Trump Shines in Foreign Policy

Trump is supposed to be an idiot, but this idiot has been a success in the international hotel business for years, and people like that have to know about currencies and commodities. They have to have credible information sources or they'll make the wrong moves. They have to read price signals. Rex Tillerson is one likely source for Trump, and so is Mattis.

James Lewis

"Remember ISIS? When Obama left office, it was still a growing network of eager sadistic killers, with secret sponsorship by Turkey, by some Gulf Arab regimes, the Wahhabi radicals, and by the Iranians. Today a lot of those boastful YouTube killers are just smoking splotches in the sand.

"A single MOAB bomb was dropped on a mountain tunnel complex in Afghanistan, apparently a clean target with no "weddings" going on. The day afterwards the media said that 94 ISIS killers died, but that assumes that somebody had already cleaned up that collapsed tunnel structure; not a chance. So a hundred or more of the worst human beings since Hitler died in one big explosion. 

"Most important, the United States sent a strong signal of determination. Trump-Mattis announced a strategy of "surround and kill the enemy in place." For mass-murdering criminals there will be no mercy.

"The U.S. media just rolled its eyes and yawned, but the Muslim world got the message loud and clear. They’ve been wondering how long the United States, which was the winning power in the Cold War and the two world wars was going to come back to its senses. Well, the MOAB bombing wasn't wish-washy, it wasn’t half-hearted and it didn't signal cowardice and weakness. The United States was finally getting serious.

"Obama would never even name the enemy, and most importantly, under Obama the United States lost the moral high ground against child-murdering sadists; we started to support Sunni killer cults in Syria.

"If ISIS is just a minor nuisance, as Obama tried to tell us, that would make the genocides of history meaningless. " . . .

"The new heir to the Saudi throne (known as MBS for Mohammed bin Salman) and the aging king needed our help against Iran. They know Trump won't help Saudi Arabia if they don't purge their own jihad sponsors. That is one big reason for the purge over there, and we will have to see how it comes out."

You can't fool McGruff the Crime Dog

Photosnark by Rich Terrell

Senate Democrats pushed nine different gun controls during the past six weeks, and ABC News has now emerged with a tenth gun law which they suggest may be the ringer.   . . . "That law would legalize firearm confiscation orders like those in Washington state. Such orders allow a judge to issue an ex parte order for the confiscation of an American’s firearms. This means the order can be issued without the firearm owner even being present for the process. His or her first knowledge of the order would come when police knocked on their door to sweep the house for firearms.

"According to ABC News, the orders are supported by Sandy Hook Promise, the gun control group to which Tim McGraw donated concert proceeds in July 2015. The firearm confiscation orders are also supported by Michael Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety.

"In fact, ABC News reported that Everytown claims “4,500 Americans died due to gun violence in August” of this year. This claim is misleading in a number of ways.

"For one, it does not differentiate between Americans who die due to suicide versus those who die via gun crime, homicide. Gun crime only makes up one-third of gun deaths each year in America. Two-thirds of the deaths are suicides." . . .

I Went To Church Today

Red State  . . . "But as big as it has grown, it still feels like “home” to me when I attend. Because, in my observation, it has always stayed on message, on point. On God. I have yet to leave a service without feeling like God spoke to me and moved in my heart." . . .

"But that isn’t why I’m writing this. In fact, as I read back over the previous paragraphs, I realize they serve to highlight the question: If it’s so wonderful, why haven’t I been going lately? 

. . .  For in the sanctuary of church, we aren’t typically on guard, prepared to do battle. Some might even say we are vulnerable.

"That was my initial thought, upon hearing the horrific news last Sunday. But that was quickly followed by a sense of resolve. No, you don’t get to scare me away from my church and my God. Not with your guns, nor your bombs, nor your hate. Not even with your honest misunderstanding and mistrust of faith and of prayer. My faith is my strength, not my vulnerability.

"So I promised myself I’d go back to church. Initially, I thought of it as a show of solidarity for the people of Sutherland Springs, Texas — and Antioch, Tennessee, and Charleston, South Carolina. But I realize, that’s hubris. My heart does ache for them and I will continue to pray for them. But, in truth, I’m going back for me. Because I’ve been the one holding myself back. I’ve been the one standing in my own way. And it’s long past time for me to get over myself." . . . Full article.

