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Will Hillary Clinton Accept the Results if She Loses? Democracy doesn’t mean Democratic Party rule. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on October 21st, 2016

The headlines are in. Trump is the “anti-Democratic” candidate because he refuses to rule out challenging the results of an election that has yet to take place. Such a course of action is “beyond the pale”. It’s a threat to democracy. And it is utterly and thoroughly unacceptable.

Except when Democrats do it.

It was the day after the election. While the Democratic Party faithful waited in the rain in Nashville, William Daley strode out and announced, “Our campaign continues”. Al Gore had called George W. Bush to withdraw his concession. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” a baffled Bush asked. “You don’t have to be snippy about it,” Gore retorted snippily.

Gore did eventually concede. Though years later he would attempt to retract his concession a second time. But his political movement never did concede. It remained a widespread belief in left-wing circles that President Bush was illegitimately elected and that President Gore was the real winner.

How mainstream is that belief?

When Hillary dragged Gore away from playing with his Earth globe to campaign for her, the crowd booed at his mention of the election and then chanted, “You won, you won”.

Hillary grinned and nodded.

Hillary Clinton has always believed that President Bush illegitimately took office. She has told Democrats that Bush was “selected” rather than “elected”. In Nigeria, of all places, she implied that Jeb Bush had rigged the election for his brother.

But it’s not unprecedented, beyond the pale or utterly unacceptable when Democrats do it.

It’s just business as usual.

The media’s focus has been on whether Trump would accept the results if he loses. Yet a better question might be whether Hillary Clinton would accept her defeat.

Even when it came to the battle for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton refused to concede defeat until the bitter end and then past it. Not only did Hillary refuse to drop out even when Obama was the clear winner, while her people threatened a convention floor fight, but she insisted on staying on in the race for increasingly bizarre and even downright disturbing reasons.

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The UN’s Shameful Purge of Historical Jewish Ties to Jerusalem How the United Nations is helping the Palestinians’ campaign of dejudaization of Jews’ holiest sites. Joseph Klein

Posted By on October 21st, 2016

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) executive board passed a resolution, entitled “Occupied Palestine,” which refers to Jerusalem’s holy sites only by their Islamic names. The resolution effectively denies the historical ties of the Jewish people to the Temple Mount, proving that this dysfunctional UN body is not grounded in any educational, scientific or cultural reality at all. UNESCO is being used by Islamists, who rammed through the admission of Palestine to UNESCO with full membership privileges in 2011, to wipe away Jewish history in Jerusalem with a stroke of the pen. The purpose is to delegitimize the Jewish state. This is no surprise, considering that Islamic states such as the holocaust-denying Islamic Republic of Iran, the ISIS-funding state of Qatar and the genocide committing state of Sudan sit on UNESCO’s Executive Board.

Even UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who has had his own issues with Israel, could not abide by UNESCO’s re-writing of history. “The Secretary-General reaffirms the importance of the Old City of Jerusalem and its Walls for the three monotheistic religions and stresses the importance of the religious and historical link of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian peoples to the holy site,” said a statement read by the UN Spokesperson on behalf of the Secretary General. “The Al Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram al-Sharif, the sacred shrine of Muslims, is also the Har HaBayit—or Temple Mount—whose Western Wall is the holiest place in Judaism, a few steps away from the Saint Sepulcher church and the Mount of Olives, which is revered by Christians.”

A senior Obama administration official told the Jerusalem Post that the UNESCO resolution was “one-sided,” “unhelpful” and “highly politicized.” The U.S. did vote against the resolution, but President Obama still wants to restore American taxpayers’ funding of UNESCO, which had been cut off after UNESCO granted full membership to the so-called Palestinian “state.”

Palestinian leaders have been cynically attempting to re-write history to suit their false narrative for years. And UNESCO has aided and abetted the lies, even referring to the holiest site in Judaism, the Western Wall, as Al-Buraq Plaza “Western Wall Plaza.” UNESCO used the Arabic name rather than the Hebrew name, Hakotel Hama’arvi, “Kotel.”

Mahmoud Abbas’ advisor on Religious and Islamic Affairs, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, recently praised the UNESCO action on official Palestinian Authority TV:

“UNESCO’s resolution confirms what we think and believe in, that Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in particular, and the Al-Buraq Wall (i.e., Western Wall) and the Al-Buraq [Wall] plaza are all purely Islamic and Palestinian assets and no one has the right to be our partner in that. No one has the right. We are the owners and we have the right to it. Only the Muslims have the right to the Al-Aqsa [Mosque] and the Al-Buraq [Wall] and the Al-Buraq [Wall] plaza which is purely Islamic waqf property… This is a message to Israel from us (i.e., the Palestinians) that we have the right and from all of the international community.”

