Displaying posts published in

August 2016

Meet Mike Gallagher, the GOP Marine Running in Wisconsin’s 8th District By Avner Zarmi

The eyes of the nation were on Wisconsin once again because of the August primary elections, principally because Paul Ryan was being challenged in the First Congressional District. The challenger, Paul Nehlen, was widely perceived as a Trumpkin, even though Trump himself had finally been coerced by the party into endorsing Ryan at a rally in Green Bay mere days before the primary. Nehlen enjoyed endorsements from the likes of Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter, but was nonetheless crushed by Ryan, who won with more than 70% of the vote.

However, there was another primary race which deserved at least as much attention.

In the Eighth Congressional District, a three-way contest developed for the chance to replace the retiring Reid Ribble. The contest was handily won (also with over 70% of the vote) by Mike Gallagher, a 32-year-old native of Green Bay with an impressive resume for his age.

After graduating from Princeton, Gallagher entered the Marine Corps and spent seven years on active duty. He served in Iraq, where he was responsible for the gathering and analysis of human intelligence (information from human sources is known as Humint, as opposed to signals intelligence, or Sigint, and electronic intelligence, or Elint). A fluent Arabic speaker, his last duty station in Iraq was the town of al-Qaim on the Syrian border. There he helped hand out school books and soccer balls to children who, just a year before, had been too terrified of al-Qaeda goons to go to school.

He was convinced at the time that his job was over, that we had won. This was before the rise of Daesh and their invasion of Iraq. The town is now controlled by Daesh.

From there, he went to work for General Petraeus at CENTCOM, where he acquired some sense of the high-level, strategic thinking behind the tactical measures he’d earlier been involved with. He also worked with the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and other federal agencies, and eventually he was the Middle East point man for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

From there, he was tapped to become national security advisor to Scott Walker’s short-lived presidential campaign. He moved back to the Green Bay area and went to work for an energy firm when the campaign folded.

Not The Onion: State University Has ‘Stop White People’ Event for RA Training By Tyler O’Neil !!!!

The State University of New York at Binghamton is actually hosting an event titled “#StopWhitePeople2K16” at a training for resident assistants. Yet again, the politically correct social justice warriors have let slip their own racial prejudices, in the name of opposing systemic injustice and “white privilege.”

The “Stop White People” class reportedly aims to help others understand “diversity, privilege, and the society we function in.” In an Orwellian twist, the teachers promise to “give attendees the tool to” debunk “‘good’ arguments from uneducated people.” Anyone who disagrees with the assertion that we live in a society with inherent advantages for white people is “uneducated” and needs to be corrected.

Nevermind the intellectual diversity and open dialogue from multiple perspectives that truly fosters education, or the fact that white people are still people and should not be discriminated against, or the simple truth that organizations focused on “stopping white people” are just as racist as ones set up to hold back other races.

No, the State University of New York at Binghamton is committed to the closing of the liberal mind and the conspiracy theory that somehow “white people” are all out to get everyone else. Here is the full description of the event:

The premise of this session is to help others take the next step in understanding diversity, privilege, and the society we function within. Learning about these topics is a good first step, but when encountered with ‘good’ arguments from uneducated people, how do you respond? This open discussion will give attendees the tools to do so, and hopefully expand upon what they may already know.

Student Howard Hecht explained the mentality behind such overt racism. “If you subscribe to the extremely leftist notion that to be racist against white people is ‘reverse racism,’ and therefore white people cannot experience racism because ‘reverse racism’ does not exist, then the title of this conference will not bother you. For the rest of the student population, however, the title may come as a bit of a shock, or at the very least spark interest in understanding the hashtag.”

This is just the latest in a long string of rather questionable anti-white events on college campuses and elsewhere. A group of “people of color” students at the Claremont Colleges specifically tried to prevent getting any white roommates. Back in May, a group of young people formed an organization aimed at convincing white men not to run for political office. Perhaps more terrifying, the Black Lives Matter protest in Milwaukee not only chanted “Black Power,” but also specifically called for violence against white people.

Hillary’s newly discovered emails raise questions about Comey’s report By J. Marsolo

The news shows reported yesterday that the FBI discovered 14,900 emails that Hillary had not turned over to the State Department. This news again focuses attention on the July 5, 2016 report by FBI Director Comey that no criminal charges be pursued against Hillary, although he criticized her handling of the emails as “extremely careless.” In his report, Comey said there were “several thousand work-related emails” that Hillary did not turn over to the State Department. The question is, are those “several thousand” part of the 14,900, and if so, why didn’t Comey say on July 5 that there were 14,900 emails not turned over to the State Department and further explain the nature of the balance of the “several thousand emails”? It again raises the issue of Hillary’s intent in using a private server.

