HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Mayorkas and Wray Refuse to Testify Publicly About National Security Threats Facing US By Debra Heine

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/21/mayorkas-and-wray-refuse-to-testify-publicly-about-national-security-threats-facing-us/

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and FBI Director Christopher Wray decided to skip an end-of-year public hearing in the U.S. Senate on Thursday, suggesting that the threats facing the country are so grave they can only be discussed in a classified setting.

Republicans and Democrats alike reacted with outrage.

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Gary Peters (D-Mich.) strongly rebuked the officials, stating that their refusal to appear is a “shocking departure” from the 15-year tradition of holding the annual hearing on worldwide threats.

Both the FBI and DHS released statements saying the officials had already “testified extensively” in public about the threats facing the U.S. and offered to discuss further threats in a classified briefing.

The FBI has repeatedly demonstrated our commitment to responding to Congressional oversight and being transparent with the American people,” the FBI’s statement said.

“We remain committed to sharing information about the continuously evolving threat environment facing our nation and the extraordinary work the men and women of the FBI are doing — here at home and around the world — to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States. FBI leaders have testified extensively in public settings about the current threat environment and believe the Committee would benefit most from further substantive discussions and additional information that can only be provided in a classified setting.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Russia and Ukraine Likely to Ignore Biden’s Attempts to Sabotage Trump’s Ukraine Peace Effort Given the havoc that Biden’s post-election Ukraine policy decisions have caused, Donald Trump cannot return to the Oval Office fast enough. Fred Fleitz

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/11/22/russia-and-ukraine-likely-to-ignore-bidens-attempts-to-sabotage-trumps-ukraine-peace-effort/

In December 1992, after the security and humanitarian situations in Somalia significantly deteriorated, the George H.W. Bush administration decided to deploy U.S. troops as part of a UN-sanctioned peace enforcement mission. Because President Bush had just lost the 1992 presidential election and would be leaving this crisis to his successor, Bill Clinton, Bush consulted with President-elect Clinton and obtained his agreement before making this major foreign policy decision.

This instance of post-election foreign policy collaboration by incoming and outgoing presidents represented the U.S. tradition of the peaceful transfer of power—and an outgoing president respecting the will of the American people who just elected a new president. Unfortunately, President Biden has chosen to ignore these crucial traditions concerning the war in Ukraine and instead appears determined to sabotage the policies of his successor.

President-elect Donald Trump has made it clear that one of his top national security priorities is swiftly ending the war in Ukraine. Trump is determined to change U.S. policy on the war by ending it instead of supporting a long war of attrition that Ukraine is sure to lose. Under the peaceful transfer of power tradition, President Biden should cooperate with the policy of his successor during his final days in office.

Unfortunately, Biden has taken a defiant approach to Trump’s new policy.

Biden decided last weekend to allow Ukraine to attack targets in Russia with the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACM). Ukraine had been asking for permission to fire these weapons at targets deep inside Russia for almost a year, but Biden refused—until after the election—because he worried this would dangerously escalate the war.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

At the University of Michigan, Getting Tough with Hamas Supporters Discouraging terror and violence. by Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/at-the-university-of-michigan-getting-tough-with-hamas-supporters/

In the academic year 2023-2024, campuses across the country, beginning on October 8, 2023, were engulfed by pro-Hamas demonstrators. Their faces contorted by hate, members of these mobs waved their signs, screamed their slogans about Israeli “genocide,” and insisted that “there is only one solution/Intifada revolution,” which is an unambiguous call for violence. They demanded a “free Palestine” “from the river to the sea,” which, properly understood, means the eradication of Israel and its replacement by a twenty-third Arab state. They invaded and vandalized campus offices. They surrounded Jewish students and would not let them escape while yelling at them. Some Jewish students were physically attacked. They burst into classrooms of Israeli and Jewish faculty, interrupting their lectures.

College administrators in the last year have been maddeningly slow to react. Many administrators did nothing, showing themselves to be unwilling to lay down the law to such violent troublemakers. Three university presidents, from Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, were asked at a congressional hearing if calling for the “genocide of Jews” in their view “violated their campus codes of conduct.” All three answered that “it depends.” Some universities offered slap-on-the-wrist suspensions for a handful of demonstrators who physically harassed Jewish students; some administrators, as at Brown University, even offered to meet with demonstrators to discuss their demands on cutting all ties to Israel. Nothing appeared to calm down the pro-Hamas anti-Israel demonstrators. After a long investigation into antisemitism and anti-Israel activities on campuses, conducted by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, a long report was issued on antisemitism on American campuses, a report that was damning in its evidence both of antisemitic acts by pro-Palestinian demonstrators, and of the failure of university demonstrators to take a firm stand against those demonstrators.

Now a few universities have begun to lay down the law by starting to punish Hamas supporters in a way that will have an impact. At the University of Michigan, the leading pro-Hamas group now faces a four-year suspension from the campus that should weaken its ability to conduct its anti-Israel propaganda campaign to win over impressionable students.

