Obama-appointed US attorney fired by Trump after refusing to resign https://t.co/cAO7SULb7I pic.twitter.com/gAFvrr42FB
— The Hill (@thehill) March 11, 2017
The implications of France's political insurgencies are hard to exaggerate https://t.co/tB5vTJrZH4
— The Economist (@TheEconomist) March 4, 2017
On March 10, witness the rise of the King. Watch the NEW trailer for #kongskullisland! Get tickets now: https://t.co/ujrlGZAy5Y pic.twitter.com/YZ1b4rUxFB— Kong: Skull Island (@kongskullisland) February 27, 2017
Here's why Rex Tillerson might be the weakest @StateDept Head ever. Robert Jervis explains: https://t.co/9t3KY34htr pic.twitter.com/tC4hPxkpp7— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) March 10, 2017
YOU'RE FIRED: Donald Trump just told all 46 Obama-era US Attorneys to resign and Dems are LOSING IT https://t.co/OO3M34Nz6u— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) March 10, 2017
DANA LOESCH: I think there's a lot of danger there [with the House Republican health plan], Shannon. I want to reiterate what Senator Paul said, but I want to take it a step further. I think it's an insult. It's an insult to the American people and it's an insult to the Trump administration for Republicans, Congressional Republicans to deliver this bill to his desk.Also, at Breitbart, via Memeorandum, "7 Reasons Why ObamaCare 2.0 is All But Guaranteed to Impose Crushing Costs on Voters, Hurt Trump's Base, and Hand Power Back to the Democrats."
They are the ones who are endangering this new administration and I can't bold, italicized, underline that anymore...
Marines from an amphibious task force have left their ships in the Middle East and deployed to Syria, establishing an outpost from which they can fire artillery guns in support of the fight to oust the Islamic State from the northern Syrian city of Raqqa, defense officials said.Keep reading.
The deployment marks a new escalation in the U.S. war in Syria, and puts more conventional U.S. troops in the battle. Several hundred Special Operations troops have advised local forces there for months, but the Pentagon has mostly shied away from using conventional forces in Syria. The new mission comes as the Trump administration weighs a plan to help Syrian rebels take back Raqqa, the de facto capital of the Islamic State. The plan also includes more Special Operations troops and attack helicopters.
The force is part of the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which left San Diego on Navy ships in October. The Marines on the ground include part of an artillery battery that can fire powerful 155-millimeter shells from M-777 Howitzers, two officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the deployment.
The expeditionary unit’s ground force, Battalion Landing Team 1st Battalion, 4th Marines, will man the guns and deliver fire support for U.S.-backed local forces who are preparing an assault on the city. Additional infantrymen from the unit will provide security, while resupplies will be handled by part of the expeditionary force’s combat logistics element. For this deployment, the Marines were flown from Djibouti to Kuwait and then into Syria, said another defense official with direct knowledge of the operation.
The official added that the Marines’ movement into Syria was not the byproduct of President Trump’s request for a new plan to take on the Islamic State...
Tracy Chevalier: 'Washington DC is one of America's most beautiful cities'https://t.co/naF3vBoqQd pic.twitter.com/zgBlsbnH6r
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) March 7, 2017
WASHINGTON — WikiLeaks on Tuesday released thousands of documents that it said described sophisticated software tools used by the Central Intelligence Agency to break into smartphones, computers and even Internet-connected televisions.Keep reading.
If the documents are authentic, as appeared likely at first review, the release would be the latest coup for the anti-secrecy organization and a serious blow to the C.I.A., which maintains its own hacking capabilities to be used for espionage.
The initial release, which WikiLeaks said was only the first part of the document collection, included 7,818 web pages with 943 attachments, the group said. The entire archive of C.I.A. material consists of several hundred million lines of computer code, it said.
Among other disclosures that, if confirmed, would rock the technology world, the WikiLeaks release said that the C.I.A. and allied intelligence services had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”
The source of the documents was not named. WikiLeaks said the documents, which it called Vault 7, had been “circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.”
