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July 2016

Michael Galak: Russia’s Five-Ring Circus

Judging by Moscow’s delighted reaction to the news that its athletes will be free to compete at the Rio Games, the IOC has confirmed perceptions of the West as corrupt, weak, easily intimidated and, most of all, lacking the courage of its alleged convictions.
There is a contemptuous saying in the Russian language which, loosely translated, sgoes something like this: ‘Piss in his eyes but he will still say it is a God’s dew’. Despite its crudity, this saying perfectly reflects the habitual pattern of deception by the Russian authorities, who lie, prevaricate and stonewall despite whatever weight of evidence condemns them.

Doping in sport? Never! Crimea? We had no Russian soldiers there! Ukraine? Nothing to do with us. Malaysian aircraft shot down with horrific civilian casualties? Someone else’s fault! And always, “You have no proof!”

The doping scandal and the near miss at the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is a humiliation for the entire country of incomparable magnitude. And, I regret to say, a wasted opportunity by the IOC to declare, clearly and strongly, ‘Enough is enough!’

The IOC did not have the guts to kick out the dope cheats and to send a message to the world that doping is unacceptable. Instead, it preferred to pass the buck and “leave it to the discretion of the individual sports bodies” to decide the fate of the Russian Olympic sports team. Judging by the delighted Russian reaction, this decision has confirmed their contemptuous opinion of the Western institutions, especially European ones, as corrupt, weak and easily controllable by discrete (or should I say – hybrid?) means.

The IOC has made a mockery of integrity. It let countries aspiring to the same level of corruption as in Russia know that all they have to do is respect the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not get caught. And if they do get caught, the appropriate response is to deny and lie, despite all evidence. If that doesn’t work, get the IOC to refer the cheaters to individual sports bodies. Countries, like China, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, North Korea and their ilk will understand the message quite clearly.

The harm IOC inflicted by this decision goes much deeper than sports. It strengthens the Russian and similarly autocratic, corrupt and oppressive countries’ opinion that everyone is as corrupt as they are; that the rule of law is just a figment of the Western propaganda; that Europeans are weak and cowardly; that the niceties of international civilised behaviour and the primacy of individual freedom over the collective predominance is nonsense; that a state can and should interfere wherever it wishes and is not answerable to anyone, least of all to the rule of law.

In effect, the IOC has colluded with the Russian government in blatantly breaching international decency. Declaring its decision as motivated by the desire to be inclusive, it has, by a simple exercise of intellectual dishonesty, approved of the Russian government’s behaviours. The meek and mild IOC decision, in effect, gave the Russian government, which committed a hanging offence, a slap on the wrist. In exchange for what?

Tony Thomas: The Clintons and Their Corruptocrats

In Hillary’s term at State, wealthy crooks, influence-seekers and tyrannical governments rushed to donate millions to the Clinton Foundation, its spin-offs, Bill Clinton personally or vague combinations of all/any of them. Figuring large on the donor list, Australia’s taxpayers.
Australian governments’ $85 million aid to the Clinton Foundation is a bit surprising, given that ex-President Bill and presidential candidate Hillary are synonyms for financial and personal sleaze. That total sum was paid by both Coalition and Labor governments over the past decade. Coalition and Labor have also despatched and committed $460m to the Clinton-affiliated Global Partnership for Education, chaired by our ex-PM Julia Gillard. Abbott’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop threw Gillard’s show a lazy $140 million of taxpayer money in 2014, no questions asked. That aid was in the teeth of Gillard’s lusty presidential campaigning for Hillary against Trump.

Ostensibly charitable, the Clinton Foundation is the centerpiece of the couple’s amassing of a vast personal fortune. Bill was president from 1993-01. Hillary was Secretary of State for Obama from 2009-13.

In Hillary’s term at State, every variety of wealthy crook, influence-seeker and tyrannical government rushed to “donate” millions to the Clinton Foundation, its spin-offs, Bill Clinton personally or vague combinations of all/any of them. Lots of those crooked donors later scored disgrace, convictions and/or gaol on unrelated matters. Amid the sleaze, of course, the Clinton Foundation did manage to do some genuine charity work.

The Australian’s Greg Sheridan reported last February that the Coalition and Labor governments aided the Clinton foundations by more than $75 million in the past decade. The aid was via partnerships with the Clintons’ outfit as ‘technical implementing partner’. There are still three deals involving the foundations aiding Indonesia, PNG and Vietnam. Australia appears to be the biggest single foreign-government source of Clinton Foundation funds, he said. Annual aid has ranged from $6.5 million to a peak $10.3 million in 2012-13, the final Labor year.

