HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Former CIA Officer Sentenced to 19 Years in Prison Over Chinese Espionage Contacts By Tobias Hoonhout

Posted By on November 23rd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/former-cia-officer-sentenced-to-19-years-in-prison-over-chinese-espionage-contacts/

A Central Intelligence Officer who was paid nearly $1 million from Chinese sources, and admitted to taking directions from Chinese agents to reveal classified U.S. intelligence, was sentenced to 19 years in prison Friday, the third former U.S. intelligence officer to be convicted this year over contacts with China.

Jerry Chun Shing Lee, who served for over a decade in the CIA, “had firsthand knowledge of some of the CIA’s most significant secrets, from the location of operations to counterintelligence techniques to the identities of clandestine human sources and the identities of covert CIA officers,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo.

Lee was arrested in January 2018 after the FBI found notebooks and a thumb drive containing classified intel on CIA operatives and locations. He pleaded guilty in May to conspiring to provide national defense information with a foreign government.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israeli Settlements Are a Political, Not a Legal Issue By Douglas J. Feith

Posted By on November 23rd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/israeli-settlements-are-a-political-not-a-legal-issue/

It was not radical for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to revive the Reagan policy.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has just upended longstanding, widely held opinion about the legality of Israel’s West Bank settlements. Critics say he is off on the law, has radically broken with U.S. policy, and is undermining the pursuit of peace. Those critics are wrong on all scores.

Pompeo made four main points. First, the settlements are not “inherently illegal.” Second, the West Bank’s fate should be determined through negotiations. Third, international law “does not compel a particular outcome” in favor of Israel or the Palestinians. And fourth, the issue is political in nature, not legal, and attacking the settlements’ legality “hasn’t advanced the cause of peace.”

For 35 years U.S. administrations refrained from repeating President Carter’s criticism of Israeli settlements as illegal, Pompeo recounted, but then President Obama broke with this policy by taking the Carter position at the United Nations. President Reagan had rejected Carter’s view. “This administration,” Pompeo said, “agrees with President Reagan.”

I advised President Reagan on the subject. Here’s some background.

President Carter had a famously strained relationship with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. Carter pressured him to make concessions to the Palestinians. This included condemnation of Israeli settlements as illegal, supported by a five-page letter dated April 21, 1978, and signed by State Department legal adviser Herbert Hansell.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Ford v Ferrari Makes Race-Car Movies Great Again By Armond White

Posted By on November 23rd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/movie-review-ford-v-ferrari-makes-race-car-movies-great-again/

An unusual Hollywood exception to the derision of American exceptionalism

There’s a MAGA moment in Ford v Ferrari when the British-immigrant auto mechanic and race-car driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) stops being a loner and decides to be a team player. He slows down on the track to let the other American drivers on his team join him so they can cruise across the finish line together. This “bringing them in” scene turns out to be Miles’s undoing, relegating him to forgotten history, but it’s one of the few scenes in Ford v Ferrari that audiences unapologetically enjoy; they respond to it as part of their natural, national, car-culture heritage.

Conservatives should pay attention to any element in a Hollywood film that supports their political and moral beliefs. Ford v Ferrari provides that sustenance. Director James Mangold dramatizes the 1964 competition in the 24-hour race at Le Mans, distilled to a three-man alliance of Miles; his mentor, the veteran driver Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), who had previously raced Le Mans in 1957; and entrepreneur Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts). They bring the Ford Racing Team up to the level of its faster, sleekly engineered European contenders.

The America First implications of Ford v Ferrari can’t be ignored. After the big-screen spectacle and vibrant sound design of revved-up motors and cheering crowds, Mangold swerves into quasi-political points about character. His best scenes show the way ambitious men commit themselves. It’s not about “toxic masculinity,” as producer Jane Rosenthal described Scorsese’s The Irishman (to make it seem progressive). Instead, he revels in high-speed, high-pressure contexts where egotism, expertise, and privilege vie for domination.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

New Assault on Orthodox Jew in Brooklyn Reported

Posted By on November 23rd, 2019

http://www.algemeiner.com/2019/11/22/new-assault-on-orthodox-jew-in-brooklyn-repo

Yet another Orthodox Jew was assaulted in Brooklyn on Thursday night, the latest in a series of violent incidents that have set Jewish communities in several of the borough’s neighborhoods on edge.

Thursday’s assault was caught on camera shortly before midnight on Sanford Street near Willoughby Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Police said the unprovoked attack was carried out by a 32-year-old man, who punched his 21-year-old victim without exchanging a word with him.

