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Two ISSIS spies meet in a busy restaurant after they had
successfully slipped into the U.S.
The first spy starts speaking in Arabic. The second spy shushes
him quickly and whispers:
"Don't blow our cover. You're in America now. Speak Spanish."
Two ISSIS spies meet in a busy restaurant after they had
successfully slipped into the U.S.
The first spy starts speaking in Arabic. The second spy shushes
him quickly and whispers:
"Don't blow our cover. You're in America now. Speak Spanish."
Dunford, Kushner Examine Counter-ISIS Fight, Discuss Lessons for Strategy
http://www.jcs.mil/Media/News/News-Display/Article/1138667/dunford-kushner-examine-counter-isis-fight-discuss-lessons-for-strategy/
Steve Bannon removed from National Security Council in shakeup
www.cnbc.com
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/05/steve-bannon-reportedly-removed-from-national-security-council-in-reorganization.html
A filing shows Bannon was no longer listed as a regular attendee of NSC "principals committee" meetings.
How they could have removed Dunford is beyond me. We were sitting behind George Shultz at this presentation. His presentation below is the best I've heard.
Dunford, Kushner Examine Counter-ISIS Fight, Discuss Lessons for Strategy
http://www.jcs.mil/Media/News/News-Display/Article/1138667/dunford-kushner-examine-counter-isis-fight-discuss-lessons-for-strategy/
Steve Bannon removed from National Security Council in shakeup
www.cnbc.com
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/05/steve-bannon-reportedly-removed-from-national-security-council-in-reorganization.html
A filing shows Bannon was no longer listed as a regular attendee of NSC "principals committee" meetings.
How they could have removed Dunford is beyond me. We were sitting behind George Shultz at this presentation. His presentation below is the best I've heard.
Officials Brace For Possible Cases Of Zika With Outbreak Of New Aggressive Mosquito In SoCal
(Keeps creeping into the US.)
March 29, 2017 8:28 PM
LAKE BALBOA (CBSLA.com) — Los Angeles residents already have to worry about quakes, mudslides, wild fires and horrible traffic.
But officials worry a new type of mosquito, the Aedes,could soon add Zika to that list.
It only takes a cap full of water for larva to grow and mosquitoes to breed.
CBS2’s Craig Herrera says that because of all the rain we just had, this season could be especially bad for bites.
Sean Rotramel and his wife are hoping to add to their family. He says he and his wife have avoided travel particularly to avoid things like Zika, that can cause disabilities, birth defects and neurological problems.
“Yeah, terrified. Me and my wife are trying for another baby and we’ve put tons of vacation plans on hold,” Rotramel said.
Officials say he has a right to be concerned about Aedes.
“They have the potential to spread different viruses like Zika virus, yellow fever and even dengue,” said Levy Sun of the Greater Los Angeles County Vector Control District.
And unlike the native mosquito that carries the West Nile, aedes are invasive and look different.
They’re black and white, they’re aggressive and bite during the daytime and they don’t lay their eggs in standing water.
“They lay their eggs on the stock of plants and on the side of containers which means even if you dump out the water, those eggs could still be present,” said Sun.
And aedes are not the only insect that has people jumping.
Be on the lookout for the crane fly.
“We call them mosquito eaters but apparently they don’t eat mosquitoes,” said Rotamel, “we have about 30,000 flying around out house.”
Crane flies are about the size of a quarter and the good news is, they’re harmless.
They pop up every spring and fall.
Vector control is out and about around the county including places like the Sepulveda Basin and Lake Balboa.
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2017/03/29/officials-brace-for-possible-cases-of-zika-with-outbreak-of-new-aggresive-mosquito-in-socal/
Officials Brace For Possible Cases Of Zika With Outbreak Of New Aggressive Mosquito In SoCal
(Keeps creeping into the US.)
March 29, 2017 8:28 PM
LAKE BALBOA (CBSLA.com) — Los Angeles residents already have to worry about quakes, mudslides, wild fires and horrible traffic.
But officials worry a new type of mosquito, the Aedes,could soon add Zika to that list.
It only takes a cap full of water for larva to grow and mosquitoes to breed.
CBS2’s Craig Herrera says that because of all the rain we just had, this season could be especially bad for bites.
Sean Rotramel and his wife are hoping to add to their family. He says he and his wife have avoided travel particularly to avoid things like Zika, that can cause disabilities, birth defects and neurological problems.
“Yeah, terrified. Me and my wife are trying for another baby and we’ve put tons of vacation plans on hold,” Rotramel said.
Officials say he has a right to be concerned about Aedes.
“They have the potential to spread different viruses like Zika virus, yellow fever and even dengue,” said Levy Sun of the Greater Los Angeles County Vector Control District.
And unlike the native mosquito that carries the West Nile, aedes are invasive and look different.
They’re black and white, they’re aggressive and bite during the daytime and they don’t lay their eggs in standing water.
“They lay their eggs on the stock of plants and on the side of containers which means even if you dump out the water, those eggs could still be present,” said Sun.
And aedes are not the only insect that has people jumping.
Be on the lookout for the crane fly.
“We call them mosquito eaters but apparently they don’t eat mosquitoes,” said Rotamel, “we have about 30,000 flying around out house.”
Crane flies are about the size of a quarter and the good news is, they’re harmless.
They pop up every spring and fall.
Vector control is out and about around the county including places like the Sepulveda Basin and Lake Balboa.
http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2017/03/29/officials-brace-for-possible-cases-of-zika-with-outbreak-of-new-aggresive-mosquito-in-socal/
State Dep’t Silent on Key Finding of Inquiry Into US-Funded Anti-Netanyahu NGO
By Patrick Goodenough | July 13, 2016 | 12:08 AM EDT
President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu have not seen eye-to-eye on the Iran nuclear deal or the Palestinian issue.
(CNSNews.com) – State Department spokesman John Kirby noted Tuesday that a congressional investigation into a U.S.-funded Israeli NGO found no evidence that the group had used the funds to influence the tightly-contested 2015 Israeli election.
Kirby did not comment, however, on the inquiry’s key finding – that the NGO known as OneVoice, within days of the end of its U.S. grant period, had used the infrastructure and resources which U.S. taxpayers had helped make possible, to support a campaign aimed at defeating Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at the polls.
Those resources included training of activists, a social media platform “which more than doubled during the State Department grant period,” as well as a voter database, according to a report compiled by bipartisan staff on the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations, released Tuesday.
Kirby said since the report had just been released, he could not comment on specifics.
“But I would note that the report makes clear there’s no evidence that OneVoice spent State Department grant funds to influence the Israeli election,” he added.
Criticism in the lengthy report was directed less at OneVoice than it was at the State Department.
“That use of [U.S.] government-funded resources for political purposes [in Israel] was permitted by the grant because the State Department failed to adequately guard against the risk that campaign resources could be repurposed in that manner,” it said.
The report found that the State Department had placed no limitations on the use of the U.S.-funded resources was the grant period was over.
And even though OneVoice had been politically active in an earlier Israel election, in 2013, the State Department had “failed to take any steps to guard against the risk that OneVoice could engage in political activities” again, using U.S.-funded infrastructure and resources, it said.
“[T]he Department did not assess the risks involved in providing funds to OneVoice to create a grassroots campaign infrastructure – including voter contact information, trained networks of organizers and activists, and a social media platform – that might later be converted into political tools.”
The report also noted that the second most-senior U.S. diplomat in the region, Consul-General Michael Ratney, had evidently deleted “an important email exchange” between himself and OneVoice in the fall of 2014 (about two months before the U.S. grant period ended on November 30, and before Netanyahu on December 2 called an early election for the following March.)
In that email exchange with Ratney, OneVoice had attached a strategy document that made clear its view on the need to change Israel’s political status quo: “Our aim is to strengthen the [center left] bloc, rather than any one party, [and] in tandem weaken Netanyahu and his right wing partners.”
In a strategy document emailed to U.S. Consul-General Michael Ratney two months before its U.S. funding period ended, OneVoice made clear that its political aim looking ahead was to ‘weaken Netanyahu and his right wing partners.’
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), the chairman of the permanent subcommittee on investigations, slammed the State Department for funding “a politically active group in a politically sensitive environment with inadequate safeguards.”
“It is completely unacceptable that U.S. taxpayer dollars were used to build a political campaign infrastructure that was deployed – immediately after the grant ended – against the leader of our closest ally in the Middle East,” Portman added. “American resources should be used to help our allies in the region, not undermine them.”
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), the ranking member of the subcommittee, said the investigation found “no wrongdoing” by the administration.
But, she said, “it certainly highlights deficiencies in the [State] Department’s policies that should be addressed in order to best protect taxpayer dollars.”
Obama-linked DC consultancy
It was an open secret in March 2015 that the Obama administration would have been glad to see Netanyahu replaced by a prime minister more amenable both to the administration’s efforts to broker peace with the Palestinians, and to its nuclear deal with Iran.
Just weeks before the election, Netanyahu in an address to Congress had warned against the nuclear deal – to the frustration of the administration which was touting the agreement as a major foreign policy success.
When Netanyahu upset poll predictions and won, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said that his “success is all the more impressive given the powerful forces that tried to undermine him, including, sadly, the full weight of the Obama political team.”
“Everyone knows that the Obama administration was rooting for the prime minister to lose,” said Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who like Cruz went on to run unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest rejected such criticism, saying that “the administration, in very conspicuous fashion, avoided leaving anybody with even the appearance of an administration effort to influence the outcome of the elections one way or the other.”
State Department funding to OneVoice totaled some $350,000 during the 14-month grant period, and was geared towards helping the NGO’s efforts to promote a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Salaries, consultancy fees and social media activities were among the targets for the funding.
The funding included $40,000 to enable OneVoice to hire the services of a Washington-based political consulting firm, 270 Strategies, with close political ties to President Obama. It provided grassroots campaign training and advised OneVoice on building “an activist/voter contact database,” the report said.
(270 Strategies was founded by Jeremy Bird and Mitch Stewart, veterans of Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, and leading figures in the “Ready for Hillary” PAC.)
During the Israeli election campaign an Israeli activist group known as Victory 2015 (V15) mobilized to defeat Netanyahu. Shortly after OneVoice’s U.S. grant period ended, it teamed up with V15 in an effort to achieve that aim.
The Senate investigation found that OneVoice had used the resources it had built up with the help of the U.S. funding, to support the V15 campaign.
“Soon after the grant period ended … OneVoice used the campaign infrastructure and resources built, in part, with State Department grants funds to support V15,” it said.
“In service of V15, OneVoice deployed its social media platform, which more than doubled during the State Department grant period; used its database of voter contact information, including email addresses, which [OneVoice] expanded during the grant period; and enlisted its network of trained activists, many of whom were recruited or trained under the grant, to support and recruit for V15.”
In a Jan. 2015 statement announcing their teaming up and intention “to disrupt the status quo,” OneVoice and V15 said they would be using the services of 270 Strategies.
On its website, 270 Strategies says V15 had with its help “reached out to more than 750,000 targeted voters in the 2015 Israeli elections.”
During its investigation, the Senate subcommittee staffers learned that Ratney, the consul-general in Jerusalem, appeared to have deleted emails including his exchanges with OneVoice including a strategy document that made clear the group’s anti-Netanyahu plans for the next election.
Ratney later explained that he sometimes “deleted emails with attachments I didn’t need in order to maintain my inbox under the storage limit.”
The report stated that although officials have the option to archive emails so as to remain within storage limits, Ratney had said that he “did not know [he] was required to archive routine emails.”
In a statement after the release of the subcommittee’s report, OneVoice highlighted the same conclusion Kirby did – that the inquiry found no evidence the NGO used U.S. funds to influence the Israeli election.
“OneVoice will continue its important work promoting peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians,” it said.
http://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/state-dept-350k-group-built-campaign-structure-used-against-election-israels
State Dep’t Silent on Key Finding of Inquiry Into US-Funded Anti-Netanyahu NGO
By Patrick Goodenough | July 13, 2016 | 12:08 AM EDT
President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu have not seen eye-to-eye on the Iran nuclear deal or the Palestinian issue.
