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July 2015

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 20, 2015 3 Comments
Rasmea Odeh is the supermarket bomber who killed Hebrew University students Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner in 1969, served 10 years in Israeli prison before being released in a prisoner exchange, and then made her way to the U.S. in the mid-1990s. Rasmea then lied on her visa and naturalization applications, among other ways, by denying that she ever had been charged, convicted or imprisoned. Rasmea was convicted in federal court in Detroit in November 2014 of immigration fraud, sentenced to 18 months in prison, and ordered deported. Rasmea danced in the aisle of the bus back to Chicago after sentencing. Rasmea is out on bond pending appeal. We have covered many times how Rasmea is being treated as a hero by the anti-Israel activist community, based in part on her claim that her Israeli conviction was solely because she falsely confessed after 25 days of sexual torture. In fact, Rasmea confessed just one day after arrest, there was substantial independent evidence, and even a Red Cross observer said she received a fair trial. Rasmea's co-conspirator decades later would brag on video about how Rasmea planned the whole thing. [caption id="attachment_106215" align="alignnone" width="600"]http://www.investigativeproject.org/4634/part-3-spinning-a-terrorist-into-a-victim-rasmieh (Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner)[/caption] In our analysis of Rasmea's initial Appeal Brief, we noted Rasmea Odeh Appeal has fundamental inconsistency:

Posted by Amy Miller on July 20, 2015 2 Comments
For the first time in three weeks, Greek banks opened for business; but for account holders, that renewed access to cash comes at a price. Although doors opened and ATMs were stocked, Greeks looking to cash out were met with the continuation of withdrawal restrictions of 60 euros per day; the government slightly relaxed the rules put in place during its negotiations with the rest of the Eurozone, and set an additional 420 euro per week limit, eliminating the need for daily runs on ATM machines and bank tills. Checking transactions are limited to deposits, and account holders are still restricted from taking out cash while abroad. Shoppers saw a 10% hike in the country's VAT tax approved by parliament on Thursday; parliament also agreed to reforms of pension and early retirement programs that have Greek citizens worried. The Wall Street Journal has on the ground coverage: Of course, those worrisome cuts were demanded by creditors for very good reasons.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 20, 2015 20 Comments
On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 space capsule landed on the moon. As I related last year:
I was at summer camp in New Hampshire. They brought us into the rec hall where a couple hundred of us stared, bleary-eyed, at a single black and white monitor. They said we would remember this all our lives. And I do. It’s as if it happened yesterday.
Six hours later, on July 21 (UTC/GMT), Neil Armstrong would be the first man to step foot on the moon:

Posted by Amy Miller on July 20, 2015 4 Comments
Even before the bloody beginning of July, U.S. defense authorities had at least one eye focused on Egypt's Sinai peninsula---and now, they're stepping in to make sure that ISIS doesn't gain a more solid foothold in the region. Late last week, a militant arm claiming loyalty to the Islamic State took responsibility for a missile attack on an Egyptian frigate in the Mediterranean. The group claims it used a missile to blow the ship up, but as Time magazine reports, that claim is disputed by Egyptian officials who have said that the frigate was merely set on fire and saw no loss of life. SITE Intel Group posted pictures of the attack to Twitter: Footage, allegedly released by ISIS and showing the attack on the frigate, can be seen here.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 20, 2015 56 Comments
During the summer of 2013, we began to see immigration amnesty activists use the Why do you want to deport my daddy? tactic against Republicans. The tactic involves sending children to confront candidates -- with the video rolling. It all was a set up, in the hope the candidate would do something stupid or mean. Most famously, Speaker John Boehner was confronted by well-coached children while eating at his usual breakfast spot: A similar confrontation just happened to Scott Walker, and it was all a set up by a "social justice" activist group seeking to stop deportations. The Washington Post reports, Scott Walker tells undocumented worker that immigrants must follow the law:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 20, 2015 22 Comments
Guess the Obama administration isn't waiting for Congress. The United Nations Security Council, at around 9 a.m. (Eastern) this morning, unanimously approved the Iran nuclear deal, Resolution 2231, 15-0. https://twitter.com/AdiKhair/status/623118022337761280 [caption id="attachment_135057" align="alignnone" width="600"][U.S. Ambassador to U.N. Samantha Power, Iran Nuclear Deal Vote] [U.S. Ambassador to U.N. Samantha Power, Iran Nuclear Deal Vote][/caption]

