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June 2016

Former Bush AG: Trump Is Right to Question Fairness of Judge By Rick Moran

Former George W. Bush administration attorney general Alberto Gonzales penned an op-ed in the Washington Post today, giving Donald Trump some cover in his rampage against a Mexican American judge presiding over the lawsuit against Trump University.

It is crucial to understand the real issue in this matter. I am not judging whether Curiel is actually biased against Trump. Only he knows the answer to that question. I am not saying that I would be concerned about him presiding over a case in which I was a litigant. And if I were a litigant who was concerned about the judge’s impartiality, I certainly would not deal with it in a public manner as Trump has, because it demeans the integrity of the judicial office and thus potentially undermines the independence of the judiciary, especially coming from a man who could be president by this time next year. But none of these issues is the test. The test is whether there is an “appearance of impropriety” under the facts as they reasonably appear to a litigant in Trump’s position.

Certainly, Curiel’s Mexican heritage alone would not be enough to raise a question of bias (for all we know, the judge supports Trump’s pledge to better secure our borders and enforce the rule of law). As someone whose own ancestors came to the United States from Mexico, I know ethnicity alone cannot pose a conflict of interest.

But there may be other factors to consider in determining whether Trump’s concerns about getting an impartial trial are reasonable. Curiel is, reportedly, a member of a group called La Raza Lawyers of San Diego. Trump’s aides, meanwhile, have indicated that they believe Curiel is a member of the National Council of La Raza, a vocal advocacy organization that has vigorously condemned Trump and his views on immigration. The two groups are unaffiliated, and Curiel is not a member of NCLR. But Trump may be concerned that the lawyers’ association or its members represent or support the other advocacy organization. Coupled with that question is the fact that in 2014, when he certified the class-action lawsuit against Trump, Curiel appointed the Robbins Geller law firm to represent plaintiffs. Robbins Geller has paid $675,000 in speaking fees since 2009 to Trump’s likely opponent, Hillary Clinton, and to her husband, former president Bill Clinton. Curiel appointed the firm in the case before Trump entered the presidential race, but again, it might not be unreasonable for a defendant in Trump’s position to wonder who Curiel favors in the presidential election.

Gonzales makes the case Trump should be making. It’s not a question of Curiel’s Hispanic heritage. It’s the web of his connections that gives the appearance of bias in favor of Hillary Clinton and against Republicans. CONTINUE AT SITE

Polygamy: Europe’s Hidden Statistic by Judith Bergman

The sheer volume of polygamous marriages shows that such marriages are also entered into in Europe, in secret, through Islamic marriage ceremonies conducted by imams. In most European countries, imams are not required to report these marriages to the authorities.

Daham Al Hasan fled from Syria to Denmark, leaving behind his three wives and 20 children. Under the Danish rules of family unification, one of his wives and eight of his children have joined him in Denmark. But Al Hasan wants all his children with him, as well as all his wives. Lawyers estimate that the remaining wives will be able to join their children in Denmark. The case has caused a shock not only because of what it will cost the Danish state just in child allowance, but because Al Hassan claims that he is too ill to work or even learn Danish. “I don’t only have mental problems, but also physical problems…” He has admitted that his “mental illness” consists of missing the children he voluntarily left behind.

Even if theoretically women can go to the police or press charges, they run the risk of being beaten or possibly divorced. Women’s shelters are “full of Muslim women.”

The spokeswoman of Germany’s Federal Employment Agency said that the establishment of a central registry of Islamic marriages would be helpful for investigating claims of fraud.

A few years ago, Sweden’s Center Party, one of the four parties in the center-right governing coalition at the time, proposed legalizing polygamy. The idea caused outrage; the proposal was dropped. The party’s youth division, however, refused to let go: “We think it is important for the individual to decide how many people he or she wants to marry,” said Hanna Wagenius, head of Center Youth, predicting that polygamy would be legal in ten years, when her generation would enter parliament and make sure of it.

Obama’s Refugee Policy: Yes to Potential Terrorists, No to Victims of Genocide by Raymond Ibrahim

“Without doubt, Syrians of all confessions are being victimized by this savage war and are facing unimaginable suffering. But only Christians and other religious minorities are the deliberate targets of systematic persecution and genocide.” — U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, March 17, 1016.

Christians account for 10% of Syria’s total population — yet they account for less than 0.5% of the refugees received into America. Sunni Muslims are 74% of Syria’s population — yet 99% of those received into America. In other words, there should be 20 times more Christians and about one-quarter fewer Sunnis granted refugee status than there already have been.

ISIS is “taking advantage of the torrent of migrants to insert operatives into that flow.” — James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence.