WikiLeaks said the source, in a statement, set out policy questions that “urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the C.I.A.’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency.” The source, the group said, “wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.”
The documents, from the C.I.A’s Center for Cyber Intelligence, are dated from 2013 to 2016, and WikiLeaks described them as “the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.” One former intelligence officer who briefly reviewed the documents on Tuesday morning said some of the code names for C.I.A. programs, an organization chart and the description of a C.I.A. hacking base appeared to be genuine.
A C.I.A. spokesman, Dean Boyd, said, “We do not comment on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents.”
WikiLeaks, which has sometimes been accused of recklessly leaking information that could do harm, said it had redacted names and other identifying information from the collection. It said it was not releasing the computer code for actual, usable cyberweapons “until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the C.I.A.’s program and how such ‘weapons’ should be analyzed, disarmed and published.”
Some of the details of the C.I.A. programs might have come from the plot of a spy novel for the cyberage, revealing numerous highly classified — and in some cases, exotic — hacking programs. One, code-named Weeping Angel, uses Samsung “smart” televisions as covert listening devices. According to the WikiLeaks news release, even when it appears to be turned off, the television “operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the internet to a covert C.I.A. server.”
The release said the program was developed in cooperation with British intelligence...
Who wrote this piece of crap Obamacare replacement bill? Please be specific.
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) March 7, 2017
I have to give full identifying info as each health ins co goes bankrupt. What are names of the brain trust that wrote this piece of crap?
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) March 7, 2017
Also, I would like every person involved in the writing of this Obamacare replacement POS to take a ten-minute IQ test. Transparency!
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) March 7, 2017
House GOP leadership faced mounting opposition Tuesday after introducing an Obamacare repeal and replace bill that was rejected by small government conservatives, panned by Republican moderates and given only lukewarm support from President Trump.
One day after unveiling the GOP’s long-promised effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something better, the new American Health Care Act already appears to be on life support, unlikely to survive the onslaught of friendly fire unless Trump personally rallies his party.
But Trump’s intervention looks uncertain. While the president embraced “our wonderful new healthcare bill” in an early morning tweet, he also suggested it’s just a starting point “for review and negotiation” — opening the floodgates to alternative ideas and proposals that could take weeks to sort out.
Later, in a White House meeting with House Republicans, he offered a stronger endorsement, saying he was "proud to support" their plan and expected it to pass “very quickly.”
At the same time, though Trump is also accepting back-channel calls from conservative Republican opponents — including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — who are warning him off legislation they view as nothing more than a revamped federal entitlement program. Conservative lawmakers are being backed by the Koch network, whose supporters rallied outside the Capitol on Tuesday, and other influential groups including Heritage Action and Club for Growth. They dismiss the GOP leadership’s bill as “Obamacare 2.0” or “Obamacare lite.”
“This is not the Obamacare repeal bill we’ve been waiting for,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who is leading the GOP opposition with Paul and the House Freedom Caucus. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has also raised objections.“We promised the American people we would drain the swamp and end business as usual in Washington. This bill does not do that,” Lee said. “This is exactly the type of backroom dealing and rushed process that we criticized Democrats for, and it is not what we promised the American people.”
For seven years Republicans have promised to end Obamacare, and after winning repeated congressional elections on their promise to repeal and replace the law, they were confident Democrats would have no choice but to join them.
But Democrats have shown no interest in the GOP bill, saying it would drop millions of Americans from healthcare coverage without offering them viable alternatives. Rather than being spooked by their November election losses, Democrats have been buoyed by the outpouring of support for Obamacare by constituents and protesters flocking to lawmakers’ town hall meetings across the country...
It isn't out of the question. The former president's administration wiretapped journalists and spied on Congress.Of course Obama spied on Trump.
So President Trump set off a firestorm over the weekend with a series of tweets alleging that Obama had tapped Trump Tower. But getting hung up on imprecise language in the president's tweets isn't the right way to look at things. What seems to be at true is that the Obama administration spied on some of Trump's associates and we don't know exactly how much information was collected under what authority and who was targeted.
