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Ruth King

The Democrats’ Likely Nominee Appears to Be a Felon — This Is Not Business as Usual By Andrew C. McCarthy

Competing Democrats debate each other one night. Republican rivals take their shots at each other a couple of nights later. An air of frenetic normalcy sets over primary season: The country is $20 trillion in the red and under heightened terrorist threat, yet pols bicker over the legacy of Henry Kissinger and the chameleon nature of Donald Trump – another liability the mogul is marketing as an asset. It is business as usual.

Except nothing about the 2016 campaign is business as usual.

For all the surreal projection of normalcy, the race is enveloped by an extremely serious criminal investigation. If press reporting is to be believed — in particular, the yeoman’s work of Fox News’s Catherine Herridge and Pamela K. Browne — Hillary Clinton, the likely nominee of one of the two major parties, appears to have committed serious felony violations of federal law.

That she has the audacity to run despite the circumstances is no surprise — Clinton scandals, the background music of our politics for a quarter-century, are interrupted only by new Clinton scandals. What is shocking is that the Democrats are allowing her to run.

For some Democrats, alas, any criminality by the home team is immaterial. A couple of weeks back, The Donald bragged, as is his wont, that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Trump was kidding (at least, I think he was). Unfortunately, the statement might have been true had it sprung from Mrs. Clinton’s lips.

In a Democratic party dominated by the hard Left, the power Left, what matters is keeping Republicans out of the White House, period. Democrats whored themselves for Bill through the Nineties, seemingly unembarrassed over the lie it put to their soaring tropes about women’s rights, good government, getting money out of politics, etc. They will close ranks around Hillary, too. After all, if she was abusing power while advancing the cause of amassing power – er, I mean, the cause of social justice — what’s the harm?

More-centrist Democrats realize there could be great harm, but they seem paralyzed. The American people, they know, are not the hard Left: If Mrs. Clinton is permitted to keep plodding on toward the nomination only to be indicted after she has gotten it, the party’s chances of holding on to the White House probably disappear. By then, there may not be time to organize a national campaign with a suitable candidate (as opposed to a goofy 74-year-old avowed socialist).

EU Border Office Chief on Refugee Crisis ‘We Should Have No Illusions’

Interview Conducted By Peter Müller

As head of the EU border agency Frontex, Fabrice Leggeri has one of the hardest jobs in Europe. Tasked with protecting the external borders of the Schengen area, he is keenly aware of just how fragile the zone has become as a result of the refugee crisis.

Fabrice Leggeri knows his borders. He headed a unit within the French Interior Ministry that dealt with cross-border traffic, and he helped draft the communique to the European Commission that recommended creating Frontex, the European Union’s external border agency. Since Leggeri took up his position as the head of Frontex in January 2015, Europe’s migrant crisis has taken on a whole new dimension. Millions of refugees fleeing war and poverty have flocked to the Continent, and their arrival has tested the very limits of one of the EU’s greatest achievements: its open borders. Leggeri knows the stakes are high: If his agency can’t manage to secure Europe’s outer borders, Schengen could collapse.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Leggeri, Turkey is seen as playing a crucial role in handling the refugee crisis. Is the government there doing enough to limit the influx of migrants to Europe?

Leggeri: No. Taking care of 2 million Syrian refugees is, of course, a burden for Turkey. I appreciate that. But if Ankara is going to demand sweeping concessions, such as a relaxation of visa requirements for its citizens, we Europeans should be able to expect more in return in the form of more stringent border controls.

SPIEGEL: As the head of the EU border agency Frontex, what do you have in mind?

Leggeri: Turkey should make life more difficult for the human-traffickers. These are organized criminals we’re talking about. The Turkish police have the responsibility and the opportunity to put them out of business. At the very least, we expect Turkey to provide us with information: How many refugees can we expect? And where are they going to arrive?

SPIEGEL: Once migrants are at sea, the Greek coast guard has no other choice but to bring them back to Greece.