(CNSNews.com) – State Department spokesman John Kirby noted Tuesday that a congressional investigation into a U.S.-funded Israeli NGO found no evidence that the group had used the funds to influence the tightly-contested 2015 Israeli election.
Kirby did not comment, however, on the inquiry’s key finding – that the NGO known as OneVoice, within days of the end of its U.S. grant period, had used the infrastructure and resources which U.S. taxpayers had helped make possible, to support a campaign aimed at defeating Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at the polls.
Those resources included training of activists, a social media platform “which more than doubled during the State Department grant period,” as well as a voter database, according to a report compiled by bipartisan staff on the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations, released Tuesday.
Kirby said since the report had just been released, he could not comment on specifics.
“But I would note that the report makes clear there’s no evidence that OneVoice spent State Department grant funds to influence the Israeli election,” he added.
Criticism in the lengthy report was directed less at OneVoice than it was at the State Department.
“That use of [U.S.] government-funded resources for political purposes [in Israel] was permitted by the grant because the State Department failed to adequately guard against the risk that campaign resources could be repurposed in that manner,” it said.
The report found that the State Department had placed no limitations on the use of the U.S.-funded resources was the grant period was over.
And even though OneVoice had been politically active in an earlier Israel election, in 2013, the State Department had “failed to take any steps to guard against the risk that OneVoice could engage in political activities” again, using U.S.-funded infrastructure and resources, it said.
“[T]he Department did not assess the risks involved in providing funds to OneVoice to create a grassroots campaign infrastructure – including voter contact information, trained networks of organizers and activists, and a social media platform – that might later be converted into political tools.”
The report also noted that the second most-senior U.S. diplomat in the region, Consul-General Michael Ratney, had evidently deleted “an important email exchange” between himself and OneVoice in the fall of 2014 (about two months before the U.S. grant period ended on November 30, and before Netanyahu on December 2 called an early election for the following March.)
In that email exchange with Ratney, OneVoice had attached a strategy document that made clear its view on the need to change Israel’s political status quo: “Our aim is to strengthen the [center left] bloc, rather than any one party, [and] in tandem weaken Netanyahu and his right wing partners.”
In a strategy document emailed to U.S. Consul-General Michael Ratney two months before its U.S. funding period ended, OneVoice made clear that its political aim looking ahead was to ‘weaken Netanyahu and his right wing partners.’
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), the chairman of the permanent subcommittee on investigations, slammed the State Department for funding “a politically active group in a politically sensitive environment with inadequate safeguards.”
“It is completely unacceptable that U.S. taxpayer dollars were used to build a political campaign infrastructure that was deployed – immediately after the grant ended – against the leader of our closest ally in the Middle East,” Portman added. “American resources should be used to help our allies in the region, not undermine them.”
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), the ranking member of the subcommittee, said the investigation found “no wrongdoing” by the administration.
But, she said, “it certainly highlights deficiencies in the [State] Department’s policies that should be addressed in order to best protect taxpayer dollars.”
Obama-linked DC consultancy
It was an open secret in March 2015 that the Obama administration would have been glad to see Netanyahu replaced by a prime minister more amenable both to the administration’s efforts to broker peace with the Palestinians, and to its nuclear deal with Iran.
Just weeks before the election, Netanyahu in an address to Congress had warned against the nuclear deal – to the frustration of the administration which was touting the agreement as a major foreign policy success.
When Netanyahu upset poll predictions and won, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said that his “success is all the more impressive given the powerful forces that tried to undermine him, including, sadly, the full weight of the Obama political team.”
“Everyone knows that the Obama administration was rooting for the prime minister to lose,” said Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who like Cruz went on to run unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest rejected such criticism, saying that “the administration, in very conspicuous fashion, avoided leaving anybody with even the appearance of an administration effort to influence the outcome of the elections one way or the other.”
State Department funding to OneVoice totaled some $350,000 during the 14-month grant period, and was geared towards helping the NGO’s efforts to promote a “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Salaries, consultancy fees and social media activities were among the targets for the funding.
The funding included $40,000 to enable OneVoice to hire the services of a Washington-based political consulting firm, 270 Strategies, with close political ties to President Obama. It provided grassroots campaign training and advised OneVoice on building “an activist/voter contact database,” the report said.
(270 Strategies was founded by Jeremy Bird and Mitch Stewart, veterans of Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, and leading figures in the “Ready for Hillary” PAC.)
During the Israeli election campaign an Israeli activist group known as Victory 2015 (V15) mobilized to defeat Netanyahu. Shortly after OneVoice’s U.S. grant period ended, it teamed up with V15 in an effort to achieve that aim.
The Senate investigation found that OneVoice had used the resources it had built up with the help of the U.S. funding, to support the V15 campaign.
“Soon after the grant period ended … OneVoice used the campaign infrastructure and resources built, in part, with State Department grants funds to support V15,” it said.
“In service of V15, OneVoice deployed its social media platform, which more than doubled during the State Department grant period; used its database of voter contact information, including email addresses, which [OneVoice] expanded during the grant period; and enlisted its network of trained activists, many of whom were recruited or trained under the grant, to support and recruit for V15.”
In a Jan. 2015 statement announcing their teaming up and intention “to disrupt the status quo,” OneVoice and V15 said they would be using the services of 270 Strategies.
On its website, 270 Strategies says V15 had with its help “reached out to more than 750,000 targeted voters in the 2015 Israeli elections.”
During its investigation, the Senate subcommittee staffers learned that Ratney, the consul-general in Jerusalem, appeared to have deleted emails including his exchanges with OneVoice including a strategy document that made clear the group’s anti-Netanyahu plans for the next election.
Ratney later explained that he sometimes “deleted emails with attachments I didn’t need in order to maintain my inbox under the storage limit.”
The report stated that although officials have the option to archive emails so as to remain within storage limits, Ratney had said that he “did not know [he] was required to archive routine emails.”
In a statement after the release of the subcommittee’s report, OneVoice highlighted the same conclusion Kirby did – that the inquiry found no evidence the NGO used U.S. funds to influence the Israeli election.
“OneVoice will continue its important work promoting peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians,” it said.
http://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-w-chapman/state-dept-350k-group-built-campaign-structure-used-against-election-israels
Hate Trump? He deserves it doesn't he?
Keep this in mind, Donald Trump did not steal your money. Donald Trump did not raise your taxes. Donald Trump did not quadruple the price of food. Trump is not stirring a race war. Trump did not leave any US soldiers in Benghazi to be slaughtered and desecrated by Muslims. Trump did not send the US Navy to fight for Syrian Al-Qaeda. Trump did not arm ISIS and systematically exterminate Christians throughout the Middle East. Trump did not betray Israel. Trump did not provide financing and technology to Iran's nuclear weapons program. Trump did not give our military secrets to China. Trump did not remove our nuclear missile shield in Poland at the behest of Russia. Trump did not shrivel our military, and betray our veterans. Trump did not cripple our economy. Trump did not increase our debt to 20 trillion dollars. Trump did not ruin our credit, twice. Trump did not double African American unemployment. Trump did not increase welfare to a record level for eight years. Trump did not sign a law making it legal to execute, and imprison Americans. Trump did not set free all of terrorists in Guantanamo bay. Trump did not steal your rights, violate US Constitutional law, or commit treason, hundreds of times. Yet Trump is being ripped apart in the news, non stop. Barrack Hussein Obama, Hillary Clinton and the criminals occupying our government, are not. The media is the Democratic Party. Save our culture. Stop listening to them..!!
Hate Trump? He deserves it doesn't he?
Keep this in mind, Donald Trump did not steal your money. Donald Trump did not raise your taxes. Donald Trump did not quadruple the price of food. Trump is not stirring a race war. Trump did not leave any US soldiers in Benghazi to be slaughtered and desecrated by Muslims. Trump did not send the US Navy to fight for Syrian Al-Qaeda. Trump did not arm ISIS and systematically exterminate Christians throughout the Middle East. Trump did not betray Israel. Trump did not provide financing and technology to Iran's nuclear weapons program. Trump did not give our military secrets to China. Trump did not remove our nuclear missile shield in Poland at the behest of Russia. Trump did not shrivel our military, and betray our veterans. Trump did not cripple our economy. Trump did not increase our debt to 20 trillion dollars. Trump did not ruin our credit, twice. Trump did not double African American unemployment. Trump did not increase welfare to a record level for eight years. Trump did not sign a law making it legal to execute, and imprison Americans. Trump did not set free all of terrorists in Guantanamo bay. Trump did not steal your rights, violate US Constitutional law, or commit treason, hundreds of times. Yet Trump is being ripped apart in the news, non stop. Barrack Hussein Obama, Hillary Clinton and the criminals occupying our government, are not. The media is the Democratic Party. Save our culture. Stop listening to them..!!
Cracks me up. This is what these drive by attorneys do every time they see an opening and she keeps the door open to their extortion business. One lawyer, now judge, to another lawyer, 'go ahead, make those false claims.' What about the shareholders?
Scum bags: Would include SA along with them.
I like this method when dealing with the con artists and punks like Mako that hide their identity while profiting from their crimes.
The article could also be a hint of events in progress that assigns Mako his jail suite and introduces him to his new boyfriend. Pucker up Mako, the vasoline is under your pillow.....
Banning the Travel Ban, Redux
Another judge finds fault with Trump's second order.
Allyne Caan · Mar. 16, 2017
Just one day before President Donald Trump’s revised immigration executive order was slated to take effect, a federal judge in Hawaii has blocked it. Surprise!
In a 43-page order, Judge Derrick K. Watson issued a preliminary injunction against the order, claiming the challenge against it had a “likelihood of success” based on the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. To his credit, at least Judge Watson cited the Constitution, even if incorrectly — especially since the state of Hawaii, as one of the plaintiffs in the case, argued against the order based on the impact it would have on the state’s university system and tourism industry. Because nothing is more important than national security except, well, lots of happy tourists from the six countries on Trump’s ban list.
Instead, Judge Watson bought the Establishment Clause argument of plaintiff Dr. Ismail Elshikh, which basically says he feels the executive order is a condemnation by the government of his Muslim religion that would make him and his family feel like second class citizens. Watson agreed, writing that “a reasonable, objective observer — enlightened by the specific historical context, contemporaneous public statements, and specific sequence of events leading to its issuance — would conclude that the Executive Order was issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion.”
Clearly, Watson is more concerned with a couple of Trump’s statements on the campaign trail than the actual law at hand.
More to the point, has anyone told the good doctor and judge that jihadi terrorists are Muslim? Or that the six nations on the ban list are pretty much the most dangerous and least vetted places in the world?
Although Watson concedes this order “does not facially discriminate for or against any particular religion” and that the government defends it “principally because of its religious neutral text” in that it applies to individuals of all religions in six countries linked to terrorism, yet he blisteringly claims, “The illogic of the Government’s contentions is palpable.”
Of course, as Hans von Spakovsky notes, there actually was some logic in selecting the six countries named in the order: “Three of the countries — Iran, Syria, and Sudan — are listed by the State Department as official sponsors of terrorism, while the other three — Libya, Somalia, and Yemen — were listed as ‘countries of concern’ because of their terrorism problems by Jeh Johnson, Homeland Security secretary under Obama.”
Undoubtedly, had Watson or anyone else scoured the world to find predominantly Christian or Hindu countries that are official sponsors of terrorism, he would have come up empty handed. But facts aside (as they often are when it comes to judicial rulings), for now at least, the order is on hold.
Trump blasted the “terrible” ruling that was “done by a judge for political reasons.” In fact, he said, “The danger is clear, the law is clear, the need for my executive order is clear.”
Meanwhile, the First Amendment isn’t the only one getting attention when it comes to immigration. The Tenth is getting in on the action, too. On Monday, Tennessee became the first state to use the “reserved powers” clause to sue the federal government — not for keeping immigrants out but for forcing refugee resettlement within state borders.
