Posted tagged ‘Donald Trump’

Is ISIS a GOP Franchise?

June 14, 2016

Is ISIS a GOP Franchise? Front Page MagazineCaroline Glick, June 14, 2016

tdy_gosk_mateen_160613.nbcnews-ux-1080-600

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post

Making clear the partisan assault intrinsic to Obama’s position, following his statement Sunday, Democratic Senator from Connecticut Richard Blumenthal blamed Republicans for the massacre at the Pulse.

Referring to the jihadist attack as “a public health crisis,” caused by “gun violence,” Blumenthal alleged that fifty people who went dancing in Orlando Saturday night never made it home because Republican Senators oppose Obama’s bill to limit gun ownership rights.

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Is Islamic State opposed to gay marriage? Was anger at the US Supreme Court’s decision mandating recognition of homosexual marriage what prompted Omar Mateen to massacre fifty Americans at the gay nightclub in Orlando on Saturday night? What about gun control? Is Islamic State, to which Mateen announced his allegiance as he mowed down innocents like blades of grass, a libertarian group that abhors limitations on private ownership of firearms? In other words, are Islamic State and its fellow jihadists from Iran to Hamas, Hezbollah, Boko Haram and al Qaida adjuncts of the Republican Party? Is Omar Baghdadi, the self-declared caliph at the helm of ISIS a social conservative, a libertarian and a card carrying member of the GOP, or just one of the three? Because President Barack Obama seems to think that this is the question most Americans should be asking. In his statement on the massacre on Sunday, Obama placed Mateen’s action in the context the partisan debate on gay rights and gun control.

With regard to the former, Obama said that the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, which was the site of the attack was more than a mere nightclub. It was, “a place of solidarity and empowerment where people have come together to raise awareness, to speak their minds and to advocate for their civil rights.” In other words, Obama intimated, the victims were murdered because Mateen opposed all of those things, specifically.

Turning to gun rights, Obama said, “The shooter was apparently armed with a handgun and a powerful assault rifle. This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub. And we have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well.” So as the president sees things, if you oppose limitations on firearm ownership, then you’re on Mateen’s side.

To say that Obama’s behavior is unpresidential is an understatement. His behavior is dangerous. It imperils the United States and its citizens.

Adolf Hitler did not go to war against Great Britain because he opposed parliamentary democracy. Hitler went to war against Britain because he wanted to rule the world and Britain stood in his way.

Just so, Islamic jihadists are not sides in America’s domestic policy debates about gun ownership and gay rights. Islamic jihadists like Mateen, the Tsarnaev brothers from Boston, Nidal Malik Hassan at Ft. Hood, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi at Garland, Texas, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik in San Bernadino didn’t decide to slaughter innocents because of their passionate opposition to the liberal takeover of the US Supreme Court.

They killed Americans because they thought that doing so advances their goal of instituting the dominion of Islamic totalitarians across the world. They oppose freedom and democracy because democracy and freedom stand in the way of their goal to subordinate humanity to an Islamic caliphate.

Maybe Obama is right that more limitations on gun ownership would have limited Mateen’s ability to acquire the means to slaughter fifty people. Then again, maybe if guns were easier to come by, Mateen’s victims would have stopped him as soon as he started firing.

There are data supporting both views. A learned exchange about whether or not restrictions on gun ownership would advance or detract from the fight against Islamic violence would be worthwhile.

But to his disgrace, Obama is not remotely interested in having that debate. To the contrary, he has silenced it for nearly eight years. And as he made clear on Sunday, he has no intention of enabling such a discussion now.

The same Obama who was quick to blame permissive gun laws and anti-gay discrimination for the bloodbath, refused to mention the fact that Islam was Mateen’s expressed motive for committing the carnage.

While unforgivable, Obama’s silence on the cause of Mateen’s bloodbath was predictable. From the outset of his first term Obama has studiously avoided discussing the Islamic motivation that stands behind most of the terrorism in the US and throughout the world.

The most devastating outcome of Obama’s behavior is not necessarily the policies he has adopted to counter Islamic violence. Some of those policies are reasonable. Some of his policies are dangerous and destructive. And it is important to discuss each of them on its merits.

The most devastating, and at this point clearly premeditated, outcome of Obama’s refusal to name the cause of the violence is that he has made it illegitimate to discuss it. He has made it controversial for Americans to talk about Islamic supremacism, extremism, violence and war for world domination.

He has made substantive criticism of his policies tantamount to bigotry. And he has rendered the public debate about the most salient strategic threat to American lives, liberty and national security a partisan issue.

Today in Obama’s America, only Republicans use the terms Islamic terrorism or radicalism or jihad. Democrats pretend those things don’t exist.

Making clear the partisan assault intrinsic to Obama’s position, following his statement Sunday, Democratic Senator from Connecticut Richard Blumenthal blamed Republicans for the massacre at the Pulse.

Referring to the jihadist attack as “a public health crisis,” caused by “gun violence,” Blumenthal alleged that fifty people who went dancing in Orlando Saturday night never made it home because Republican Senators oppose Obama’s bill to limit gun ownership rights.

This sort of talk, which makes opponents of leftist policies and ideology illegitimate, is arguably Obama’s dangerous legacy.

Obama’s efforts to render discussion of Islamic violence an illegitimate topic of debate is part of his larger policy of Europeanizing American politics.

For more than a generation, the Left’s policies have reigned supreme in Europe. For leftist ideologues and politicians, controlling policies was never sufficient though. To truly rule, they set out to control the public discourse in order to delegitimize their opponents.

And they succeeded. Today it is impossible for Europeans to openly debate the policies and social forces that affect their lives.

For instance, Islamic immigration is the most pressing public policy issue in Europe today. But due to the Left’s destruction of free speech through criminal statute and social pressure, in Europe today you cannot mention the word “Islamic” in the context of the public discourse on Islamic immigration without risking social exclusion and even criminal prosecution.

