Friday morning roundup

S.E. Cupp gives a very effective refutation of Michelle Obama's identity-politics bluster about how any woman who didn't vote for Madame BleachBit last November was "ignoring her own voice."

It may sound like the stuff of tinfoil hat potboilers to say that it looks like Russia has been stoking divisions between Americans on social media, but that's what CNN is reporting.

An absolute must-read by Randoph Parrish at The American Thinker entitled "How to Destroy a Nation." He understands that it is very, very late in the day.

If you want to destroy a nation, you find a way to denigrate its belief in itself. Smear its founders. Belittle its accomplishments. Pillory it for failing to live up to its ideals. Mock its most sacred traditions. Deride its heroes.

In the end, you will no longer have a nation, but only a collection of tribes, who occupy the same space but share no common concepts. There is nothing to unify them. In other words, you will be able to pinpoint that country with geographical data, but you will not find a national people.

David French at NRO on the legacy of Hugh Hefner.

How snot-nosed is the Left in post-America? Well,, consider the response of a Massachusetts librarian to Melania Trump's gift of some children's books to the school where she works:

My students were interested in reading your enclosed letter and impressed with the beautiful bookplates with your name and the indelible White House stamp, however, we will not be keeping the titles for our collection. I’d like to respectfully offer my explanation…

Yearly per-pupil spending in Cambridge is well over $20,000; our city’s values are such that given a HUGE range in the socioeconomic status of our residents, we believe that each and every child deserves the best free education possible and are working hard to make that a reality (most classrooms maintain a 60/40 split between free/reduced lunch and paid lunch). This offers our Title I school and the district a lot of privilege and room for programming and pedagogy to foster “high standards of excellence.” Even so, we still struggle to close the achievement gap, retain teachers of color, and dismantle the systemic white supremacy in our institution. But hell, we test well! And in the end, it appears that data — and not children — are what matters…

Another fact that many people are unaware of is that Dr. Seuss’s illustrations are steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes. Open one of his books (If I Ran a Zoo or And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, for example), and you’ll see the racist mockery in his art. Grace Hwang Lynch’s School Library Journal article, “Is the Cat in the Hat Racist? Read Across America Shifts Away from Dr. Seuss and Toward Diverse Books,” reports on Katie Ishizuka’s work analyzing the minstrel characteristics and trope nature of Seuss’s characters. Scholar Philip Nel’s new book, Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books, further explores and shines a spotlight on the systemic racism and oppression in education and literature.

I am honored that you recognized my students and our school. I can think of no better gift for children than books; it was a wonderful gesture, if one that could have been better thought out. Books can be a powerful way to learn about and experience the world around us; they help build empathy and understanding. In return, I’m attaching a list of ten books (it’s the librarian in me) that I hope will offer you a window into the lives of the many children affected by the policies of your husband’s administration.

It's, um . . . persons like that who make it really hard to refrain from vitriolic lashing out, ad hominem attacks and mockery. But here at LITD we keep things on the level of ideas and principles, so we'll just let the above dog vomit speak for itself.

An out lesbian Methodist bishop calls Jesus a bigot. 

Tuesday roundup

 Ted Cruz calls for the Senate to forego an August recess and work on the repeal plan for the "A"CA.

Very thoughtful piece at NRO by Nicholas Gallagher on the tension between the two key notions of what America is: an idea (namely, that liberty is an essential condition for human well-being) and a blood-and-soil geographically identifiable location populated by particular demographics.

North Korea has been supplying everything from arms to construction labor to a number of African nations for decades, and they are quite pleased with the partnership.

Identity politics madness in San Francisco prevents BART from releasing videos of criminals beating people up and robbing them on public transit:

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) authority is refusing to release surveillance videos involving a recent spate of robberies committed at BART stations in the last three months. Their reasoning?

They don’t want to perpetuate negative stereotypes of minorities.

 The CBS affiliate in San Francisco says in the last three months “there have been at least three robberies on BART involving groups of teenagers.”

April 22: Forty to sixty kids boarded a train at the Coliseum stop and robbed seven passengers, beating up two;

June 28: A group of four kids assaulted a passenger and made off with a cell phone at Dublin; and

June 30: A woman on a train with about a dozen teenagers had her phone snatched by one them before the group got off at the Coliseum stop. Thankfully, a good Samaritan was on hand to retrieve the phone.

Despite the heightened threat to the public, BART authorities continue to withhold video of the attacks from the press, citing concerns that they would be aiding negativity towards minorities, although they failed to identify which minorities are in question.

You knew this was coming: transgendered dolls.

There's been a lot of hype in recent times about China being poised to become a genuine world-stage leader. Don't buy it, says Rich Lowry.

Here's where to get clarity on all the threads in the tangled mess that is Russia's role in the 2016 election

David French at NRO admirably and succinctly examines all the factors and figures in the cluster of controversies surrounding the current administration, its immediate predecessor, Russia, and US politics. He lays it out in Q&A style, with the italicized questions representing the various aspects of the entire scenario about which the everyday American is curious. He covers it all: Manafort, Page and Flynn, the fakes-news phenomenon, the historically dismal approval numbers for both of last year's final candidates, the notion of a "deep state," what is problematic with the way Devin Nunes has behaved, what we do and don't know about Obama-era figures trying to hobble Trump from early on.

The way to give you a taste is with a look at the final question and answer:

Wait a minute, after more than 2,300 words, are you saying that we know Russia tried to interfere with the election, but we don’t know if Trump officials helped or colluded in any way, if Trump himself was involved in any way, if Obama officials have improperly unmasked or surveilled Trump’s team, or who any unlawful leakers were? Is this the least-helpful Q & A ever written?

