“Italian Government Collapse More Than Just A Possibility”

Posted July 7, 2016 by Peter Hofman
Categories: Uncategorized

Italian Government Collapse More Than Just A Possibility”

by Tyler Durden

Jul 6, 2016 11:54 PM

Source: “Italian Government Collapse More Than Just A Possibility” | Zero Hedge

Submitted by Mish Shedlock of MishTalk

Four new polls show comedian Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement (M5S) ahead of prime minister  Matteo Renzi’s Democratic Party (PD) were an election held today.

The next election will be no later than May 23, 2018. Renzi promised to step down if he fails a constitutional reform referendum later this year.

The reform referendum will likely be held no later than this October.

Beppe Grillo – Comedian Founder of Five Star Movement

Renzi Rocked Yet Again

Please consider Renzi Rocked as Five Star Surges in Polls.

The populist Five Star Movement has emerged as Italy’s leading political party, overtaking Matteo Renzi’s ruling Democratic party (PD) in four separate opinion polls that have exposed the growing vulnerability of the country’s centre-left prime minister.

The primacy of the Five Star Movement, which is led by the sardonic comedian Beppe Grillo and has called for a referendum on ditching the euro, reflects a shift in public opinion against Mr Renzi that will heighten fears of a return to political instability and uncertainty in the single currency’s third largest economy.

“A government collapse is more than just a possibility, it is a scenario that we are looking at very closely,” said Federico Santi, an analyst at the Eurasia Group consultancy. “The trend has been clearly bad for the ruling party and favourable to the Five Star Movement, driven by issues — like migration, the banking troubles and corruption scandals — that are not going to go away. It’s hard to see what it could take for Renzi and the PD to make a comeback at this point.”

According to polls released on Wednesday by Ipsos, the Five Star Movement is supported by 30.6 per cent of Italians, compared with 29.8 per cent for the PD. Similar polls in January had Mr Renzi’s party leading the Five Star Movement by nearly six percentage points. In the 2014 European elections, shortly after Mr Renzi took office, the PD defeated the Five Star Movement by nearly 20 percentage points.

Three other surveys taken after the Brexit vote also showed the Five Star Movement ahead, with the next national elections due in early 2018.

One by Demos released on July 1 showed the party ahead by a margin of 32.3 per cent to 30.2 per cent over Mr Renzi’s PD. Others by Euromedia and EMG showed the Five Star Movement with narrower leads of 0.5 and 0.4 percentage points. Another poll showed the Democratic party hanging on to a narrow lead.

The polls look even darker for Mr Renzi if the likelihood of a run-off between the two largest parties — which is called for under Italy’s new electoral law if no party exceeds 40 per cent — is taken into account. In those scenarios, the Five Star Movement would defeat the PD by as much as ten percentage points, as right-wing voters would coalesce around the protest party.

Beneath the surface, there is increasing talk of what might happen should his efforts fail. Most likely, said Mr Santi, a technocratic government would have to take charge, rather than a quick move to fresh elections. But no clear candidate has yet emerged who would take the reins.

Credibility of the Italian Political Class at Stake.

Renzi asked voters to stick with him and promised an aggressive campaign in favor of the referendum.

His rationale is laughable: “The referendum is not crucial for the destiny of an individual, but for the future credibility of the Italian political class,” said Renzi.

Are voters really supposed to rally around the notion of saving the credibility of the ruling political class?

Wow! The statement is so ridiculous one has to wonder if Renzi secretly wants the referendum defeated.

40% the New Majority

The referendum would shrink the Italian senate and give a majority of parliament to any political party that could achieve 40% of the vote in national elections.

If no party achieved 40%, a runoff would take place and the winner would automatically receive a majority of parliament.

Curiously, M5S is against this reform although it may the best way for Grillo to get the vote he seeks on leaving the Euro.

Renzi Stung in Mayoral Elections

In recent mayoral elections Renzi’s party went down in defeat in in Rome, Turin, Naples and Trieste. Rome and Turin went to the Five Star Movement.