The Tennessean reports, “The lawsuit … alleges that the federal government has violated the 10th Amendment, which says the federal government possesses only the powers delegated to it by the U.S. Constitution and that all other powers are reserved for the states.” It argues that the feds have “unduly forced states to pay for the refugee resettlement program” and “asks the court to force the federal government to stop resettling refugees in Tennessee until all costs associated with the settlement are incurred by the federal government.” The Tennessean reports that in fiscal year 2016, more than 2,000 refugees were resettled in the state.
Of course, Barack Obama, not Donald Trump, ordered the forced resettlement, though as of yet, Trump hasn’t vacated that order. Hence, although filed against the Trump administration, the lawsuit is targeting an Obama-era policy.
It remains to be seen how the court will rule, but if Tennessee wins, perhaps Hawaii will volunteer to take Tennessee’s allotment of refugees. After all, opposition to Trump’s executive order aside, of the nearly 85,000 refugees the U.S. admitted in fiscal year 2016, guess how many the Aloha State took in? Exactly zero.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/48014
Banning the Travel Ban, Redux
Another judge finds fault with Trump's second order.
Allyne Caan · Mar. 16, 2017
Just one day before President Donald Trump’s revised immigration executive order was slated to take effect, a federal judge in Hawaii has blocked it. Surprise!
In a 43-page order, Judge Derrick K. Watson issued a preliminary injunction against the order, claiming the challenge against it had a “likelihood of success” based on the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. To his credit, at least Judge Watson cited the Constitution, even if incorrectly — especially since the state of Hawaii, as one of the plaintiffs in the case, argued against the order based on the impact it would have on the state’s university system and tourism industry. Because nothing is more important than national security except, well, lots of happy tourists from the six countries on Trump’s ban list.
Instead, Judge Watson bought the Establishment Clause argument of plaintiff Dr. Ismail Elshikh, which basically says he feels the executive order is a condemnation by the government of his Muslim religion that would make him and his family feel like second class citizens. Watson agreed, writing that “a reasonable, objective observer — enlightened by the specific historical context, contemporaneous public statements, and specific sequence of events leading to its issuance — would conclude that the Executive Order was issued with a purpose to disfavor a particular religion.”
Clearly, Watson is more concerned with a couple of Trump’s statements on the campaign trail than the actual law at hand.
More to the point, has anyone told the good doctor and judge that jihadi terrorists are Muslim? Or that the six nations on the ban list are pretty much the most dangerous and least vetted places in the world?
Although Watson concedes this order “does not facially discriminate for or against any particular religion” and that the government defends it “principally because of its religious neutral text” in that it applies to individuals of all religions in six countries linked to terrorism, yet he blisteringly claims, “The illogic of the Government’s contentions is palpable.”
Of course, as Hans von Spakovsky notes, there actually was some logic in selecting the six countries named in the order: “Three of the countries — Iran, Syria, and Sudan — are listed by the State Department as official sponsors of terrorism, while the other three — Libya, Somalia, and Yemen — were listed as ‘countries of concern’ because of their terrorism problems by Jeh Johnson, Homeland Security secretary under Obama.”
Undoubtedly, had Watson or anyone else scoured the world to find predominantly Christian or Hindu countries that are official sponsors of terrorism, he would have come up empty handed. But facts aside (as they often are when it comes to judicial rulings), for now at least, the order is on hold.
Trump blasted the “terrible” ruling that was “done by a judge for political reasons.” In fact, he said, “The danger is clear, the law is clear, the need for my executive order is clear.”
Meanwhile, the First Amendment isn’t the only one getting attention when it comes to immigration. The Tenth is getting in on the action, too. On Monday, Tennessee became the first state to use the “reserved powers” clause to sue the federal government — not for keeping immigrants out but for forcing refugee resettlement within state borders.
The Tennessean reports, “The lawsuit … alleges that the federal government has violated the 10th Amendment, which says the federal government possesses only the powers delegated to it by the U.S. Constitution and that all other powers are reserved for the states.” It argues that the feds have “unduly forced states to pay for the refugee resettlement program” and “asks the court to force the federal government to stop resettling refugees in Tennessee until all costs associated with the settlement are incurred by the federal government.” The Tennessean reports that in fiscal year 2016, more than 2,000 refugees were resettled in the state.
Of course, Barack Obama, not Donald Trump, ordered the forced resettlement, though as of yet, Trump hasn’t vacated that order. Hence, although filed against the Trump administration, the lawsuit is targeting an Obama-era policy.
It remains to be seen how the court will rule, but if Tennessee wins, perhaps Hawaii will volunteer to take Tennessee’s allotment of refugees. After all, opposition to Trump’s executive order aside, of the nearly 85,000 refugees the U.S. admitted in fiscal year 2016, guess how many the Aloha State took in? Exactly zero.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/48014
Are Sanctuary Cities Safer?
The "sanctuary city" movement is nothing more than a pandering political charade aimed at Hispanic voters — and sanctimonious fellow leftist elites.
By Mark Alexander · March 15, 2017
"The policy or advantage of [immigration] taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the language, habits, and principles good or bad which they bring with them. Whereas by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: in a word, soon become one people." —George Washington (1794)
My interactions with rational liberals (not always an oxymoron) provide a window into how they process "facts," reshaping them to comport with their statist and utopian worldviews.
I had an opportunity to engage one such lefty this week — an acquaintance who's an attorney, and who took strong exception to my characterization of so-called "sanctuary cities" as being more dangerous because they advertise immunity for illegal aliens, thus attracting more violent offenders.
Liberals, of course, become insufferably sanctimonious when advocating for things as ostensibly wonderful as a "sanctuary," but, despite all the "warm and fuzzy feelings," the secret among Democratic Party leaders is that the sanctuary city movement is nothing more than a pandering political charade aimed at Hispanic voters — and sanctimonious fellow leftist elites.
The previous administration's "immigration reform strategy" was designed to fail, because otherwise it would flood the markets of their dwindling union and blue collar constituencies with cheap immigrant labor, and the former would never tolerate the latter. Instead, the policy has always been one of smoke and mirrors: placating Hispanic voters with empty promises of blanket amnesty,
while never losing a constituent by fulfilling that promise.
That notwithstanding, there are now more than 500 sanctuary cities, large and small, all across the United States. That's almost twice the number of a year ago. Not surprisingly, the growth has been driven by opposition to President Donald Trump's commitment to enforce our nation's immigration laws. Consequently, Trump has put those cities on notice, threatening to cut $2.7 billion in federal funding if they refuse to abide by the law.
So, here's how my debate with a big-hearted but light-headed lawyer began.
Last week, a friend was on his way home to our mountain community outside of Chattanooga. He stopped at a hardware store for some supplies, and when he returned to his vehicle in broad daylight, he was subjected to aggravated kidnapping (at gunpoint) and robbery. A local gang thug forced my friend into his vehicle for an "ATM joyride" — after stealing the money in his wallet, the thug forced him to drive to a nearby money machine and withdraw hundreds of dollars. My friend kept his calm, though, and was later released without bodily harm.
My friend, a physician and man of strong faith who had no option to fend off the armed assailant, told the gang member at the end of the ordeal as the offender left his car, "I will be praying for you — and this story is not over." The gang member was later arrested, and I suspect the next chapter of this story will likely be my friend's role in leading the offender to the transformation of God's grace — behind bars.
But the first chapter of this story — which now occurs with alarming regularity across our country — could have ended in violence and tragedy. Indeed, most gang violence occurred between gang members a few years ago, but it is now metastasizing into frequent violence against citizens who have nothing to do with gangs.
According to the FBI's most recent Uniform Crime Reports (2015), there were 1,197,704 violent crimes, up 3.9% from 2014 — a trend that started several years earlier after Barack Obama initiated his war on cops.
That violence, which is erupting across the U.S., is part of Obama's failed legacy.
For the record, my home state of Tennessee ranks near the top of conservative states. Overall, conservative principles have put our state at the top of many lists, including economic growth and freedom indexes. Just this week, our state initiated a lawsuit against the federal government rejecting Obama's leftover Middle Eastern migrant resettlement plans, citing violation of the Tenth Amendment as the basis of its complaint. (Yes, they are migrants, not refugees, according to the UN's own accounting of the mass migration.)
However, our urban centers have been subject to the same social entropy and blight that afflicts other cities under Democrat "leadership." And the most costly measure of that blight is violent crime.
Memphis is ranked #4 on the list of most dangerous cities nationwide, and now Chattanooga is moving to the top of the ratings for violent cities with populations under 200,000.
Chattanooga's gang violence has increased significantly in the last four years under its inept and philandering Democrat mayor, Andy Berke. Despite that increase, just ahead of the recent election Berke announced his support for the faux sanctuary city parade, most assuredly giving violent crime a boost.
On that latter assertion, my lib lawyer acquaintance insisted that sanctuary cities are safer than other cities, citing a study by the leftist Annenberg Public Policy Center.
Well, not exactly. I responded that the study primarily cited crime-rate comparison by immigrants and non-immigrant populations, not illegal aliens.
He responded with another study from the Cato Institute on immigration and crime. But this study also primarily cited crime-rate comparison by immigrants versus non-immigrant populations, not illegal aliens. In fact, the Cato study concluded with this caveat: "Note on Illegal Immigration — The public focus is on the crime rates of unauthorized or illegal immigrants. The research papers above mostly include all immigrants regardless of legal status."
Now, I would agree with research findings that legal immigrants are less likely to commit criminal acts than some indigenous racial or ethnic groups — particularly poor blacks and Hispanics who've been enslaved by generations of leftist statist policies on what amount to urban poverty plantations.
I then advised the lawyer that I wasn't basing my conclusion about crime and sanctuary cities on political rhetoric from the either end of the spectrum but on the facts — and the fact is that in almost all declared sanctuary cities, violence is growing rapidly.
For example, in 2015, in one of the nation's largest sanctuary cities, Los Angeles, violent crime was up 19.9%: homicides up 10.2%, shootings up 12.6%, rapes up 8.6%, robberies up 12.3% and aggravated assault up 27.5%.
Of course, we have covered the explosion of violent crime in the most celebrated of sanctuary cities, Chicago, under its inept Democrat mayor, Rahm Emanuel.
But these grim statistics alone don't prove that the increase in violence is due to criminal aliens, primarily because the Obama administration intentionally scrubbed federal criminal records of data that would identify assailants as criminal aliens versus U.S. residents. But one GAO study from 2011 did sneak through, and it indicated that the percentage of criminal aliens in U.S. prisons is disproportionate to the estimated percentage of illegal aliens in America.
However, this does prove my case: I have spoken with federal and state law enforcement command line personnel across the nation — they are my first-hand sources on illegal aliens and crime — and they consistently make two declarations about violent crime:
The perpetrators of 95% of violence in major sanctuary cities are associated with gangs and/or drugs networks.
The most violent gang and drug networks have been infiltrated by criminal aliens.
It is no coincidence that in the nation's largest "sanctuary city," New York, it was announced this week that 10 of the 14 members of the MS-13 gang, who were indicted for the brutal murder of two teenage girls in neighboring Suffolk County, are criminal aliens.
Finally, I asked my acquaintance to view this video message from Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones to Barack Obama, after two deputies, Danny Oliver and Michael Davis, were murdered by an illegal immigrant on Obama's watch.
The deputies' widows, Jessica Davis and Susan Oliver, were in the gallery for Trump's February address to Congress. "Their husbands," said Trump, "were slain in the line of duty in California. They were pillars of their community. These brave men were viciously gunned down by an illegal immigrant with a criminal record and two prior deportations. Sitting with Susan is her daughter, Jenna. Jenna, I want you to know that your father was a hero, and that tonight you have the love of an entire country supporting you and praying for you."
Notably, a colleague who recently retired after a career in both military and federal civilian law enforcement had this suggestion for political leaders refusing to enforce our nation's immigration laws in their jurisdictions: "Any state or local government leaders inviting illegal aliens into their 'sanctuary cities' should lose the qualified immunity normally granted to government officials acting under color of law, thus leaving them open to civil suits from the victims (or survivors of victims) of the violent crimes committed in those jurisdictions by illegal aliens."
Now, removing that legal liability limitation would be a Trump executive order that would give pandering sanctuary city politicians reason to reconsider.
