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Clinton Ignores Questions About Father of Orlando Shooter Attending Her Rally

August 9, 2016

Clinton Ignores Questions About Father of Orlando Shooter Attending Her Rally, Washington Free Beacon,, August 9, 2016

Hillary Clinton ignored questions on Tuesday about whether she knew that the father of the Orlando shooter was going to attend her rally in Kissimmee, Florida on Monday.

Reporters asked Clinton about Seddique Mateen–father of Omar Mateen, the terrorist who killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub in June–attending her campaign event as a supporter. Clinton dodged the questions from reporters after delivering remarks about the dangers of the Zika Virus to medical staff and other health representatives at the Borinquen Medical Centers of Miami-Dade.

Mateen, a Taliban sympathizer, attended Clinton’s rally on Monday and was seated behind the Democratic nominee. He at first refused to answer questions regarding the rally, but hours later WPTV ran into him and they asked about Clinton.

“Hillary Clinton is good for United States versus Donald Trump, who has no solutions,” Mateen told WPTV.

Categories: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Orlando massacre, Taliban
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A brutal Trump AD

August 9, 2016

A brutal Trump AD, Power Line,  John Hinderaker, August 8, 2016

This ad by the Donald Trump campaign is a good reminder of why I plan to vote for him, despite his flaws. It is brutal but 100% accurate and fair:

Categories: 2016 elections, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton
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A Hillary Clinton Presidency Would Be An American Tragedy

August 8, 2016

A Hillary Clinton Presidency Would Be An American Tragedy, PJ Media, Roger L Simon, August 7, 2016

tragedy

The American people are generally goodhearted. Historically, most presidents have a honeymoon period when they are newly elected. The majority of our citizens want them to do well, at least for a while.

This cannot happen for Hillary Clinton. Over half the country, even many who will have voted for her, do not believe she is remotely honest. Almost as many believe criminal charges should have been brought against her for her email scandal. They are convinced, quite arguably, that were her name not Clinton, she would be in jail.

And this before what we have just now learned–how serious, even fatal to our (and humanity’s) best friends, her use of an easily hacked home-brew email server could be.

Hillary Clinton recklessly discussed, in emails hosted on her private server, an Iranian nuclear scientist who was executed by Iran for treason, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Sunday.”I’m not going to comment on what he may or may not have done for the United States government, but in the emails that were on Hillary Clinton’s private server, there were conversations among her senior advisors about this gentleman,” he said on “Face the Nation.” Cotton was speaking about Shahram Amiri, who gave information to the U.S. about Iran’s nuclear program.

The senator said this lapse proves she is not capable of keeping the country safe.

To say the least, but there’s more.

Many do not think Clinton is even a moral human being. Any person who could lie to the parents of the dead over the fresh caskets of their sons, as Clinton has apparently done with the Benghazi victims–if you believe the testimony of the parents themselves as many of us do–has lost contact with basic human values.

So Hillary Clinton would be beginning her incumbency with an unprecedented level of distrust, even disgust, for an incoming president and it is hard to conceive how she could regain the public confidence necessary to govern. What could she say or do? Continue to lie, as she did yet again at her recent press conference and interview with Chris Wallace? Suddenly tell the truth after decades of dissembling? The result would be a psychic unraveling so extreme she would likely dissolve like the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz.

No, she would undoubtedly do her best to ignore everything while a Damoclean sword in the form of  the +/- 33,000 emails, depending on what transpires between now and November, hung over her head. Who knows what’s in them? Hillary undoubtedly doesn’t like to think about it herself, but stress and endless prevarication have clearly taken a toll on her. Most 68-year old women I know can walk up the stairs by themselves.

According to FBI Director Comey, her lawyers don’t know what was in the emails either, even though they supposedly supervised their deletion. They only read the subject lines, they testified. To know the truth, it should be obvious, would have been inconvenient for them.

It’s also obvious from the mass releases so far from all sides that her server could have been permeated by who knows how many parties, state and non-state. This would lead to the inevitable.  Every even slightly controversial policy decision she makes as president would be open to question—and for good reason. Is someone blackmailing her?

And what about the Clinton Foundation? Suppose Putin — or someone else for whatever reason… destabilizing the United States perhaps — decides to reveal information definitively tying the Clintons to treasonous activities with foreign companies, potential “high crimes and misdemeanors” of the kind we are beginning to learn about in the uranium business. An impeachment trial would follow that dwarfs in implications any such trials before. Many would be swept up in it.

Is this a stretch? Not at all. More a likelihood. We’ve already seen enough of this in Clinton Cash, book and movie, to know how real it is. People aren’t going to stop looking for the truth if Hillary is elected, nor should they.

No, a Hillary Clinton presidency would be An American Tragedy waiting to happen—and not just a symbolic one like that described by Theodore Dreiser in his classic novel of that title, but one that engulfs the whole country and the world. In that worst-case scenario, our lives would never be the same.

Civil war is even a possibility. I never thought that until now, but when the rule of law has been broken, no telling what will happen.

For that reason, I desperately hope that Donald Trump will prevail, as unproven, erratic and self-destructive as he often is. I was truly disheartened the last couple of weeks. Like many, I haven’t come close to sleeping through the night. The man seemed incapable of reform.

But Friday evening there was a reprieve. Donald Trump the grown-up reappeared as he relented in his battles with people he should never have been fighting in the first place. For all our sakes, now more than ever, he should hold firm to this approach. No more dumb mistakes, if he can possibly manage it. Somebody has to prevent this American Tragedy.

As Trump himself has said, it’s not about him. It sure isn’t. Not in the slightest. It’s about us. Try to remember that, Donald, or our country is in trouble as never before.