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‘Trumping Clinton’ by Ruthie Blum

Posted By on October 21st, 2016

A joke I heard when I was a teenager – growing up in a New York City neighborhood with a large population of Latino immigrants – serves as a good explanation for the (thus far) political success of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

It goes something like this:

Two friends from the Dominican Republic run into each other on a Manhattan street and one begins to boast that he is bettering himself by attending night school.

The other shrugs, unimpressed. “I don’t go to night school,” he says. “But I know a lot.”

“Oh, yeah?” the first one challenges. “Do you know who George Washington was?”

“Never heard of him,” the second replies. “But I know many things.”

“Really?” the first questions. “So who was Abraham Lincoln?”

“I don’t know who Abraham Lincoln was,” the second answers. “But I know plenty more than you do.”

“Hmmm,” the first says. “Like what?”

The second says, “I know who Juan Rodriguez is.”

“Who’s he?” the first one asks.

The second responds, “He’s the guy who’s sleeping with your wife while you’re at night school.”

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Trump Threatens Democracy! Where are Trump’s critics about Obama’s executive tyranny and Hillary’s promises to swell the Federal Leviathan? Bruce Thornton

Posted By on October 21st, 2016

As expected, Trump’s refusal to make a pledge accepting the outcome of the election stirred up the usual hysteria on the left and the right. According to the New York Times, Trump’s response was “a remarkable statement that seemed to cast doubt on American democracy.” The other P.R. firm for progressives, the Associated Press, said Trump was “threatening to upend a fundamental pillar of American democracy.” Prominent NeverTrumper John Podhoretz was even more vehement: “It was a shocking and cravenly irresponsible thing to say, the sort of thing that threatens to rend our national fabric, and for that alone, Trump has earned his place in the history of American ignominy.” Right alongside Benedict Arnold and John Wilkes Booth, I guess.

All these hyperbolic responses are curiously similar to Hillary’s during the debate. Sniffing political opportunity with all the olfactory acuity of an outhouse rat, Hillary thundered, “Horrifying . . . He is denigrating [sic]. He is talking down our democracy. And I for one am appalled that someone the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that kind of position.” As opposed to trading uranium mines to a Russian firm in exchange for donations to her family foundation? Once again, over-the-top rhetoric that serves political interest substitutes for clear thinking and moral distinctions when it comes to Donald Trump.

Indeed, these preposterous claims of “threat to democracy” and an unprecedented violation of a “democratic tradition” conjure up apocalyptic scenes of Alt-Right and KKK and Survivalist battalions swarming from basements and Klaverns and foothills with their gun-show “assault rifles” to spark a civil war in the streets, while Vladimir crawls out of his coffin in the Kremlin and dispatches legions of little green bats to destroy the Republic and anoint Donald “Renfeld” Trump as dictator. All the while that Hillary’s corruption and subversion of the Constitution––genuine threats to democracy––are tsk-tsked then swamped by anti-Trump hysteria.

Not that Trump should be let off the hook for his typically thoughtless reply, a bad habit that might cost him the election. Chris Wallace’s question was ambiguous, asking if Trump “will absolutely accept the result of the selection” and claiming “no matter how hard fought a campaign is, that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner.” But what did Wallace mean? After the results of the voting have been certified by the states, according to each state’s laws? Or after results are announced by the media and the states, but not yet certified? And doesn’t the “campaign end” on November 7, which suggests Wallace meant the latter?

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ROGER FRANKLIN : THE WORST OF TIMES

Posted By on October 21st, 2016

Sherlock Holmes knew the significance of dogs that don’t bark — a skill that would have seen him spot in an instant what is so wrong with the New York Times “fact check” of the candidates’ claims, counterclaims and tossed-off assertions during yesterday’s third presidential debate. As an example of an event viewed through the distorting prism of partisanship it is hard to beat. Consider the very first entry:

Mr. Trump said that health insurance premiums were “going up 60, 70, 80 percent,” and “next year, they’re going to go up over 100 percent.”

This was rated “overstated”, yet the Times’ explanation actually agrees with Trump’s appraisal (emphasis added):

“Increases of 25 percent to 45 percent or more have been approved in some states. But increases of 80 percent or more are rare.”

Rare they may be, but evidently they do happen. So Trump was correct. More than that, the Times’ “fact check” supports his contention that Obamacare is a disaster, yet makes no comment on increased premiums of between “25 percent to 45 percent”. Should Times reporters be afflicted with salary reductions of that size, one can imagine annoyance in the newsroom being widespread.

