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August 2016

Hebron is a hot spot in many ways. Hebron and its immediately surrounding Arab areas are the single largest source of terror attacks during the so-called Knife or Stabbing Intifada. It's also a place where anti-Zionist and left-wing "liberal Zionist" American Jews love to gather to protest the Jewish "settlers" who live in a tiny section of the city. That section is under Israeli military control by agreement with the Palestinian Authority, with good reason. Hebron has a long history of violence directed at Jews. Hebron also is the place of the Cave of the Patriarchs, which I visited in 2015. [caption id="attachment_129734" align="alignnone" width="600"][Cave of Patriarchs - Abraham] [Cave of Patriarchs - Abraham][/caption]Hebron had one of if not the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world, dating back several hundred years at least. Until 1929. On August 23, 1929, the Arabs attacked the Jews of Hebron along with numerous other Jewish communities.

How is this for an armed citizen story?! A 91-year-old man in Michigan shot a man who tried to rob him on Monday in a parking lot at a local Rite Aid pharmacy. As the suspect walked closer, the man told him he holds a concealed pistol license (CPL), but the suspect didn't care. When the suspect aimed something at him, the elderly man whipped out his gun and shot him:
"The person who fired the shots had a CPL and was lawfully carrying a handgun," said [deputy Chief Eric] Keiser. "He said he defended himself when he was attacked."

Former Fox News Host, Andrea Tantaros, filed a sexual harassment complaint against the network Monday. The complaint went full scorched Earth, accusing Former Fox News CEO, Roger Ailes, Fox News Host Bill O'Reilly, and former Senator Scott Brown of making unwanted advances. Fox News has said they cannot comment on pending litigation, but the entire ordeal is a nasty "he said, she said" affair. Tantaros' legal troubles began earlier this year when Fox News accused her of breach of contract for writing a book without first obtaining the network's approval. Tantaros alleges the network is using the book kerfuffle to silence her sexual harassment complaints, and the network contends she's attempting to draw attention away from the alleged breach of contract. From Buzzfeed:

The FBI has decided to investigate a stabbing in Virginia as a possible terrorist attack after the man allegedly yelled "Allah Akbar." Wasil Farooqui, 20, stabbed two people at an apartment complex on Saturday night. Both people survived. Witnesses told the police Farooqui yelled "Allah Akbar" as he attacked them.

If you've been paying attention, you already know the media coverage of Trump is a daily drum beat of negativity and undue scrutiny unlike anything we've ever seen. The media may not be crazy about Hillary Clinton, but they're on a special mission to make sure Donald Trump never sees the inside of the Oval Office. The New York Post's Michael Goodwin made this the subject of his most recent column:
American journalism is collapsing before our eyes Donald Trump may or may not fix his campaign, and Hillary Clinton may or may not become the first female president. But something else happening before our eyes is almost as important: the complete collapse of American journalism as we know it.

I've been keeping an eye on the tough Congress elections headed into November, especially since the GOP could easily loses its majority in the Senate. North Carolina could lose one of its GOP senators while New Hampshire could lose its only GOP senator in Kelly Ayotte. The tough reelection has led her to distance herself from GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump. Ayotte said she would vote for Trump, but stopped before giving him her full endorsement. This has frustrated the independent voters she needs to win. She didn't even attend a rally attended by Vice President candidate Mike Pence where he told the crowd they need her "back in the U.S. Senate." As The Washington Post described it, she "is stuck between Donald Trump and a hard place."

Judicial Watch revealed another batch of Hillary Clinton emails they received from their Freedom of Information Act request they sent in last year. The group insists Hillary has not fully explained why she had a private server, but the investigation has presented details that a lot more went on than we thought. This latest batch has grown the hole Hillary dug for herself as major donors to her Clinton Foundation used her status as secretary of state to ask for special favors for friends. Unlike the previous release, though, these emails shows donors asking for access to Hillary herself. In other emails, they asked for access to other State Department officials. The release comes on the same day a federal judge told the State Department to quickly release another 15,000 Hillary emails the FBI discovered in July.

In recent days, Donald Trump has made a concerted effort to moderate the tone, and some would say the substance, of his campaign. So how does a notable member of the MSM reward him? By analogizing him in explicit terms to a Nazi. On Monday evening's Hardball, Matthews asked if Trump is "in the bunker?" Making the Nazi analogy clear, Matthews said that "somebody compared him to Downfall, the movie about the end of the Third Reich." Matthews admitted: "it's never fair to do that," but that of course didn't stop him, as he suggested that "he's in the bunker but doesn't know what's going on outside. "

While fake instances of “Palestinian suffering” has been taking up all the bandwidth of media attention in the West, mainstream media and liberal activists have been surprisingly silent over the suffering of Baloch people living under the brutal occupation of Iran and Pakistan. Once an independent people with distinct ethnicity, culture and language, Baloch people today are living under foreign military occupation. In 1928, the armies of the Shah of Iran took hold of the western part of Balochistan. Today over 2 million Baloch are living under Iranian rule, more than 80 percent of them in abject poverty. Just like Kurdish Peshmerga fighters in Northern Iran, ill-fed and outgunned Baloch have been putting up resistance to the Mullah Regime in the south. Forgotten by the rest of the world, Kurds and Baloch are facing an increasingly well-equipped Iranian army -- replenished thanks to 150 billion dollar windfall from Obama's sanctions relief.