Turkish-German Pact: EU Split by Merkel’s Refugee Plan

By Horand Knaup, Peter Müller, René Pfister and Christoph Schult

Angela Merkel has held six meetings with the Turkish government in the hopes of forging a solution to the refugee crisis. But with most of the leverage in Ankara, progress has been slow. Worse yet, Berlin’s plan has split the EU into two rival camps.

On a recent windy Saturday morning, António Rocha heads out to sea off the north end of the Greek island of Lesbos in accordance with his mission: securing the maritime border between Greece and Turkey. Rocha, a 52-year-old officer with the Portuguese coast guard, steers his ship, the Tejo, into the meter-high waves with the two 350-horsepower engines whining in protest. Rocha stands at the helm, legs spread wide for balance, and scans the sea for inflatable rafts full of refugees. “Only a lunatic would head out today,” Rocha says. Lunatics or, to be more precise, the desperate. And there are plenty of those these days.

Rocha and his three crewmembers have only been active in the area for a few weeks, patrolling on behalf of the European border protection agency Frontex, but the things they have seen in that short amount of time have already proven emotionally challenging. On one occasion, Rocha stopped a drastically overloaded inflatable raft with desperate mothers holding their babies over the gunwale so that they might be saved first.

One thing, though, that Rocha and his shipmates haven’t yet seen is a boat being turned back by the Turkish coast guard. “Sometimes they motor around the refugee rafts and tell them they should turn around,” says the Greek liaison officer onboard the Tejo. “But when nothing happens, the Turkish boats just leave.”

That isn’t good news for the German chancellor, who is heading to Brussels next Thursday to meet with her European partners and with Turkey to discuss possible solutions to the refugee crisis. Ankara is the most important building block in Angela Merkel’s strategy, which is why Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Dovutoglu has been invited to the summit of European leaders.

In the current situation, however, Merkel’s cards are not particularly promising. Since the beginning of the refugee crisis, Brussels has been operating under a new set of rules: Germany, with its power and money, is not able to determine policy on its own. Instead, Merkel is reliant on the understanding and goodwill of the rest of Europe.

Toss Another Western Society on the Barbie? by Mark Steyn

Australia’s population has just hit a new high of 24 million. But, as in Britain, Canada, France and elsewhere, the question is what’s driving that population growth. Clarissa Bye reports in the Aussie Daily Telegraph that there are strange discrepancies between the robust fertility rates in certain parts of Sydney (Lakemba, at right) and the dearth of births in others (Surry Hills, Potts Point). As she notes, Lebanese- and Syrian-born residents have an average of four and 3.5 children respectively, whereas Australian-born women have 1.86.

Along the way in Ms Bye’s story, a certain demographic doom-monger puts in an appearance:

IT’S the biggest story of our times, but political correctness has stifled debate so badly that politicians are too afraid to even talk about it.

According to visiting ­Canadian author and free-speech advocate Mark Steyn, low birth rates have put Western societies into a “demographic death spiral”…

“Normally for a population transformation you need a Black Death, the Plague or a world war,” he said. “But in this case we are having it without any of that. That’s why it’s the most fascinating question of our times.”

People underestimate how fast this change takes place. A small minority having four kids doesn’t sound that big a deal. But, to keep the math simple, take a population of 100,000, 90 per cent of whom have 1.86 kids per woman and 10 per cent of whom have four:

The 90,000 have 83,700 children;
The 10,000 have 20,000 children.

In turn:

The 83,700 have 77,841 children;
The 20,000 have 40,000 children.

And thereafter the minority is the majority. And all that growth is without a single new immigrant.

Free Speech vs. Islamic Law? by Denis MacEoin

The law regarding freedom of speech and of religion, as it exists in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, is already compelled to protect all citizens and to extend that protection to non-citizens who come to American shores.