For mayoral details and details of the constitutional referendum, please see Stinging Defeat of Renzi in Italian Mayoral Elections; 40% the Proposed New Majority

Italian Banking System Near Collapse

Monte dei Paschi, the oldest bank in the world, and Italy’s third largest is so woefully undercapitalized that even the ECB recognizes that fact.

On July 4, I commented the ECB Triggers Another Bank Shares Selloff, Tells Monte dei Paschi to Shed More Assets.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the ECB are at odds with Renzi over how to fix €360 billion in nonperforming loans in the Italian banking system.

Merkel rebuffed Renzi’s request for state sponsored bank bailouts on four occasions.

On June 30, I asked Italy’s Zombie Banks on Death Bed, Bail-Ins Coming?

Merkel chastised Renzi, “We wrote the rules for the credit system, we cannot change them every two years.”

Under a bail-in scheme bondholders and depositors will take a huge hit. Voters are already angry over the bail-in of bondholder of much smaller Banca Etruria last December.

In Italy, individual investors own close to €200 billion in Italian bank bonds. Imagine the anger should they lose even a portion of their investments.

This is why Italy Threatens to Defy Merkel, Brussels Over bank Bailouts.

Italy on the Euro

What has the Euro done for Germany vs. Italy?

Voters Hold the Key

Yesterday I asked Can the EU Survive as a Prison? Who Has the Keys?

The short answer is voters hold the key, and they are already mad as hell. If bail-ins happen, it will be the end of the Renzi government for sure.

Renzi Slams Deutsche Bank

ZeroHedge has an excellent article out today on the state of Deutsche Bank through the eyes of Renzi.

Please consider A Furious Italian Prime Minister Slams Deutsche Bank As Europe’s Most Insolvent Bank

 In a surprising admission of reality, none other than Italy’s prime minister Matteo Renzi, “went there” and slammed Deutsche Bank as the true “derivative problem” facing Europe.

As Reuters adds, speaking at a joint news conference with Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, Renzi said other European banks had much bigger problems than their Italian counterparts.

“If this non-performing loan problem is worth one, the question of derivatives at other banks, at big banks, is worth one hundred. This is the ratio: one to one hundred,” Renzi said

So just like that the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine is activated, because now that Deutsche Bank’s dirty laundry has been exposed for all to see, Renzi’s gambit is clear: if Merkel does not relent on bailing out Italian banks, the collapse of Italian banks will assure the failure of Deutsche Bank in kind.

Also see Diving Into Deutsche Bank’s “Passion to Perform” Balance Sheet.

This kind of insanity is precisely why the euro is doomed.

Get Out Now!

I repeat my warning from last December: Get Your Money Out of Italian Banks Now!

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Why Trump Will Win in November

Posted July 7, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: 2016 elections, Corruption, Democrats, Donald Trump, Foreign policy, Hillary Clinton, History, Lawlessness, national security, Never Trumpers, Politics, Rule of Law
Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Why Trump Will Win in November, Front Page Magazine, David Horowitz, July 7, 2016

hj_1

Reprinted from Breitbart.com.

In elections generally – but this one in particular – things are not always what they seem. Take the apparent exculpation of Hillary by FBI director James Comey. The Democrats responded with a statement that the issue had now been “resolved” because the target had not been indicted. But not so fast. The failure to indict was not an exoneration, and what the public witnessed – the secret meeting between the head of Justice and the target’s husband, the job offer to her would-be prosecutor, and the FBI’s  dossier of her misdeeds – was in effect a second trial, and it came with a conviction. The former Secretary of State had lied to Congress and the public, and not about private matters like sexual escapades with interns. She had lied about national security matters, and was reckless in handling secrets that affect the safety of all Americans. Worse, the fact she appeared to be getting away with a serious crime was a dramatic confirmation of Trump’s campaign narrative: the system is corrupt, the fix is in, I will change all this.