Posted by New Neo on July 20, 2015 33 Comments
Obama's Iran deal has generated enormous anger, and some of that ire has been directed at the Republicans in Congress. One of the main accusations against them is that they have made Obama's task easier by passing Corker-Menendez, a bill that allows them to stop the president from lifting the Iranian sanctions unilaterally, but only with a super-majority because Obama could (and indeed would) veto the bill. Then Congress would end up needing a 2/3 majority of both houses to stop him. Why do it that way, critics ask, instead of the simple route of exercising the Senate's treaty power (under Article II Section 2 Clause 2 of the Constitution) to advise and consent? That would require a two-thirds vote before the treaty is approved rather than requiring a two-thirds vote to stop it. But what a great many critics fail to appreciate is how watered-down the Senate's treaty power has already become ever since FDR, and how much the de facto power of the executive to make international agreements without Congress' say-so has expanded. It's well worth your time to listen to an interview on the subject with Elizabeth Chryst, who is a former elected officer of the U.S. Senate and an expert on how Congress works in terms of rules and procedures. In this recording, she speaks on the subject of the Corker-Menendez bill and why conservatives are dreaming if they think there was ever any chance of blocking the Iran deal as a treaty. That's not a reality that Chryst likes, and she knows that her fellow conservatives are very unhappy to hear it; but she thinks it's a reality they need to face.

Posted by Amy Miller on July 19, 2015 32 Comments
Today, the State Department sent the Obama Administration's now-infamous Iran nuclear deal to Congress for review. This means that starting now, Congress has 60 days to fully read, analyze, and pass judgment on the bill of goods Obama and Kerry are selling. Will any of that work matter, though? Maybe not. The other parties to the agreement with Iran are putting enormous pressure on the Obama Administration to push this deal through the UN before our Congress has the opportunity to either accept or reject its contents. The Administration, in turn, appears to have decided to take away all of the legitimacy of Congressional review by acquiescing to the demands of the international community---and Congress is not happy about it. Via The Hill:
The battle is uniting Republicans, from conservative firebrand and presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to GOP leadership and Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, urged the administration to hold off on the U.N. Security Council vote.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on July 19, 2015 28 Comments
The Republican presidential debate situation is a mess. With far too much talent, and about ten too many contenders, the early presidential debate process continue its devolution into chaos. The first official debate was scheduled to take place August 6. Or at least it was until C-SPAN decided to throw their party first. Unlike Fox New's debate stage which would only hold the top 10 GOP candidates according to national polling, C-SPAN invited all 17 contenders to their "Voters First Forum" to be held August 3. The Hill reports:
Publishers at the New Hampshire Union Leader, The Post and Courier of South Carolina, and Iowa's The Gazette say the forum was prompted in part by Fox's controversial decision to cap the number of candidates in its Aug. 6 debate at 10. “Fox says only the ‘top’ 10 candidates, as judged solely by national polling, will be allowed on its stage,” the publishers said in a joint statement. “That may be understandable later, but the first votes are half a year away and there are a lot more than 10 viable candidates.”

Posted by Mike LaChance on July 19, 2015 6 Comments
Despite being shot multiple times, Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford survived the 2009 attack at Fort Hood. He was recently interviewed by Charles Payne of the FOX Business Network and offered some sober commentary on the shooting in Tennessee. Tom Tillison of BizPac Review has more:
‘War is here on US soil': Ft. Hood victim says Obama WH needs to get head out of a** The White House has its head where it doesn’t belong. Saying the “war is here on U.S. soil,” a victim of the 2009 Fort Hood attack by Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan described the killing of four U.S. Marines in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Thursday as “an act of terror.” He said the threat won’t go away until it is eliminated... “They need to get their heads out of the fourth point of contact and call it what it is,” Lunsford said of the Obama administration. The “fourth point of contact” is Airborne military jargon for the derriere, which is a somewhat more polite way of telling Obama to get his head out of his **s.
Watch the video below:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 19, 2015 26 Comments
After the recent Supreme Court ruling on "disparate impact" in housing, Amy predicted that social justice activists and lawyers had been given powerful precedent to use racial and ethnic data mining against developers who did not intentionally discriminate:
When the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Texas Department of Housing v. Inclusive Communities Project last week, social justice activists claimed a major victory in the battle against segregated housing. The decision endorsed a “disparate impact” analysis as applied to a Texas program that plaintiffs claimed distributes federal low income housing credits disproportionately, awarding too many credits to inner-city, predominately black neighborhoods and too few to suburban, predominately white neighborhoods.... Kennedy and the majority endorsed a form of social engineering just as pernicious as those that disparate impact analyses aim to correct. Instead of creating “more equality,” these methods do nothing but invent controversies for social justice groups and the courts to work out, and, as Clarence Thomas says, presume that defendants are “guilty of discrimination until proved innocent.”
In the NY Post, Paul Sperry of the Hoover Institution, highlights how massive data mining by numerous branches of the Obama administration is set to light a fire nationwide even where there is no government-sponsored, or intentional private discrimination in order to recreate communities and businesses, Obama collecting personal data for a secret race database:

