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April 2018

ISRAEL, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Carter Center Sued for Providing Support to Hamas Jimmy Carter’s unstinting hatred for Israel paved the way. Robert Spencer

By on April 27th, 2018

The Washington Free Beacon reported Monday that the Zionist Advocacy Center is alleging in a suit that former President Jimmy Carter’s nonprofit organization, the Carter Center, “has used taxpayer funding to provide material support to international terrorist groups, including Hamas.” Given Carter’s longstanding and abundantly established hatred for the Jewish state, this allegation is no great shock. Nonetheless, the specter of an American President’s foundation funding a jihad terrorist group demonstrates how far we have fallen.

The Zionist Advocacy Center further alleges that the Carter Center “received more than $30 million in taxpayer grants while violating federal statutes barring it from using the cash to provide material support to terror groups.” Not only that: “The plaintiffs maintain the Carter Center has violated the law by hosting designated terrorists at is facilities, as well as by providing various forms of assistance to the Palestinian terror group Hamas and other known terror entities.”

No one who has watched Carter over the years can really be surprised. Back in 2008, Carter claimed that Hamas was prepared to accept the right of Israel to “live as a neighbor next door in peace.” He had no grounds for saying so, and it wasn’t remotely true, but this claim helped him perpetuate the fiction that the Israelis, not the Palestinians, were responsible for the failure of all peace talks and the ongoing tensions between the two.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Berkeley Discrimination Suit Survives Legal Challenge Judge refuses to throw out lawsuit about UC Berkeley’s discrimination against conservative speakers. Matthew Vadum

By on April 27th, 2018

The University of California at Berkeley’s thuggish request to throw out an important civil rights lawsuit that could hold the school accountable for its blatant viewpoint discrimination that involves slapping unreasonable restrictions and fees on appearances by conservative speakers like David Horowitz and Ann Coulter was refused this week by the federal judge hearing the case.

It has long been known that the administration at UC Berkeley only pretends to adhere to the First Amendment’s speech protections. When conservatives are scheduled to speak on campus the administration typically doesn’t forbid their appearances. Instead, it makes the speeches inconvenient to the point of impossibility, requiring the use of venues a mile off campus at times when students can’t attend.

This bears more than a passing resemblance to the shadow-banning practices of social media giants like Twitter and Facebook that secretly limit politically disfavored users’ reach online. It’s ugly, Orwellian stuff but that’s what the Left is all about today.

But Twitter and Facebook are private for-profit businesses so when they push conservatives around and arbitrarily punish them the First Amendment isn’t implicated. Not so with UC Berkeley, which as a taxpayer-supported university must abide by the First Amendment or suffer legal consequences.

In San Francisco, U.S. District Judge Maxine M. Chesney, appointed in 1995 by President Bill Clinton, said Young America’s Foundation and the Berkeley College Republicans may pursue their claim that UC Berkeley applied policies for high-profile speakers in a way that unfairly burdened conservative speech, Reuters reports. Chesney preliminarily rejected the transparently false arguments by campus administrators that the school’s speaking policies were enforced equally against all speakers regardless of ideology or politics.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Pompeo Confirmed as Secretary of State as Embattled VA Nominee Jackson Drops Out By Bridget Johnson

By on April 27th, 2018

WASHINGTON — Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo was confirmed as secretary of State today by a 57-42 vote in the Senate.

Democratic Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Joe Donnelly (Ind.) and Doug Jones (R-Ala.) supported Pompeo, along with Independent Sen. Angus King (Maine).

“Based on his experience as CIA Director, an Army officer, a congressman, and his proven leadership on national security matters, he is eminently qualified to serve as our nation’s top diplomat,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) after the vote. “It is a shame that his nomination encountered partisan headwinds at a time when the U.S. and our allies face mounting national security threats. I look forward to working him and I am confident that he will successfully advance U.S. interests abroad, including the promotion of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said he voted against Pompeo “because we need someone who will be a check on President Trump’s bellicose nature, not an encourager.”

“After 17 years of war in Afghanistan, 15 in Iraq and decades of huge military budgets, we need a secretary of state who will help bring the nations of the world together in diplomatic efforts to prevent war, not someone who supports never-ending wars,” Sanders said. “We need a secretary of state who will stand up for people of all faiths, sexual orientations and genders, not someone who opposes women’s rights and LGBTQ rights and who promotes religious bigotry. And we need a secretary of state who will address the crisis of climate change, not stymie action on one of the world’s most serious security threats.”