The answer to all these questions except the last (I hope!) is “yes.” We don’t know the most important facts of the case, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t know anything important. It’s important and troubling to know that members of the intelligence community are seemingly leaking with impunity to damage Trump. It’s important and troubling to know that Trump has lost key aides because of their Russia ties, and that Trump and his team continue struggling to tell the truth about their Russian contacts. And it’s important and troubling to know that huge swaths of the American political establishment are being exposed as purely partisan.

The FBI is continuing its investigation, and so are the House and Senate intelligence committees (though Nunes’s House committee is in a state of chaos). Every major media publication is feverishly chasing the various threads of the story. It’s entirely possible that we’re not at the beginning of the end of this scandal, but rather at the end of the beginning. It’s also entirely possible that the end, when it comes, will leave political casualties on all sides, from bureaucrats who may face prosecution for unlawful leaks to public figures who may face ruin for unlawful or inappropriate foreign contacts.

One thing is clear: The Russian government has run one of the most cost-effective and disruptive espionage operations in history. Through a few simple hacks of the DNC, some basic online trolling, and garden-variety propaganda spread by modern means, the Kremlin has turned a superpower’s politics upside down. Its chief geopolitical rival is divided, with leaders obviously more furious at each other than at the foreign power who created the crisis. Russia may well face a day of reckoning for its attack on our democracy, but for now it has won, and the magnitude of its victory increases with each petty and partisan turn in Washington’s most consequential drama. 

Indeed. One big takeaway is that Russia is our adversary at best.

As I said the other day, though, LITD is not going to get mired in the latest supposedly hot development and run the risk of getting distracted by matters of speculation.

Big picture, folks, big picture.

The age of distraction

A Top Five list of matters on our nation's plate at this moment might look like this, don't you think?

1.) The acceleration of North Korea's missile-test program.

2.) The increasing bellicosity and estrangement from Europe of Turkey under Erdogan and its ramifications for the Syrian civil war, demographic trends in Europe, and a unified Western response to Russian and Iranian aims.

3.) The civil war among Congressional Republicans manifested most acutely by the question of how to repeal and replace the "Affordable" Care Act, an issue with implications for one sixth of the US economy.

4.) The nearly complete rot of America's educational system.

5.) The marked slowdown in entrepreneurial activity.


Okay, it would make for an interesting parlor game to pursue the tweaking of this list. I've no doubt left off some readers' pet front-burner issues, and perhaps elicited a what's-that-one-doing-up-there response to a few on the list.

The overarching point, though, is that the country is facing an array of pressing problems.

I might have included something about the destiny of the Supreme Court on the list. The current Capitol Hill hearings for nominee Neil Gorsuch are pretty significant, after all.

But consider what a clown show much of yesterday's proceedings were:

During one exchange today, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) pressed Gorsuch to reveal the names of donors to Judicial Crisis Network, which ran an amply-funded ad campaign to fight Garland’s confirmation.

Though he did not name Judicial Crisis Network by name, Whitehouse asked why the group spent at least $7 million to keep President Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland from getting a confirmation hearing and is now spending $10 million to get Gorsuch confirmed.

“Ask them,” Gorsuch said.

“I can’t, because I don’t know who they are,” Whitehouse replied.

We could debate all day about why it matters who is willing to put their money up for the causes or candidates they believe in.

Whitehouse attempted to frame it as a matter of courtesy, in order to know what interests are backing Gorsuch’s confirmation.

That is vile, on its face. It suggests that Gorsuch would be the puppet to special interest groups, and there is nothing in his background, or from his confirmation answers to suggest that to be the case.

“You could ask right now as a matter of courtesy, as a matter of respect for the process that anybody funding this should declare themselves right now so we can evaluate who is behind this effort,” Whitehouse said.

It is Whitehouse who is guilty of disrespecting the process.

Wisely, Gorsuch turned it back on Whitehouse.

“It would be a politics question and I’m not, with all respect senator, going to get involved in politics,” he said.

Gorsuch said if lawmakers want to pass legislation that would require that political advocacy groups to disclose their donors, they could do that.
“If you want to have more disclosure, pass a law,” he said.

It is no shock that Whitehouse would play the outraged party and say Gorsuch’s answer was unsatisfactory.

According to Whitehouse, Gorsuch failed to give his views on the problem of special interest influence in the political process.

One problem, Senator Whitehouse: That wasn’t your question.

You wanted specific names. You didn’t want to know Gorsuch’s opinion on special interests.

Nice try, though. 

Al Franken went Whitehouse one further and just plain beclowned himself.

Dick Durbin and Dianne Feinstein likewise conducted themselves in an utterly ridiculous manner.

But, of course, the big preoccupation, at least among the east-coast chattering class, is the whole business involving the following list of players:

• Russia
• James Comey
• The House Intelligence Committee
• Twitter
• Donald Trump
• WikiLeaks

The bottom line is that a whole lot of people are investigating a whole lot of nothing.

The president could go a long way toward steering the nation's attention to actually important issues and away from everybody's zeal to stumble across a Watergate-magnitude scandal - or two, or three - but, as we know, that's not the way he rolls. It's not in his nature to do a clean back-down from his outrageous tweet about Obama wiretapping Trump Tower.

And, speaking of parlor games, it's an interesting exercise to try to parse where FBI director Comey is coming from. In the past year, he's gone from soft-spoken-but-firm-and-principled law enforcement official to tragic figure who crumbles even in the face of 30,000 Clinton-related emails, to a guy who appears to be frantically trying to stay on top of incoming evidence, or at least ostensible evidence, that seems to necessitate reopening an investigation into said emails, to a guy obsessed with investigating presidential campaigns per se.

