- The Senate voted 60–38 to close debate on the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which means Mitch McConnell was successful in preventing amendments to the bill. As a result, the NSA will continue intercepting Americans’ data without a warrant.
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Steve Bannon appeared before the House Intelligence Committee but refused to answer questions about his time in the White House. Bannon didn’t offer a justification for his refusal to answer questions, so the committee handed him a subpoena. Bannon was also subpoenaed to appear before Robert Mueller’s grand jury.
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The commanding officers of the USS John S. McCain and USS Fitzgerald face courts-martial on charges that include negligent homicide. Both ships were involved in collisions in the Pacific Ocean that resulted in the deaths of sailors. Three other officers from the Fitzgerald also face charges.
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The Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirsten Nielsen, said her agency has no plans to investigate voter fraud, although they will help states prune their voter registration lists.
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U.S. state attorneys from 20 states and the District of Columbia sued the FCC to reinstate the ~450 pages of net neutrality regulations. Senate Democrats claim they have 50 votes to restore net neutrality, but that bill would have a tough time in the House and Donald Trump would likely veto it.
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American oil output will soon exceed 10 million barrels a day, breaking a record set in 1970.
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The FBI arrested a former CIA officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, whom they believe revealed the identities of CIA informants in China. The initial charges against Lee relate to retaining classified information:
In 2012, Mr. Lee left Hong Kong and returned to the United States to live with his family in Virginia. F.B.I. agents investigating him searched his luggage during a pair of hotel stays in Hawaii and Virginia, and found two small books with handwritten notes that contained classified information. It is unclear why Mr. Lee decided to risk arrest by coming to the United States this month.
In the books, Mr. Lee had written down details about meetings between C.I.A. informants and undercover agents, as well as their real names and phone numbers, according to court papers. Prosecutors said that material in the books reflected the same information contained in classified cables that Mr. Lee had written while at the agency.
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Four South Carolina police officers were shot as they responded to a domestic disturbance call. One of the officers, Detective Michael Doty, is in particularly bad shape. A suspect was arrested, and he has a prior arrest for assault, resisting arrest, and assaulting a police officer.
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The serial “swatter” who got someone killed in Wichita, Kansas, Tyler Raj Barriss, was charged with involuntary manslaughter and faces 11 years in prison.
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The Trump administration is withholding $65 million in aid to the U.N. Relief and Welfare Agency that was destined for the Palestinian Authority. The administration is still sending $60 million to UNRWA for the Palestinians.
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The Venezuelan government claims it hunted down and killed a rogue police officer who used a helicopter to stage a grenade attack against government buildings in Caracas.
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A Kosovo Serb leader who was standing trial for the killings of Albanians during the 1998–1999 war, Oliver Ivanovic, was shot dead in the street in the town of Mitrovica.
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Following Hawaii’s example, Japanese broadcaster NHK issued a false warning about inbound North Korean missiles.
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John Stossel says the Southern Poverty Law Center is running a scam:
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Homeless camps in Anaheim, California:
Tag: voter fraud
Links for 1-5-2018
- A federal district court judge ruled that the House Intelligence Committee can subpoena Fusion GPS’ bank records. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said the Department of Justice agreed to provide all of the documents his committee requested regarding the Trump/Russia collusion investigation; the DOJ and the FBI have been dodging the committee’s subpoenas for months. The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman sent a letter to the DOJ asking for an investigation into whether Christopher Steele (the author of the Trump dossier, which he produced at Fusion GPS’ behest) lied to federal authorities.
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The Department of Justice opened a new investigation into whether the Clinton Foundation was a pay-for-play operation while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State. (Hint: It was.)
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The man who was acquitted of murdering Kate Steinle in San Francisco, Jose Inez Garcia Zarate, was sentenced to time served for his conviction on a state charge of illegally possessing a firearm. Supposedly Zarate will be turned over to federal authorities because he was indicted by a federal grand jury last month.
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The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) is threatening to sue Bexar County, Texas (home of San Antonio) because the county is refusing to comply with a records request filed under the National Voter Registration Act. PILF is interested in records related to non-citizens on Bexar County’s voter rolls.
