NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

California Drug Legalization Leads to Political Corruption Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 18th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/273194/california-drug-legalization-leads-political-daniel-greenfield

I’m shocked. Shocked.

In the more than two years since California voters approved the licensed growing and sale of recreational marijuana, the state has seen a half-dozen government corruption cases as black-market operators try to game the system, through bribery and other means. The cases are tarnishing an already troubled roll-out of the state permitting of pot businesses as provided for when voters approved Proposition 64 in November 2016…

“There is no doubt in my mind that the multi-billion-dollar nature of the marijuana industry is corrupting public officials,” said Lopey, a 41-year veteran of law enforcement who began his full-time career as a California Highway Patrol officer stationed in East Los Angeles.

California is going full narcosocialist and there’s a price to pay for that. The price is deeper corruption and criminality.

That case is just one of several that have involved cannabis sellers and growers allegedly bribing or trying to bribe government officials, or public officials acting illegally to get rich from marijuana.

Last year, Jermaine Wright, then the mayor pro tem of Adelanto, was charged with agreeing to accept a bribe to fast-track a marijuana business. Wright’s trial is scheduled for August. In May, FBI agents served search warrants at the home of Rich Kerr, who was mayor of Adelanto at the time, as well as at City Hall and a marijuana retailer.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Fake Newsom San Francisco Democrat comes out as a pro-criminal autocrat. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on March 18th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273165/fake-newsom-lloyd-billingsley

“Gavin Newsom’s real ambition is not California’s governor seat,” University of San Francisco political science professor James Taylor told the San Francisco Chronicle, “it’s the presidency of the United States.” In similar style, Tad Friend of the New Yorker touts Newsom’s Bobby Kennedy look, as “Newsom seeks to embody Kennedy’s grainy glamour, to provide moral clarity in a bewildering hour.” For their part, Californians are now bewildered by the governor’s benevolence to the state’s worst criminals.

As the Sacramento Bee reported, Gov. Newsom “plans to sign an executive order Wednesday morning granting reprieves to all 737 Californians awaiting executions.” The governor’s action comes “three years after California voters rejected an initiative to end the death penalty, instead passing a measure to speed up executions.”

Newsom claims the death penalty system has “discriminated against mentally ill defendants and people of color,” while not making the state safer and wasting “billions of taxpayer dollars.”

According to the Bee, the governor’s moratorium invites a “vitriolic” response from death penalty proponents and “some of the families of murder victims in the state.” The piece cites no family members of those murdered by recipients of the governor’s reprieve.

The initial story of the San Jose Mercury News was in effect a press release for Newsom, citing Natasha Minsker of the ACLU, the state’s major criminals’ lobby, that Newsom was showing “bold leadership.” The piece also failed to name or quote any relatives of murder victims.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Trump Vetoes Congressional Effort to Kill the Border Emergency The president throws down the gauntlet against leftists, NeverTrumpers, and weak-kneed Republicans. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on March 18th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273183/trump-vetoes-congressional-effort-kill-border-matthew-vadum

After Congress voted to overturn President Trump’s emergency declaration to divert federal funds to build a wall on the nation’s porous border with Mexico, the president issued the first-ever veto of his administration to keep the declaration intact.

The veto is Trump’s effort to defend the emergency he declared Feb. 15 under the National Emergencies Act of 1976.

Trump invoked the act as Congress gave final approval to a $333 billion omnibus spending bill. The legislation provides $1.375 billion for 55 miles of border barriers in Texas, well below the $5.7 billion Trump sought for a border wall and the $25 billion he originally said was needed. The emergency declaration moves around $6.7 billion in funding that was previously appropriated for other projects, largely for military construction. In his new fiscal 2020 budgetary blueprint provided to Congress March 11, the president is seeking another $8.6 billion to build the border wall.

On March 14 the Republican-dominated Senate approved a resolution 59-41 disapproving of Trump’s emergency declaration as 12 GOP senators joined Democrats. On Feb. 26 the Democrat-controlled House approved the disapproval resolution introduced by leftist Congressman Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) on a vote of 245 to 182.

The vetoed resolution now heads back to Congress where hostile lawmakers probably won’t be able to get the two-thirds supermajority in both chambers needed to override Trump’s veto and invalidate the emergency declaration.

But that won’t stop the open-borders crowd from trying.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Stop Calling Her AOC By David Solway

Posted By on March 18th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/stop-calling-her-aoc/
The new Democratic congresswoman does not deserve the stature that the acronym conveys.
As Michael Connelly’s bristly no-nonsense detective Harry Bosch says in The Black Echo, fed up to the gills with the infinite cascade of public acronyms for every conceivable police file, unit, task force, and department, acronyms give a sense of “eliteness,” of special authority, to the routine and humdrum business of professional practice and institutional procedure.