While there are police chiefs who oppose deportation, the basis for most of those objections (those not politically motivated to appease a mayor) is concern about the increased threat to their officers resulting from interactions with offenders who are criminal aliens.
And a final note: There is some good news on the illegal migration from south of the border. Whether you approve of Donald Trump's border enforcement policies or not, his commitment to enforce Rule of Law has already had a dramatic effect on illegal border crossings. According to Secretary of Homeland Security John F. Kelly, in the first month of this year, "the flow of illegal border crossings as measured by apprehensions and the prevention of inadmissible persons at our southern border dropped by 40 percent."
https://patriotpost.us/alexander/48000
CAR TROUBLE
A blonde pushes her BMW into a gas station. She tells the mechanic it died.
After he works on it for a few minutes, it is idling smoothly.
She says, “What's the story?”
He replies, “Just crap in the carburetor.”
She asks, “How often do I have to do that?”
SPEEDING TICKET
A police officer stops a blonde for speeding and asks her very nicely if he could see her driver’s license.
She replied in a huff, “I wish you guys would get your act together! Just yesterday they took my license away and now today you expect me to show it to you?”
AT THE DOCTOR'S OFFICE
A gorgeous young redhead goes into the doctor's office and said that her body hurt wherever she touched it.
“Impossible!” says the doctor. “Show me.”
The redhead took her finger, pushed on her left shoulder and screamed, she pushed her elbow and screamed even more.
She pushed her knee and screamed; likewise she pushed her ankle and screamed.
Everywhere she touched made her scream.
The doctor said, “You're not really a redhead, are you?”
“Well, no,” she said, “I'm actually a blonde.”
“I thought so,” the doctor said, “Your finger is broken.”
KNITTING
A Highway patrolman pulled alongside a speeding car on the freeway. Glancing at the car, he was astounded to see that the blonde behind the wheel was knitting! Realizing that she was oblivious to his flashing lights and siren, the trooper cranked down his window, turned on his bullhorn and yelled, “PULL OVER!”
“NO!” the blonde yelled back, “IT'S A SCARF!”
BLONDE ON TIME
A girl was visiting her blonde friend, who had acquired two new dogs, and asked her what their names were.
The blonde responded by saying that one was named “Rolex” and one was named “Timex”.
Her friend said, “Whoever heard of someone naming dogs like that?”
“Helllooooo...! ,” answered the blonde. “They're watchdogs.”
FINALLY
In the swim-meet, after the blond came in last competing in the breast-stroke, she complained to the judges that all the other girls were using their arms.
Remember Niall is a Brit whose wife is Nigerian living in the Netherlands with a fatwa on her. He has his perspective from his British, Euro experiences. He, his wife and daughter recently moved to the states permanently to get away from real death threats in London. His strengths are Brexit, the European surrender to Islam and the daily increasing risk in England and throughout Europe.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/8770965/Henry-Kissinger-watches-historian-Niall-Ferguson-marry-Ayaan-Hirsi-Ali-under-a-fatwa.html
He's on our team. Personally, I like all perspectives, it shows us who are the ones to resist.
To each American administration, its war. Which will be Donald Trump’s?
There is good reason to fear it could be the Second Korean War, with craziness in North Korea and chaos in the South. Or it could be yet another quagmire in the Middle East. Trump’s most excitable critics keep warning that World War III will happen on his watch. But I am more worried about Cyber War I — especially as it has already begun.
Last week’s cyberattack was just the latest directed against the United States by WikiLeaks: the release of an enormous cache of documents stolen from the Central Intelligence Agency. To visit the WikiLeaks website is to enter the trophy room of what might be called Cyberia. Here is the “Hillary Clinton Email Archive,” there are “The Podesta Emails.” Not all the leaked documents are American, to be sure. But you will look in vain for leaks calculated to embarrass the Russian government. Julian Assange may still skulk in the Ecuadorean embassy in London. But the reality is that he lives in Cyberia, an honored guest of President Vladimir Putin.
In Washington they are worried, and with good reason. “We’re at a tipping point,” according to Admiral Michael S. Rogers, head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command. Cyber activities are now number one on the director of national intelligence’s list of threats. This is not just about WikiLeaks. The Pentagon alone reports more than 10 million attempts at intrusion each day.
In recent years, the United States has found itself under cyberattack from Iran, North Korea, and China. Yet these attacks were directed against companies (notably Sony Pictures), not the US government. Last year, using WikiLeaks and the Romanian blogger “Guccifer 2.0” as proxies, the Kremlin launched a sustained assault on the American political system itself.
Let’s leave aside the question of whether or not the Russian interference decided the election in favor of Donald Trump. The critical point is that Moscow was undeterred. For specialists in national security, this is only one of many features of cyberwar that are perplexing. Accustomed to the elegant theories of “mutually assured destruction” that evolved during the Cold War, they are struggling to develop a doctrine for an entirely different form of conflict, in which there are countless potential attackers and multiple gradations of destructiveness.
For Joseph Nye of Harvard’s Kennedy School, deterrence may be salvageable, but that can only be true now if the United States is prepared to make an example of an aggressor. The three alternative options Nye proposes are simply to ramp up cyber security, to try to “entangle” potential aggressors in trade and other relationships (so as to raise the cost of cyberattacks to them), or to establish global taboos against cyber like the ones that have (mostly) held against biological and chemical weapons.
Nye’s analysis is not very comforting. Given the sheer number of cyber aggressors, defense seems doomed to lag behind offense. And the Russians have proved themselves to be indifferent to both entanglement and taboos, even if China seems more amenable to Nye’s approach.
How scared should we be of Cyberia? For Princeton’s Anne-Marie Slaughter, our hyper-networked world is, on balance, a benign place and the “United States . . . will gradually find the golden mean of network power.” At the other extreme is Joshua Cooper Ramo, whose book “The Seventh Sense” argues for the erection of real and virtual “gates” to shut out the Russians and other malefactors. But Ramo himself quotes the three rules of computer security devised by the NSA cryptographer Robert Morris Sr.: “RULE ONE: Do not own a computer. RULE TWO: Do not power it on. RULE THREE: Do not use it.” If we all ignore those rules, how will any gates keep out the likes of Assange?
An intellectual arms race is on to devise a viable doctrine of cybersecurity. My ten cents’ worth is that those steeped in the traditional thinking of national security will not come up with it. A realistic goal is not to deter attacks or retaliate against them but to regulate all the various networks on which our society depends so that they are resilient — or, better still, “anti-fragile,” a term coined by Nassim Taleb to describe a system that grows stronger under attack.
Those, like Taleb, who inhabit the world of financial risk
management, saw in 2008 just how fragile the international financial network was: The failure of a single investment bank nearly brought the whole system of global credit to its knees. The rest of us have now caught up with the bankers and traders; we are all now as interconnected as they were nine years ago.
Like the financial network, our social and business networks are under constant attack from fools and knaves, and there is nothing we can do to stop them. The most we can do is design and build our networks so that the ravages of Cyberia cannot trigger a complete outage.
Donald Trump’s war has already begun: It is Cyber War I. Like all wars, its first casualty was truth. Unlike other wars, it will have no last casualty, as it is a war without end. Get used to it. Or get rid of your computer.
Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2017/03/13/cyber-war-has-already-begun/dYE1vkpT1W3zKdhjxwH1QP/story.html
http://us1.campaign-archive2.com/?u=de744b88c98cf7f8a268b1808&id=0cb9e7ed49&e=81a468bcc5
Pins tell a story......
Amen............
And Justice will come to those who manipulate the stock.
Insight: "Any man who tries to incite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect to do so in the interest of the class he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainty that class's own worst enemy." —Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
Nailed it: "Replacing Obamacare is complicated. There are trade-offs. Somebody's going to walk away convinced they got a bad deal. Even worse, whenever a legislator has the courage to tell the public that trade-offs and compromises are necessary, a political challenger will insist that it is not, that it represents lawmakers being stupid, or spineless, or selling out. ... [I]t is very easy to promise a better health-care system with no compromises and trade-offs; it is pretty much impossible to deliver it." —Jim Geraghty
Upright: "[T]he preferred free-market plan for health care policy should be no plan whatsoever. The idea that we need a federal top-down strategy to manage a huge chunk of the economy is at the very heart of the problem. We don't need a federal plan for health care. Yet Republicans have allowed liberals to frame the entire health insurance debate in these anti-market terms." —David Harsanyi
Braying Jenny: "[Republicans] don't want the American people to see the facts. They're always afraid of the facts. It's just a remarkable thing." —Nancy Pelosi
Busted: "Since 2012, The Fact Checker warned against politicians from language that implies women get mammograms at Planned Parenthood clinics. ... [Chuck] Schumer's claim is problematic because it says 'millions of women' turn to Planned Parenthood for 'mammograms, maternity care, cancer screenings & more.' He greatly exaggerates the universe of women who rely on Planned Parenthood for mammograms." —The Washington Post awarding Schumer Three Pinocchios
Non Compos Mentis: "My moral compass is in my vagina." —actress Cate Blanchett
And last... "Barbra Streisand says Trump-caused stress is making her fat. No word yet on what's making her stupid." —Twitter satirist @weknowwhatsbest
https://patriotpost.us/digests/47918
Without 'leaks', we would never know what's going on. Too bad we have so many tailored for specific outcomes that we have to wade through them to find the truth.
The Real Problem With WikiLeaks
To these anti-American clowns, no leak is a bad leak.
Allyne Caan · Mar. 9, 2017
This week’s WikiLeaks bombshell has the Central Intelligence Agency scrambling, conspiracy theorists conspiring, and Edward Snowden undoubtedly smiling with glee.
It should also have every American concerned — very concerned.
In Tuesday’s release of 8,761 documents and files stolen from the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, WikiLeaks claims to have uncovered how the CIA hacks into devices including smartphones, smart TVs, and computer operating systems. What’s more, the leak also appears to show the CIA can carry out hacking activities while making it appear the breach came from another country.
Commenting on the leak, infamous NSA leaker Snowden tweeted that it’s “genuinely a big deal.” If the leaked information proves authentic, he’s right, unfortunately.
As the Wall Street Journal explains, if authenticated, the leak “would be one of the biggest breaches in the spy agency’s history. … [While] Mr. Snowden’s leaks revealed names of programs, companies that assist the NSA in surveillance and in some cases the targets of American spying … the recent leak purports to contain highly technical details about how surveillance is carried out. … In one sense, Mr. Snowden provided a briefing book on U.S. surveillance, but the CIA leaks could provide the blueprints.”
Americans should be alarmed for several reasons.
First, to leakers like Snowden and WikiLeaks Founder-in-Hiding Julian Assange, there is no such thing as an inappropriate leak. WikiLeaks has no desire to discern between what should be released and what shouldn’t. The Snowdens and Assanges out there may think they’re going to change the world by indiscriminately dumping sensitive data, but they are not friends of America, and they’re endangering lives. It’s one thing to hold our government accountable; it’s quite another to reveal to our nation’s enemies our national security tactics and methods.
Indeed, as the Journal reports, “The exposure, if genuine, is likely to disrupt or halt many ongoing intelligence operations … and could implicate the CIA in past operations, including some that might be under investigation in foreign countries where the agency was spying.”
As long as WikiLeaks is able recklessly to release national security secrets, Americans should be both concerned and outraged.
Second, this latest leak once again casts extreme doubt on our government’s ability to handle information in a way that protects Americans' rights. As Reason’s Scott Shackford writes, beyond the nuts and bolts of what was leaked the fact that anything was leaked is the problem: “That our intelligence agencies cannot expect to keep their practices secret from the public at large (and other nations) should influence policy decisions on how much information they collect and how they prioritize infiltrating devices over revealing security risks.”
According to Reuters, U.S. officials are looking at contractors as the possible source of the breach, with one official saying the number of contractors with access to highly secret information has “exploded” as a result of budget limitations.
Yet, if the CIA, NSA and other security agencies have classified tools for spying on America’s enemies, these agencies have a deep responsibility to ensure these tools are not leaked and made available to those very enemies.
