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November 2016

Giving Thanks for the End of the Pro-Crime Presidency Obama’s Thanksgiving gift to America: putting an unprecedented number of criminals back on the streets. Matthew Vadum

This Thanksgiving, Americans can give thanks for the termination of one of the most pro-criminal administrations in American history, though the damage done to the criminal justice system may far outlast outgoing President Barack Obama’s tenure in office.

To date, President Obama has now freed more than a thousand prisoners as part of his crusade against a criminal justice system he considers to be racist.

With fewer than 60 days remaining in his second and final term of office, the most felon-friendly president in American history just “reduced the sentences of 79 people in prison for non-violent drug crimes,” bringing his total to 1,023 commutations of prison sentences, Quartz reports.

“Unlike pardons, commutations don’t officially constitute forgiveness of a crime. They reduce a prisoner’s sentence but don’t necessarily let them go free immediately. The details of the most recent 79 commutations weren’t immediately clear.”

The 1,023 figure does not include the 6,112 allegedly non-violent drug offenders freed a year ago under retroactively applied federal sentencing guidelines.

The president’s pardon power is unreviewable in any court in the land and cannot be modified by Congress. When it comes to federal offenses, the president is free to pardon or commute the sentence of anybody for anything anywhere in America.

To Obama the fact that African-Americans are the most incarcerated group in the U.S. is proof not that they commit a lot of crimes but that they are innocent victims of racist, systemic discrimination in a country where race relations haven’t improved much since Jim Crow.

ALLIED: A REVIEW BY MARILYN PENN

It’s one thing to play off a classic movie and tweak it; it’s another to dress up your actors in vintage costumes and forego the essential irony that you need when re-making a period film. In “Allied,” Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard play the parts of intrepid allied undercover agents in Casablanca, pretending to be husband and wife but really there to assassinate the German commander of Vichy during World War II. They are both superb eye candy but Brad has never been duller, even when wielding a machine gun and speaking French. Marion has the kind of face the camera melts into so she will hold your interest a while longer. But at the moment when the plot thickens, this movie disintegrates so that instead of being a thriller, it becomes prosaically predictable with too many familiar tropes that lack cleverness.

The Times critic summoned the name Hitchcock and one can only assume that he was DUI either while viewing or reviewing this film since it is the antithesis of what the master of suspense was about. Once the audience is alerted to the possibility of a more malevolent plot, there are no further surprises or shocks – not one MacGuffin to throw you off track. You will figure out the end ten minutes before it happens and that won’t really matter because the actors are more models than characters with any dimension. I hate to sound as cynical as W.C. Fields but even the baby is a bore. You can tell how phony the screenplay is when you have the mother of a one year old inviting a horde of people to her London house for a party where in 1942, there is smack, sex and lesbianism on display. The baby sleeps through it all – I told you she was a bor

Quinoa Apocalypse The food movement is cooked under the Trump administration By Julie Kelly

Liberal foodies are crying in their craft beer about what’s to come under a Trump administration.

For the last eight years, the food movement — a collection of celebrity chefs, food writers, and organic-food executives — has been a star player in the Obama administration, dictating policies that range from expanding subsidized school meals to micromanaging food labels. These are the same folks who lecture us about what we should and shouldn’t eat, force-feed us the idea of local, organic, non-GMO food, and tie food production to climate change. And yes, they are mostly elites who vilify the people who make and grow our food (guess what, foodies? the farmers won).

All of that will likely end under fast-food lover President Trump. The president-elect said little about food policy on the campaign trail, but there’s plenty of reason to believe he will roll back some of the most ineffective policies and stop bad ones from advancing on his watch. The culinary elites were hoping to use food issues to promote their overall agenda of higher taxes and more regulations under a Clinton administration; that agenda is now toast.

Trump’s win curbs the political influence of top food activists, who were all-in on a Hillary Clinton victory. That includes celebrity chef Tom Colicchio (head of the liberal Food Policy Action group, which worked against Republican candidates), who stumped for Clinton in Pittsburgh the day before the election. In his rambling introduction, Colicchio slammed Ronald Reagan and said the Republican party “refuses to include everyone, that fights your right to vote, that is out there right now, making sure that people can’t vote” (if you’re a Republican, you might want to think twice about patronizing Mr. Colicchio’s pricy restaurants). His Twitter timeline is a non-stop rant against Trump and the GOP. A few days after the election, a still-stung Colicchio tweeted out, “Sure let’s rally around the racist” and compared the feeling in New York City to the days following 9/11.