But, even if one would substitute some other issue for one or two on the list above, are they not all far more vital to our national well-being than a bunch of data-combers trying to prove what we already know - namely, that even a great system of governance such as that enjoyed by the Unites States is peopled with fallible human beings prone to both honest error and temptation?

So now that that is out of our system here at LITD, don't look for endless posts on the latest developments on this.

Neil Gorsuch will be confirmed, as he should be, Donald Trump will be a mess, as he always has been, leakers will leak, media hounds will pounce on each leak, Russia will continue to foment chaos in American politics and institutions, and Democrats will continue to behave like cornered animals.

Meanwhile, there is plenty of importance to pay attention to.

Flynn had to go for telling Pence a falsehood, but the insidious media - intelligence community axis is a danger to the country

Erick Erickson has a solid track record as a vehement anti-Trump pundit. That's another way of saying he's a solid conservative, and an essential aspect of being a conservative is upholding principles whether it's comfortable to do so or not.

So he is on solid ground when he excoriates the New York Times for using baseless innuendo to try to chip away at the current president's legitimacy:

There is no evidence that Donald Trump’s campaign and Russian intelligence cooperated to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. But the New York Times waits for the third paragraph of this sensational story to tell you. First, they want you to know intelligence sources say Trump campaign staffers had multiple, repeated contacts with the Russians.

What we are seeing is an intelligence community trying to sabotage the President of the United States. We should all be concerned even if we have our own concerns about the President and Russia.

It is more and more apparent that, while Mike Flynn misled Vice President Pence and should have been fired, we only know this because members of the intelligence community engaged in an opposition research dump on Flynn with the media. They engaged as a separate and distinct branch of government, and that is a dangerous situation.

The left is cheering on the outcomes, as are some on the right, but they are all ignoring the process. When the intelligence community ceases to serve the Commander-in-Chief and instead tries to sabotage him because they do not like the direction he is taking the country, they are putting their interests ahead of the voters and the electoral process.

And the blood-in-the-water effect is spreading. One hears media rumblings of 9/11 and Pearl Harbor comparisons, and calls from Congressional Dems for a special committee - with proceedings open to the public! Is not enough classified information floating around already?

About this crud going around about the Most Equal Comrade's rule being scandal-and-embarrassment-free

Gay Patriot succinctly reminds the purveyors of such nonsense of the actual record:

The last eight years have been pretty bad. But as we prepare to wave good-bye and good riddance to one of America’s truly awful presidencies, there are some low points that stick out in the memory more than others.

Obama’s Iranian-born slumlord chief advisor Valerie Jarrett claims “The president prides himself on the fact that his administration hasn’t had a scandal and he hasn’t done something to embarrass himself.” Really? No scandals? Solyndra, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the Secret Service picking up hookers, his Secretary of Treasury who cheated on his taxes? These weren’t scandals.

I think she meant he isn’t ashamed of his scandals… because he has no capability to feel remorse. People who’ve been told they are flawless gods their entire lives tend to get that way.

And nothing to embarrass himself? So, he wasn’t embarrassed when he walked up to a window and tried to open it like a door? Or, when he and the Danish Prime Minister were yukking it up taking selfies at Nelson Mandela’s Memorial Service? Or when he tried to get a open umbrella through an archway? Or when he made that “workout video” flapping around with those little baby weights. Or, when he gifted Britain’s blind prime minister with a collection of DVD’s that were incompatible with British DVD players.

Again? Not embarrassed? Or simply incapable of feeling shame?

One more thing. Obama has been lecturing Hillary and the Democrats about how they lost by being too elite and out of touch (this from the guy who whined about the price of Arugula at Whole Foods back in ’08.) In his last press conference before departing on his annual lavish, taxpayer funded Hawaiian vacations, Obama lectured.

I became a U.S. Senator not just because I had a strong base in Chicago, but because I was driving downstate Illinois and going to fish fries and sitting in V.F.W. Halls and talking to farmers.

No, dirtbag. You only became a US Senator because a corrupt Chicago judge released your opponent’s sealed divorce record and the Chicago Democrat Machine hyped it into a scandal. Your entire political career is the fruit of a poisoned tree, and it shows. Were it not for 7 of 9′s divorce, we would have had Hillary Clinton as president. Which would also have been dreadful.

A little something to set the record straight next time some lefty pollutes your Facebook feed with that it's-been-Camelot  hooey.

Oh, look, here's 30 more emails - and they're about Benghazi

"Thorough process." Yeah, right.

Hillary Clinton said in March of last year that she “provided all my emails that could possibly be work-related” after a “thorough process” that involved BleachBit and a baseball bat.

As it turns out, Team Clinton took that “thorough process” at least as seriously as Bill respected his marital vows. Hillary turned all work-related emails over — except maybe for a few thousand here and another 30 related to Benghazi that the FBI discovered:

The State Department says about 30 emails that may be related to the 2012 attack on U.S. compounds in Benghazi, Libya, are among the thousands of Hillary Clinton emails recovered during the FBI’s recently closed investigation into her use of a private server.
Government lawyers told U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta Tuesday that an undetermined number of the emails among the 30 were not included in the 55,000 pages previously provided by Clinton. The State Department’s lawyer said it would need until the end of September to review the emails and redact potentially classified information before they are released.

Sensing that the State Department heel-dragging would probably just coincidentally last until after the November election, the judge is trying to speed things along:

Mehta questioned why it would take so long to release so few documents, and urged that the process be sped up. He ordered the department to report to him in a week with more details about why the review process would take a full month. 