However, Sheridan and/or his US source overlooked $10 million in a direct donation by a Rudd government entity to the Clinton Foundation in 2009-10. Rudd in 2008 set up the Global CCS Institute for research into carbon capture and storage with $100 million of taxpayer money. “The Institute provided AU$10 million to the Clinton Foundation to support the work being conducted through the Clinton Climate Initiative to accelerate key ‘early mover’ CCS projects around the world,” the Institute said.

According to the ABC, Rudd’s little venture actually involved a further commitment of $215m, at the rate of $100m a year. Other countries were supposed to tip in money too but by 2012 that amounted to a tiny $4.5m from the US and EU. The Institute itself had no idea what to spend its money on, actually complaining to the ABC that “the Rudd Government funding was too much, too soon.” After two years, Rudd’s institute had spent $7.4 million on travel and meetings, $11.3 million on contractors and consultants, and almost $6 million on administration. It had donated only $37m to carbon capture projects around the world but had $145m sitting idle in the bank. The $10 million thrown to the Clinton Foundation appears to be part of the institute’s desperate attempts to spend its piggy bank. Carbon capture of course has proved to be a total turkey.

Wikileaks reveals apparent sale of presidential appointments by DNC By Thomas Lifson

It has always been taken for granted that presidents appoint wealthy donors to commissions, ambassadorships, and other honors. But we have never before seen evidence of the way the transactions are carried out. However, thanks to Wikileaks, we have an actual spreadsheet listing donors and possible purchases of office being circulated among DNC officials.

Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller has the story.

The spreadsheet — which was accompanied by emails sent between officials with the DNC’s finance team — contains 23 names of little-known corporate executives and professional fundraisers who have donated to the committee and various Democratic political action committees.

(snip)

The donor spreadsheet is included in an email chain in which Jordan Kaplan, DNC’s national finance director, asks other officials to provide names of donors they want to propose for federal commissions.

“Last call for boards and commissions,” Kaplan wrote on April 20.

“If you have someone, send to [DNC finance chief of staff Scott] Comer – full name, city, state, email and phone number. Send as many as you want, just don’t know how many people will get to.”

The email confused at least one official involved in the exchange.

“Boards and commissions? Sorry, I’m lost,” wrote Jordan Vaughn, the national finance director for the DNC’s African American Leadership Council.

Comer explained: “Any folks who you’d like to be considered to be on the board of (for example) USPS, NEA, NEH. Basically anyone who has a niche interest and might like to serve on the board of one of these orgs.”

“I should say, though, that the likelihood of landing a spot on ones as prestigious as NEA/USPS is unlikely,” Comer added, referring to the National Endowment for the Arts and the U.S. Postal Service.

For Trump! Against the Disloyalists! By Jared E. Peterson

At last it’s beyond dispute: This time the Republican Party’s presidential nominee is someone chosen by full throated roar from its augmented voter base, not by the timid and failed leadership that’s gripped the Party since Reagan.

And just as importantly, despite furious howls from “We prefer Hillary” turncoats scattered among Republican elites and conservative intellectuals, it’s now also indisputable that Donald Trump is fighting for the major part of the Republican Party and American conservatism’s Reagan agenda: unapologetic patriotism and belief in American exceptionalism, a freer, less regulated economy, a Supreme Court that respects the Constitution, unrestricted freedom of expression, unambiguous condemnation of all domestic violence, especially against the police, and a muscular defense of America, its people and allies against increasingly murderous enemies.

Not good enough, say the allegedly Republican and conservative turncoats … we prefer Hillary Clinton and all that comes with her.

An important aside: In law as in logic, the absolutely certain consequences of actions that are known to the actor beforehand … are consequences that he intends. If he fires an automatic weapon into a crowd, he will not be heard to say he did not intend to kill or seriously wound.

Those members of the Republican elite now denouncing Donald Trump and proclaiming he will not get their votes, or failing to endorse and campaign for him when by resume they would be expected to, are actions they know — to an absolute certainty — will help elect Hillary Clinton.

Thus, the entire gaggle of Republican and conservative disloyalists — from former presidents and failed presidential candidates all the way down to obscure scribblers — are intentionally working for the election of Hillary Clinton and the now radical Left Democratic Party.

If Hillary Clinton is elected, especially if by a narrow vote, the turncoat disloyalists will forever own all of the utterly predictable consequences of her Leftist presidency (see below for a partial list).

The reasons for this astonishing betrayal of their own voter base? A mixture of motives is on display. Much social and intellectual snobbery, selfish wound licking, and sinecure protecting are all unsuccessfully seeking cover behind alleged issue or character criticisms.