How could this be? How is it that a news organisation which purports to be America’s journal of record gets it so wrong?

Well, part of the explanation resides in the Times’ opinion of itself, best summed up by a former editor who arrogantly quipped that “it hasn’t happened until the Times reports it.” So, if Hillary lies and the Times looks the other way, she’s blameless. If an upstart news organisation gets the wood on dirty tricks, as Steve Kates notes, those revelations won’t count for a hill of beans when the Times ignores them.

And there is one other factor to explain such selective blindness — a factor the Times itself touched upon in a recent profile of Ben Rhodes, US deputy national security adviser and a lead architect of much of Obama’s foreign policy. Here it is:

“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

For what it is worth, the Times’ fact-checking can be read via the link below. Oh, and do notice the biggest dog that didn’t bark: no examination of Trump’s assertion that Mrs Clinton’s operatives and Democrat associates are in the business of voter fraud, ballot-stuffing and making sure the dead vote early and often. It didn’t bark because the Times declined to let that matter out of its kennel in the first place.

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Europe’s Terror Challenges: The Returnee Threat : Abigail Esman

Posted By on October 21st, 2016

Another week, another barrage of headlines illustrating the depth of Europe’s terror threat. The following examples came during a 24 hour window earlier this month: “Schiphol Airport Was Possibly A Target Of Terror Cell That Attacked Paris;” “Police In Brussels Stabbed In Possible Terror Attack;” and “MI5 Missed Chance To Foil Paris And Brussels Attacks.”

It is news to no one that Islamic terrorism is everywhere now, and principally in Northern and Central Europe. But the three news stories, and the Schiphol and MI5 revelations in particular, demonstrate the enormity of the challenges now facing European counterterrorism officials.

Intelligence and law enforcement continue to fumble in handling the threat, often through no real fault of their own. The perpetrators are slippery and elusive. Sometimes they travel under false names. Some slip in as refugees, using false passports and false histories. Others are returnees from Syria whose activities and encrypted Telegram communications slide beneath the radar, even as they are being watched. And overtaxed law enforcement agencies have made any number of mistakes, overlooking suspicious behavior or releasing suspects without adequate investigation – in part a consequence of political pressures and the fear of being accused of “Islamophobia” by politicians and the press.

As it turned out, the suspect in the Brussels knife attack was a former Belgian military officer already known to the police for his connections to fighters in Syria. To date, officials have not determined whether he has been to Syria or ISIS territory in Iraq.

But the contact with ISIS and other terror groups in the self-declared caliphate is a common link, not only among the known perpetrators of last November’s Paris attacks and the March attacks in Brussels, but among their alleged colleagues planning to attack Schiphol airport. Those two men, identified as the Tunisian Sofien Ayari and Syrian-Swedish Ossama Krayem, traveled by bus from Brussels to Amsterdam on Nov. 13, the day of the Paris massacre. Both used false IDs. They returned, still undetected, the following day.

Four months later, police raided a safe house used by the terror cell in Schaarbeek, a Brussels neighborhood, and retrieved a laptop computer containing files labeled “13 November.” Included in those files were documents referring not only to “Stade de France” and “Bataclan” – both targets in the Paris killings – but also to a “Schiphol group.”

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Pay to Play? Moroccan King Paid $12M to Meet with Hillary By Debra Heine

Posted By on October 21st, 2016

WikiLeaks’ 13th batch of John Podesta’s emails revealed that Morocco’s king paid $12 million to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). The payment was intended to guarantee that Hillary Clinton would appear at a conference in Morocco last year.

The star-studded guest list included heads of state and CEOs of major global corporations, who all expected Hillary Clinton to be there. But as the date for the event drew closer, it became apparent that the already-campaigning Clinton would not be able to attend.

Via Breitbart:

Clinton did not attend, instead spending the days of the conference campaigning in Nevada and California. Aide Huma Abedin repeatedly insists in emails published today that Clinton will be at the event, warning it would “break a lot of china” for Hillary Clinton to back out, before suggesting to Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook that Clinton would cancel her appearance at the last minute.

“No matter what happens, she will be in Morocco hosting CGI on May 5-7, 2015. Her presence was a condition for the Moroccans to proceed so there is no going back on this,” Abedin asserted in a November 2014 email.

In January of 2015, another email from Abedin to Robby Mook and Podesta discussed how Morocco had paid $12M to CGI in order to gain access to Clinton.

