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September 2019

BIDEN, HARRIS, BOOKER, KLOBUCHAR, EDUCATION

www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/why_harris_booker_and_klobuchar_will_never_be_president.html

Why Harris, Booker, and Klobuchar will never be President
Patricia McCarthy, AmericanThinker.com/blog

The calculated Russia hoax devised to bring down a presidential candidate, president-elect and then president, is the most serious and egregious political scandal in US history. Second may be the Kavanaugh hearings. So determined to not let Brett Kavanaugh be seated on the Supreme Court, the demented Left decided to invent an equally monstrous lie to prevent the confirmation of Trump’s choice for the Justice to replace Anthony Kennedy. I think that every Democrat on that committee had to know that the accusations against Kavanaugh were false, that Blasey-Ford was a plant, a willing dupe in the Democrat scheme to destroy a good man for their political purposes. The entire fiasco was so unspeakable that in a just world, all the perpetrators would be in prison for fraud, Diane Feinstein among them.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/03/right-needs-revolutionary-higher-ed-reform-plan-now/

The Right Needs To Adopt This Revolutionary Higher Ed Reform Plan Now
William L. Krumholz, TheFederalist.com

Far too many pundits believe culture is upstream from politics. That might be true, but bad policy is often upstream of culture. And it is shocking how often Republicans use the “culture” trope as an excuse for long-running inaction and lack of serious thought on needed policy changes.
One such example is higher education. Speakers such as Heather Mac Donald have done an excellent job of highlighting examples of the far-left bias that is prevalent at America’s higher ed institutions. Conservative YouTube channels are great at highlighting the perils of conservative speakers attempting to speak on various campuses.
But few address the elephant in the room. Taxpayers are heavily subsidizing the entrenched and blatant anti-American and anti-Christian bent in our colleges and universities.

https://www.takimag.com/article/joe-biden-is-going-nuts/

Joe Biden is Going Nuts
Jim Goad, TakiMag.com

Joe Biden
“I want to be clear—I’m not going nuts,” Joe Biden assured a crowd in New Hampshire last Friday.
It was merely the latest in a lifetime of lies this serial fabulist has told. ALL of the available evidence proves that he is clearly going nuts.
Perhaps part of it is due to the pressure of being an old white man who’s posing as the standard-bearer of a political party whose sole agenda these days is the extermination and debasement of old white men. How taxing must it be to run on the premise of, “Well, sure, everything I represent sucks, but at least I acknowledge it, so vote for me, anyway”? I could see how that could take its toll on a fella.

Why is the US Training and Equipping the Lebanese Army? Shoshana Bryen

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

LAF soldiers on a foot patrol along the Blue Line in the vicinity of Meiss el Jabel.

American security assistance generally is predicated on the principle that a smaller or poorer country that has U.S. equipment and training will be better able to defend common interests than one that doesn’t. Sometimes it works that way. But sometimes it puts the U.S. in bed with people who want our weapons and training but do not share our bottom line — their enemy is not ours; their rules of engagement are not ours; their government, in fact, is not a friend of ours, but maybe if we reward it thoroughly enough it won’t actively oppose our interests.

In that latter category is Lebanon.

As Hezbollah announced it is preparing to attack Israel, we must consider the role of the United States in arming and training the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), the national army of Lebanon that technically is an arm of the Hezbollah-dominated government in Beirut.

Lebanon is not a functional country and there are those — the Assad family in Syria, for example — who don’t think it should be a country at all. Syria didn’t recognize the independence of Lebanon until 2008, after a 29-year occupation that ended in 2005. By law, power is shared among religious and ethnic groups — 19 in the current parliament.

Hezbollah, created, armed and run by Iran as a Shiite supremacist military force, has both the majority in the political cabinet in Beirut and a separate, private army complete with precision missiles and rule-making authority in the southern part of the country. Lebanon has little economy, but Hezbollah runs rackets — mostly arms and drugs, mostly in South America — and kills people in Europe, and Jews and Israelis around the world.

Hezbollah kills Americans, too. Until 2001, it had killed more Americans than any other terror organization — including 241 American service members in 1983 in their barracks in Beirut, the greatest loss of American Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945.

What to Expect When You’re Expecting FISA Abuse Charles Lipson

By Charles Lipson – RCP ContributorSeptember 03, 2019
What to Expect When You’re Expecting FISA AbuseAP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
Now that James Comey’s corruption of the FBI has been exposed, the country awaits the next report from Inspector General Michael Horowitz. This one will deal with government misrepresentations to the special court that grants secret surveillance warrants on foreign agents in the United States.