As former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy summarizes in National Review, the Obama Justice Department considered a criminal investigation aimed at a number of Trump’s associates. When they didn’t find anything criminal, they converted the investigation into an intelligence probe under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Elements of that story have been confirmed by The New York Times, the BBC and McClatchy newspapers.
FISA surveillance has to be approved by a special court, which almost always allows the government to spy on people when asked. But when the Justice Department asked to spy on several of Trump's associates, the court refused permission, according to the BBC. As McCarthy writes, this is notable because “the FISA court is notoriously solicitous of government requests to conduct national security surveillance.”
Not taking no for an answer, the Obama administration came back during the final weeks of the election with a narrower request that didn’t specifically mention Trump. That narrower request was granted by the court, but reports from the Guardian and the BBC don't mention the tapping of phones..
Former Obama officials issued denials that the former president had anything to do with it, which McCarthy calls “disingenuous on several levels.” Others have characterized them as a "non-denial denial.”
President Donald Trump is “absolutely right” to claim he was wiretapped and monitored, a former NSA official claimed Monday, adding that the administration risks falling victim to further leaks if it continues to run afoul of the intelligence community...Keep reading.
"Sanctuary cities" should wear the label proudly https://t.co/ficPkrQCxw— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) March 7, 2017
There are no A Day Without a Woman events planned for Wednesday amid charges of “white privilege.” What may be the only Puget Sound area event is a free yoga open house in Kirkland.Keep reading.
So maybe it wasn’t the best thought-out event, A Day Without a Woman general strike this Wednesday, on International Women’s Day.
“Stupid. That’s what I first thought,” says Angie Beem, the state director of the Women’s March that in Seattle drew tens of thousands of participants on Jan. 21.
“What’s the purpose of a strike when you can’t afford a day to not work? Women who could possibly do this are in an executive-type position. Life will go on for them. Their career is more stable. This screamed …”
Guess the next two words.
“White privilege,” concludes Beem.
Her group is not sponsoring any events associated with A Day Without a Woman, which also coincides with International Women’s Day.
There are strike events promised in New York, Washington, D. C., Boston and even Fairbanks.
Beem remembers a tweet coming a month or so ago from the national Women’s March group.
“It was just two women who decided it was going to happen. They put this out on social media without discussing it,” says Beem.
“Facebook blew up. There were a lot of people like myself saying, ‘This isn’t right.’ ”
She says she had the same misgivings about “A Day Without Immigrants” that took place Feb. 16 — that there’s too much risk. News reports said a number of protesters were fired for not showing up for work that day.
“People are desperate to take some action and some control over their lives,” says Beem. “Then they make the horrible choice of not going to work and their whole career is over.”
While Beem doesn’t agree with the strike, the event was later expanded to include avoiding shopping that day — except for at small women-and-minority owned businesses — and wearing red in solidarity.
About the color red, says the national group, “We have chosen red as a color of signifying revolutionary love and sacrifice. Red is the color of energy and action associated with our will to survive. It signifies a pioneering spirit and leadership qualities, promoting ambition and determination.”
Beem says she will wear red on Wednesday...
By her own account, Vielka McFarlane was an immigrant success story. She had escaped a childhood of poverty in Panama, made her way to Los Angeles and founded a nonprofit network of publicly funded charter schools called the Celerity Educational Group.Well, nice work if you can get it. And a "black car service"? Must be nice.
In 2013, she earned $471,842, about 35% more than Michelle King, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, makes today.
McFarlane was prospering, and it showed. She wore Armani suits, ate at expensive restaurants and used a black car service.
Financial records obtained by The Times show that, as Celerity’s CEO, she paid for many of these expenses with a credit card belonging to her charter schools, which receive the bulk of their funding from the state.
It could not be determined whether McFarlane, 54, ever reimbursed the charter schools for her credit card purchases. Neither she nor a lawyer hired by Celerity responded to requests for comment about the transactions.