The Dems Are Back, Baby!

Power Line Blog

"And celebrating their return on Saturday Night Live."

"If only the Democrats’ leaders were as young as the comics who portray them in this skit…"

However "Chuck Schumer" looks more like Ezekiel Emanuel, also known as "Easy-kill Emanuel" for his stance on abortion.

Bill Clinton's looming reckoning as a sexual predator

Thomas Lifson  "So far, there has not been much holding of Bill Clinton to account by progressives, despite the change in zeitgeist for sexual predation by the powerful.  Never mind that it's fashionable on the left today to hold the founders of our country to present-day standards.

"But the inevitable is happening.  At first, a few progressives start mentally applying the post-Weinstein ethic to Bill Clinton.  In the process, they eventually have to reflect on their own past and regret their support for him throughout Kenneth Starr's revelations, impeachment, and beyond.  That will take a long time.  

"But if they don't publicly reflect, I am sure their friends on the feminist left and the entire right will be happy to dig up whatever the politicians and pundits said at the time about private matters being off limits.  It's only sex!

"Worst of all: Just as with Harvey Weinstein, everybody knew.  That's why Hillary and Betsy Wright put together the "bimbo eruptions" team.  Bill's victims were double-victimized, dismissed, pictured as chasing a hundred-dollar-bill dragged through a trailer park by James Carville.

"The dam may be leaking among the progressive pundits, in cable news, at least.  Justin Caruso of the Daily Caller is covering the awakening of MSNBC's Chris Hayes on Twitter.  This tweet is the general charge, but Hayes gets more specific:

As gross and cynical and hypocrtical [sic] as the right's "what about Bill Clinton" stuff is, it's also true that Democrats and the center left are overdue for a real reckoning with the allegations against him.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) November 10, 2017

. . .
"The omertà on Bill Clinton's predation of less powerful women lasted through last year, as Caruso points out:

Broaddrick and several other Clinton accusers appeared with then-candidate Donald Trump before the second debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016. She said at the time, "Actions speak louder than words. Mr. Trump may have said some bad words, but Bill Clinton raped me and Hillary Clinton threatened me. I don't think there's any comparison."

"The MSM commentariat knew, and they kept their mouths shut.

"They even knew that Hillary, the breaker of glass ceilings, was the enforcer." . . .

"As always when we are fighting the cultural hegemony of the progressives, we use Alinsky's Fourth and hold the enemy to its own rules.  It works most of the time."

To wit:

You Have to Hand It to Hillary – the Girl Can Smear

Clarice Feldman   "With the help of the DNC (broke, but forking over millions to this end), Hillary pulled off what Kimberly Strassel rightly calls “one of the dirtiest tricks in U.S. political history." She hired a smear outfit (Fusion, headed by Glenn Simpson) which put together ludicrous claims, leaked them to willing press cohorts, including David Corn at Mother Jones, hired Christopher Steele (GPS) to concoct a fairytale about Donald J Trump and had Steele give the Dossier to the FBI in July 2016. Then press megaphone Michael Isikoff at Yahoo News -- obviously tipped off by Steele -- reported, “U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump advisor and Kremlin.”

"Having generated this nonsense, handed it off to the FBI, and shared the news of that handoff to Isikoff, Hillary “jumped all over it, spinning its own oppo research as a government investigation into Mr. Trump.”  . . .

. . . 

"And his effort to keep from turning over to Congress the bank records, which seem likely to disclose the names of journalists whom his outfit Fusion paid, has hit a bump as far as he is concerned. The Obama-appointed judge who was handling the bank records case has been removed -- perhaps because her law firm represented Huma Abedin and other Democratic insiders and a new judge appointed to hear it;

"If you, like me, prefer to remember the day when Americans were smarter and more resourceful than to be taken in by this foolishness, I draw your attention to an obituary in this week’s New York Times.