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Former ambassador Zalmay Khalizad writes that it’s time to end Pakistan’s double game, where they support terrorist groups while providing sporadic help with American anti-terror efforts:
But soon Pakistan concocted a complex strategy of cooperating on logistics and occasional help with hunting Al Qaeda leaders in exchange for massive U.S. aid, while simultaneously building out a clandestine program to reconstitute the Taliban. Yet, when evidence began to emerge that Pakistan was providing sanctuary and active support to the Taliban, the Bush administration did not follow through on its earlier “with us or against us” dictate but instead gave Islamabad what amounted to a pass.
The situation grew worse under President Obama. The administration enhanced U.S. diplomatic engagement and significantly increased the already generous economic and military assistance to Pakistan. The Pakistanis had indicated that, with enhanced military capability and economic inducements, they would move against the Afghan insurgents based on their territory. Then—continuing their earlier pattern—they took the aid but continued with sanctuary and support for the insurgents.
Khalizad offers suggestions for pressuring Pakistan’s government, including sanctioning the ISI and individual Pakistanis and conducting more strikes against terrorists in Pakistani territory.
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North Korea agreed to hold talks with South Korea next week. This happened shortly after South Korea and the U.S. agreed to postpone a military exercise until after the Winter Olympics.
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China said it will limit exports of crude oil, refined oil, steel, and other metals to North Korea. If you believe this, China also has a bridge you may be interested in.
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A Georgian court sentenced former president Mikheil Saakashvili to three years in prison in absentia. Saakashvili was convicted of covering up evidence about a Georgian banker’s murder and pardoning four men convicted of the crime. Georgia is trying to get Saakashvili extradited from Ukraine.
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to “rethink” bilateral agreements with the U.S. after an American jury convicted a Turkish banker of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. Testimony in the case implicated senior Turkish officials in the scheme, including Erdogan himself.
Links for 1-3-2018
- The soldier who was killed in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province was Sgt. 1st Class Mihail Golin, an immigrant from Lativa. He was 34, and is survived by his wife and six year old daughter.
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Donald Trump dissolved his voting integrity commission and gave the job of investigating voter fraud to the Department of Homeland Security.
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Paul Manafort sued Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, claiming that Mueller’s investigation has exceeded its mandate.
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The Trump administration is threatening to withhold payments to the Palestinian Authority unless they resume negotiating with Israel.
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An American jury found a Turkish banker, Mehmet Hakan Atilla, guilty of bank fraud and violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. The jury found him not guilty of money laundering. Atilla is scheduled to be sentenced on April 11.
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Congressional Republicans claim they’ve uncovered a FBI paper trail that shows the agency believed Hillary Clinton broke the law with her private email server, but started drafting a statement exonerating her even before they finished interviewing witnesses and serving subpoenas.
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Doug Jones and Tina Smith were sworn in as senators from Alabama and Minnesota, respectively.
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James Risen wrote about battling the editors and leadership of The New York Times to get his national security stories published, including his scoop on the NSA’s interception of Americans’ communications without a warrant.
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A new California law prohibits private companies from cooperating with federal immigration officers. Companies are required to warn their employees ahead of time if federal immigration agents are coming to check their employment eligibility.
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Jenni White explains why it’s been so difficult to roll back Common Core in Oklahoma — it’s next to impossible to defeat the bureaucracy:
I learned through this process that education policy in this country simply can’t be shifted by citizens anymore because there are too many moving parts and entrenched policy makers tied to progressive education methods to have any real impact. So I quit fighting for public education.
Part of me hates that, but I was beginning to look a bit like the Elephant Man from banging my head into unmovable walls, and my husband and kids deserved more of my attention. Today, I help run our small farm, teach three classes at our homeschool co-op, and drive my kids’ studies like a good natured tyrant.
If I learned anything from Common Core, I learned that local is the answer to nearly every government problem, and I turned my attention to my tiny Oklahoma town of 2,700 where, in April, I became mayor. Now I fight battles largely winnable, in a picturesque little town on a plot of land where I can see both the sunrise and sunset, and pray that national public education will get better despite the near impossibility of parents and local voters to significantly affect it.
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Israel is offering to pay African illegal immigrants to leave the country. If they’re still in the country at the end of March, they’ll be subject to arrest.
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A German study indicates violent crime grew by 10% in 2015 and 2016, and 90% of the increase was due to young male refugees.
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Petrobras agreed to settle an American class action lawsuit for $2.95 billion. The case stems from the “Operation Car Wash” bribery scheme. Petrobras denied any wrongdoing.
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China is reportedly building a military base in Jiwani, Pakistan, a port near the border with Iran. The facility will be both a naval and an air base.