At a time when charter school advocates are determined to increase the number of such schools in L.A., the story of McFarlane and the Celerity schools offers a case study of the growing difficulty of regulating them. The task of spotting and stamping out risky financial practices in charters largely falls to the school district’s charter schools division, which employs about a dozen people dedicated to monitoring the schools’ fiscal health.
But as the number of L.A. charter schools has grown to more than 220, enrolling about 111,000 students, oversight has become a challenge for district officials, who are at once competitors and regulators...
In a global ranking of "best countries," the United States drops to No. 7 https://t.co/Pnd8rB70xp— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 7, 2017
There is one bright spot for the United States: It is still perceived as the most powerful nation on earth, running ahead of Russia, China, the United Kingdom and Germany.You see, all those countries that are ranked as "better" than us, are also free-riding on the security we're providing. And honestly, Canada, Sweden, and Germany are already gone, turned over to leftists and Islamists. Switzerland's a nice place for a vacation, but why would it be ranked the best country in the world? And Japan! California's better than Japan, and we're a Democrat Party hell-hole, heh.
When the event ended, and it was time to leave the building, I breathed a sigh of relief. We had made it. I was ready for dinner and conversation with faculty and students in a tranquil setting. What transpired instead felt like a scene from Homeland rather than an evening at an institution of higher learning. We confronted an angry mob as we tried to exit the building. Most of the hatred was focused on Dr. Murray, but when I took his right arm both to shield him from attack and to make sure we stayed together so I could reach the car too, that’s when the hatred turned on me. One thug grabbed me by the hair and another shoved me in a different direction. I noticed signs with expletives and my name on them. There was also an angry human on crutches, and I remember thinking to myself, “What are you doing? That’s so dangerous!” For those of you who marched in Washington the day after the inauguration, imagine being in a crowd like that, only being surrounded by hatred rather than love. I feared for my life...RTWT.
Harvard Confronts the Deep Ties to Slavery in Academia.
— Michiko Kakutani (@michikokakutani) March 6, 2017
by @jennyschuessler via @nytimes https://t.co/S71XPsrxt5
"Separating fact from fake news has never been more essential," writes columnist @mgoodwin_nypost https://t.co/zIegHBFQP0
— New York Post (@nypost) March 5, 2017
Here a Russian story, there a Russian story, everywhere a Russian story — all based on leaks from anonymous sources. You don’t have to be a spook to spot the plan: Destroy Donald Trump by putting him in a bear hug.Keep reading.
To judge by their scattershot approach, the conspirators are fishing for a bombshell. The fallback goal is to inflict death by a thousand cuts.
Already they’ve gotten one scalp and part of another. Gen. Mike Flynn is gone, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions is wounded. Each made a mistake that obscured a larger truth: Somebody in the government has been spying on Trump’s team and giving top secret information to anti-Trump media outlets.
Our president is many things, but dumb he’s not. He recognized the stakes, so yesterday he struck back in a way that dramatically upped the ante in the war over his presidency.
Trump’s early-morning tweets accusing President Barack Obama of having wiretapped him at Trump Tower startled the world. It is a sensational claim, but in light of the tsunami of leaks from intelligence agencies, the president is right to suspect that he’s the target of a dirty game.
To start with, the unprecedented alliance against him clearly includes remnants of the Obama administration, and probably the former president himself. The recent New York Times report that Obama and his team dropped intelligence findings like bread crumbs so they would get wide readership and to prevent the Trump administration from burying them reveals an attempt to undermine if not subvert a legally elected president.
The Times report conveys suspicions that Trump would deep-six the findings if he could while giving a free pass to Obama’s leakers who may have committed crimes. The Times knows who in the Obama camp was involved and what they did. The paper has an ethical obligation to report it.
Yet here’s the rub: What exactly was in those findings? All the public knows is that intelligence officials said they investigated whether the Trump campaign had ties to Russia, and we only know that because it was leaked by anonymous sources.
But that knowledge, while sounding suspicious, raises more questions than it answers.
