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March 2016

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SYDNEY WILLIAMS- THOUGHT OF THE DAY

By on March 14th, 2016

I am a conservative who believes in government. Government is a requisite for a functioning, civil society, but it should be limited. It has responsibility for the safety of its citizens and it is necessary to uphold and protect individual rights. I revere the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution and Bill of Rights. They are the foundations on which our nation was built. I believe in property rights and the rule of law. Pertinent to today, I believe in the Electoral College, as an institution to help thwart the rise of demagogues. I believe in equality of opportunity, while understanding that outcomes will never be equal.

I believe that a job is critical to self-respect and that most jobs come from the private sector. Initiative, innovation and creativity are characteristics government should encourage. I believe fiscal prudence is necessary in government and I believe if we promise something we should be able to deliver it. I believe government has a responsibility for the aged, infirm, indigent and those unable to care for themselves. But I also believe that government is wrong when it crosses the Rubicon from providing help to those in need to exchanging favors for votes, which increases dependency at the cost of personal accountability.

I believe in the importance of family and the value of traditional marriage; though I respect those who have chosen different paths. I believe children are better off when raised in a two-parent household and that government should promote such family formations. It is hard for me to believe that life does not begin at conception, but I also understand that there can be mitigating circumstances warranting abortion – rare, one would hope, but including rape, incest and deformed fetuses. I believe government has a duty to provide a high school education for everyone, and that its responsibility is to students, not unions. I believe in civility, honor and mutual respect. I believe morality is absolute, not relative. For example, honor killings, sexual slavery and female genital mutilations, in any culture, are wrong. They have no place in civilized society and perpetrators should be punished. I believe religion is principally a matter between an individual and their God. I believe that God resides in each of us. Just as I will not force my religion on anyone else, I don’t want someone else’s forced on me.

I believe that equality before the law is fundamental to a fair and democratic society – that no one is above the law, no matter the political power they or their friends may have, nor the wealth they or their friends may possess. I recognize that we can never do away with cronyism – that from time immemorial some men and women have attached themselves to those with great wealth or who exert great power. But I also believe that our laws and courts should be vigilant against those who abuse their positions. I recognize that there are bad people in every profession and that hatred and racism are not the sole purview of one class, race, or political party, and that society has a responsibility to flush them out. I believe that ninety-nine percent of law enforcement personnel are good people doing a difficult and dangerous job and deserve our support.

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Deport Melania Trump She is, literally, the poster girl for his corrupt, H-1B-exploiting agency. By Kevin D. Williamson

By on March 14th, 2016

Donald Trump cannot quite decide what he thinks about the H-1B visa program, under which certain high-skilled foreign workers are permitted to work in the United States. Silicon Valley executives love it, and Silicon Valley worker bees hate it, charging that it is used to undercut domestic wages.

Because Donald Trump is a man who knows nothing about almost anything, his mind (as John B. Anderson once said of Jimmy Carter) is “like a seat cushion that bears the imprint of the last person who sat in it.” In the last debate, Trump decided, out of nowhere, that he was reversing his formerly restrictive view of the H-1B visa program, that our high-tech businesses needed those foreign workers, the domestic supply being insufficient. About five minutes later, having been informed that abruptly reversing himself on his key issue was bound to cost him a few votes — one suspects that Ann Coulter was on the verge of tears or worse — Trump announced that he was reversing his reversal.

It is natural that Trump is of two minds on the question. There is the third Mrs. Trump to consider.

Donald Trump, a man whose sexual insecurities are such that he feels the need to reassure the republic that his tiny little fingers are not proportional to his genitals — Lincoln versus Douglas this ain’t — and to boast in his memoirs about his sex life (“Oftentimes when I was sleeping with one of the top women in the world I would say to myself, thinking about me as a boy from Queens, ‘Can you believe what I am getting?’”), invested in beauty pageants and a modeling agency. If you are thinking that sounds like a pretty transparent ploy to put himself in the company of economically subordinate women, the fact is that his third/current wife is a former client of the Trump modeling agency, a Slovene by the name of Melanija Knavs, known to the world now as Melania Trump. The third/current Mrs. Trump came to these United States on an H-1B visa.

