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How Democrats Are Politicizing the Benghazi Investigation By Debra Heine

Posted By on October 22nd, 2015

In the past couple of days, the State Department has delivered to the Select Committee on Benghazi, nearly 2,200 pages of printed emails from U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, one of the four Americans killed in the Benghazi attacks. On Tuesday, the committee received about 1,300 new pages of printed e-mails to pour through and on Wednesday, 900 additional emails were delivered.

Democrats, who have long accused Republicans of politicizing the investigation, are ”ramping up an aggressive, multi-pronged effort to quash the damaging effects of the 17-month investigation before Clinton testifies on Thursday,” the Washington Post reported.

In other words, they are doing what Democrats do best – they are circling the wagons around a fellow Democrat.

This week, ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) and his staff are embracing the offensive with coordinated messaging, rapid response and a bevy of memos, fact-checking documents and reports. If you see Democratic panel members on television, it’s not by accident.

For the first time on Monday morning, Cummings called explicitly for the committee to disband, a comment that kicked off the week’s busy news cycle.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy for Dummies by Roger L Simon

Posted By on October 22nd, 2015

Let me get this straight. Two weeks ago Donald Trump said we shouldn’t have gone into Afghanistan, that it was a “terrible mistake” and now he says he was misunderstood?

Uhuh.

Sounds remarkably like the same dude who mixed up Hamas and Hezbollah and claimed he was hearing the word Kurds when Hugh Hewitt was asking him about the Quds force. Or the know-nothing who sloughed off his lack of knowledge of terror leader names because, he insisted, they’d be gone before he took office, when the likes of Hasan Nasrallah have been around for decades. Fool me once, as they say…

Anyway, here’s CNN on the subject. Yes, I know it’s CNN but read the transcript:

Donald Trump claimed Wednesday that he has consistently supported the decision to invade Afghanistan and that his earlier comment calling the war there a “terrible mistake” was a result of him misunderstanding the question he was asked.

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There is Nothing to Negotiate By Dan Calic

Posted By on October 22nd, 2015

How is Israel supposed to negotiate when its very existence is considered unacceptable?
Some hard realities need to be faced about the Middle East “peace process.” The US, EU, UN and others have said the “settlements” are an obstacle to peace. The Arabs point to the “occupation.”

However, neither of these are the core issue…. and frankly, they never have been. Why? Keep in mind there was no “occupation” or “settlements” in 1948 when the surrounding Arab nations attacked the fledgling Jewish nation one day after declaring independence.

Moreover, where were settlements or occupation in 1967?

So if it isn’t the “occupation,” or “settlements,” what is the real issue? While many consider these to be legitimate issues, the Arabs are using them as a deliberate smokescreen.

The core issue is the Muslim’s rejection of Israel’s right to exist. It’s as simple as that. This is the main reason why the first attempt at a two-state solution (the 1947 UN partition plan) was not successful. The Muslims would not allow a Jewish state on land which they consider theirs. Its size or borders didn’t matter. It was, and remains, its mere existence.

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Marco Rubio, a Fortunate Son By Fritz Pettyjohn

Posted By on October 22nd, 2015

Marco Rubio titled his autobiography An American Son. It’s a good read. It’s apparently his own work, and it reflects well on him. I read a couple of Kasich’s books, Every Other Monday and Stand for Something, and all I learned is that Kasich’s a golf nut who has learned some incredibly important things about life on the golf course.

Rubio is a family candidate. His paternal grandfather quit school for work at eight, was orphaned at fourteen, and in middle age was widowed with seven children between four and sixteen. They were left on their own while he scratched out a miserable living on the streets of Havana, with Marco’s father and Aunt Georgina getting their own jobs at nine.

The maternal grandfather was the son of middling Spanish immigrants to Cuba, and was able to get an education only because polio left him partially disabled. This man, Pedro Victor Garcia, is responsible for the political education of Marco Rubio. In 1980 Marco was nine, living in Las Vegas, and took an interest in the Kennedy-Carter fight for the Democratic nomination. His grandfather — Papa — quickly set him right. While his parents were at work, Marco sat at the feet of this Cuban immigrant, listening in Spanish, learning the virtues of free market capitalism, Ronald Reagan, and the United States of America. Papa believed in the great man theory of history, and assured his grandson that Reagan was a great man who would destroy the communists. Marco decided he believed in the great man theory as well, and dreamed of being one himself, leading an exile army back to Cuba to overthrow the Castros.

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Europe Stumbling Toward Apocalyptic Strife By J. Robert Smith

Posted By on October 22nd, 2015

Western Europe’s long, slow suicide is too long and slow for Western European elites, apparently. You know, the self-loathing, Western-loathing progressive-minded sorts. Projections of Muslim supremacy in Europe by the latter part of the 21st Century means that Europe’s enlightened class won’t experience the pleasure of watching Muslims hoist guidons emblazoned with the shahada and the takbir over the Vatican. Quite a visual, won’t it be, compliments of Al Jazeera, having a muckety-muck imam emerge on the once papal balcony — a balcony festooned with a boldly oversized crescent moon and star flag — to bestow blessings on masses of believers shouting, “Allah Akbar,” as a global audience watches enthralled.

Thus the intent to hasten Europe’s demise — that is, whatever remains of degraded Christian Europe and Western Civilization there. Muslim ascendency has its satisfactions, but nothing beats witnessing the coup de grâce, the final scimitar coming down on the neck of once mighty Europe. That’s what open borders means — it’s a quickening of the suicide. It gives an outside chance for Western Europe’s elites to witness the dénouement of their crimes (perhaps they would prefer the kinder, gentler word, “designs”).

