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The McCarthy Report: White Supremacism and Pittsburgh Synagogue Massacre By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-mccarthy-report-white-supremacism-and-pittsburgh-synagogue-massacre/

In last week’s edition of our NR podcast, The McCarthy Report, Rich and I spent the first half of our discussion digging in to the knotty issues of birthright citizenship and the 14th Amendment, including whether — assuming for argument’s sake that birthright citizenship is not mandated by the Amendment — the president has the power to change current policy (or is it law?) by executive order. I won’t belabor the discussion further, having had plenty to say about it in the weekend column and in an earlier column last week. Basta!

The second half of the podcast homes in on some issues that deserve more attention in the wake of the horrific massacre two Saturdays ago at the synagogue in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh. Rich pressed me on why I don’t think we need new domestic-terrorism laws to deal with white-supremacist groups — an issue I’ve dealt with a few times over the years, most recently in connection with Antifa (see here). We also talk about why I don’t think the synagogue murders should be a federal prosecution (which I explained in this column — the Justice Department has filed its complaint, and has indicated an indictment alleging death-penalty charges is imminent). I relate my personal horror story about a very tough state attempted-murder that I tried to prosecute as a federal racketeering case.

We also talk a bit about the arrest of the pipe bomber; touch on the intriguing Politico reporting that suggests Special Counsel Mueller is in a secret grand-jury litigation to try to force a witness to testify (is it the president?); and take a look back at the truly abominable Whitey Bulger, the Boston mobster who was killed in federal prison last week.

You can give us a listen here on the website. Even better, make us part of your feed at iTunes, Google Play, or Stitcher.

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Democrats Have Not Earned Your Vote By David French

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/democrats-havent-earned-your-vote-midterms-2018/

If you like your Republican, you should keep your Republican.

Tens of millions of Americans have mailed in their ballots already. Tomorrow, tens of millions more will go to the polls. I’m not confident how they’ll vote, but I am absolutely certain of one thing: Not one of them will see the name “Donald Trump” on the ballot.

Instead, they will see different individuals with characters very different from Trump’s. They will see Republicans and Democrats with their own policy positions and their own rhetorical styles.

Yet now voices from the left, the center, and what can only be called the “former right” are calling on Republicans and conservatives to abandon any kind of individualized determination for the sake of opposing a man who isn’t on the ballot. They’re making that demand even as leading Democrats prove time and again that they will not moderate for the benefit of Republicans who change parties, will not compromise, and — crucially — will not even behave better than Trump himself.

In other words, they are asking for your political capitulation without earning your support.

Democrats claim that now is a critical time for public hygiene. It’s time to hold corrupt, self-aggrandizing politicians accountable. I agree.

Ask your Democratic candidate if he or she is willing to publicly condemn New Jersey senator Robert Menendez — tried for public corruption and admonished by the Senate Ethics Committee for doing favors for a wealthy contributor in exchange for lavish gifts — the way that so many conservatives condemned (and ultimately rejected) Roy Moore.

Democrats claim that now is the time to reject the politics of personal destruction. They look at a president who calls people names, who spins out wild conspiracy theories (Ted Cruz’s father participated in the Kennedy assassination? Really?), and they demand better. I agree.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Homegrown Jihad: 10 Years of Terrorist Radicalization in the Somali-American Community By Patrick Poole

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/homegrown-jihad-10-years-of-terrorist-radicalization-in-the-somali-american-community/

Ten years ago today — the same day that Barack Obama was elected president — a group of young Somali-American men left Minneapolis intending to join the al-Shabaab terrorist group in Somalia. Nearly two dozen men were part of that first wave of terror recruits, but they wouldn’t be the last. And Somalia wouldn’t be their only destination.

This proved to be one of the first major signs of an escalating problem of terrorist radicalization in the Somali-American community that has continued for the past decade. Among the fallout from that radicalization has been several attempted terror attacks here in the U.S., and the death of these youths in fields of jihad abroad.

I was one of the first to speak out about the problem nearly a year before.

In December 2007, I wrote about my attempts to get Homeland Security to prevent the entry of a known deputy of a U.S. designated terrorist leader from keynoting a series of fundraisers in Minneapolis, Columbus, and Washington, D.C. — three of the largest Somali communities in the country.