Obviously, ciphers, abbreviations, and alphabetical contractions facilitate ordinary communication. They operate as a form of shorthand to convey messages without bogging down in wordy prolongations that may lose the thread of an argument or send our interlocutors to sleep. As such, they perform a necessary function. Thus we are comfortable using alphabetical elisions for institutions, offices, programs and titles like FBI, CIA, DoJ, NATO, the UN, KFC, SNL, NYT, WSJ, NBC, CEO, and so on, or phrasal compressions like ASAP, AWOL, aka, TLC, LOL, WTF, IMO, ad infinitum.

The same applies to individuals, especially to names of famous people—e.g., MLK—or of presidents who may, or may not, have earned the sobriquet, for example: FDR, JFK, LBJ or GWB (the latter tinseled by the nickname “Dubya). This makes sense since they are referred to in political discourse with relative frequency.

An article in Slate for June 11, 2012, ruminates on the growing ubiquity of “the three-initial formulation,” which it sees as generic forms of compression trimmed for newspaper convenience. But as the article also suggests, there is more to it. Lyndon Baines Johnson understood the power of the triple initial; as Robert Caro reports in The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Johnson said, “What I want is for them to start thinking of me in terms of initials.” This is understandable. Three initials are a reputation enhancer.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Judge Jeanine is right — Fox News is wrong By M. Catharine Evans

Posted By on March 18th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/03/judge_jeanine_is_right__fox_news_is_wrong.html

Fox’s newest fan is a Jew-hating member of Congress. Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is extremely grateful that Fox defended her and punished Judge Jeanine Pirro for asking a legitimate question.

On Saturday, Fox suddenly cancelled Pirro’s highly rated weekly show “Justice with Judge Jeanine.”

After “Justice” failed to appear on Fox’s upcoming weekend schedule, a spokesperson for the network refused to comment on “internal scheduling matters,” according to USA Today.

In a statement following Judge Jeanine’s opening remarks on March 9 , Fox News “strongly condemned” Pirro’s comments about Muslim Rep. Omar. A Muslim Fox News associate producer, Hufsa Kamal Khan, also called out Pirro asking her to stop “spreading the false narrative” that Muslim women wearing a hijab “aren’t American enough.”

The funny thing is the judge’s logical examination of the origin of Omar’s anti-Semitic statements was neither bigoted, nor false, nor inciteful.

She asked a valid question.

FOREIGN POLICY, HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

“Dangerous Nuclear Schemes” by Peter Huessy

Posted By on March 18th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13909/dangerous-nuclear-schemes

The proposed policies, if adopted by the new leadership in the House, would certainly fracture whatever consensus exists today to modernize America’s strategic nuclear deterrent — and at a time when both Russia and China are charging ahead militarily, and Iran and North Korea are racing toward a deliverable nuclear weapons capability.

If the United States chooses to eliminate its land-based missiles, as arms control advocates have proposed, it would dramatically and dangerously simplify an adversary’s targeting calculus. The US would be reducing more than 500 distinct American-based nuclear-related targets — including 450 Minuteman silos and 48 launch control centers spread across five American states — down to only five continental US targets — three USAF bomber bases, and two submarines bases — and only roughly 10 targets if US submarines at sea were included.

China’s “declared” policy of no first use policy is, in fact, suspect, considering the country’s deployed weapons and nuclear threats to the US that involve America’s protection of Taiwan. China, needless to say, is being currently exposed for its massive track record of lying, cheating and stealing everything, from their military land-fill bases in the South China Sea to the virtual theft from the United States of China’s entire telecom industry.

There is no reason whatever to discontinue implementing the traditional three-part nuclear deterrent posture (land, sea and air) endorsed not only by the 2018 nuclear posture review (NPR) but also by the past three nuclear posture reviews (1994, 2001 and 2010). If the proposals above are adopted, two nuclear dangers in particular will be heightened. First, America’s allies, no longer credibly protected by the US nuclear umbrella, may seek to build their own nuclear weapons to compensate for the omission. Second, in a crisis, America’s adversaries might seek to disarm the US, or coerce it to stand down, especially as US nuclear forces would have been so diminished as to invite aggression, rather than deter it.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Hamas War Crimes against Israel, Palestinians by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on March 18th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13910/hamas-war-crimes-against-israel-palestinians

Suddenly, everyone was talking only about the rocket attacks on Tel Aviv, and Hamas seemed to have gotten away with its beating and shooting at peaceful protesters. It is also worth noting that many of the Palestinians who were brutally beaten by Hamas were children. In the view of many Palestinians, what Hamas is doing in the Gaza Strip is tantamount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Recently, in a grotesque allegation, UN human rights “experts” claimed that Israel may have committed war crimes by shooting at Palestinian demonstrators who tried to breach the Gaza-Israel border fence and infiltrate into Israel. The demonstrators who were shot were mostly Hamas and Islamic Jihad members, as both organizations have openly admitted. In other words, Israel is being accused of war crimes for defending its border against terrorists attempting to infiltrate it in order to murder or kidnap Israelis.