To launch a counter-intelligence investigation on an American citizen, like Carter Page, the Department of Justice applies to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. All warrants require accuracy and integrity, but those to the FISA court should meet an even-higher standard. Why? Because, unlike criminal warrants, FISA warrants remain hidden. The goal is to “spy on spies,” not haul them into court, so the application will remain secret, never challenged by a defense attorney at trial.

That’s why the DoJ and FBI must certify, in writing, that the FISA application is truthful and complete and that the evidence it presents has been thoroughly vetted by the bureau. That’s what the Obama administration’s top law-enforcement officials did when they wanted to spy on Carter Page. It is becoming increasingly clear they were lying.

Apparently, the court turned down the initial application — a very rare event — so the FBI and DoJ tried again. This time they bulked up the application with details from Christopher Steele’s dirty dossier. The dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, using two cut-outs (the DNC’s law firm, Perkins Coie, and the opposition research firm it hired, Glenn Simpson’s FusionGPS). The FBI’s second-in-command, Andrew McCabe, told Congress that the warrant would not have been granted without the dossier.

The FBI, which also paid Steele as a “confidential human source,” never verified the dossier and did not even try until after the warrant was issued. The bureau hid the Clinton campaign’s involvement in a murky footnote. It said the informant, former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, was reliable. What it didn’t say was that he was virulently anti-Trump and the FBI had fired him for leaking. The law required the bureau to say so to the court.

Even today, the Steele dossier has not been verified — and almost certainly cannot be. The author himself testified in Britain that he doesn’t know how much is truthful. The New York Times has suggested that it may be filled with Russian disinformation. Remember, this dodgy material was solicited and paid for by the Clinton campaign, Democratic National Committee, and the FBI.

This essential background was hidden from the FISA Court when it granted four successive warrants to spy on a U.S. citizen because he was purportedly a foreign agent. That citizen, Page, had actually been cooperating with American law enforcement and intelligence for years. He came to them on his own and spoke freely after his occasional business trips to Russia.

The decision to spy on Page came, conveniently, when the CIA, FBI, DoJ, and their political bosses wanted to know a lot more about the Trump campaign. That, almost certainly, is why they tried to entrap George Papadopoulos and spy on Page. When their initial FISA application was rejected, they added the Steele dossier, covered up its gaping problems, and certified the whole hot mess to the FISA Court.

The highest levels of the FBI and DoJ must have known it wasn’t true. They were certainly told so, in advance. We know the warnings were correct because Robert Mueller’s team investigated Page intensively, hardly mentioned him in its report, and did not indict him (or any other American) for collaborating with Russia in the 2016 election.

This sinkhole of FISA abuse is what the looming Horowitz report will detail. Although the IG cannot issue indictments, he can refer them to Attorney General Bill Barr and is very likely to do so.

We don’t know how Barr’s team will handle those referrals or the avalanche sure to come from U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is leading a criminal investigation into how the anti-Trump investigation began and how it morphed into a criminal inquiry.

Who dropped this bouquet of E-coli into the punch bowl? We know some of the culprits. It was James Comey’s FBI, including Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, James Baker, and several others on their hand-picked team. It was Loretta Lynch’s DoJ, where John P. Carlin headed the national security team. It was the intel agencies run by John Brennan and James Clapper. It was Susan Rice’s national security team at the White House, busy unmasking hundreds of names of U.S. citizens picked up in foreign surveillance. Still more surveillance was outsourced to friendly foreign intel agencies, which didn’t need warrants to spy on U.S. citizens. Those agencies relayed their findings to the CIA, a backdoor trick to spy on Americans.

These actions look like political surveillance masquerading as national security, executed by political appointees across the executive branch. So … who authorized it? Who coordinated it? How high up did it go? We need answers, under oath.

We don’t know what role President Obama’s top aides played in these machinations. Nor do we know the roles played by the president himself and his vice president, Joe Biden. All we know, so far, is that Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were central to the FBI investigation, texted about it on Aug. 5, 2016. The key text says, “The White House is running this.” Three years later, we still don’t know what that means.

Horowitz’s upcoming report will begin to answer the questions. Durham’s probe will answer still more, even though it is apparently limited to the origins of the anti-Trump investigations, at least so far. We will need to know how those investigations evolved, who ran them, and who consumed the political intelligence.

Who was the real target? It must have been Trump’s inner circle and perhaps the insurgent candidate himself. After all, Carter Page and George Papadopoulos were minnows. Surely, spying on them (and probably others like them) was meant to pry open communications with major players, to catch the big fish.

The biggest fish of all was Trump himself, first in the campaign, then in the transition, and finally in office. He was never briefed that Russia might have been trying to penetrate his campaign, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein was briefed about a Chinese spy on her staff. He was treated more like an adversary than a candidate who needed protection from malevolent foreign actors.

We know Comey falsely told the president-elect he was never under investigation. Actually, the FBI director was personally gathering information on him as part of the probe, code-named “Crossfire Hurricane.” After conveying the barest outlines of the Steele dossier to Trump (the infamous Jan. 7, 2017, meeting), Comey ran immediately to his mobile computer, wrote up the conversation, met with others on the investigative team by secure teleconference, and kept his notes out of the FBI’s filing system, where they could be searched and evaluated.

Comey’s M.O. in that meeting matches his decision three weeks later to try and trap Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, at the White House. Since the FBI already had tape of Flynn’s phone call with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, their only purpose in asking about it was to snag him and, ideally, to flip him on the president.

This conduct goes beyond sleazy. It goes beyond Comey and Brennan, the FBI and CIA. It points to something very big and very nasty in the final year of the Obama administration, orchestrated by its most senior appointees.

Was there a deliberate, multi-pronged effort to use the government’s most powerful tools to undermine a free and fair election and, after Trump was elected, to hobble or unseat him?

We cannot say that yet. But we cannot rule it out, either. We need to know. If there was a concerted, illegal effort by our own government to take down a presidential candidate and then the country’s new leader, it would represent a noxious, frontal assault on America’s constitutional order. That’s true whether you like Trump or loathe him.

Short of that, there seems to have been a broad-based effort to conduct domestic political surveillance, led by high-level Obama appointees. If that happened, we need to hold the perps to account. They need to defend their actions in open court.

Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he founded the Program on International Politics, Economics, and Security. He can be reached at charles.lipson@gmail.com.

General Mattis’ Finest Hour: Editorial of the New York Sun

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/general-mattis-finest-hour/90818/

That James Mattis is a tough man, we have no doubt. He is, after all, a Marine. He’s been decorated for the kind of valor it’s impossible to alloy. The question is whether he’ll prove tough enough to withstand the pressure to jump into the 2020 election campaign not as a candidate but as a critic of the commander in chief he served as secretary of defense. It seems the pressure is mounting with every passing day.

This is owing to the general’s new book, “Call Sign Chaos.” It’s out today from Random House. The book is about learning to lead. It’s a riveting read, in our view. Yet the general stops short of crabbing about the president he served and on whom he finally quit. As near as we can count, it mentions President Trump but four times — in the prologue, which offers a brief description of his job interview for secretary.

Such reticence is driving our best newspapermen crazy. The editor of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, traveled all the way to the state of Washington for one of his famous scoop-interviews. He went for a walk with the general along the Columbia River. They talked about fishing, command-and-feedback loops, the fragility of the American experiment, even Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the famed stoic.

About President Trump, though, zilch. On the question about which Mr. Goldberg wanted to hear — “Is Donald Trump fit for command?” — the general clammed up tighter than one the Columbia’s notorious mollusks. Mr. Goldberg himself found it “exasperating.” The general wouldn’t budge. “There is a period in which I owe my silence,” the general said, though he added: “It’s not eternal.”

Boris Johnson’s Tories Lose Majority in Parliament as Fight to Delay Brexit Erupts By Mairead McArdle

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/boris-johnsons-tories-lose-majority-in-parliament-as-fight-to-delay-brexit-erupts/

Britain’s ruling Tory party lost its parliamentary majority Tuesday as the melee continues over legislation to delay the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union.

  

Conservative Phillip Lee defected to the Liberal Democrats amid Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s speech against legislation that would delay Brexit three months past the October 31 deadline. Lee, who had been a Tory for nearly three decades, said the party has become “infected with the twin diseases of populism and English nationalism.”

Lee’s defection changes Johnson’s political calculus amid the chaotic Brexit fight, but will not automatically trigger a new election. The Liberal Democrats and some members of Johnson’s own party vehemently oppose exiting the European Union without a deal in place to mitigate the consequences of the move, but Johnson has forged ahead, vowing to push Brexit through whether or not a deal is reached with the EU.