The soreheads’ issue gripes with Trump focus on those positions that indisputably have expanded the potential voter base of the Republican Party: In addition to embracing much of core conservatism and Republicanism, Trump has responded favorably to two pleas from huge and long-standing majorities of Republican and conservative voters — and from large numbers of working and middle class Americans who are neither:

AMERICA’S ECONOMY IS CARTELIZED, CORRUPT, AND ANTI-COMPETITIVE BY DAVID GOLDMAN

Under the title “Rotting-Flesh Reaganism,” R. R. Reno argues that Reagan’s campaign for economic freedom “made sense in 1980, a great deal of sense. But we’re in 2016 now, and we’re no longer suffering under suffocating collectivism and clotted, complacent capitalism. . . . The politics of freedom is losing its salience.”

It surely is the case that the old Reagan message has less purchase now than it did a quarter-century ago. The word “entrepreneurship” hardly was spoken during the recent Republican primaries. That is disturbing, because the empirical evidence argues strongly that today’s capitalism is more “clotted” and more “complacent” than at any time for which we have data.

Here are some parameters that show just how cartelized the American economy has become:

First, and most alarming, startup businesses contributed virtually zero new jobs during the post-2009 employment recovery. Nearly all the employment growth since the depth of the Great Depression came among the 1,500 largest American public companies by market capitalization. In a February study for Asia Times, I showed that the reported employment growth of the S&P 1,500 companies was nearly identical to the total increase in payroll employment reported by the Bureau of Labor statistics during the past seven years.

That is a drastic and unprecedented reversal of historic patterns. As I observed in the Asia Timesstudy, “Economists from the US Census Bureau and the University of Maryland showed in a 2014 study that startup firms created an average of 2.9 million jobs a year between 1980 and 2010—twice the 1.4 million average increase in employment. In other words, startups created 2.9 million jobs a year while established firms lost 1.5 million jobs a year.”

Bolívar Hats Were All the Rage European powers lost their hold on the New World during the Napoleonic wars. As colonies suddenly broke away, Americans were thrilled. By Fergus M. Bordewich

The presidency of James Monroe is often recalled as a period of political quiescence between the heroic age of the Founders and the era of muscular national expansion that followed him. Of course, his presidency is mostly remembered for the Monroe Doctrine. Proclaimed in 1823, it declared that the United States would consider any European action against the newly independent states of the Americas as an affront to itself.

Beneath the surface, the Monroe years and the decade that preceded them—roughly, 1810 to 1825—were anything but placid, at least with respect to Americans’ political discovery of Latin America. The turbulent visions and new ideological affinities of this period are the focus of Caitlin Fitz’s superb “Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions.” Ms. Fitz, a history professor at Northwestern University, argues that the Monroe era not only laid the foundation for U.S. policy toward Latin America but shaped North Americans’ ideas about the place of the United States in the world. It is a fascinating and often surprising story.

“Our Sister Republics” is not a history of Latin America’s revolutions, although Ms. Fitz tells us enough to enable us to distinguish the fleeting Republic of Pernambuco from the new regimes in Buenos Aires or Caracas. Rather, she focuses on North Americans’ passionate, if short-lived, identification with the aspirations of their South American neighbors.As instructive as Ms. Fitz’s narrative is, it is also a pleasure to read. She has a gift for the sparkling phrase that both enchants and illuminates. North American newspapers were “foreign agents’ strongest weapons, their pages scraping away at Portuguese authority with the accumulated force of a thousand paper cuts.” News of revolutions was carried by “merchants, sea captains, and other international men of motion.” Monroe, in the weeks before proclaiming his doctrine, sat “in Washington’s crisp autumn, holding foreign policy in his thoughts like a jeweler appraising a diamond, turning it around, inspecting it from all sides.” It is a rare historian who can bring politics alive with such verve.

Priest Dead, Two Attackers Killed After Assault on Church in Normandy, France Investigators are treating the assault as a terror attack, Interior Ministry spokesman saysBy Noemie Bisserbe and Inti Landauro

A priest was killed and another person was seriously wounded in an attack on a church in a northern French town, police said Tuesday.

Two men entered the church in Saint Etienne du Rouvray in Normandy and took five hostages, including the priest, who was found with his throat cut, police said.

Police surrounded the church and shot the two men as they exited the building, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said.

The assault is being treated as a terror attack by investigators, said Paris prosecutors in a statement.

France’s President Francois Hollande and Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve are on their way to the small town where the attack took place, government officials said.

The attack comes less than two weeks after the killing of 84 people assembled on France’s Bastille day in Nice on the French Riviera.

This is a developing story and will be updated shortly.

ISIS Suicide Bombing Sets Germany on Edge Series of attacks over past week add new fuel to debate over migrants and security By Anton Troianovski and Ruth Bender And Todd Buell

Terror militia Islamic State on Monday claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in southern Germany—the latest in a string of attacks that have shattered the country’s sense of calm and stoked tensions over accepting migrants.