Although the U.N. and U.S. know that Sunni refugees are terrorizing Christians in their camps, they abandon the true victims who deserve sanctuary in the West, while “humanitarianly” taking in their persecutors.

The Obama administration has been escalating a policy that both abandons Mideast Christians and exposes Americans to the jihad.

Late last year it was revealed that 97% of Syrian refugees accepted into the U.S. were Sunni Muslims — the same Islamic sect to which the Islamic State belongs— while fewer than half-a-percent were Christians.

This disparity has since gotten worse. From May 1 to May 23, 499 Syrian refugees — a number that exceeds the total number of refugees admitted during the last three years — were received into the United States. Zero Christians were among them; 99 percent were Sunni (the remaining one percent was simply listed as “Muslim”).

These numbers are troubling.

Rigged: The Trial of Trump University Jeffrey Lord

Political conflicts of interest galore go uncovered in witch hunt against Trump.

Can we talk a big, fat political conflict of interest? Can we talk the lawyers and the judge involved in the lawsuits against Trump University? Let’s throw in identity politics and, but of course, follow the money.

Well of course there’s a conflict.

What did you expect when you saw the breathless headlines blare about Trump University lawsuits? The impression being assiduously cultivated that Donald Trump, a billionaire ten times over, set up some sort of elaborate con to scam regular folks on real estate.

What’s not being said? What questions are not being asked? How about this? How about asking just who is pursuing these cases against Donald Trump? What if what’s really going on here is… a witch trial? A rigged game designed to produce a desired political end — the smearing of Donald Trump — to enable the political fortunes of Democrats generally, and Hillary Clinton specifically?

Let’s examine the players in this lawsuit.

The players are:

The Judge: U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, the California federal judge in the Trump University law suit case.

The Lawyers: Two law firms: Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP and Zeldes Haeggquist & Eck LLP.

And let’s not forget another player, this one in New York. That would be:

The New York Attorney General: Eric Schneiderman.

The Play: As detailed here in Law360, this is how the game works:

Law360, Los Angeles (October 28, 2014, 4:00 PM ET) — A California federal judge has granted class certification in a Racketeer influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act suit accusing Donald Trump of scheming to make millions of dollars by falsely claiming attendees of Trump University LLC seminars would learn his real estate secrets.

… In addition to certifying the class, Judge Curiel on Friday appointed Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP and Zeldes Haeggquist & Eck LLP as class counsel.

Stop. Stop right there. Let’s parse.

Who is the “California federal judge” who not only granted “class certification” to the lawsuit against Trump — but then assigned the two law firms now involved with the case?

PRAISE FOR MIGUEL DE CERVANTES ON THE QUADRICENTENNIAL OF HIS DEATH

A VERRAY PARFIT GENTLE KNIGHT BY MALCOLM FORBES
Amid the celebratory hullaballoo marking the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s death, it is worth remembering that 400 years ago another writer died, one whose greatest work also transformed literature and created a new way of seeing the world.

On publication in 1605, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha became an international bestseller and brought Miguel de Cervantes, an aging, crippled veteran of Spain’s wars, fame and fortune after years of moderate artistic success, financial loss, imprisonment and disillusionment. Readers delighted in the picaresque scrapes and adventures of Cervantes’ comic double-act: Don Quixote, a humble nobleman whose obsession with chivalric romances has deluded him into thinking he is a knight errant; and Sancho Panza, his dumpy, trusty squire who is “a little short of salt in the brain-pan”. The book was such a hit that Cervantes sent his characters out on fresh sallies in a sequel ten years later. Both volumes became one classic, an imperishable cornerstone of Western culture, and a source of pleasure and inspiration for generations of readers and writers.

Chiming with the anniversary of Cervantes’ death comes a book on him and his famous creation. The Man Who Invented Fiction is not a traditional biography of Cervantes. In his introduction, William Egginton, a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins University, explains that his book explores Cervantes’ life in order to demonstrate how the author achieved his “innovation”. “I hope to cast a new light on what fiction is,” Egginton writes, “and to show how it was that Miguel de Cervantes came to invent it.”

Much of Cervantes’ life consisted of encountering and surmounting hard knocks, and weathering the debilitating fug of desengaño, or disappointment, which plagued late-16th-century Spain. His father was hounded by creditors and eventually jailed, which resulted in a childhood spent largely on the move and blighted by poverty and dishonour. Egginton’s early chapters depict an adolescent Cervantes seeking solace by writing poetry.

However, the book truly takes off when he trades his native Spain and relative peace for Italy and war. He participates in great battles, makes treacherous voyages and suffers many injuries, including the permanent loss of feeling in his left hand. Egginton argues that Cervantes’ later fiction is shot through with ambivalence towards war: a deft seesawing whereby a character is seen lauding or enacting individual deeds of valour while in the same breath condemning the practice of warfare and skewering the state for its merciless treatment of soldiers.