The Comey episode also turned a lot of Republican heads – most notably Paul Ryan’s – that had been openly skeptical of Trump’s candidacy, and lukewarm in endorsing his campaign. Until that moment, the failure of some Republicans to rally behind the Republican nominee, indeed to refrain from seconding Democrat attacks, has been the chief weakness of Trump’s candidacy. When Trump objected to an obviously biased judge – a member of “La Raza” and opponent of securing the border – Ryan and other Republicans joined the Democrats in the ludicrous charge that Trump was a racist. (What Republican candidate in the last thirty years have the Democrats not slandered as racist?) But Ryan is not attacking Trump now. Instead he is calling on officials to remove Hillary’s security clearance – a strong signal to voters that she is not fit to be commander-in-chief, and a powerful reinforcement of Trump’s campaign theme.

At the moment, Trump is in a virtual dead heat with Hillary, which is remarkable considering the slanderous attacks on his character not only by Democrats but by the chorus of #NeverTrump Republicans who have also called him a sexist and xenophobe, and have compared him to Mussolini and Hitler. These negatives have hurt him but will ultimately fail for the same reason that the anti-Trump attacks in the primary failed. Trump is not an unknown quantity. He has been in front of the American public for thirty or forty years. Nothing in the public record would validate the charge Trump is a racist, let alone Hitler. Consequently these negatives are unlikely to over-ride the actual issues when voters make the judgments that will determine the election. At the same time, the obviousness of the slanders merely serves to confirm Trump’s narrative that corrupt elites fear him and will do anything to prevent him from upsetting their applecarts.

The reason Trump will win in November is that national security is at the top of voter concerns and Trump has been a strong advocate on this front. Beginning with his promise to build a wall, made national security issues – vetting Syrian Muslim refugees, rebuilding the military, “bombing the sh-t” out of ISIS and naming the enemy – have been centerpieces of his campaign. Of course he has also had help from the terrorists who carried out the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino and Orlando, and from a feckless Obama who refuses to recognize the Islamist threat. But so did Mitt Romney, who had Benghazi and Fort Hood and the same feckless commander-in-chief to work with. Romney, however, chose not to do so. He took the war issue off the table when he embraced Obama’s foreign policy in the third presidential debate and never tried to make it central again.

Since World War II no Republican has won the popular vote in a presidential election where national security has not been a primary issue. The one seeming exception is Bush’s victory in 2000. But Bush did not win the popular vote even though he was able to get the necessary majority in the electoral college.  In this election, Trump has instinctively seized the high ground on national security. He has put the disasters of Obama’s Middle East retreats front and center, and challenged the crippling denial of the commander-in-chief and his failure to take appropriate measures to defeat our enemies at home and abroad.

Thanks to nearly eight years of a party in power that refuses to secure our borders and is more interested in disarming law-abiding Americans than confronting the terror threat in our midst, national security is now a primary issue on the minds of all Americans. Donald Trump speaks to those concerns in a way that the damaged and compromised Hillary cannot. Her fingerprints are all over the disastrous Obama policies in the Middle East. National security is an issue that crosses party lines and also gender lines. Even more important, it is an issue that unifies the Republican coalition, whose current disunity is Trump’s greatest weakness. With the fallout from Hillary’s server fail as a backdrop, Trump should be able to bring his party together at the upcoming convention, and go on to secure a victory in November.

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Iranian military official: We have 100,000 missiles in Lebanon ready to hit Israel

Posted July 7, 2016 by Peter Hofman
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Iranian military official: We have 100,000 missiles in Lebanon ready to hit Israel

By ARIEL BEN SOLOMON \

07/03/2016 11:47

Source: Iranian military official: We have 100,000 missiles in Lebanon ready to hit Israel – Arab-Israeli Conflict – Jerusalem Post

According to Hossein Salami, deputy commander of the IRGC, “the opportunity to destroy Israel is now better than ever.”

President Hassan Rouhani said the last year’s nuclear deal “was the cheapest way to achieve Iran’s goals and interests.”

Speaking in Tehran on Saturday at an iftar meal breaking the Ramadan fast, Rouhani said the pre-Iran nuclear-deal era is past and Iran now needs to take advantage of the new atmosphere to pursue its “national interests more than before,” Iran’s Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

The country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday called for student associations to establish a “unified anti-US and anti-Zionist front” among the Muslim world’s students, Tasnim News Agency reported.
“By using advanced means of communication and in cyberspace, general campaigns can be formed by Muslim students based on the opposition to the policies of the US and the Zionist regime of Israel so that when needed, millions of young Muslim students create a big movement in the Islamic world,” he said.

