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December 2016

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 19, 2016 29 Comments
A gunman shot Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, in Ankara on Monday at a gallery opening. Reuters has tweeted that Karlov passed away: https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/810892214863794181 Hurriyet Daily News reported:
Hürriyet Ankara representatvice Deniz Zeyrek said the attacker first shot into the air and later shot the envoy in the back. He shot the envoy for the second time after the scene was evacuated. It has also been reported that the attacker entered the scene by showing a police identity and wearing a suit. The attacker reportedly shouted “Don’t forget Aleppo! Don’t forget Syria! As long as our brothers are not safe, you will not enjoy safety” according to a footage released on Dutch website nos.nl.

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 19, 2016 81 Comments
Texas has given President-elect Donald Trump 36 electoral votes, pushing him to 304 electoral votes. He needed 270 to secure the presidency. Today is the day! The Electoral College across the nation will meet and cast its vote for the next president of the United States of America. President-elect Donald Trump won 306 electoral votes on election day, only needing 270 to win the election against Hillary Clinton. Remember, though, that Congress will officially count the votes on January 6. I have updated the post below the jump. Keep checking back!

Posted by Mary Chastain on December 19, 2016 11 Comments
White House staffers placed four snowmen in the Rose Garden for Christmas decorations, but a few decided to use them as pranks on President Barack Obama after he called them creepy:
In an Instagram post this weekend, Souza showed a snowman decoration looking in on Obama through a window in the Oval office. Many online saw the photo and commented the snowman looked as if it were stalking the president. In the post, Souza explained it was part of a prank.

Posted by Mark Finkelstein on December 19, 2016 32 Comments
Shades of "other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?" . . . On today's Morning Joe, Mike Barnicle claimed that Barack Obama had a "great, outstanding" presidency, "with a few minor ripples like Syria." So the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians, traceable to Obama's abandonment of his red line, is a "minor ripple?" How callous can Barnicle be? And as bad as was Obama's failure on Syria, it is just one of a string of fiascos at his feet, from the rise of ISIS, to Iran, Libya, and on the domestic front, a record number of people out of work and on food stamps, and the slowest recovery in modern history.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 18, 2016 1 Comment
On December 4, 2016, I was a speaker at a national conference sponsored by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), held at Harvard Law School. The conference was co-hosted by HLS Alliance for Israel, and was titled "War By Other Means - BDS, Israel and the Campus." My presentation was on the history of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. While I have written hundreds of posts about the BDS movement, including its history, this presentation gave me an opportunity to pull it all together in one place, and to do more research to obtain documentation. BDS is a direct and provable continuation of the Arab anti-Jewish boycotts in the 1920s and 1930s and subsequent Arab League Boycott, restructured through non-governmental entities to evade U.S. anti-boycott legislation and repackaged in the language of "social justice" to appeal to Western liberals.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on December 18, 2016 7 Comments
As DNC chair Donna Brazile contradicts Obama on Russian hacking and John McCain asserts that Obama has no idea what to do about the serious problem of Russian hacking that could "undermine our democracy," Henry Kissinger offers some much-needed perspective. ABC News reports on Brazile undercutting Obama's public statements:
Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile said Russian hackers persisted in trying to break into the organization's computers "daily, hourly" until after the election -- contradicting President Obama's assertion that the hacking stopped in September after he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin to "cut it out."

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 18, 2016 14 Comments
It's been a while since we measured the lack of diversity at major liberal publications. In 2012, I did a photo montage of the NY Times Editorial Board and Masthead in response to an Op-Ed by a U. Penn. professor accusing Republicans of tokenism by appointing Tim Scott to fill the seat vacated by Jim DeMint, I would never be so insulting as to accuse the NY Times of tokenism:
The New York Times today ran a demeaning Op-Ed about Tim Scott, the Republican Congressman from South Carolina who was just appointed to the seat being vacated by Jim DeMint. The Op-Ed was written by U. Penn. Political Science Professor Adolf L. Reed Jr.,  The Puzzle of Black Republicans, and accused Republicans of engaging in tokenism by appointing Scott:

Posted by Leslie Eastman on December 18, 2016 18 Comments
If California's general election votes were ignored, President-Elect Donald Trump would have won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College count. Perhaps inspired by the "different direction" taken by its citizens, California Governor Jerry Brown feels inspired to conclude his political career by taking the role of President, an office for which he campaigned several times during his lengthy career? This would align with development of the the California secession movement.

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 18, 2016 13 Comments
The folks at MRCTV have created a splendid piece of satire aimed squarely at the "safe space" crowd currently occupying American college campuses. From their website:
MRC Launches ‘Save the Snowflakes’ Campaign Given the devastating emotional and psychological consequences of Donald Trump’s election victory on sensitive, liberal college students – a.k.a., snowflakes – the Media Research Center has launched a special project, “Save The Snowflakes.”

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on December 18, 2016 27 Comments
While the Washington Post didn't seem very concerned about the eight years of disinformation oozing from the Obama White House and its online surrogates, they are so obsessed with President-elect Trump that they've created a Google Chrome browser extension to fact check Trump's tweets. WaPo writes:
We made a tool that slips a bit more context into Trump's tweets. It's still in the early stages, but our goal is to provide additional context where needed for Trump's tweets moving forward (and a few golden oldies).
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