Are Muslims in need of greater protection? According to the FBI’s 2014 Hate Crime Statistics, there were 1,140 victims of anti-religious hate crimes in the U.S. that year: Of those, 56.8% were victims of crimes motivated by the offenders’ anti-Jewish bias. 16.1% were victims of crimes motivated by the offenders’ anti-Muslim bias.

“We cannot agree that prohibiting speech is the way to promote tolerance, and because we continue to see the ‘defamation of religions’ concept used to justify censorship, criminalization, and in some cases violent assaults and deaths of political, racial, and religious minorities around the world.” — U.S. Ambassador Eileen Donahoe.

Again and again, Muslim individuals and organizations have released documents to define Islamic human rights, and in each instance, all rights are restricted to those given by God and are subject to the phrase “according to the Shari’a.”

The U.S. Congress, on December 17, 2015, passed House Resolution 569 and referred it to the House Committee on the Judiciary. The resolution is headed: “Condemning violence, bigotry, and hateful rhetoric towards Muslims in the United States.” The problem is that the law regarding freedom of speech and of religion, as it exists in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, is already compelled to protect all citizens and to extend that protection to non-citizens, be they businessmen or tourists who come to American shores: “Amendment I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” No democracy should believe otherwise.

Welcome to HELL: Resident describes how refugees have turned Calais into a living nightmare. “This is the death of civilization”

http://www.therebel.media/it_s_worse_than_you_ever_feared_resident_describes_how_refugees_have_turned_calais_into_a_living_hell_this_is_the_death_of_civilization

It’s a living nightmare they can’t wake up from.

A resident of Calais, France described how the city has been transformed by refugees and the infamous ‘jungle’ is really a city within a city.

“Every day, every night there are riots,” she says. “They come to the town centre, by 2-3-4 thousand. Everywhere. They bash cars with iron bars. They attack people. They even attack children. There are rapes. There is theft. It’s unimaginable what we suffer.”

“They enter private houses when people are at home. They just enter. They want to eat. They help themselves. Sometimes they also bash the people, stealing what they can afterwards. What they cannot take they destroy. And when we want to defend ourselves we have the police on our back.”

Imagine for a moment this was happening to your family. Can you imagine the hell these people must be going through?

Just wait until you hear the rest of her story. You will be shocked. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UKAQX74yRyc

Democrat primaries: Soviet style By David L. Hunter

Your name is Hillary Clinton. You run for president. Six different dead-locked precincts tossing tie-breaking coins all fall your way. Per Las Vegas odds makers, six consecutive appearances of heads-or-tails is a statistical probability of 1.5%. That’s 64-to-1 against, an exceedingly lucky outcome.

For Democrats, there is no hand-wringing, no equivalent “hanging chads” controversy. Unlike Bush/Gore in 2000 in Florida, there are no recounts demanded, no cadre of lawyers dispatched to Iowa, no lawsuits filed. Mrs. Clinton claimed victory before all the results were tallied, ultimately managing a microscopic victory of four delegates. That’s people, not percentage points. (Does she know something the rest of us don’t?)

In New Hampshire, Bernie Sanders – an avowed Socialist who took his blushing bride to Russia for their honeymoon – gave Madame a real shellacking by 22 percent. A Donald Trump-like primary performance. That translates into 15 delegates for him to her 9. However, despite the Iowa virtual tie and the clear New Hampshire win, it turns out today that Bernie’s been burnt. That’s because in the all-important delegate count – the convention electors who ultimately select the Democrats’ presidential nominee – she leads him going into Clinton-friendly South Carolina 394 to 44.

Nonexistent in the Republican Party for the very good reason that they can easily thwart the voters’ intentions, the discrepancy lies in little-understood Democrat super-delegates. These are the “important” people, party insiders like Bill Clinton (no nepotism there). Instituted in 1982 – no doubt due in large part to Ronald Reagan’s landslide 1980 victory over unpopular incumbent Jimmy Carter – super-delegates are designed to prevent brokered conventions and their result: weak or insurgent candidates. They make up 712, a whopping 30% of the 2,382 delegates needed to secure the Democratic nomination.