As one of President Trump’s nominees cleared the Senate, another dropped out before even getting to the confirmation hearing stage. CONTINUE AT SITE

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Restrictions on Travel from Terrorist Safe Havens Are Not a ‘Muslim Ban’ By Hans A. von Spakovsky

By on April 27th, 2018

Protesters at the Supreme Court were wrong.

The weak arguments made on Wednesday in the Supreme Court against President Donald Trump’s restrictions on travel from dangerous countries demonstrate that the government should win the case. The justices should rule in favor of upholding the president’s authority to protect national security and the safety of the American public.

It was a rainy, overcast day in the nation’s capital, but that did not stop protesters outside the Supreme Court who were yelling about the so-called Muslim ban, which exists only in their fevered imaginations. The weather also did not deter those attending the arguments inside the courtroom, which was packed with Washington’s media and political elites, including Don McGahn, Trump’s White House counsel, and legislators including Representative Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Even Lin-Manuel Miranda, author of the Broadway musical Hamilton, was there.

The justices heard their final oral arguments of the term in U.S. v. Hawaii, the case filed against Trump’s revised proclamation of September 24, 2017. That proclamation was issued after an intensive, multi-agency review applied to 200 countries. The Department of Homeland Security recommended that entry be restricted from eight countries that, as Noel Francisco, the solicitor general, told the Court, “failed to provide the minimum baseline of information needed to vet their nationals.”

The countries included Iran and Syria, state sponsors of terrorism; Libya, Yemen, Chad, and Somalia, which have extensive terrorist activities inside their borders; and two non-Muslim countries, North Korea and Venezuela.

Francisco put on a very strong case on behalf of the government. He relied heavily on a straightforward provision of federal immigration law, whereby Congress gave the president the power to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” if he finds that their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” As Francisco argued, “the proclamation reflects a foreign-policy and national-security judgment that falls well within the president’s power” under this federal law.

The solicitor general argued against the courts’ getting involved in this, since “the whole vetting system is essentially determined by the executive branch. It’s up to the executive branch to set it up. It’s up to the executive branch to maintain it. And it’s up to the executive branch to constantly improve it.” He pointed out that prior presidents, Carter and Reagan, used this law to restrict entry from Iran and Cuba, and Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that Trump’s proclamation contains more detail on the specifics of the grounds for the restrictions than did those prior presidential proclamations.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

A real Indian answers a fake By James Lewis

By on April 27th, 2018

At a time of ugly race-baiting in politics, a good laugh is like a ray of sunshine. For the funniest candidate of the day, conservatives owe a big vote of thanks to a gentleman named Shiva Ayyadura (pronounced ah-yah-DOO-rah) in the Commonwealth of Mass., a man who is both a real Indian (from India!) and a real American (from America!) – unlike Fauxcahontas Warren, the current senator from that benighted state.

So Mr. A. is running against Liz (Fakey) Warren for Senate, and naturally, the local leftist thugs are trying to shut him up.

Liz Warren is the most ridiculous senator since Foghorn Leghorn, because she is such an obvious affirmative action cheat. When anybody objects that she doesn’t have an particle of Indian DNA, her answer is to accuse other people of racism. (Of course!)

Well, this is a chance for payback.

The left has sliced and diced U.S. voters into blocs of blacks against whites, women against men, young against old, Amerindians against other Americans, on and on, regardless of sanity and common sense. The media protect race-baiting Democrats, which is why American politics has gone mad.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Politics as a Weapon in the Cause of Islam By Janet Levy

By on April 27th, 2018

In 2007, in a highly controversial move, Keith Hakim Ellison, the first Muslim congressman, swore his oath of office on a copy of the Koran. In effect, Ellison rejected the values that unify Americans and instead pledged to follow a religious text that commands Muslims to wage war against secular legal systems.

Today, swearing the oath of office on the Koran and even simultaneously praising Allah have become almost commonplace. In 2016, Minneapolis Park Board member and Somalian refugee, A.K. Hassan took his oath on a massively oversized Koran and proclaimed his commitment to serve “in the name of Allah.” In 2015, another Somali refugee, Ilhan Omar, elected to the Minnesota House of Representative, swore on the Koran, as did Carolyn Walker-Diallo, the first Muslim woman judge elected to Brooklyn’s 7th Municipal District, and Abdullah Hammoud, a Michigan state representative.