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Iran deployed the Revolutionary Guard to three provinces to put down anti-government demonstrations.
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Iraqi Kurdistan agreed to take steps to prevent the PKK from crossing its border with Turkey.
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Norway suspended arms sales to the United Arab Emirates over the UAE’s war in Yemen.
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An infamous ISIS executioner, Abu Omer, was caught in Mosul, Iraq. He’s best known for throwing gay people off buildings.
Links for 1-2-2018
- An American soldier was killed and four were wounded during fighting in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, which is on the border with Pakistan. The U.S. is withholding $255 million in aid to Pakistan because it harbors terrorists.
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Mark Steyn’s first post of the new year includes a twelve days of Christmas-style countdown: an eight o’clock curfew, seven sexual assailants, six stabbers arrested, five homes raided, four women gang-raped, three pubs attacked, two police officers lynched, and a canceled New Year in Sydney. His numbering scheme doesn’t handle the 945 cars that were torched in France on New Year’s Eve.
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Two members of Germany’s Alternative for Germany party are being investigated for violating a new law that makes it a crime to “incite people to commit violence against a certain section of society.” Their alleged offenses were committed via Twitter, which deleted the tweets because the company can be fined 50 million euros for failing to delete “hateful” content.
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Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) won’t run for re-election. He’s only been in the Senate for 40 years, and he’s 83 years old. Say hello to Senator Mitt Romney.
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Congressman Bill Shuster (R-PA) won’t run for re-election.
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Huma Abedin forwarded emails containing passwords to government systems to her personal Yahoo account before all of Yahoo’s accounts were breached. At least one of those breaches was perpetrated by a Russian intelligence agent.
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Victor Davis Hanson writes that we’re in the midst of an unusual experiment in American government, a rapid switch from far-left to far-right governing at the federal level. He characterizes the Obama administration this way:
Identity politics, progressive policing of ideas on campus, an end to campus free expression that only empowered hate speech, the politicization and expansion of the deep state, along with open borders and new laxities governing citizenship and voting would usher in new, kinder and gentler race, ethnicity, and gender agendas. A single EPA director, one high IRS commissioner, or a federal-appeals-court justice would now exercise far more political power than any congressional committee. The “law” — in the sense of customary non-surveillance of American citizens, disinterested attorneys general, or a nonpartisan bureaucracy — was redefined as whatever would best serve social justice and equality.
On the economic side, more regulations, larger government, more entitlements, higher taxes, zero interest rates, and doubling the national debt were designed to redistribute income and “spread the wealth.” The idea that the stock market could get much higher, that GDP could ever hit 3 percent or above, or that industry and manufacturing would return to the U.S. was caricatured as the ossified pipe dreams of discredited supply-siders.
- The initial narrative on collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia isn’t going anywhere, so The New York Times is trying again, this time focusing on George Papadopoulos instead of Carter Page.
In the Times’ new version of events, it was not the dossier that “so alarmed American officials to provoke the F.B.I. to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election.” That, according to the Times, is a false claim that “Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged.” Somehow, the paper omits the inconvenient details that it was the Times that led the charge in claiming that it was Page’s trip to Moscow that provoked the investigation, and that it was the dossier that so alarmed the FBI about that trip.
In what we might think of as the latest “Russian Reset,” the Times now says the investigation was instigated by “firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies” — Australia. Turns out Papadopoulos was out drinking in London with Alexander Downer, “Australia’s top diplomat in Britain.” Tongue loosened, the “young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign” made a “startling revelation” to Downer: He had learned that “Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.”
Later:
To say this story has holes in it does not do justice to the craters on display. To begin with, the Times admits that “exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said” to Downer “is unclear.” What we are dealing with here is sheer supposition. And, it appears, flawed supposition.
- The death toll in Iran’s protests is up to 20, and the government is blaming the country’s unnamed “enemies.” Ben Shapiro writes that Donald Trump has reversed the Obama doctrine on Iran:
Contrast Trump’s behavior with that of the Obama administration, which deliberately ignored anti-regime protests in 2009, choosing instead to cozy favor with the regime and maximize Tehran’s regional power. The administration even went so far as to give Tehran a legal pathway to a nuclear weapon. Obama stated that while he was “troubled” by violence against the protesters, it was “up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be,” and he hoped “to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran.”