Many Americans have expressed alarm, surprise and dismay at Donald Trump’s success in winning the Republican nomination. They note, angrily and to a degree, justifiably, that Trump’s policies of nationalist isolationism and economic protectionism are antithetical to the pillars of the Republican Party.

But what this storm of protest misses is that Trump’s rise to power, and his prospects for defeating Hillary Clinton in November are not fueled by popular opposition to Obama’s foreign policies, or his economic policies per se. Trump’s supporters are attracted to the outspoken businessman for reasons that eclipse the partisan discussions of those issues.

Trump’s main attraction for his supporters – millions of whom voted in the Republican primaries for the first time process — is his willingness to attack Obama’s efforts to delegitimize his political opponents. Obama’s success in making his opponents toxic has caused millions of Americans to feel shut out from the national discourse and national life.

Trump’s supporters object to Obama’s Europeanization of American politics far more than they object to his health care policies or his counter-terror policies. They see in Trump a leader who is willing to “tell it like it is,” and they are captivated by this aspect of his personality. In Trump they see a means to regain their own voice in the public square.

Trump’s supporters understand that the Pulse nightclub in Orlando didn’t become slaughterhouse because Americans disagree on gun control or gay rights. They know that it became the scene of the largest mass murder in US history because Mateen, like his fellow jihadists believed that Allah wants his followers to kill innocents to advance the cause of Islamic world domination.

Trump’s supporters are angry that Obama has made stating the obvious illegitimate. And they are right to be angry.

America must not become Europe. And the most urgent step that must be taken to preserve America as America is to make discussing reality legitimate again.

Finally: A Realistic Plan for Fighting the Jihad and Protecting Americans

June 14, 2016

Finally: A Realistic Plan for Fighting the Jihad and Protecting Americans, Front Page MagazineRobert Spencer, June 14, 2016

(Please see also, Donald Trump’s Full Speech on National Security/Hillary Clinton in Manchester, NH (6-13-16) — DM)

Trump on Jihad

Trump’s point was sound. In what way was it not? Combining unrestricted immigration and a massive influx of Muslim migrants, among whom the Islamic State has promised to embed jihadis, with a disarmed American population is simply an invitation to jihad massacres on a frequency never hitherto imagined. Could there be an Orlando-style attack every day? Why not, in the America of the near future that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are busy preparing for us? 

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We’ve gotten so used to politically correct obfuscation about Islam being a religion of peace that preaches tolerance and non-violence that Donald Trump’s words in his address Monday were startling: “Many of the principles of radical Islam are incompatible with Western values and institutions. Remember this, radical Islam is anti-woman, anti-gay and anti-American. I refuse to allow America to become a place where gay people, Christian people, Jewish people are targets of persecution and intimation by radical Islamic preachers of hate and violence.”

Trump continued: “This is not just a national security issue. It’s a quality of life issue. If we want to protect the quality of life for all Americans — women and children, gay and straight, Jews and Christians and all people then we need to tell the truth about radical Islam and we need to do it now.”

One may quibble about whether jihad violence and Sharia oppression in Islam are really “radical,” but the fact is that Donald Trump has become the first nominee of either party since 9/11 to reject the usual nonsense about how jihadis believe in and preach a twisted, hijacked version of the religion of peace. Even more importantly, Trump is now the first presidential candidate since maybe John Quincy Adams to recognize that the problem posed by Islam is not just restricted to the specter of violent jihad attacks, but is, given Sharia oppression of women, gays, and non-Muslims, very much, as Trump put it, a “quality of life issue.”

Trump declared his determination to prevent more jihad attacks such as the one in Orlando Saturday night above all by reiterating his proposal temporarily to “suspend immigration from areas of the world where there’s a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe or our allies until we fully understand how to end these threats.” CNN huffed: “Critics of Trump’s policies, however, have pointed out that the perpetrator of the Orlando massacre was born in the U.S.”

Those critics are not being honest. What Trump actually said was that the Orlando jihad mass murderer was born “of Afghan parents, who immigrated to the United States.” He noted, quite correctly, that “the bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in America in the first place, was because we allowed his family to come here,” and pointed out, quite rightly, that “we have a dysfunctional immigration system, which does not permit us to know who we let into our country, and it does not permit us to protect our citizens properly….We’re importing radical Islamic terrorism into the West through a failed immigration system and through an intelligence community held back by our president. Even our own FBI director has admitted that we cannot effectively check the backgrounds of people we’re letting into America. ”

Can any truthful person seriously dispute that? Tashfeen Malik, who, along with her husband Syed Rizwan Farook murdered fourteen people at a Christmas party in San Bernardino last December 2, had passed five separate background checks from five different U.S. government agencies. If the U.S. did not have a “dysfunctional immigration system,” she would never have been in the country in the first place. And neither would her husband, about whom Trump noted that he was “the child of immigrants from Pakistan and he brought his wife, the other terrorist from Saudi Arabia through another one of our easily exploited visa programs.”

Trump skewered Hillary Clinton for having “repeatedly refused to even say the words radical Islam until I challenged her yesterday.” He quoted her fatuous words: “Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people, and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism” and opined “she’s in total denial, and her continuing reluctance to ever name the enemy broadcasts weakness across the entire world — true weakness.” Clinton wants, he said, “to take away American’s guns and then admit the very people who want to slaughter us. Let them come into the country, we don’t have guns. Let them come in, let them have all the fun they want….The bottom line is that Hillary supports policies that bring the threat of radical Islam into American and allow it to grow overseas, and it is growing.”

Trump’s point was sound. In what way was it not? Combining unrestricted immigration and a massive influx of Muslim migrants, among whom the Islamic State has promised to embed jihadis, with a disarmed American population is simply an invitation to jihad massacres on a frequency never hitherto imagined. Could there be an Orlando-style attack every day? Why not, in the America of the near future that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are busy preparing for us?