Categories: 2016 elections, Clinton character, Clinton Foundation, Clinton unsecured server, Donald Trump
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The Press and Pollsters Are Putting Too Much Cornstarch in the Cherry Pie

August 7, 2016

The Press and Pollsters Are Putting Too Much Cornstarch in the Cherry Pie, American Thinker, Clarice Feldman, August 7, 2016

That’s the short take of my friend Thomas Lipscomb and I have to agree with him

Contrary to most of the media-sponsored polls (The LA Times stands alone now calling the race a tie at last view), I agree with this one: Trump will draw in millions of voters who didn’t show up to the polls before and he will beat Hillary Clinton.

I don’t pretend to be a polling expert but note others who claim to be have said much the same thing using different statistical methodologies, including Yale Professor Ray Fair (economic models) and Emory University President Alan Abramowitz (presidential approval ratings), Politik.com predicts a landslide, noting in recent years the number of people voting for Democrats has dipped while the number of those voting for Republicans has risen.

Conservative Treehouse has argued along the same lines and notes that the NYT buried its own key finding that American voters are whiter than “historic leftist presentations”.

It projects that 73,272,595 Republicans will vote this fall in the general election.

That jaw-dropping number, 7.2 million more potential votes than Barack Obama carried in 2008 and almost 13 million more than Mitt Romney carried in 2012, is the least result achievable when you turn out THE MONSTER VOTE.

[snip]

What the New York Times is statistically beginning to quantify is the existence of The Monster Vote. If you look closely at the data behind their newly discovered 10 million potential/predictable voters, you’ll notice the additional votes carry to exactly what we predicted in February.

Even if Republican projection turnout was off by 5 million votes, Trump still wins in a landslide. Heck, even if the projection turnout was off by a staggering 10 million votes, the republican nominee (Trump) would still get more votes than President Obama did in 2012 and it is highly doubtful Hillary could turn out that level of support.

♦ Even the fact the NYT would write such an article tells you there are interests (financial interests, globalists) who are looking closely and trying to quantify the challenge they have in front of them.

♦ Remember, even in honest scientific polling — the poll methodologies are based on “assumptions”, or inputs into the collected poll samples in order to make them representative of the anticipated turnout.

♦ Thanks to Donald Trump, historic turnout trends are obsolete. Additionally, historic demographics and party affiliations are also obsolete; And, more importantly, as a consequence…

…any poll data that is relying on obsolete sample methodology is going to be significantly inaccurate.

I don’t know about the methodologies or baselines used by nationally recognized polling companies this year, but I note that Democratic pollster Pat Caddell recently said Reuters midstream shift in its tracking polls comes as close as I have ever seen to cooking the results.”

There are methods for projecting and allocating undecided voters based on complex attitude structures, based on many questions that tell the pollster that this person is in movement to support someone, he said. “Sometimes, they are hiding. That happens. Particularly in the past, or in racially-sensitive cases.”

Caddell cited two examples to Breitbart News.

“On July 25, they originally reported: Trump 40.3 percent and Clinton 37.2 percent, which was a Trump margin of 2.8,” he said. “They have recalculated that now — which I have never heard of — they changed that data, to be: Clinton 40.9 and Trump 38.4, which is a 2.5 margin for Clinton.”

The July 25 Reuters poll now shows a result that reflects a 5.3 percentage point flip from the previously published results, he said.

“Now look at July 26,” he said. “On July 26 they had Trump at 41.5 percent and Hillary at 36.3. That was a 5.2 Trump margin. Then, in the new calculation, they claim that Clinton was 41.1 percent, Trump was 37.5, and the margin was 3.6 for Clinton. Same poll. Two different results. Recalculated, after you’ve announced the other results.”

“What you get is an 8.8 percentage point margin change, almost nine points swinging from one candidate, based on some phony, some bizarre allocation theory that you claim you know where these people are or you are just leaving them out,” he said. “I actually believe they are allocating them because they are claiming they are really Clinton voters and they are using something to move them to Clinton.”

As Mickey Kaus has long noted, many polls are “hamburger helper polls”, that is designed to advance a point of view of the press organs which engage the pollsters so they can promote as fact what is merely their opinion.

In any event, the recent coverage of the election by the major media suggest to me that they are panicking and throwing in as much as they can to make Hillary look as if she were a far better candidate — or at least Trump a far weaker one — than is the case. Obama’s unpresidential and unprecedented attack on Trump, the low turnout at her rallies (and cancellation of some of her appearances), the huge turnout everywhere for Trump, the promoting of the Khan phony baloney story, the Reuters polling change, the  daily press sleight of hand  all suggest to me panic  there is on the left.

The Khan Con

The media fairytale is that Trump dissed a Gold Star family. In fact, it was the other way around. The Democrats used the father of a military hero who died at the hands of Muslim enemies to argue that Trump was wrong in wanting us to suspend immigration from terrorist countries until we had better means to vet them.

How far overboard on this did the media go? This week a number of press and photographers just happened to show up at the same time as two families showed up to pay their respects, the Washington Post even had a shot of one wiping a dry eye. Thomas Sowell long pegged such people as the Khans as “mascots of the anointed”. My friend Janet Shagam has documented the coverage by press which thinks we are dumb enough not to realize this was a staged performance:

* Muslim Soldier’s Grave at Arlington National Cemetery Attracts Visitors After Trump’s Remarks About Parents

NBC Washington 4 —

* Humayun Khan’s grave becomes a shrine in the wake of his father’s speech

Washington Post —

* Strangers visit grave of Muslim US Army Capt. Khan at Arlington National Cemetery

ABC 7 News —

from the WaPo link – “Sally Schwartz, 65, and her mother, Harriet Schwartz, 85, stood before the grave. Harriet leaned on a black cane.

