Illegals in California with Driver’s Licenses Eligible to Vote After April 1 By Peter Barry Chowka

Starting on April 1, 2018, illegal aliens in California who have recently obtained state driver’s licenses legally, or obtained them previously by lying about their immigration status, will automatically be registered to vote. Since January 2015, according to the California DMV, A.B. 60, a law passed by the California Assembly, “allows illegal immigrants to the United States to apply for a California driver’s license with the CA Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)” [emphasis original]. As of December 2016, more than 800,000 California driver’s licenses were issued to illegal aliens under the A.B. 60 law. Additional thousands of illegals may have been granted licenses prior to 2015 because they lied on their driver’s license application forms and claimed they were in the country legally. (No proof of legal residence has been required by the California DMV in recent years.)

An editorial in the Victorville Daily Press on January 22 summarized the situation:

According to the [s]ecretary of [s]tate’s website, in order to vote in California one must be at least 18 years old, a United States citizen[,] and a resident of California.

But a court settlement Jan. 10 in response to a suit filed by the League of Women Voters [and several other groups including The National Council of La Raza] may have pushed open the door to rampant voter fraud in this state. That’s because under the settlement, starting in April the Department of Motor Vehicles will automatically register to vote all those who renew their driver’s licenses unless they opt out.

California Political Review and Courthouse News first broke the story of illegals being allowed to vote starting this spring on January 18 in an article titled “Alert: Starting April 1 California DMV Will AUTOMATICALLY Register Illegal Aliens to Vote – by COURT ORDER:”

Claim: Page and Strzok Referenced FBI ‘Secret Society’ that Met the Day After the Election By Debra Heine

There is serious talk on Capitol Hill about the appointment of a second special counsel amid several new bombshell revelations swirling around the Trump/Russia probe. First, there are the allegations of shocking and substantial government surveillance abuses under President Obama outlined in the FISA abuse memo. Secondly, the FBI lost five months of key text messages between the anti-Trump/pro-Clinton FBI officials Peter Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page.

And now there’s talk of a “secret society” of officials within the FBI that apparently met the day after the election of Donald J. Trump to plot against the president-elect.Top Republicans now believe there may be real grounds for a second special counsel, Fox News reported Monday evening.Reps. Devin Nunes (R-CA), Trey Gowdy (R-SC), and Bob Goodlatte (R- VA) met on Saturday to discuss the FISA memo and the text messages. On Monday, the trio put out the following statement:

Book Excerpt: ‘American Pravda’ By James O’Keefe, Project Veritas

James O’Keefe is one of the most controversial and consequential figures in American media. Using hidden cameras and microphones, he has engineered a series of undercover investigations that have toppled powerful figures, sparked legal reforms – and generated a torrent of criticism: Tough appraisals in the New York Times, Washington Post and elsewhere have portrayed the 33-year-old as an unethical right-wing activist who seeks to legitimize his work by claiming it is journalism.

Now O’Keefe is getting his say in a new book, “American Pravda: My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News.” In it he presents himself as a modern-day Mike Wallace and his organization, Project Veritas, as a “60 Minutes” for the digital age. In the following excerpt, he argues that the failings of the mainstream media have made his brand of citizen journalism necessary. And he offers brief sketches of some of Project Veritas’s top exposés, before its most recent: Twitter employees describing the hiding of users’ tweets, based on content, without notifying them.

All Points Books/St. Martin’s Press

Why the Veritas Journalist Exists

The mission of Project Veritas is “to investigate and expose institutional waste, fraud, abuse, and other misconduct in order to create a more ethical and transparent society.” This is not inherently a political mission. If our objective were to advance a political agenda, as journalists on both sides have admitted doing, we would have to reinforce that agenda time after time with editorial content. We don’t. We move on. We do not put words in our subjects’ mouths. We cannot create a reality where there is none. If we have any motivation at all, it is to hold the media and administrative state accountable. Not inherently “right wing” or “left wing,” we work the opportunities the major media choose to ignore.

No ordinary American advocates for general waste, fraud, and abuse. No politician does either. That does not stop the political class from practicing—indeed perfecting—all of the above. So mired are so many lawmakers and administrators in everyday abuses that the Trumpian word “swamp” seems altogether appropriate to describe the contemporary deep state. For many of the swamp dwellers, the Constitution is not a guide but an obstacle. Without the journalist’s external light—and lots of light day after day, night after night—the swamp will not be drained.

Justice May Bust the College Trust The federal government is looking into an ‘ethics code’ designed to shield schools from competition. By Naomi Schaefer Riley

Are colleges colluding? The U.S. Justice Department wrote the National Association for College Admission Counseling Jan. 10 seeking information on its “ethics code.” The department’s aim is to determine whether colleges, through NACAC, may be violating antitrust law by seeking “to restrain trade among colleges and universities in the recruitment of students.”