Trump declared: “The burden is on Hillary Clinton to tell us why she believes immigration from these dangerous countries should be increased without any effective system to really to screen.” Again, his point his sound: all those, including Hillary, who are busy excoriating Trump for the “racism” and “bigotry” of his immigration proposal have not bothered to suggest any alternative plan for preventing jihadis from entering the country. The bottom line, to borrow one of Trump’s pet phrases, is that Hillary and the rest of the political and media elites would rather see Americans subjected to jihad mass murder on a huge scale than do anything that is politically incorrect.

Another foray into political incorrectness in Trump’s speech was his insistence that the Muslim community in the U.S. has “to work with us. They have to cooperate with law enforcement and turn in the people who they know are bad. They know it. And they have to do it, and they have to do it forthwith….The Muslims have to work with us. They have to work with us. They know what’s going on. They know that he was bad. They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what? They didn’t turn them in. And you know what? We had death, and destruction.”

The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was furious. CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper claimed that “law enforcement authorities have repeatedly stated that they have tremendous cooperation from the Muslim community.” CAIR’s hypocrisy is astounding, as it has more than once advised Muslims not to cooperate with law enforcement. In January 2011, its San Francisco chapter featured on its website a poster that read, “Build A Wall of Resistance / Don’t Talk to the FBI.” In November 2014, CAIR-Florida’s “14th Annual Banquet Rooted in Faith” in Tampa distributed pamphlets entitled “What to do if the FBI comes for you” and featuring a graphic of a person holding a finger to his lips in the “shhh” signal.

Another CAIR pamphlet, entitled “Know Your Rights: Defending Rights, Defeating Intolerance” featured a graphic of the Statue of Liberty likewise making the “shhh” symbol. Cyrus McGoldrick, a former official of Hamas-linked CAIR’s New York chapter, even threatened informants, tweeting with brutal succinctness: “Snitches get stitches.” Zahra Billoo of CAIR-San Francisco regularly tweets that Muslims have no obligation to talk to the FBI, and should contact Hamas-linked CAIR if the FBI asks to talk to them.

This is the group criticizing Trump for noting that Muslim communities have not been any significant help in rooting out jihadis from among them?

Trump’s most revolutionary proposal was for an overhaul of our entire foreign policy establishment and the assumptions upon which it rests – assumptions that have led us into numerous blind alleys and failed initiatives. He said: “The decision to overthrow the regime in Libya, then pushing for the overthrow of the regime in Syria, among other things, without plans for the day after, have created space for ISIS to expand and grow like nobody has ever seen before. These actions, along with our disastrous Iran deal, have also reduced our ability to work in partnership with our Muslim allies in the region. That is why our new goal must be to defeat Islamic terrorism not nation building. No more nation building. It’s never going to work.”

Indeed. It didn’t work in Iraq. It hasn’t worked in Afghanistan. We have poured billions into Pakistan since 9/11 to help them fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and the Pakistani government has funneled a good deal of that money to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Trump said it: “And by the way we’ve spent almost $5 trillion over the years on trying to nation build in the Middle East and it has been complete and total disaster.” Yet despite the fact that its policies have failed again and again and again, the foreign policy establishment keeps reappointing and promoting those responsible for those failures, allowing them to make more mistakes in ever-larger arenas. But no candidate has ever challenged that establishment – until now.

Trump offered one more common sense that no establishment politician has thought to or dared to make: he suggested that there needs to be a reconfiguration of our alliances, which are still based on the Cold War. “NATO,” he said, “needs to change its focus and stop terrorism….America must unite the whole civilized world in the fight against Islamic terrorism.”

Indeed. The world is on fire courtesy of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. If America votes in November for more of the same, we will soon be engulfed in those flames as well. On Monday, Donald Trump outlined an unprecedentedly realistic plan for putting out the fire.

Donald Trump’s Full Speech on National Security/Hillary Clinton in Manchester, NH (6-13-16)

June 13, 2016

Donald Trump’s Full Speech on National Security/Hillary Clinton in Manchester, NH (6-13-16) via YouTube

(Trump’s remarks begin at about eleven minutes into the video. — DM)

Trump: US Muslims aren’t handing over potential terrorists

June 13, 2016

Trump: US Muslims aren’t handing over potential terrorists Republican candidate doubles down on aggressive rhetoric, says ‘thousands’ of people in the US are ‘sick with hate’

By AP and Times of Israel staff

June 13, 2016, 5:06 pm

Source: Trump: US Muslims aren’t handing over potential terrorists | The Times of Israel

Republican candidate for President Donald Trump arrives in his plane to speak to supporters at a rally at Atlantic Aviation on June 11, 2016 in Moon Township, Pennsylvania (Jeff Swensen/Getty Images/AFP)

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump asserted Monday that American Muslims know the identities of potential terrorists but are not reporting them. He also said there are thousands of people living in the United States “sick with hate” and capable of carrying out the sort of massacre that killed at least 49 people in a Florida nightclub.

“We can’t let people in…. We have to be very, very strong,” the presumptive nominee said in one of a host of broadcast interviews ahead of a speech he planned later Monday in New Hampshire.

 “The problem is we have thousands of people right now in our country. You have people that were born in this country” who are susceptible to becoming “radicalized,” the billionaire real estate mogul told the Fox News channel’s “Fox & Friends.” He claimed that there are Muslims living here who “know who they are” and said it was time to “turn them in.”

The gunman, identified by police as Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old US citizen from Fort Pierce, Florida, opened fire with an assault-style rifle inside a crowded gay nightclub in Orlando early Sunday, killing at least 49 people before dying in a gunfight with police. Another 53 people were hospitalized, most in critical condition.

Trump’s longstanding proposal to temporarily ban foreign-born Muslims from entering the United States has triggered outrage from Democrats and Republicans alike, who see it as unconstitutional, un-American and counterproductive. But it has helped him win over many primary voters who fear the rise of Islamic extremism and believe that “political correctness” — the fear of offending Muslims — is damaging national security.