That speaker, Zakariya Mahmoud Haji Abdi, was here to raise funds and to recruit for the jihad in Somalia. I noted in my report that a summary, published in Somalia, recorded the fundraiser held in Minneapolis. That event summary is still online.

It was later acknowledged that the fundraisers I warned federal officials about were the tipping point for radicalization in the Somali community.

The first group composed of six men from Minneapolis left only several days after the Zakariya Abdi fundraiser.

Among that group was Shirwa Ahmed, who conducted a suicide terror attack on October 28, 2008, just a few days before the next group left. Ahmed had arrived in the U.S. at an early age, had done well in school, went to college, and had a good job. But he fell into a group at the Abubakar as-Siddique mosque in Minneapolis, where most of the men who later left for Somalia attended.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

David Steinberg New Photos Corroborate Perjury Claims Against Rep. Ilhan Omar, as She Deletes Social Media Evidence

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/davidsteinberg/new-photos-corroborate-perjury-claims-against-rep-ilhan-omar-as-she-deletes-social-media-evidence/

“Bone-chilling anti-Semitism? Serial felon? Meet the rising Democratic star. ”

On Tuesday, one-term state Representative Ilhan Omar (D-60B) appears likely to replace the outgoing Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) by winning Minnesota’s pre-eminent House seat: CD-5.

In October, however, the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board opened a formal investigation of her after reviewing evidence of several violations. Omar has also made, and defended, anti-Semitic comments as direct and vicious as any spoken by a U.S. politician in a generation.

Yet those legal and character matters may only be secondary red flags.

In 2016, an anonymous writer on SomaliSpot.com published verified photos and Minnesota state records suggesting that Rep. Omar is a serial felon and fraudster.

Since then, the additional evidence discovered to back these claims — and the absence of contradictory evidence — are almost as remarkable as Minnesota media’s refusal to lift a finger investigating her for two years.

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Don’t join this year’s Women’s March unless you’re good with anti-Semitism mitism By Karol Markowicz

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://nypost.com/2018/11/04/dont-join-this-years-womens-march-unless-youre-good-with-anti-semitism/

With the Pittsburgh shooting so fresh and anti-Semitism (alas) so necessary a topic, it’s time for a reckoning with the Women’s March. This January, women who say they stand with Jews need to boycott the Women’s March.

The first year of the march, it made sense that many otherwise normal people would attend. It was just two months after Donald Trump’s shocking victory. Many were dazed and upset. The march was quickly organized by people whose names were not yet known to everyone.

Linda Sarsour is one of the leaders. Articles soon sprang up about terrible comments she made: She supported the radical Muslim Brotherhood. She praised Sharia law, which, among other things, includes second-class status for women. She was open about her fandom of Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam.

In 2012, she tweeted: “When we write the history of Islam in America, the Nation of #Islam is an integral part of that history.”

Perhaps she didn’t know Farrakhan said “Hitler was a very great man” in a 1984 speech or that in 1985 he warned Jews: “And don’t you forget, when it’s God who puts you in the ovens, it’s forever!”

Maybe she was ignorant of his 1996 remark about “fake Jews,” that is, Jews who disapprove of his anti-Semitic comments: “You are the synagogue of Satan, and you have wrapped your tentacles around the US government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell.”

People change, goes the argument, and comments Sarsour made were several years ago, before she became a high-profile political figure on the left. Perhaps she’s more responsible now.

But in September, Sarsour said American Muslims shouldn’t “humanize” Israelis. There was no overwhelming response from the left to remind her that Israelis are actually human. American Jews who ignore this hatred are fooling themselves. Anti-Semitism is specifically about dehumanizing Jews until their murder makes sense.

In July, she tweeted birthday wishes at a fugitive cop-killer. This is not a woman who has done a lot of introspection and changed her views. Why stand with her?

POLITICS Comments turned off

Will Trump Convince Hoosiers to Dump Donnelly? By Julie Kelly

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/05/will-trump-convince

President Trump travels to Indiana again today—his second visit to the Hoosier State in three days. The president is pushing hard to make sure Mike Braun, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, wins on Tuesday. If Braun snatches away this critical seat from the Democrats, he could help widen the GOP’s majority in the Senate (if Democrats don’t add any seats) and turn this already-red state even redder.

But there could be a bigger reason why Trump wants Braun in the Senate: the desire to have a fellow political novice and successful business owner on his side.