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The Roof Blows Off the Echo Chamber Trump Will Win the National Battle for Legitimacy By David P. Goldman

Posted By on October 21st, 2016

“We created an echo chamber. They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say. In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this….The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience is being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

Thus spake a certain Ben Rhodes, literary dabbler and Don DeLillo wannabe, in a stunning interview-essay by David Samuels in the New York Times last May. Rhodes was describing the sale of the Iran nuclear deal to America’s body politic, fed by media ignoramuses who dutifully repeated the echoes of the administration’s stable of putatively independent experts. But the “echo chamber” principle applies just as well to anything that the Establishment media wants to sell to the public. The trouble with echo chambers, of course, is that positive feedback can blow the roof off. That is what is happening in American politics right now.

There is no news cycle. There is no national debate. There’s no Ed Murrow, no Walter Cronkite, no figure of authority from whom the public can learn the facts with a reasonable degree of trust. We have had so many iterations of lies, cover-up, cover-up malfunction, new lies, new cover-up and new cover-up malfunction that the experts are in information overload. What is going on in the head of an ordinary voter with a passing interest in politics and ten or fifteen minutes a day to devote to news?

The answer is: Almost anything you might imagine. Sixty-two percent of Americans get at least some of their news via social media according to a Pew Research survey and the proportion is growing fast. Facebook and other social media allow individuals to customize their news consumption on the basis of recommendations and re-posting by friends, and news consumers increasingly depend on their networks rather than the media.

That’s how Steve Bannon’s Breitbart news organization, with its edgy mix of salacious gossip and right-wing politics, morphed almost overnight into a major media player. That’s why the Drudge Report got 1.47 billion page views in July. There is no way of knowing what Americans believe. Only one in nine Americans believes that Hillary Clinton is “honest and trustworthy.” They don’t trust the media’s cover-up of her misdeeds, and the cover-up of the cover-up of the cover-up.
Trump Will Win the National Battle for Legitimacy

Do they believe what the National Enquirer put at the top of its website, namely that Hillary had her “bagman” arrange lesbian trysts? Do they believe she called Muslims “sand N—ers”? Do they believe that the Clintons are responsible for 46 unsolved homicides? Or do they just believe that Bill and Hillary made $250 million by peddling influence, used a private email server to hide their self-dealing at the State Department, and lied until their faces turned blue when caught?

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James O’Keefe Says Donna Brazile’s Head May Be Next to Roll By Stephen Kruiser

Posted By on October 21st, 2016

Having already gotten Democrat operatives Scott Foval and Robert Creamer (Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky’s husband) to “resign” after the release of the first two parts of his recent sting, James O’Keefe just hinted that he’s got bigger fish to fry:

Yes we do. Oh, we’re just getting started. @donnabrazile may be forced to resign next week after what comes out. https://t.co/dmAKlCgiEq

— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) October 20, 2016

The MSM has been dismissing the videos that sunk Foval and Creamer with weak nonsense about them being “low-level” and “unknown,” despite the fact that Creamer is married to a member of Congress. If Brazile is forced to go, look for a lot of unfounded attacks on O’Keefe designed to distract. Brazile has her current job because her predecessor was forced to step down under scandalous circumstances. I would say “resign in disgrace,” but Democrats really aren’t embarrassed by their behavior.

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Clinton Foundation Subsidized Now-Imprisoned Senior Muslim Brotherhood Official :By Patrick Poole

Posted By on October 21st, 2016

Gehad El-Haddad, the now-imprisoned former spokesman for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s so-called “Freedom and Justice Party,” was effectively the “Baghdad Bob” of the Arab Spring.

Educated in the UK and the son of a top Muslim Brotherhood leader, Essam El-Haddad, the special advisor on foreign policy to deposed Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi, Gehad incited violence, justified the torture of protesters, recycled fake news stories, and staged fake scenes of confrontation during the 2013 Rabaa protests.

Gehad was arrested in September 2013 after the fall of Morsi and the bloody confrontations during the breakup of the Muslim Brotherhood’s protest camps in Rabaa Square and around Cairo.

And during his ascendancy in 2011 and 2012, at which time he served on the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Nahda” (Renaissance) Project to revive the caliphate and reinstitute Islamic law and also served as Morsi’s campaign spokesman, he was being paid by the Clinton Foundation, having been employed for five years as the Cairo director of the foundation until August 2012, according to his own LinkedIn page.

www-linkedin-com_2016-09-20_11-48-31

This shows that the Clinton Foundation effectively subsidized one of the senior Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood officials in his rapid rise to power.

His LinkedIn shows he was employed by the Clinton Foundation from August 2007 through August 2012, during which time he served in several positions within the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party.