For example, did investigators looking at Trump’s campaign find anything substantive? The Times has said no but keeps suggesting the probes continue. Publicly, the FBI won’t confirm or deny anything and even Congress is frustrated by the bureau’s behavior.
Yet the fact that there are leaks reveals something important: The investigation involved monitoring phone calls and maybe computers and maybe physical surveillance...
The invaluable legal analysis of Andrew M. McCarthy, checking the work of the NYT.And see the roundup at Maggie's Farm, "The Political Warfare Continues."
The arrest so shook the school, a public charter called Academia Avance, that administrators held an assembly Tuesday afternoon to discuss what happened and to ease fears. The school’s executive director, Ricardo Mireles, has since ordered his teachers to talk to students whose parents are here illegally about creating a family plan in case they are detained or deported.It's "unfortunate" that illegal immigrant children now have to "deal with reality"?
“It’s unfortunate that we have to have minors now deal with reality,” he said. “You need to be ready. ‘Have you talked to your parents? Do you have power of attorney?’ ”
The true story of the Louisiana Purchase is one of shameful plunder of native lands: https://t.co/EcbSMdAACk pic.twitter.com/jhv0qzuKzT
— Slate (@Slate) March 5, 2017
RETWEET if @realDonaldTrump is YOUR president! #TeamTrump pic.twitter.com/5sT0KV9ekD
— Eric Spracklen (@EricSpracklen) March 5, 2017
The single most devastating statistic in American life is this: The average black high school senior reads at the level of the average white eighth-grader. This, more than anything else, explains why race remains such an overwhelmingly salient fact in American life. It explains why affirmative action is, or at least appears to be, necessary. It explains to a very large degree why blacks continue to lag so far behind whites in income and socioeconomic status.Keep reading.
And, as Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom demonstrate with remorseless lucidity in "No Excuses," their latest exploration of the causes and consequences of persistent black failure, the gap cannot be explained away by racism, testing bias, inequitable resources or even by poverty itself. The gap is not only an incontrovertible fact but a fact rooted in black experience and behavior. The Thernstroms do not believe that school is the cause of black failure, but they insist that, given the right innovations, school can be the solution to black failure. Readers may find it hard to believe that a problem so deeply rooted can be cured with such a straightforward and inexpensive application of reform.
The Thernstroms have been accused in the past of relishing, rather than ruing, the bad news they deliver on, say, affirmative action or welfare. In their previous book, "America in Black and White," they seemed to take great pleasure in putting liberal noses out of joint. But they deserve at least equal credit for venturing fearlessly where more cautious scholars fear to tread and taking the considerable flak that comes with it. "No Excuses" is also not likely to be welcomed in the hallways of our great foundations or in graduate schools of education.
The essential piece of bad news the Thernstroms deliver here is that none of the conventional explanations for the academic gap hold much water, and thus neither do the conventional solutions. They challenge the view, most fervently advanced by Jonathan Kozol in "Savage Inequalities," that schools with large minority populations are systematically denied resources. This is one of those common-sense perceptions that turns out on close examination, they say, to be false...
