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October 2015

DHS, White House Tout Ability to Screen Syrian Refugees. But Under Oath, FBI Says Opposite By Patrick Poole

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told USA Today yesterday that the wave of Syrian refugees that will be admitted into the U.S. in the coming year will be subjected to “extensive, thorough background checks.”

But just last week, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, FBI Director James Comey said exactly the opposite.

When asked about criticisms made by Donald Trump about the administration’s immigration policies and about concerns that ISIS may embed themselves among Syrian refugees as a “Trojan horse,” Johnson replied:

Well, in terms of the level of effort of security review that we will apply and we have applied it will be and it is extensive. Both law enforcement and homeland security have improved the process from the days when we admitted a lot of Iraqi refugees.

We now do a better job of connecting the dots, consulting all the right databases and systems that we have available to us, and the refugee review process is probably one of the most if not the most extensive thorough background checks that someone seeking to enter this country goes through.

What Ted Cruz Did in Wednesday’s Debate Was So Much More Than an Applause Line By Walter Hudson

In one moment, Senator Ted Cruz managed to do what no other candidate for the Republican nomination for president has done to this point: unite Republicans. He did so by pushing back against the ridiculously biased questions presented by CNBC moderators. The Hollywood Reporter transcribes:

“The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” said the U.S. senator from Texas, instantly earning applause.

“This is not a cage match,” he continued. “Look at the questions. ‘Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain;’ ‘Ben Carson, can you do math;’ ‘John Kasich, will you insult two people over here;’ ‘Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign?;’ ‘Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?’ How about talking about the substantive issues people care about?”

Cruz contrasted moderators’ treatment of Republicans with their treatment of Democrats:

…every fawning question from the media was, “Which of you is more handsome and wise? …”

The Socialist Republic of Canada By David Solway

The results of the Canadian general election are now graven in stone and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has been given a decisive majority. Canadians have opted for change without stopping to consider that change is by no means an unalloyed good. The “hope and change” that Obama promised the American people has led the country into an abyss of debt, racial conflict, open-border chaos, destructive initiatives like global warming legislation, alliances with genocidal enemies, alienation of political friends, and a state of international weakness that would be risible were it not so devastating. America allowed itself to be seduced by a charismatic interloper with spotty credentials, a pro-Muslim bias, hard-left sympathies, and no accomplishments worth mentioning.

It appears that Canada has followed suit, electing an aureate nonentity whose CV would in any sane society have generated howls of laughter or stunned disbelief. “Spectacularly unqualified,” as a PJM commenter posted, Trudeau studied environmental geography at McGill University and engineering at the Université de Montréal—but failed to complete degrees in either discipline. Among his other triumphs, which apparently earned the confidence of the electorate, Trudeau was a snow board instructor, a camp counselor, a white water rafting instructor, and a substitute drama teacher. Even a farcical billet like community organizing would have been more impressive.

North Korea and Syria Applaud, as Cuba Bullies America at the UN Posted Claudia Rosett

Never mind that since last December President Obama has been falling all over himself to please and appease Cuba’s Castro regime. He has failed to come up with arguments compelling enough to persuade Congress to lift the embargo on Cuba. So, while pocketing Obama’s concessions, Havana has been complaining to the United Nations General Assembly that the U.S. embargo is still in place. On Tuesday, the General Assembly continued its annual tradition of approving a resolution [1] slamming the U.S., urging the tailoring of U.S. law to UN interests, and demanding that the U.S. embargo be lifted. As usual, the resolution passed with near total support, the tally this year being 191 in favor, 2 against — the two holdouts being the U.S. itself, plus Israel (which, as a loyal ally, voted with the U.S.).

Lest anyone think this is some clearcut case in which the UN collective is right, and the U.S. is wrong, let’s be clear on what this vote is really about. It is not actually about Cuba per se, or the embargo. Cuba is a tyranny that routinely violates the principles of the UN charter, without incurring protest by the eminences of the UN. And Cuba has had abundant opportunity for years to trade with most of the world. The real constraint on its economy is Castroite communism, not the leaky barrier of the U.S. trade embargo. In this long-running saga, the Castro regime is not the victim. It is the villain.