BOOKS, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Crime of the Century? Naomi Wolf delivers the harrowing facts about the Pfizer jab. by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/crime-of-the-century/

If my father had been alive, I wouldn’t have done it. He was a doctor who had a diverse background in medical research, medical writing and editing, both private and hospital practice, and pharmaceutical advertising, and he was always exceedingly wary about treatments that he considered unnecessarily dangerous or insufficiently tested. When my pediatrician wanted to have my adenoids taken out, he said no, and whenever I went to the dentist he wouldn’t let the guy give me novacaine.

But my father wasn’t alive when COVID came along, and so I got the damned Pfizer jab – twice – without giving it much thought at all. In retrospect I feel like a fool. I’ve long since been aware of just how much political propaganda we’re fed by the legacy media. And my dad, who worked closely with drug companies, taught me not to have any illusions about them. But even though I recognized the idiocy of the mask mandates and the six-foot distancing rule and other elements of COVID theater, it didn’t occur to me, I guess, that the corporate media and Big Pharma might team up with the Deep State to push life-threatening drugs on the whole world, and to impose severe punishments upon those relatively few brave souls who dared to turn them down.

Anyway, we went through the pandemic, and then it ended, and now it can seem almost as if none of it ever happened – the enforced long-term isolation, the destruction of small business and jobs and interruption of schooling, the mass violation of individual rights, and the mass demonization of vaccine skeptics. Anthony Fauci and countless others at the NIH and WHO and elsewhere should be behind bars, but I can’t remember the last time I even heard Fauci’s name. It’s as if even many of the people who were put through hell during the COVID years would prefer to try to forget about it and move on.

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

ISIS Plots Its Return Brian Stewart

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/01/isis-plots-its-return/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

The West can’t afford passivity

We are living through a momentous phase in the twilight struggle against the Islamic State. In the past year or so, the jihadist outfit has been an increasingly assertive presence in Syria’s hinterland, deploying a band of “holy warriors” to resurrect its dream of ruling a caliphate. Once more, an armed rebellion has blossomed there against the U.S.-led coalition, and, unless put down in short order, it promises to bring about an Islamic State resurgence.

The gathering of jihadist forces and the corresponding explosion of violence could prove potent enough to engulf Syria and consolidate another state with no law but God’s — a supposed kingdom of heaven on earth. This year, the pace of Islamic State attacks in Syria and Iraq has doubled. The primary targets have been U.S. garrisons in Syria and units of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Kurdish-led troops who worked with the U.S. to defeat ISIS five years ago. The jihadists’ immediate objective has been to curtail counterterrorism patrols and free thousands of their confederates who have languished in jail since the SDF and the U.S.-led coalition swept away the final remnant of the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate at Baghuz in March 2019.

Since shattering the Islamic State, the U.S. has maintained a small military footprint in Syria and Iraq to keep the peace. U.S. warplanes carry out air strikes and provide live aerial surveillance to SDF ground forces that conduct raids on suspected Islamic State cells. Occasionally, American commandos conduct missions of their own to kill or capture senior Islamic State leaders. This year, the SDF has reportedly captured 233 Islamic State fighters in 28 operations, while American aircraft have conducted three strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria and one in Iraq. This level of activity mirrors that of 2023, when the U.S. carried out four strikes against the Islamic State.

Bolstering the tepid military campaign in Syria and Iraq is a necessary precondition to staving off the ISIS resurgence.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Chooses Pam Bondi to Replace Gaetz as AG Nominee Alex Welz

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-chooses-pam-bondi-to-replace-gaetz-as-ag-nominee/

In the hours following Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal from consideration, President-elect Donald Trump selected Florida’s Pam Bondi to be his nominee for U.S. attorney general.

“For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans – Not anymore,” Trump said in a statement.

“Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and Making America Safe Again. I have known Pam for many years — She is smart and tough, and is an AMERICA FIRST Fighter, who will do a terrific job as Attorney General!”

Bondi served as one of Trump’s lawyers during his first impeachment trial, when he was accused of conditioning military aid to Ukraine on the Eastern European nation’s commitment to investigating Joe Biden.

The Sunshine State’s first ever female attorney general previously served on a Trump commission tasked with curtailing the opioid crisis and drug addiction more broadly. The former president has commended her work in combating “the trafficking of deadly drugs.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Yes, You Do Have to Hand It to Trump Jeffrey Blehar

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/01/yes-you-do-have-to-hand-it-to-trump/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

If anything, his political skills have been underrated

In a very real way, Donald Trump was running not just for the presidency but for his life.

Many political observers, myself included, spend more time mocking or castigating the losers of an election than crediting the winners. “If it bleeds it leads,” and for someone prone to engage in rhetorical carnage, few better opportunities present themselves than by counting coup on the political sad sacks moping around the Losers’ Table. So, if you’ll permit one last laugh about Kamala Harris’s blessed political demise, let’s marvel that the official line in Washington, D.C., and among Democratic media types is that “Harris ran a perfect campaign.” A “flawless campaign.” She did “everything she needed to do,” you see — why, she even secured Queen Latifah’s endorsement — but, alas, fell just a bit short.