Another food-movement leader, Stonyfield Farm chairman Gary Hirshberg, raised more than $600,000 for Clinton and is a close ally of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Hirshberg’s pet project is mandatory GMO (genetically modified organism) labels, and several e-mails released by WikiLeaks reveal that he lobbied hard to get Clinton to come out in favor of those labels (she did not). President Obama signed a GMO-labeling bill last summer, but the details still need to be worked out at the Department of Agriculture over the next two years, and Hirshberg was poised to get his way if Clinton won. Now there’s a chance that anti-labeling Republicans could reverse the policy altogether. And other Obama-era labeling laws pushed by food activists could be on the chopping block: The American Action Forum recommended last week that Congress repeal two costly labeling rules, including newly revised nutrition labels.

Mavi Marmara: Another Media Assault on Israel’s Legitimacy:By Alex Grobman, PhD

In recent weeks, the worrisome current relationship between Israel and Turkey has been much in the news. Relations between the two countries had been very good before the rise to power of the Turkish Islamist politician Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his “Justice and Development” Party (AKP) in 2003. But, in 2010, seven years after he was first elected prime minister of Turkey, Mr. Erdoğan, an ardent supporter of the Palestinian Arabs, including the terrorist Hamas faction, engineered a crisis with Israel which was encouraged by the pro-Palestinian media throughout the Western world.
Attempts by Palestinian Arabs and their supporters to embarrass and malign Israel in the media are relentless. One of the most successful operations against Israel involved a Turkish-supported flotilla ostensibly designed to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip and increase international awareness of the plight of the alleged destitute Arabs living there.
In June 2007, after Hamas assumed control of the Gaza Strip, Israel initiated a blockade to restrict the flow of smuggled rockets, mainly from Iran, that had been fired at civilian targets in Israeli towns. The Israeli Navy successfully thwarted a number of attempts by Hamas supporters to breach the naval blockade without incident.
Ship of Terror
On May 22, 2010, the Mavi Marmara, a 4,000-ton ship, the length of a football field, set sail from Istanbul’s Haydarpaşa port on route to Gaza, allegedly with the approval of Mr. Erdoğan.
On board the ship were 700 recognized radical leftists and Islamic extremists, including European members of parliament, and Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian-Arab woman member of Knesset.
Five small protest ships accompanied the larger vessel, but an additional ship had to forgo the voyage after encountering mechanical problems. That ship’s passengers were transferred to the Mavi Marmara.
Thus, a caravan of six ships became a flotilla whose participants hoped to thwart Israel’s goal of protecting its citizens.
Remembering Anti-Jewish Islamic Past
Prior to the launch of the flotilla, activists chanted Islamic battle cries recalling “Khaibar,” the last Jewish village defeated by the Prophet Muhammad’s army in 628 CE. The battle marked the end of Jewish presence in Arabia.
“[Remember] Khaibar, Khaibar, oh Jews! The army of Muhammad will return!” the activists chanted.
“Either the Israelis let us reach Gaza, or they can stop us,” one participant told Al Jazeera. “We can also die as martyrs and never return, which is okay with us.”
No Humanitarian Interest
According to Gerald Steinberg, founder and president of NGO Monitor, the objective of this hyped “humanitarian” mission was not, as the activists claimed, to provide Palestinian Arabs “trapped behind the Israeli blockade,” with aid, but, rather, to ambush the Israelis in a “bloody confrontation to exploit the ‘halo effect,’ which is automatically granted to groups claiming moral missions.”
It was also planned to reinforce the image of Israelis as “war criminals,” responsible for the “plight of starving residents of Gaza.”
In fact, however, contrary to the “reports” of many elements in the media, people in Gaza were not starving. Then, as now, every day Israel delivers tons of food, drugs and humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Trump Should Let the Senate Kill the Paris Climate-Change Agreement He could simply ignore it, but the smarter option is to send it to the Senate for a vote. By Joseph Eule

Conservatives are giddy at the prospect of President Trump’s undoing much of President Obama’s agenda with “a pen and a phone.” Near the top of the list sits last year’s Paris Agreement on climate change.