In this regard, we actually agree wholeheartedly with Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein, who noted, “[Y]ou have to be loyal to America to work for an intelligence agency, otherwise don’t do it.”
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the leak once again raises the question of whether the government should be able to carry out mass surveillance in the first place. Granted, in the latest leak, reports have not indicated the CIA used any of these tools against Americans, but one of the reasons we objected to the NSA’s mass surveillance was we didn’t trust the Obama administration to handle the information in a way that protected Americans' rights.
A change in administration shouldn’t change our wariness of government’s ability to collect and retain massive amounts of information on Americans — which, incidentally, they can do this very minute. Indeed, if we are to remain vigilant about our rights, we should not fully trust any administration, regardless of party label, to spy on Americans.
As John Adams so presciently noted, “The only Maxim of a free Government, ought to be to trust no Man living, with Power to endanger the public Liberty.”
https://patriotpost.us/articles/47889
The Real Problem With WikiLeaks
To these anti-American clowns, no leak is a bad leak.
Allyne Caan · Mar. 9, 2017
This week’s WikiLeaks bombshell has the Central Intelligence Agency scrambling, conspiracy theorists conspiring, and Edward Snowden undoubtedly smiling with glee.
It should also have every American concerned — very concerned.
In Tuesday’s release of 8,761 documents and files stolen from the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, WikiLeaks claims to have uncovered how the CIA hacks into devices including smartphones, smart TVs, and computer operating systems. What’s more, the leak also appears to show the CIA can carry out hacking activities while making it appear the breach came from another country.
Commenting on the leak, infamous NSA leaker Snowden tweeted that it’s “genuinely a big deal.” If the leaked information proves authentic, he’s right, unfortunately.
As the Wall Street Journal explains, if authenticated, the leak “would be one of the biggest breaches in the spy agency’s history. … [While] Mr. Snowden’s leaks revealed names of programs, companies that assist the NSA in surveillance and in some cases the targets of American spying … the recent leak purports to contain highly technical details about how surveillance is carried out. … In one sense, Mr. Snowden provided a briefing book on U.S. surveillance, but the CIA leaks could provide the blueprints.”
Americans should be alarmed for several reasons.
First, to leakers like Snowden and WikiLeaks Founder-in-Hiding Julian Assange, there is no such thing as an inappropriate leak. WikiLeaks has no desire to discern between what should be released and what shouldn’t. The Snowdens and Assanges out there may think they’re going to change the world by indiscriminately dumping sensitive data, but they are not friends of America, and they’re endangering lives. It’s one thing to hold our government accountable; it’s quite another to reveal to our nation’s enemies our national security tactics and methods.
Indeed, as the Journal reports, “The exposure, if genuine, is likely to disrupt or halt many ongoing intelligence operations … and could implicate the CIA in past operations, including some that might be under investigation in foreign countries where the agency was spying.”
As long as WikiLeaks is able recklessly to release national security secrets, Americans should be both concerned and outraged.
Second, this latest leak once again casts extreme doubt on our government’s ability to handle information in a way that protects Americans' rights. As Reason’s Scott Shackford writes, beyond the nuts and bolts of what was leaked the fact that anything was leaked is the problem: “That our intelligence agencies cannot expect to keep their practices secret from the public at large (and other nations) should influence policy decisions on how much information they collect and how they prioritize infiltrating devices over revealing security risks.”
According to Reuters, U.S. officials are looking at contractors as the possible source of the breach, with one official saying the number of contractors with access to highly secret information has “exploded” as a result of budget limitations.
Yet, if the CIA, NSA and other security agencies have classified tools for spying on America’s enemies, these agencies have a deep responsibility to ensure these tools are not leaked and made available to those very enemies.
In this regard, we actually agree wholeheartedly with Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein, who noted, “[Y]ou have to be loyal to America to work for an intelligence agency, otherwise don’t do it.”
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the leak once again raises the question of whether the government should be able to carry out mass surveillance in the first place. Granted, in the latest leak, reports have not indicated the CIA used any of these tools against Americans, but one of the reasons we objected to the NSA’s mass surveillance was we didn’t trust the Obama administration to handle the information in a way that protected Americans' rights.
A change in administration shouldn’t change our wariness of government’s ability to collect and retain massive amounts of information on Americans — which, incidentally, they can do this very minute. Indeed, if we are to remain vigilant about our rights, we should not fully trust any administration, regardless of party label, to spy on Americans.
As John Adams so presciently noted, “The only Maxim of a free Government, ought to be to trust no Man living, with Power to endanger the public Liberty.”
https://patriotpost.us/articles/47889
The Faking News Fakers: 'Wiretaps? What Wiretaps?'
By Mark Alexander
Mar. 8, 2017
“But the fact being once established, that the press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood, I leave to others to restore it to its strength, by recalling it within the pale of truth. Within that, it is a noble institution, equally the friend of science and of civil liberty.” —Thomas Jefferson
Despite all the fake media hysterics, keeping the “Trump and Putin rigged the election” myth alive has nothing to do with facts. But it has everything to do with delegitimizing Trump’s stunning victory, keeping his administration off-balance and derailing his agenda.
As usual, leftists and their media sycophants never let facts get in the way of a political hatchet job.
Last weekend, Donald Trump tweeted a sensational claim — that the Obama administration tapped his phones during the 2016 presidential campaign between Trump and BO’s corrupt heir-apparent, Hillary Clinton1. The Democrats' public relations department, a.k.a. the mainstream media, responded with howls that there was no evidence of any wiretaps, much less evidence Obama knew about any wiretaps — just more Trump paranoid hysteria.
However, Patriot Post editor Thomas Gallatin provided a heap of evidentiary substance2 for Trump’s claims, given that news of wiretaps3 on senior Trump leadership, while Obama was in office, had been widely affirmed by the same Leftmedia outlets now denying Trump’s claims about wiretaps. Some of the more notable MSM print and talkinghead “journalists” even cited these wiretaps as sources for their “reports” on Trump.
Gallatin pointed out that the MSM was “disingenuously dismissive” in rejecting Trump’s charge, especially given that an initial request to wiretap Trump’s team was turned down by the FISAC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court), but subsequent requests were granted4.
Allow me to elaborate.
In June 2016, after Trump had clinched the Republican nomination, Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch tried to meet secretly with Bill Clinton5 on a tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. A few days later, after a visit to the White House, Lynch’s Department of Justice asked the FISAC for wiretaps not just for communication devices in Trump’s office but specifically for Trump’s phones.
This request never would have been submitted without Lynch’s consent, which she never would have given without Obama’s consent. (If only the NSA could produce a transcript of that conversation.)
While FISAC most often rubber stamps requests, the court denied the Obama administration’s first request because it was a fishing expedition based on speculation of criminal activity.
On 21 July Trump became the Republican nominee. A week later, The Washington Post and other media outlets began propagating the Trump/Putin collusion myth6.
In October, a month ahead of the presidential election, looking for any shred of evidence that might corroborate the myth, Obama’s Department of Justice again asked FISAC for wiretap warrants for Trump’s office, this time (according to our sources) omitting Trump’s name specifically and making the request on broad speculation about national security concerns. FISAC approved that request, and since such permissions apply, by extension, to others mentioned in the intercepted communications, we may fairly assume that Trump’s name was mentioned and, consequently, his lines were monitored.
Recall if you will that a week before the election, Hillary Clinton posted this social media message: “Computer scientists have uncovered a covert server linking the Trump organization to a Russian-based server.”
Huh? Did she mean the “scientists” at the Department of Justice?
Was she confusing this with the discovery of her own “covert servers7”?
In fact, no such evidence of the Russian link has been discovered.
Sidebar: However, there were direct links between Tony Podesta, brother of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and Russians, who paid him more than $170,000 for six months of “consulting” to influence Clinton and ensure, once elected, she would reduce the sanctions Obama was compelled to impose after Putin invaded Ukraine. His firm was paid $24 million in fees in 2016, mostly from foreign interests.
Back to the media’s now-acute case of wiretap amnesia — they now insist that Trump’s wiretap accusations have no merit.
Allow me to direct your attention to a headline on the front page of The New York Times on Inauguration Day, January 20th, which boldly cites Trump wiretaps as its source for information regarding assertions about collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign leadership team.
According to Times writer Michael Schmidt, “American law-enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broader investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President elect Donald J Trump. … The FBI is leading the investigations, aided by the National Security Agency, the CIA and the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit. … The investigators have accelerated their efforts in recent weeks but have found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing. [So, why is this front-page news on Inauguration Day?] One official said intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House.”
Got that? Again, “some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House” — while Obama was still in office.
This week, the same Times writer, Michael Schmidt, under the headline “Trump Offering No Evidence,” asserts that Trump “accused former President Barack Obama of tapping his phones at Trump Tower the month before the election, leveling the explosive allegation without offering any evidence.”
The same “no evidence” headlines were atop The Washington Post and other MSM outlets.
For the record, while Trump’s social media wiretap messages were intended to imply that Obama had knowledge of the wiretaps, as is too often the case with such “loosely worded messaging,” he provided the MSM yet another “huge” opening to focus on the fallacy of his “literal message.”
Frankly, all of us should be able to take the literal words of a United States president posted on social media, literally. There is now a predictable MSM blowup pattern9 when Trump’s version of literal departs from the rest of the world’s reality, and these self-inflicted wounds continue to cost him precious political capital.
In this instance, the MSM used his literal messages to divert from the questionable legality of the wiretaps and their propagation of the Trump/Putin myth, and focus instead on the fact there is currently no evidence of Obama fingerprints on, or knowledge of, those wiretaps — even though Schmidt wrote in January that the wiretapped communications were provided to the White House while Obama was in office.
Let me reiterate: The July and October wiretap requests never would have been submitted without Lynch’s consent, which she never would have given without Obama’s consent. But there will likely be no fingerprints or electronic trail on these consents. Obama’s staff would have most certainly ensured that he had “plausible deniability” in regard to any knowledge of politically motivated wiretaps.
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey concludes, “I think [Trump is] right in that there was surveillance and that it was conducted at the behest of the attorney general — at the Justice Department.” But proving it is another matter.
That notwithstanding, there is plenty of reason for anyone with an ounce of healthy skepticism to conclude, with high probability, that Trump’s communications were intercepted and, with a reasonable level of confidence, that Obama was aware of those wiretaps.
Of course, the first victim within Trump’s administration to be felled by these “non-existent wiretaps” — orchestrated and illegally released by some yet-to-be determined government hack while Obama was in office — was Trump’s nominee for National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
Flynn, as you may recall, was the most vocal former high-ranking military officer who opposed Obama’s nefarious “Iran Nuke Deal10,” which is precisely what put him in the sights of Obama’s deep state operatives11 who remain within the FBI and/or CIA.
After his confirmation in January, Flynn was bushwhacked with a complicated web of media accusations based on wiretap transcripts, which were illegally distributed to Obama-friendly MSM outlets.
Though the Flynn transcripts12 indicated no wrongdoing, in February he fell on his own sword13 and resigned in order to minimize the collateral political damage to the Trump administration. (For the record, the CIA and the Departments of Justice and Treasury are now being sued by Judicial Watch14, on behalf of Flynn, to see whose fingerprints are on those wiretaps.)
Amid the wiretap wars this week, you may have missed this conclusion about the Trump/Putin election collusion from former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. According to Clapper, there wasn’t “any evidence” found by the CIA or FBI in their investigations that would indicate “any reflection of
collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians.”
The New York Times conceded as much in January and again in February, so why was this a front-page headline story?
But as noted previously, the Leftmedia never let facts get in the way of a political hit piece — until they’re caught in a BIG propaganda lie15. In the light of truth, the political cockroaches scurry for cover.
Andrew McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. attorney and respected legal analyst, summarized the lie16: “The specter of an investigation — breathless media reports of FISA-court applications, wiretaps, surveillance of agents of a foreign power, and mysterious servers; painstaking analysis of shady financial transactions involving Russian banks and funding streams — seems to make the outlandish conspiracy impossible to dismiss out of hand.”