It's good that she's getting damaged, but she's still fairly likely to win. The question is, how damaged would she have to be to be unable to jettison the Constitution and put all her troubles behind her once she had her grip on post-America's throat?  Memo to Judicial Watch: don't let up.

Now, let's get to the bottom of who put them up to it

Somebody in high places puts his or her reputation as a "successful" executor of foreign policy over the actual security of the nation:

A House Republican task force has found that officials from the U.S. military’s Central Command altered intelligence reports to portray the U.S. fight against ISIS and al Qaeda in a more positive light than lower-level analysts believed was warranted by the facts on the ground, three officials familiar with the task force’s findings told The Daily Beast.

A roughly 10-page report on the controversy is expected to be released by the end of next week, two officials said. While it contains no definitive evidence that senior Obama administration officials ordered the reports to be doctored, the five-month investigation did corroborate earlier reports that analysts felt the leaders of CENTCOM’s intelligence directorate pressured them to conclude that the threat from ISIS was not as ominous as the analysts believed, the officials said.

“The investigation is ongoing but the report substantiates the claims” that intelligence reports were altered, one official familiar with the report explained to The Daily Beast. Another official said that the investigation could remain open even after report is released.

So those 50 analysts who complained about this last year were spot on.

The Most Equal Comrade's team's approach to foreign policy: a fetid stew of evil and incompetence

Per the Benghazi report:

The much anticipated Benghazi Select Committee report released early Tuesday morning reveals former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta order military assets to be deployed to Benghazi, but they never arrived. Two unarmed drones, showing a live feed of the attack, did.

Military assets sat for hours while Americans were under attack and while President Obama's team at the White House debated getting YouTube to take down a video offensive to Muslims, which was of course used as an excuse for the attack. 

"You can read this report in less time than our fellow Americans were under attack in Benghazi" Select Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy said during a press conference Tuesday. 

Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed eight hours into the attack. Doherty self-deployed with a small team to Benghazi from Tripoli after hearing about the attack. 

"Team Tripoli,  which  included military  personnel based  at  the Tripoli  Annex,  acted  with  purpose, precision and  ingenuity that  night. The Secretary and  the  Joint  Staff  did  not  know  those personnel  were  in Tripoli, much less were they considered as one of the potential assets to respond to the  events  in  Benghazi," the report states. "In  fact, they represent  the  only military 'asset' to  reach  Benghazi  during  the  attacks. They deployed  themselves because fellow Americans needed them."

The world's mightiest defense apparatus was not ready to deal with a major act of jihad:

"When  the  attacks in  Benghazi  began, the  Defense  Department was unprepared to respond. Despite there being a missing U.S. Ambassador, its response—from  the start  of  the  attack  at  9:42 p.m. in  Libya,  to  the amount of time it took for the forces to actually deploy until late the next morning in Libya at best illustrates a rusty bureaucratic  process  not in keeping  with  the gravity  and urgency  of  the  events  happening  on  the ground. The  decisions  made  earlier  in  the  year  by  senior  State  Department  officials to maintain a presence in Benghazi without adequate security forces and  an  inadequately  fortified Mission compound contributed  to  what amounted  to  a worst  case  scenario of  circumstances  that  would  test the military’s preparedness and ability to respond," the report states. "Nevertheless, the Defense Department did not pass the test. Whether this failure is shouldered by it alone,  or  rests  in  part  on  decisions  made  by  the  State  Department  in Washington D.C. or with the White House who presided over a two hour meeting  where  half  of  the  action  items  related  to  an  anti-Muslim video wholly unconnected to the attacks, is one of the lingering questions about Benghazi."
"What is  clear  is  the Secretary  of  Defense testified  he was  clear on both what the President ordered and what he ordered subsequent to the initial attack. Yet,  no  asset  was  ever  ordered  to  respond  to  Benghazi  and  the decisions made and  not  made coupled  with  a  lack  of  urgency in Washington D.C. delayed  the  response even, in some  instances, with an Ambassador missing," the report continues. 

To the pointy-headed scribes of the regime's propaganda wing it's all a big yawn:

Here’s the opening paragraph of the New York Times’s story on the report:

Ending one of the longest, costliest and most bitterly partisan congressional investigations in history, the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued its final report on Tuesday, finding no new evidence of culpability or wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton in the 2012 attacks in Libya that left four Americans dead.

And here’s the Washington Post on the report:

A final report issued by the Republican majority that investigated the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, found fault with virtually every element of the executive branch response to the attacks but provided no new evidence of specific wrongdoing by then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

This is an extraordinary response to a report that comprehensively details one of the most shameful episodes in recent American diplomatic and military history. 

That's the deeply sinister way the regime's propaganda arm plays: make that which is evil seem banal and overblown.

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

The charge that the 17 state-and-territory-level attorneys general are making that Exxon has been up to something nefarious regarding "climate change" is beyond flimsy. It's obvious that the goal is to harass anyone who champions economic liberty and opposes statism:

The 17 attorneys general participating in this cause have always been careful to identify Exxon as their only target. It’s easier to accuse a big, bad oil company of nefarious deeds, so they make the bogus claim that Exxon somehow “defrauded” the public and its shareholders by engaging in “climate denial.” All the better if they can beat Exxon into cutting a giant check to settle any future charges—a payoff for their states (and for the trial lawyers helping them).

–– ADVERTISEMENT ––

But the Healey subpoena shows that Exxon is a front. The real target is a broad array of conservative activist groups that are highly effective at mobilizing the grass-roots and countering liberal talking points—and that therefore must (as the left sees things) be muzzled. This is clear from the crazy list of organizations Ms. Healey asked for information about in her subpoena. She demanded that Exxon turn over decades of correspondence with any of them.