Trump previously vowed to “cancel” the Paris Agreement, but seemed to backtrack on that promise in an interview with the New York Times earlier this week, saying he was “looking at it very closely” and keeping “an open mind.” It is, by any standard, a bad, lopsided deal for the U.S. It obligates China, India, and other large, greenhouse-gas-emitting, developing countries — not to mention Russia — to do precisely nothing until at least 2030. Meanwhile, it commits the U.S. to a 26–28 percent reduction from 2005 emissions levels by 2025, which is unachievable and would lead energy prices to, in then-candidate Obama’s words, “necessarily skyrocket,” devastating America’s industrial revival.

Trump would thus be wise to kill the agreement. And if he is serious about doing so, he has two main options: He could just ignore it, since the pledges to which it commits signatories are largely voluntary, or he could submit it to the Senate for a vote with the recommendation that it be rejected as not in the national interest. The latter option has three advantages over the former: It would demonstrate that President Trump will adhere to constitutional norms; it would permanently kill U.S. participation in the agreement; and it would put red-state Democrats up for 2018 reelection in a political bind.

When the Senate approved the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992, it did so with the proviso that any future agreement containing emissions targets and timetables pursuant to UNFCCC must be subject to Senate ratification. Secretary of State John Kerry thus connived to make the Paris Agreement “Senate proof” by making as much of it voluntary as he could. In this he didn’t completely succeed: There are still several provisions in the agreement committing the U.S. to actions that would require Senate approval. For example, the Nationally Determined Contributions in Article 3 and the mitigation commitments in Article 4 unequivocally require future U.S. administrations and Congresses to develop and put forward increasingly stringent targets and timetables, many elements of which would need to be legally binding and thus approved by the Senate.

RELATED: A Trump Administration Is a Catastrophe in the Eyes of a U.N. Climate Conference

In short, the constitutionally proper course of action would be for Trump to submit the agreement to the upper chamber for a vote, urging that it be killed there. And that option would have the additional advantage of foreclosing any opportunity for a future Democratic administration to revive the agreement, invoking it as cover for more job-killing regulations. Perhaps anticipating a Hillary Clinton presidency with an intransigent Republican House, green groups devised a legal theory that the reciprocal promises in the Paris Agreement would allow the EPA to bypass Congress and implement what is essentially a national cap-and-trade system under the Clean Air Act. Allowing the Senate to kill the agreement would make that much more difficult. (Green groups could fall back on the UNFCCC itself, but that would be a much harder sell.)

It would also have political advantages for the GOP. There are several vulnerable Democratic senators from energy-producing, industrial states that voted for Trump who are facing reelection in 2018. A vote on the agreement would force them into the politically difficult choice between their states’ economic interests and the entreaties of climate-change activists.

Enemies of Language What would happen if conservatives started to change the words we use for political ends? By Victor Davis Hanson

Throughout history, revolutionaries of all stripes have warped the meaning of words to subvert reality.

And now here we go again, with another effort — spearheaded by the media and universities — to use any linguistic means necessary to achieve political ends.

“Sanctuary city” is a euphemism for the local and state nullification of federal law — a subversive tactic that dates back to the nullification crises during the Andrew Jackson administration and, later, in the years leading up to the Civil War.

This makes a mockery of the simple constitutional principle that cities and states cannot subversively pick and choose which federal laws to obey.

The term “sanctuary” would never apply to conservative jurisdictions that in similar fashion sought to offer “sanctuary” to those dissidents who disobeyed federal gun registration, income tax, or environmental laws.

College administrators boast of offering counseling and therapeutic help to students and faculty members distraught over the recent election. They use terms like “divisive” and “polarizing” in describing the election, when in truth they wish to hide from their donors, alumni, and half the country their own abject and one-sided contempt for incoming president-elect Donald Trump.