Cervantes was held captive for five years in Algiers (during which time he made four unsuccessful escape attempts) and later wound up in jail in Seville. According to Egginton, both internments provided valuable first-hand material to draw on for Don Quixote. Cervantes’ stinking cell in Seville exposed him to the wild stories and perspectives of numerous rogues and outcasts. Algiers engendered the intercalated “Captive’s Tale”. Egginton goes on to make the convincing claim that while capitalising on the traumatic memory of his captivity to create fiction, Cervantes was in turn using fiction as a means of helping himself overcome that trauma. What’s more, in writing invented stories to deal with his personal pain, “Cervantes was inaugurating a particularly modern use of literature.”

Nick Turner The Brexit Countdown — Part I

On June 23, UK voters will decide if they stay or turn their backs on the EU. Today, as that plebiscite approaches, Quadrant Online presents the first installment in an extended examination of the issues and factors at play — an appraisal, it should be noted, by an ardent advocate of the Leave cause.
As of June 23′s Brexit vote, 2016 could well prove to be a date of enduring and historic significance — one of those years made famous by the events they encompass. Actions of genuine significance in history, like The Great Reform Act of 1832 or The Glorious Revolution of 1688. Of course it could equally go down as an 1848, a year of possibilities unrealised; a footnote chiefly of interest to counter-factual historians who ask ‘what if?’

In the spirit of hypothesis contemplate this notion: if you were an extraterrestrial looking down dispassionately at the Earth, wondering who is your best bet for first contact, you would chose Britain. You would observe that it is the most liberal and tolerant advanced civilisation on the planet. You would notice that its language and culture have spread across the globe. That its politics, law, science, engineering and inventions had shaped the modern world. Throughout its history it had welcomed and assimilated peoples and today its capital could claim to be the most diverse, cosmopolitan metropolis anywhere. You would find that its system of government had the longest pedigree, greatest number of disciples and that its Head of State is respected wherever she goes, cordially received and gracious to all world leaders she welcomes in return. Yes, our alien would conclude, Britain might no longer be top dog, but it is our best bet at a fair hearing.

Britons are faced with a historic choice in this year, one that goes beyond membership of the European Union. They are asking a question that all mature democracies in the early 21st Century should be asking themselves. Unlike a general election there are no tactical votes to be had, no safe seats, no shades of grey. You are either In or Out or you couldn’t care less.

The Brexit referendum, in a nutshell, is a vote on Big Government. If you believe the problems the world faces can only be solved by unelected officials making decisions on your behalf, you will vote to stay in. If you believe you are better able to face the challenges of this young century by trusting a system of representative government, vote to get out.

And that’s it!

Economics, security, trade, immigration, emigration, they are all part of a long history. They were there before the EU and will be part of the future whatever the result. The debate itself, however, is another matter.

David Singer: The European Union Must End PLO Subjugation and Exploitation

The European Union (EU) possesses the financial levers to end 10 years of exploitative rule by the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in not holding any elections in the West Bank during that period.

95 per cent of the West Bank Arab population live in Areas “A” and “B” under the total administrative control of the PLO. That population has been subjugated into silence by the PLO and given no opportunity to freely express their support or otherwise for the political and economic decisions taken by the PLO since 2006.

The EU in February 2015 released €130 million in direct financial support to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and a further €82 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Commissioner for Neighbourhood and Enlargement Negotiations, Johannes Hahn, commented at the time:

“The EU remains committed to the two-state solution and will therefore continue to support the Palestinian Authority in its state-building efforts and in delivering basic social services.”

Hahn’s statement ignored that the PA had:

1. frustrated state-building efforts to bring about the two-state solution during the previous twelve months by refusing to resume negotiations with Israel without preconditions.

2. ceased to exist as a legal entity after President Abbas had disbanded it by Presidential decree on 3 January 2013.

Holder’s Dangerous Ignorance About Snowden : Fred Fleitz

Many regard Eric Holder as one of the most incompetent and partisan men to serve as attorney general in U.S. history.

Holder’s record as attorney general included proposing to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a Manhattan court room, failing to seriously investigate IRS targeting of tea party and other conservative groups, monitoring American journalists and the “Fast and Furious” operation cover-up.

Congress held Holder in contempt of Congress in June 2012 for refusing to hand over documents on the Fast and Furious operation. Senator Ted Cruz called for Holder to be impeached for the way he handled IRS targeting of conservative groups.

Holder’s recent comment about Edward Snowden adds to his record of ineptitude.