“We thought we’d pay our respects,” Sally Schwartz said as the women walked away. ”

From the NBC link – “D.C. resident Sally Schwartz visited Khan’s grave on Monday with her mother.”

The local ABC coverage — The story doesn’t quote Sally Schwartz but she is pictured in the video.

As for the Benghazi soldiers’ survivors there has been scant coverage — even though we know our government not only left them to die but also compounded the crime by lying to them about the motivations of their killers. In the words of another online friend “Iggy”, they were merely “unpeople from Jesusland”.

The same was true of Mary Ann Mendoza, Sabine Durden, and Jamiel Shaw, whose children were killed by illegal aliens, Spanish speakers watching Univision and Telemundo heard they were “anti-immigrant” and gave them only 55 seconds of air time.

Covering for Congenital Liar Hillary is Getting Harder and Harder

Hillary keeps lying about Comey’s report, which said clearly she lied about her private email server. While a number of papers challenged her on this the NYT steadfastly stuck by her story. It was so blatant even the Public Editor of that paper, Liz Spayd, called her newsroom out for covering up for Hillary. As Tom Maguire observes quoting the Spayd:

Waddya expect? The conventions are over and we are at the top of the backstretch, bracing to head for home.

“The Washington Post, NPR, USA Today and PolitiFact all challenged Clinton’s claims, saying they appeared to be based on a selective and misleading interpretation of Comey’s remarks. The Post awarded her ‘Four Pinocchios,’ the worst truth-telling rating it gives, for statements it classifies as ‘Whoppers.’ “

Yeah, whatever. The Times has suspended criticism of Hillary until after the election, due to the national emergency caused by Trump.

Topping off the week and indicative of the media panic is the news that the administration illegally transported $400 million in cash on pallets in an unmarked plane to Iran where it is being used to finance terrorists. The administration dissembled to Congress about the transaction.

The deal had to be kept secret because neither the voters nor the Congress would ever have approved it and it surely sent the wrong message — taking Americans hostage is a money-making proposition, Two more, in fact, have been taken hostage since that covert exchange took place.

It’s a deal (The Iran scam as a whole, not the ransom deal?– DM) so bad that the administration lied and said Israel approved it — prompting the foreign minister to bitterly reject that claim and respond the deal is so bad it is like Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich.

Trump criticized the hush hush deal and said correctly that Iran had made a video of the pallets of cash coming off the unmarked plane to further embarrass the U.S. This sent the partisan kiddos at the Washington Post into a tizzy, denying there was any such video, when in fact it was easily available to be viewed on YouTube, the BBC, or Memri.

In the meantime — as crowds pour into Trump rallies throughout the country, waiting in long lines for a chance to hear and cheer him, Hillary made a rare appearance before unquestioning Hispanic and Black news reporters where she looked a wreck, almost called Trump her “husb–” and then said her earlier interview lies about Comey’s report were the result of a “short circuit.” It’s a long time between now and the election. Her staff cannot continue to keep her bottled up and appearing only before small, sympathetic audiences and interviewers and I expect so much “short circuiting” from her even the low information voters will have to take notice.

Categories: 2016 elections, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Media and Democrats, Media and Donald Trump, Media and Hillary Clinton, Polls
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CIA Chief Who Edited Benghazi Talking Points, Works for Hillary Adviser, Endorses Hillary

August 6, 2016

CIA Chief Who Edited Benghazi Talking Points, Works for Hillary Adviser, Endorses Hillary, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, August 5, 2016

morrel

If only Ex-CIA boss Mike Morell had done as good of a job serving his country as he did serving Hillary Clinton.

Former CIA director Michael Morell endorsed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and blasted GOP rival Donald Trump, accusing him of becoming an unwitting agent of Russian President Vladimir Putin in an op-ed on Friday.

Well we know that Morell is a better editor than a writer.

Mike Morell, then-head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC), had the task of helping to prepare talking points for then-U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, who was slated to appear on five Sunday morning talk shows a few days later. Morell was personally responsible for “cutting some 50 percent of the text,” including all “references to Al Qaeda” and the many earlier terror attacks against U.S. and other Western targets in Benghazi. When the Senate Intelligence Committee finally succeeded in prying loose the emails that had flowed back and forth to the CIA, State Department and the White House during the talking points editing process, it was clear that Morell not only had misrepresented his own role, but also had been less than forthcoming about the close oversight role played by the White House in ensuring that all references to al-Qa’eda 15 terrorism would be scrubbed. Morell also made sure to scrub from the talking points the honest assessment that “We cannot rule out that individuals had previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.”

There’s a lot of details in this new report by Fox News, much of it stuff we already know. But the big takeaway from this report is that the CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell, who edited the talking points that were used by Susan Rice on Sept. 16, was told in a secure video call less than 72 hours after the attack by our people on the ground in Libya that they were ‘baffled, angry, and dismayed, with Washington’s singular focus on the video. They were upset with Morell because he seemed to dismiss their reporting — none of which suggested in any way that a video was the cause of the attack. That video conference call included CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell, the CIA Chief of Station in Tripoli, survivors who had been evacuated to Germany, and Greg Hicks (Deputy to Ambassador Chris Stevens).

After Hillary blamed the video at the funeral of the four men who were murdered in the attack, the Chief of Station in Tripoli then emailed Morell directly saying that the video was NOT an escalation of protests.

Despite that email, Morell still edited the talking points to blame the video, which is the same talking points Susan Rice used on the 16th in her infamous appearance on all five Sunday morning political talk shows.

Bear in mind that on Sept 12, the day after the attack, the CIA Chief of Station in Tripoli sent situation reports with the raw intelligence from the attack to the leadership of the CIA which included Morell, none of which indicated a video was responsible for the attack.