Being married to Donald Trump is, as it turns out, another temporary job Americans just won’t do.

Given Trump’s habitual disregard for the law and for basic decency in his business affairs, it will come as no surprise that there is evidence coming to light that Trump Model Management is a serial abuser of the H-1B visa program, that it lied to modeling recruits overseas about their earnings in the United States while raiding such wages as they did earn with undisclosed fees (the structural parallels with prostitution-trafficking rings are too obvious to belabor), and, more to the point as a criminal question, lied to U.S. immigration authorities about those wages, too.

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Mental Illness in Congress By D. J. Jaffe

By on March 14th, 2016

Earlier this month, mentally ill Kyle Odom shot pastor Tim Remington in Idaho because he “knew” the pastor was a Martian. In his untreated delusional state, Kyle then flew to the White House and started throwing his possessions over the fence to get the president’s attention so he could inform him about all the other Martians in government, including Senators Mitch McConnell, Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin, Roger Wicker, and Patty Murray.

Congress should learn from episodes like that. Yet at the same time Kyle went on his mission, Senators Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D., Wash.) went on theirs. They revealed a discussion draft of their Mental Health Reform [sic] Act of 2016, which is perhaps the worst mental-health bill ever conceived. It is a rudderless hodgepodge of studies, reports, commissions, and added bureaucracy that would do nothing to help people like Kyle.

John Snook, of the Treatment Advocacy Center, an organization focused on improving care for the seriously mentally ill, told Modern Healthcare, “If this were to pass as is, it would be of no benefit to [people with] severe mental illness.” Mental-illness-policy advocate, blogger, and former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley wrote, “The Senate has now set a low standard.”

Alexander and Murray should know better. There are plenty of bills floating around that include useful provisions they chose to ignore. Senator John Cornyn (R., Texas) introduced the Mental Health and Safe Community Act of 2015 (S2002) specifically to reduce violence by the most seriously mentally ill. It encourages states to use assisted outpatient treatment (AOT). Assisted outpatient treatment is only for a tiny group of the most seriously ill who have already accumulated multiple episodes of violence, arrest, homelessness, incarceration, or hospitalization because they refused to stay in treatment. It allows judges to order them into six months of mandated and monitored treatment while they continue to live in the community. It is less expensive to taxpayers and less restrictive and more humane to patients than the alternatives, incarceration and inpatient commitment. It is the only program with independent research showing it reduces homelessness, arrest, incarceration and violence in the 70 percent range.

Senators Alexander and Murray also ignored provisions in the Mental Health Reform Act of 2015 (S. 1945), proposed by Senators Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) and Bill Cassidy (R., Louisiana). That bill would slightly ameliorate the federal proscription on using Medicaid mental-health funds for those who are so seriously mentally ill they need hospitalization. New York City Police commissioner William Bratton recently described the lack of hospital beds as the top difficulty for officers who are called to assist the seriously mentally ill.

More importantly, Alexander and Murray ignored all the extraordinary work of Representative Tim Murphy (R., Pa.) and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D., Texas) in the House. They introduced the bipartisan Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act (H.R. 2646), which would eliminate wasteful, counterproductive federally funded mental “wellness” programs and reallocate the savings to programs that are proven to help the most seriously mentally ill. H.R. 2646 would start by defanging the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), perhaps the most useless bureaucracy in Washington. Its own employees rated it one of the worst federal agencies. SAMHSA funds anti-psychiatrists who lobby Congress, encourages states to use federal mental-illness funds on people who don’t have mental illness, certifies as “evidence-based” programs that don’t help the mentally ill, and wastes money. There is no support for it other than from those who receive funds from it. Alexander and Murray would add more bureaucracy rather than taking a scalpel to it.

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The U.N. Reaches a New Anti-Israel Low By Elliott Abrams —

By on March 14th, 2016

It may seem hard to believe that the United Nations can hold any new surprises when it comes to unprincipled attacks on Israel, but never despair: There is always farther to fall.