Last weekend, Holder said former NSA technician Edward Snowden, who stole over 1.7 million highly classified documents, leaked many of them to the news media and sought refuge in Russia, performed a “public service” by triggering a debate over surveillance techniques by U.S. intelligence agencies.

Holder also said: “Now I would say that doing what he did – and the way he did it – was inappropriate and illegal” and conceded that Snowden damaged U.S. national security.

Holder added: “He harmed American interests. I know there are ways in which certain of our agents were put at risk, relationships with other countries were harmed, our ability to keep the American people safe was compromised.

“There were all kinds of re-dos that had to be put in place as a result of what he did, and while those things were being done we were blind in certain really critical areas. So what he did was not without consequence.”

The Friend and the Foe Posted by Daniel Greenfield

On Memorial Day, the flowers bloom. A dozen towns in a dozen states all claim that it began there when after the long weary struggle of the Civil War, the mothers and sisters of the lost and the fallen brought fresh cut flowers to bring a touch of life to the dead men entombed in the cold, gray stone.

“From the silence of sorrowful hours, The desolate mourners go, Lovingly laden with flowers, Alike for the friend and the foe,” reads the famous Francis Miles Finch poem which helped popularize the practice.

Today the wars are no longer fraternal. The First World War is the last war that had anything brotherly in it. It was a war where soldiers from both sides could observe a Christmas truce and hurl nothing deadlier than snowballs at each other. The end of that terrible war on the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” became Armistice Day and then, when the “war to end all wars” did not end them, but instead gave way to wars fought against terrible evils, Nazism, Communism, Islam, it became Veteran’s Day to remember those who would go on sacrificing in this eternal struggle against evil.

But while wars are no longer fraternal, the flowers are laid now on the graves of foes, not friends.

The men and women who die fighting for the cause of freedom are not accorded a fraction of the tender affection from the press that it lavishes on a single imprisoned Al Qaeda terrorist. We live today in an America in which the butchers of the Jihad in Guantanamo Bay receive better medical care than veterans waiting endlessly at the VA. While Obama cut off hot meals for Marines in Afghanistan, Islamic terrorists in Guantanamo Bay were enjoying lemon baked fish, honey glazed chicken, lyonaise rice, tandouri chicken breast, okra, hummus, dates, honey and seasoned lentils.

While veterans died at the VA, the men they had fought and helped capture were gifted with a $750,000 soccer field. This treatment is an obscene echo of the days of segregation when German POWs were allowed to sit inside at eateries while the African-American soldiers who guarded them had to wait outside. This segregation no longer occurs by race, but by patriotism and creed.

Obama denies that Islamic terrorism exists and suppresses any training materials about the role of Islam in Islamic terrorism while his administration warns of domestic terror threats from veterans. Muslim migrants from Syria receive lavish social benefits while health care for veterans is slashed. The Muslim migrants, many of whom support Islamic terrorists, benefit from job programs while veterans head for the unemployment line. This hatefully discriminatory attitude has become pervasive on the left.

Hollywood bends over backward to avoid accurately portraying Muslim terrorists, but depicts returning veterans as unstable killers and ticking time bombs. The media gushes over each petty Islamophobia grievance, like Tahera Ahmad, who claimed that she didn’t receive a Diet Coke can on a plane only because she was Muslim, while sweeping the sweeping the thousand veterans who died because of the VA scandal under the progressive prayer rug. A Muslim Diet Coke matters more than a thousand dead veterans.

New York City proclaims a man who thinks he’s a woman is a ‘real woman’ By Rick Moran

A “factsheet” issued by the New York City Commission on Human Rights makes some astonishing claims about biology and gender identity.

They claim that it’s a “myth” that biological men are not “real women.”

The commission published a “myths vs. facts” document on gender identity and expression after receiving a flurry of criticism over its transgender guidance that forces businesses to accommodate 31 different gender identities.

One of the “myths” listed is that “Transgender women are not ‘real’ women, and transgender men are not ‘real’ men.”

Next to that myth, the commission asserts the correct “fact”: “Gender identity is not based on one’s sex assigned at birth.” The implication is that one’s self-determined “gender identity” — rather than one’s biological makeup — is what makes a woman a woman.

Underneath the “myth” and “fact,” the commission offers an explanation of the issue.

“If someone’s gender identity is female, then that person is a woman – regardless of what her birth sex was – and she should be treated as a woman,” the document states. “Similarly, if someone’s gender identity is male, then that person is a man, and he should be treated as a man.”

The document also states that it’s a “myth” that, “The New York City Human Rights Law allows men to enter the women’s bathroom and vice versa.” The “fact” the commission offers to disprove that “myth” is “If an individual identifies as a man, he is not permitted to use the women’s room.”

The document explains this by stating: “The NYCHRL allows individuals to use the bathroom that is consistent with their gender identity.”