The relevant text of Comey’s report is as follows:

From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.

The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. We found those additional e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on devices that supported or were connected to the private e-mail domain. Others we found by reviewing the archived government e-mail accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, people with whom a Secretary of State might naturally correspond.

This helped us recover work-related e-mails that were not among the 30,000 produced to State. Still others we recovered from the laborious review of the millions of e-mail fragments dumped into the slack space of the server decommissioned in 2013[.] …

… I should add here that we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them. Our assessment is that, like many e-mail users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted e-mails or e-mails were purged from the system when devices were changed. Because she was not using a government account—or even a commercial account like Gmail—there was no archiving at all of her e-mails, so it is not surprising that we discovered e-mails that were not on Secretary Clinton’s system in 2014, when she produced the 30,000 e-mails to the State Department.

Guess who is coming to dinner with Raul Castro! By Silvio Canto, Jr.

As the world turns, we are watching some rather amazing things in year 8 of “hope and change”:

First, kids are killed in Aleppo and those lives don’t seem to matter to anyone, especially anyone at the Obama White House;

Two, Russian planes are taking off from Iranian bases;

Third, Cuban dissidents are in jail rather than doing the wave at a baseball game; and,

Fourth, Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif is starting off his tour of Latin America with a stop in Havana. (By the way, Raul Castro will greet this visitor at the airport. Unlike President Obama, who was greeted by a low-level Cuban official, the Iranian visitor will get to shake hands with Raul.)

Is this how we were supposed to be respected around the world? Or is this the smart foreign policy that we were promised?

Let’s take a look:

Iran’s foreign minister kicked off a Latin American tour Sunday in Havana, saying the Iran nuclear deal has “removed obstacles” for closer ties between his country and the region.

Foreign Minister Javad Zarif will visit Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia and Venezuela, reported the Tasnim News Agency.

Zarif said he plans to sign oil, energy and maritime transport agreements during his tour.

But the visit is raising concerns with a key Republican lawmaker.

“The timing of Zarif’s trip is significant as Iran could use many of these rogue regimes to circumvent remaining sanctions, undermine U.S. interests, and expand the drug trafficking network that helps finance its illicit activities,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) in a statement.

Media Anti-Trump Frenzy Will Backfire By Karin McQuillan

The Democrat will to power is only possible if conservatives are scapegoated as sub-human compared to the wonderfulness of liberals. First they demonize fellow Americans. Then they announce they are morally compelled to suppress us. Trump is our answer.

The media can land a few punches, but they will not win this fight on their terms, because the media itself has become a central part of the problem. Their attacks are not on Trump, they are on all of us. That is why they will backfire very, very quickly. Glenn Reynolds in USA Today:

… the thoughts of a 22-year-old Trump supporter … a prosperous post-collegian in the San Francisco Bay area — someone who should be backing Bernie, or Hillary, or maybe Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. But instead he’s backing Trump, and so is his Asian fiancée. And the reason he gives is political correctness.

“For me personally, it’s resistance against what San Francisco has been, and what I see the country becoming, in the form of ultra-PC culture. That’s where it’s almost impossible to have polite or constructive political discussion. Disagreement gets you labeled fascist, racist, bigoted, etc. It can provoke a reaction so intense that you’re suddenly an unperson to an acquaintance or friend. … If Trump wins, we will have a president that overwhelmingly rejects PC rhetoric. Even better, we will show that more than half the country rejects this insane PC regime.”

Political correctness is not, as some might claim, just an effort to encourage niceness. …it’s an effort to control people. Like the Newspeak in George Orwell’s 1984, the goal is to make it impossible for people to speak, or even think, unapproved thoughts.

A Hillary Presidency: Who Will Be in Charge? By Eileen F. Toplansky

In the 2012 book titled Stalin’s Secret Agents by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, there is a chapter detailing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s serious and obvious decline of health as he entered the pivotal Yalta talks at the end of World War II. FDR’s health had been an issue “from the day in 1921 when he was struck down by polio, as a result of which he would never walk again unaided.” While the Washington press corps concealed his infirmity from the public, there were,

however, other health problems of a more daunting nature in terms of his official performance. These concerned not the paralysis of his lower body or even his physical health in general, but involved instead his mental balance, judgment, and powers of comprehension.

In recent decades this information has become more publicly available. But at the time,

“…hundreds of persons, high and low, reported… that [FDR] looked bad, his mind wandered, his hands shook, his jaw sagged and he tired easily.” Notwithstanding the fact that FDR couldn’t “survive another presidential term” he went to Yalta and “seemed to have made ‘absolutely no study of the German problem'” facing the group. In fact, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins recalled the change in Roosevelt “with the oncoming of a kind of glassy eye, and an extremely drawn look around the jaw and cheeks, and even a sort of dropping of the muscles of the jaw and mouth [.]”