For more than 20 years, the U.N. Human Rights Council has had a dedicated “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” (Needless to say, there’s no U.N. Special Rapporteur for the condition of Tibetans or Cubans; only Palestinians.) Now, the incumbent Israel-Hater-in-Chief is leaving and his replacement must be chosen.

This being the U.N., what kind of candidate will they choose? Be careful, now: The position’s entire purpose is to condemn Israel, so it’s important to disqualify anyone who might examine the evidence in an unbiased search for truth. Heaven forfend. Much better to choose someone whose anti-Israel bias is absolute.

And this being the U.N., that’s what they’re doing.

There are two top candidates, both worthy successors to Richard Falk, who served in the post from 2008 to 2014. Falk was the nut-case Princeton professor who wanted U.S. officials prosecuted as war criminals for deposing Saddam Hussein, and once said, “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.” You can see why the U.N. chose him.

Anyway, back to the current candidates. Ranked second for the Special Rapporteur job is a Canadian named Michael Lynk. Who is Lynk? The invaluable U.N. Watch notes: “Lynk . . . promotes an extreme anti-Western political agenda. Three days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Lynk instinctively blamed the West, pointing the finger at ‘global inequalities’ and ‘disregard by Western nations for the international rule of law.’” Needless to say, this political stance means he hates Israel. As UN Watch reports:

Lynk plays a leadership role in numerous Arab lobby groups, including CEPAL, which promotes “Annual Israeli Apartheid Week” events; signs anti-Israel petitions; calls to prosecute Israel for alleged war crimes; addresses “One State” conferences that seek to eliminate Israel; and argues that “the solution” to “the problem” must go back to Israel’s very creation in 1948, which he calls “the start of ethnic cleansing.”

You might think, “Wow, he’s perfect for the U.N.!” But no, he’s only ranked second, under the top candidate, Penny Green. Who is Green? She’s a British criminologist whose hatred of Israel is even more blatant. She has urged that the U.K. de-list Hamas as a terrorist group. U.N. Watch reports that she “advocates the total boycott of Israel, posting statements on Twitter such as: ‘Support BDS against Israel – best way to resist this criminal government’; ‘Academics should now systematically refuse any invitations to visit Israeli universities or attend conferences there’; ‘the West must impose sanctions against, boycott and divest from Israel.’”

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Shameful Spectacles, in Chicago and Elsewhere

By on March 14th, 2016

The curious case of Donald Trump vs. Riots Inc. puts us in mind of Henry Kissinger’s assessment of the Iran–Iraq War: It’s a pity both sides can’t lose.

Instead, the loss is being suffered by the United States and its political institutions.

Politics-by-riot, and politics-by-threat-of-riot, is unworthy of the oldest and finest democratic republic on earth. Politics-by-assault isn’t just a crime, though such crimes should be robustly prosecuted: It is an attack on the institutions that make American self-governance possible as much as an attack on individual speakers or protesters. Among those institutions are freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. The Bill of Rights guarantees protection of those rights from government encroachment, but they also must be defended from mob-ocracy, which we have seen more than enough of in the past year, from Ferguson to Washington.

Donald Trump canceled a rally in Chicago after protests that were intended to pressure him into doing so. Which is to say, protests that were not oriented toward political expression but toward its suppression. If you have any doubt of that, consider that the protesters chanted “We stopped Trump!” after they succeeded in out-bullying the big bully of Fifth Avenue. Trump, for his part, played the martyr — a cynical posture for a man who fantasizes in public about using the law to punish journalists who displease him. A protester disrupted a planned Trump event in Ohio and later described his goal as to “take his podium away from him and take his mic away from him.” Another act of protest oriented not toward political expression but toward its suppression. That protester has been charged with disorderly conduct, and the evidence is plain enough that he should be convicted.

Trump — Saddam Hussein to the ayatollahs of political correctness on the other side — is of course far from blameless in all this. That is not to say that Trump’s irresponsible, wild-eyed, and meat-headed rhetoric, which has included explicit calls for violence against his critics, is responsible for having provoked the protests. Rather, Trump’s rhetoric has been unworthy of a presidential candidate — and unworthy of an American — in and of itself.