Note that in the highly emotional elections of 2008 and 2012, universities did not offer commensurate counseling services — because their own preferred candidate won and was thus his victory was not “polarizing.” Once upon a time, campuses did not worry about whether independent faculty and conservative students were sullen and depressed in adolescent style over the implications of President-elect Barack Obama’s radical promises to “fundamentally change America.”

Iran’s Khamenei Threatens Response If U.S. Extends Sanctions Supreme leader’s comments come after U.S. House of Representatives voted in favor of extension By Asa Fitch

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei threatened a response Wednesday if the U.S. extends sanctions against his country for another 10 years, just days after the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of an extension.

Mr. Khamenei, who has final say in most matters of state, didn’t say what action Iran would take if the sanctions are extended. The House voted almost unanimously last week to keep the Iran Sanctions Act in place for a decade more following its expiration at the end of this year.

Such an extension would violate the landmark nuclear deal brokered last year between Iran and six world powers including the U.S., Mr. Khamenei said in comments published to his official website, Khamenei.ir.

“If this sanction is put in place, it’s a violation of the [nuclear deal] and they should know that the Islamic Republic will certainly react against it,” he said.

Mr. Khamenei has asserted both during negotiations and after the deal was finalized that Iran would only remain committed to it as long as the U.S. and other powers honored their obligations. In June, after President-elect Donald Trump suggested reconfiguring the deal, Mr. Khamenei vowed to “light it on fire” in response.

Iran’s commitments under the deal include a reduction in the number of uranium enrichment centrifuges in operation, limits to the amount of nuclear material in its possession and international oversight of its nuclear program.

The House vote to renew the act signals wide agreement on a hard-line approach to Iran despite President Barack Obama’s nuclear diplomacy.

Mr. Trump staked out an antagonistic stance toward Iran during his presidential campaign, making criticism of the nuclear deal a familiar theme during rallies and debates. During the final presidential debate last month, he called it the “stupidest deal of all time.”

Trump Picks School-Choice Advocate Betsy DeVos for Education Secretary The former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman would be the second woman named to join the administrationBy Michael C. Bender

President-elect Donald Trump selected Betsy DeVos to be his secretary of education, putting a well-known Michigan philanthropist and school-choice advocate in charge of the agency tasked with promoting student achievement.

Ms. DeVos, 58 years old, a former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman, would be the second woman named to join the Trump administration. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was announced earlier on Wednesday as Mr. Trump’s choice to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

“Together, we can work to make transformational change to ensure every student has the opportunity to fulfill his or her highest potential,” Ms. DeVos wrote Wednesday on Twitter, adding that the “status quo” in education is “not acceptable.”

The post is subject to Senate confirmation.

She is chairwoman of American Federation for Children, a Washington-based group that advocates for the use of school vouchers and scholarship tax credit programs. Ms. DeVos’s husband, Dick DeVos, was the Republican nominee for Michigan governor in 2006. The DeVos family, heirs to the Amway Corp. fortune, are major donors to Republican Party candidates and conservative causes.

Ms. DeVos, a prominent charter-school advocate, would enter the office at a time when traditional public schools are fighting charter schools for students, as enrollment drives state and local funding. Some school districts, including the Los Angeles Unified School District, have reported losing thousands of students and millions of dollars.

Charter schools, publicly funded campuses that are mostly privately run, are the fastest-growing educational option. Enrollment in charters rose 219% from 2004 to 2014 to more than 2.5 million students, while school-district enrollment dropped by 1%, according to an analysis of the latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Advocates for charters, which are usually not unionized, have often clashed with teachers unions.

 Kevin Donnelly The West’s Foes, Foreign & Domestic

Instead of acknowledging the strengths and benefits of a heritage dating back to ancient Greece and Rome, the Left rails against a culture it denigrates as eurocentric, misogynist, imperialistic, racist and rapaciously self-serving. Is it any wonder common cause has been made with Islam?
What makes Western culture unique and is it worthwhile defending? Given events, both foreign and domestic, the question is a vital one as the answer will determine whether countries like Australia survive and prosper — or whether, as we currently know them, they cease to exist.