Turkey: Kurds Threatened Before Election by Uzay Bulut

The pro-government newspaper Sabah claimed that dragging dead bodies in the streets was “routine practice” around the world, a security measure to check if the body was booby-trapped.

“If we wanted to, we could round up all of them, kill them and say they committed suicide.” — Ismet Sezgin, former Minister of the Interior, 1993.

What Turkey is engaging in appears an attempt at historicide, just as al-Qaeda and ISIS have done in Bamiyan and Palmyra and throughout Iraq – and as the Palestinian Authority did last week with the help of a duplicitous UNESCO by labeling the Jewish holy sites of Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs Muslim sites.

How are Kurds supposed to trust such a government and its army when even their dead are exposed to attacks, torture and attempts at obliteration?

In Turkey’s election on June 7, the pro-Kurdish party came in third, evidently thwarting the plans of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to attaining the supermajority of 367 seats to be President-for-Life — or Sultan. In an apparent attempt to rectify this supposed miscarriage of the democratic process, Erdogan called for another, snap election on November 1, seemingly to try once again to get his permanent Sultanate.

CNBC’s John Harwood Has No Business Moderating A GOP Presidential Debate By Mollie Hemingway

It’s not news to anyone that political journalists tend to be liberal. That alone doesn’t mean they’re bad at their jobs, but the presence of strong political views combined with the lack of ideological diversity can pose problems for those with differing political views.

We see this frequently with mediated political debates, where journalists moderate and control what topics are covered, how questions are framed, and what assumptions are built into topics.

Some journalists are better than others, of course, but too often the moderators — from smug local journalists to Candy Crowley — become part of the story. They frequently don’t have the policy chops to ask good policy questions or respond to dumb policy answers. When they generally agree with a politician, they won’t push back on even the most erroneous or outlandish claims. But if they disagree with a candidate, they’ll push back, no matter how uninformed about the matter at hand they may be. This is related to another point of confusion: they seem to believe it’s their job to argue with candidates rather than facilitate discussions among candidates. The debate is supposed to be with one other, after all, not with the moderator.
They seem to believe it’s their job to argue with candidates rather than facilitate discussions among candidates.

Journalists frequently ask questions full of incorrect assumptions, mistaking their job of reporting on a given topic for being significantly knowledgeable on the same. The ideological agendas advanced by various journalists show that the media are not neutral parties. To take just one example, reporters love to push pro-life candidates about every angle of their views on the sanctity of life, posing increasingly difficult questions. But when was the last time you heard a pro-choice politician asked much of anything about his views, much less if he thinks the right to abortion extends to killing a child because she’s a girl?

Many Republican observers were excited by the news that Reince Priebus, Republican National Committee chairman, had announced changes to the 2015 primary debates. Here he was on Hugh Hewitt’s show earlier this year explaining why liberal media will partner with conservative media figures, including Salem Media and Hugh Hewitt, this time around:

RP: Well, hey, congratulations to you and congratulations to Salem Media. This is exactly what I wanted to do a couple of years ago when we talked about taking control of the presidential primary debate process. And I was never interested in turning the debate process into some kind of patty-cake session, but that we would have serious journalists, serious people that wanted to get involved in asking questions and creating a debate environment that would bring honor to the Republican Party, not a debate environment spurred on by nefarious actors like Chris Matthews and others. And so, you know, we’re going to have a reasonable number of debates, and we’re going to have conservatives help in the moderating and the management of these debates, and today was a big announcement. I’m excited about it. I’m happy for you.

That was a big announcement.

So permit me to ask the obvious questions: Why in the world is liberal journalist John Harwood moderating Wednesday’s Republican debate? And where the heck is his conservative media partner?

Surprise! John Harwood Lied About Marco Rubio’s Tax Plan: Sean Davis

As The Federalist‘s Mollie Hemingway predicted, CNBC’s management of Wednesday’s Republican presidential primary debate was a complete disaster. The night’s biggest loser, aside from everyone who suffered through watching the debate debacle, was CNBC moderator John Harwood, who blatantly and aggressively lied about the tax plan proposed by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Harwood accused Rubio of offering a tax plan that was heavily tilted towards the rich. When Rubio corrected him and said that no, lower-income taxpayers receive a higher percentage of the plan’s benefits than rich taxpayers, Harwood repeatedly argued with him and declared that Rubio’s plan was just a big, fat giveaway to the wealthy 1 percent. Proving that his agenda was to push progressive talking points, not to offer debate questions that might lead to insightful answers, John Harwood swore up and down on live television that the conservative Tax Foundation backed up his assertion about Rubio’s tax plan.

