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December 2016

Friday, President Obama stood behind the podium for his last scheduled press conference of 2016. Obama discussed Trump, Russia, and media treatment of Hillary in the most recent election. We've compiled a few highlights:

We recently reported that a Superseding Indictment was filed against Rasmea Odeh, the convicted terrorist who faces re-trial on an immigration fraud charge. Rasmea  was convicted in Israel in 1970 of the 1969 bombing of the SuperSol supermarket in Jerusalem that killed two Hebrew University students, Edward Joffe and Leon Kanner. Rasmea also was convicted of the attempted bombing of the British Consulate. Rasmea was released in 1979 in a prisoner exchange for an Israeli soldier captured in Lebanon. Rasmea made her way to the U.S. in the mid-1990s, where she lied on her visa application by denying any prior convictions or imprisonment, and again in her 2003 naturalization application when she repeated the same false answer.

Professor Jacobson has covered the Democrat's futile attempt to mount an electoral college insurrection in the hopes of turning over the results of the recent presidential election. Monday morning, establishment media outlets along with a bevy of Democrats decided Russia was to blame for Hillary's embarrassing electoral loss. The sudden, unified chorus was an amusing sight to behold. I blogged:
The Russian hacking/tainted election story line is a particularly fascinating coping mechanism in leftist elite circles.

Republican elector Chris Suprun caused a ruckus when he announced he would not vote for President-elect Donald Trump even though Trump won the state in the November election. But is it all a publicity stunt? WFAA investigated Suprun's past and found numerous inconsistencies such as lying about working as a 9/11 first responder at the Pentagon:
"He claimed to be a first responder with the Manassas Park [Virginia] Fire Department on September 11, 2001 and personally told us stories 'I was fighting fire that day at the Pentagon.’ No, I was on a medic unit that day at the Pentagon and you make a phone call to Manassas Park and you find out that he wasn't even employed there until October 2001,” said a first responder who knows Suprun and only agreed to speak about him if his identity was concealed. The City of Manassas Park confirmed to WFAA that it hired Suprun on October 10, 2001, one month after the 9/11 attacks.

For those of us in the gun rights and concealed carry community (and old enough to have been around) the 1990s was a pivotal decade. When it began, there were only 15 states that would issue concealed carry permits to private citizens based on objective criteria and just one that required no permit at all to carry concealed. In contrast an almost identical number (14) that would not issue such permits under any circumstances. In 1992 Bill Clinton was elected President, and working with a largely Democrat Congress he managed to pass the infamous “Assault Weapons Ban” that also limited magazine capacities to 10 rounds.

Weakness is not rewarded in the Middle East, as the Obama-Kerry fiasco in Syria is showing. It also is not rewarded in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Khaled Abu Toameh writing at The Gatestone Institute website, makes the point that Palestinian militants view Israeli concessions as weakness, and actually encourage more intransigence, The Palestinian Jihads against Israel:
Many Palestinians see Israeli concessions, gestures and unilateral moves as proof of capitulation, rather than positive signs testifying to Israel's peaceful intentions. These "concessions for peace" by Israel further increases Palestinians' appetite for launching armed attacks against Israel. Today, many Palestinians are convinced that they can achieve more through stabbings, vehicular rammings and shooting attacks than sitting with Israel at the negotiating table.
That phenomenon has also been evident in the repeatedly failed decades-long peace negotiations.

Regular Legal Insurrection readers will recognize the name Kurt Eichenwald. A senior writer at Newsweek [which apparently still exists], Eichenwald is a frequent guest on Joy Reid's MSNBC show, where he can be counted on to spout virulently anti-Republican/Trump views. We've chronicled, as here and here, his predilection to burst into disdainful laughter in the face of conservative interlocutors. On MSNBC, Eichenwald's odd nature had been sheltered in a comfortable cocoon. But on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show of Thursday evening, Eichenwald's deep weirdness was exposed. The meltdown came when Carlson pressed Eichenwald to answer a simple question: is it true, as Eichenwald had tweeted, that Donald Trump had been confined to a mental institution in 1990? Rather than answer the question, Eichenwald went off on a variety of tangents, including the stunt of hauling out a big binder he had created of Carlson's supposed "falsehoods."

Bernie Sanders has thrown his support behind Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison in the contest to lead the DNC. This should surprise no one because Sanders represents the radical far-left wing of the Democratic Party and that's where Ellison would steer the party as chairman. The Washington Times reports:
Bernie Sanders vows Keith Ellison will usher in ‘real change’ at DNC Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont went to bat Wednesday for Rep. Keith Ellison’s bid to become the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee, saying the status quo is not working and that the Minnesota Democrat has the gumption to move the party in a different direction.

Anonymous sources and leaks have fueled an unhinged quest to flip the Electoral College against Trump. The narrative has been, depending on which rant you are reading at the moment, that Russia "hacked the election," was unfair because it didn't also release RNC emails, Trump is a really bad hombre who must be stopped at all costs, etc. But tonight the anonymous narrative took a new turn. NBC News reports that Obama administration thought Clinton would win, didn't want to risk potential cyber war with Russia:

Thursday, a Trump Advisor confirmed CNBC business analyst Larry Kudlow has been chosen to lead the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Kudlow served as an advisor to Trump's campaign. Reports suggest the announcement will be official sometime in the next two days. The Detroit News reports:
Conservative economist Stephen Moore, who advised Trump’s presidential campaign on economic policy, disclosed Kudlow’s appointment to the influential post during a lunchtime speech to the Lansing Regional Chamber of Commerce’s economic club.

The Senate Finance Committee has discovered that 27 IRS employees in fiscal 2015 spent over $1.4 million on travel expenses to use "high-end car services and luxury apartment and hotel stays." One member of the committee said the report hows that the agency has not done anything to reduce waste. Federal employees must spend like a "prudent person" while traveling. These 27 employees traveled only 125 business days and the bills averaged $52,000 a year:
The committee found more than half of the long-term travel time was spent in the Washington D.C., area. It found cases of five employees living in hotels, primarily in the capital, for months at a time without looking for lower-cost housing or having their per diem rates reduced as outlined in federal guidelines.

So the Michigan vote recount revealed corruption and fraud..just not what Jill Stein and Hillary Clinton hoped for. Instead, the recount showed that too many people voted in the Detroit precincts, areas that Hillary won by a large majority. The Detroit News reported:
Voting machines in more than one-third of all Detroit precincts registered more votes than they should have during last month’s presidential election, according to Wayne County records prepared at the request of The Detroit News. Detailed reports from the office of Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett show optical scanners at 248 of the city’s 662 precincts, or 37 percent, tabulated more ballots than the number of voters tallied by workers in the poll books. Voting irregularities in Detroit have spurred plans for an audit by Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson’s office, Elections Director Chris Thomas said Monday.

A Muslim woman who attends Baruch College recently claimed that three drunken men attacked her on the subway and pulled at her headscarf while yelling "Trump." Now she has been arrested after admitting she made the whole thing up. The New York Daily News reports:
Muslim college student who claimed Trump supporters attacked her on the subway under arrest for making story up She made it all up — and now she’s under arrest. The Muslim college student who claimed she was harassed on the subway by three men who shouted “Donald Trump,” called her a terrorist and tried to rip her hijab off her head has admitted to detectives that she concocted the entire story, the Daily News has learned.