So yes. Mike is quite the author. But he’s not an unwitting agent, but a witting one.

STEVE HAYES: I will give you two examples… One, he complains bitterly in the book about cherry-picking, critics are cherry picking information that supports their case and leaving out information that doesn’t. He does the exact same thing throughout his entire two chapters on Benghazi and he does it in his interview with you. A perfect example was when you were talking about/he writes about whether this was a pre-planned attack or not.

You [Bret Baier] interviewed the CIA contractors who wrote the book 13 Hours — it said there had been surveillance of the facility, and in their book they wrote that that surveillance put them into high alert. It was a big deal that they were casing the facility before the attack. It doesn’t appear in Mike Morell’s book. He simply leaves it out. You can have questions about what they say, you can disagree, but you can’t just set it aside. And that is what he does, repeatedly.

And, oh yes, guess where Mike works.

HH: And a very last question, you’re now working for Beacon Global Strategies. One of your partners is Philippe Reines. Now I have partners at my law firm, which is Arent Fox, who are not, you know, they’re left wing Democrats, and I get along fine with them. Philippe is Hillary’s guy. And so…

MM: Yeah, yeah.

Reines was a Hillary Clinton adviser.

Categories: Benghazi cover-up, CIA, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Michael Morell
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RUSH: Obama’s Statement On Presidential Fitness – HILARIOUS PARODY

August 6, 2016

RUSH: Obama’s Statement On Presidential Fitness – HILARIOUS PARODY via YouTube, August 5, 2016

Categories: 2016 elections, Donald Trump, Humor, Obama
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Cartoons of the Day

August 5, 2016

H/t Freedom is Just Another Word

President Obama said that Donald Trump is "unfit" to serve as President.

President Obama said that Donald Trump is “unfit” to serve as President.

 

safer

 

H/t Vermont Loon Watch

death-care

Categories: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Humor, Kerry, Obama
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Does the First Amendment Protect Warrior Religions?

August 5, 2016

Does the First Amendment Protect Warrior Religions? Front Page Magazine, William Kilpatrick, August 5, 2016

wk

Reprinted from CrisisMagazine.com.

After every Islamic terrorist attack, whether in Europe or the U.S., people ask what can be done to prevent it from happening again. But when the obvious solutions are proposed, they are invariably met with the objection that “you can’t do that,” or “that’s unconstitutional,” or words to that effect.

Some of the obvious solutions are to close radical mosques and radical Islamic schools, to monitor suspected mosques, to deport radical imams, and, of course, to restrict Muslim immigration or ban it altogether. If you dare to say such things, however, it quickly becomes apparent that—for many, at least—only politically correct solutions are acceptable. The trouble is, the politically correct crowd doesn’t have any solutions. In the memorable words of French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, “France is going to have to live with terrorism.”

Catholics are frequently in the forefront of those who object to these “drastic” measures for preventing terrorism in the West. Pope Francis, for example, has made generosity to refugees and immigrants a hallmark of his papacy. Christians, he has reminded us on several occasions, should build bridges, not walls. Others, Catholics among them, have objected that restrictions on Islamic immigration would violate the freedom of religion guaranteed by the Constitution—as would surveillance of mosques and Islamic societies.

Catholics are understandably touchy about the subject of religious liberty. But concerns over Christians being forced to bake cakes for same-sex weddings shouldn’t be allowed to overshadow some other basic questions about religious liberty.

One of the questions is this: does a religion that doesn’t believe in religious freedom for others qualify for First Amendment protection? Another, related question might be framed as follows: Is a religion that calls for the subjugation of other religions entitled to the “free exercise” of that mandate? The underlying issue, of course, is whether or not Islam really qualifies as a religion. As any number of authorities have pointed out, Islam is a hybrid—part religion and part a geo-political movement bent on world domination.

The “world domination” bit, by the way, is not confined to the fevered imaginations of right-wing fanatics. In a recent interview with Religion New Service, Cardinal Raymond Burke said “there’s no question that Islam wants to govern the world.” “Islam,” he continued, “is a religion that, according to its own interpretation, must also become the State.”

Here’s what I had to say about the matter four years ago:

Does this [the 1st Amendment] make the exercise of religion an absolute right to do anything in the name of religion? Should the free-exercise clause be extended to protect suicide cults or virgin sacrifice? The First Amendment also prohibits the establishment of a state religion, but one of the main purpose of Islam is to establish itself as the state religion. It can be argued that Islam’s raison d’etre is to be the established religion in every nation. Hence, another question must be asked: does the First Amendment protect its own abolishment?

Cardinal Burke is a canon lawyer—a profession that requires one to choose words carefully. Hence, when he talks about Islam becoming the State, he should be taken seriously. According to him, “when they [Muslims] become a majority in any country then they have the religious obligation to govern that country.” As we have seen, however, long before Muslims become a majority they begin demanding that their fellow citizens comply with sharia laws regarding diet, dress, and blasphemy. Allowing Muslims the full and free exercise of their faith is tantamount to restricting the freedom of others. Or, as Dutch MP Geert Wilders likes to say, “more Islam” means “more intolerance” for everyone else.

Wilders is referring to the consequences that follow upon the mass migration of Muslims into Europe. Although his was once a lonely voice, numerous polls show that the majority of Europeans now believe along with him that Islam does not belong in Europe. Pope Francis, on the other hand, has been in the habit of chiding Christians for their opposition to accepting more Muslim immigrants. He recently went so far as to warn them that they will have to answer to Christ at the Last Judgment because he (in the guise of the migrant) was homeless, and they did not take him in.

