The Front Page Cover
The Events of the Week -- Featuring:
The Travel Moratorium: A Hopeless Disaster
by Charles Krauthammer
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Why the Demos Dissed DeVos
The Senate Tuesday finally cleared the way for Betsy DeVos to take over as head of the Department of Education — but just barely. Last week, DeVos' nomination fell in danger after two teacher union-supported Republicans (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine) opted to join Democrat obstructionists. This put the Senate in a 50/50 split, leaving absolutely no room to spare, which always opens the door for backroom deals being cut over future legislation. Vice President Mike Pence cast the pivotal tie-breaker vote in the Senate.
Never before has a cabinet confirmation come down to a tie-breaker, and the reason this one did is because DeVos is a threat to the Democrats' stranglehold on shaping the worldview of the next generation of Americans. Not only is the vote historic, but the role DeVos will play in America's future may well be too. She stands ready to upend the Democrats' government school status quo, especially their urban poverty plantation schools. The situation is so crucial that public policy protagonist Thomas Sowell temporarily came out of retirement to lobby on her behalf. He warned, "American education is at a crossroads. If the teachers' unions and their allies can defeat the nomination of Mrs. DeVos, and the Republicans substitute someone else more acceptable to the education establishment, a historic opportunity will be lost, and may never come again in this generation." Republicans (most of them anyway) should be applauded for not wasting this opportunity.
"What matters is what families and students think about having a change agent in this position," Janine Yass argues in a Washington Examiner op-ed. "If you judge from the tens of thousands of families on waiting lists for charter schools and for scholarships in private schools it is apparent that poor families are desperate for someone who will fight for them for a change." Yass also scolded the media for ignoring "the faces of the millions of families and students who have been the victims of bad education policy." Sadly, Democrats and their media cohorts are more interested in protecting what they accurately consider the Holy Grail, because indoctrination masquerading as education is the pathway to statism. And Americans are fed up with it. Thankfully, with the help of DeVos' agenda, they will be ignored no more. ~The Patriot Post
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“9th Circuit Intellectually Dishonest,”
Usurped President, Trampled Constitution
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ It’s difficult to imagine a case which would be any more clear cut than this one, and more difficult to assign any motivation to the anti-American actions of the courts other than a desire to harm America in collusion with their pro-Islamist, global allies who are behind the invasions... They orchestrated demonstrations, enlisted the Soros-backed ACLU and then put their corrupt Democrat state officials and wholly purchased kangaroo courts to work. This is a takeover of the office of president by the Marxist left in total violation of the Constitution, the beginning of that conquest from within we’ve been warned was coming. In voicing his opinion on the ruling by the extreme liberals in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Napolitano doesn’t pull any punches. In an interview by phone with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, Napolitano says, “It’s precisely the wrong thing for the court to do, Chris, when you have the following observations which are beyond dispute. The Constitution assigns the decision making for foreign policy exclusively to the President, even Congress has a subordinate role, subordinated to confirming ambassadors and ratifying treaties and paying for the State Department.”... http://rickwells.us/napolitano-9th-circuit-intellectually-dishonest-usurped-president-trampled-constitution/
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Russia's Art of War
by Michael Cecire
{foreignaffairs.com} ~ War is the continuation of politics by other means,” observed the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz in his classic treatise On War. Although the aphorism has become axiomatic almost to the point of cliché... it is an especially apt prism for understanding Russia’s increasingly adventurous foreign policy. Take Russian President Vladimir Putin’s penchant for “hybrid warfare,” or the combination of traditional military methods with the manipulation of information for strategic gain. In many ways, Moscow’s recent interventions in Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine are explicit exemplars of Clausewitz’s maxim, albeit with a twist...
