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August 2016

Keeping Turkey in the U.S. Orbit Leaders from Kiev to Jerusalem to Tokyo are familiar with Ankara’s discontent with Obama.

Turkey is living through a 24/7 state of emergency. The latest alarm came Thursday with an assassination attempt on the leader of the secular opposition. Kemal Kilicdaroglu was traveling the country’s northeast when his convoy came under fire. A member of his security detail was killed in the shootout, but Mr. Kilicdaroglu was unharmed and evacuated by helicopter. The perpetrators escaped, though Mr. Kilicdaroglu’s aides say his bodyguards may have killed one of them.

“Even though we are attacked, we will continue with determination in the path that we believe in,” Mr. Kilicdaroglu said in an interview Friday at the headquarters of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP. The separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, took credit but said government security forces, not Mr. Kilicdaroglu, were the intended target.

In today’s Turkey such incidents capture headlines only to be overshadowed a few hours later by the next thing to go bang. Sure enough, hours after the Kilicdaroglu attempt, a truck bomb on Friday killed 11 Turkish police officers near the Syrian border. The PKK also claimed responsibility for that attack.

Life goes on. Men and women still gather in outdoor bars to sip raki, watch soccer and shoot the breeze. The margin of personal freedom remains wider than in most of the region. Even so, the mood is dark. With July’s failed coup, nearly three million Syrian refugees, a fresh PKK insurgency in the southeast and the menace of Islamic State, the Turks feel they can’t catch a break.

The Turkey emerging out of these manifold crises is more insular, paranoid and illiberal. This means Ankara may no longer be as solidly anchored in the West as it has been since the Cold War. Washington assigns the blame for this turn to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and rightly so in Turkey’s domestic sphere. But the president isn’t alone to blame for Ankara’s troubles abroad.

Mr. Erdogan’s project to concentrate power in the presidency was well under way before the coup attempt on July 15. Most serious observers here believe followers of the Pennsylvania-based cleric Fethullah Gülen organized the ill-fated coup. Few have forgotten that the Gülenists were the authoritarian handmaidens to Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AKP, before the two Islamist camps turned on each other in 2013. In the mid-2000s, when Messrs. Erdogan and Gülen were still allies, well-placed Gülenists in the judiciary persecuted and sidelined a common enemy: the old secular establishment.

The failed coup has accelerated Mr. Erdogan’s will to power. But it has also rallied much of the country behind his grievance narrative. Turks, secular and pious, feel betrayed. The West lectures them about the post-coup purges, they complain, without acknowledging the deep trauma of the coup itself: the putschist pilots who buzzed their apartments, the tanks that rolled down their streets.

Meanwhile, pro-government media feed the population a steady diet of ever-nuttier propaganda suggesting U.S. involvement in the coup attempt. Mr. Kilicdaroglu, the opposition leader, says the ruling party’s dominance over media leaves little doubt that it is “guiding the public.” A Western diplomat puts it nicely: “The government shapes public opinion and then claims to be constrained by that same opinion.”

Then again, externalizing responsibility for one’s destiny is nothing new in this part of the world. The relevant question for the American national interest is how to prevent this strategically crucial country from drifting further toward Russia’s orbit and away from the U.S.-led security order—or what remains of it after eight years of President Barack Obama.

Here the Turks ought to be listened to. Not all of Ankara’s lashing out at Washington derives from Mr. Erdogan’s cynicism and ideological hubris. Some of it is in reaction to the same sudden shift in U.S. policy under Mr. Obama that has jolted allies world-wide. Leaders from Kiev to Jerusalem to Tokyo are familiar with Ankara’s discontent.

Turkey has felt the jolt most acutely in Syria. Mr. Erdogan took Mr. Obama at his word when the American said in 2011 that Bashar Assad “must go.” He also took seriously Mr. Obama’s red line on chemical weapons. Turkey’s much-maligned early policy in Syria included overt support for moderate rebels and a laissez-faire policy that enabled the movement of more hard-line jihadists into the country. Ankara expected that Washington would favor its traditional allies and disfavor others: namely the Iranian mullahs, Mr. Assad and their various Shiite proxies.