Trump said Monday “there are people out there with worse intentions” than the perpetrator of the shootings in Orlando early Sunday. “They have to report these people,” he said.

“This is a case of surveillance,” he said on CNN. “You will find that many people that knew him (the Orlando shooter) felt that he was a whack job.”

“You look at the people that have come to the country, and are here, and for that we need intelligence-gathering,” he said. “We have to look at the mosques. The (Muslim) communities know the people that have the potential for blowup.”

Trump planned later Monday to further address the deadliest shooting in modern US history in a campaign speech originally intended to attack Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee. That switch came a day after Trump called for Clinton to drop out of the race for president if she didn’t use the words “radical Islam” to describe the Florida nightclub massacre.

Trump will retool his talk in New Hampshire to “further address this terrorist attack, immigration and national security,” his campaign said Sunday.

A gunman wielding an assault-style rifle and handgun opened fire inside a crowded gay nightclub in Orlando early Sunday, killing at least 50 people before dying in a gunfight with police. Another 53 people were hospitalized, most in critical condition. Authorities identified the shooter as Omar Mateen, a 29-year-old US citizen from Fort Pierce, Florida.

Trump’s rhetoric on Muslims was a hallmark of his primary campaign. Besides proposing a temporary prohibition on foreign Muslims from entering the country, he has advocated using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods to try to stave off future attacks.

In the hours after the Orlando shooting, Trump issued a statement calling on President Barack Obama to resign for refusing “to even say the words ‘radical Islam’” in his response to the attack. He also said Clinton should exit the presidential race if she does the same.

In an address from the White House, Obama called the tragedy an act of terror and hate. He did not talk about religious extremists. He said the FBI would investigate the shootings in the gay nightclub as terrorism, but added the gunman’s motivations were unclear.

On Monday Trump said, “We’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind. People cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he is and cannot even mention radical Islam.”

Like Obama, Clinton called the shootings acts of terror and hate, but did not use the words radical Islam in a statement released by her campaign. Instead, she said the country must “redouble our efforts” to defend the country, including “defeating international terror groups, working with allies and partners to go after them wherever they are, countering their attempts to recruit people here and everywhere, and hardening our defenses at home.”

Hours after Obama spoke, a law enforcement official confirmed to The Associated Press that Mateen made a 911 call from the club during which he professed allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The official was familiar with the investigation but not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

While some Republican leaders have encouraged Trump to abandon his proposed Muslim ban in an effort to broaden his support among voters before November’s general election, the Orlando attack appeared Sunday to harden the billionaire businessman’s position.

“What has happened in Orlando is just the beginning,” Trump tweeted Sunday. “Our leadership is weak and ineffective. I called it and asked for the ban. Must be tough.”

Afghanistan Migration Surging into America; 99% Support Sharia Law

June 12, 2016

Afghanistan Migration Surging into America; 99% Support Sharia Law, Breitbart, June 12, 2016

(Are the “folks” in the photo supporting American law over Sharia law? Highly unlikely. — DM

Muslim-immigration-migration-United-States-AP-640x480AP/Evan Vucci

Law enforcement sources have identified the gunman in the Orlando terror attack as Omar Mateen, the child of Afghan migrants, according to CBS News.

Between 2001 and 2013, the U.S. permanently resettled nearly 30,000 Afghan migrants on green cards. According to Pew, nearly all Muslims in Afghanistan (99%) support sharia law as official law.

As legal immigrants, these migrants will be granted lifetime resettlement privileges will be given automatic work permits, welfare access, and the ability to become voting citizens.

Between 2001 and 2013, the United States permanently resettled 1.5 million Muslim immigrants throughout the United States.

In the next five years, without changes to our autopilot visa dispensations, the U.S. will permanently resettle a Muslim population larger than the entire population of Washington D.C.

Immigration from the Middle East is on the rise. Based on 2014 data–the most recent available data from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)– the number of green cards issued to Middle Eastern countries increased by 32 percent. The number of green cards issued to Afghan migrants increased by 379 percent in the course of that single year.

Hillary Clinton has made clear that under a Clinton Presidency, these numbers will grow substantially higher. Based on the minimum numbers Clinton has put forth thus far, the U.S. will resettle 730,000 permanent migrants from the Muslim world during her first term alone.

According to NBC, the suspect’s family says the terror attack may have been motivated Mateen’s hatred for the LGBT community. Mateen’s father says his son was angry over the sight of two men kissing.

At his Friday speech at the Faith and Freedom Summit, Donald Trump addressed Clinton’s plan to import migrants that hold beliefs that are antithetical to Western liberal values.

“Hillary will bring hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of whom have hostile beliefs about people of different faiths and values, and some of whom absolutely and openly support terrorism in our country. We don’t need that. We have enough problems.”

The latest terror attack, carried out by the son of Afghan migrants, underscores how large-scale migration creates a multi-generational threat matrix, just as it has in the banlieues of France.

For instance, Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born jihad propagandist and “spiritual advisor” to 9/11 terrorists was the son of migrants from Yemen; Syed Farook, the Chicago-born San Bernardino terrorist was the son of Pakistani migrants; Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter was the son of a woman who emigrated from Palestine; and Muhammed Youssef Abdulazees, the Chattanooga shooter who murdered four U.S. Marines was an immigrant from Kuwait, who naturalized at the age of 6.

In a December letter to the Obama administration demanding the release of the immigration histories of those connected to terrorism, Senator Jeff Sessions wrote: “We are dealing with an enemy that has shown it is not only capable of bypassing U.S. screening but of recruiting and radicalizing Muslim migrants after their entry to the United States. The recruitment of terrorists in the U.S. is not limited to adult migrants, but to their young children and to their U.S.-born children – which is why family immigration history is necessary to understand the nature of the threat.”

