’s judiciary, media and other independent institutions were well under way long before July’s failed military coup gave him a pretext to quicken his pace. Now the President appears to be targeting parliamentary democracy.

Police raids in Ankara and southeast Turkey on Friday saw a dozen parliamentarians from the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party, or HDP, detained. Those arrested include HDP co-leaders Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag, who are charged with defying prosecutors’ orders to testify on terrorism charges and allegations that they are sympathetic to the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

“Terrorism” is defined loosely in Mr. Erdogan’s Turkey. The HDP is an opposition party with 59 seats in Parliament that uses legal means to press for the rights of Turkey’s 14 million Kurds. Other “terrorists” and terrorist sympathizers include the more than 100,000 police officers, judges, professors, journalists and teachers who have been detained or dismissed since the coup, including the editor of Cumhuriyet, the country’s main secularist newspaper.
The real reason for the assault is that the HDP is one of the few remaining political obstacles to Mr. Erdogan’s efforts to impose an autocratic presidential system. Those ambitions also predate this summer’s coup attempt. In the June 2015 general election the HDP expanded its support beyond its ethnic-Kurdish base by appealing to secular-minded urbanites alarmed about Mr. Erdogan’s drive toward an Islamist dictatorship.

The HDP’s strong performance in that election meant the President’s Justice and Development Party failed to garner the supermajority it needed to amend the constitution. A subsequent election saw the HDP’s support dwindle somewhat, but the party remains committed to blocking any power grab by Mr. Erdogan. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Opinion Commentary Conservatism’s Last Line of Defense Dozens of Republican attorneys general may prove a powerful check on the next president. By Kimberley A. Strassel see note please

Posted By on November 8th, 2016

Presidents can fire attorney general. Such was the case of the late Attorney General Gerald Walpin who was fired without time or reason when his investigations showed chicanery by one of Michelle Obama’s friends…..rsk

Most Americans won’t have heard of Luther Strange, though that might be about to change. Next week the Alabaman ascends to the top of what by that point could be one of the most consequential GOP organizations in the country.

That would be the Republican Attorneys General Association, the umbrella group for the states’ conservative prosecutors—and a new force to reckon with in American politics. Attorney general races don’t get much national attention, but these days they should. Under a Hillary Clinton presidency in particular, Republican AGs may prove the most effective check on both an overweening federal government and growing abuses by liberal prosecutors.

“Health care, immigration, climate regulations—the AGs are acting as a last line of defense, but also in an agenda-setting capacity,” Mr. Strange told me at a recent meeting in Washington, D.C. “And we’ll be in an even stronger position to do this after Election Day.”

His words are a nod to the extraordinary transformation Republican AGs have undergone in the era of Barack Obama. Not many years ago, those AGs had little to do with each other and were focused on policing occasional state crime. But the combination of the president’s growing federal overreach, and a new generation of activist, conservative law dogs, has inspired a powerful and cohesive new AG movement.

Members include the likes of Florida AG Pam Bondi, who helped oversee a coalition of states that sued the federal government over the constitutionality of ObamaCare. Or Oklahoma’s Scott Pruitt, who has plowed the way in lawsuits against federal overreach in health care, water regulations and endangered species listings. Or Michigan’s Bill Schuette, whose state successfully challenged the feds on its costly rules on power-plant emissions. Or Texas AG Ken Paxton, whose legal efforts put a hold on President Obama’s immigration plan.

Republicans currently hold 27 AG seats, and they are likely to emerge from Tuesday with more. In Missouri, a young dynamo, the 36-year-old Josh Hawley, looks poised to beat Democrat Teresa Hensley. Mr. Hawley, a law professor and Becket Fund for Religious Liberty alumnus, has run on a promise to defend working Missouri families against “Washington bureaucrats.”

In North Carolina, state Sen. Buck Newton is in a tight race against Democrat Josh Stein, in a contest that may hinge on the upticket re-election fortunes of Donald Trump and Gov. Pat McCrory. Republicans are also feeling more confident they’ll hold on to West Virginia, where rebel AG Patrick Morrisey (the first GOP AG in the state since 1933) is defending against liberal activist Doug Reynolds. And in Indiana, Republicans expect to hold a seat with the election of Curtis Hill, who’d become the Hoosier state’s first African-American AG. If it’s a good night, RAGA could end up 29-strong, a record.