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Palestinians: Laughing Their Heads Off by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on March 14th, 2016

As in any comedy, there is a clown, and Biden was played for a fool by a Palestinian Authority leadership that finds that it pays to point its finger at Israel.

Here is a dirty little secret: the Palestinian attackers were not driven to murder Jews because of “settlements” and “checkpoints.”

Check their Facebook accounts: what fueled their hatred were the lies they had been fed for the past few years by President Abbas and other Palestinian leaders. Palestinian media outlets and spokesmen vomit poison against Israel.

And so the curtain rises on another act of the ceremonial, make-believe theater of the Middle East. In Abbas’s sneaky script, it is about settlements. In reality, it is about the refusal of the Americans to read, speak or even translate Arabic.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited Ramallah last week, and Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and his top officials are laughing their heads off.

Why not laugh? Biden arrived in the region hoping to persuade the Palestinian leaders to issue a “condemnation” of the reign of terror, which they continue to describe as a “popular and peaceful uprising.” This in itself reeks of gallows humor.

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From Ferguson to Chicago Left-wing fascists go for Donald Trump. Matthew Vadum

By on March 14th, 2016

The riot planned and executed by the Left at the canceled Donald Trump campaign rally in Chicago on Friday was just the latest in a long series of mob disturbances manufactured by radicals to advance their political agendas.

Even so, it is a particularly poisonous assault on the American body politic that imperils the nation’s most important free institution – the ballot.

“The meticulously orchestrated #Chicago assault on our free election process is as unAmerican as it gets,” tweeted actor James Woods. “It is a dangerous precedent.”

This so-called protest, and the disruptions at subsequent Trump events over the weekend, were not spontaneous, organic demonstrations. The usual culprits were involved behind the scenes. The George Soros-funded organizers of the riot at the University of Illinois at Chicago relied on the same fascistic tactics the Left has been perfecting for decades – including claiming to be peaceful and pro-democracy even as they use violence to disrupt the democratic process.

Activists associated with MoveOn, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street, all of which have been embraced by Democrats and funded by radical speculator George Soros, participated in shutting down the Trump campaign event. Soros recently also launched a $15 million voter-mobilization effort against Trump in Colorado, Florida, and Nevada through a new super PAC called Immigrant Voters Win. The title is a characteristic misdirection since Trump supports immigration that is legal. It’s the invasion of illegals who have not been vetted and are filling America’s welfare rolls and jails that is the problem.

Among the extremist groups involved in disrupting the Trump rally in Chicago were the revolutionary communist organization ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), National Council of La Raza (“the Race”), and the Illinois Coalition of Immigrant and Rights Reform. President Obama’s unrepentant terrorist collaborator Bill Ayers, who was one of the leaders of Days of Rage the precursor riot at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, also showed up to stir the pot.

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Florida Muslim Leader Spreads Claim ‘Holocaust Was Faked’ AMANA Director Sofian Zakkout shares material from website praising Adolf Hitler. Joe Kaufman

By on March 14th, 2016

Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, the Director of the Miami, Florida-based American Muslim Association of North America (AMANA), is advertising on social media a report claiming that the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany during the 1930s and 1940s was fabricated. This is just one example of many of how Zakkout has belittled and maligned members of the Jewish community and others with the most grotesque manifestations of bigotry – and that’s just in this past month!

On February 14th, Zakkout took to Facebook to promote a report questioning the validity of the Holocaust, entitled, ‘How the Holocaust was faked.’ The piece, which includes gruesome photos of dead bodies piled upon one another, begins, “The alleged ‘Holocaust’ of ‘6 million Jews’ at the hands of Adolf Hitler and National Socialist Germany during WWII is the biggest lie ever foisted upon humanity.”

The piece was produced by The Realist Report, a white supremacist outfit located on the outskirts of San Diego, California that regularly targets Jews, blacks and homosexuals. On the group’s website, its viewers are commanded to: “Fight White Genocide. Rise up against the destruction of your race!” while an accompanying video’s narrator ominously states, “We are told to accept our inevitable brown future.”