The Sunday night blast that injured 15 people outside a concert venue in the Bavarian town of Ansbach was the second attack to be claimed by Islamic State here in a week and the first jihadist suicide bombing in the country.

The bomber was a 27-year-old Syrian asylum applicant identified by authorities as Mohammad D., who had been in Germany for about two years but was facing deportation. Authorities said he had pledged allegiance to Islamic State’s leader in a video found on his smartphone.
ENLARGE

The revelations focused more attention on the security implications of the more than a million refugees and migrants who arrived in the last year-and-a-half, and raised pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel to ramp up domestic security.

“It is clear that with these attacks in quick succession, the worries and fears in our population will grow,” said Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, whose conservative Christian Social Union is allied with Ms. Merkel but has called on her to limit the number of asylum applicants.

The run of violence began July 18 when a teenager who had registered as an Afghan refugee injured five people with an ax in Würzburg, an attack also claimed by Islamic State.

On Friday, an 18-year-old Iranian-German who officials say was obsessed with mass shootings went on a shooting spree in Munich, killing nine. And on Sunday, a 21-year-old Syrian asylum applicant killed a 45-year-old Polish woman with a large knife after what police suspected was a personal dispute.

Investigators said the Ansbach attacker, whose surname was withheld under German privacy law, came from Aleppo in Syria and appeared to have war wounds, suggesting he had military experience.

Japan Knife Attack at Facility for Disabled Kills at Least 19 The attack is one of the worst mass murders in Japan in recent decades By Eleanor Warnock and Mitsuru Obe

SAGAMIHARA, Japan—A man broke into a residence for disabled adults outside Tokyo early Tuesday morning and stabbed to death 19 people, authorities said, one of the worst mass murders in recent decades in a country known for its low crime rate.Officials at the facility described the 26-year-old suspect, Satoshi Uematsu, as a troubled former employee who quit in February of this year after being warned to stop making abusive comments about the severely disabled people living thereThey said Mr. Uematsu broke a window in the middle of the night to gain entrance to the home, then tied up some of the caregivers before attacking dozens of residents with a knife.

Top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said Mr. Uematsu surrendered himself to police shortly afterward and was arrested. Footage from a security camera aired on local television showed a person who appeared to be Mr. Uematsu returning to his car parked outside the home at about 2:50 a.m. and driving off. Public broadcaster NHK said Mr. Uematsu drove to a nearby police station to turn himself in.

Mr. Uematsu appears to have given a warning that he planned to kill disabled people.

A Japanese parliament official said a man believed to be Mr. Uematsu visited Parliament on Feb. 15 and hand-delivered a letter addressed to the lower-house speaker. The official declined to reveal its contents, but Kyodo News quoted Mr. Uematsu as writing in the letter that he wanted to carry out “euthanasia” on severely disabled people “to revitalize the global economy and prevent World War III.”

The Democrats’ Second Email Problem Hacked messages showing the party connived against Sanders have sent his fans in Philly into a tizzy.By Allysia Finley

Donald Trump got a post-convention gift Friday when WikiLeaks released a trove of hacked emails that showed Democratic National Committee leaders conniving against Bernie Sanders.Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz disparaged Mr. Sanders’s party loyalty in one email and called his campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, a “damn liar.” The party’s CFO, Brad Marshall, suggested trying to make an issue of the Vermonter’s religion: “Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist.” Amy Dacey, the party’s CEO, replied: “AMEN.”

It’s hardly news that the Democratic machine assisted Hillary Clinton throughout the primary. The party scheduled debates at times likely to draw few viewers—for instance, Sunday night at 9 p.m. Still, it’s bracing to see the political cynicism lain out in black and white.

The uproar cost Ms. Wasserman Schultz her job, as the chairwoman announced she will step down at the end of the convention. She leaves after having accomplished her mission of nominating Mrs. Clinton, for which she is being rewarded with a titular position as head of the Clinton campaign’s “50-state program” to elect Democrats nationwide.

At first the party establishment expressed remorse only that the improper collusion was exposed. Mr. Marshall, the CFO, apologized Saturday. “I deeply regret,” he wrote in a post on Facebook, “that my insensitive, emotional emails would cause embarrassment to the DNC.” The following day, after Ms. Wasserman Schultz announced her resignation, President Obama lauded her service, saying that “her fundraising and organizing skills were matched only by her passion, her commitment and her warmth.” Mrs. Clinton thanked her “longtime friend” for “getting the Democratic Party to this year’s historic convention.”

Meantime, Team Clinton is using Russian hackers as a diversion. “Sources are saying the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump,” campaign manager Robby Mook said. Campaign Chairman John Podesta sensed “a kind of bromance going on between Putin and Trump, which is distinct from this leak.”