I just published “Feminism 2017: ‘Shut Up, White Women’” https://t.co/X4XsGm17ZB— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) March 3, 2017
Whoa! A woman in Florida captured this crazy sight of a gator carrying a fish across a golf course. https://t.co/Kj4cZjWEVg pic.twitter.com/yeMPoZs6gI
— Fox News (@FoxNews) March 3, 2017
Fan mail pic.twitter.com/5lU2DG2YVg
— Mark Z. Barabak (@markzbarabak) March 3, 2017
Leftist Students Physically Assault Conservative Scholar, Professor Over Speech https://t.co/gRj8zpjMvS
— Scott Greer (@ScottMGreer) March 3, 2017
#MiddleburyCollege students shout down lecture by Charles Murray https://t.co/l7umGvRozk #highered pic.twitter.com/1pM4QbPpQ5
— Inside Higher Ed (@insidehighered) March 3, 2017
OMG.This happened after Charles Murray lecture. Female prof assaulted--car mobbed. @splcenter helped incite the hate pic.twitter.com/a6VMclPjxU
— Christina Sommers (@CHSommers) March 3, 2017
This is gratuitously cruel. She was brought here when she was 7. They're making an example of her. https://t.co/mu4VMoIZiT
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) March 3, 2017
The utter lack of empathy in some of the responses to this story is depressing. https://t.co/b8vDsZkFnn
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) March 3, 2017
Revenge of Obama’s ‘Former Officials’ - by @noahcrothman https://t.co/d8z9pZGl8i pic.twitter.com/Fhh6SywFeo
— Commentary Magazine (@Commentary) March 3, 2017
For a president who has a uniquely hostile relationship with the press, positive news cycles are both rare and fleeting. The Trump team displayed remarkable discipline by refusing to step on the president’s well-received address to a joint session of Congress. A lot of good discipline did them. Just 24 hours after Trump’s address, a series of troubling reports involving links among those in Trump’s orbit to Russian officials reset the national discourse. Those stories make for a trend, though, that has little to do with Trump and a lot to do with his predecessor. The Obama administration’s foreign-policy team seems to be campaigning to rehabilitate itself one leak at a time, and the press is helping.Democrats are treasonous scum.
The frenzy on Wednesday night began with a revelation in the New York Times that members of Barack Obama’s administration had left a trail of breadcrumbs for investigators who happen to be looking into the Trump campaign’s contacts with the Russian government. The report revealed that intelligence officials intercepted communications between Russian officials and “Trump associates,” and that the administration worked frantically in the final days to ensure those revelations could not be buried and forgotten after they left office.
More than six “former officials” described efforts to reduce the classification on some reports relating to Trump associates’ contact with Russians so they would be widely distributed. They also revealed their efforts to raise the classification level of some information related to Russia that was so sensitive they feared the Trump administration might leak it to Moscow. Some officials apparently even touted their efforts to ask leading questions during intelligence briefings so their questions would be transcribed and archived, leaving clues for congressional investigators should they ever come looking for them.
The Times report revealed that a “former senior American official” disclosed that Jeff Sessions had met with “Russian officials.” The Washington Post confirmed that Sessions took a private meeting with Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak, appearing to contradict testimony Sessions provided to the Senate. The controversy whipped up around the discrepancy between Sessions’ confirmation-hearing testimony, and these reports have resulted in Democrats calling for his resignation and Republicans running for cover.
Though it received less attention amid the flurry of reports involving Team Trump’s connections to the Kremlin, the Washington Post published another story involving the decision-making process that led up to the Yemen raid. That raid, in which Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens was killed, an Osprey helicopter was lost, and up to 31 Yemeni civilians died, cannot be said to have gone according to plan. This report alleges that the plan might have been the problem.
The report quoted former advisor to Vice President Joe Biden on national security, Colin Kahl, who averred that the raid was the result of an Obama administration-era initiative expediting the approval of partnered ground operations. Yet, this raid was greenlit as a result of “a more abbreviated White House process.” Kahl took particular issue with the revelation that a sub-Cabinet level meeting on the raid—a meeting scheduled after the raid had been approved by the president and following a variety of briefings on the mission—lasted less than an hour. “You can’t cover the complexity of a topic like that in 23 minutes,” he declared. Other “former officials” quoted in that piece criticized the raid for straining relations with the Yemeni government. In sum, the Obama administration deserves all the credit for what went right in Yemen and none of the blame for what went wrong.
At least a few of these “former officials” who so freely offer reporters at the Times and the Post intimate details about the Obama administration’s approach to foreign policy are members of the infamous gang of nine. These officials within the Obama administration’s intelligence apparatus confirmed to the Post that former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn had misled Mike Pence when he said he did not discuss the Obama-era sanctions regime in his phone conversations with Kislyak. As the Times revealed last night, federal officials monitored those calls, transcribed the conversations, and related the substance to the press.