Mr. Obama scrambled that friend-enemy pattern. He awkwardly ignored the red line, and the U.S. carried out secret talks that would culminate in a nuclear deal with Tehran and tie America’s hands against Mr. Assad. Then came a second shock to the Turks. America increasingly relied on Syrian-Kurdish factions with close ties to the Turkish PKK as its main ground forces in the country. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary and the Soros Agenda By Rachel Ehrenfeld

These days, George Soros’ connections are getting quite a bit more attention than they did in the 1990s. But by the end of Bill Clinton’s reign Soros had already obtained a very influential position with the Clintons, especially with Hillary.

In her excellent profile of Soros in The New Yorker, on January 23, 1995, Connie Bruck relates how Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s friend, who served as Ambassador-at-Large and Special Adviser on the New Independent States to Secretary of State Warren Christopher, saw Soros. According to Talbott, Soros was “a national resource – indeed, a national treasure.” He described the billionaire as a sort of shadow arm of the State Department. “I would say that it [Soros’ foreign policy] is not identical to the foreign policy of the U.S. government, but it’s compatible with it, “he told The New Yorker. “It’s like working with a friendly, allied, independent entity, if not a government. We try to synchronize our approach to the former Communist countries with Germany, France, Great Britain, and with George Soros.”

When Soros opened his own D.C. office to be close to the action, one of his minions explained that it would serve as “his State Department.” Soros conceded, “Of course what I do could be called meddling because I want to promote an open society.” According to Soros, such an” Open society transcends national sovereignty.” He also proposed “modification of the concept of sovereignty” because “sovereignty is basically somewhat anachronistic.”

Soros wrote memos on every foreign policy and monetary issue imaginable, and these memos were read widely at the very highest echelons of the Clinton White House. Soros has also used the services of the Washington lobbying firm Raffaelli, Spees, Springer & Smith, where he was represented by Clinton hack Terry McAuliffe, who in 2005 became the Democratic National Committee Chairman, and in 2008 chaired Hillary’s presidential campaign (McAuliffe has been Governor of Virginia since 2014). Between his payments to McAuliffe and the hundreds of thousands of dollars he gave to various official Democratic PACs, Soros was clearly able to purchase himself quite a bit of clout in the Democratic Party, and gain the adoration/co-dependency of its members that continues to this day.

WHO DOES SHE THINK SHE IS….MARGARET SANGER? DANIEL FLYNN

The Standard Bearer of Bull Connor’s Party Calls Trump Racist

A Hillary Clinton campaign video featuring Confederate flags and goobers in white sheets ominously informs, “If Trump wins, they could be running the country.”

Mike Tyson didn’t bite Evander Holyfield’s ears because the knockout artist felt he was winning.

Such flouting of the Marquess of Queensberry rules of politics (a much rougher sport than boxing) coming in late summer rather than mid fall demonstrates either desperation, deviousness, or both. Though Clinton holds a lead — sometimes slight, sometimes sizable — in recent polls, she suffered through one of the worst weeks of her campaign.

The Associated Press proved that donating money to her “charity” served as the best way to secure a meeting with her as secretary of state. Eighty-five of the 154 people outside of government successful in gaining face time with the secretary did so after donating to the Clinton Foundation.

Rather than answer questions, Clinton attempted to change the subject by going below the belt. “Donald Trump has built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia,” Mrs. Clinton maintained Thursday in a Reno speech. “He’s taking hate groups mainstream and helping a radical fringe take over one of America’s two major political parties.”

The depiction of a Queens Kleagle strikes as far-fetched. The world of mullets, meth, and monster trucks seems as far removed from Trump Tower as one can imagine. But Clinton-Kaine seeks to strangely make it all stick. And hey, he fired Omarosa, didn’t he?

The chutzpah of the negative campaigning appears especially audacious when considering the history of the Democratic Party and, to a lesser extent, its standard bearer.

Hillary Clinton called Senator Robert Byrd not a racist but her “mentor.” From the beginning of the Carter presidency until the end of the Reagan administration, Hillary’s party looked to the former Ku Klux Klan Exalted Cyclops as its exalted leader in the United States Senate.