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Donald’s Missing Details Who would be eligible for TrumpCare? What will the border wall cost? He doesn’t say. Karl Rove

Posted By on October 22nd, 2015

Having led the polls for three months, Donald Trump has shown he’s no flash in the pan. Voters and the media should therefore treat him as a traditional front-runner, examine his temperament and require him to go beyond sound bites. A governing agenda is essential to win the White House. Candidates must demonstrate mastery of the issues and cannot wing it. Platitudes don’t cut it for swing voters. Inquiring minds might like to hear Mr. Trump explain what specifically he would do as president.

He has said that he would deport the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S., and in two years or less, thanks to “really good management.” But what exactly is Mr. Trump’s plan to arrest, detain and deport—with all the litigation that entails—15,000 people a day? That’s roughly 10 times the number of daily arrests in the U.S. for violent crime. How will Mr. Trump round up these people in a way that is, as he promises, “very humane” and “very nice”? And how many tens of billions will this cost?

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Why Aren’t There More Black Scientists? The evidence suggests that one reason is the perverse impact of university racial preferences. By Gail Heriot

Posted By on October 22nd, 2015

Remember when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor predicted in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) that universities would no longer need race-preferential admissions policies in 25 years? By the end of this year, that period will be half over. Yet the level of preferential treatment given to minority students has, if anything, increased.

Meanwhile, numerous studies—as I explain in a recent report for the Heritage Foundation—show that the supposed beneficiaries of affirmative action are less likely to go on to high-prestige careers than otherwise-identical students who attend schools where their entering academic credentials put them in the middle of the class or higher. In other words, encouraging black students to attend schools where their entering credentials place them near the bottom of the class has resulted in fewer black physicians, engineers, scientists, lawyers and professors than would otherwise be the case.

But university administrators don’t want to hear that their support for affirmative action has left many intended beneficiaries worse off, and they refuse to take the evidence seriously.

The mainstream media support them on this. The Washington Post, for instance, recently featured a story lamenting that black students are less likely to major in science and engineering than their Asian or white counterparts. Left unstated was why. As my report shows, while black students tend to be a little more interested in majoring in science and engineering than whites when they first enter college, they transfer into softer majors in much larger numbers and so end up with fewer science or engineering degrees.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

This Child Doesn’t Need a Solar Panel By Bjorn Lomborg ****

Posted By on October 22nd, 2015

Spending billions of dollars on climate-related aid in countries that need help with tuberculosis, malaria and malnutrition.
In the run-up to the 2015 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11, rich countries and development organizations are scrambling to join the fashionable ranks of “climate aid” donors. This effectively means telling the world’s worst-off people, suffering from tuberculosis, malaria or malnutrition, that what they really need isn’t medicine, mosquito nets or micronutrients, but a solar panel. It is terrible news.

On Oct. 9, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim pledged a one-third increase in the bank’s direct climate-related financing, bringing the bank’s annual total to an estimated $29 billion by 2020. In September, Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged to match President Obama’s promised $3 billion in aid to the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund. Meanwhile, the U.K is diverting $8.9 billion from its overseas aid budget to climate-related aid over the next five years, and France is promising $5.6 billion annually by 2020, up from $3.4 billion today. The African Development Bank is planning to triple its climate-related investments to more than $5 billion a year by 2020, representing 40% of its total portfolio.

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Benghazi Panel to Focus on Attack, Not Hillary Clinton’s Emails By Byron Tau

Posted By on October 22nd, 2015

Republicans Say Committee will concentrate questions on details of fatal 2012 assault, according to GOP lawmakers

WASHINGTON—The House Committee on Benghazi will focus its long-awaited questioning of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on details of the 2012 attack on a Libyan diplomatic outpost, rather than on Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangements, Republicans said this week.

The panel’s hand has been forced by recent suggestions, including by some Republicans, that the committee’s motivations are chiefly political. That has shifted the dynamics of Thursday’s high-profile hearing, with Republicans facing pressure to show they are playing fair just as Mrs. Clinton faces pressure to show she didn’t botch a tragic incident.

Republicans remain eager to press Mrs. Clinton publicly on the State Department’s Libya policy before, during and after the attack in which four Americans died, while she looks to defuse lingering claims that the incident reveals flaws in her management of the State Department, her leadership or her judgment.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has been dogged for months by her decision to use a private email server while she served as secretary of state, an arrangement revealed by the committee’s work. But Republicans say most of Thursday’s hearing will tackle topics more directly related to the attack in Libya.

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France’s Long Ambivalent Relationship with the Jews: Joshua Muravchick

Posted By on October 22nd, 2015

The image of a “French republican idyll” masks a history of repeated anti-Jewish prejudice, and worse.

At the outset of his very interesting and provocative essay, Alain El-Mouchan quotes French Prime Minister Manuel Valls: “If 100,000 [French] Jews leave [for Israel], France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure.”

Will France’s Jews depart en masse for Israel? Should they? If they do, will France still be France? These are disturbing questions to which I do not have the answers, and which may be unanswerable. But I would like to offer a number of thoughts and reactions, mainly of a historical nature, and some in the form of further questions.

Let us recall that in the first half of the 20th century, one-quarter of the Jews living in France were murdered in the Holocaust, with French connivance. Was France still France after that? If so, then it is hard for me to see how the departure of one-quarter of today’s Jewish population—not for Auschwitz but for Israel—would constitute the end of France.

But El-Mouchan, like Prime Minister Valls, has something more specific in mind. For both of them, that something, in El-Mouchan’s words, is “the French republican idyll, one of the most attractive and promising chapters in the history of mankind,” and one hallmark of this idyll was France’s “exceptionally open and welcoming” posture toward the Jews. That idyll, says El-Mouchan, has now “reached the beginning of the end.”