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The Muslim Council of Britain's Little Problem
by Douglas Murray
by Douglas Murray
Miqdaad Versi
{gatestoneinstitute.org} ~ When considering the roles that various people worldwide play in advancing various causes, a lot of attention is paid to the people who blow themselves up. A fair amount of time is spent on the victims of such people... But relatively little time is spent focusing on the people whose role is clearly to tire everyone to death. In this regard, it is worth introducing to a wider audience the existence of a man called Miqdaad Versi. This man works for the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an organization which enjoyed a certain amount of access to the British government after the Satanic Verses affair, 9/11, 7/7 and other atrocities. During those years, they presented themselves in the manner of debt collectors: standing beside a big bruiser stressing how sorry they were to have to demand this payment, but that they were only just holding back their big, angry friend. Unfortunately for them, during the last Labour government in Britain, the MCB's behavior and beliefs were exposed by the more progressive Muslim voices who were by then coming along, and also by a wider society which had become wise to the tricks of these self-appointed "community leaders."... https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9889/muslim-council-britain-miqdaad-versi
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Hezbollah-Linked Company Exporting
Millions to U.S. Despite Sanctions
by Brent Scher
Hezbollah fighters hold their party flags
{freebeacon.com} ~ A new report says that an African lumber company owned by major financiers of the Hezbollah terror group has circumvented sanctions and managed to export millions of dollars worth of timber to U.S. companies... The investigation by Global Witness, a D.C.-based group that aims to uncover global corruption, focused on an African-based company called Congo Futur, which was targeted by sanctions from the U.S. Treasury Department because the Tajideen family, which gives millions of dollars to Hezbollah, owns it. Now, by creating new companies and transferring ownership to proxies, the Tajideen family has managed to circumvent sanctions and export more than $5.5 million worth of luxury timber from Congo to the United States since sanctions were implemented in 2010, according... http://freebeacon.com/national-security/report-hezbollah-linked-company-exporting-millions-u-s-despite-sanctions/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&utm_campaign=5933e49102-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_02_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-5933e49102-45611665
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Hamas-Linked CAIR Holds Event with Hezbollah Imam
by Joe Kaufman
{frontpagemag.com} ~ This past August, the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) sponsored a roundtable event featuring a meal at the American Islamic Center of Florida (AICF) located in Pompano Beach, Florida... Representing CAIR was the group’s Regional Operations Director, Nezar Hamze. Representing the mosque was its imam, Mohamad al-Ali al-Halabi, aka Mohamad al-Fouani. It was an interesting dynamic, given the background of the two, Hamze being from a group associated with Hamas and al-Halabi being a devotee of Hezbollah. While Hamas and Hezbollah are both Muslim terrorist organizations and both enjoy financing from their Iranian backers, at best they disassociate from one another and at worst they are bitter rivals. Their animus for one another is best exhibited in the ongoing conflict in Syria, where leaders of Hamas, a Sunni faction, have supported the ‘Arab Spring’ rebellion against Bashar al-Assad and Hamas militants have joined in the rebellion and members of Hezbollah, a Shiite faction, have fought alongside Assad against the rebellion...
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The Travel Moratorium: A Hopeless Disaster
by Charles Krauthammer
{freedomsback.com} ~ Stupid but legal. Such is the Trump administration’s travel ban for people from seven Muslim countries. Of course, as with almost everything in American life, what should be a policy or even a moral issue becomes a legal one. The judicial challenge should have been given short shrift, since the presidential grant of authority to exclude the entry of aliens is extremely wide and statutorily clear. The judge who issued the temporary restraining order never even made a case for its illegality.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has indeed ruled against the immigration ban, but even if the ban is ultimately vindicated in the courts (as is likely), that doesn’t change the fact that it makes for lousy policy. It began life as a barstool eruption after the San Bernardino massacre when Donald Trump proposed a total ban on Muslims entering the country “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
Rudy Giuliani says he was tasked with cleaning up this idea. Hence the executive order suspending entry of citizens from the seven countries while the vetting process is reviewed and tightened.
The core idea makes sense. These are failed, essentially ungovernable states (except for Iran) where reliable data is hard to find. But the moratorium was unnecessary and damaging. Its only purpose was to fulfill an ill-considered campaign promise.
It caused enormous disruption without making us any safer. What was the emergency that compelled us to turn away people already in the air with already approved visas for entry to the United States?
President Trump said he didn’t want to give any warning. Otherwise, he tweeted, “the ‘bad’ would rush into our country. . . . A lot of bad ‘dudes’ out there!”
Rush? Not a single American has ever been killed in a terror attack in this country by a citizen from the notorious seven. The killers have come from countries that are not listed — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Lebanon, Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan (the Tsarnaev brothers). The notion that we had to act immediately because hordes of jihadists in these seven countries were about to board airplanes to blow up Americans is absurd.
Vetting standards could easily have been revised and tightened without the moratorium and its attendant disruptions, stupidities, random cruelties and well-deserved bad press.
The moratorium turned into a distillation of the worst aspects of our current airport-security system, which everyone knows to be 95 percent pantomime. The pat-down of the 80-year-old grandmother does nothing to make us safer. Its purpose is to give the illusion of doing something. Similarly, during the brief Trump moratorium, a cavalcade of innocent and indeed sympathetic characters — graduate students, separated family members, returning doctors and scientists — were denied entry. You saw this and said to yourself: We are protecting ourselves from these ?
If anything, the spectacle served to undermine Trump’s case for extreme vigilance and wariness of foreigners entering the United States. There is already empirical evidence. A Nov. 23 Quinnipiac poll found a six-point majority in favor of “suspending immigration from ‘terror prone’ regions”; a Feb. 7 poll found a six-point majority against . The same poll found a whopping 44-point majority opposed to “suspending all immigration of Syrian refugees to the U.S. indefinitely.”