There is an assumption permeating these reports: that those unnamed Obama-era officials are selflessly sacrificing in the effort to prevent the Trump administration from undermining American national security. Some have even dedicated themselves to creating an elaborate Da Vinci Code for future scavenger hunters to decipher. More likely, the Obama administration’s foreign policy professionals are doing their best to retroactively vindicate themselves after leaving office under a cloud of mistrust. In their effort to self-aggrandize at the expense of the current administration, these rogue officials have found willing partners in the press.
The Obama administration was engaged in narrative manipulation surrounding Russia’s intervention into the election process even in its final hours...
Was former Secretary of labor and assistant attorney-general Tom Perez’s victory over Congressman Keith Ellison over the weekend in the race to serve as the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee a victory of centrist Democrats over radical leftists in the party? That is how the mainstream media is portraying Perez’s victory.Keep reading.
Along these lines, Prof. Allen Dershowitz, a lifelong Democrat who promised to quit the party if Ellison was elected due to his documented history of antisemitism and hostility toward Israel, hailed Perez’s election. Speaking to Fox News, Dershowitz said that Perez’s election over Ellison “is a victory in the war against bigotry, antisemitism, the anti-Israel push of the hard Left within the Democratic Party.”
There are two problems with Dershowitz’s view. First, Perez barely won. Ellison received nearly half the votes in two rounds of voting.
Tipping his hat to Ellison’s massive popularity among the party’s leadership and grassroots, Perez appointed the former Nation of Islam spokesman to serve as deputy DNC chairman as soon as his own victory was announced.
There is a good reason that Perez is so willing to cooperate with Ellison in running the DNC. And this points to the second problem with the claim that Perez’s election signals a move toward the center by Democratic leaders.
Perez is ready to cooperate with Ellison because the two men have the same ideological worldview and the same vision for the Democratic Party. As Mother Jones explained, “There’s truly not much ideological distance between the two.”
Far from being a victory for the centrist forces in the party, Perez’s win marks the solidification of the far Left’s control over the party of Harry Truman. Only hard leftists participated in a meaningful way in the race for leadership of the second largest party in America – a party that less than a decade ago controlled the White House and both houses of Congress.
The implications of this state of affairs are disastrous for the US generally. It is inherently destabilizing for a nation when one of the parties in a two-party political system is taken over by people who have a negative view of the country.
While America as a whole will suffer from the radicalization of the Democratic Party, perhaps no group will suffer more from the far Left’s takeover of the party than the American Jewish community. The vast majority of American Jews give their partisan allegiance to the Democratic Party and their ideological allegiance to the Left.
While Perez made a name for himself by fighting the enforcement of US immigration and naturalization laws against illegal immigrants, and Ellison rose to prominence for his activism in radical African American and Islamic circles, thanks to the so-called intersectionality of the far Left, that makes the cause of one faction the cause of all factions, today Perez is as much an apologist for Israel bashers as Ellison.
Perhaps in response to the danger that the far Left’s takeover of the Democratic Party represents, Malcolm Hoenlein, the long-serving professional head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations called on Sunday for the convening of a global conference on antisemitism. In a meeting with The Jerusalem Post’s editorial board, Hoenlein said that one of the goals of the proposed conference would be to reach a universally accepted definition of antisemitism...
Why Were the 7,000 Antisemitic Incidents Under Obama Largely Ignored? by Seth Frantzman https://t.co/vjFkrkBDTd— Algemeiner (@Algemeiner) March 1, 2017
Pat Benatar
Heartbreaker
7:59 AM
Same Old Song and Dance
Aerosmith
7:55 AM
BURNIN' FOR YOU
B.O.C.
7:51 AM
Let's Go
The Cars
7:47 AM
Stairway to Heaven
Led Zeppelin
7:39 AM
Wanted Dead or Alive
Bon Jovi
7:34 AM
Long Cool Woman
the Hollies
7:31 AM
Jungle Love
Steve Miller Band
7:28 AM
Your Love
The Outfield
7:24 AM
Suffragette City
David Bowie
7:21 AM
All Right Now
Free
7:04 AM