But, although charity is the paramount Christian virtue, there is another virtue that governs the exercise of charity. It’s called “prudence.” And prudence would suggest that spiritual leaders and secular leaders should exercise caution when advocating acts of charity that put the lives of others at risk. In Europe, there are now numerous prudential reasons for slowing or halting the flow of Muslim immigration: the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the Bataclan Theater massacre, the massacres at the Brussels airport and subway, the massacre at Nice, the Munich mall massacre, the axe attack aboard a German train, the bomb attack on a wine bar in the city of Ansbach, and the New Year’s Eve sexual assaults which targeted over 1,200 German women.

The most recent outrage was the slaughter of a French priest, Fr. Jacques Hamel, by two Islamic terrorists who burst into a church in Normandy during Mass and slit his throat. Pope Francis condemned the attack, but on the same day in Krakow he spoke once again about the need to welcome refugees. He called for “solidarity with those deprived of their fundamental rights, including the right to profess one’s faith in freedom and safety.”

But how about the right of Christians and Jews to profess their faith “in freedom and safety?” Fr. Hamel is no longer free to profess his faith, and now that the Islamic State has proclaimed its intention to target more churches in Europe, Christians are going to feel considerably less safe at Sunday service. Jews in Europe already know the feeling. Most synagogues in Europe are now protected by security guards during Saturday services.

But if you really want to see the European future, just look at those nations where Muslims are already a majority. In Nigeria, where Muslims make up about 60 percent of the population, Christians are regularly attacked during church services, and on some occasions entire congregations have been burned alive inside their churches.

All of which prompts a question: should Western nations passively stand by as their own population balance shifts in the direction of Nigeria’s? A curtailment or a moratorium on Muslim immigration is one of the obvious solutions to the problem of terrorism in the West. But, as I’ve suggested above, many Americans think that such a moratorium would be unconstitutional. After all, doesn’t the Constitution forbid a “religious test” in scrutinizing immigrants? Indeed today’s top news story concerns the attack on Donald Trump by the father of a slain Muslim soldier. At the Democratic Convention, Khizr Khan challenged Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigration by asking: “Have you even read the U.S. Constitution?”

In fact, the Constitution has no ban on a religious test for immigration. In a recent National Review piece, Andrew McCarthy points out that Article VI of the Constitution states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” The clause has nothing to do with immigration and, as our bien pensants like to say, it has nothing to do with Islam.

The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 actually gives the president wide latitude in restricting immigration:

Whenever the president finds that the entry of aliens or any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, the president may … suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non-immigrants or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.

One of the main intents of the act was to prevent communist ideologues from entering the country, but it was also invoked in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter to keep Iranians out of the U.S. And—surprise—according to McCarthy, “under federal law, the executive branch is expressly required to take religion into account in determining who is granted asylum.” As McCarthy notes:

We have a right to require scrutiny of the beliefs of aliens who petition for entry into our country … this includes beliefs the alien may regard as tenets of his faith—especially if such ‘faith tenets’ involve matters of law, governance, economy, combat and interpersonal relations that in our culture’s separation of church and state are not seen as spiritual.

In short, if you believe your religion allows you to execute apostates or subjugate infidels, don’t bother to apply.

When Pope Francis visited Poland for World Youth Day, security in Krakow was at its highest level. Forty thousand security personnel were deployed and, according to The Guardian:

Mobile X-ray devices and metal detectors, as well as dogs trained to detect explosives, are in use at railway and bus stations, major road hubs and venues where papal events are due to take place. Police said that gas tankers and large trucks had been banned from Krakow following the use of a 19-ton truck in a terrorist attack in Nice earlier this month.

Does that suggest anything? Are the officials worried that Protestants or Jews are going to attack the Catholic youth? Are they fearful that Buddhist will attempt to bomb the popemobile? Before the era of mass Muslim immigration into Europe, such precautions would have been deemed as overkill. Now they seem like prudent measures to prevent overkill. The heightened security at World Youth Day and all over Europe is a tacit acknowledgement that Islam differs radically from all other religions. This is a point that Cardinal Burke made in his interview when he criticized Catholic leaders who “simply think that Islam is a religion like the Catholic faith or the Jewish faith.” Just so. It’s well past time to question whether a religion with totalitarian ambitions should be treated like all other religions.

In the Guardian story about the Pope’s visit to Poland, he is described as a “modern pope.” But in some respects he, along with many bishops, seems to belong to an earlier era—an era when it seemed that all people desired nothing more than peace and friendship. At a time when the world is faced with the resurgence of a seventh-century warrior religion, that sixties sensibility no longer seems so modern.

Categories: Donald Trump, Europe, Islam - the religion of war, Islam and human rights, Islam and terrorism, Islamic hatred of others, Islamic immigration, Khzir Khan, Pope Francis
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Fake Republicans For Hillary

August 5, 2016

Fake Republicans For Hillary, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, August 5, 2016

o-richard-hanna-facebook

The media is gleefully touting the defection of Republicans to the Hillary camp. In reality, the Republicans who are defecting were never Republicans at all.

Take Congressman Richard Hanna. Please.

Hanna has announced that he’ll be backing Hillary Clinton. This isn’t so much a change as an admission.

Hanna is a retiring lame duck whose Republican credentials are up there with those of fellow Hillary endorsee Michael Bloomberg. Both men are New York politicians who ran as Republicans because of pure political opportunism. No one seriously believed that Bloomberg was a Republican.

Hanna’s Republican credentials are an even bigger joke.

He opposed ending funding for Planned Parenthood and he’s a Global Warmunist. His credentials on most other Republican issues are extremely shaky at best.

Congressman Hanna, like most of the fake Republicans, blames his defection on Trump. But in the last election, when Trump was not an issue, he was telling attendees at an ERA rally to give money to Democrats “because the other side — my side — has a lot of it.”