In “Muslim Brotherhood Political Infiltration on Steroids,” I described how as early as 1987, FBI information revealed that the Muslim Brotherhood – a Middle East political organization considered a terrorist organization by five Arab countries and Russia – was seeking to “peacefully get inside the United States Government” and accomplish “the ultimate goal of overthrowing all non-Islamic governments.” Several M.B. front groups, including Project Mobilize; the United States Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO); and Jetpac, Inc., had been created to politically exploit America’s Muslim community to achieve supremacist goals set forth in the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategic plan, the Explanatory Memorandum.

As if taking a cue from the memorandum, the executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), Nihad Awad, spoke in January 2016, at the 14th annual Muslim American Society-Islamic Circle of North America (MAS-ICNA) conference in Chicago. He urged Muslims to “[t]urn your centers, Islamic centers, mosques into registration centers for voters, into polling stations during election time.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is ‘Guilty Until Proven Innocent’ the New Standard? By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on April 27th, 2018

Too many Trump critics have abandoned all pretense of respecting due process.

The absurd ruling by District Judge John Bates in the DACA case — which means that what is lawlessly imposed by executive order may not be lawfully rescinded by executive order — reminds us that justice is being politicized plenty from the bench. No surprise, then, that the pols and pundits are getting in on the act.

Byron York’s Washington Examiner column takes up the question of whether, where Donald Trump is concerned, the “generally accepted standard of justice has been turned on its head.” The matter at issue is the so-called Steele dossier, the Clinton-campaign-sponsored compilation of opposition-research memos that the author, former British spy Christopher Steele, masqueraded as intelligence reports. Byron collects commentary from left-leaning political, academic, and media doyens, all arguing that the dossier’s sensational allegations carry a degree of credibility because, though unverified, they have not been proven untrue.

We’ll come to the law in a moment. First, it’s worth observing how even the facts are corrupted by political narrative. The dossier did not drop out of the sky five minutes ago. Many media outlets had it long before it was finally published 17 months ago, refusing to run with it because they well knew that doing so would be irresponsible. The FBI has had Steele’s reports for nearly two years. As former deputy director Andrew McCabe told the House Intelligence Committee, the bureau made elaborate efforts to corroborate it. What’s more, the FBI and Justice Department have come in for fierce criticism for failing to verify dossier allegations that were included in the surveillance applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court). They have great incentive to show corroboration if it exists, but they haven’t.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Trump Takes On Obstruction Focus on the threat to the powers of the presidency, not the president personally. Kimberley Strassel

By on April 27th, 2018

President Trump vociferously protests his innocence as Robert Mueller finishes the first year of his Russia investigation. Still, the endless Tweet bleats of “PHONY” and “WITCH HUNT” are doing little to help his cause.

The question is why this high-energy president seems to have fallen for the media claim that his only proactive course is to fire Mr. Mueller. It isn’t. There are two very bold actions the Trump White House could take to reset the Russia dynamic. Both would aid Mr. Trump’s presidency and serve the executive branch and the public in the longer term.

The first is an abrupt overhaul of the president’s legal team and strategy. Mr. Trump has talented lawyers, but not ones skilled at confronting the threat at hand. They continue to fret over his personal liability, when the real threat is to the Constitution—to this presidency and every future one. Mr. Mueller is by all accounts now focused on obstruction of justice. Mr. Trump needs constitutional powerhouses who can swiftly take that issue off the table.

Constitutional lawyer David Rivkin in December argued on these pages that a president’s exercise of the powers of his office cannot legitimately be construed as obstruction of justice. Among those powers are the right to direct law enforcement and to fire executive-branch appointees at will. Whether or not Mr. Trump’s conversations with former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey, or his firing of Mr. Comey, were wise, Mr. Trump was exercising rightful powers. If Congress believes he abused his office, it has the power to impeach. If Congress had the authority to criminalize the exercise of presidential power, or the judiciary to question a president’s motives, the separation of powers would be severely threatened.