“It’s an unpleasant but unavoidable fact that bringing in large unassimilated flows of migrants from the Muslim world creates the conditions possible for radicalization and extremism to take hold, just like they’re seeing in Europe,” Sessions said on the Senate floor.

The Tampa Tribune reported last year that Florida now leads the nation as the number one state in resettling refugees.

According to the federal government, Florida resettled 43,184 refugees in 2013.

While most of these refugees settling in Florida arrive from Cuba, many arrive from Middle Eastern countries. According to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement, the next largest countries to resettle in Florida are (in order) Iraq, Myanmar (Burma), the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Somalia, Colombia, Afghanistan, Jordan, Pakistan, Syria, and Palestine.

According to data from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 91.4 percent of recent refugees from the Middle East are on food stamps and 68.3 percent of recent refugees from the Middle East are on cash welfare.

The Tampa Tribune reported that many of these Muslim refugees are carving out their own Muslim communities within Florida (similar to what refugees have done in Dearborn and Minneapolis): “Many of the refugees finding homes in the Tampa Bay area are Muslim because the region has an established Muslim community.

Schweizer Lays Out ‘Clinton Cash’ Allegations in Anticipation of Trump Speech

June 11, 2016

Watch: Schweizer Lays Out ‘Clinton Cash’ Allegations in Anticipation of Trump Speech

by Breitbart TV

11 Jun 2016

Source: Watch: Schweizer Lays Out ‘Clinton Cash’ Allegations in Anticipation of Trump Speech – Breitbart

Saturday on CNN’s “Smerconish,” Breitbart editor at large Peter Schweizer laid out some of the allegations from his book and subsequent documentary “Clinton Cash,” which shows pattern of behavior in which donations were given to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s charitable and those contributors later receiving favorable, especially while Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, was secretary of state.

Some of those allegations are expected to be included in a speech from presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to given next week.

Transcript as follows:

SMERCONISH: So here’s what he seems to be talking about, the long summering allegations about the Clintons and money. Accusations largely from the book “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” which has now spawned a documentary that showed at the Cannes film festival.

The documentary is going to open July 24 on the eve of the Democratic convention and joining me now is the executive producer of the movie and author of the book on which it’s premised, Peter Schweizer, and David Brock, founder of the Clintons’ super PAC, Correct the Record.

Peter, let me begin with you. I’ve read the book. Here’s the premise as I understand it. It’s that they allowed individuals to skirt the long standing legal prohibition against foreign participation in American politics by hiring Bill to speak and by making contributions to the Clinton Initiative in return for political influence. Is that the Cliff’s note version?

SCHWEIZER: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s the old adage, follow the money. I happen to believe when it comes to American industries or foreign oligarchs sending large checks to politicians they’re not going it out of the kindness of their hearts. They want favors and in the case of the Clintons, we’re talking about massive amounts of money and we’re talking about favorable action in return.

SMERCONISH: So give me the best evidence, the short version of the most compelling case that you write about in the book.

SCHWEIZER: Well, I think the power of the case is that you see the same pattern repeated over and over and over again. There’s no disputing that. A foreign oligarch, it can be a corporation, it can be a financier, it can be a foreign government — sends the Clintons a large sum of money, Hillary Clinton as secretary of state takes favorable action on their behalf. You can look at a couple of those examples, Michael, and say maybe it’s just coincidence, but when you see that same pattern over and over again, I think it’s naïve to think there’s nothing going on there.

SMERCONISH: One example you wrote about extensively has to do with uranium.

SCHWEIZER: Yes, it’s a Canadian financer named Frank Giustra. Bill Clinton helps him procure a lucrative uranium concession in Kazakhstan. Bill Clinton’s foundation gets $30 million out of the deal. Later on that Canadian company wants to sell to the Russian government which requires federal government approval. One of the agencies that has to approve that deal is Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Nine shareholders in that company in that company send $145 million to the Clinton foundation and by the way, as The New York Times and others have confirmed that story, some of those donations were not disclosed by the Clintons even though they had promised president Obama and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee they would do that exact thing.

SMERCONISH: But Time magazine taking the case that you established said there’s absolutely no evidence that Hillary Clinton played a direct role in any of that?

SCHWEIZER: Well, we don’t know. I mean, this is the problem. Imagine you had a county council where you had nine people voting and everybody votes in favor of a development, but one of the county commissioners got $145 million from the developer. Wouldn’t people say we need to look into this? And that’s what I’m calling for. I’m calling for an investigation. To me it’s absurd that in a time when we are looking at you know, $50,000 or $100,000 donation to political campaigns and arguing influence, nobody wants to look at $145 million that happens to come sometimes in hidden donations at the precise time that this government agency is looking at this.

SMERCONISH: I would say this. I mean, there are a lot of interesting pieces to a puzzle that you’ve assembled but I don’t know that you’ve put the puzzle together. Let me put on the screen from the table of contents of book. I want to draw attention to Chapter 11. The title “Quid pro Quo?” but at the end, you put a question mark after it. So in the end what have you established?

SCHWEIZER: What I’ve established is a pattern of behavior and this is one of the biggest misnomers by the way that you’re going to hear from the Clinton campaign and their supporters is that there’s no quid pro quo. That’s not the legal standard. I would ask might be to look at recent cases, whether it’s Gov. McDonnell in Virginia, whether it’s Sen. Menendez in New Jersey, there’s a former governor in Alabama who’s in jail precisely on a pattern of behavior and in none of those cases was there an email or recorded phone conversation that established the quid pro quo. It was a pattern of money flowing, favorable action taken. And in the case of the Clintons it is far more established than it was in any of those cases.

Will Anti-Trump Republicans Elect Hillary?