Obama’s foreign policy incompetence encouraging Putin to go to war with Turkey By Rick Moran

I remember a lot of people speculating about what would have happened in the world if Jimmy Carter had been elected to a second term. Many believed that the Soviets would have taken advantage of Carter’s weakness and confusion to confront NATO, believing that the U.S. would be paralyzed into inaction.

Something similar could happen today, according to some analysts. Vladimir Putin’s saber-rattling at Turkey could become more than bluster if the Russian strongman doesn’t think that the U.S. and NATO would go to war if Moscow attacked Turkey.

The Russians are beginning military exercises in the region immediately adjacent to their border with Turkey. The exercises are a threat because Russian troops will be on the highest level of alert short of war. And Russian rhetoric aimed at Turkey has become more bellicose as events in the Syrian city of Aleppo may force Turkey to try and intervene in the conflict. With Russian jets pounding rebel positions in and around Aleppo and Syrian and Iranian proxy troops surrounding the city, Turkey may feel it has no choice but to lift the siege of Syria’s largest city.

One of Russia’s most knowledgable and respected defense analysts – a critic of Putin and Russian military policy – offered some insight into what’s going on in Moscow:

Today Pavel Felgenhauer published his analysis under the alarming title, “Russia has begun preparations for a major war,” and he marshals a convincing case that the snap exercises in the country’s southwest are really a cover for a shooting war with Turkey—and therefore with NATO too, if Ankara is perceived as defending itself and can assert its right to Article 5, collective self-defense, which obligates all members of the Atlantic Alliance to come to Turkey’s aid.

Obama’s Foreign Policy Rebuked – by His Own Intel Chiefs By William Tate

Barack Obama’s foreign policy – and by extension Hillary Clinton’s – received a stinging rebuke this week…from Obama’s own intelligence chiefs. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Lieutenant General Vincent Stewart, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, gave Congress an assessment of threats around the globe that amounted to a direct indictment of Obama’s failed foreign policies.

Clapper called the dangers currently facing the United States “a litany of doom.” He told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “In my fifty-plus years in the intelligence business, I cannot recall a more diverse array of challenges and crises that we confront as we do today.”

Where have Obama’s policies failed? You might as well put on a blindfold and throw a dart at a map of the world.

On the nuclear accord with Iran, which Obama seems to think is his crowning foreign policy accomplishment, Clapper said that Iran could begin construction of a nuclear weapons program at any time. “Iran probably views the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) as a means to remove sanctions while preserving some of its nuclear capabilities, as well as the option to eventually expand its nuclear infrastructure.”

Even Democrats’ Rigged Superdelegate System May Not Be Enough for Hillary to Prevail By Stephen Kruiser

Via FiveThirtyEight:

If you look at a Democratic delegate tracker like this one from The New York Times, you’ll find that Hillary Clinton has a massive 394-44 delegate lead over Bernie Sanders so far, despite having been walloped by Sanders in New Hampshire and only essentially having tied him in Iowa. While Sanders does have a modest 36-32 lead among elected delegates — those that are bound to the candidates based on the results of voting in primaries and caucuses — Clinton leads 362-8 among superdelegates, who are Democratic elected officials and other party insiders allowed to support whichever candidate they like.

If you’re a Sanders supporter, you might think this seems profoundly unfair. And you’d be right: It’s profoundly unfair. Superdelegates were created in part to give Democratic party elites the opportunity to put their finger on the scale and prevent nominations like those of George McGovern in 1972 or Jimmy Carter in 1976, which displeased party insiders.

Here’s the consolation, however. Unlike elected delegates, superdelegates are unbound to any candidate even on the first ballot. They can switch whenever they like, and some of them probably will switch to Sanders if he extends his winning streak into more diverse states and eventually appears to have more of a mandate than Clinton among Democratic voters.

Clinton knows this all too well; it’s exactly what happened to her in 2008 during her loss to Barack Obama.