Hillary Clinton accepted the Margaret Sanger Award in 2009. “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously,” she told Planned Parenthood, “her courage, her tenacity, her vision.” But this vision included blaming Jews and Italians for causing “the multiplication of the unfit in this country,” judging “the Aboriginal Australian” the “lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development,” and using the n-word in private correspondence. If she sounds like an ideal speaker for a KKK rally in some barn, that’s because Sanger really once spoke at a KKK rally in some barn.

Turkey’s Official “Cocktail Terror” by Burak Bekdil

In its latest attack in Turkey, ISIS used a child suicide bomber to attack a wedding ceremony. More than 50 victims were killed, of whom 26 were less than 18 years old.

This is premeditated, officially-tolerated murder. Evidence? Two opposition parties appealed to parliament five times asking for a parliamentary investigation into ISIS and its activities in Turkey. All five requests were rejected by the votes of the ruling AKP Party, Erdogan’s powerful political machine.

The opposition claims SADAT International Defense Consultancy, which was established by soldiers dismissed from the military due to Islamist activities, offers ISIS operatives training in “intelligence, psychological warfare, sabotage, raiding, ambushing and assassination.” Erdogan this month appointed the owner of SADAT, retired Brigadier General Adnan Tanriverdi, as his chief presidential advisor.

Failing to name Islamic terror has cost Turkey hundreds of lives and will likely cost it hundreds more, as the country’s leaders — and many others, especially in the West — are still too demure to call Islamic terror by its name. Without a realistic diagnosis, the chances of a successful treatment are always close to nil, and Turkey’s leaders stubbornly remain on the wrong side of the right diagnosis.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s theory that “there is no Islamic terror,” coupled with his persistent arguments that Islamist radicals hit Europe because of Islamophobia in the Western world, are not only too remote from reality but have now become a curse in his own country.

As early as 2014, cars began to be seen in the streets of Istanbul sporting the black flag of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The same year, Islamists opened a shop selling T-shirts featuring the same flag. ISIS-related magazines went ahead with open hate content even though, in March 2014, ISIS spilled its first blood in Turkey when an ISIS team ambushed a police checkpoint and killed one police officer, one soldier and one civilian.

In its first suicide attack on June 5, 2015, ISIS targeted a pro-Kurdish rally in Diyarbakir, killed four people and injured 279. It targeted, once again, a pro-Kurdish gathering in July 2015 in Suruc, a small town bordering Syria, killed more than 30 people and injured more than 100.

How to Sustain a False Police Shooting Crisis The facts are a mere inconvenience for progressives stoking racial conflict. By David French

It’s hard to recall a political movement built on more verifiable lies and misinformation than Black Lives Matter, which exists to advance that notion that America is in the midst of a race-motivated epidemic of police shootings. From “hands up, don’t shoot” to the extraordinary claim that it’s “open season” on young black men, America is awash in rhetoric and fury that is already proving to be deadly to police and deadly to black communities across the United States.

Even worse, the rhetoric persists in spite of the facts: Individual stories of police misconduct are often far more complex than activists portray, and the accumulated data shows that black men are not, in fact, facing a wave of racist police killings. For a summary of the available evidence, Heather Mac Donald’s video is outstanding:

Yet the narrative has been fixed. The crisis must be sustained, evidence be damned.

Vox has an interesting feature called a “card stack,” a site dedicated to a single issue, allowing you to quickly click through specific links and educate yourself. They created a card stack about police brutality — and it is a textbook example of how the sophisticated progressive looks at racial issues. This is how the Left sustains a false racial crisis:

Step One — Begin with the misleading use of statistics.

After some throat-clearing about how American police use force more than police in many other countries — conveniently ignoring the fact that we also have much higher rates of violent crime than those nations — Vox gets right to the heart of leftist thinking about race: “There are huge racial disparities in how U.S. police use force.” The proof for that statement? Black people are a mere 13 percent of the population but comprise a whopping 31 percent of all people killed by police.

Keep Swinging, Mr. President Golfing is the best thing Barack Obama does. By Kevin D. Williamson

Set aside Barack Obama the private man, about whom even now relatively little is known. The most likeable thing about Barack Obama the public man is his dedication to golf.