Khamenei also warned against plots by enemies seeking to sabotage the country.

Separately, on Saturday, Fars News Agency reported a senior official of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards as having said Israel’s Iran Dome anti-rocket system has vulnerabilities that were revealed in recent wars.
On a similar note, the deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Brig.-Gen.

Hossein Salami, said on Friday “more than 100,000 missiles are ready to fly from Lebanon,” according to Tasnim.

“Today, the grounds for the annihilation and collapse of the Zionist regime are [present] more than ever,” he declared, saying there are “tens of thousands of destructive long-range missiles” from Islamic territories aiming at all of “occupied” Israel.

“If the Zionists make a wrong move, all the occupied territories will come under attack from dedicated fighters and, God willing, the territories will be liberated,” Salami warned.

On Friday, Rouhani accused Western powers of trying to exploit differences between the world’s Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims to divert attention from the Israel-Palestinian conflict, state television reported.

“We stand with the dispossessed Palestinian nation,” he said.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Nigel Farage Press Conference: Brexit – Let’s Get Things Started

Posted July 7, 2016 by Peter Hofman
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , ,
Published on Jul 6, 2016

http://www.ukipmeps.org | http://www.ukip.org/join
• European Parliament, Strasbourg, 06 July 2016

 

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We Saved Our Democracy

Posted July 7, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: BREXIT, Britain, Democracy, Europe, European Union
Tags: , , , ,

We Saved Our Democracy, Pat Condell via YouTube, July 7, 2016

(Perhaps American will vote for her own Brexit on November 8th. — DM)

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French Prisons: Universities of Jihad

Posted July 7, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Crime, France, Islamic invasion, Islamic radicalization, Islamic training camps, Muslims in prison, Obama's America
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French Prisons: Universities of Jihad, Clarion Project, Leslie Shaw, July 7, 2016

PrisonMuslimHP_0_0Photo: Video screenshot)

Sociologist and author Farhad Khosrokhavar has estimated that Muslims make up between 50 and 80 percent of prison inmates in France. Given that Muslims account for between seven and eight percent of the French population, this means that they are either more prone to crime than the indigenous French population, or that they are victims of discrimination by French law enforcement.

Given that many offenders are not behind bars but out on parole, wearing electronic bracelets, under house arrest or were not jailed on conviction but benefited from the leniency of the criminal courts, the real figure for the share of Islam in French crime is probably much higher than Khosrokhhavar’s estimate.

One of the disadvantages of this high proportion of Muslim inmates is that French prisons have become universities of jihad and incubators of terrorism.

French prison authorities were aware of the problem of radicalization way before the Charlie Hebdo attacks of January 2015. Mohamed Merah, who killed seven people (including three schoolchildren) in Toulouse in 2012 and Mehdi Nemmouche, who killed four people at the Jewish museum in Brussels in 2014, had been radicalized in prison.

The Kouachi brothers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo attack had also rallied to the cause of radical Islam while doing jail time. But when prison governors notified the authorities of the rise in Islamic radicalism, they were not only ignored but accused of Islamophobia.

Official figures indicate that 18,000 Muslim inmates observe Ramadan. There are currently only 182 Muslim prison chaplains, a situation which contributes to the influence of self-styled imams from the Muslim prison constituency.

In that constituency, 1,400 have been identified as radical Islamists of which 300 are linked to terrorism. The extent to which Islamist extremists indulge in and spread their ideology is astonishing.

Calls to prayer are made from prison windows. Inmates who are considered “bad” Muslims — those who watch television, do not rise at dawn to pray or do not wear a jellaba after sunset — are expelled from their cells by their radical co-religionists.

Female Muslim visitors who wear Western-style clothing are insulted and some have resorted to changing into Islamic robes in the parking lot before visits. In 2014, 1,012 cellphones found in prisons were seized, of which 50 percent contained Facebook accounts, some with links to Syria and Yemen.