In late May 2015, I wrote about my visit to Ziv Medical Center in Safed (Tsfat), northern Israel, which serves as a center for medical assistance given Syrians, Meet an Israeli Doctor Saving Syrian Lives and Limbs:
Ziv is only 30 kilometers, a 40 minute drive, from the Syrian border. Ziv has received some publicity the past two years for its treatment of Syrians. While some of the Syrians seeking help are not direct casualties of the fighting, such as expectant mothers, almost all have traumatic wounds as a result of the war.

The MSM can't stop talking about Donald Trump having brought onto his campaign the Chairman of Breitbart News. But Hillary's closest aide being for 12 years an editor of an Islamist magazine that among other things blamed the US for 9/11? Meh! On today's With All Due Respect, guest co-host Alex Wagner seconded the excuse that the Clinton campaign is shopping. Said Wagner: "as you and I have both worked on magazines, we know that there are a lot of editors who do absolutely nothing but are listed on mastheads anyway." John Heilemann similarly argued that while his title at Bloomberg Politics is Managing Editor, he doesn't do any managing or editing. He went on to assert that not many voters care about Huma Abedin "one way or the other." Added Heilemann: "I know people on the right will hate me for saying that."

The House Oversight Committee recently received classified documents and notes from the FBI's untaped interview with Hillary Clinton in order to understand why Director James Comey didn't recommend charges against her. The FBI said it wants to remain as transparent as possible, but Chairman Jason Chaffetz said he has a few problems with the documents, especially since many are heavily redacted:
"Hillary Clinton is out there saying there's not very much sensitive information in there, that she didn't trade in sensitive classified information. It's so sensitive and so classified that even I as the chairman of the Oversight Committee don't have the high level of clearance to see what's in those materials," Chaffetz said. "I think the documents are overly classified. We're going to call on the FBI this week to give us a version where there's non-classified, the unclassified material and the classified material redacted so that that could be out there in the public. I think that's the right thing to do."

The GOP has panicked lately about their majority in Congress, especially in the Senate, as the party divides over Donald Trump and the lack of fundraising. Their worst fears appear to becoming true in North Carolina, once seen as a lock for the GOP. The Wall Street Journal reports that Democrat Deborah Ross may beat two term GOP Senator Richard Burr. The Democrats also gained a rise because Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has placed North Carolina high on her priority list. Ross tends to climb the polls as Clinton does the same. When Clinton went up nine points, Ross found herself up two points on Burr for the first time in the election.

Whoops! Judicial Watch's investigation into the Hillary Clinton email scandal continues as a federal judge told the State Department to expedite the release of 15,000 emails the FBI discovered that her attorneys did not turn over. The watchdog group has kept a close eye on the scandal, at first questioning Clinton aide Huma Abedin's jobs before she went to the State Department. It unraveled to show that Hillary used an unsecure server and that many of her foundation's donors asked her for special favors when she served as Secretary of State.

Dumbest movie ever or THE dumbest movie ever? Is That a Gun in Your Pocket is set to hit theaters in September takes aim at Texas and our love of guns. The film's official website provides the following synopsis:
If there's one thing that the men of Rockford Texas love as much as their women, it's their guns. But when a gun incident at a neighborhood school spurs one stay at home mom, Jenna (Andrea Anders), to rethink Rockford's obsessive gun culture, life in this idyllic town is turned upside-down.
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Will Hillary Clinton's latest ad, which attempts to scare people about Donald Trump when it comes to national security, actually wind up winning him votes? Today's Morning Joe opened by playing the ad, which features clips of Trump making various bellicose statements, e.g., "I would bomb the s--- out of them." Mika Brzezinski found the ad "very strong: it tweaks on every level." Better than twerking on every level, we suppose. "It's scary," said Mika as, in a bit of unintentional humor, she imitated the "whoosh" sound of the fighter jet at the end of the ad. But query: could the ad wind up winning more votes than it loses him? After eight years of "leading from behind," of foreign policy disasters from Russia to Syria to Libya to Iran, could America be ready for a blunt-talking president? Remind me: who was the president who, speaking of the Cold War, said "we win, they lose?"

In May, Texas, joined by twelve other states filed suit against the Obama Administration who'd recently issued a national transgendered bathroom use policy for publicly funded schools. A mixed bag of states joined Texas in legal action, those states included: Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, Arizona's Department of Education, Maine Gov. Paul LePage, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Utah, and Georgia. “This represents just the latest example of the current administration’s attempts to accomplish by executive fiat what they couldn’t accomplish through the democratic process in Congress," said Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton. Late Sunday, a federal judge granted the temporary injunction. Reuters reports: