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Ruth King

Bernie Sides with Iran’s Mullahs The Left’s romance with the Islamic Republic ensues. Kenneth R. Timmerman

The Senate debated on Tuesday a resolution introduced by Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders that would require the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Yemen.

The surprising support the resolution won from 44 U.S. Senators handed a big win to Iran, which is engaged in a hot war with Saudi Arabia on the Arabian Peninsula. And it was a huge slap in the face to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who was meeting with President Trump in the White House as the Senate debated the motion on the floor.

It also showed the extreme damage recent scandals involving NSA snooping and political bias at the FBI have done to the credibility of the United States government, which lobbied heavily against the resolution.

Let there be no doubt: the only reason the United States has any interest in the civil war that has been raging in Yemen since 2012 is because of the Iranian regime support for the Houthi rebels.

The Houthis have fired Iranian-supplied missiles at the Saudi capital, Riyadh. They have targeted civilian airports, as well as royal palaces. As I wrote earlier this year, imagine for an instant if a hostile regional power were to stir up a civil war in Mexico or Canada, with the ultimate aim of destabilizing the U.S.?

For that is the unabashed goal of the Iranian regime: destabilize Saudi Arabia, which Tehran sees as the main check on its effort to dominate the Persian Gulf, control the free flow of oil, and establish its land bridge through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to Israel’s borders.

Sometimes you wonder at the intelligence of members of Congress. Seriously.

The Media’s Facebook Hysteria and Double Standards When the left hailed the genius of Obama for exploiting the data of millions. Joseph Klein

Facebook is grappling with the fallout from its alleged role in permitting the London-based data firm Cambridge Analytica to gain access to data from profiles of more than 50 million Facebook users for political purposes. The Facebook data reportedly was mined for data by an app called “thisisyourdigitallife,” presumably for an academic research project. The app was created by Aleksandr Kogan, a Russian-American academic at Cambridge University, and his company Global Science Research. The data was then transferred by the researcher to Cambridge Analytica, which worked for the Trump presidential campaign and was backed by Steve Bannon and the conservative billionaire Robert Mercer. Cambridge Analytica claims that the Facebook data it gathered from the app was not used for the 2016 Trump presidential election campaign. Facebook claims that its user profile data was provided to Cambridge Analytica without its knowledge. Facebook also claims that it shut the app down in 2015.

There are reports the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating whether Facebook violated terms of a 2011 consent decree in connection with the transfer of user data to Cambridge Analytica. A spokesperson for the FTC would neither confirm nor deny whether it was launching such an investigation.

Members of Congress and United Kingdom lawmakers have called on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to explain Facebook’s actions and his company’s connections with Cambridge Analytica. The hit to Facebook’s reputation and the potential for increased government regulation on both sides of the Atlantic are taking its toll. Facebook’s stock value has taken a nosedive as a result.

On the political front, President Trump’s enemies are busy exploiting the connection between Cambridge Analytica and the Trump campaign, and by implication the purported misuse of Facebook sourced data for improper partisan purposes. As the Russian-Trump campaign collusion narrative begins to fade due to lack of evidence, the Trump-hating media has latched on to a new Deus ex Machina behind Donald Trump’s improbable victory in a continuing effort to delegitimize his presidency.

Democrats, NeverTrump Finally Have a Jobs Plan By Julie Kelly

With the decisive midterm elections just months away, Democrats are finally rolling out a long-awaited jobs program in hopes of wooing disaffected, working-class voters back to their party this November.

Their message is sure to win the hearts and minds of millions of blue-collar workers in the heartland who abandoned the party in 2016 to vote for Donald Trump. It is unflinching in its commitment to protect the most vulnerable employees—those who are at-risk of having their jobs taken away on a whim by powerful forces—and rendered unable to pay their bills or find other work.

It is “The Special Counsel Independence Protection Act.” Or, as I prefer to call it, the Robert Mueller Job Protection Act.

What, you say? You thought this effort would target steelworkers or coal miners or tradesmen who are struggling to find work? You hoped this would appeal to small business owners who are drowning under rising healthcare costs and expensive federal regulations? You expected a compelling plan from party leaders desperate to take control of Congress next year that would earn back voters in the 206 counties that flipped from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016?

Oh, LOL! You don’t think Democrats actually give a rip about the deplorables in “backward” areas of the country where nothing ever happens and no one of value lives, do you? As Hillary Clinton just reminded us, Democrats are all about serving our betters in “optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving-forward” areas of the country. You losers in Mattoon, Illinois? Suck it.

These brave warriors are charging the Trump Tower at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to defend Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his merry band of Democrat donors, er, investigators, and make sure their jobs are protected ad infinitum. Despite the obvious vicissitude of the Mueller investigation—which has yet to find any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Putin regime before the presidential election—bold coastal liberals are staking their political fortunes on the taxpayer-funded probe they have wagered will destroy Trump’s presidency.