Take Americans for Prosperity. AFP confirms it has never received a dime from Exxon. But its 2.3 million activists nationwide are highly effective in elections, and it receives funding from the left’s favorite boogeymen, Charles and David Koch.

Or, closer to home: Ms. Healey named the Beacon Hill Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Boston. My sources confirm Beacon Hill has also never seen Exxon dollars. But it is a perpetual thorn in the side of liberal Massachusetts politicians like Ms. Healey.

Also named: the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC doesn’t now, and hasn’t ever, taken a position on the climate. The group is, however, one of the most powerful forces in the country for free-market legislation, having written hundreds of model bills that states use in their efforts to reduce taxes, cut regulations and reform tort laws. Democratic activists have, for the past five years in particular, waged a vicious campaign to run ALEC out of business, and Ms. Healey is now doing her bit.

The same tactics were on display in a subpoena to Exxon from Virgin Islands Attorney General Claude Walker. He appears to have cut-and-pasted from an anti-Exxon website maintained by Greenpeace, since his subpoena lists the same groups in pretty much the same order. The exercise was so sloppy that Mr. Walker named numerous organizations that have been defunct for years, listed several targets twice, and misidentified others.

The goal of the Exxon probe isn’t to protect consumers or help the environment. It’s a message: Oppose us, and we will marshal our terrifying government powers to intimidate and threaten you, to force you to spend millions defending yourself, to eat up the time you’d otherwise use speaking out.

This is raw totalitarianism, right here in post-America.

This will be a major change in my morning Web-perusal routine, but . . .

 . . . after sixteen years, I will no longer be checking in with Free Republic.com. Robinson and his Kool-Aid drinkers have made it official:

On the right, we’ve grown to pride ourselves on our greater openness to debate and ideas, on having no need to toe a Politically Correct line or crawl into a “safe space” like pampered college kids who just can’t handle hearing from anyone who disagrees with them.

For myself, I am so personally dedicated to this ideal that I even perform the great personal sacrifice of reading the comments field beneath my articles.

Yet somehow I wasn’t surprised to see Donald Trump supporters, those swaggering tough guys, turn one of their favorite Internet forums into a safe space where they no longer need to encounter criticism or opposition. Earlier today, Free Republic proprietor Jim Robinson announced that the discussion board would no longer tolerate opposition to Trump’s candidacy.

FR is going all in to defeat Hillary/Bernie, et al, by supporting our America-first nominee Donald Trump to the hilt.

Very sorry if your favorite candidate did not win the nomination and sorry if you cannot understand or agree with our mission, but those who can’t live with our immediate goal need to either keep it to themselves or sit it out (from FR) for the duration. Anti-Trump activities and NeverTrump trolling and recruiting efforts are not appreciated and are unwelcome on FR….

Our intent is to do whatever it takes to defeat the commies in November and if you do not wish to be part of this effort, please sign off now.

As I say, creature of habit that I am, it will be weird tomorrow to leave that out of my rounds, but they've made it clear they have no use for principled conservatives anymore.

Your overlords' contempt for America on full display

In case you needed to get smacked right between the eyes to conclude that Common Core was bad for post-America, brace yourself:

Project Veritas has released its third undercover video of another Common Core executive revealing the political ideology behind the national educational standards. And this time the anti-American agenda is made clear.

The featured Common Core salesperson in this video is Kim Koerber of National Geographic Education (funded by the Gates Foundation, by the way) and a former Pearson Education publishing executive. Her expressions of hatred for America's founding documents coupled with her undying love for Common Core brings the problem to an entirely new level. Plus, she brings a new meaning to the word disgust when talking about those pesky Texas conservatives:

Common Core is really important because it needs to have some cohesion between the states, and Texas keeps screwing it up over and over again.

Texas got upset about it and they wanted to have their founders, they wanted to pound the founders in it. And it's like come on!

The dead white guys did not create this country. It was a whole bunch of different kinds of people. And yes there were women, and yes there were people of color, and yes… you need to talk about them, too. But they want to talk about those dead white guys.

People who say that they want to teach the Constitution, only want to teach the part of the Constitution that they like. 

When told that Texans are upset that the Constitution isn't being covered, Koerber pushed back hard saying, " It is being covered, but not the way they -- cause they’re idiots and they don’t know what’s in it."

"You should know a little bit about it, you shouldn’t have to memorize the thing," she added.

When a Project Veritas undercover journalist spoke about the Second Amendment, Koerber interjected:

That damn Second Amendment. I don’t think personal handguns need to be on anyone except the government, the police. What is the purpose of having a gun?

But Koerber wasn't done insulting conservatives, or Christians -- what she kept referring to as "those" people in Texas who keep resisting Common Core:

They don't agree with Islam, so they don't want their kids to know about it. They don't agree with birth control, so they don't want their kids to talk about it. They don't agree with math because they don't understand it. It's not the same math that they did in high school, so they don't want their kids to know about it. 

Here is a little back and forth with a PV journalist and Kroeber, continuing this line of thought (via Breitbart):

PV: I am really glad I’m here in California, whatever religious affiliation you want to take is fine, but in Texas they want to push the Christianity.

KOERBER: Because they think it’s the only one.

PV: They do, and I see that.

KOERBER: That’s why it’s so offensive to have these prayers in the school board.

PV: Christianity is totally out of the common core?

KOERBER: Yes it is. Totally. It’s not a core concept at all.

PV: But then there is a mention of other religions like Islam.