They’ll need that strength, particularly under a Clinton presidency. With Republicans near certain to hold the House, and potentially the Senate, Mrs. Clinton will undoubtedly build on Mr. Obama’s extralegal habit of ruling via executive order or regulation. The GOP AGs will be the primary way for conservatives to challenge those edicts, in court. Under a Trump presidency, they will be an invaluable tool in dismantling some of the Obama federal behemoth. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Trump, Clinton and the Culture of Deference Political correctness functions like a despotic regime. We resent it but we tolerate it. By Shelby Steele

Posted By on November 8th, 2016

The current election—regardless of its outcome—reveals something tragic in the way modern conservatism sits in American life. As an ideology—and certainly as a political identity—conservatism is less popular than the very principles and values it stands for. There is a presumption in the culture that heartlessness and bigotry are somehow endemic to conservatism, that the rigors of freedom and capitalism literally require exploitation and inequality—this despite the fact that so many liberal policies since the 1960s have only worsened the inequalities they sought to overcome.

In the broader American culture—the mainstream media, the world of the arts and entertainment, the high-tech world, and the entire enterprise of public and private education—conservatism suffers a decided ill repute. Why?

The answer begins in a certain fact of American life. As the late writer William Styron once put it, slavery was “the great transforming circumstance of American history.” Slavery, and also the diminishment of women and all minorities, was especially tragic because America was otherwise the most enlightened nation in the world. Here, in this instance of profound hypocrisy, began the idea of America as a victimizing nation. And then came the inevitable corollary: the nation’s moral indebtedness to its former victims: blacks especially but all other put-upon peoples as well.

This indebtedness became a cultural imperative, what Styron might call a “transforming circumstance.” Today America must honor this indebtedness or lose much of its moral authority and legitimacy as a democracy. America must show itself redeemed of its oppressive past.

How to do this? In a word: deference. Since the 1960s, when America finally became fully accountable for its past, deference toward all groups with any claim to past or present victimization became mandatory. The Great Society and the War on Poverty were some of the first truly deferential policies. Since then deference has become an almost universal marker of simple human decency that asserts one’s innocence of the American past. Deference is, above all else, an apology.

One thing this means is that deference toward victimization has evolved into a means to power. As deference acknowledges America’s indebtedness, it seems to redeem the nation and to validate its exceptional status in the world. This brings real power—the kind of power that puts people into office and that gives a special shine to commercial ventures it attaches to.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Everybody Loves Israel Formerly neutral or hostile countries from across the world, including Saudi Arabia and China, are now eagerly courting the Jewish state. What’s going on? Arthur Herman

Posted By on November 7th, 2016

If my title seems counterintuitive, let’s concede from the start: not everyone does love Israel now.http://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/2016/11/everybody-loves-israel/

There’s still a Palestinian Authority that actively encourages Palestinians to murder Israelis; there’s still an Iran that periodically threatens to finish the Holocaust; there’s still a very active boycott-Israel movement in Europe and on American college campuses. And there is still and always the United Nations, with its unparalleled half-century record of hostility toward Israel and wildly disproportionate list of standing resolutions targeting the Jewish state.

As for the United States, the current president’s relations with Israel and its prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been anything but loving. Barack Obama has viewed the Jewish state almost exclusively as a regrettable holdover from the era of European colonialism and an occupier of land properly belonging to the embattled and oppressed Palestinian Arab population. Despite the president’s boasts to the effect that he “has Israel’s back,” and despite the recent renewal of military aid (albeit delivered with an air of chilly regret), he has hinted in the past at compelling Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders, and many Israelis worry that a lame-duck Obama may feel freer to take unilateral action against them.

Not just anti-Israelism but outright anti-Semitism is on the rise. For European Jews in general, the encircling atmosphere of hostility, often instigated by Muslims but tolerated or excused by elites, seems to worsen year by year. Jacques Canet, the president of La Victoire synagogue in Paris, reports that the France’s Jewish community—still the third largest in the world, though rapidly diminishing—feels threatened to the point where “Jews in Paris, Marseilles, Toulouse, Sarcelles feel they can’t safely wear a kippah outside their homes or send their children to public schools.” The number of French Jews emigrating annually to Israel has steadily risen from 1,900 in 2011 to nearly 8,000 in 2015, with no end in sight; additional thousands are making their way elsewhere. No less grim is the picture in the United Kingdom, where the Labor party, in Douglas Murray’s wordsy—“the party of Clement Atlee, Harold Wilson, and Tony Blair”—has been taken over by “forces aligned with naked anti-Semitism.”

The examples multiply. All in all, then, we may grant that in many quarters, an anti-Israel—and anti-Jewish—mindset remains a palpable presence on the political and social scene. But there is also good news: elsewhere, and not in obscure corners but in world capitals, a transformation of attitudes is under way. Far from being the pariah of the Middle East, Israel is fast becoming the region’s golden child, courted and caressed even by some of its most important and once-implacably hostile neighbors. The change has certainly registered in Israel itself, but so far has been largely ignored by Western media.

More than three years ago, in a column entitled “Why Israel Will Rule the New Middle East,” I wrote these sentences:

Israel . . . is set to dominate the region like never before. . . . Indeed, instead of plotting Israel’s destruction, its Arab neighbors could find themselves courting Tel Aviv’s favor the way the United States and Europe courted OPEC in the 1970s and 1980s.