Hanna’s hiccup was telling. He viewed Republicans as “the other side.” He’s a Democrat in all but name. Soon he’ll be a Democrat in name as well. His defection was not about Trump. Not when he was urging donations to Democrats in the last election. Trump is just an excuse that fake Republicans like Hanna are using to let their donkey flag fly freely.

Four years ago, Hanna was whining that, “I would say that the friends I have in the Democratic Party I find … much more congenial — a little less anger.”

No doubt. Because Hanna was one of them.

A year later, he responded to Obama’s State of the Union address by saying that he “agreed with much of it” and during the investigation of Benghazi, he had insisted that, “a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual: Hillary Clinton.”

The media will pretend that Congressman Hanna’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton is a shocking development, when it’s really an inevitable one. Hanna found it convenient to play Republican. Now that he’s retiring, he no longer needs to. The fake Republican can tell the truth for the first time.

Then there’s Sally Bradshaw, the close Jeb Bush adviser who was the media’s other big “Republicans for Hillary” catch. Bradshaw’s candidate lost and she has moved on to opening a bookstore. This may or may not be a step up from her chicken farm with the world’s most expensive chickens whose eggs go for $100 a piece. Meanwhile her husband’s Southern Strategy Group lobbyists, closely integrated with Jeb Bush, represented clients like Disney and Apple. But that’s just politics as usual.

Sally Bradshaw was the force behind the Jeb Bush campaign. And her vision proved to be utterly wrong.

Bradshaw had co-authored the GOP post-election autopsy which backed illegal alien amnesty. It complained that conservatism was an “ideological cul-de-sac” still clinging to Reagan. It insisted that Republicans had to “make sure young people do not see the Party as totally intolerant of alternative points of view” by evolving and reforming on social issues.

Republicans had to be “inclusive,” “welcoming” and tolerant.” Illegal alien amnesty was “consistent with Republican economic policies that promote job growth and opportunity for all.” Republicans had to be angry at CEOs and stand for entitlements. They had to stop being so conservative and focus on diversity training. They had to carefully watch their language and avoid saying anything politically incorrect.

While some of the report’s proposals had merit, its overall tone predicted Republican decline and insisted that the GOP had to become more liberal to survive. It was full of tidbits such as, “On messaging, we must change our tone — especially on certain social issues that are turning off young voters” or “the importance of a welcoming, inclusive message in particular when discussing issues that relate directly to a minority group.” There was little in it that Democrats would have opposed.

The campaign process proved Bradshaw wrong. Her defection to Team Hillary is the outcome of a process which disproved her message. Team Hillary follows the GOP autopsy program.

But Bradshaw’s defeatist program didn’t work for Jeb Bush. It didn’t work for the GOP. It wasn’t conservative. It assumed that conservatism had lost. And Bradshaw’s defection is an open admission of that assumption. If the GOP is doomed, she might as well switch to Team Hillary which is very tolerant, inclusive and welcoming to illegal aliens.

So that is what she did.

Then there’s Meg Whitman who became a Republican when convenient, despite not having voted in decades. After wasting massive amounts of Republican resources on a failed bid in California against Jerry Brown, Meg has announced that she is now backing Hillary Clinton as a “proud Republican.”

“Secretary Clinton’s temperament, global experience and commitment to America’s bedrock national values make her the far better choice in 2016 for President of the United States,” Whitman insisted.

Because if there’s anything Hillary Clinton embodies it’s a commitment to American values.

But that says more about Whitman’s values than it does about American values. Meg Whitman backed illegal alien amnesty, she’s for abortion, gay marriage and marijuana legalization. Before backing Hillary, Whitman had served on Friends of Boxer to help elect Barbara Boxer. And she believes in global warming.

Like the rest of the fake Republicans, Meg Whitman was never conservative in any sense of the word. She was a political opportunist who found it convenient to use the Republican elephant as a platform for her political ambitions. And then, when the going got tough, she defected back just as quickly.

Fake Republicans have always been easy to spot. Like Whitman, they speak in generalities about our values, but when it comes to the details they lean to the left. They have no conservative program. Their only linkage to the GOP is a weak attachment to fiscal conservatism. But this fiscal conservatism, shared by fake Republicans like Michael Bloomberg and Meg Whitman does not trump their left-wing positions on social issues. The only kind of Republicanism that they are comfortable with is one that adopts the positions of the left on everything except the economy. And that is a doomed proposition.

“The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country,” Thomas Paine wrote. The GOP had more than its share of sunshine patriots and summer candidates who are eager to play Republican when it’s convenient for them, but who have no commitment to a conservative cause. Their defections are not a loss, but a benefit.

Meg Whitman blocked conservative candidates. The departure of fake Republicans clears the way for a more conservative party that will be able to truly articulate conservative ideas because it believes in them. Hillary can have Whitman, Bradshaw and Hanna. Conservatives will take the GOP.

Categories: 2016 elections, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Republican Party, Republicans
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Sliming Trump

August 5, 2016

Sliming Trump, Front Page Magazine, Matthew Vadum, August 5, 2016

(Please see also, Mainstream Media: ‘Trump Boots Baby From Rally!’ Non-Media Witnesses: ‘That’s Pure Propaganda’ — DM)

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Now that Donald Trump is safely ensconced as the official Republican nominee for president, the mainstream media is running an intense around-the-clock operation to deprive him of the relatively unfiltered media exposure he needs to seal the deal with the American people.

Trump being silly and playful in front of TV cameras or utilizing his sense of humor is cast as evidence of a disordered, antisocial mind. The media is focusing on minor benign details and marketing them as the evil deeds of an evil man.

Preventing Trump from communicating effectively with Americans didn’t work so well during the primaries. That was when student radicals, union thugs, Democrat allies in Black Lives Matter, and the remnants of Occupy Wall Street were disrupting Trump rallies and intimidating would-be rally attendees by beating the New Yorker’s supporters up in broad daylight.