The administration would go on to allegedly leak Israeli plans to kill the commander of the Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, to the Iranians, lie to the American public about contact with the “moderate” Iranian regime regarding a nuclear deal, and then ship pallets of cash to the greatest state sponsor of terror on the planet.
This, then, is the irony of Trump’s foreign policy in contrast with Obama’s: Obama jabbered endlessly about American leadership while simultaneously “leading from behind.” Trump actually pursues American leadership while simultaneously claiming the isolationist mantle of “America first.”
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The Washington Free Beacon obtained a document from China’s Communist Party that indicates China offered North Korea increased aid and military support if the country stopped testing nuclear weapons. China’s public stance is that it wants a denuclearized Korean peninsula, but the document says North Korea can keep its existing nuclear weapons. The Beacon doesn’t say how it obtained the document, but there’s a good chance dissident Guo Wengui was involved.
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An academic study suggests that Republicans support photo voter ID laws to combat voter fraud, but Democrats only support them when it’s likely that Republicans would be hurt by such laws.
Links for 12-12-2017
- Two bioscience companies settled a criminal lawsuit brought by the Orange County, California district attorney’s office. DV Biologics and DaVinci Biosciences paid $7.785 million to settle charges that they illegally sold baby body parts, and they agreed to cease operations in California.
About $7.5 million of the settlement is the estimated scientific value of a planned donation of the company’s adult biological samples, tissues and cells to a nonprofit academic and scientific teaching institution affiliated with a major U.S. medical school, according to the agreement. Prosecutors did not disclose the name of the medical school.
The defendants also will donate and transfer laboratory storage containers and equipment estimated to be worth more than $10,000.
DV Biologics will pay the county $195,000 in civil penalties.
- In a court filing, Lois Lerner’s lawyers claim there’s “no legitimate” reason why the public should read her testimony about her role in the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups that applied for non-profit status.
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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson offered direct talks with North Korea without pre-conditions, a first.
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Donald Trump signed a bill into law that bans the use of Kaspersky Lab software by the federal government.
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A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau whistleblower claims her managers ordered her to falsify documents about a payday lending company, and when she refused they retaliated. She claims her managers then changed the documents themselves and pushed the company into a $10 million settlement.
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Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox note that inequality is increasing in leading U.S. cities, and left-wing politics is gaining strength along with it:
Cities today are about as politically diverse as the former Soviet Union; they are increasingly dominated by “the civic Left,” for which pragmatism and moderation represent weakness and compromise. The emergence of Trump seems to have deepened this instinct, with mayors such as de Blasio and Garcetti, Seattle’s Ed Murray, and Minneapolis’s Betsy Hodges all playing leading roles in the progressive “resistance” against the president. Their anti-Trump posturing is mostly for show, but these mayors are pushing substantive — and increasingly radical — agendas of social engineering. Their initiatives include, in Los Angeles, imposing “road diets” on commuters to reduce car usage (while making traffic worse), as well as “green energy” schemes that raise energy prices. Most are committed to serving as “sanctuary” cities and enacting unprecedented hikes in the minimum wage in an effort to eliminate income inequality by diktat.
Many of these efforts clash with the aspirations of middle-class residents, who tend to drive cars, want to preserve their human-scale neighborhoods, and own small businesses highly sensitive to wage levels. Regulatory policies that seek to limit lower-density housing have led to escalating home prices in areas such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Portland. In these areas, housing costs (adjusted for income) are roughly two to three times higher than in places like Dallas, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh.
They conclude with:
Rather than indulging feel-good radical experiments in social justice, cities need to rediscover their historical role as creators of the middle class, as Jane Jacobs put it. If they don’t, some extraordinary areas — in brownstone Brooklyn, much of Manhattan, Seattle, west Los Angeles, and San Francisco — will likely become ever more exclusive, divided between the rich and the hip (many of whom are their subsidized children) and surrounding poor populations working in low-end services (or not working). The policy emphasis should shift to middle-income areas — whether in the Sunset district of San Francisco, Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, Queens, or South Brooklyn — and closer suburbs, which could keep some younger families in the urban orbit. Such a shift will require a new kind of urban politics, one that encourages grassroots industries and corporate relocations that create more middle-income jobs, promotes the flourishing of human-scale neighborhoods, and accommodates families with good schools and low crime. The appeal of urban living remains viable, though today’s urban political class sometimes seems determined to kill it.
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The NAACP wants Phenix City, Alabama to remove 82 people from its voter rolls because they registered to vote with business (as opposed to residential) addresses.