“If that happens, all the progress we have been making will have been for nothing,” Johnson said of the legislative proposal to extend the October 31 deadline, saying it would force the U.K. to accept whatever deal the EU demands. “There are no circumstances in which I could accept anything like it. We promised the people we would get Brexit done. Enough is enough. The country wants this done.”

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who backs the delay bill, slammed Johnson’s remarks, calling the prime minister’s policies “dangerous and reckless.”

Johnson has threatened call a snap general election and kick members who oppose a no-deal Brexit out of the party.

“Let’s get on with the people’s agenda,” he said.

The Anti-Climate-Change Energy Crunch Is Starting To Hit New York Francis Menton

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&

As you all know, the game plan of climate activists is to restrict and ultimately ban the use of carbon-based fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas. Don’t worry, those will all be replaced in due course with perfectly clean and free “renewables.” You won’t even notice that it is happening! At least until your price of electricity triples or you can’t heat your house any more.

I’ve long said that the politics of energy will change significantly when people start to get hit with reality in the form of soaring prices or shortages. An early example of the latter is starting to take shape here in New York.

In recent years, jurisdictions have competed with one another with promises to get higher and higher percentages of energy from “renewables,” and lower and lower percentages from fossil fuels, by earlier and earlier dates. For example, California claims to be “leading the nation toward a 100 percent clean energy future and addressing climate change.” California’s SB 350, enacted into law in 2015, directs the state to reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. But New York was not about to cede “climate leadership” to those rubes on the West coast. As reported here on July 6, New York’s legislature had just passed the “Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.” Its goals: to get 70% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030, followed by reduction of all carbon emissions — not just from the electricity sector — by 85% below 1990 levels by 2050. Take that, California!

And then there’s the question of where to start, because after all, you have to start somewhere. And you can’t really expect to be taken seriously in your claim to be replacing fossil fuels if you just keep adding and adding to your fossil fuel infrastructure and capacity. Back in 2014 Governor Cuomo got the ball rolling by banning “fracking” for natural gas in the state. But of course, they “frack” in a big way right next door in Pennsylvania, and it’s just a hop, skip and a jump by pipeline to bring that gas over here.

NORMAN-A REVIEW BY MARILYN PENN

http://politicalmavens.com/

Count the derogatory characteristics stereotypically applied to Jews and confirmed by this scathing film: pushy, two-faced, greedy, power-hungry, untrustworthy, social-climbing, controlling, puppet-masters of the government – there are more but let’s start with these. Under the guise of being a soft-spoken, gentle schlemiel – the kind of man who knows how to manipulate an invite to a billionaire’s dinner party but shows up wearing a newsboy’s cap that signals why he doesn’t belong – Richard Gere plays Norman, a man who lives by connecting people to other people who can do them important favors. By tailing an Israeli minister as he meanders back to his NY hotel after an important meeting, Norman eventually introduces himself in an elegant men’s shop and promises to get the minister an invitation to the billionaire’s dinner that night. To establish his credibility, he insists on paying for the minister’s exorbitantly expensive shoes – previously tried on and rejected for their extravagance. The greedy minister accepts the offer, and if adjusted for inflation, probably sells out for less than Judas did. Jews have always loved both shekels and beautiful menswear – think of Joseph and that rainbow coat.

There’s a lot more plot concerning a potty-mouthed rabbi who needs to raise money to save his temple (Steve Buscemi); a successful lawyer/nephew who needs a rabbi who will marry him to his Korean love (Michael Sheen); an Israeli prime-minister who needs to get his son accepted to Harvard (Lior Ashkenazi) – a chad gadya of the interlocking needs and wants of Israeli and American Jewry. And there are the un-subtle references to names and types to arouse a nod and smile from viewers who pick up on them – a Korean rabbi at Central Synagogue, the names Alfred Taub and Henry Kavisch. There’s the brief scene showing Norman eating pickled herring from a jar while miles away, the prime-minister is slurping oysters and the soundtrack of glorious cantorial chanting of prayers offers the spirituality that Judaism used to represent. As a movie for home-consumption in Israel, one could make the argument that Norman is an over-extended SNL sketch that skewers its leaders, movers and shakers. As a film sent out for international distribution to an increasingly anti-semitic world, its a misguided attempt at satire that will only re-enforce and inflame existing prejudice.