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on July 19, 2015 25 Comments
Just when you thought the Democrat presidential primary couldn't get any more entertaining, the folks over at Salon are trying to kick off a "draft Al Gore" campaign. Seriously. From Salon's article It's time to draft Al Gore, with the subheading, "Hillary's flailing. Biden's grieving. Bernie's a longshot. Gore bridges the party's establishment, progressives":
Sure, the GOP field is studded with unserious candidates, but they still have a relatively deep bench of big-state governors and prominent senators. To win, therefore, the Democrats need a nationally viable candidate. Enter Al Gore: the one person on the left, apart from Clinton and Biden, with the cachet to bridge the establishment and progressive wings of the party. Here are 10 reasons why a Gore candidacy makes sense, both for the Democratic Party and the country.
Let's look at these ten reasons:

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on July 19, 2015 14 Comments
The Family Leadership Summit in Iowa on Saturday was a veritable who's who of 2016 GOP presidential candidates including Dr. Ben Carson, Senator Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Governor Mike Huckabee, Governor Bobby Jindal, Senator Marco Rubio, Governor Rick Perry, Senator Rick Santorum, Donald Trump, and Governor Scott Walker. I like the one-on-one sit down interview format, and I think Frank Luntz does a great job both interacting with the audience and asking key questions.  According to Luntz, the candidates were "unable to rely on a Teleprompter or note cards" and as such "the presidential hopefuls display their impromptu speaking skills."  Not only did Luntz ask questions of the candidates, but the audience did, as well. Donald Trump's comments about John McCain have taken center stage, but there were many great moments throughout the day.  You can catch all ten full interviews of the attending presidential candidates here.

Posted by David Gerstman on July 19, 2015 27 Comments
In his combative press conference last week to defend the P5+1 nuclear deal with Iran, President Barack Obama issued the following challenge:
So to go back to Congress, I challenge those who are objecting to this agreement, number one, to read the agreement before they comment on it; number two, to explain specifically where it is that they think this agreement does not prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and why they’re right and people like Ernie Moniz, who is an MIT nuclear physicist and an expert in these issues, is wrong, why the rest of the world is wrong, and then present an alternative.
First off it's worth noting that Energy Secretary and MIT nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz said back in April that to be effective the deal would have to include "anytime, anywhere," inspections, so Obama's explanation about why 24 days notice is now good enough fails to convince me. I want Moniz to explain why he changed his position on this AND why 24 days is now acceptable. I would like Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes to explain why he walked back his comments on requiring "anytime, anywhere" inspections. And I want a more convincing explanation than negotiator Wendy Sherman's excuse that the term was just a "rhetorical flourish." (If that was a rhetorical flourish, I'm curious how many other administration comments about the nuclear deal were rhetorical flourishes.)

Posted by Mike LaChance on July 18, 2015 13 Comments
Yesterday in Iowa, the Hillary Clinton campaign told their young supporters they couldn't speak to the press. This clumsy and seemingly paranoid move earned Hillary Clinton mockery even on MSNBC. Daniel Halper of the Weekly Standard has the details:
"Here's what struck me," said Susan Page of USA Today, "when I read the coverage in the Des Moines Register this morning. Jennifer Jacobs, who's been on your show, was covering this last night. Big demonstrations outside of young people for O'Malley and Hillary Clinton. She went up to the Clinton supporters -- these are protesters for Clinton -- and they were told they were not allowed to [speak to] a reporter." Page continued, "Now, why in the world would the campaign tell their own supporters who came out to campaign in favor Hillary Clinton ... these are the young people, college kids, for Hillary, and they've been told they can't talk to reporters. Why in the world would you do that?
Enjoy the video:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 18, 2015 28 Comments
One of the big secrets of the Democratic Party is the deep racial tension between the mostly white elite progressive leaders and activists "of color." We examined this in detail in 2011, Dem Base Fractures Into Twitter War And Charges Of Racism Against Professional Left. In that post, we documented the Twitter war between black activists and Joan Walsh of Salon.com and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake:
What is clear is that there is a growing fissure in the Democratic “base” over criticism by the (mostly White) Professional Left, as reflected in this Twitter exchange:
Those tensions have simmered for the past several years, and grown in the past year as the #BlackLivesMatters movement insisted that its voice was not being heard even within progressive circles.
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