The suspect was arrested on assault charges shortly after.

More than half of the hate crimes reported in New York City this year have been antisemitic in nature, with over 150 incidents targeting Jews — a rise of 63 percent from the previous year, according to figures released by the New York Police Department in September.

Speaking to The Algemeiner in an extensive interview earlier this month, Rabbi Yaacov Behrman — the founder of the Brooklyn-based Jewish Future Alliance — said that the spate of attacks over the last two years against Orthodox Jews in the Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park neighborhoods were overwhelmingly perceived within the community as driven by antisemitic hatred.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Doubt lingers about ADL’s ability to fight anti-Semitism in Brooklyn, despite the new push By Shiryn Ghermezian

Posted By on November 23rd, 2019

https://www.jns.org/doubt-lingers-about-adls-ability-to-fight-anti-semitism-in-brooklyn-despite-the-new-push/

“The ADL has failed to call out any form of anti-Semitism that isn’t borne of white supremacy, and their curriculum is more about tolerance and racism in general than it is about the unique history of anti-Semitism,” said Bryan Leib, a board member of Americans Against Anti-Semitism.
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt announcing an expansion for the “No Place for Hate Peer to Peer Program” in Brooklyn to combat rising anti-Semitism. Source: Anti-Defamation League via Twitter.

Standing alongside Brooklyn Borough president Eric L. Adams, local faith leaders, elected officials and community partners, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt announced last week that the New York-based group will be doubling the number of Brooklyn schools involved in its “No Place for Hate Peer to Peer Program” for the 2019-20 school year. The ADL committed $250,000 to expanding the initiative, which has helped promote tolerance in more than 1,700 public and private schools nationwide since 1999.

The program has already been rolled out in 22 schools in Brooklyn, N.Y., and reached more than 8,200 students, according to ABC7. The number of schools administering the program will expand to up to 40 this academic year, with a focus on the neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Williamsburg and Borough Park, where most of the recent anti-Semitic incidents against Orthodox Jews have taken place.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

ADL: Extreme Antisemitism Among Western European Muslims “Almost Three Times” National Rates Andrew Bostom

Posted By on November 23rd, 2019

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2019/11/adl-2019-data-extreme-antisemitism-among-western-european-muslims-almost-three-times-national-rates/
Yesterday, November 21, 2019, the ADL released its 2019 survey data on the prevalence (occurrence) of extreme Antisemitism (defined, below) within 18 countries assessed between April 15 and June 3, 2019. Six of these countries—Belgium, The United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, France, and Italy—included a Muslim over-sample, allowing for a direct comparison of Muslims vs. Christians, those professing no religion, and the overall populations. 

As ADL’s own press release stated:

“Muslim acceptance of anti-Semitic stereotypes was substantially higher than among the national populations—on average almost three times as high—in the six countries tested: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy”

In sadly typical fashion, however, the ADL downplayed these findings in its press release, effectively concealing them as the last of six bullet points, i.e., # 6 of 6.

The ADL also failed to expressly note how compared to Western European Christians, specifically, Muslims were also ~3-times more likely to harbor extreme Antisemitic attitudes as gauged by abiding at least 6 of 11 Antisemitic stereotypes queried. (see tabulated data)

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Right from wrong: Israel’s battle on the ‘home front’ Ruthie Blum

Posted By on November 23rd, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Israel-Elections/Right-from-wrong-Israels-battle-on-the-home-front-608659

Anyone following the political chaos of the past six months could have predicted it would take a miracle to prevent a third round of Knesset elections.

Blue and White Party chairman Benny Gantz’s announcement on Wednesday evening that he was returning his coalition-building mandate to President Reuven Rivlin came as little surprise. Anyone following the political chaos of the past six months, particularly that which ensued when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was unable to cobble together a government, could have predicted that it would take a miracle to prevent a third round of Knesset elections.

This is chiefly due to Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman, whose ill-deserved role as “king-maker” seems to have caused him such megalomaniacal pleasure that he’s decided to try to hold on to the title indefinitely.This, too, might have been anticipated.

Indeed, as nausea-inducing as all the above has been, none of it has elicited gasps of shock. The Israeli public has come to expect the worst of its politicians, after all. It also has grown increasingly disillusioned with an electoral system that enables small parties such as Liberman’s to dictate terms to their larger counterparts, and abuse their disproportionate power to topple governments at will.