The most common argument used to entice new recruits is to tell them that they will be absolved of their sins and gain entry to paradise if they commit to waging violent jihad upon release.

In January 2015 Prime Minister Manuel Valls unveiled an $800 million project to combat the spread of radical Islam including the creation of dedicated prison units (U2P or Units for the Prevention of Proselytism) where Islamists would be separated from other prisoners. The project was rolled out in five5 prisons at a cost of $17 million.

One prison governor expressed scepticism at the scheme, saying it would not prevent the recruitment of prisoners to the cause of jihad.

“If we want to separate the radical inmates from the rest of the prison population, we would need to build a French Guantanamo. Is that what we want?” he asked.

A member of the national security intelligence service shares this view. “Our prisons are cauldrons of radicalization. Terrorist inmates are heroes and this facilitates proselytism and recruitment.”

The real question to consider is what restrictions on freedom are acceptable in the interest of national security.

A report published on July 6, 2016 by the inspector general of prisons evaluates the result of this project and the judgement is far from favorable.

Between February and May 2016, three inspectors visited four prisons and interviewed 64 U2P inmates and their handlers. The report concludes that the experimental model is unrealistic given the overpopulation in prisons and presents more disadvantages than advantages.

Moreover, the structures put in place are inappropriate given the scale of the problem and the spectacular increase in people (over 1,000) currently indicted for terrorism. The initial objective of combating proselytism has been supplanted by that of gathering radicalized inmates in single units.

The report echoes the concerns of counter-terrorism magistrates that putting radical Islamists together will facilitate bonding, networking and the intimidation of vulnerable inmates. While radicals in the U2Ps are held in private cells, they are still not completely sealed off from the rest of the inmates and continue to spread their ideology.

The isolation of jihadists in U2Ps is accompanied by deradicalization programs, which consist of lessons in citizenship, lectures and debates on political violence and structured seminars on disengagement from violence for groups of six to eight over a three-month period on a voluntary basis.

Commenting on the report, Guillaume Denoix de Saint-Marc, director of the French Association for Victims of Terrorism, stated that the only way to eliminate prison radicalization is to “make inmates reflect in order to prepare for their release.”

Given the high rate of repeat offending and the crossover from juvenile delinquency to violent crime and ultimately to jihad, such a statement belongs more in the realm of wishful thinking than reality.

Radicalization is also taking place at an alarming rate in prisons in the U.S. Watch a clip from the Clarion film, The Third Jihad: 

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Chaffetz: If an Average Joe did what Hillary Clinton did, they’d be in handcuffs

Posted July 7, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Clinton e-mails, FBI, Hillary Clinton, US Congress
Tags: , ,

Chaffetz: If an Average Joe did what Hillary Clinton did, they’d be in handcuffs, Washington Free Beacon via YouTube, July 7, 2016

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Why Hillary Clinton Must go to Jail

Posted July 7, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: 2016 elections, Clinton Crime Family, Clinton e-mails, Department of Justice, FBI, Hillary Clinton, Sexist
Tags: , , , ,

Why Hillary Clinton Must go to Jail, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, July 7, 2016

Jail to the Chief

In 1994, Hillary Clinton took questions under a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Wearing a pink pantsuit, she offered what would become her customary mix of lies and defensiveness, admitting to something and then trying to shift the blame, denying that she had broken the law and then claiming ignorance.

It was an act that we would see over and over again for the next few decades, but back then it was still new when Hillary Clinton claimed that she couldn’t remember anything, that the whole Whitewater affair was an invasion of her privacy and that she had never meant to do anything wrong.

Some twenty years later, we have spent the past few months witnessing the same performance.

She blamed sexism for Whitewater. “It’s a little difficult for us as a country, maybe, to make the transition of having a woman like many of the women in this room, sitting in this house.” Her supporters claim that her email scandal is caused by sexism rather than her blatant violation of the law.

“I do feel like I’ve always been a fairly private person leading a public life,” Hillary Clinton whined about the examination of her shady investments. This time around she claimed that her whole rogue email server filled with classified documents was an attempt at protecting her classified yoga routines.