June 11, 2016

Will Anti-Trump Republicans Elect Hillary? Power Line, John Hinderaker, June 11, 2016

Yesterday on CNN, Mitt Romney ruled out supporting Donald Trump on grounds of character. Romney called Trump a racist, referring repeatedly to “trickle-down racism,” by which I take it he means racism inspired in future generations by a racist president. When asked at the end of the interview by Wolf Blitzer whether he thinks Trump is a racist, Romney wouldn’t quite say that, but instead responded that Trump’s “comments, time and again, appeal to the racist tendency that exists in some people.” Here is the video; it is only about a minute and a half:

I find the willingness of Republican leaders to allege that Trump is a racist disheartening, if not shocking. We expect that kind of calumny from the Democrats; they accuse pretty much all of their opponents of being racists. (Has Romney forgotten that the Democrats called him a racist, over and over, during the 2012 election? If you have forgotten too, just Google “Mitt Romney racist.”)

Romney’s Exhibit A as evidence of Trump’s racism were his comments about the Trump University judge, which have been discussed ad nauseam. But, while Trump’s attack on Judge Curiel may have been stupid, it wasn’t racist. He merely agreed with liberals that a person of Mexican descent may be biased against Trump because of his position on immigration. What is wrong with that? Ann Coulter’s epic rant is correct:

The entire media — and most of the GOP — have spent 10 months telling us that Mexicans in the United States are going to HATE Trump for saying he’ll build a wall. Now they’re outraged that Trump thinks one Mexican hates him for saying he’ll build a wall.

What else has Trump done that could arguably be racist? His proposed ban on Islamic immigrants is often cited, but that is silly since Islam isn’t a race. Moreover, if he would improve how he articulates his proposal–it isn’t feasible to ban Muslims from immigrating to the U.S., but it would be easy to suspend immigration from majority-Muslim countries, except for refugees from religious persecution–it would be good policy, in my opinion. Likewise, it is absurd to argue that Trump’s stated intention to carry out his constitutional duty by enforcing the immigration laws is racist–yet that claim is frequently made.

Trump has been in the public eye for decades. He has made plenty of enemies and, like any famous, arrogant person, he has lots of detractors. Yet to my knowledge, no one who actually knows Trump or has dealt with him calls him a racist or bigot of any other stripe. Unlike Hillary Clinton, he has never been heard to call anyone a “f****** Jew bastard.”

By endorsing the Democrats’ baseless attacks on Trump, Mitt Romney is doing a terrible disservice, not just to the Republican Party, but to the United States of America.

Cartoons of the Day

June 11, 2016

H/t Power Line

Trump FP dangerous

 

Election choice

 

Glass ceiling

 

Glass ceiling truth

 

Paula Jones

 

Job fair

 

H/t Vermont Loon Watch

Sit Heel

Exclusive — Donald Trump Plans To Continue GOP Legacy Of Leading On Women’s, Civil Rights Against Racist, Sexist Democrats

June 10, 2016

Exclusive — Donald Trump Plans To Continue GOP Legacy Of Leading On Women’s, Civil Rights Against Racist, Sexist Democrats, BreitbartMatthew Boyle, June 10, 2016

donald-trump-supporters-rally-associated-press-640x480AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States, tells Breitbart News he plans to continue the rich GOP tradition of standing up for women’s and civil rights in the face of opposition from Democrats.

He also says he plans to help the Republican Party, which led the way on ending slavery, the Civil Rights movement and women’s suffrage and women’s rights—among other big picture moral leadership causes in American history—take more credit for its victories for women’s and civil rights while fighting Democrats who opposed those measures.

“You’re right—100 percent,” Trump told Breitbart News when asked about how the Republican Party led the way on ending slavery, the Civil Rights movement and women’s suffrage.

On Tuesday night, when now presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton assumed the leadership of that party, she whitewashed the Democratic Party’s history of racism, sexism, support for slavery and long history of standing against civil rights for all in America. In fact, as the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major political party in America, Clinton attempted to align herself with the Seneca Falls convention of 1848, the first ever women’s rights convention organized in large part by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

“Tonight’s victory is not about one person,” Clinton said in her speech accepting her role as the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee.

It belongs to generations of women and men who struggled and sacrificed and made this moment possible. In our country, it started right here in New York, a place called Seneca Falls, in 1848. When a small but determined group of women, and men, came together with the idea that women deserved equal rights, and they set it forth in something called the Declaration of Sentiments, and it was the first time in human history that that kind of declaration occurred.

Clinton did not mention Cady Stanton, or the fact that the women’s rights leader went on to become one of the nation’s first Republicans. In fact, Stanton’s husband Henry Brewster Stanton—a journalist and a New York State senator—was one of the nation’s leading voices for the abolition of slavery and helped found the Republican Party in New York back in 1856.

Later in the speech, Clinton took a shot at Trump, arguing that he wanted to send America backward—that his trademark campaign phrase “Make America Great Again” was code for taking the country back before all people had civil rights.

“Donald Trump is temperamentally unfit to be president and commander-in-chief,” Clinton said. “And he’s not just trying to build a wall between America and Mexico – he’s trying to wall off Americans from each other. When he says, ‘Let’s make America great again,’ that is code for, ‘Let’s take America backwards.’ Back to a time when opportunity and dignity were reserved for some, not all, promising his supporters an economy he cannot recreate.”

Never mind the fact that her own husband, former President Bill Clinton, used the phrase“Make America Great Again” multiple times back in the 1990s—a phrase first popularized by former President Ronald Reagan, who used the campaign slogan in his own successful 1980 White House bid—but Clinton is forgetting the history of her own political party. Clinton’s success is built out of a Democratic Party that rose to and clutched onto power by actively suppressing equal rights of not just women, but minorities as well.

Abraham Lincoln, the president who signed the Emancipation Proclamation abolishing slavery then led the country through the Civil War preserving the Union until his assassination, was a Republican. The general public often forgets how influential the Republican Party was in ending slavery—Democrats wanted to continue slavery, while Lincoln’s Republicans wanted to end it—and if it weren’t for the GOP, slavery would not have ended and the Union itself may have fallen apart.