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NATO extended Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s term in office by two years. His term now ends on September 30, 2020.
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Russia will keep its naval and air bases in Syria as it starts to withdraw some of its troops.
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Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro banned opposition parties from participating in next year’s presidential election.
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Afghan intelligence officials detained four teachers who work for schools that Turkey claims are associated with Fethullah Gulen. One of the teachers is an Afghan, and the other three are Turkish.
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An ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan placed $800,000 bounties on two former U.S. government employees who have been critical of Erdogan. The two people are Michael Rubin, a former Department of Defense official, and Graham Fuller, a former CIA official. Turkish prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for Rubin and Fuller, claiming they were involved in last year’s failed military coup.
Links for 12-3-2017
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The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence is drafting a resolution holding Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress for withholding information about FBI agent Peter Strzok, who was removed from Robert Mueller’s investigation for sending anti-Trump text messages to a FBI lawyer, Lisa Page, with whom he was having an affair. The committee has been demanding information about Strzok and the infamous Trump dossier for months, and the FBI and the Department of Justice have been stonewalling them.
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The Daily Signal published a chart detailing the differences between the House and Senate tax “reform” bills.
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The U.S. quit negotiations on a U.N. resolution on global migration, saying it’s not compatible with U.S. sovereignty.
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An Alabama chapter of the NAACP and a progressive candidate in Minnesota claim to be victims of voter fraud, which we’ve been told by the political left doesn’t exist.
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Israel staged a missile attack against an Iranian base near Damascus. The base is only 31 miles from the Israeli border.
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The commander of the Taliban’s special forces branch was killed in Helmand province by Afghan troops.
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Venezuela is trying to solve its economic problems by launching a cryptocurrency backed by oil, which they’re calling the “petro.”
Links for 11-2-2017
- The Department of Justice is contemplating whether to charge at least six Russian government officials in the Democratic National Committee computer hacking case.
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The Senate approved 27 Trump nominees today, including 16 ambassadors.
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The Trump administration imposed punitive duties on Canadian softwood lumber imports.
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Four Democratic election workers in Philadelphia were charged with crimes, including “intimidating voters, casting bogus ballots, and falsely certifying the results in their polling place.”
Perhaps the most flagrant incident (at least among the ones we know of) involved a pair of husband and wife Republican voters who both cast their ballots for the GOP candidate. One of the votes was registered properly while the other was replaced with a write-in ballot with the name of the Democrat filled in, effectively nullifying the vote for their household.
- Michael Brendan Dougherty writes that we’re on the slippery slope to shunning the Founders:
Previously, civil-rights activists such as King reconciled white America’s devotion to the nation’s founding and their own ambition to living as equals under the law by casting the Declaration and other artifacts of the Founding as a “promissory note” whose liberties need to be justly extended to all human beings in America. And many today say that we can honor the Founders because, unlike the the Confederates, the principles they enshrined in our Founding documents could be used against the injustice of slavery and white supremacy.
It is my contention that this way of honoring the Founders will soon begin to seem dishonest to liberals. It will be seen as a concession to a recalcitrant prejudice and a political reality that is rapidly disappearing, the same way civil unions for same-sex couples are now seen.
It is easy to imagine a writer who grew up reading Ta-Nehisi Coates on “the First White President” looking back at Bouie’s assertion that we have statues to Jefferson on account of his authorship of the Declaration of Independence with a jaundiced eye. That future man of letters will observe that the Declaration’s invocations of liberty and its pretensions of universalism were merely Whig propaganda against a King. He will assert that Jefferson did not actually believe that all men were so endowed by their creator. He will hasten to add that as America achieved the political sovereignty, Jefferson became more convinced of white supremacy, more secure in the view that white liberty could be guaranteed only through black bondage. Many reading this argument will conclude that by raising statues to Jefferson we are crediting him only for his hypocrisy, a privilege only white racists and slavers get in America. They will conclude, in other words, that America has spent centuries sanctifying its foundational hypocrisy. Land of the Free, home of the enslaved.
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More than 180,000 people, most of them Kurds, have been displaced as a result of the fighting between the Peshmerga and the Iraqi army and its Shiite militia allies.
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Iraq’s central government wants control of Kurdistan’s oil exports.
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A Spanish judge ordered that nine leaders of Catalonia’s secessionist government be held in custody pending a trial.