In April 2013, The Realist Report devoted an entire page on its website to offer birthday wishes to Adolf Hitler. The page states, “Happy Birthday, Adolf Hitler. You were and remain the greatest leader in modern Western history, and offer unparalleled inspiration and guidance to us all. God bless you, and may you forever rest in peace. Heil Hitler!”

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Breitbart Exodus: Michelle Fields and Ben Shapiro Quit, More Resignations Likely “Steve Bannon is a bully, and has sold out Andrew’s mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump.” By Debra Heine

By on March 14th, 2016

Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields and editor-at-large Ben Shapiro have tendered their resignations to the management at Breitbart.com over the site’s handling of the Corey Lewandowski/Michelle Fields imbroglio, Rosie Gray and McKay Coppins of BuzzFeed News reported late Sunday night. And more resignations are likely in the coming days and weeks, according to their report.

Fields and Shapiro join Breitbart spokesman Kurt Bardella, who left the company on Friday, citing as his reason the website’s inadequate handling of Donald Trump’s campaign manager’s alleged assault on Fields last week.

Bardella told CNN’s Don Lemon on Saturday that he thought the website has been “looking for a reason to disprove something” even though the evidence strongly supports Fields’ version of the story. When Lemon asked Bardella if he thought Breitbart was lying, he bluntly answered, “Yes, I am.”

BuzzFeed reports that Fields and Shapiro informed Breitbart’s chairman, Steve Bannon, of their decisions Sunday night.

“Today I informed the management at Breitbart News of my immediate resignation,” Fields said in a statement sent to BuzzFeed News. “I do not believe Breitbart News has adequately stood by me during the events of the past week and because of that I believe it is now best for us to part ways.”

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The Weirdness of Illegal Immigration By Victor Davis Hanson

By on March 14th, 2016

Set aside for a moment all the controversies over illegal immigration—the wall, deportation, amnesty, Donald J. Trump, “comprehensive immigration reform,” etc. Instead, contemplate what happens in a social, cultural, and economic context when several million immigrants arrive from one of the poorest areas in the world (e.g., Oaxaca) to one of the most affluent (e.g., California). For guidance, think not of Jorge Ramos, but of the premodern/postmodern collision that is occurring in Germany, Austria, and Denmark.

The first casualty is the law. I am not referring to the collapse of federal immigration enforcement, but rather the ripples that must follow from it. When someone ignores a federal statute, then it is naturally easy to flout more. In Los Angeles, half the traffic accidents are hit-and-run collisions. I can attest first-hand that running from an accident or abandoning a wrecked vehicle is certainly a common occurrence in rural California. Last night on a rural road, a driver behind me (intoxicated? Malicious? Crazy?) apparently tried to rear-end me, then turned off his lights, sped up, and at the next stop sign pulled over swearing out the window in Spanish. In this age and in these environs, why would one call a sheriff for a minor everyday occurrence like that? The point is simply that when there is no federal law, no one has any idea how several million arrive in the U.S., much less what exactly they were doing before their illegal arrival. I note the latter consideration, because legal immigration does require some sort of personal history, and at the airport I am always asked by U.S Customs what exactly I was doing in Greece or Germany that prompted my trip.

Out here almost all laws concerning the licensing and vaccination of dogs seem to have simply disappeared. No one can walk or ride a bicycle along these rural roads without being attacked by hounds that are unlicensed and not vaccinated—and that have no ID or indeed owners that step forward to claim ownership once the victim is bleeding. The Bloomberg Rule reigns (i.e., if you can’t keep snow off the street, deplore global warming or cosmic war): we talk of dreamers because we have not a clue how to ensure that hundreds of thousands of pets are registered and given rabies shots. No one suggests that once one breaks the law of his adopted home, and continues to do so through false affidavits, aliases, and fraudulent documents, then the law itself become an abstraction, useful as a shelter, expendable if an inconvenience. Again, one assumes that if a citizen were to do that, he would face a felony indictment.

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