Perhaps a small step, such as viewing easily available material, would set the record straight. These UN human rights “experts” might, for a change, glance at the videos and photos coming out of the Gaza Strip to see who is really responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity: Hamas. Its members are opening fire at peaceful protesters, who are taking their lives in their hands to end the harsh economic conditions created by their rulers’ catastrophic policies in the Gaza Strip. It is the leaders of Hamas, and only Hamas, who are committing war crimes in and around Gaza. They are committing war crimes against Jews and they are committing war crimes against their own people.

Hamas has again proved that it really is a terrorist group that oppresses its people and prevents them from expressing their opinions. It has also shown that when it is in trouble, it will do its utmost to divert attention from the problems it is facing at home.

As far as Hamas is concerned, one of the best ways to divert attention from the growing frustration with its rule is by attacking Israel and Jews. Then, Israel is forced to respond to defend itself. That will allow Hamas to tell its people that there is no room for internal fighting and disputes “because we are under attack by the Jews.” No Palestinian would dare to criticize Hamas while Israel is supposedly “attacking” Hamas. Anyone who did so would be accused of being a “traitor” and “collaborator” with the “Zionist enemy.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Jason Greenblatt sets the record straight: Pay-to-slay is not welfareThe PA has made engaging in terrorism far more lucrative than pursuing productive employment.Dr. Alex Grobman (Arutz 7)

Posted By on March 18th, 2019

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/23603

Those who have watched what passes for the Middle East peace process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority have long recognized that there can be no peace until there is a complete renunciation of violence and terror as substitutes for negotiations.

Now, thanks to President Donald Trump’s special Middle East envoy, Jason D. Greenblatt, an equally valid corollary has been acknowledged: There will be no peace until the PA ceases its practice of financially rewarding terrorists and their families.

“We must acknowledge that peace can only be achieved by those who reject violence and terror,” Mr. Greenblatt told Adam Kredo in an interview for the Washington Beacon. “It is unacceptable for the PA to pay these terrorists and their families a reward for criminal acts. It is unacceptable for the PA to divert its funds and fail to pay the hard-working civil servants who teach in PA schools, patrol the streets in uniform, and provide medical care to the sick. The PA would rather pay terrorists than ordinary Palestinians and their families. What a shame.”

Withholding Funds

Last month, as punishment for the PA’s policy of continuing to pay stipends to Palestinian-Arab prisoners and to families of those terrorists who have been wounded or killed, the Israeli Security Cabinet announced it would suspend approximately five percent of the monthly funds the Jewish state transfers to the PA from specific taxes Israel collects from Palestinian Arabs.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Terrorist’s second victim, a rabbi, dies from wounds

Posted By on March 18th, 2019

https://worldisraelnews.com/second-victim-in-terror-attack-a-rabbi-dies-from-wounds/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=push_notification&utm_campaign=PushCrew_notification_1552889525&pushcrew_powered=1

Rabbi Ettinger, a father of 12, perished from a head wound a day after the attack.

By David Isaac, World Israel News

Rabbi Ahiad Ettinger is the second victim to die at the hands of the terrorist, who shot at civilians at the Ariel junction in Samaria on Sunday.

Ettinger, 47, who was sitting in his car at the junction during the attack, drew his weapon and was about to fire at the terrorist when he was struck in the head by bullets.

Ettinger leaves behind a wife and 12 children, ages one to 20. The eldest serves in an elite IDF unit.

He lived in the town of Eli in Samaria.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Pompeo’s Contempt of Court

Posted By on March 17th, 2019

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/pompeos-contempt-of-court/90613/

In a week of grim news, one bright spot stands out, at least for us — Secretary of State Pompeo’s announcement that America will block members of the International Criminal Court from coming here to investigate war crimes in Afghanistan. The ICC is a threat to American sovereignty, part of a broad attack on the very idea of sovereignty being levied by world government types.

No doubt there will be those who set this down as an all too Trumpian contempt. Concern about the ICC, though, is broadly bipartisan. The court was brought into being via a treaty called the Rome Statute, adopted in 1998. America inked the parchment, but in 2000 President Clinton declared he would neither submit the treaty to the Senate for ratification nor recommend his successor do so.

The successor was President George W. Bush, who went Mr. Clinton one further. He worked with Congress to pass the American Service-Members’ Protection Act. It guards our GIs and officials from criminal prosecution by “an international criminal court to which the United States is not party.” It passed the Democratic-led Senate by a vote of 71 to 22. The opposition to the ICC was bipartisan.