KOERBER: Yeah well you have to because …

PV: So how did Islam get worked in?

KOERBER: Islam…they said you have to talk about Islam, you have to talk about Judaism and you have to talk about Christianity and they wanted to make it big about Christianity; no it’s like, everybody needs to know about everything else.

Relativism, contempt for the great men who understood that America was to be unique because it was founded on the idea that liberty is essential,  the hatred of the fact that Americans can arm themselves - it's all there.

Keep your kids away from government schools.

The full context for the Clock Boy story

The Mohamed family had it in for the mayor of Irving, Texas, where they live:

Mayor Van Duyne revealed that the family of Ahmed Mohammed has not only repeatedly refused to meet with city officials but refused to sign a school release form that would explain the school and police’s side of the story.

Instead, the family held a press conference in their front yard flanked by CAIR lawyers.

The mayor of Irving became a target of Islamists and leftists last February, when she opposed sharia-based arbitration courts that were trying to get a foothold in town.

She immediately took action, proposing a law that was passed by the city council forbidding the establishment of sharia courts.

Since then, as Glenn Beck noted, she has been “hammered” by well-funded Muslim activists and their left-wing sympathizers.

CAIR lawyers. Yes, indeed, just a fine, assimilated, clean-livin' family trying to protect its good name.

Let's review the basics of what CAIR is all about:

Notable facts about CAIR's pas de deux with Islamic extremism and terrorism include the following:

• Co-founder Nihad Awad asserted at a 1994 meeting at Barry University, "I am a supporter of the Hamas movement." Awad wrote in the Muslim World Monitor that the 1994 trial which had resulted in the conviction of four Islamic fundamentalist terrorists who had perpetrated the previous year's World Trade Center bombing was "a travesty of justice."
• On February 2, 1995, U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White named CAIR Advisory Board member and New York imam Siraj Wahhaj as one of the "unindicted persons who may be alleged as co-conspirators" in Islamic Group leader Omar Abdel Rahman's foiled plot to blow up numerous New York City monuments.
• On June 6, 2006, CAIR's Ohio affiliate held a large fundraiser in honor of Siraj Wahhaj. Following the event, CAIR-Ohio issued a press release heralding the more than $100,000 that Wahhaj had helped raise that evening for the organization’s “civil liberties work.”
• In October 1998, CAIR demanded the removal of a Los Angeles billboard describing Osama bin Laden as "the sworn enemy." According to CAIR, this depiction was "offensive to Muslims."
• In 1998, CAIR denied bin Laden's responsibility for the two al Qaeda bombings of American embassies in Africa. According to Ibrahim Hooper, the bombings resulted from "misunderstandings of both sides."
• In September 2003, CAIR's former Community Affairs Director, Bassem Khafagi, pled guilty to three federal counts of bank and visa fraud and agreed to be deported to Egypt. Federal investigators said that a group Khafagi founded, the Islamic Assembly of North America, had funneled money to activities supporting terrorism and had published material advocating suicide attacks against the United States. Khafagi’s illegal activities took place while he was employed by CAIR.
• In July 2004, Ghassan Elashi, a founding Board member of CAIR's Texas chapter, was convicted along with his four brothers of having illegally shipped computers from their Dallas-area business, InfoCom Corporation, to Libya and Syria, two designated state sponsors of terrorism. That same month, Elashi was charged with having provided more than $12.4 million to Hamas while he was running HLF. In April 2005, Elashi and two of his brothers were also convicted of knowingly doing business with Hamas operative Mousa Abu Marzook, who was Elashi's brother-in-law. Elashi's illegal activities took place while he was employed by CAIR, whose Dallas-Fort Worth chapter depicted the Elashis’ indictment as “a war on Islam and Muslims.”
• On September 6, 2001, the day that federal agents first raided Infocom’s headquarters, CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad denounced the U.S. government for “tak[ing] us back to the McCarthy era.” 
• FBI wiretap evidence which was introduced during the 2007 trial of the Holy Land Foundation (a trial that explored HLF's financial ties to Hamas), proved that Nihad Awad had attended a 1993 Philadelphia meeting of Hamas leaders and operatives who collaborated on a plan to disguise funding for Hamas as charitable donations.
• CAIR co-founder and Chairman Emeritus Omar Ahmad was named, in the same 2007 Holy Land Foundation trial, as an unindicted co-conspirator with HLF. During the trial, evidence was supplied proving that Ahmad had attended, along with Nihad Awad, the aforementioned 1993 Philadelphia meeting of Hamas leaders and operatives. Moreover, prosecutors described Ahmad as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood's "Palestine Committee" in America.
• The home of Muthanna al-Hanooti, one of CAIR's directors, was raided in 2006 by FBI agents in connection with an active terrorism investigation. FBI agents also searched the offices of Focus on Advocacy and Advancement of International Relations, al-Hanooti's Michigan- and Washington DC-based consulting firm that investigators suspect to be a front supporting the Sunni-led insurgency in Iraq.
  
  Al-Hanooti is an ethnic Palestinian who, according to a 2001 FBI report, "collected over $6 million for support of Hamas" and attended, along with CAIR and Holy Land Foundation officials, the previously cited Hamas fundraising summit in Philadelphia in 1993. Currently a prayer leader at a Washington-area mosque that aided some of the 9/11 hijackers, he is a relative of Shiek Mohammed al-Hanooti, an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Muthanna al-Hanooti formerly helped run an organization called LIFE for Relief and Development, a suspected Hamas terror front whose Michigan offices were raided by the FBI in September 2006, and whose Baghdad office was raided by U.S. troops in 2004.
  