“Some may not realize that the modern Republican Party owes its origin to the fight over slavery nearly two centuries ago,” CNN’s Tom Foreman wrote back in 2012.

In the tumultuous mid-1800s, right before the Civil War, some political activists were concerned about keeping slavery from spreading into new western territories, and they saw no way to stop it through existing political powers: the Democrats and the Whigs (the pro-Congress party of the mid 1800s that largely destroyed itself in the 1852 elections in a battle over slavery). So they formed a new party, taking the name ‘Republicans’ in a salute to earlier American politicians.

As Republicans led the battle against slavery, in 1861 the party’s first U.S. president—Abraham Lincoln—was elected.

“Soon after, slavery fell,” Foreman wrote.

The Whig party disappeared. And the Republicans began a long steady rise in power. Even back then, the party liked to talk about fiscal responsibility — immigration, religion — and the need for a strong business climate. All of this spurred a sympathetic Chicago newspaper to call the Republicans the Grand Old Party, or the GOP.

Republicans have led the way on every major civil rights movement in American history—ending slavery was hardly the only one. What is now the Party of Trump also led the way in granting women the right to vote. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a leader in the women’s rights movement in the 19th Century, was a Republican, as was Susan B. Anthony. So were many of the others involved in the effort. In fact, it was Republicans who led the effort for decades that eventually saw passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which granted women the right vote.

“Most educated Americans vaguely remember that the amendment granting women the right to vote was passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified by the states in 1920,” the American Spectator’s David Catron wrote back in 2012.

But the number of people who know anything about the forty-year legislative war that preceded that victory is smaller than the audience of MSNBC. That war began in 1878, when a California Republican named A.A. Sargent introduced the 19th Amendment only to see it voted down by a Democrat-controlled Congress. It finally ended four decades later, when the Republicans won landslide victories in the House and the Senate, giving them the power to pass the amendment despite continued opposition from most elected Democrats — including President Woodrow Wilson, to whom the suffragettes frequently referred as “Kaiser Wilson.”

Catron continued by noting that Republicans in Utah—Mormons—granted women the right to vote back in 1870. Then, for years afterwards, Republicans—facing objections from Democrats—over and over again introduced the 19th Amendment for ratification in Congress. Meanwhile, Republican states granted women the right to vote in many other places.

“Meanwhile, the Republicans continued to introduce the 19th Amendment in Congress every year, but the Democrats were able to keep it bottled up in various committees for another decade before allowing either chamber to vote on it,” Catron wrote.

In 1887 it finally reached the floor of the Senate. Once again, however, it was defeated by a vote of 34 to 16. After this setback, advocates of women’s suffrage opted to put pressure on Congress by convincing various state legislatures to pass bills giving women the vote. This met with some success. By the turn of the century a variety of Republican-controlled states, including Wyoming, Colorado, and Idaho, had granted women suffrage. During the first ten years of the new century, several other states gave women the vote, including Washington and California.

Eventually, Democrats relented and Republicans succeeded in granting women’s suffrage nationally.

“Congress, however, didn’t deign to vote on the issue again until 1914, when it was once again defeated by Senate Democrats,” Catron added.

It was subsequently brought up for a vote in January of 1915 in the House, where it went down by a vote of 204 to 174. Nonetheless, the Republicans continued to push even after it was defeated yet again in early 1918. The big break for 19th Amendment came when President Wilson, a true Democrat, violated his most solemn campaign promise. Having pledged to keep the United States out of the European conflict that had been raging since 1914, he decided to enter the war anyway. This set the stage for the 1918 midterm elections in which voter outrage swept the Republicans into power in both the House and the Senate. This finally placed the GOP in a position to pass the amendment despite Democrat opposition.

Later in the 20th Century of course, during the Civil Rights Movement, Democrats again stood against equal rights for all Americans regardless of race or gender. Writing in the Guardian of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act back in 2013, Harry Enten detailed how the Democratic Party opposed civil rights efforts while Republicans backed them.

“80% of Republicans in the House and Senate voted for the bill. Less than 70% of Democrats did,” Enten wrote. “Indeed, Minority Leader Republican Everett Dirksen led the fight to end the filibuster. Meanwhile, Democrats such as Richard Russell of Georgia and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina tried as hard as they could to sustain a filibuster.”

In fact, a PBS special on “The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow” detailed how systemic racism was embedded into the very fabric of what has now become Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party.

“The Democratic Party identified itself as the ‘white man’s party’ and demonized the Republican Party as being ‘Negro dominated,’ even though whites were in control,” the PBS special writes on its website of the post-Civil War Democrats. “Determined to re-capture the South, Southern Democrats ‘redeemed’ state after state — sometimes peacefully, other times by fraud and violence. By 1877, when Reconstruction was officially over, the Democratic Party controlled every Southern state.”

The PBS special goes on even further to detail how even Northern Democrats tolerated the overt discrimination and racism from their Southern brethren so as to keep their coalition of power together. “The South remained a one-party region until the Civil Rights movement began in the 1960s. Northern Democrats, most of whom had prejudicial attitudes towards blacks, offered no challenge to the discriminatory policies of the Southern Democrats,” PBS writes.

A deeper more than 30-page report from the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU)—called “The Truth About Jim Crow”—details how the Democratic Party was integral to the development of such laws.

“Jim Crow’s political purpose was to keep the white population in power, and the Democratic Party thought of itself as the white man’s party,” one part of the more than 10-page-long section on how the Democratic Party pushed Jim Crow laws reads. “A chronological look at the Jim Crow era will illustrate how Democrats created and exploited Jim Crow.”

The report goes on to detail how it was Republicans who ended Jim Crow laws.