"It’s about Irv Refkin, from my hometown, Milwaukee. When he was 3 or 4 his immigrant parents died in an auto accident and he spent the next 10 years in a German Lutheran orphanage where he learned to speak German. Through a series of mix-ups while in the U.S. Army, he was mistaken for a Canadian and flown to Britain, “before the United States army knew he was missing, he had parachuted into occupied France.” He carried out three missions for the British and when the U.S. entered the war he worked for the O.S.S. as a “saboteur, assassin and courier behind enemy lines.”

"It’s good to remember that once upon a time in a country called the USA we had people with enough courage and wit to know how to do the right thing. "

Are mass murderers always insane? Researchers don't think so

UK Independent   File under "They know this because....?"  

" 'In almost all high-end mass killings, the perpetrator’s thinking evolves,' says one expert"

If what people do is any reflection of who they are, then Devin Patrick Kelley, who slaughtered 26 churchgoers on Sunday in Texas, surely was a madman.

Before the atrocity, he had attempted to sneak weapons onto an Air Force base after making death threats to his superiors, according to a local police report. In 2012, he had escaped from a mental hospital in New Mexico to which he had been sent after assaulting his wife and fracturing his stepson’s skull.

"A video of the church killing reportedly shows Mr. Kelley working his way methodically through the aisles, shooting some parishioners, even children, at point-blank range.

"But the rest of these murderers do not have any severe, diagnosable disorder. Though he was abusive to his wife, Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people in an Orlando nightclub, had no apparent serious mental illness. Neither did Stephen Paddock, who mowed down 58 concertgoers from a hotel window in Las Vegas."

"Ditto for Dylann Roof, the racist who murdered nine African-American churchgoers in South Carolina in 2015, and Christopher Harper-Mercer, the angry young man who killed nine people at a community college in Oregon the same year." . . .

"Adam Lanza, who in 2012 killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., exhibited extreme paranoia in the months leading up to his crime, isolating himself in his room."

20-Year-Old Friends Become Youngest Black Republicans Elected in Connecticut

Big Government

A pair of 20-year-old friends may have just become the youngest black Republicans ever elected to public office in Connecticut, according to reports.

"Ed Ford Jr. and Tyrell Brown, a pair of young black men elected to office in Middletown, Connecticut, have been friends since middle school. They share many things but most especially an interest in politics, WTNH channel 8 reported.

"Speaking of his friend, Mr. Ford told WTNH, “I met him playing two-hand touch football.”

"Now, these two college juniors may have become the youngest black Republicans ever to be elected to a public office in the liberal state of Connecticut. On Election Day, Ford won a seat on the Middletown school board, and Brown was elected to the Middletown Planning and Zoning Commission.

"Both young men admitted that many of their fellow millennials look suspiciously at them for being Republicans. They also note that they are serious about their politics.

“ 'If you have the will to do it, if you have the passion to do it, go do it now,” Ford told reporters of the pair’s go-getter attitude.

"Ford, a psychology major at Central Connecticut State University, and Brown, a business major at Southern Connecticut State University, hope to bring their conservative ideas to their newly won seats.

"The newly minted representatives of Middletown’s voters will be sworn in on November 14 at the Middletown City Hall." . . .

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin says most in middle class will get a break under Republican tax reform proposal . . .

. . . but stops short of promising it to all

UK Daily Mail  . . . "Mnuchin pointed out Sunday that the complexity of the tax code makes predicting every scenario impossible, adding that Republicans in the House and Senate want to simplify the code with proposed legislation. 

 " 'For most people - and, again, it may not be 100 percent, but by far the majority - both the House and Senate version provide middle-income tax relief,' Mnuchin said on CNN.

" 'What's so complicated in our tax situation today is that everybody has a different situation, takes advantage of different parts of the code, it's very complicated. So by simplifying the code, we're putting everybody on a level playing field,' he said." . . . Read more 

Atheism and the Texas Church Shooter

Selwyn Duke  “ 'If God does not exist, everything is permitted,” wrote Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov.  Mentioning this in association with Devin Patrick Kelley, the militant atheist who last Sunday perpetrated the worst church shooting in U.S.  history, is bound to raises hackles.  Of course, few atheists will descend into committing murder; in fact, I’ve known some I’d call “good people.” Moreover, note that I myself once not only didn’t believe in God, but like Kelley thought religious people were “stupid.” Yet is it possible a straight line can be drawn between atheism (the belief) and increasing crime and immorality? Ideas do have consequences, after all." . . . 
. . . 