Nonetheless, all of these concerns about FDR’s health “were kept secret from the public.” In fact, Roosevelt’s own physician maintained that “there had been no previous signals of a [health] disaster.” Yet, Churchill’s personal physician maintained that “[w]henever FDR was called on to preside over any meeting, he failed to make any attempt to grip it or guide it, and sat generally speechless, or, if he made any intervention, it was generally completely irrelevant.” At one point, FDR made the outlandish comment that in dealing with Middle Eastern issues, there was one concession that might be made and that “was to give Saudi Arabia’s King Ibn Saud the six million Jews in the United States.” One explanation of this response was a kind of aphasia — the lack of the sort of mental filter that keeps people from blurting out impulsive statements.”

Moreover, there were times when Roosevelt “signed or agreed to things of which he later said he had no knowledge. Thus, many of the cables and memos issued in his name during the last year of Roosevelt’s life were routinely the work of others.” It appears that Roosevelt’s administration was, “in its last months, a kind of ghost ship, running on inertia.”

Attack on American University of Afghanistan Leaves 12 Dead Attackers exchanged gunfire with Afghan forces; No group has claimed responsibility By Ehsanullah Amiri and Margherita Stancati

Attackers stormed the heavily-barricaded American University of Afghanistan in Kabul, firing at students in an hourslong overnight siege that left 12 people dead and 30 wounded by Thursday morning.

The assault began during evening classes on Wednesday, when a truck bomb exploded outside the fortified wall of the campus, opening the way for two assailants to enter as panicked students and staff fled and hid, Afghan officials and witnesses said.

Seven students, three policemen and two security guards were killed in the nine-hour siege, police spokesman Basir Mujahideen said. Thirty students were wounded, he added.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the assault, but the university has long been at high risk of attack from Taliban militants because of its association with foreigners.

Elite Afghan troops led the clearing operation and exchanged gunfire with the militants as they attempted to secure the campus. Foreign troops with the U.S.-led military coalition were at the scene to advise and assist Afghan forces.

“These advisers are not taking a combat role, but advising their Afghan counterparts,” said U.S. Army Col. Michael Lawhorn, a spokesman for NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
Afghan security forces rush to respond to an attack on the campus of the American University in Kabul on Wednesday. ENLARGE
Afghan security forces rush to respond to an attack on the campus of the American University in Kabul on Wednesday. Photo: RAHMAT GUL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ahmad Mukhtar was in the courtyard talking to friends when he heard gunshots followed by a large explosion.

“The explosion lit up the whole university,” said Mr. Mukhtar, a local reporter and part-time student at the university. “We rushed in all directions. Some jumped over the wall—I did, too.”

Mr. Mujahid, the police spokesman, said there were about 700 students inside the campus at the time of the attack. Most of them were at the prestigious school for after-work classes.

The English-language university first opened in 2006 with U.S. funding, and is the country’s top institution for higher education, attracting many young Afghans. Foreign professors teach there.CONTINUE AT SITE

Iran Vessels Harassed U.S. Destroyer Near Persian Gulf, Navy Says Fifth Fleet spokesman calls interaction ‘unsafe and unprofessional’ By Paul Sonne

WASHINGTON—Four ships from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps harassed a U.S. destroyer near the Persian Gulf in what the U.S. Navy called an “unsafe and unprofessional” interaction.

The USS Nitze, an Arleigh-Burke class guided-missile destroyer, was transiting international waters near the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday when the four Iranian vessels approached at high speed and failed to respond to 12 separate radio communications, according to Cdr. William Urban, a spokesman for the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

The USS Nitze blew its whistle in five short blasts on three occasions—signaling the Iranian vessels were on a dangerous course—and fired off 10 flares in the direction of the approaching ships before altering course to avoid a potential collision, Cmdr. Urban said.

As two of the Iranian vessels came within 300 yards of the destroyer, the quartet finally slowed speed and motored away from the U.S. ship, according to Cmdr. Urban, who characterized the interaction as a dangerous, harassing situation that could have led to further escalation. The USS Nitze was transiting the waters with the USS Mason, another guided-missile destroyer.

The incident was one of many interactions between Iranian and American ships in and around the Persian Gulf in recent months. But it was one of few the U.S. Navy has deemed unsafe or unprofessional. CONTINUE AT SITE

In University Purge, Turkey’s Erdogan Hits Secularists and Boosts Conservatives By Joe Parkinson and Emre Peker

Crackdown, which has snagged associates of imam Fethullah Gulen and others, is designed to remake country’s higher education in president’s image.