Nothing new about that.

SOMETHING JAW-DROPPING certainly has been taking place, however, which explains precisely why Netanyahu has been the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history. In the past two weeks alone – with the threat of indictments by Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit hanging over his head and a justified fear of Gantz forging a narrow coalition with outside bolstering from the anti-Zionist Arab parties – Netanyahu has been fighting a war on two fronts against Iran. And with a newly appointed defense minister, Naftali Bennett, to boot.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Weak consumption, economy could sink Trump re-election bid David Goldman

Posted By on November 23rd, 2019

https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/11/article/weak-consumer-economic-slump-could-sink-trump-re-election-bid/

US President Donald Trump’s case for re-election in 2020 comes down to his economic record. New forecasts from two Federal Reserve banks, though, warn of near-recession conditions just as the presidential election campaign is getting underway.

Both the New York Federal Reserve “Nowcast” model and the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s “GDPNow” model predict that US economic growth will slow to barely above zero during 2019’s fourth quarter. Both models translate the latest data releases from government agencies into overall GDP growth. The NY Fed’s forecast stands at 0.4% annualized GDP growth and the Atlanta Fed model shows just 0.3%. This degree of convergence is rare, and the dip from an estimated 1.9% growth rate during the third quarter to 0.3%-0.4% is alarming.

Eighteen months ago the Trump Administration advertised the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s forecast as proof of its success. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told CNBC in June 2018, “The Atlanta Fed is projecting 4.7% [GDP growth]. I have no idea whether it will be that high. But a year ago, people were laughing when we talked about 3% GDP. We have an economy that’s here because of the president’s tax plan and the president’s regulatory relief.”

The administration isn’t bragging about the Atlanta Fed’s present forecast of just 0.3% annualized GDP growth.

Since then GDP growth has fallen below 2%, as businesses cancel capital investment plans in response to uncertainty about global supply chains, following the Trump Administration tariff war on China and threatened bans on technology exports to Chinese companies. Consumer spending kept the economy growing despite shrinking CapEx and a manufacturing recession that is now in its third quarter. At just 12% of GDP, the manufacturing recession isn’t enough to tip the overall economy into recession.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Five Lines of Questioning Would End Impeachment Robert B. Charles

Posted By on November 22nd, 2019

https://amac.us/five-lines-of-questioning-would-end-impeachment/?campaign=daily-news-email

With the right witnesses, five lines of questioning will end this impeachment.  Here they are.

First, federal statutes and the US Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) prohibit federal officials from selling influence to profit relatives. Example:  5 CFR 2635.702 states an official “shall not use his public office for his own private gain… or for the private gain of … relatives.”    

Accordingly, Joe Biden and his son, have answering to do.  Did actions of either – in Ukraine or China – amount to selling influence?  Did the younger leverage his father’s position for money? Did the Vice President know?

When Vice President Biden flew his son to Ukraine and China, after which his son secured large contracts, did the older Biden see the conflict?  Did the elder Biden facilitate those contracts?  When Vice President Biden insisted a prosecutor be fired who was investigating a company on whose board his son sat, under penalty of lost aid, was that illegal?

The answer to each question is: probably yes.  

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

WAYNE ALLYN ROOT: The Real Ukraine Scandal Leads to the Clinton Foundation

Posted By on November 22nd, 2019

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/

‘The real story is about the  Clintons , the Clinton Foundation, Obama, Pelosi, Kerry and many other powerful Democrats. Their fingerprints are all over Ukraine. Forget about the high-paying jobs for their family members. This goes much deeper. touched the third rail of Democrat/Deep State/DC Swamp politics. He asked Ukraine’s President to investigate massive Democrat corruption and theft of taxpayer money.

In my opinion, Hillary was running her version of the Gambino Crime Family slush fund. Jimmy Hoffa and the teamsters had nothing on the  Clinton’s . And everyone in the Democrat Party and Deep State got a piece, to insure no one would rat.

 

Ukraine is the key to this massive Democrat scandal. But Biden was just the tip of the iceberg. This is all about the Obama and Clinton Crime Families.

 

Suddenly alarm bells went off at the DNC. I believe Trump is about to expose the biggest scandal in US political history. Trump is about to put powerful people in prison. Trump is about to destroy the Democrat Party and expose the Deep State. Trump is not getting thrown out of office. Not with his remarkable record of economic success for the average American worker. Not going to happen.

 

63 million Trump voters will insure that never happens. We have your back, Mr. President.’