Already we are seeing the obstruction narrative threaten other core powers. We are now told it is obstructionist for a president to use his pardon power, as Mr. Trump did with Joe Arpaio and Scooter Libby. We are told that Mr. Trump is obstructing justice by ordering the attorney general to cooperate with congressional document demands. And Team Trump needs to understand that the mere specter is enough to constrain the presidency; Mr. Mueller doesn’t need to bring a charge.

Which is why the president needs a team that focuses on the Constitution, decoupling its defense of Mr. Trump’s presidential powers from his personal legal risk. CONTINUE AT SITE

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Megyn Kelly and NBC: The cost of Trump Derangement Syndrome is huge By Thomas Lifson

By on April 27th, 2018

NBC executive Andrew Lack, reputedly the man who hired Megyn Kelly away from Fox News, has cost shareholders of NBC-Universal millions of dollars. The three-year contract paying her a reported $23 million a year is the least of the costs the network must absorb. Had Kelly brought-in the eyeballs of early morning viewers for the Today Show, where she landed after dismal ratings for her Sunday prime-time “news magazine” entry, the money could be considered a wise investment of corporate resources.

But it turns out that, according to this report in the UK Daily Mail, Kelly is driving away viewers from her morning gig. Her:

…program that averages 2.4 million viewers an episode, which is 18 percent below what the hour was pulling in last season according to data from Nielsen.

Things get worse when it comes to the key demographic of adults aged 25 to 54, where the show is down 28 percent from last season.

That “key demo” is what advertisers seek, because brand preferences are not as firmly established as among older viewers, and this age cohort buys a lot of stuff, as they raise kids, buy houses and furnishings, and work hard to pay for all of what advertisers are selling.

And the damage extends to the program that follows:

Those numbers are now having a negative impact on the fourth hour of Today, which is also dropping in total viewers.

The hosts of last season’s pre-Kelly show, Al Roker and Tamron Hall, together reportedly were paid less than half of what Kelly is being paid. Evidently, they were more congenial guests in viewers’ homes. Ratings for daily morning television shows like Today are believed to be driven by viewers’ comfort with and attachment to the personalities of the hosts, who guide them through an overview of what’s happening in the world, along with fluff-like celebrity interviews, cooking, and quasi-stunt segments that revolve around the hosts being put in amusing or interesting situations and settings. The Q Score, which purports to measure the appeal of a celebrity or brand, and the comfort of consumers with it, is vital to success in building a weekday morning viewing habit.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

At 70 – Israel’s economy exceeds expectations Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on April 27th, 2018

1. In 1948, conventional wisdom considered the newly-reestablished Jewish State insolvent economically, indefensible militarily, a basket case, totally dependent upon handouts.

2. In 2018, Forbes Magazine quoted Warren Buffett (February 26, 2018): “I’m not Jewish, but Israel reminds me of the USA after its birth. The determination, motivation, intelligence and initiative of its people are remarkable and extraordinary. I’m a big believer in Israel’s economy.” According to Forbes, “Buffett just purchased a $358MN stake in Teva Pharmaceutical, 1.8% of Teva’s outstanding shares…. In 2006, Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway purchased an 80% stake in Israel’s Iscar for $4BN, its first international acquisition…. In 2013, Berkshire bought out the remaining 20% for $2BN…. Other Israeli companies purchased by Berkshire include eVolution Networks, creators of wireless network energy savings software, Ray-Q Interconnect, a distributor of electronic components and AgroLogic, a designer of electronic control units for agriculture….”

3. Amazon’s Israel – Island of Success by Adam Reuter and Noga Kainan provides critical data on Israel’s surging economy:

From 1987 to 2017, Israel’s population upsurged from 4.4MN to 8.75MN; GDP – from $35BN to $358BN; GDP per capita – from $8,000 to $41,000; tax burden – from 45% to 30%; foreign exchange reserves – from $4BN to $112BN; national debt to GDP ratio – from 155% to 59%; defense expenditures- from 17% to 4.5% of GDP; US foreign aid (actually, US investment in Israel) – from 7% to 1% of GDP; exports – from $10BN to $102BN; independent energy resources – from 4% to 65% (66% of electricity consumption); desalinated water – from 3% to 50%; annual inflation – from 16% (450% in 1985) to 0.30%; life expectancy – from 75 to 82 years; women’s participation in the job market – from 36% to 58%.

Since the year 2000, Israel’s economy has grown 65% – 2nd best among the OECD countries.

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