Although the legislation was introduced last year and has since stalled, Democrats are re-upping their plea after President Trump tweeted about Mueller over the weekend. In response, Senator Christopher Coons (D-Del.) issued this statement:

I understand that many of my colleagues don’t believe that President Trump will fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller without cause, and some have cited that as their reason for not backing the legislation I’ve introduced. Unfortunately, the statements and actions from the President and his lawyer over the weekend have led me to believe that the Special Counsel is now at real, immediate risk of being removed, and I believe the Senate needs to pass legislation to ensure that does not happen.

Scandal Questions Never Asked, Much Less Answered By Victor Davis Hanson

Sometimes the hysteria of crowds causes them to overlook the obvious. Here is a series of 12 questions that do not seem to trouble anyone, but the answers to these should expose why so many of the people today alleging scandals should themselves be considered scandalous.

1) Had Hillary Clinton won the election, would we now even know of a Fusion GPS dossier? Would assorted miscreants such as Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page, Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele, or Peter Strzok now be under a cloud of suspicion? Or would they instead have been quietly lionized by a President Clinton grateful for noble services in the shadows rendered during the campaign?

2) If Clinton had won, would we now know of any Russian-supplied smears against Donald Trump? Would a FISA judge now be complaining that he was misled in a warrant request? Would likely Attorney General Loretta Lynch be reassigning Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr for his consultations with Fusion GPS operatives? Or would Russian operatives alone be likely, at an opportune moment, to threaten to leak to the media that they had given salacious material to Clinton operatives to ensure her election, and thus they were to be owed for their supposed help in ensuring a Clinton victory? Would anyone be now listening to a losing candidate Donald Trump making wild charges that he had been smeared in the closing days of his campaign by leaks of a Clinton cabal that drew on Russian help?

3) Are any Russian related interests currently still donating millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation? Why is Bill Clinton not being asked to speak by various groups—including those with Russian-ties—for $500,000 and above per talk? Is he now less persuasive than he was between 2009 and 2015?

4) Why did Andrew McCabe believe that two Democratic political action funds, one controlled by Clinton “best friend” Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, donated a total of $675,288 to his wife’s campaign for a rather obscure state senate post? What percentage of Jill McCabe’s actual campaign budget did the $675,288 comprise? And why after her defeat would Andrew McCabe still not recuse himself from directing FBI inquiries into allegations of (likely next president and past generous benefactor) Hillary Clinton’s prior improper use of an email server while Secretary of State? Does quid pro quo refer really more often to simultaneous benefactions or rather sequential ones?

Mark Zuckerberg Is No James Madison The Constitution was designed to constrain our worst impulses. Facebook encourages them. By Paul Bergevin

One of the many conceits of the digital age is that so-called platforms are a new invention. In some respects they are. Built with computer code, powered by microchips and operated in the cloud, these digital building blocks did not exist until relatively recently. But in other respects, platforms are simply large aggregations of people coming together to search information online, shop or connect with friends.

Compare today’s platforms to the American Constitution: a large aggregation of citizens organized on the principle of self-government. As a work of design, the Constitution is a brilliant piece of architecture, an intellectual foundation that has stood the test of time. If James Madison were a software developer in a Harvard dorm room and not a Virginia planter, we might say he was a better coder than Mark Zuckerberg. The Constitution understands human nature. Facebook , dangerously at times, does not.

In designing the Constitution, Madison managed to appeal to people’s better angels while at the same time calculating man’s capacity to harm and behave badly. Facebook’s designers, on the other hand, appear to have assumed the best about people. They apparently expected users to connect with friends only in benign ways. While the site features plenty of baby and puppy photos, it has also become a place where ISIS brags about beheadings and Russians peddling misinformation seek to undermine the institutions of a free society.CONTINUE AT SITE

Much-vaunted Robert Mueller’s record shows bad investigations By Monica Showalter

As President Trump deliberates on whether to be interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, a look at Mueller’s record of indicting ham sandwiches ought to give him pause.

Mueller, as The Federalist points out, botches high-profile cases and can drag them out for a decade. Reporter Daniel Ashman found this case with Mueller’s name on it, the anthrax attacks case dating back to 2001. That was when some maniac or terrorist, some beast, sent anthrax powder in the mail to news agencies, injuring people who opened the packages. I worked at Forbes magazine in New York at the time and remember how the mail was quarantined, depriving us of that communication line, and I remember how terrified people were at this nasty coda to the horrific 9/11 terror attacks.

The Federalist reports:

The anthrax letters began just a week after the 9/11 attack. While planning the airplane hijackings, Al-Qaeda had been weaponizing anthrax, setting up a lab in Afghanistan manned by Yazid Sufaat, the same man who housed two of the 9/11 hijackers. Two hijackers later sought medical help due to conditions consistent with infection via anthrax: Al Haznawi went to the emergency room for a skin lesion which he claimed was from “bumping into a suitcase,” and ringleader Mohamed Atta needed medicine for “skin irritation.” A team of bioterrorism experts from Johns Hopkins confirmed that anthrax was the most likely cause of the lesion. Meanwhile, the 9/11 hijackers were also trying to obtain crop-dusting airplanes.

So how did Mueller’s investigative team handle the case?

Mueller issued a statement in October of 2001, while anthrax victims were still dying: the FBI had found “no direct link to organized terrorism.” The John Hopkins team of experts was mistaken, the FBI continued, Al Haznawi never had an anthrax infection. The crop-dusting airplanes they needed was possibly for a separate and unrelated anthrax attack.

Global Warming: The Evolution of a Hoax By Dale Leuck

Only forty-some years ago, “climate science” suddenly turned from advancing a theory of global cooling to one of global warming. A 123-page paper by Christopher Booker, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), explains this sudden change in terms of a “groupthink” belief system formulated and perpetuated by a few strong personalities. Through key positions, and with sympathetic lobbyist groups, the theory overwhelmed politics during its formative years in the 1970s from its center in various United Nations agencies until its unraveling began in the late 1990s.

The first of those personalities was Swedish meteorologist Professor Bert Bolin (1925-2007), who believed that increasing atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide from industrialization would inevitably lead to global warming. Bolin presented his views in 1979 at a first-ever meeting of the “World Climate Conference,” sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The WMO is a 191-member-country agency of the United Nations (U.N.), headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

Bolin had developed his theory in the 1950s during thirty-five years of declining temperatures. Through the 1970s, many scientists, activists, and policymakers had voiced alarm at global cooling. A common view was that the cooling effect of more dust in the atmosphere, from volcanoes and industrial smokestacks, more than offset the warming effects of carbon dioxide and might require dire policies, such as those proposed by Dr. Arnold Reitze, to include banning the internal combustion engine, regulating industrial research and development, and limiting population.

John Brennan: Deep State Political Hack By Daniel John Sobieski

Considering that John Brennan once proudly admitted that he voted for Communist Party leader Gus Hall and openly supports liars and perjurers like Andrew McCabe, James Clapper, and James Comey, he redefines chutzpah when in a tweet he describes President Trump in words that sound as though they were plagiarized from FBI lead investigator Peter Strzok:

When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America… America will triumph over you.

The only “disgraced demagogues” in this scenario are John Brennan; James Clapper; Andrew McCabe; James Comey; Peter Strzok; and, yes, Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller, all parties in a political resistance whose purpose was to keep Hillary Clinton out of prison and Donald Trump out of the White House. And John Brennan dares to talk about political corruption?

So much for an apolitical intelligence community that is supposed to gather intelligence on and about America’s enemies to guarantee the safety and security of the United States, its people, and the leaders they have democratically elected. Brennan’s venomous tweet, like Strzok’s infamous text messages to his lover and co-conspirator in the FBI, Lisa Page, show the depth of the political corruption infesting an intelligence community that conspired to interfere in our elections to deny Donald Trump the presidency. Brennan and his colleagues are supposed to serve the president, not conspire against him.

Women-Only College Objects to Professors Using the Word ‘Women’ By Tom Knighton

There’s something horribly wrong with the world when language is policed to such a degree that calling a woman a woman is controversial. However, that’s the world we live in.

The most recent example comes from Mount Holyoke College.

For those unfamiliar with Mount Holyoke, it’s a small college in Massachusetts with an enrollment of just over 2,200. All students are women.

That’s right. Mount Holyoke does not allow men. So you might think they would not have the absurd SJW issues with gender that you see at co-ed universities, because Mount Holyoke clearly believes that gender is a fact.

Nope. A school-produced guide titled Supporting Trans and Non-Binary Students instructs professors: “When discussing the student body, say ‘Mount Holyoke students’ rather than ‘Mount Holyoke women.'”

It adds: “Avoid making statements like ‘We’re all women here … ‘, or referring to ‘… the two genders.'”

Hold on: why might someone who does not identify as a woman be at an all-women’s school?

The guide continues: “[M]any students spend the first day of class braced against various types of disrespect … professors who mispronounce their names, call them by the wrong name entirely, misgender them, and so on.”

CONTINUE AT SITE

Transparency on federal employee bonuses isn’t a privilege, it’s a right by Rep. Mark Sanford and Adam Andrzejewski

President Trump wants to make the federal bureaucracy a meritocracy. He has proposed slapping a cap on federal employee salaries and shifting more dollars to merit-based performance bonuses.

Many will consider this a great proposal, but there’s a catch. While taxpayers can see most federal salaries, they can’t see performance bonuses.

In fiscal year 2016, the federal government awarded 1 million performance bonuses, racking up a $1.1 billion tab paid for by taxpayers. Every cent, however, was hidden from public disclosure. Anti-transparency language inserted into government union contracts is blocking the right of taxpayers to see how their money is being spent.

Last month, a Treasury Department watchdog uncovered$1.7 million in bonuses to IRS employees who had been disciplined by the agency during fiscal year 2016-2017. These 2,000 IRS employees received “high-performing” bonuses despite their record of “serious misconduct such as unauthorized access to tax return information, substance abuse, and sexual misconduct.”

Transparency is especially crucial for federal agencies that have failed in the past. The Department of Veterans Affairs has an ugly history with performance bonuses. For example, in 2014, the VA doled out up to $100 million in undeserved performance bonuses while sick veterans died waiting to see a doctor.