McCarthy continued, “Into this misleading ‘Russia hacked the election’ narrative, the press and the Dems injected a second explosive allegation: Not only did Russia hack the election, but there are also enough ties between people in the Trump orbit and operatives of the Putin regime that there are grounds to believe that the Trump campaign was complicit in Russia’s hacking of the election. Transparently, the aim is to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s election victory.”
As for the Leftmedia retreat, McCarthy notes16, “Now that they’ve been called on it, the media and Democrats are gradually retreating from the investigation they’ve been touting for months as the glue for their conspiracy theory. It’s actually quite amusing to watch: How dare you suggest President Obama would ever order surveillance! Who said anything about FISAC orders? What evidence do you lunatic conservatives have — uh, other than what we media professionals been reporting — that there was any investigation of the Trump campaign?”
Constitutional attorney Mark Levin, former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan’s17 Attorney General Edwin Meese, asserts18 that while “No evidence is found” tying Trump or anyone on his team to Russia, “the wiretaps continue.”
Levin concludes, “The issue isn’t whether the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign or transition of surrogates; the issue is the extent of it.”
Which leads me back to my original assertion: The Trump/Putin myth being propagated by the Democrats19 and their Leftmedia propagandists has nothing to do with facts and everything to do with derailing Trump’s agenda. However, Trump’s social media messages are certainly assisting their cause.
Footnote: Unfortunately, some of the “conservative media,” most notably Fox News, are reading off the same Beltway memos being broadcast by the Leftmedia — but then they also have advertising to sell… Fox News now has a lower rating for “somewhat credible” and higher rating for “not credible” than CNN, according to recent news credibility polling20.
Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertas — 1776
https://patriotpost.us/alexander/47871
They are a breed apart from the rest of us.
The Ancient Laws of Unintended Consequences
Eight years of a fawning press have made the Left reckless.
By Victor Davis Hanson — March 7, 2017
The classical idea of a divine Nemesis (“reckoning” or “downfall”) that brings unforeseen retribution for hubris (insolence and arrogance) was a recognition that there are certain laws of the universe that operated independently of human concerns.
Call Nemesis a goddess. But it was also simply an empirical observation about collective and predictable human behavior: Excess invites unexpected correction.
Something like hubris incurring Nemesis is now following the frenzied progressive effort to nullify the Trump presidency.
Fake News
“Fake news” was a term the Left invented to describe the ancient practice of propaganda (updated in the Internet age to drive Web traffic). They applied it to the supposed Russian habit of planting international news stories to affect Western elections, and in particular Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency and his tendencies to exaggerate and massage the truth.
But once the term caught on in our faddish age, who were the more appropriate media fakers? Fake news now serves as a sort of linguistic canary to remind the public that it is customarily saturated with a lethal gas of media disinformation.
Thus “fake news” seemed a proper if belated summation and clarification of years of liberal bias in the media that were supposed to be our custodian of the truth.
Were NBC anchor Brian Williams’s fantasies fake news? Were Dan Rather’s “fake but accurate” Rathergate memos? How about the party line circulated in JournoList or the Washington and New York reporters who colluded to massage the news to favor the Clinton campaign, as revealed in the Podesta WikiLeaks trove? Was jailing a video maker part of an Obama-administration fake-news attempt to blame Benghazi deaths on a spontaneous riot? Was the Iran Deal’s “echo chamber,” about which Ben Rhodes later bragged, the epitome of fake news?
Thank the Left, because suddenly the term “fake news” is becoming a common description of the media’s effort to suggest that Trump once went to Moscow to frolic with prostitutes, that his lawyer met Russians in Prague, that he removed Martin Luther King’s bust from the Oval Office, that he was going to employ “100,000” guardsmen to enforce immigration law, or that he wished to invade Mexico.
The once liberal invention of the term “fake news” now mostly refers to media efforts by leftists to warp the Trump presidency; to progressive media celebrities who have been caught lying, colluding, or plagiarizing; and to the cohort of unapologetically left-wing journalists who, in the words of Obama White House operative Ben Rhodes, “know nothing” and thus are easily manipulated by their progressive political puppeteers.
Fake Crimes?
Is “fake news” also the proper description for nonfactual accounts
of “hate crimes,” an increasingly percentage of which prove to be pure inventions (at the University of Louisiana, in North Carolina, in Santa Monica, etc.) fabricated to accord the “victim” media attention, compensation, or sympathy?
Or does “fake news” define the supposed epidemic of campus sexual assault, which in all too many cases involves the university’s suspension of due process and constitutional guarantees for the male accused — who is sometimes accused because he engaged in consensual sexual relations with a female student and then socially rejected her, or because he failed to stay monogamous? In other words, “sexual assault” is now redefined down to the crime of unenjoyable sexual congress, or of males proving post facto to be insincere lotharios or unreceptive cads.
Illegal Immigration Really Is Illegality
Illegal immigration offers another Nemesis moment. Media outrage now surrounds almost every effort by ICE authorities to detain an illegal alien on deportation lists compiled during the Obama administration. Activists, Democratic politicians, and Mexico itself allege that the Trump administration is hounding the blameless, as if there were neither immigration law nor a concept of deportation for violations of it.
But usually in every media report of a victimized illegal alien, one also finds buried incidental information showing that the detainee had previously been convicted for such crimes as drunk driving, or had engaged in voting fraud, or had committed identity theft or falsified a government document, or had failed to show up for a prior deportation hearing.
All that the progressive frenzy over deportation seems to be doing is drawing attention to the quite surprising number of foreign guests who continue to live here illegally even though they have prior criminal convictions. How odd that the public is now learning that the Left apparently sees identity theft as a minor matter for illegal aliens, though a serious one for citizens. And how strange to witness entitled guests showing outrage at the possibility that they might not be allowed to enter and reside in the U.S. illegally and then commit crimes without having to worry about endangering their already illegal-resident status.
The Russian Can of Worms
In the latter months of the 2016 campaign, the Clinton team floated the narrative that Trump was colluding with Russian president Vladimir Putin, who in turn was engineering leaks to increase Trump’s unlikely chance of becoming president.
At first, alleging Russian collusion with Trump was a strange strategy, given that Hillary Clinton herself, as the primary agent for the Obama-administration outreach to Putin, had pushed the red Russian reset button in Geneva. And it was quite an outreach: the shelving of long-established plans to build missile-defense shields in Eastern Europe, the open
-mic promise by Obama to be more flexible with Putin after Obama’s reelection, the anemic response to the de facto annexation of the Crimea and eastern Ukraine, the constant trashing of the Bush administration as too harsh on Russia, and the ridicule showered on Mitt Romney for his supposed naïveté in naming Russia as America’s “Number One geopolitical foe.” In addition, the Trump plans of encouraging domestic oil production, updating strategic weapons, and beefing up the defense budget were not agendas conducive to Russian interests. Their Obama antitheses were.
In addition, while the media and progressives were floating the Trump-Russian connection, it was also clear that there were all sorts of shady elements to the story that would not appear favorable to either Clinton or Obama — from the Uranium One mess, which saw concessions given by Hillary Clinton’s State Department to Russian companies buying North American uranium, to Clinton operative John Podesta’s own investments in Russian oil concerns.
Worse, the subject of election-time courting of Russia suddenly reopened the question of past Democratic electioneering gymnastics with foreign powers, such as Ted Kennedy’s efforts in 1984 to have the Russians’ help in undermining Ronald Reagan’s reelection chances, or Bill Clinton’s 1996 campaign-finance connections with China, or the Obama-designated officials’ contact, before they assumed office in 2009, with their foreign counterparts.
But Nemesis was not done. It is now reported that the Obama administration during the campaign went to a FISA court to tap the communications of Trump-campaign officials and unofficial supporters. FISA applications are almost never rejected (and never leaked), but the court rebuffed this one in June 2016, ostensibly for insufficient cause. Ostensibly it is also unprecedented for a sitting president’s administration to order surveillance of campaign personnel of an opposite party before an upcoming election — a fact suggesting that Obama-administration officials may have assumed that a grateful shoo-in successor Clinton Justice Department would not worry greatly about such interference.
News reports further suggested that a frustrated Obama administration may have tried again as the campaign heated up in October 2016, may have found a more sympathetic judge, and may on the second try have begun widely tapping Trump-campaign officials.
In addition, the Obama administration after eight years in power suddenly and deliberately expanded the number of people granted access to such surveillance, apparently in the hope (which soon proved correct) that greater dissemination would increase the likelihood of illegal leaks that in turn would embarrass Trump.
Perhaps from such intelligence leaks, the media reported that Jeff Sessions, Trump’s attorney general, had met in his office with the Russian ambassador, a supposed contradiction of his Senate testimony.
But then Nemesis again appeared. It turned out that almost everyone in Washington — especially Sessions’s Democratic accusers — had met with the Russians (most commonly Democratic senators and representatives in the spirit of the Obama-reset age).
Indeed, Sergey Kislyak was on every Democratic powerbroker’s A list and traveled throughout the United States to meetings and conferences — as part of accustomed outreach. Journalists had apparently forgotten that Russian officials were frequent guests at the Obama White House, a logical consequence of the then-current media narrative that cowboy George Bush had provoked Putin’s Russia, which in turn required a sober and judicious Barack Obama to calm down the class cut-up Putin and educate the macho former KGB officer about why American and Russia were in fact friends rather than enemies.
Finally, after Democrats, Obama officials, and the media massaged the leaks from surveillance of Team Trump, in Samson-like fashion, Trump pulled down the temple on everyone — by tweeting groundbreaking but unsupported accusations that a sitting president of the United States and his team were the catalysts for such unlawful tapping. Apparently, he reckoned that the liberal conversation would therefore turn defensive rather than accusatory. If the progressive media and intelligence agencies were hand-in-glove leaking damaging rumors about Trump, and if none were yet substantiated, then the issue reversed and turned instead on a new question: How were they trafficking in confidential intelligence information if not from skullduggery of some sort? No wonder that some smarter observers backtracked from the Russian-Trump collusion charges of the past six months, given that the leaks were less likely to be credible than they were criminal. The accusers have become the accused. And who would police the police?
The media and the anti-Trump Republicans decried Trump’s reckless and juvenile antics as unbefitting a president. Perhaps, but they may have forgotten Trump’s animal cunning and instincts: Each time Trump impulsively raises controversial issues in sloppy fashion — some illegal aliens harm American citizens as they enjoy sanctuary-city status, NATO European partners welch on their promised defense contributions, Sweden is a powder-keg of unvetted and unassimilated immigrants from the war-torn Middle East — the news cycle follows and confirms the essence of Trump’s otherwise rash warnings. We are learning that Trump is inexact and clumsy but often prescient; his opponents, usually deliberate and precise but disingenuous.
FISA-gate
Where are we now?
Obama officials have written contorted denials that by their very Byzantine wording suggest there is some truth to the thrust of Trump’s accusations. (Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Obama, tweeted a warning: “I’d be careful about reporting that Obama said there was no wiretapping. Statement just said that neither he nor the WH ordered it.”) At best, the public is learning that intelligence agencies and the Obama Justice Department deliberately monitored Trump’s campaign effort (and leaked its findings), acts that fit a larger pattern of seeking to oppose his 2016 campaign.
Maybe there is a divine goddess Nemesis, or maybe humans inevitably become arrogant when not checked, as a reflection of their primeval genetic code.
Or just maybe over the last eight years, the Obama administration so relied on media collusion (and Hillary Clinton’s all but sure progressive continuum) that it felt it could do things politically and culturally — monitoring reporters’ communications, politicizing the IRS, using the Justice Department to redistribute banking fines to left-wing activist groups — that otherwise no sane administration would even dare.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445548/democrats-unintended-consequences-media-collusion-partisan-overreach
The Ancient Laws of Unintended Consequences
Eight years of a fawning press have made the Left reckless.
By Victor Davis Hanson — March 7, 2017
The classical idea of a divine Nemesis (“reckoning” or “downfall”) that brings unforeseen retribution for hubris (insolence and arrogance) was a recognition that there are certain laws of the universe that operated independently of human concerns.
Call Nemesis a goddess. But it was also simply an empirical observation about collective and predictable human behavior: Excess invites unexpected correction.