Then there is the opportunity cost of the whole debacle. It risks alienating the leaders of even nonaffected Muslim countries — the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation expressed “grave concern” — which may deter us from taking far more real and effective anti-terror measures. The administration was intent on declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, a concrete measure that would hamper the operations of a global Islamist force. In the current atmosphere, however, that declaration is reportedly being delayed and rethought.
Add to that the costs of the ill-prepared, unvetted, sloppy rollout. Consider the discordant, hostile message sent to loyal law-abiding Muslim Americans by the initial denial of entry to green-card holders. And the ripple effect of the initial denial of entry to those Iraqis who risked everything to help us in our war effort. In future conflicts, this will inevitably weigh upon local Muslims deciding whether to join and help our side. Actions have consequences.
In the end, what was meant to be a piece of promise-keeping, tough-on-terror symbolism has become an oxygen-consuming distraction. This is a young administration with a transformative agenda to enact. At a time when it should be pushing and promoting deregulation, tax reform and health-care transformation, it has steered itself into a pointless cul-de-sac — where even winning is losing.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has indeed ruled against the immigration ban, but even if the ban is ultimately vindicated in the courts (as is likely), that doesn’t change the fact that it makes for lousy policy. It began life as a barstool eruption after the San Bernardino massacre when Donald Trump proposed a total ban on Muslims entering the country “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”
Rudy Giuliani says he was tasked with cleaning up this idea. Hence the executive order suspending entry of citizens from the seven countries while the vetting process is reviewed and tightened.
The core idea makes sense. These are failed, essentially ungovernable states (except for Iran) where reliable data is hard to find. But the moratorium was unnecessary and damaging. Its only purpose was to fulfill an ill-considered campaign promise.
It caused enormous disruption without making us any safer. What was the emergency that compelled us to turn away people already in the air with already approved visas for entry to the United States?
President Trump said he didn’t want to give any warning. Otherwise, he tweeted, “the ‘bad’ would rush into our country. . . . A lot of bad ‘dudes’ out there!”
Rush? Not a single American has ever been killed in a terror attack in this country by a citizen from the notorious seven. The killers have come from countries that are not listed — Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Lebanon, Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan (the Tsarnaev brothers). The notion that we had to act immediately because hordes of jihadists in these seven countries were about to board airplanes to blow up Americans is absurd.
Vetting standards could easily have been revised and tightened without the moratorium and its attendant disruptions, stupidities, random cruelties and well-deserved bad press.
The moratorium turned into a distillation of the worst aspects of our current airport-security system, which everyone knows to be 95 percent pantomime. The pat-down of the 80-year-old grandmother does nothing to make us safer. Its purpose is to give the illusion of doing something. Similarly, during the brief Trump moratorium, a cavalcade of innocent and indeed sympathetic characters — graduate students, separated family members, returning doctors and scientists — were denied entry. You saw this and said to yourself: We are protecting ourselves from these ?
If anything, the spectacle served to undermine Trump’s case for extreme vigilance and wariness of foreigners entering the United States. There is already empirical evidence. A Nov. 23 Quinnipiac poll found a six-point majority in favor of “suspending immigration from ‘terror prone’ regions”; a Feb. 7 poll found a six-point majority against . The same poll found a whopping 44-point majority opposed to “suspending all immigration of Syrian refugees to the U.S. indefinitely.”
Then there is the opportunity cost of the whole debacle. It risks alienating the leaders of even nonaffected Muslim countries — the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation expressed “grave concern” — which may deter us from taking far more real and effective anti-terror measures. The administration was intent on declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, a concrete measure that would hamper the operations of a global Islamist force. In the current atmosphere, however, that declaration is reportedly being delayed and rethought.
Add to that the costs of the ill-prepared, unvetted, sloppy rollout. Consider the discordant, hostile message sent to loyal law-abiding Muslim Americans by the initial denial of entry to green-card holders. And the ripple effect of the initial denial of entry to those Iraqis who risked everything to help us in our war effort. In future conflicts, this will inevitably weigh upon local Muslims deciding whether to join and help our side. Actions have consequences.
In the end, what was meant to be a piece of promise-keeping, tough-on-terror symbolism has become an oxygen-consuming distraction. This is a young administration with a transformative agenda to enact. At a time when it should be pushing and promoting deregulation, tax reform and health-care transformation, it has steered itself into a pointless cul-de-sac — where even winning is losing.
http://www.freedomsback.com/charles-krauthammer/the-travel-moratorium-a-hopeless-disaster
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