This was always less an effort to counter Trump or challenge his policy platform, than a fascistic push to simply suppress his message. With Trump, the master communicator whose outreach skills arguably mirror President Obama’s, the message is everything.

Squelch his voice and he’s finished.

The leftist narrative being deployed against Trump is based on lies, half-truths, and nothing-burgers. They don’t even have to make sense. All they have to accomplish is to hold Trump, the blunt, brash billionaire elitists love to hate because he’s from lowly Queens, the home of the fictional Archie Bunker, up to ridicule. Trump may own country clubs and golf courses but he doesn’t have the manners or the breeding the upper crust expects from those with money. New money is bad money unless you’re a left-winger who gives it to inane social justice-oriented causes, goofy charities, nonprofits pushing radical social engineering on people, and Democrat candidates for office.

So Americans are subjected to a buffet of stupid “news” stories that happen to help journalists make their case against Trump. Meeting the Donald head-on wouldn’t work so instead it’s death by a thousand cuts.

The fact that a veteran admired Trump so much he gave a copy of his Purple Heart medal to the candidate who made a lighthearted joke about always wanting to receive the medal (an obvious absurdity since you have to be injured during military service to get it) was twisted to make the case Trump was a draft dodger who hates military families that have lost loved ones in wars.

The media has been gleefully resurrecting the “chickenhawk” fallacy that was the rage during George W. Bush’s presidency. It held that because Cindy Sheehan lost her son in Bush’s war she was uniquely qualified to pass judgment on matters of war and peace and in general to make a spectacle of herself.

Of course, once the fake dove Barack Obama was sworn in as president, Sheehan’s antiwar yammering was no longer useful to the Left so blessed sister Cindy disappeared from media coverage. When the Left’s favorite president of all time is in power, and he’s a thuggish warmonger who can’t even be bothered to consult Congress before launching an illegal, ill-advised war against Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, having antiwar leftists dog the president at every turn is no longer a positive thing.

Besides, Trump sacrificed nothing, according to the wrathful Khizr Khan, so he needs to shut up. Trump’s run-in with the sleazy immigration lawyer is still receiving media attention. The lie that Trump attacked Khan’s hero son who died in Iraq getting his men to move away from danger won’t die. It’s taken on a life of its own and hardened into fact in the minds of many.

This “chickenhawk” fallacy gives rise to another fallacy that rears its ugly head whenever there is an opportunity to make Republicans look heartless. That is the idea that the words and actions of Gold Star families can never be questioned. Even though Khan, whose sketchy background has been emerging, used a prime speaking spot at the Democrat convention in Philadelphia last week to promote even higher levels of immigration that would financially benefit him as an immigration lawyer, he is supposed to be untouchable because the media wants it that way.

At the same time the media ignores the fact that Hillary Clinton let four men die in Benghazi, Libya, when U.S. facilities came under terrorist attack, and then lied to the surviving family members’ faces, blaming an anti-Islam YouTube video nobody saw. The media also avoids providing a body count for the Arab Spring that Clinton inflicted on North Africa and the Middle East.

“It’s funny to be lectured about respect for vets and the military by a party that’s spent years calling our soldiers rapists and baby killers,” tweeted Legal Insurrection contributor “Aleister.”

Contrast what happened to Trump with what happened when someone gave former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.) a Purple Heart that she hadn’t earned. The gift came after she nearly died at the hands of a crazed shooter and it was treated as a heartwarming gesture from an appreciative citizen toward a public servant who had suffered so much for her country.

Trump gets creamed by the media no matter what he does.

After playfully tolerating an infant’s crying from the podium at a rally, Trump eventually asked the mother to remove the baby from an event. That’s what decent people do. It’s called politeness. It’s a non-issue if you’re a normal person with a healthy respect for social norms but rabid feminists seized on it as example of the Republican’s supposed contempt for babies and mothers.

At CNN’s website MoveOn mom Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner berates Trump, claiming he was mocking the mother. Trump doesn’t realize “that when he throws a baby out, the metaphorical bathwater can’t be ignored.” This garden-variety humorless left-wing feminist used the opportunity to blather on about equal pay, how women outnumber men in this country, and the need for crazy-expensive big government programs like paid family parental leave.

To the Left what Trump did is a grievous offense against civility and social norms, yet Clinton’s communistic blueprint It Takes A Village, calls for the state “to teach, train and raise children,” adding that “[p]arents have a secondary role.” Put Hillary in the White House and she’ll solve the problem of crying babies by terminating parental rights. After all, that’s what she says in her book.

And don’t forget that the Left deems this crying baby incident to be far worse than Clinton’s strident, unconditional, unapologetic support for the taxpayer-funded human body parts trafficking concern known as Planned Parenthood.

During the Democratic National Convention last week CNN and the New York Times pushed out the lie that at a presser Trump had invited Russia to somehow hack Hillary Clinton’s emails which are far as anyone can tell no longer exist. The party of sedition and treason went nuts calling Trump a traitor. In reality all Trump did was offer a quip to reporters, urging Russia or any other governments that may have Clinton’s mountain of missing emails in their possession to return them to the United States. Nor was Trump’s statement tantamount to asking Russia to interfere in U.S. elections.

The media left out the fact that Clinton is much closer to Russia than Trump is and that that nation’s government has compromised her. She even cut bad deals with that country to hand over a big chunk of American uranium to the Kremlin.

Journalists are engaging in all this mischief because they are acutely aware that if Trump can somehow penetrate the massive propaganda force-field the mainstream media has erected around his campaign, the party is over. The thinking among the media and the Left – but I repeat myself – is that if they can keep strategically placing nasty little booby-traps in the undisciplined candidate’s path they can keep him off-message and floundering long enough to get would-be federal inmate Hillary Clinton across the finish line Nov. 8.