  In March 2011, al-Hanooti was sentenced to a year in federal prison for violating U.S. sanctions against Iraq. According to the FBI, al-Hanooti also raised more than $6 million for support of Hamas and was present with CAIR and Holy Land Foundation officials at a secret Hamas fundraising summit held in Philadelphia during the 1990s.
• Randall Todd Royer, who served as a communications specialist and civil rights coordinator for CAIR, trained with Lashkar-I-Taiba, an al Qaeda-tied Kashmir organization that is listed on the State Department's international terror list. He was also indicted on charges of conspiring to help al Qaeda and the Taliban battle American troops in Afghanistan. He later pled guilty to lesser firearm-related charges and was sentenced to twenty years in prison.  Royer's illegal activities took place while he was employed by CAIR.
• Onetime CAIR fundraiser Rabih Haddad was arrested on terrorism-related charges and was deported from the United States due to his subsequent work as Executive Director of the Global Relief Foundation, which in October 2002 was designated by the U.S. Treasury Department for financing al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.  
• During the 2005 trial of Sami Al-Arian, who was a key figure for Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the United States, Ahmed Bedier of CAIR’s Florida branch emerged as one of Al-Arian’s most vocal advocates.
• In the aftermath of 9/11, federal agents raided the Washington-area home of CAIR civil rights coordinator Laura Jaghlit as part of a probe into terrorist financing, money laundering and tax fraud. Her husband Mohammed Jaghlit, a director of the Saudi-backed SAAR Foundation, is a suspect in the still-active (as of January 2008) investigation.

Anyway, back to the Mohameds. It's pretty clear that this entire episode was a ploy to discredit the mayor. But a lot of other lives are being put through hell as well:

The mayor also said: “I now have our police chief who is a wonderful, wonderful man, a family man, a churchgoing man, and I now have our police officers as well as a number of teachers, school administrators, receiving death threats as a direct result of this. It is unfortunate, and it has got to stop.”

And, true to form, the Most Equal Comrade has injected himself into a local situation with the express purpose of exploiting notions that a beleaguered and misunderstood minority is getting a raw deal:

Mayor Van Duyne said she was “shocked” when she saw the president’s tweet to Ahmed Mohammed. She said “it seems to be an underlying habit that he is going to second guess police officers without any kind of information.”

She later noted that the president had tweeted about the case and invited Ahmed to the White House before the pictures of the clock were even publicly available. Obama made no attempt to contact her office before making public comments in support of the Muslim teen. 

Creepy and shameful, but par for the course in post-America.

 

 

Yes, let's find out if this is as stinky as it looks - and soon

With a threat as menacing as ISIS, you don't want this kind of manipulation going on:

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s inspector general is investigating allegations that military officials have skewed intelligence assessments about the United States-led campaign in Iraq against the Islamic State to provide a more optimistic account of progress, according to several officials familiar with the inquiry.

The investigation began after at least one civilian Defense Intelligence Agency analyst told the authorities that he had evidence that officials at United States Central Command — the military headquarters overseeing the American bombing campaign and other efforts against the Islamic State — were improperly reworking the conclusions of intelligence assessments prepared for policy makers, including President Obama, the government officials said.

Fuller details of the claims were not available, including when the assessments were said to have been altered and who at Central Command, or Centcom, the analyst said was responsible. The officials, speaking only on the condition of anonymity about classified matters, said that the recently opened investigation focused on whether military officials had changed the conclusions of draft intelligence assessments during a review process and then passed them on.

The prospect of skewed intelligence raises new questions about the direction of the government’s war with the Islamic State, and could help explain why pronouncements about the progress of the campaign have varied widely.
Legitimate differences of opinion are common and encouraged among national security officials, so the inspector general’s investigation is an unusual move and suggests that the allegations go beyond typical intelligence disputes. Government rules state that intelligence assessments “must not be distorted” by agency agendas or policy views. Analysts are required to cite the sources that back up their conclusions and to acknowledge differing viewpoints.
Under federal law, intelligence officials can bring claims of wrongdoing to the intelligence community’s inspector general, a position created in 2011. If officials find the claims credible, they are required to advise the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. That occurred in the past several weeks, the officials said, and the Pentagon’s inspector general decided to open an investigation into the matter.

Spokeswomen for both inspectors general declined to comment for this article. The Defense Intelligence Agency and the White House also declined to comment. 

Let's get to the bottom of this pronto. David French at NRO has it right when he spells out the stakes:

Every day that ISIS is allowed to consolidate its hold over northern Syria and north and western Iraq is a day that it recruits new members, encourages ”lone wolf” attacks, and plans new offensives.  I keep getting the ominous feeling that the clock is ticking on a truly significant terror attack, one that will leave our political leadership answering to the American people — why didn’t you do more to defeat the enemy? And if one answer is that Pentagon officials lied about success against ISIS, then courts-martial should be the response.

Quite so.

 

Planned Parenthood: extermination of fetal Americans is its only business

Michelle Malkin at NRO on what utter hooey it is for pro-death jackboots to try to foist the mammogram canard on us:

The breast-cancer screening charade casts Planned Parenthood as a life-saving provider of vital health services unavailable anywhere else. You may recall that during the 2012 presidential campaign, Obama himself falsely claimed during a debate that the abortion provider administers mammograms to “millions” of women — and liberal CNN moderator Candy Crowley let him get away with it. On cue, Hollywood activists Scarlett Johansson, Eva Longoria, and Kerry Washington all attacked the GOP ticket for wanting to “end” funding for “cancer screenings” by cutting off government subsidies for Planned Parenthood’s bloody billion-dollar abortion business. The celebrities in the White House and Tinseltown took their script straight from Dr. Deborah Nucatola, Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services, who purported to speak for countless women for whom Planned Parenthood is “the only way” they can gain access to mammograms. (If the name sounds familiar, Nucatola is the same wine-swishing Josephine Mengele who was exposed on video by the Center for Medical Progress two weeks ago lolling through a business lunch negotiating payments for aborted baby parts.)