CNBC and Jeb Bush Commit Suicide in Boulder by Roger L Simon

It’s hard to see how Jeb Bush recovers from his self-inflected wound at Wednesday’s CNBC Republican debate in Boulder when he went after Marco Rubio just after the young senator had hit one out of the park. Rubio was defending himself from an editorial in the Sun Sentinel calling on Marco to stop “ripping off” the public and quit the Senate for non-attendance while campaigning. Rubio responded that John Kerry and Barack Obama had been even more truant while running for president and the paper had not only ignored that, but given these men their endorsement. It was an example of liberal media bias at its most obvious. The crowd erupted in its first ovation of the night. Advantage Rubio.

Clueless, Bush jumped in as if nothing had happened, taking the paper’s side and schoolmarmishly doubling down on Marco. He got his head handed to him by Rubio (politely) and the audience. It was so mishandled on Bush’s part, such an obvious case of self-sabotage, it left you wondering whether Jeb really wants to be president. You didn’t have to be a Freudian to think his unconscious had gotten the better of him — well, unconscious mixed with envy mixed with entitlement mixed with who knows. During the break you heard what Ross Perot famously called ”the giant sucking sound,” but this time it was of pledged Bush supporters calling their bundlers.

Debate 3: Ted Cruz Changes the Game By C. Edmund Wright

There was a disturbance in the force last night at CNBC’s Republican debate, and it left no doubt of who won and who lost. The loser was CNBC, and the winners were all ten Republican candidates – in varying degrees, of course. (More on that later). And there is no doubt when this shift in the axis happened.

Everything changed when Ted Cruz dressed down Carl Quintenilla and John Harwood – two of CNBC’s far-left commentators – and literally mocked their absurd line of questioning.

Cruz did not just criticize the questions; he made sport of them. He demonstrated just how infantile most of the CNBC crew was (Tea Party originator Rick Santelli not included). Cruz flat-out embarrassed them, and they knew it.

After the crowd stopped roaring in approval of Cruz’s protest, which took a while, the rest of the Republicans followed the Texas senator’s lead, and there was almost no Republican-on-Republican crime after this exchange. In fact, we then saw numerous examples where Republicans made it clear that any of the ten on the stage would be far preferable to what we have now, and to Hillary Clinton. These comments were met with loud approval from the audience every time. Meanwhile, Quintenilla was literally booed loudly three times.

Later in the night, Chris Christie embarrassed the mods again with his fantasy football reply, as did Mike Huckabee by turning a gotcha question related to Donald Trump into praise of Trump. I have my problems with Christie and Huck overall, but both are demonstrably nimble on their feet.

13 reasons why we should not admit Muslim ‘refugees’ By Carol Brown

President Obama wants to flood this country with “Syrian refugees.” As most AT readers know, we should not admit a single one. Unfortunately, a lot of folks are in the dark about what’s going on and/or are so brainwashed by politically correct thinking they dare not acknowledge the truth. We need to keep chipping away at this gargantuan problem of Americans choosing stupidity over survival.

Any one of the reasons noted below should be sufficient to make the case as to why we must close our doors to Muslims pouring out of Islamic countries heading points West. But in case you encounter someone who is truly thick (and there are a lot of them out there), it’s always best to have several facts on hand.

They are not “refugees.” They are invaders; soldiers of Allah: What is unfolding is hijra, otherwise known as immigration jihad. It is written in the Quran and is a powerful strategy the Islamic world has used for many centuries to overwhelm nations and assert dominance. We must not allow our culture to be undermined and destroyed by increasing the population of Muslims in the United States. (See here, here, here, and here. See here for a book on the topic by Ann Corcoran.)
The vast majority of Muslims flooding into the West are young men: We are being invaded by an army of young fighting-age men from across the Islamic world. Muslim males often wreak havoc wherever they go, including disproportionately high levels of involvement with criminal activity, rape, threats against others, terrorism, and everything in between. We should not be importing a demographic of people who have a propensity toward violence. (See here, here, here, and here.)