Conservatives hate President Obama’s commitment to his tee times. Or at least we pretend to. The talk-radio ranters and the cable-news mouthholes have tried to bully the president out of his leisure, going on and on about his putting around Martha’s Vineyard or Porcupine Creek while the world burns or Baton Rouge is submerged.

Those complaints are partly insincere — something has to fill up the minutes between doggie-vitamin commercials — and partly are an indirect complaint about media bias. Yes, the same press that savaged George W. Bush for his golfing and for his allegedly excessive vacation schedule has nothing to say about President Obama’s following that example. That is the way of things: Jackie Kennedy spent a little coin sprucing up the White House and she was single-handedly conferring “class” on the nation at large; Nancy Reagan bought a new set of china and it was the biggest crisis since Suez. The New York Times sniffed at Mrs. Reagan for ordering $200,000 worth of new Lenox for White House formal dinners; Mrs. Obama spent $290,000 on a single painting (by Alma Thomas) when she was redecorating a room in the White House — nothing. Mrs. Obama’s painting was not paid for by taxpayers, but then neither was Mrs. Reagan’s China, the tab for which was picked up by the nice people at the J. P. Knapp Foundation.

The hypocrisy should be noted, and complained about, but we should not let it make asses of us, if we can avoid it.

So Barack Obama likes his golf game.

There are some obvious and practical reasons not to discourage President Obama’s sporting pursuits. The most obvious of them is that every hour Barack Obama spends on the links is an hour he is not wrecking the republic, distorting its character, throwing monkey wrenches into its constitutional machinery, or appointing sundry miscreants and malefactors to its high offices. If golf is the only prophylactic we have against him, then Scotland’s second-greatest contribution to modern civilization is to be celebrated for doing work that the Supreme Court and Congress can’t quite manage.

Back to Campus, Where Due Process Is a Myth By Tom Knighton

Colleges are supposed to be places of learning. However, many argue they’ve become liberal indoctrination centers, dedicated to churning out legions of progressive zombies who can parrot the Democratic Party’s platform verbatim — yet can’t actually do anything useful to support themselves, or society.

Liberals, unsurprisingly, deny this.

However, there appears to be a movement afoot on college campuses that should alarm liberals, conservatives, and libertarians alike.

By now, most readers of this site are bound to be familiar with the persecution of men suspected of sexual assault on campuses throughout the nation. And yes, using “persecution” rather than “prosecution” is intentional. Prosecution implies they will be put through the unalienable rights-based American legal system. That isn’t true anymore.

As your kids head off to school, they should be aware that sexual assault isn’t the only situation where college officials now figure silly things like due process should be completely ignored:

The University of California-San Diego routinely hides the identity of witnesses that could help students accused of wrongdoing exonerate themselves, departing from its own rules on who is “relevant” to an investigation.

This policy, which has been applied against accused students for at least the past five years, was not publicly known until 11 months ago. A state appeals court fleshed out its existence in a due-process lawsuit against the school by a student who was found responsible for cheating and expelled.

That court struck down UCSD’s ruling against Jonathan Dorfman, saying it had no legal reason to withhold the identity of “Student X” — whose test answers Dorfman allegedly copied — from him.

The claim that Dorfman copied answers from “Student X” would assume the two sit near one another. However, without knowing the identity of the student, Dorfman can’t establish whether he was sitting near “Student X” on the day of the exam or not.

So how did they “prove” his guilt? CONTINUE AT SITE

There is no moral basis to oppose Trump By J. Marsolo

On August 19, 2016, Douglas Ernst, of The Washington Times, reported that William Bennett, former secretary of education and author of the Virtues books, declared that holier-than-thou so-called Republicans and conservatives should put the interests of our country above their “vanity” and “moral superiority.” Bennett said: “Donald Trumpdoes not need to speak to the ‘Never Trumpers,’ some of my friends – or maybe former friends – who suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country,”

There are many articles and comments here at American Thinker and other websites setting forth the reasons why we should vote for Trump to defeat Hillary. A brief summary of the reasons is that Hillary is a lying crook who will be the third term of Obama. Obamacare will be here to stay, and a Hillary Supreme Court will weaken the Second Amendment by upholding state and local laws on owning and carrying firearms. The nanny state will grow with more regulations. There will be no wall on the southern border, and illegal immigration will continue. Further, Hillary will allow immigration of Syrian and other Middle Eastern “refugees” without proper vetting, which will increase terrorist attacks in our country.