The truth, then and now, is that Hillary Clinton is a public figure who claims that her private life is being invaded whenever she gets caught violating the law.

Then there are the vague statements that almost sound like apologies, but aren’t. “I’m not in any way excusing any confusion that we have created,” she said of Whitewater. But the only confusion was Hillary’s efforts to make her critics appear to be confused. On her emails, she said that she was “sorry that it has raised all these questions.” Which is another way of saying that she was sorry she got caught.

Finally there is the politician who would be president playing dumb. Hillary Clinton didn’t understand how investments worked back then. She doesn’t understand how emails work now. When all else fails, Hillary Clinton will plead incompetence and then claim that she wants to focus on fixing health care.

Investments are confusing. Email accounts are confusing. Someone please put her in charge of something simple. Like health care for the entire country. Or maybe just the entire country.

No one trusts her and no one believes that she will ever be held accountable.

In 1998, prosecutors had the evidence to bring charges against Hillary Clinton. They chose not to act because they did notbelieve that she would be convicted. If that sounds familiar, it should.

FBI Director James Comey got up in front of the country and laid out a criminal case against Hillary over her email abuses and then announced that no prosecutor would ever take it. The material was there and it still is there. But no one in authority believes that Hillary Clinton will ever be held accountable.

Back then the evidence was too circumstantial. This time around there’s no definitive proof of criminal intent. Each time Hillary Clinton plays dumb, plays the victim and then urges everyone to move on.

Hillary Clinton lied about Whitewater. She lied about her covert email operation. Comey’s exoneration was more like an indictment, sweeping aside her lies about her classified correspondence. But that too is nothing new. Hillary Clinton has always lied and her lies are always exposed. Her fallback position is to argue that no one can prove that she knew she was committing a crime. Out of that mix of denials, partial admissions, non-apologies, misleading lawyerly statements, comes that final defense.

You can’t prove that I knew I was committing a crime.

This time around, the FBI could prove that she broke the law, that she lied about breaking the law and that she knew the law, but not that she intended to break the law. That brand of absurdity has gotten her off before. And it worked once again at the most crucial moment of her career.

Hillary Clinton trails a pattern of crimes and cover-ups dating back decades. And still no one can prove that she knew that was committing the crimes that she committed. Her associates have gone to jail. Her alibis have been shredded. But instead of heading to jail, she is aiming at the White House.

And that’s inevitable.

The Clinton crimes have always come down to politics. From Whitewater onwards, the Clintons got rich and powerful by exploiting their political connections. The Clinton Foundation and its rainbow of cash, from sources foreign and domestic, is just Whitewater writ large. The email scandal is the same old Clinton records game that they have been playing for decades being conducted with more high tech tools.

The Clinton server is more impressive than Sandy Berger burglarizing the National Archives for classified documents about Bill’s failure to fight Islamic terrorism, but it’s not really any different.

Berger’s burglary was dubbed an “honest mistake.” Hillary’s rogue email server? Another mistake, but only because “It’s caused all this uproar and commotion.” After she blatantly lied about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire, she smugly retorted, “So I made a mistake. That happens. It shows I’m human, which for some people is a revelation.”

It’s a revelation only because it’s the one single thing that she never lied about.

A trail of lies and scandals isn’t a mistake. It’s a record. Hillary Clinton has been entirely consistent in her criminal career. And just as consistently, she has never faced any consequences for her crimes.

Every time she might have been held accountable, investigations were written off as partisan witch hunts and prosecutors and law enforcement backed off convinced that trying to prosecute her would be futile. And that’s a mistake. Corruption grows when there is no accountability.

When Bill Clinton meets with the Attorney General, when the FBI Director makes a show of pardoning Hillary right before his boss goes to campaign for her, the message is that those in power can play by a different set of rules than ordinary people. And that is another way of saying that our society is corrupt.

If the Clintons can commit any crime that they like without being held accountable, that sends a message to ordinary people that we are not a nation of laws, but of special interests. It becomes harder to ask the average person to do the right thing when their leaders profit by doing the wrong thing.

The Clintons have amassed fortune, power and fame by being crooked. Holding them accountable is not just about partisan political battles, but about our integrity and our ethics as a nation.