You know who surely did not run a flawless campaign? Donald Trump. His consolation is that he has completed the most impressive act of political resurrection in American history, one that makes Richard Nixon’s 1968 return look trivial, and that he, not Harris, will become the 47th president of the United States. The Trump campaign’s victory this year was a landmark — and not just because Trump managed to win despite his behavior and the events that have surrounded him since the last election. The campaign was remarkable also because of its breadth. It organized a voter coalition very different from those of the Bush years and one much better equipped to compete nationally against Democrats in the longer term. It produced an increasingly multiracial party now reoriented toward working-class economic and cultural concerns, whose constituents are bound together in their skepticism of elites, all by the force of Trump’s success.

Who deserves the credit? Surely everyone involved in the campaign is eager to claim some.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Howard Husock Local Option How to drill, baby, drill—even in New York State.

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/local-option

The 2024 election was a referendum on a wide range of issues, but there’s no doubt that increasing domestic fossil-fuel production—“energy dominance,” as Donald Trump now calls it—was on the ballot and won. Kamala Harris backed away from her past calls to ban fracking but nonetheless lost Pennsylvania, where voters seemed to doubt her sudden change of heart.

The pro-Trump vote in most counties outside Gotham suggests that pro-fracking sentiment played a role in the election in New York State. Trump won by overwhelming margins in the counties located above portions of the Marcellus Shale formation, which feeds natural gas extraction in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Many of these counties are economically distressed and have lost population. The time has come to give them a voice when it comes to permitting natural gas fracking, currently banned statewide.

At least 22 upstate New York counties sit atop Marcellus Shale deposits. These counties typically lag the state’s median household income level. Median income in Broome County, which is located on the Pennsylvania border and which nearly flipped from Biden to Trump (as of current data), is $63,000 compared with the statewide figure of $81,000. The county has lost 2 percent of its population since 2010, and 19 percent of residents live at or below the official poverty line. In western New York, Cattaraugus County, which also borders Pennsylvania, has a similar profile, with a median income of just $56,000. It has lost 5,000 of the 80,000 residents it had in 2010, and 16 percent live in poverty. It, too, voted for Trump in 2024. Indeed, outside of cities like Rochester, Syracuse, and Buffalo, the entire 2024 upstate county vote map is red.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Seriously, Is Biden Trying To Start WWIII To Get Even With Trump?

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/11/22/seriously-is-biden-trying-to-start-wwiii-to-get-even-with-trump/

A mentally-challenged President Joe Biden turned 82 years old this week, a much-diminished man from his hey-day as a Democratic Party Senate stalwart in the last century. But one part of his character is undimmed by the passage of the years: His legendary spite and gleeful willingness to betray his political foes.

Knowing this, is he now about to set off a third world war to settle an election score with newly re-elected President Donald Trump, who Biden still calls an “existential threat” to America?

We’re talking of course of Biden’s inexplicably dangerous decision to encourage Ukraine to use long-range U.S. missiles against Russian territory, which has already prompted a response from Russia in the form of a missile barrage against Ukraine.

Biden’s also approving antipersonnel mines for use against Russian forces, along with sending yet another $237 million in military aid and forgiving $5 billion in loans.

It makes no sense at all, unless you see it as a way of showing he still has the reins of government firmly in hand, and wants to hand newly re-elected President Donald Trump a nasty, dangerous mess as he takes the oath of office on January 20, 2025.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Regime-Change: Prerequisite for Iran’s Policy-Change Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on November 22nd, 2024

http://bit.ly/40Xe8QQ

According to the State Department’s annual human rights report on Iran: “Iran’s restrictions on human rights worsened in a number of areas during the year….[For instance], transnational repression against individuals, femicide, forced sterilization, early and forced marriage, trafficking in persons, recruitment of child soldiers, worst forms of child labor, violence targeting ethnic minorities [e.g., Shiite Arabs, Sunni and Shiite Kurds and Sunni Balochis], severe restrictions on freedom of expression and religion [e.g., Sunnis, Baha’is, Jews], criminalizing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex persons, enforced disappearance, torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government….”

The UN High Commissioner of Human Rights adds: ”Human rights violations by Iran… amounting to crimes against humanity…. Women and girls subjected to rape and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence, including gang rape, rape with an object, electrocution of genitalia, forced nudity and groping…. State authorities at the highest levels encouraged, sanctioned and endorsed human rights violations through statements justifying the acts and conduct of the security forces….”

*Since its February 1979 violent rise to power, the Ayatollahs’ regime has been intensely committed to its 1,400-year-old fanatical vision, as documented by its Constitution, school curriculum, mosque sermons and the daily enforcement of its Islamic Revolution, domestically and globally.  The Ayatollahs’ vision – which transcends financial and diplomatic considerations – has transformed Iran from “The American Policeman of the Gulf” to the leading global epicenter of anti-US terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and the proliferation of advanced military systems.