If he can reach voters with his tremendously popular message of law and order, immigration enforcement and border security, and mostly pro-growth economic policies, he wins – convincingly – in a year of political populism and anti-establishment anger.

If Trump focuses on one issue, specifically, how truly rotten and anemic the Obama-Clinton economy is, he probably wins.

Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger said Clinton, whose class warfare-dominated platform calls for far-reaching, even punitive, tax hikes all over the place ought to doom her candidacy. “Trump should be killing her on that point,” he said on the most recent installment of the “John Batchelor Show.”

Despite polling showing Clinton ahead of Trump, seasoned political handicappers know that Hillary’s support is a mile wide and an inch deep. Even gung-ho leftists Michael Moore and Cenk Uygur think Clinton, the ultimate political insider, is such a lousy candidate that she’s destined to take a dive on Nov. 8.

Reporters are doing these terrible things because they are terrified that there will be no third Obama term and that Americans will have to wait a few more years for a president who has a uterus. And worst of all in their view, is the possibility that America just might have a future with Trump in the Oval Office. That is unacceptable to these ink-stained wretches and blow-dried talking heads who insist on influencing the news instead of merely reporting it.

The media is also trying to depict the Trump campaign as in a state of growing disarray, even though Democrats are experiencing unprecedented political meltdowns.

Top staffers were liquidated in a Bolshevik-style purge at the Democratic National Committee after leaked emails showed top Democrats engaged in unethical behavior, including waging war against second-place primary finisher Bernie Sanders.

DNC chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz got the axe and was replaced on an interim basis by Gore-Lieberman 2000 campaign manager Donna Brazile. Brazile, in turn, gave the bum’s rush to DNC CEO Amy Dacey, communications director Luis Miranda, and chief financial officer Brad Marshall.

Although recent polls show Clinton’s lead over Trump growing in the wake of the businessman’s messaging problems, the admittedly subjective anecdotal evidence on the ground suggests Trump is doing fine. His fundraising has dramatically picked up.

Trump continues receiving rock star treatment at rallies around the country such as those held this week in Portland, Me., and Daytona Beach and Jacksonville, Fla. Trump speaks to overflow crowds while Clinton has great difficulty filling more modestly sized venues. There is no passion for Hillary. There are plenty of people who feel they have to vote for her because having a president with a uterus would be a world-historic moment.

But reporters still aren’t asking the Clinton campaign about the candidate’s fall in December 2012 in which she sufferedbrain damage. Her coughing fits at the podium, strange facial expressions at the Democrat convention as celebratory balloons were falling, and jerky body movements also don’t inspire confidence in her ability to physically endure the rigors of the presidency. Nor does the fact that she hasn’t held a press conference in 244 days. She is everywhere on TV and yet she says next to nothing of substance. She is hiding in plain sight and the media is protecting her from having to answer inconvenient questions.

It also should be noted that the Trump candidacy is also bringing out the worst in conservatives who refuse to get behind the GOP nominee.

At Mediaite, conservative talk show host John Ziegler is already pushing for Sean Hannity to be “punished severely” by having his Fox News Channel show canceled because he got on the Trump train early and proved influential among primary voters.

In a sophomoric, oddly written rant, Ziegler accuses Hannity of recently launching a campaign to cover his posterior for boosting Trump, whom he declares was obviously unelectable from the start. He calls Hannity “not at all a bright guy” and “the guy who married the obviously wrong girl, and now wants to try to blame his buddies, who tried to tell him she clearly wasn’t the right one.”

Ziegler is far from the worst offender among right-leaning commentators as anyone who has been following the recent adventures of Mitt Romney, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sens. Jeff Flake and Lindsey Graham, George Will, and Bill Kristol can attest.

Meanwhile, the leader of a Republican anti-Trump group is moving her efforts against the candidate to a new level. Liz Mair, the founder of Make America Awesome, an anti-Trump super PAC, is now communications director for something new called Republicans for Johnson-Weld, the Libertarian Party’s presidential ticket.

Mair, a former Republican National Committee online communications director, called Trump a “loudmouthed dick” on CNN Wednesday, adding that she expects him to continue “basically acting as if he’s on a suicide mission and aiming to take the whole rest of the party down with him.”

Critics say the Libertarian ticket is working to elect Clinton by siphoning votes away from Trump.

Aside from politics junkies, most people think of Libertarians as vaguely conservative so it’s hard to argue with that critique.

The ticket this year consists of two former Republicans, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson and his would-be vice president, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld.

Both men say nice things about Democrat standard-bearer Hillary Clinton. Weld said she was “by and large a good secretary of state,” and Johnson called her “a wonderful public servant.” Referring to the end run Clinton did around public records laws by maintaining private email servers, Johnson said “I don’t think there was criminal intent on her part.”

The two men are Clinton shills, Breitbart’s Patrick Howley opines.

“The Johnson-Weld team seems to think that libertarianism is mostly about admitting as many immigrants to the United States as possible. This is a far cry from Ron Paul’s pro-borders libertarian movement of a few years ago. The libertarian movement has shifted to the progressive globalist Left.”

Johnson even attacks religious freedom laws, likening them to a “black hole.”

Such laws might “open up a plethora of discrimination that you never believed could exist,” Johnson said. “And it’ll start with Muslims.”

While America is under siege by homicidal Islamofascists, Johnson and the rest of the nation’s left-wingers are worried that somewhere in the country a Muslim woman might have to take her veil off to pose for a driver license photo.

It’s a pretty piddling matter to be concerned about given that America’s future is on the line.

Categories: 2016 elections, Democrat Party and media, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Trump and media
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