Something like hubris incurring Nemesis is now following the frenzied progressive effort to nullify the Trump presidency.
Fake News
“Fake news” was a term the Left invented to describe the ancient practice of propaganda (updated in the Internet age to drive Web traffic). They applied it to the supposed Russian habit of planting international news stories to affect Western elections, and in particular Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency and his tendencies to exaggerate and massage the truth.
But once the term caught on in our faddish age, who were the more appropriate media fakers? Fake news now serves as a sort of linguistic canary to remind the public that it is customarily saturated with a lethal gas of media disinformation.
Thus “fake news” seemed a proper if belated summation and clarification of years of liberal bias in the media that were supposed to be our custodian of the truth.
Were NBC anchor Brian Williams’s fantasies fake news? Were Dan Rather’s “fake but accurate” Rathergate memos? How about the party line circulated in JournoList or the Washington and New York reporters who colluded to massage the news to favor the Clinton campaign, as revealed in the Podesta WikiLeaks trove? Was jailing a video maker part of an Obama-administration fake-news attempt to blame Benghazi deaths on a spontaneous riot? Was the Iran Deal’s “echo chamber,” about which Ben Rhodes later bragged, the epitome of fake news?
Thank the Left, because suddenly the term “fake news” is becoming a common description of the media’s effort to suggest that Trump once went to Moscow to frolic with prostitutes, that his lawyer met Russians in Prague, that he removed Martin Luther King’s bust from the Oval Office, that he was going to employ “100,000” guardsmen to enforce immigration law, or that he wished to invade Mexico.
The once liberal invention of the term “fake news” now mostly refers to media efforts by leftists to warp the Trump presidency; to progressive media celebrities who have been caught lying, colluding, or plagiarizing; and to the cohort of unapologetically left-wing journalists who, in the words of Obama White House operative Ben Rhodes, “know nothing” and thus are easily manipulated by their progressive political puppeteers.
Fake Crimes?
Is “fake news” also the proper description for nonfactual accounts of “hate crimes,” an increasingly percentage of which prove to be pure inventions (at the University of Louisiana, in North Carolina, in Santa Monica, etc.) fabricated to accord the “victim” media attention, compensation, or sympathy?
Or does “fake news” define the supposed epidemic of campus sexual assault, which in all too many cases involves the university’s suspension of due process and constitutional guarantees for the male accused — who is sometimes accused because he engaged in consensual sexual relations with a female student and then socially rejected her, or because he failed to stay monogamous? In other words, “sexual assault” is now redefined down to the crime of unenjoyable sexual congress, or of males proving post facto to be insincere lotharios or unreceptive cads.
Illegal Immigration Really Is Illegality
Illegal immigration offers another Nemesis moment. Media outrage now surrounds almost every effort by ICE authorities to detain an illegal alien on deportation lists compiled during the Obama administration. Activists, Democratic politicians, and Mexico itself allege that the Trump administration is hounding the blameless, as if there were neither immigration law nor a concept of deportation for violations of it.
But usually in every media report of a victimized illegal alien, one also finds buried incidental information showing that the detainee had previously been convicted for such crimes as drunk driving, or had engaged in voting fraud, or had committed identity theft or falsified a government document, or had failed to show up for a prior deportation hearing.
All that the progressive frenzy over deportation seems to be doing is drawing attention to the quite surprising number of foreign guests who continue to live here illegally even though they have prior criminal convictions. How odd that the public is now learning that the Left apparently sees identity theft as a minor matter for illegal aliens, though a serious one for citizens. And how strange to witness entitled guests showing outrage at the possibility that they might not be allowed to enter and reside in the U.S. illegally and then commit crimes without having to worry about endangering their already illegal-resident status.
The Russian Can of Worms
In the latter months of the 2016 campaign, the Clinton team floated the narrative that Trump was colluding with Russian president Vladimir Putin, who in turn was engineering leaks to increase Trump’s unlikely chance of becoming president.
At first, alleging Russian collusion with Trump was a strange strategy, given that Hillary Clinton herself, as the primary agent for the Obama-administration outreach to Putin, had pushed the red Russian reset button in Geneva. And it was quite an outreach: the shelving of long-established plans to build missile-defense shields in Eastern Europe, the open-mic promise by Obama to be more flexible with Putin after Obama’s reelection, the anemic response to the de facto annexation of the Crimea and eastern Ukraine, the constant trashing of the Bush administration as too harsh on Russia, and the ridicule showered on Mitt Romney for his supposed naïveté in naming Russia as America’s “Number One geopolitical foe.” In addition, the Trump plans of encouraging domestic oil production, updating strategic weapons, and beefing up the defense budget were not agendas conducive to Russian interests. Their Obama antitheses were.
In addition, while the media and progressives were floating the Trump-Russian connection, it was also clear that there were all sorts of shady elements to the story that would not appear favorable to either Clinton or Obama — from the Uranium One mess, which saw concessions given by Hillary Clinton’s State Department to Russian companies buying North American uranium, to Clinton operative John Podesta’s own investments in Russian oil concerns.
Worse, the subject of election-time courting of Russia suddenly reopened the question of past Democratic electioneering gymnastics with foreign powers, such as Ted Kennedy’s efforts in 1984 to have the Russians’ help in undermining Ronald Reagan’s reelection chances, or Bill Clinton’s 1996 campaign-finance connections with China, or the Obama-designated officials’ contact, before they assumed office in 2009, with their foreign counterparts.
But Nemesis was not done. It is now reported that the Obama administration during the campaign went to a FISA court to tap the communications of Trump-campaign officials and unofficial supporters. FISA applications are almost never rejected (and never leaked), but the court rebuffed this one in June 2016, ostensibly for insufficient cause. Ostensibly it is also unprecedented for a sitting president’s administration to order surveillance of campaign personnel of an opposite party before an upcoming election — a fact suggesting that Obama-administration officials may have assumed that a grateful shoo-in successor Clinton Justice Department would not worry greatly about such interference.
News reports further suggested that a frustrated Obama administration may have tried again as the campaign heated up in October 2016, may have found a more sympathetic judge, and may on the second try have begun widely tapping Trump-campaign officials.
In addition, the Obama administration after eight years in power suddenly and deliberately expanded the number of people granted access to such surveillance, apparently in the hope (which soon proved correct) that greater dissemination would increase the likelihood of illegal leaks that in turn would embarrass Trump.
Perhaps from such intelligence leaks, the media reported that Jeff Sessions, Trump’s attorney general, had met in his office with the Russian ambassador, a supposed contradiction of his Senate testimony.
But then Nemesis again appeared. It turned out that almost everyone in Washington — especially Sessions’s Democratic accusers — had met with the Russians (most commonly Democratic senators and representatives in the spirit of the Obama-reset age).
Indeed, Sergey Kislyak was on every Democratic powerbroker’s A list and traveled throughout the United States to meetings and conferences — as part of accustomed outreach. Journalists had apparently forgotten that Russian officials were frequent guests at the Obama White House, a logical consequence of the then-current media narrative that cowboy George Bush had provoked Putin’s Russia, which in turn required a sober and judicious Barack Obama to calm down the class cut-up Putin and educate the macho former KGB officer about why American and Russia were in fact friends rather than enemies.
Finally, after Democrats, Obama officials, and the media massaged the leaks from surveillance of Team Trump, in Samson-like fashion, Trump pulled down the temple on everyone — by tweeting groundbreaking but unsupported accusations that a sitting president of the United States and his team were the catalysts for such unlawful tapping. Apparently, he reckoned that the liberal conversation would therefore turn defensive rather than accusatory. If the progressive media and intelligence agencies were hand-in-glove leaking damaging rumors about Trump, and if none were yet substantiated, then the issue reversed and turned instead on a new question: How were they trafficking in confidential intelligence information if not from skullduggery of some sort? No wonder that some smarter observers backtracked from the Russian-Trump collusion charges of the past six months, given that the leaks were less likely to be credible than they were criminal. The accusers have become the accused. And who would police the police?
The media and the anti-Trump Republicans decried Trump’s reckless and juvenile antics as unbefitting a president. Perhaps, but they may have forgotten Trump’s animal cunning and instincts: Each time Trump impulsively raises controversial issues in sloppy fashion — some illegal aliens harm American citizens as they enjoy sanctuary-city status, NATO European partners welch on their promised defense contributions, Sweden is a powder-keg of unvetted and unassimilated immigrants from the war-torn Middle East — the news cycle follows and confirms the essence of Trump’s otherwise rash warnings. We are learning that Trump is inexact and clumsy but often prescient; his opponents, usually deliberate and precise but disingenuous.
FISA-gate
Where are we now?
Obama officials have written contorted denials that by their very Byzantine wording suggest there is some truth to the thrust of Trump’s accusations. (Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for Obama, tweeted a warning: “I’d be careful about reporting that Obama said there was no wiretapping. Statement just said that neither he nor the WH ordered it.”) At best, the public is learning that intelligence agencies and the Obama Justice Department deliberately monitored Trump’s campaign effort (and leaked its findings), acts that fit a larger pattern of seeking to oppose his 2016 campaign.
Maybe there is a divine goddess Nemesis, or maybe humans inevitably become arrogant when not checked, as a reflection of their primeval genetic code.
Or just maybe over the last eight years, the Obama administration so relied on media collusion (and Hillary Clinton’s all but sure progressive continuum) that it felt it could do things politically and culturally — monitoring reporters’ communications, politicizing the IRS, using the Justice Department to redistribute banking fines to left-wing activist groups — that otherwise no sane administration would even dare.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445548/democrats-unintended-consequences-media-collusion-partisan-overreach
I think that was a sarcastic line on the joke.
The ladies should appreciate the humor ...
Choosing a wife
A man wanted to get married. He was having trouble choosing among three likely candidates. He gives each woman a present of $5,000 and watches to see what they do with the money.
The first does a total makeover. She goes to a fancy beauty salon, gets her hair done, new makeup; buys several new outfits and dresses up very nicely for the man. She tells him that she has done this to be more attractive for him because she loves him so much.
The man was impressed.
The second goes shopping to buy the man gifts. She gets him a new set of golf clubs, some new gizmos for his computer, and some expensive clothes. As she presents these gifts, she tells him that she has spent all the money on him because she loves him so much..
Again, the man is impressed.
The third invests the money in the stock market She earns several times the $5,000. She gives him back his $5,000 and reinvests the remainder in a joint account. She tells him that she wants to save for their future because she loves him so much.
Obviously, the man was impressed.
The man thought for a long time about what each woman had done with the money he'd given her.
Then he married the one with the biggest tits.
Men are like that, you know.
And on another note!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There is more money being spent on breast implants and Viagra today than on Alzheimer's research. This means that by 2040, there should be a large elderly population with perky boobs and huge erections and absolutely no recollection of what to do with them.
If you don't send this to five OLD friends right away there will be five fewer people laughing in the world
Mysterious radioactive cloud moves towards UK as plane which tackled Chernobyl called in to find source
A US Air Force plane which helped in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster has been called in to find the source of a mysterious radioactive cloud heading towards the UK.
The WC-135 Constant Phoenix, which is specially modified to collect atmospheric samples, flew out of RAF Mildenhall on a mission to find evidence of nuclear activity or explosion, according to strong rumours.
Specialist equipment enables the crew to detect radioactive debris ‘clouds’ in real time - after such a cloud was believed to be heading towards northern Europe and the Barents Sea.
News of the deployment comes amid claims Russia may be testing nuclear weapons, either to the east or in the Arctic, after a spike in radioactivity was reported. The WC-135 Constant Phoenix, which is known as a nuclear ‘sniffer’ plane, was deployed to Britain last week on an undisclosed mission.
Air quality stations in Norway, Finland, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, France and Spain have detected the presence of Iodine-131 at low levels. This has fuelled speculation that the WC-135 has been called in to investigate the cause of the higher-than-normal levels of Iodine-131.
The spike has sparked speculation that Russian president Vladimir Putin is testing nuclear weapons in Novaya Zemlya near the Arctic.
However, the CTBTO (Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation) ruled out a nuclear test had recently taken place.