Hillary’s past misdeeds are too much to recount, such as Whitewater and covering up Bill’s rape of Juanita Broaddrick and other sexual misconduct. Worse are the current email scandal, where she destroyed emails relating to her work as secretary of state, and her activities on behalf of the Clinton Foundation. But the absolute worst is her failure to provide the requested security at Benghazi and then compounding it by lying that the cause was a video. She lied to help Obama win the 2012 election and to maintain her political viability. And now she runs an ad attacking Trump for saying that Mrs. Khan had nothing to say while Mr. Khan attacked Trump at the Democrat convention. Hillary has no shame and no conscience, and she will do and say anything to make money and get power.

The NeverTrumpers act, as Bennett said, from “moral superiority.” They say it is only a choice of the lesser evil, and they cannot vote for evil. This is complete nonsense. There is nothing evil about Trump. You may not like some of his words and statements, but there is nothing evil about his conduct. Covering up a rape, using the office of secretary of state to make money, destroying the email evidence and lying about it, and lying to the mother of Sean Smith are evil. There is no moral equivalence between the conduct of Hillary and the words of Trump.

The NeverTrumpers do not act from “moral superiority” because there are not legitimate facts to support a claim that the choice between Hillary and Trump is a choice between two evils.

As Bennett says, if you care about the best interests and welfare of our country, then you have to vote for Trump to defeat Hillary. It is common sense based on the facts.

TOP 10 INNOCENT WOMEN EXECUTED IN IRAN — AN ANNI CYRUS VIDEO

On this new special edition of Anni Cyrus’s “Top 10”, Anni focuses on The Top 10 Innocent Women Executed in Iran, asking us to never forget them — and to reflect on the true meaning of Sharia:

And make sure to watch another special Anni Cyrus Top 10 in which Anni discusses the Top 10 Facts About Pre-Islamic Iran, sharing why she is so proud to unveil these facts today — and why the Mullahs never will.

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/08/27/top-10-innocent-women-executed-in-iran-an-anni-cyrus-video/

Hillary Clinton’s for-profit university problem by Drew Griffin, Curt Devine and Scott Zamost

Note from Dr. John A…..”Bill gets a cool $17.6 million (!!) merely for being an ‘inspiration’ (!!) to students at a for-profit university; university gets favourable treatment from the Administration while Hillary is Secretary of State..”
It’s got all the makings of a conspiracy theory.

After Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, Bill Clinton received $17.6 million in payments from a for-profit university. Since that time, another organization with a connection to that university received almost $90 million in grants from an agency that’s part of the State Department.

Critics of the Clintons have cried foul. But is there really something shady going on?

There is no shortage of connections between the Clintons and Laureate International Universities. Laureate is a for-profit university — the same kind Hillary Clinton has railed against for saddling students with huge debts.

“[Students] find little support once they actually enroll, or they graduate and discover that, when it comes to finding a job, their degree isn’t worth what they thought,” she told an audience last year.

Laureate has about one million students worldwide, mostly in Latin America, with five schools in the United States.

Laureate has faced investigations in Brazil over whether students were getting what they paid for, and in Chile concerning its for-profit status. U.S. students have complained the school failed to deliver on its promised degree programs.

In addition, three of the five schools Laureate operates in the United States are under what the U.S. Department of Education calls “heightened cash monitoring” because of potential problems with its “financial responsibility.” The school told CNN it disagrees with the government’s methodology.

The Clinton campaign told CNN that the candidate intends to hold for-profit colleges accountable.

“Hillary Clinton has made it clear that all for-profit institutions should be held to the same standards and she will crack down on law-breaking for-profits by expanding support for federal regulators to enforce laws against deceptive marketing, fraud, and other illegal practices.”