T. S. Eliot in Notes Towards a Definition of Culture defines culture as “a way of life of a particular people living together in one place” and includes a people’s social system, habits, customs and, most importantly, religion. More recently, in his 1996 Boyer Lecture, the Australian academic Pierre Ryckmans describes culture “as the true and unique signature of man” and, in the same way a garden is cultivated, it is vital that society cultivates the young to enable them to preserve and enrich the culture in which they are born. Based on the example of China, Ryckmans goes on to argue it is impossible to understand a foreign culture unless you have a “firm grasp of your own culture” and, as a result, “the luxury which no country can ever afford, in any circumstances… is to dispense with its memory and its imagination”.

One only has to study history or be aware of current events around the world to appreciate that cultures rise and fall and that Western culture, in particular, is under attack by enemies both foreign and domestic. The violence and terror associated with Islamic fundamentalism and illustrated by attacks in London, Paris, Nice, New York, Boston, Melbourne and Sydney represent an external threat that strikes at the heart of our way of life. Indiscriminate and random acts where innocents are killed and maimed, in addition to creating an atmosphere of intimidation and fear, lead to governments introducing security laws that are in danger of compromising the freedoms and rights so often taken for granted.

As noted by the Somalian activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her recent book Heretic, Islam is not a religion of peace and terrorist groups like ISIS, in addition to waging violent jihad against the West, are committed to establishing an Islamic caliphate where non-believers face conversion, subjugation or death. The mass migration of Muslims from the Middle East and Northern Africa to England and Europe also represents a clear and present danger to the liberties and freedoms central to the West’s way of life. Whether it is Islamic youth rioting in the suburbs of Paris, German women being physically and sexually accosted in Cologne and Hamburg during New Year, the incidence of female genital mutilation in England or the ever increasing incidence of rape in Sweden by Islamic men, the reality is that our way of life is under threat.

France on the Verge of Total Collapse by Guy Millière

France did not perceive it at the time, but it placed itself in a trap, and the trap is closing.

In 1970, The Palestinians began to use international terrorism, and France chose to accept this terrorism so long as France was not affected. At the same time, France welcomed immigrant population from the Arab-Muslim world, evidently as part of an Arab wish to expand Islam. The Muslim population has since grown in numbers while failing to assimilate.

Polls show that one third of French Muslims want the full application of Sharia law. They also show that the overwhelming majority of French Muslims support jihad, and especially jihad against Israel, a country they would like to see erased from the face of earth.

“It is better to leave than flee.” — Sammy Ghozlan, President of the National Bureau of Vigilance against Anti-Semitism. He was later mugged, and his car was torched. He left.

Villiers…also mentions the presence in “no-go zones” of thousands of weapons of war. He adds that weapons will probably not even have to be used ; the Islamists have already won.

Originally France’s dreams might have been of displacing America as a world power, inexpensive oil, business deals with oil-rich Islamic states, and the prayer of no local terrorism.

France is in turmoil. “Migrants” arriving from Africa and the Middle East sow disorder and insecurity in many cities. The huge slum commonly known as the “jungle of Calais” has just been dismantled, but other slums are being created each day. In eastern Paris, streets have been covered with corrugated sheets, oilcloth and disjointed boards. Violence is commonplace. The 572 France’s “no-go zones,” officially defined as “sensitive urban areas”, continue to grow, and police officers who approach them often suffer the consequences. Recently, a police car drove into an ambush and was torched while the police were prevented from getting out. If attacked, police officers are told by their superiors to flee rather than retaliate. Many police officers, angry at having to behave like cowards, have organized demonstrations. No terrorist attacks have taken place since the slaughter of a priest in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray on July 26, 2016, but intelligence services see that jihadists have returned from the Middle East and are ready to act, and that riots may break out anywhere, any time, on any pretext.

Although overwhelmed by a domestic situation it barely controls, the French government still intervene in the world affairs : a “Palestinian state” is still its favorite cause, Israel its favorite scapegoat.

Last Spring, even though both France and the Palestinian territories were in terrible shape, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault anyway declared that it was “urgent” to relaunch the “peace process” and create a Palestinian state. France therefore convened an international conference, held in Paris on June 3. Neither Israel nor the Palestinians were invited to it. The conference was a flop. It concluded with a vapid statement about the “imperative necessity” to go “forward”.