Even many Democrats are disgusted by the Clintons. Comey’s speech was not met with celebrations, but with disgust. Media outlets compiled every example of how the FBI Director had shredded Hillary’s alibi.  Everyone understood what had happened here. The only ones celebrating this shameful miscarriage of justice were the Clintons, their corrupt cronies and amoral associates.

During her Whitewater conference, Hillary Clinton claimed, “I don’t want anybody to have the wrong impressions of either of us.” The trouble is that the entire nation has the right impression of her.

America deserves leaders who inspire us to be better people. And we can’t have that until we start holding corrupt politicians accountable. It is time for Americans from all parties and political backgrounds to demand an end to the immunity of the Clinton Crime Family.

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Palestinian Authority Pays Terrorists, Families $140M a Year

Posted July 7, 2016 by Peter Hofman
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Palestinian Authority Pays Terrorists and Their Families $140 Million a Year Palestinians using foreign aid to reward terrorists for acts that kill Israelis

BY:
July 7, 2016 5:00 am

Source: Palestinian Authority Pays Terrorists, Families $140M a Year

The Palestinian Authority spends roughly 10 percent of its annual budget paying terrorists who attack Israelis and supporting their families, according to expert testimony to congressional lawmakers.

Yigal Carmon, the president and founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee Wednesday that the Palestinian Authority is investing $137.8 million this year in salaries to terrorists jailed in Israel and payments to the families of imprisoned terrorists or suicide bombers, in violated of the Oslo peace accords with Israel.

Wednesday’s hearing took place following a months-long wave of violent attacks waged by Palestinians on Israelis in the West Bank. Last week, a Palestinian attacker broke into a home in the West Bank and stabbed to death a 13-year-old Israeli-American girl in her sleep.

There have been 250 such attacks or attempted attacks by Palestinians on Israelis since October 2015, according to the report of the Middle East Quartet—comprised of the United States, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations—issued last week. The assaults have killed at least 30 Israelis and resulted in dozens of Palestinians being killed by Israeli police.

Official Palestinian Authority media have glorified perpetrators of these terrorist attacks. Bashar Masalha, a Palestinian who stabbed U.S. Army veteran Taylor Force to death and wounded several others in March, was hailed on official media outlets as a “martyr” at the time of his funeral.

“We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas stated last September on Palestinian television. “With the help of Allah, every martyr will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward.”

The Palestinian Authority has also furnished terrorists and their families with financial support weighted by the severity of the attack, a matter over which congressional lawmakers expressed outrage on Wednesday.

“These terrorists are not, in fact, lone rangers. They are not lone wolves,” said Rep. Ed Royce (R., Calif.), who chairs the committee, in opening remarks during the hearing. “Instead, these terrorists are the product of the programming done by the PA’s perverted culture that glorifies the willingness to die or to spend time in prison in pursuit of killing or maiming Israelis.”

According to Carmon’s testimony, which was informed by an analysis of the Palestinian Authority’s budget and years of research, the Palestinian Authority transfers funds to terrorist prisoners in Israeli or their families using two Palestinian Liberation Organization funds. The financial support of these individuals is mandated by law.

Prisoners must be provided a monthly salary ranging from $364 to over $3,000 during their detention, and salaries or jobs upon their release. Those who commit the most grievous attacks receive the most substantial monthly payments and are also entitled to jobs in the Palestinian Authority institution upon their release.

Carmon said that it is difficult to determine exactly what percentage of the Palestinian Authority’s annual budget is put toward this cause because of a lack of transparency, but estimated that it amounts to about 10 percent.

“It is just outrageous that they pay cold-blooded killers who murder innocent people and call them martyrs,” Rep. Eliot Engel (D., N.Y.), the committee’s ranking member, said during the hearing. “I cannot think of anything more disgusting.”

While Abbas two years ago ordered that these salaries not be paid by the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Prisoners’ Affairs but instead by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Carmon described this as a “deliberately misleading move” to assuage concerns from donor countries worried about their money being funneled to terrorists.