Once again, it was undercover pro-life journalists who unmasked the truth. An investigation of 30 Planned Parenthood clinics in 27 different states, conducted by the pro-life group Live Action, confirmed that the abortion provider does not perform breast-cancer screenings. “We don’t provide those services whatsoever,” a staffer at Planned Parenthood of Arizona confessed on tape. Planned Parenthood’s Comprehensive Health Center clinic in Overland Park, Kan., admitted: “We actually don’t have a, um, mammogram machine at our clinics.” Even the liberal Washington Post doled out a three (out of four) Pinocchio rating for the White House’s mammogram lies. “The problem here is that Planned Parenthood does not perform mammograms or even possess the necessary equipment to do so,” the paper’s resident fact-checker reported. “As such, the organization certainly does not ‘provide’ mammograms in the strict sense. Instead, its clinics provide referrals and direct low-income women toward resources to help pay for the procedure. These services are by no means unique to Planned Parenthood. In fact, the Susan G. Komen Foundation and the American Cancer Society provide them, as well.”

Even the "referral service" is a smokescreen.

Planned Parenthood is in the murder business.

With the Left, it's always about their intentions, never results

And organic farming is a perfect example:

The organic community and USDA offer two explanations for such minimal testing. First, they emphasize that organic farming is process-based, not product-based, meaning that what counts for organic certification are the approved organic system (production) plan and the farmer’s intention to comply with that plan as reflected through record-keeping obligations.

Second, widespread testing would impose substantial costs on organic farmers, thereby increasing production costs beyond the already greater expenses that organic farmers incur. Organic farmers offset these higher productions costs by earning large premiums for organic products, but there is always a price point beyond which consumers will shift to cheaper non-organic.

Few organic consumers are aware that organic agriculture is a “trust-based” or “faith-based” system. With every purchase, they are at risk of the moral hazard that an organic farmer will represent cheaper-to-produce non-organic products as the premium-priced organic product. For the vast majority of products, no tests can distinguish organic from non-organic—for example, whether milk labeled “organic” came from a cow within the organic production system or from a cow across the fence from a conventional dairy farm. The higher the organic premium, the stronger the economic incentive to cheat.

Think such nefarious behavior is purely theoretical? Think again. USDA reported in 2012 that 43 percent of the 571 samples of “organic” produce tested violated the government’s organic regulations and that “the findings suggest that some of the samples in violation were mislabeled conventional products, while others were organic products that hadn’t been adequately protected from prohibited pesticides.”

How do organic farmers get away with such chicanery?  A 2014 investigation by the Wall Street Journal of USDA inspection records from 2005 on found that 38 of the 81 certifying agents–entities accredited by USDA to inspect and certify organic farms and suppliers—“failed on at least one occasion to uphold basic Agriculture Department standards.” More specifically, “40% of these 81 certifiers have been flagged by the USDA for conducting incomplete inspections; 16% of certifiers failed to cite organic farms’ potential use of banned pesticides and antibiotics; and 5% failed to prevent potential commingling of organic and non-organic products.”

Speaking of trust and faith—or lack thereof–in organic foods, there was the example of holier-than-thou Whole Foods importing large amounts of its supposedly “organic” produce from China, of all places. Those imports even included Whole Foods’ house brand, “California Blend.” (Yes, you read that correctly.) 

They have such an investment in the nobility of their fantasy - that their methods are morally superior to those of the squaresville "corporate world" - that they're willing to jive the very folks consuming what they produce.

Where have we seen this phenomenon before?

They stop at nothing

Among the other deranged fictions - such as "gender fluidity" - that the overlords foist upon us is human-caused "climate change."

And the overlords miss no opportunity to insert it into every facet of life.  Witness this maneuver:

Americans trust their doctors, so the White House wants these medical professionals to be a mouthpiece for President Obama’s global warming agenda.

“We also need doctors, nurses and citizens, like all of you”President Obama said in a taped speech presented to medical professionals gathered at the White House, “to get to work to raise awareness and organize folks for real change.”

The Obama administration has been hard at work trying to draw a link between global warming and public health issues. The summit included the U.S. Surgeon General, top administration officials, and public health experts from around the country telling doctors, nurses and other conference goers how to talk about global warming with their patients.

The central message: doctors should warn their patients that global warming could make their health worse.

“I know we have people all around the country, in all of the regions, who are also listening to this conversation, and like all of you in the room, I hope will go out and continue to talk and educate,” echoed Nicole Lurie, assistant secretary for Preparedness and Response at the Health Department.

“We need to engage medical students themselves,” said Vice Admiral Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, “to demand the curriculum change” to prepare them for a warmer future.

Speakers at the White House summit didn’t just tell doctors to go out and raise awareness about global warming, but to also promote the Obama administration’s regulatory agenda aimed at cutting carbon dioxide emissions.

“We need people, proponents, to talk about it. Make sure that the public is informed,” said Texas Democratic Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson. “Stand behind the EPA, because they’re attacked every day, all day by many committees.”

Rep. Johnson is referring to EPA rules to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants — a regulation that has come under fire from Republicans and industries for threatening to raise energy prices and cause job losses.

We get no relief from this totalitarian nightmare, not even in our doctors' offices.