Image 01 Image 03

December 2016

Adam Saleh is a YouTube personality with over a million followers. Today, he claimed he was removed from a Delta Airlines flight for speaking Arabic. Saleh has a history of creating hoaxes, many of them in order to portray Muslims as victims of discrimination. The facts are still coming in, but it's appearing that this at best was a deliberate over-reaction by Saleh for the camera, or at worst an outright hoax he created from the start as he has done before. Either way, Saleh achieved another round of viral video fame, and his video on Twitter has been shared several hundred thousand times.

Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison was fast out of the gate for Chair of the Democratic National Committee, amassing quick endorsements from Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and the AFL-CIO. But Ellison was barely at the first turn when he stumbled badly in what Ellison and his supporters called a "smear campaign" against him. Ellison’s past decade-long support for Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, his suggestion of dual loyalty from American Jews when speaking at a fundraiser for Muslim leaders, and his cozy relationship with some of the worst pro-BDS, anti-Israel groups, has disrupted what seemed like a clear trajectory to DNC Chair. And then Obama-Biden sent signals they were encouraging Labor Secretary Tom Perez to seek the position. I suggested at the time that Keith Ellison DNC bid circling Farrakhan drain as Perez set to announce.

I'm sick of writing this kind of "well, actually" post. They're required far too often, but this is the world in which we live. Media narrative wish casts one version of a story while the facts say another. Such is the case (again) in the arson and vandalization of a black church in Mississippi. An arrest has been made, reports the AP:

Turns out there's a particular group of gals more willing to block or "unfriend" people on social media due to their political beliefs -- Democrats. A survey conducted by PRRI found that only 13% of respondents fessed up to blocking, unfriending, or unfollowing "someone on social media because of what they posted about politics." Given how nasty this two-year-long election season has been, 13% seems low. Both Democrats and those identifying as moderates were more likely to eliminate someone from their political circles than Republicans.

Trump's election has certainly heated the imaginations of climate change alarmists. The Washington Post published an editorial that now places the blame for global warming on the Electoral College, as the elections of George W. Bush and Donald Trump through our constitutional process has made anthropogenic climate change nearly impossible to stop. Todd Cort, the co-director of the Yale Center for Business and the Environment, takes us on a fascinating theoretical journey that clearly passes Reason and Sanity Junction:
...In 2000, George W. Bush was elected U.S. president despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore. In 2008, the Bush administration released a document on his legacy claiming sweeping protections for the environment while in office. Yet there was little progress on climate change because the administration resisted it. Under the Bush administration, the U.S. exited the Kyoto agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions, declined to regulate carbon dioxide emissions for coal fired power plants under the U.S. Clean Air Act, and worked to limit the authority of regulatory agencies to prevent climate change impacts. In contrast, Al Gore went on to fame and a Nobel Peace Prize for his work to raise awareness of climate change.

The U.S. Treasury Department released more sanctions against Russians and Russian companies for Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula Crimea in March 2014. The Kremlin has lashed out against these new sanctions, saying the government may respond:
"We regret that Washington is continuing on this destructive path," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call. "We believe this damages bilateral relations ... Russia will take commensurate measures."

We recently reported on important developments in the immigration fraud trial of convicted supermarket bomber and murderer Rasmea Odeh. Specifically, the prosecutors obtained a Superseding Indictment which expanded the grounds upon which to convict Rasmea of the single charge of falsely obtaining naturalization. The prosecution signaled, in those new allegations, that it would seek a conviction not just because Rasmea falsely denied prior convictions and imprisonment (the prior grounds), but also that she lied on immigration forms about being associated with a terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. See these posts for background:

Just days after the election, two students from Babson College drove a pick-up truck through the campus of nearby Wellesley College flying a Donald Trump flag. Wellesley students made accusations against the young men ranging from spitting to yelling discriminatory slurs. The two were expelled from their fraternity and faced multiple charges, but now it's all over. The Boston Globe reports:
Pro-Trump Babson students cleared in Wellesley incident Babson College has cleared two students of any disciplinary violations stemming from their controversial drive through Wellesley College to celebrate Donald Trump’s victory the day after the presidential election, their lawyers said Monday.

“I am horrified, shocked and deeply saddened,” Chancellor Angela Merkel told the press after 12 people were killed and at least 49 people were injured in a terror attack on a Berlin Christmas market. Police are still looking for the perpetrators after reportedly releasing a previous suspect. Tunisian identity papers were recovered from the truck used in the attack. ISIS has taken responsibility for the Monday night's attack adding to a long trail of death and carnage left behind by the Islamic terror in recent months. Following the incident, a team of 250 police officers searched a refugee housing at the old Berlin-Tempelhof airport. Details of the investigation are sketchy, but a nationwide manhunt is still underway.

"There, I said it. Mark it Down. Write it." That was Joe Scarborough on today's Morning Joe predicting that Republicans will be "wiped out" in the 2018 elections if they govern as far right as the Trump cabinet selections suggest. Scarborough drew the analogy to the 1994, and more specifically to the 2010 midterm elections, when Dems suffered cataclysmic losses after an emboldened Obama admin governed from the left in its first two years. Scarborough misses an important point, in the view of this Insurrectionist. Dems didn't get punished in 2010 because of some abstract notion that they governed too far to the left. They lost because their liberal policies failed. The economy remained in the doldrums. And people could see that Obamacare was heading for failure.

A New York judge has unsealed the search warrant giving the FBI permission to search a laptop belonging to disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, one of Hillary Clinton's top aides. The FBI began an investigation into Weiner after it emerged he sexted with an underage girl. The investigation revealed a laptop that may have had new information for the FBI's investigation into Hillary's private email server, which Director James Comey closed in July.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn't hesitate to take to social media to get his point across, including when the press treats him unfairly. (Where have I heard that before?) But if you read the headlines about some comments he made at a press event, you'd think Netanyahu just admitted to "attacking", "lashing out" at, and "berating, badmouthing" journalists on social media. But that's not what he said. Those journalists misstated the question he was asked in their headlines. Leftist Haaretz used the "lashing out" words:

The families of the Orlando nightclub shooting victims filed a federal complaint against the web giants for allegedly providing "material support" to ISIS and helping terrorist Omar Mateen "radicalize", according to an exclusive report by Fox News. Why not sue Mateen's internet service provider? Or the manufacturer of the web-enabled devises he used to "radicalize" himself? This is akin to blaming the gun for the actions of the shooter.