“The source of the money remains the PA, which receives them from donor countries, and the overseeing body remains none other than the PA,” Carmon told lawmakers. He said that countries who provide aid to Palestine, including the United States, are “complicit” in inciting terrorism because the Palestinian Authority uses foreign donations to subsidize terrorists and their families.

“By providing this support, the PA is encouraging terrorism in violation of its Oslo commitment.

Furthermore, the PA has been using money granted by donor countries for this purpose, and by doing so, has made them complicit in encouraging terrorism as well,” Carmon said.

The United States has committed over $5 billion in bilateral economic and non-lethal aid to the Palestinians since the mid-1990s in order to prevent Palestinian terrorist groups from attacking Israel and promote piece in the West Bank, according to a Congressional Research Service report issued in March.

While U.S. law allows the government to cut aid to the Palestinian Authority for paying terrorists and their families, the Palestinian Authority has avoided this by transferring the payments to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, experts said Wednesday.

“The U.S. stipulations have … been evaded by the PA by this deceitful technique of funneling money to terrorists and their families under a different name,” said David Pollock, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“I think that the United States and other countries should … reduce the amount or condition the amount of assistance that they provide to the PA without threatening to or without actually cutting it off completely,” Pollock, added, cautioning that completely ceasing aid could result in the collapse of the Palestinian Authority.

“I do think that a certain calibrated, limited amount of financial pressure applied, again, by the United States without any loopholes or escape hatches and, if possible, by European and other donors to the PA would be helpful in addressing this immediate issue,” Pollock added.

Members of Congress have pursued legislative action to address this problem. A Senate subcommittee recently approved language inserted into the fiscal year 2017 State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill that would cut U.S. aid to Palestine by an amount equal to that “expended by the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization and any successor or affiliated organizations, as payments for acts of terrorism by individuals who are imprisoned after being fairly tried and convicted for acts of terrorism, and by individuals who died committing acts of terrorism during the previous calendar year.”

The companion bill in the House also includes similar language. The State Department would be responsible for enforcing the law.

Israel has already implemented such action. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Friday that the country would withhold some tax revenues that it sends to the Palestinian Authority. The amount withheld will be equal to what is “being transferred by the Palestinian Authority to terrorists and their families,” though it is unclear how much it will be.

Some members of Congress took a hardline approach toward the issue on Wednesday. Rep. Ted Yoho (R., Fla.) said that the United States should send a clear message to Palestine that “if these policies continue, we’re done.”

“We are funding hatred. We are funding terrorism,” Yoho said, labeling it “unconscionable” to provide aid to Palestine in the name of peace while the Palestinian Authority is subsidizing terrorists.

Royce said that the United States and its European allies must do more to use leverage against Palestinian Authority to halt the practice of rewarding terrorists.

“If the PA’s irresponsible behavior continues, the whole premise for funding the PA needs to be reconsidered. The U.S. needs to do better at bringing the parties together while holding the parties responsible for their actions. This has traditionally been our role,” Royce said. “Unfortunately, in recent years, the Obama administration has been hesitant to hold the PA accountable—yet has consistently pressured Israel.”

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Attorney General Lynch accepts FBI recommendation to clear Clinton of wrongdoing

Posted July 7, 2016 by danmillerinpanama
Categories: Clinton e-mails, Department of Justice, FBI, Hillary Clinton
Tags: , ,

Attorney General Lynch accepts FBI recommendation to clear Clinton of wrongdoing, Washington Free Beacon, Sara Westwood, July 6, 2016

(Surprise! Who would have expected Lynch to do that?. — DM)

Attorney General Loretta Lynch officially accepted the FBI’s recommendation that neither Hillary Clinton nor any of her aides should face criminal charges Wednesday, effectively ending the year-long investigation into their handling of classified information.

Lynch said in a statement she had met with FBI Director James Comey and career prosecutors earlier Wednesday and accepted their “unanimous” recommendations to close the case without bringing an indictment against anyone involved.

Her ruling came one day after Comey publicly blasted the former secretary of state for her “extremely careless” treatment of sensitive material before suggesting the FBI had not uncovered enough evidence to support a criminal case.

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