At the time, I was thinking primarily about the game-changing implications of Israel’s recently discovered offshore energy resources (about which more below). And indeed those resources, one of the most massive discoveries of the past several decades, do play an important role in the new view of Israel, especially on the part of its neighbors in the eastern Mediterranean.

But that is hardly all. Perhaps most strikingly, the change in attitude has little or nothing to do with any shifts in Israeli policy regarding the one issue that’s assumed to be paramount in the world’s judgment of the Jewish state: namely, its relations with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s positions on the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process,” Israeli settlements in the territories, Palestinian statehood, and Gaza, not to mention his outspoken criticisms of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, might have seemed geared precisely to inflame rather than placate international opinion. Yet it is under his adroit tenure in office that the shift in his country’s favor has accelerated.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Thomas Pickering’s Shameful Record How a prominent former U.S. diplomat worked against the Israeli government and helped Iran. November 7, 2016 Joseph Klein

Posted By on November 7th, 2016

Thomas Pickering, a prominent retired U.S. diplomat and former ambassador to Israel and the United Nations, has endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. Pickering had co-chaired the Benghazi Accountability Review Board, the State-Department-sponsored panel established by then Secretary of State Clinton to investigate the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. Pickering’s board failed to even interview Clinton, while protecting her and other senior State Department officials, such as Under Secretary of State Patrick F. Kennedy, from any personal accountability for the tragic deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other brave Americans.

Pickering signed a letter, along with other diplomats, endorsing Hillary for president. The letter sharply criticized her opponent Donald Trump in strident terms: “In his frequent statements about foreign countries and their citizens, from our closest friends to our most problematic competitors, Mr. Trump has expressed the most ignorant stereotypes of those countries; has inflamed their people; and has insulted our allies and comforted our enemies.”

Pickering needs to take a good look at the mirror when it comes to insulting our allies and comforting our enemies. As reported by the Daily Wire, for example, Pickering “advised then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in late 2011 to promote anti-Zionist agitation with Arab females in and around Israel in order to politically pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into further compliance with the State Department’s vision of statehood for the ‘Palestinians’”

The State Department’s vision of statehood for the Palestinians would require Israel to virtually withdraw to the pre-June 1967 lines while not requiring the Palestinians to forsake their demand for the so-called “right of return” of millions of Palestinian refugees to overrun pre-1967 Israel.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Those Benghazi Stingers Yes, they did exist, but…. Kenneth R. Timmerman

Posted By on November 7th, 2016

More than a dozen people have sent me the same email over the past couple of weeks, purporting to tell the “REAL story on Benghazi.”

Like a lot of information circulating on the Internet, it contains an important kernel of truth, namely a reference to the July 25, 2012 Taliban attack on a U.S. Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan, using a U.S.-supplied Stinger missile.

That attack really did take place, as I reported in my 2014 book Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi.

I learned about the helicopter downing from early Wikileaks disclosures known as the Afghan war logs, and corroborated the information with a senior U.S. military officer working an intelligence billet in support of U.S. special forces operations overseas.

The officer explained that the Stinger never exploded – not because “the stupid Taliban didn’t arm the missile,” as the email claims (if you can fire it, the missile is armed) – but because of a malfunction, most likely in the impact fuze and the guidance system.

Instead of exploding against the body of the helicopter, as designed, the missile lodged and broke apart in the engine nacelle. The alert pilot managed a hard-landing, and everyone on board the Chinook walked away. Crash investigators subsequently discovered pieces of the Stinger lodged in the engine nacelle, including a portion of the missile casing that included a serial number.

That serial number tracked back to a lot of Stingers that had been “signed out” to the CIA in Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, in early 2011, and transferred to the government of Qatar, my U.S. Special Forces informant told me.

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Clinton Foundation Creator: Chelsea Used Foundation for Wedding, Campaigning Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 7th, 2016

More fallout from the Podesta emails. This is a snapshot of the tensions within Clintonworld between Chelsea Clinton and Doug Band who for a while played the role of Bill’s Huma Abedin and claims credit for having effectively created the Clinton Foundation.

Doug Band starts off bashing Chelsea to Podesta, who appears to agree with his criticisms of the First Daughter. Then he suggests that her efforts to clean up the Foundation are dangerously misguided because, in his own words, “the investigation into her getting paid for campaigning, using foundation resources for her wedding and life for a decade, taxes on money from her parents…”

All of those are intriguing. The wedding part is getting top billing. Being paid for campaigning also suggests some obvious direction. And it’s no secret that the Clintons have been living off the Foundation. But the most intriguing part may be that final reference to “taxes on money from her parents”.

That suggests some rather basic illegalities that even the Clintons might not escape.