KONYA, Turkey—On the humid afternoon after July’s bloody coup attempt, signs of a rift that is redefining this nation’s academia played out in two cities 400 miles apart.

In Istanbul, Nil Mutluer grabbed her 3-year-old daughter and raced with a suitcase toward Turkey’s coast. The former sociology-department chair at the city’s Nisantasi University narrowly escaped the nation’s looming dragnet.

“Authorities had already begun questioning colleagues at the airports,” said Dr. Mutluer, 42, a Western-leaning liberal who took a ferry to Greece en route to an academic post in Berlin.

That afternoon in Konya, once known as the Citadel of Islam, some local professors cheered the coup’s failure as a chance to remake Turkish academia. “Elitist professors are looking at the world with Western glasses—they’re not really thinking about what the Turkish people want and need,” said Assistant Professor Sedat Gumus, 33, a U.S.-educated lecturer at Konya’s Necmettin Erbakan University, named after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s political mentor.
For Sedat Gumus, an associate professor at Necmettin Erbakan University in Konya, the failed coup provides an opportunity to intensify the revamping of Turkish academia.
For Sedat Gumus, an associate professor at Necmettin Erbakan University in Konya, the failed coup provides an opportunity to intensify the revamping of Turkish academia. Photo: Ivor Prickett for The Wall Street Journal

“The current situation might be a golden opportunity for Turkey to write a new constitution,” he said, “and with it reform the higher-education system.”

Turkey’s crackdown after the July 15 putsch has been swift and expansive, sweeping through the military, judiciary and higher education. The government declared a state of emergency and said it has detained more than 40,000 people as it hunts for suspected affiliates of the man officials accuse as the mastermind, Fethullah Gulen, a U.S.-based Turkish imam. Mr. Gulen, who counts millions of supporters in part because of his network’s investments in education, has denied any role. CONTINUE AT SITE

Turkey Moves on Syria Islamic State is a bigger threat to Ankara than is a Kurdish autonomous zone.

As military operations go, Turkey’s pre-dawn incursion Wednesday into Syria is neither large nor particularly complex. A combined force of some 20 Turkish tanks, along with 500 troops of the Free Syrian Army and U.S air assets and special forces, entered western Syria to evict Islamic State from Jarabulus on the banks of the Euphrates River. By evening they had taken the town, depriving Islamic State of its last stronghold along the Turkish border and one of its key supply lines.

Yet the Jarabulus raid has wider strategic implications. How they play out depends on whether the aim of the operation is to fight Islamic terror or serve as another opportunity to thwart the Kurdish forces that have been America’s best ally in that fight.

So far it looks like the latter. Though the incursion comes days after an Islamic State suicide bomber killed 54 people at a wedding in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, Ankara’s timing seems to have been dictated by its fears that the U.S.-backed Kurdish YPG forces would cross the Euphrates and capture Jarabulus before it could. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan considers the YPG to be a terrorist group based on its purported links to the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK. Mr. Erdogan is fighting an underreported war of “liquidation” in southeastern Turkey and routinely uses artillery to attack the YPG.

But the YPG is not a terrorist group, and it has been Washington’s most effective proxy in the fight against Islamic State in Syria. Its fighters—ethnic Kurds, Arabs and Yazidis—are doing the bulk of the fighting. Without them, Islamic State would long ago have seized northern Syria, posing an even larger risk to Turkey.

That’s an argument we hope Joe Biden, who arrived in Turkey on Wednesday, makes to Mr. Erdogan. The Vice President is trying to smooth relations with Ankara following last month’s attempted coup, which Mr. Erdogan blames on Pennsylvania-based cleric Fethullah Gulen. But the evidence of Mr. Gulen’s involvement is slender, and the Administration has been right to resist Turkey’s extradition demands. There’s no upside for the U.S. in contributing to Mr. Erdogan’s purge of alleged conspirators.

Mr. Biden should also explain that Turkey has nothing to gain by treating the YPG as an enemy, or by opposing a Kurdish autonomous region in northern Syria akin—and perhaps joined—to Iraqi Kurdistan. The autonomous region, established with the help of a U.S. no-fly zone after the 1991 Gulf War, is a rare Middle East success, thanks to political moderation, military prowess and U.S. assistance. Turkey could use more such neighbors.

The principal threat to Turkish security comes from Islamic jihadists, not alienated Kurds or the liberal-minded social activists Mr. Erdogan is arresting in droves. An autonomous Kurdish region outside of Turkey could mitigate separatist Kurdish tendencies and serve as a buffer against Arab upheavals. That should be attractive considering the alternatives of Islamic State or Bashar Assad. CONTINUE AT SITE