It’s long been an open secret that American colleges engage in cartel-like behavior. Schools that are supposed to be wholly independent agree on when students can submit applications, when admissions officers must inform them of a decision (including a financial-aid offer), when students must accept or decline the offer, and when to let students off the waiting list. In response to an earlier Justice Department investigation, Ivy League schools in 1991 agreed to stop sharing information about offers of financial aid.

Colleges argue that this cooperation benefits applicants. Its purpose is “to provide access to college in a way that is transparent, is clear and easy to understand, in a way that parents and school counselors can understand how the process works,” Todd Rinehart, a University of Denver administrator who led the committee that rewrote the code last year, told InsideHigherEd.

Perhaps, but the code also serves to ensure that colleges cannot get an “unfair” advantage over one another. What if one school decided to allow applications before the NACAC-decreed Oct. 15 start date? What if it was so impressed by an application it sent an admission offer the following day? The student would save months of work filling out applications and hundreds of dollars on application fees. But the other colleges would be out of luck.

What about the way colleges agree on what it means to apply “early decision”? Students promise they’ll enroll in a school no matter what other offers come in and risk being blacklisted if they back out. Katharine Fretwell, dean of admission and financial aid at Amherst College, told U.S. News in 2016 her school and about 30 other colleges share lists of students admitted through early decision—and of those who subsequently decided not to attend. CONTINUE AT SITE

Chuck Schumer, Shut Down Democrats running for President vote to keep the government closed.

Over in the department of futile and stupid gestures, the Senate on Monday voted 81-18 to end the government shutdown that Democrats had insisted on late last week. The politics apparently didn’t turn out to be the winner the Democrats anticipated, so they bailed out and called retreat a victory.

The Senate and House passed a resolution to fund the government through Feb. 8. Both parties will continue to negotiate a deal on the status of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the law-abiding young adults who came to the U.S. as children. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would bring some immigration measure to the floor, and Democrats are calling this a shutdown triumph. But the negotiations were already underway, and President Trump has said he wants a deal to legalize the Dreamers. The shutdown needlessly roiled immigration politics.

Some 15 Democrats plus Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) voted to keep the shutdown going. They include several of the multitude of Democratic presidential aspirants in addition to Mr. Sanders : Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. This crew wants to tout their credentials as fighters for the Dreamers, and they’d rather have a wedge issue than a solution.

Also voting against opening the government were Republicans Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mike Lee of Utah. This is a reminder that the 51-seat GOP majority is really a 49-seat minority given that those two might stage a protest vote at any moment for no useful purpose.

James Comey’s Ethics Class Some advice on questions to discuss and speakers to invite.

The College of William & Mary in Virginia announced last week that James Comey will teach a course on “ethical leadership” starting this autumn. The former FBI director would not have been our first choice for such an assignment, but upon reflection maybe his experience as a federal prosecutor, deputy attorney general and FBI director is ideal for the task.

Mr. Comey said in a statement accompanying the news that “ethical leaders lead by seeing above the short term, above the urgent or the partisan, and with a higher loyalty to lasting values, most importantly the truth.” In that spirit, here are some suggestions on how Mr. Comey can structure his course to help students confront these profound questions.

Week One case study: The FBI is investigating a presidential candidate for mishandling classified emails as Secretary of State. The director decides on his own to violate Justice Department rules and exonerate that candidate in a public statement to the media, letting an aide replace the legally potent phrase “grossly negligent” in a draft of his statement with “extremely careless” in the final version.

Students will examine when a public official can choose to ignore rules and standards of conduct for what he considers to be higher purposes. Required reading: Former Deputy Attorney General and federal Judge Laurence Silberman’s February 2017 speech to the Columbia Law School chapter of the Federalist Society.

Breakout session topic: Having exonerated that candidate, the FBI director intervenes in the campaign again only days before Election Day, saying new evidence has required him to reopen the email case. Two days before the polls open he says that the new evidence turned out to be nothing of consequence. Was the FBI director protecting the rule of law, or his own reputation?

Ethical guides Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner will visit each breakout session to steer the discussions. (Thanks to the federal prison system for letting Mr. Weiner appear by video from Federal Medical Center Devens.)

L’Oréal’s boundary-breaking Muslim model steps aside over anti-Israel tweets By Cnaan Liphshiz

Amena Khan said she deeply regrets the 2014 tweets, including one in which she labeled Israel a “child murderer.”

L’Oréal made history last week when it became the first major cosmetics firm to feature a Muslim woman wearing a head covering in a mainstream international ad campaign for hair products.

The signing of Amena Khan, a British blogger on beauty, as the newest face of L’Oréal Paris generated a lot of positive publicity for the French firm, with CNN lauding the company for “breaking barriers” and “becoming more diverse” in an article that also flattered Khan for “empowering women.”

But the response was less enthusiastic in some French Jewish media like JSSNews, where Khan was denounced as “an anti-Semite of the worst kind” for her remarks on Twitter in 2014 calling Israel an “illegal and sinister state.” She also labeled Israel a “child murderer” that Allah will ultimately defeat.