Similar aircraft were used in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in the Soviet Union in 1986 and the Fukushima incident in Japan six years ago by collecting particles and chemical substances in the atmosphere, days, weeks and months after they were dispersed. The deployment of the WC-135 aircraft, which detects and identifies explosions from the air and was used after the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Ukraine in 1986, adds weight to the argument.
An air filter station in Svanhovd, Norway, was the first place to measure the Iodine-131 in the second week of January. Next it was measured in Rovaniemi, in Finnish Lapland. Within two weeks, it was traced in Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, France and Spain.
This movement led the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority (NRPA) to suggest the particles may have originated in Eastern Europe. It’s possible that the particles could have come from an incident at a nuclear reactor. The compounds may also have also come from an Iodine plant.
Iodine-131 has a very short half life of just eight days, making it very radioactive. When it is present in high levels in the environment, it contaminates food. After it is swallowed it will accumulate in the thyroid. As it decays, it damages body tissue and can cause thyroid cancer. However levels present in the atmosphere today are too low to be damaging.
http://www.wakefieldexpress.co.uk/news/environment/mysterious-radioactive-cloud-moves-towards-uk-as-plane-which-tackled-chernobyl-called-in-to-find-source-1-8407845
Mysterious radioactive cloud moves towards UK as plane which tackled Chernobyl called in to find source
A US Air Force plane which helped in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster has been called in to find the source of a mysterious radioactive cloud heading towards the UK.
The WC-135 Constant Phoenix, which is specially modified to collect atmospheric samples, flew out of RAF Mildenhall on a mission to find evidence of nuclear activity or explosion, according to strong rumours.
Specialist equipment enables the crew to detect radioactive debris ‘clouds’ in real time - after such a cloud was believed to be heading towards northern Europe and the Barents Sea.
News of the deployment comes amid claims Russia may be testing nuclear weapons, either to the east or in the Arctic, after a spike in radioactivity was reported. The WC-135 Constant Phoenix, which is known as a nuclear ‘sniffer’ plane, was deployed to Britain last week on an undisclosed mission.
Air quality stations in Norway, Finland, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, France and Spain have detected the presence of Iodine-131 at low levels. This has fuelled speculation that the WC-135 has been called in to investigate the cause of the higher-than-normal levels of Iodine-131.
The spike has sparked speculation that Russian president Vladimir Putin is testing nuclear weapons in Novaya Zemlya near the Arctic.
However, the CTBTO (Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation) ruled out a nuclear test had recently taken place.
Similar aircraft were used in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in the Soviet Union in 1986 and the Fukushima incident in Japan six years ago by collecting particles and chemical substances in the atmosphere, days, weeks and months after they were dispersed. The deployment of the WC-135 aircraft, which detects and identifies explosions from the air and was used after the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Ukraine in 1986, adds weight to the argument.
An air filter station in Svanhovd, Norway, was the first place to measure the Iodine-131 in the second week of January. Next it was measured in Rovaniemi, in Finnish Lapland. Within two weeks, it was traced in Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, France and Spain.
This movement led the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority (NRPA) to suggest the particles may have originated in Eastern Europe. It’s possible that the particles could have come from an incident at a nuclear reactor. The compounds may also have also come from an Iodine plant.
Iodine-131 has a very short half life of just eight days, making it very radioactive. When it is present in high levels in the environment, it contaminates food. After it is swallowed it will accumulate in the thyroid. As it decays, it damages body tissue and can cause thyroid cancer. However levels present in the atmosphere today are too low to be damaging.
http://www.wakefieldexpress.co.uk/news/environment/mysterious-radioactive-cloud-moves-towards-uk-as-plane-which-tackled-chernobyl-called-in-to-find-source-1-8407845
Every picture tells a story...............
Sorry, media — this press conference played very differently with Trump’s supporters
By Michael Goodwin
Maybe it’s not a coincidence that Barnum & Bailey is folding its tents this year. After all, how could the circus possibly compete with Donald Trump?
The president proved once again that he is the greatest show on Earth. Lions and tigers and elephants are kid stuff next to his high wire act.
Next time, the White House ought to sell popcorn.
Amid feverish reports of chaos on his team and with Democrats fantasizing that Russia-gate is another Watergate, Trump took center stage to declare that reports of his demise are just more fake news.
Far from dead, he was positively exuberant. His performance at a marathon press conference Thursday was a must-see-TV spectacle as he mixed serious policy talk with standup comedy and took repeated pleasure in whacking his favorite piñata, the “dishonest media.”
“Russia is a ruse,” he insisted, before finally saying under questioning that he was not aware of anyone on his campaign having contact with Russian officials.
Trump’s detractors immediately panned the show as madness, but they missed the method behind it and proved they still don’t understand his appeal. Facing his first crisis in the Oval Office, he was unbowed in demonstrating his bare-knuckle intention to fight back.
He did it his way. Certainly no other president, and few politicians at any level in any time, would dare put on a show like that.
In front of cameras, and using the assembled press corps as props, he conducted a televised revival meeting to remind his supporters that he is still the man they elected. Ticking off a lengthy list of executive orders and other actions he has taken, he displayed serious fealty to his campaign promises.
Sure, sentences didn’t always end on the same topic they started with, and his claim to have won the election by the largest Electoral College margin since Ronald Reagan wasn’t close to true.
Fair points, but so what? Fact-checkers didn’t elect him, nor did voters who were happy with the status quo.
Trump, first, last and always, matches the mood of the discontented. Like them, he is a bull looking for a china shop. That’s his ace in the hole and he played it almost to perfection.
The immediate impact of his performance is likely to calm some of the jitters among Republicans in Congress and supporters elsewhere, especially after the beating he took in the last few days.
On Monday night, Trump suddenly removed Gen. Michael Flynn, his national security adviser, over circumstances that still are not entirely clear. And on Wednesday, his nominee for secretary of labor, Andrew Puzder, withdrew after Republicans said he didn’t have the votes to be confirmed.
Combined with courts blocking his immigration and refugee order, unflattering leaks of confidential material from intelligence agencies and numerous demands for investigations into any Russian connections, Trump’s fast start suddenly hit a wall.
Just three weeks into his term, Democrats, in and out of the media, smelled blood. Many already were going for the kill.
They won’t get it, at least now. Trump bought himself time yesterday.
Yet those determined to bring him down won’t give up, and the insidious leaks of secret material suggest some opponents are members of the permanent government who are willing to use their position and the media to undermine him.
Indeed, the most serious leaks seem to vindicate a warning that Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer made in early January after Trump criticized leaders of the spook agencies.
“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told an interviewer. “So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”
That incredible statement reflects what a dangerous game rogue agents are playing. The world is on fire yet the president is the target of partisan revenge in his own government. It’s a scandal and it’s outrageous, but it’s a fact that Trump must confront.
Finding the leakers and prosecuting them, which he promises to do, is part of the solution.
Another part comes Saturday, when Trump takes his solo act to Florida for a massive public rally. It’s smart for him to get out of Washington and soak in the enthusiasm of the populist movement he leads.
He should do it regularly, and also hold smaller, town hall-style forums where ordinary citizens can ask him questions in more intimate settings. Any way he can speak directly to the American people and hear from them democratizes his presidency and reduces the power of big, biased media and the Washington establishment.
Yet the only sure and lasting way to keep ahead of the lynch mob is by producing results. Success will be Trump’s savior.
And nothing says success like jobs, jobs, jobs. Getting the economy to reach liftoff speed is essential so it can deliver the good-paying jobs and prosperity that he promised and the nation needs.
While Republican honchos in Congress say they’re getting ready to move on tax cuts and replacing ObamaCare, nothing will happen without presidential leadership. That means Trump’s fate is in his own hands and he must keep himself and his White House team focused on delivering an economic revival.
If he does that, the lynch mob will be left holding an empty rope.
http://nypost.com/2017/02/16/sorry-media-this-press-conference-played-very-different-with-trumps-supporters/
Sorry, media — this press conference played very differently with Trump’s supporters
By Michael Goodwin
Maybe it’s not a coincidence that Barnum & Bailey is folding its tents this year. After all, how could the circus possibly compete with Donald Trump?
The president proved once again that he is the greatest show on Earth. Lions and tigers and elephants are kid stuff next to his high wire act.
Next time, the White House ought to sell popcorn.
Amid feverish reports of chaos on his team and with Democrats fantasizing that Russia-gate is another Watergate, Trump took center stage to declare that reports of his demise are just more fake news.
Far from dead, he was positively exuberant. His performance at a marathon press conference Thursday was a must-see-TV spectacle as he mixed serious policy talk with standup comedy and took repeated pleasure in whacking his favorite piñata, the “dishonest media.”
“Russia is a ruse,” he insisted, before finally saying under questioning that he was not aware of anyone on his campaign having contact with Russian officials.
Trump’s detractors immediately panned the show as madness, but they missed the method behind it and proved they still don’t understand his appeal. Facing his first crisis in the Oval Office, he was unbowed in demonstrating his bare-knuckle intention to fight back.
He did it his way. Certainly no other president, and few politicians at any level in any time, would dare put on a show like that.
In front of cameras, and using the assembled press corps as props, he conducted a televised revival meeting to remind his supporters that he is still the man they elected. Ticking off a lengthy list of executive orders and other actions he has taken, he displayed serious fealty to his campaign promises.
Sure, sentences didn’t always end on the same topic they started with, and his claim to have won the election by the largest Electoral College margin since Ronald Reagan wasn’t close to true.
Fair points, but so what? Fact-checkers didn’t elect him, nor did voters who were happy with the status quo.
Trump, first, last and always, matches the mood of the discontented. Like them, he is a bull looking for a china shop. That’s his ace in the hole and he played it almost to perfection.
The immediate impact of his performance is likely to calm some of the jitters among Republicans in Congress and supporters elsewhere, especially after the beating he took in the last few days.
On Monday night, Trump suddenly removed Gen. Michael Flynn, his national security adviser, over circumstances that still are not entirely clear. And on Wednesday, his nominee for secretary of labor, Andrew Puzder, withdrew after Republicans said he didn’t have the votes to be confirmed.
Combined with courts blocking his immigration and refugee order, unflattering leaks of confidential material from intelligence agencies and numerous demands for investigations into any Russian connections, Trump’s fast start suddenly hit a wall.
Just three weeks into his term, Democrats, in and out of the media, smelled blood. Many already were going for the kill.
They won’t get it, at least now. Trump bought himself time yesterday.
Yet those determined to bring him down won’t give up, and the insidious leaks of secret material suggest some opponents are members of the permanent government who are willing to use their position and the media to undermine him.
Indeed, the most serious leaks seem to vindicate a warning that Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer made in early January after Trump criticized leaders of the spook agencies.
“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told an interviewer. “So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”
That incredible statement reflects what a dangerous game rogue agents are playing. The world is on fire yet the president is the target of partisan revenge in his own government. It’s a scandal and it’s outrageous, but it’s a fact that Trump must confront.
Finding the leakers and prosecuting them, which he promises to do, is part of the solution.
Another part comes Saturday, when Trump takes his solo act to Florida for a massive public rally. It’s smart for him to get out of Washington and soak in the enthusiasm of the populist movement he leads.
He should do it regularly, and also hold smaller, town hall-style forums where ordinary citizens can ask him questions in more intimate settings. Any way he can speak directly to the American people and hear from them democratizes his presidency and reduces the power of big, biased media and the Washington establishment.
Yet the only sure and lasting way to keep ahead of the lynch mob is by producing results. Success will be Trump’s savior.
And nothing says success like jobs, jobs, jobs. Getting the economy to reach liftoff speed is essential so it can deliver the good-paying jobs and prosperity that he promised and the nation needs.
While Republican honchos in Congress say they’re getting ready to move on tax cuts and replacing ObamaCare, nothing will happen without presidential leadership. That means Trump’s fate is in his own hands and he must keep himself and his White House team focused on delivering an economic revival.
If he does that, the lynch mob will be left holding an empty rope.
http://nypost.com/2017/02/16/sorry-media-this-press-conference-played-very-different-with-trumps-supporters/