. . . "This may take a dark form or just that of the atheistic but generally good-hearted young man I once knew who responded, when I mentioned that something he was contemplating was wrong, “But it’s not wrong for me.” The point, however, is that atheism’s implied moral nihilism can justify anything.  Rape? Kill? Steal? Why not? Who’s to say it’s wrong? This brings us to one last matter. 

"When someone points out that atheistic Marxist governments have killed 65 to 110 million people, atheists will often retort, “But atheism doesn’t prescribe that!” They’re correct.  Atheism doesn’t prescribe any behavior.

"It also doesn’t proscribe any behavior.

"And that’s the problem.  Silence on moral matters would be fine if man by nature were angelic.  But by nature, he’s barbaric — and he remains so unless some civilizing agency enters the equation.  Atheism’s mistake is one of omission. "

"A Republic, if You Can Keep It"

An argument for the Electoral College and against "popular vote"

John F. McManus  . . . "The Founding Fathers supported the view that (in the words of the Declaration of Independence) "Men ... are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." They recognized that such rights should not be violated by an unrestrained majority any more than they should be violated by an unrestrained king or monarch. In fact, they recognized that majority rule would quickly degenerate into mobocracy and then into tyranny. They had studied the history of both the Greek democracies and the Roman republic. They had a clear understanding of the relative freedom and stability that had characterized the latter, and of the strife and turmoil — quickly followed by despotism — that had characterized the former. In drafting the Constitution, they created a government of law and not of men, a republic and not a democracy.

"But don't take our word for it! Consider the words of the Founding Fathers themselves, who — one after another — condemned democracy.

"• Virginia's Edmund Randolph participated in the 1787 convention. Demonstrating a clear grasp of democracy's inherent dangers, he reminded his colleagues during the early weeks of the Constitutional Convention that the purpose for which they had gathered was "to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and trials of democracy...."

"• John Adams, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, championed the new Constitution in his state precisely because it would not create a democracy. "Democracy never lasts long," he noted. "It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself." He insisted, "There was never a democracy that 'did not commit suicide.'"

. . .  Full article here.

CNN’s Awful Week: Lies, Meltdowns, Ratings Collapse, New Discrimination Suit

comicallyincorrect.

Big Journalism
. . .

CNN Communications‏Verified account @CNNPR

Replying to @DRUDGE

CNN is pacing to have its 2nd highest year in primetime since 2008 - behind only 2016 elex year. Those are the facts.

. . . "If CNN was only in competition with itself and its own dismal ratings, that tweet would make sense. The problem for last-place CNN, though, is that it has actual competition in the form of MSNBC and Fox, both of which are shellacking The Least Trustws Name In News in every conceivable metric.

"Moreover, when compared to the same month last year, CNN’s October 2017 ratings collapsed a whopping 52 percent. Meanwhile, Fox News is only down 26 percent, MSNBC down a mere 6 percent.

"My reference to “last place” is not a specious one. Until CNN turned into a 24/7 RedBaitingAntiTrumpFakeNewsHateMachine, the left-wing network was in second place, beating MSNBC much more often than not. So not only has CNN lost more than half of its year-over-year viewers, it has lost its bragging rights over its left-wing counterpart at MSNBC.

"And things continue to get worse, primarily through unforced errors caused by CNN’s blinding hate and rabid partisanship. Without a doubt, CNN has just suffered through its worst week since those hilarious weeks back in June when CNN staffers had to be fired over hate-sprees against President Trump, and a barrage of firings occurred after the network was caught red-handed telling one audacious lie after another.

"To begin with, although CNN and its elite media brethren are covering this news up, on Thursday we learned that CNN is facing yet-another massive racial discrimination lawsuit— a class-action suit. And when you look back and remember the efforts CNN put into stirring up riots in predominantly black neighborhoods, this should surprise no one.

"CNN’s public missteps this week, however, left all kinds of bruises." . . .