“I believe Trump showed you can come from outside the political farm system and gain the most powerful spot in the world,” Braun told me Thursday morning on his way to a campaign stop in South Bend. “More and more people will enter politics from the business world, bringing a new dynamic. We can get rid of career politicians, at least I hope that’s the case.”

Braun, 64, is taking on Democratic incumbent Senator Joe Donnelly, who is finishing his first term. The race is considered a toss-up; recent polls suggest it’s a dead heat—and an expensive one. Outside groups have spent nearly $65 million in Indiana since May, compared to $45 million on the state’s 2016 Senate race between Evan Bayh and incumbent Republican Todd Young.

A two-term state legislator, Braun is the founder and chief executive officer of Meyer Distributing, an automotive parts distributor with locations across the country. “There are some feisty entrepreneurs in Congress,” Braun said. “We need some in the Senate, too. I turned a little company into a national one, and if I win and Rick Scott wins and Mitt Romney wins, we will double the number of businessmen in the Senate.”

Trump lauded Braun’s business background during a campaign event in Indianapolis on Friday night, where the president was joined by legendary former Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight.

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Rationalizing Our Surrender The War on Free Speech by Mark Steyn

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://www.steynonline.com/8969/rationalizing-our-surrender

Following The Mark Steyn Show’s Free Speech Forum, many readers have asked me to comment on the recent decision by the European Court of Human Rights, summarized in this headline:

Calling Prophet Muhammad a Pedophile Does Not Fall Within Freedom of Speech: European Court

And yet, oddly, calling Muhammad a prophet now seems to be binding on non-Muslim headline writers. I don’t really have anything to say about this case that I haven’t said a decade and a half back and at great length in my book America Alone (personally autographed copies of which, etc, etc) – to whit, absent any reversal of the demographic trends, some of the oldest nations in Christendom would soon beginning making their accommodations with an ever more assertive Islam.

But, alas, nobody who matters listened to me, and thus “soon” has now arrived – which is why the most powerful European institutions (courts, media, police, bureaucracy) are increasingly eager to shovel core western liberties into the landfill.

With regard to this particular case, I wrote it about it at the time – seven long years ago:

Consider the case of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, a Viennese housewife who has lived in several Muslim countries. She was hauled into an Austrian court for calling Mohammed a pedophile on the grounds that he consummated his marriage when his bride, Aisha, was nine years old. Mrs. Sabbaditsch-Wolff was found guilty and fined 480 euros. The judge’s reasoning was fascinating: ‘Paedophilia is factually incorrect, since paedophilia is a sexual preference which solely or mainly is directed towards children. Nevertheless, it does not apply to Mohammad. He was still married to Aisha when she was 18.’

Ah, gotcha. So, under Austrian law, you’re not a pedophile if you deflower the kid in fourth grade but keep her around till high school. There’s a useful tip if you’re planning a hiking holiday in the Alps this fall. Or is this another of those dispensations that is not of universal application?

We now know the answer to that question. For the record, I have met Mrs Sabaditsch-Wolff just once – at the European Parliament a few years back. She is a most forceful and engaging personality. You get no sense of that from the Court’s decision, of course, where the appellant has degenerated to a mere set of initials – “E S”. One of the revolting aspects of Continental “justice” is the way the police and media preference for the non-identification of “victims” has expanded to a general denial of the specific humanity of those who come before the courts. I had cause the other day, over a recent filing re that litigious CRTV tosser Cary Katz, to recall the ancient legal principle that the public has the right to every man’s evidence. But, increasingly, not in Europe. So Mrs Sabaditsch-Wolff is now “E S”.

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MY SAY: ELECTION NOVEMBER 6, 2018

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

I keep humming a song…..rsk

“To the right, ever to the right

Never to the left, forever to the right

We have gold, a market that will hold

Tradition that is old, a reluctance to be bold.”—

“Cool, Cool, Considerate Men,” from 1776, book by Peter Stone, music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards (1969)

It had been included in the original Broadway show, but didn’t make it into the finished film.

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Breaking Factors that Will Determine the Election By Richard Baehr

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/the_breaking_factors_that_will_determine_the_election.html

As I have done every two years for quite some time, here are my predictions for the midterms.