Merkel’s in Beijing, Pence is in Poland Germany’s chancellor and the Amercan vice president have their diplomatic work cut out for them David Goldman

https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/09/article/merkels-in-beijing-pence-is-in-poland/

A senior Polish official explained to me recently why his country couldn’t accept American demands to exclude Huawei from Poland’s buildout of 5G broadband. During the early 2010s, the United States ignored Poland entirely, but Huawei made a long-term commitment, and built the country’s entire telecommunications infrastructure. To exclude Huawei at this point would be disruptive as well as prohibitively expensive. Besides, the official explained, Poland’s economic future was bound up with China’s. Its flagship national project, an enormous new airport 40 kilometers east of Warsaw, will be “China’s gateway to the continent.”

That is the background to Vice President Mike Pence’s appearance in Poland on Tuesday to sign a “security pact” requiring “rigorous review” of telecommunications suppliers, that is, Huawei. The pact declares, “We believe that all countries must ensure that only trusted and reliable suppliers participate in our networks to protect them from unauthorized access or interference.” 

One strains to recall another such “security pact,” or to comprehend just what such a pact means in terms of diplomacy. It obligates the Poles to nothing except a formal review process. Germany’s telecom regulator undertook such a review process and declared last April that “no equipment supplier, including Huawei, should, or may, be specifically excluded.” German and Chinese government and industry sources report that the Chinese telecom giant persuaded the German government that its 5G technology would not enable China to spy on the Germans, but rather would prevent the United States from doing so. A senior German official is said to have told US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that Germany was not aware of China tapping Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone, as the US reportedly did in 2013.

Michael Flynn’s Attorney Accuses Feds Of Hiding Exculpatory Information About His Case By Margot Cleveland

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/03/michael-flynns-attorney-accuses-feds-hiding-information-favors-case/

Michael Flynn’s new attorney filed a 19-page brief detailing prosecutorial misconduct and seeking sanctions against government attorneys for withholding evidence.

On Friday, while most of America prepared for the long Labor Day weekend, things exploded in the Michael Flynn case. What began with an intriguing status report, which exposed the chasm between Flynn’s new powerhouse attorney Sidney Powell and prosecutors, culminated with Powell’s filing of a 19-page brief detailing prosecutorial misconduct and seeking sanctions against government attorneys for withholding evidence.

Flynn, who pleaded guilty in late 2017 to lying to FBI agents about conversations he had in December 2016 with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, awaits sentencing before federal Judge Emmett Sullivan. In Friday’s status report, prosecutors told Sullivan that Flynn’s “cooperation has ended” and that the case is ready for sentencing.

Conversely, Powell argued “the case is not ready for sentencing,” first because new counsel still needs “a significant amount of time” to review the mountainous file. But it was the additional reasons for a delay Powell detailed that piqued the interest of pundits.

Israel’s Good and Bad New Realities By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/israel-new-alliances-dangerous-old-enemies/

New alliances with Arab nations are positive but unstable, and old enemies are most dangerous when in a weakened state.

One of the most radical changes in the labyrinth of the Middle East is the near cessation of the old formal hostility of the Arab nations to Israel. That does not mean that the destruction of the Jewish state is not still a commandment among hundreds of millions of Arab speakers throughout the Middle East in general and on the proverbial West Bank in particular.

Rather, a number of currents has convinced most of the Gulf monarchies, frontline Arab states such as Jordan and Egypt, and the other North African nations that of all the existential crises in the world threatening their regimes, Israel is no longer perceived as their font.

Instead, elemental dangers to Israel arise mostly from Iran, Iranian-backed Hezbollah in the badlands of Syria and Lebanon, and Turkey. Why this fundamental realignment?

One reason, of course, is Iran’s likely soon-to-be nuclear status. Iran detests Israel. But such hatred is relatively recent and dates from 1979 — unlike the ancient schisms between Shiite and Sunni, Persian and Arab, and the Straits of Hormuz versus the Persian Gulf.

Arab nations believe that a nuclear Iran will threaten them explicitly. They assume that a messianic Tehran is quite capable of carrying out what would be serial nuclear threats. And they are certain that such constant tensions would embolden Shiite minorities in their own states, much like millions of Eastern European Germans of the 1930s were suddenly deemed oppressed, and believed that they could be liberated only by eventual protection from and incorporation into Hitler’s ascendant Third Reich.