According to the British government’s 2016 definition of anti-Semitism, “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards by requiring of it [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation” are examples of the phenomenon.

On Monday, Khan said she is stepping down from the L’Oreal Paris Elvive World of Care campaign because “the current conversations surrounding it detract from the positive and inclusive sentiment that it set out to deliver.”

“I deeply regret the content of the tweets I made in 2014, and sincerely apologize for the upset and hurt they have caused,” she wrote on Instagram.

EDWARD CLINE: THE VENOM OF THE SPLC

The “Palestinians” are a hate group. Across the board in Gaza and the West Bank and elsewhere, they call for killing Jews and destroying the State of Israel.

The #Resistance is a hate group. It refuses to acknowledge the election of Donald Trump, even to the point of questioning his physical and mental fitness to be President, and includes in that mantra the implied accusation that Dr. Ronny Jackson, who examined Trump, is lying. It is willing to say anything to damage Trump, no matter how irrational and unproven.

Antifa is a hate group. The visual evidence is ample. Masked thugs attack individuals who want to see and hear someone the group disapproves of; destroy property with glee, and calls “fascist” (as though the thugs knew what real “fascists” were in the past) anyone who opposes them. Antifa thugs should take Pogo’s complaint to heart;”We have seen the enemy and he is us.” Not that doing such would give them second thoughts. Their minds are the property of leftist ideology.

Democratic congressmen who oppose President Trump comprise a hate group.

Any group that does not disavow its unremitting, obsessive hatred for Trump is a hate group.

Yet it will not be classified as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty LawCenter (SPLC). This and other groups get a free pass because they hate Trump and spew their hatred to another level of ranting insanity. My argument is that any government authority that suppresses freedom of speech across the globe is a “hate group,” any group that offers “resistance” to freedom of speech is a “hate group,” any individual who rants irrationality against President Trump is a one-man “hate group” and could said to be in the grip of “Trumpophobia.”

Like the saliva of an IndonesianKomodo dragon injected into a bite victim, the toxin is supposed to cause a fatal and a certain, helpless death. The dragons are attracted to the putrefaction of the bodies of their victims. Much as the Democrats are.

Articles have surfaced that claim that the SPLC is by definition a “hate group” itself, because its chief purpose today is to establish and publish lists of names that hate groups can target for hateful action. This is a charge which cannot be denied by the SPLC. Virtually the only time it makes news headlines today is when it has declared certain individuals – such as Pamela Geller, Richard Spencer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali – and numerous blogs that critique Islam, as “Islamophobes” or as “hate groups.” They commit “hate crimes” and must be sent to the slammer. Never mind that Geller is under a constant fatwa to behead her, that Spencer was poisoned in Iceland, and that Hirsi Ali survived the worst of Sharia for a woman, female genital mutilation.

So, what is a “hate crime”?

From Innocence To Cynicism By Herbert London

In 1959 I made a record, a song that reflected the virtues of bourgeois culture: “We’re Not Going Steady.” The lyrics were pure “bubblegum,” silly yet nostalgic. “We’re not going steady because we’re never alone, I can’t even love you, love you on the telephone.” I was reminded of my foray into the rock world as I watched Kendrick Lamar and the half time entertainment at the College Football Championship. All I could think is how culture has been debased in six decades.

During the 1940’s-50’s Sinatra sang “Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage” and Lloyd Price sang, “I Want to Get Married.” At the height of the cynical sixties, a generation later, when middle class values were under attack, Dusty Springfield sang, “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me” and Meat Loaf argued “I want you, I need you but I’m never goin’ to say I love you. Two out of three ain’t bad.” The tie between love and sex was severed.

Still it is hard to imagine how far down the proverbial rabbit hole we have gone. For rappers sex is raw. Women are objects, to be treated as ho’s. Deviancy has been defined down to kindergarteners who mouth vile lyrics as if they are the Gettysburg Address.

LGBTQ – The Islamic Perspective – Canada Rachel Ehrenfeld

Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau touts himself as a leader who equality and rights for the LGBTQ community. At the same time, he also embraces and promotes the growing Islamist movement in Canada, which views homosexuality as a crime punishable by lashing and even death. And the Islamists make no secret of their views. They promote them in mosques, public lecturers, articles and books often distributed free in bookstores and on city street corners.

In November 2016, Trudeau has appointed a special advisor to develop and coordinate the Canadian government’s LGBTQ agenda within and without Canada. Trudeau’s government is also “funding and implementing LGBTQ-related projects abroad supporting violence-prevention programs, awareness-raising campaigns and advocacy efforts, including initiatives aimed to combat homophobia and transphobia in education systems.” Trudeau has spoken of the “great strides in securing legal rights for the LGBTQ community in Canada. But the fight to end discrimination is not over and a lot of hard work still needs to be done. Canadians know our country is made stronger because of our diversity, not in spite of it.”