House of Representatives

There are several dozen House races and five Senate races where one candidate or the other has a lead of 2 points or less in the most recent survey. Picking individual winners in these House races is hazardous since there are few public polls of these districts . Another few dozen House seats show a candidate leading by five points or less. The great majority of the close House races are Republican-held seats, hence their vulnerability to Democrats taking over the House, where a net pickup of 23 seats is required.

Most every analyst — Larry Sabato, Stuart Rothenberg, the Cook Political Report, the Real Clear Politics average, Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Cohn in the upshot in the New York Times — is predicting a pickup for the Democrats of more than the 23 seats needed. Several have increased their range of the likely pickup in the last week to the 30 to 40 seat range.

Polling is becoming more difficult with ever lower response rates to telephone surveys with live callers. . There are sometimes higher response rates to automated surveys, whether by phone or online (though not much higher), and there are issues related to whether such surveys reach a representative sample of likely voters.

Rasmussen, an automated survey, shows Trump with a positive approval score, and most other surveys show him 8-12 or more points net negative. The generic ballot for which party voters prefer control Congress has consistently shown large margins for the Democrats, currently over 7 points on average, though a few surveys have shown smaller margins this week.

The Democrats seem poised for significant gains in the House delegation in Pennsylvania , due to court-ordered redistricting. Democrats should also net big gains in California, New Jersey, and possibly Florida and Virginia, where a weak (or in California, nonexistent) GOP Senate candidate could drag down GOP House candidates. There are many other states where there are 1 or 2 endangered GOP held seats.

RCP has placed 15 GOP-held House seats in the lean or likely Democratic column, and two Democratic held seats in the lean or likely Republican column. That accounts for a net 13 of the 23 needed. Add to that 31 GOP-held seats regarded as tossups, and 26 more as Lean GOP. That makes 57 GOP held seats that are tossups or only slight margins for Republicans in which Democrats need to pick up a net 10. There are another 18 Likely GOP seats, which are not really safe this year. Only 6 Democrat-held seats are regarded as tossups. Given these daunting numbers, it is very difficult to see how Republicans hold the House and easier to see a possibility of a significant Democratic gain or 30 or more.

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CNN’s Existential War With Trump By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/04/cnns-existential

It may be unwise or monotonous for President Trump to harp on CNN as a purveyor of “fake news.” And the constant refrain “enemy of the people” should not be used of a media outlet, even one as prejudicial as CNN.

Yet Trump’s obsessions with CNN are largely reactive, not preemptive.

After just 100 days in office, before his own agendas could even be enacted, the liberal Shorenstein Center at Harvard reported that 93 percent of CNN’s coverage of the Trump Administration was already negative. Just one in every 13 CNN stories proved positive. That radically asymmetrical pattern (shared by NBC/MSNBC) had never been seen before in the history of comparable media analytics. No one at CNN sought to explain the imbalance, leaving the impression that the news organization had more or less joined the progressive opposition.

In his serial pushbacks against CNN, if Trump has perhaps surpassed the invective of Barack Obama’s own periodic dismissals of Fox News, he has clearly not ordered his Justice Department to monitor the communications of any CNN reporter, in the manner of Eric Holder’s surveillance of Fox News journalist James Rosen. Associated Press journalists are not being monitored by the administration as they were during the Obama years. That difference is oddly never cited by CNN reporters who are want to decry their own treatment by the administration, but who were not particularly vocal when their professional colleagues were once placed under electronic surveillance.

Naming Names
But most importantly, both Chris Cillizza and White House correspondent Jim Acosta are quite mistaken in their most recent denials of CNN reporters as purveyors of fake news, and, even more so, in dismissing such accusations as “just empty rhetoric.”

Cillizza complains without irony that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders “can’t name specific outlets or specific people who are enemies of the people or purveyors of fake news because the whole thing is just empty rhetoric solely designed to motivate base voters.” Acosta went further, challenging Sanders to “have the guts” to “state which outlets, which journalists are the enemy of the people.”

Didn’t CNN reporter Manu Raju in December 2017 falsely assert that Donald Trump, Jr. had advanced access to the hacked WikiLeaks documents? Such a false charge smeared Trump, Jr. and it may have spawned all sort of subsidiary rumors that he was on the verge of a Mueller indictment. What were Raju’s sources for such an inaccurate charge?