Trump, in his latest exclusive interview with Breitbart News, said that Clinton’s rewriting of her Democratic Party’s sordid history on these important narratives is more proof that she is just playing the woman card and the race card for pure political gain—and in opposition of the facts. He also believes that Republicans need to do more to take credit for the party’s leading role in the women’s rights, Civil Rights and slavery abolition movements—all movements the Democrats, the party of Clinton, originally fought against intensely.

“The Democrats have always played that card,” Trump said. “The Republicans have not taken enough credit for what’s taken place. They’ve never taken enough credit for what’s taken place.”

Trump told Breitbart News that he plans to win support across the country despite anyone’s particular race, and aims to seek support from Hispanics and African Americans and white voters alike—and men and women—using the same message delivered to each of them the same way, equally: Jobs and economic opportunity for all. Meanwhile, Clinton, of course, is going to use these race and gender issues to divide Americans into separate classes based on gender and skin color.

“I plan to help Hispanics and African Americans because I’m going to bring jobs back to the country,” Trump said.

She doesn’t know how. I’m going to rebuild the infrastructure of the country, she wouldn’t know where to start. That’s why a lot of the unions, the head people, they routinely endorse the Democrats. Routinely. And they’re having a hard time. Because while they’re dying to endorse the Democrats because that’s where their head people have their lunch and dinner, their membership wants to endorse Trump. Look at the Teamsters. The people within the Teamsters want Trump. They haven’t endorsed yet, and the reason they haven’t endorsed yet is because everybody in the Teamsters wants Trump. The reason they want Trump is because I’m going to rebuild the infrastructure of the country and that’s good for them. It appeals across the lines to people that have small businesses and contracting companies that are not unionized.

When asked about how—when those self-appointed leaders in the African American and Hispanic communities will certainly further the Democratic Party’s agenda and undermine the GOP’s efforts, facts be damned—he plans to get his message out to the actual voters, Trump said it is simple.

“I think that’s been my whole message up to this point,” Trump said. “I’m going to continue to hit it very hard. But I think it’s been very much my own message up to this point, jobs, good trade deals. Last night I talked about it. Great trade deals.”

There are some early signs that Trump—using his unique style of mixing interesting campaigning with his celebrity appeal—might be able to cut through the clutter and reach voters in African American and Hispanic communities that have for years now been outside the GOP’s grasp, despite the Democratic Party’s dark history on civil and women’s rights matters.

As noted by Fox News Latino, Trump’s support among Hispanics is spiking fast according to new data from analytics firm CulturIntel. In fact, he is almost equal with Clinton.

“Based on big data analysis over the last 30 days as of June 1st, Trump reports 37 percent of Hispanic positive sentiment versus 41 percent for Clinton,” CulturIntel writes in the report. “Surprisingly, the candidates tie in negative sentiment across Hispanics at 38 percent; discounting the fact that Latinos default as Democrats or are completely turned off by Trump’s off-color comments. After all, over 50 percent of Latinos identify as political independents.”

Meanwhile, as Gateway Pundit notes in a new report as well based off this and other data, Trump could be on par to win 25 percent of the black vote. It would, the report detailed, lead to a landslide victory for Trump in November. It would also be the first time since 1960, when Richard Nixon failed to beat John F. Kennedy for the presidency before coming back eight years later to win in 1968, that a Republican won such a big percentage of the non-white vote. With black unemployment rates double what they are for whites, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if Trump hammers his jobs message—and corrects the record on Democrats versus Republicans when it comes to civil rights—maybe he could cut into a significant portion of the black electorate.

On top of all of this, as Breitbart News previously reported in an earlier part of this interview, Trump is also zoning in one place where failed 2012 GOP presidential former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney did not succeed: proving to voters he cares about them.

He said in this interview that he believes that to run the country, a president must “manage with heart”—a sign that he is appealing to the significant portion of the electorate that looks for a president who cares about people like them, qualifications be damned.

While Trump paints Clinton as “Heartless Hillary,” his second nickname for who he also calls “Crooked Hillary,” he could be growing the GOP tent and expanding the electorate based off key analytics that establishment Republicans in Washington, D.C., hellbent on amnesty for illegal aliens and jailbreak style “criminal justice reform” crime bills have completely missed.

Liberal Esquire writer visits the border, comes back supporting the wall

June 10, 2016

Liberal Esquire writer visits the border, comes back supporting the wall, American ThinkerThomas Lifson, June 10, 2016

A little knowledge and experience go a long way.  Let’s hope the Trump campaign notices.  Truth Revolt reports:

This week on MSNBC’s Morning JoeEsquire Editor-in-Chief Jay Fielden describes sending one of his liberal journalists to the U.S.-Mexico border to find out what the locals are saying about illegal immigration. The journalist came back agreeing with Donald Trump saying, “Build that wall.”

Fielden went into detail about this accidental journalism:

“You gotta go down there with no preconceived notions, right, just an empty notebook. Go to my former home state and walk the border, drive the border 800 miles and talk to whoever you see and let them tell us what they think about what’s really going on — whether we need a wall, in fact. Instead of hearing it from the debate stage, let’s hear it from the people who are down there everyday.”

The locals’ conclusion? “They said, ‘Build the wall,'” according to Fielden. “They said two things — whether Hispanic, Anglo, Democrat, Republican, uncommitted, clueless, whatever — they said, ‘We want a wall and yet, we want it to be married with some compassion for the people we’re trying to keep from jumping over the wall.'”

The Esquire article explains that Hispanics are the ones who are less sympathetic about illegals crossing the border, far more so than whites. Fielden said they view the situation as unfair because many first generation immigrants came over the legal way and are now having to compete for jobs with those doing it illegally on a daily basis.

“Let ’em get in line,” he said, quoting one local legal immigrant.

Here’s the segment:

The notion that Hispanics who came here legally are disadvantaged by illegal immigration is a powerful one that should resonate among all Americans, including African-Americans.  It turns Donald Trump from a racist into a defender of poor people who play by the rules.