LinkSwarm for August 5, 2016

August 5th, 2016

Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm! A lot of plane and weird news links this time around:

  • Aetna is losing $300 million a year on ObamaCare. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Air Force Declares F-35 ready for combat. (Hat tip: Borepatch, who is more than a little skeptical…)
  • Islamic State Sinai leader Abu Dua al-Ansari killed in Egyptian air strike.
  • Is there any greater bastion of 1%er elitism than New York Times wedding announcements?

    How is it actually acceptable for an ostensibly liberal newspaper to conclude that wealthy, well-educated people’s lives are more interesting and worth more attention than non-wealthy, less-educated people? Everyone laughs about the Weddings section, even the Times itself. But joking aside, isn’t it morally indefensible to treat people as newsworthy in accordance with their elite social status… a paper run by liberals, who would profess themselves averse to inequality, openly treats most of the population as insignificant.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • Cahnman’s Musings has a really solid review of Jane Jacobs’ classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities and how central planning screwed everything up.
  • Clint Eastwood on various liberal whining over Trump: “Just fucking get over it.”
  • Frau Merkel ist nicht sehr beliebt.
  • Austin’s toy trains are a monument to government waste. (Hat tip: Push Junction.)
  • What Pokémon Go Teaches Us About Capitalism.
  • #BlackLivesMatters is all in against Israel. So what do George Soros and Tom Steyer have against Israel? (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “A point of view should be based on its own merit, not dismissed by a lazy appeal to privilege.”
  • Funny or die mostly does the latter. (Funny or Die still has 95 staffers? Really? It takes that many people to produce mediocre comedy?)
  • Things you never knew about the World’s Strongest Man competition.
  • An Exciting History of Drywall.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Who would have won the battle between a Bismarck-class battleship and an Iowa class battleship? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Butthurt level: Epic.
  • Airplane trick.
  • Feel good dog story of the day.
  • Behold the legendary crime spree of Dickface Johnson.
  • “Oh no! Not the bees!
  • Clinton Corruption/Election Update for August 4, 2016

    August 4th, 2016

    Hillary Clinton corruption! The 2016 Presidential race! Two not-so-great tastes that taste absolutely rancid together!

    Let’s tuck in, shall we?

  • How the DNC used its illegal favoring of Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders to break campaign finance laws:

    A joint fundraising committee called the Hillary Victory Fund, ostensibly designed to funnel money from rich donors to local party committees, had in fact been used as a cut-out to funnel money back to the national party and the Clinton campaign.

    As an example, take couples who paid or raised $353,400 to sit at a table with George Clooney, a sum that Clooney himself called an “obscene amount of money.” The figure represented the maximum allowable donation given the structure of the Hillary Victory Fund, a joint venture between the Clinton campaign, the DNC and 32 state committees.

    Donors can give a maximum of $5,400 per election cycle to Hillary’s campaign, $33,400 per year to the DNC, and $10,000 per year to each of the 32 state committees in the fund.

    If you assumed that the Clooney guests had already given their maximum $5,400 to the Clinton campaign, that left just over $353,000 for the DNC and the committees.

    But Vogel and Arnsdorf found that less than 1 percent of the $61 million raised by the Hillary Victory Fund went to the state committees.

    Actually it’s better to say that only 1 percent of the money “remained” with the committees. In talking to state sources, the Politico reporters found that large sums of money would sometimes appear briefly in state committee coffers, and disappear just as quickly, and then just as quickly be deposited into DNC accounts.

    The money sometimes came and went before state officials even knew it was there. Politico noted that the Victory Fund treasurer, Beth Jones, is also the COO of the Clinton campaign.

  • “Hillary Clinton’s relationship to the truth is akin to a mass murderer’s relationship with his victims. She is a Charles Manson of falsehood.”
  • The complete Huma Abedin report. Among her State Department duties: Determining if the speeches Bill Clinton gave for big while Hillary was Secretary of State were “appropriate” at the same time she was also working for the Clinton Foundation. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • How Hillary eased the way for Russian state tech company Skolkvovo to receive tech and money transfers from U.S. tech giants like Intel and Cisco. “Many of the key figures in the Skolkovo process—on both the Russian and U.S. sides—had major financial ties to the Clintons. During the Russian reset, these figures and entities provided the Clintons with tens of millions of dollars, including contributions to the Clinton Foundation, paid for speeches by Bill Clinton, or investments in small start-up companies with deep Clinton ties.”
  • “At least a handful of the State Department’s global health efforts relied on drug companies that were also major Clinton Foundation donors in arrangements that raise questions about the distance Clinton kept from her family’s philanthropy.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Hillary Clinton still hasn’t given a straight answer on her emails. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Walid Shoebat says that Khizr Khan has a long history of supporting Sharia law and the Muslim Brotherhood.
  • Which explains why after he gave his DNC speech attacking Trump, Khizr deleted the website of his business supporting Muslim immigration.
  • Charles Woods, father of dead Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods: “I know who should apologize, and that would be Hillary Clinton, for lying to the American families who lost their loved ones as well as to the American public,”
  • Examining Trump’s “racism” it seems that a lot of Trump’s “racist” incidents have no objective proof they ever happened.
  • “We had a few stories on the front page yesterday that were critical of Clinton. Whenever those stories were in the top slot, traffic bombed. Put up a story about Trump, the traffic goes back up. Clinton’s actual presence is beside the point. Everything is about what prism you view the phenomenon of Trump through.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Trump is Fishtown’s revenge. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Leftwing Democrats now favor Palestine over Israel. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Horrific Bloodbath Follows Campus Carry

    August 3rd, 2016

    Austin, Texas, August 1: Police at the University of Texas were stunned by horrific violence unlashed by the first day of the new concealed carry law taking effect.

    A grand total of 537 fatal shootings occurred across the UT campus as minor disputes turned into deadly gun-battles, drenching the campus in a veritable river of blood. Another 932 students were suffering from wounds ranging from minor to life-threatening.

    “I knew this would happen!” said University of Texas at Austin Anthropology professor Pauline Strong, surveying the carnage. “Putting guns in the hands of lawful 21-year old American citizens immediately turns them into crazed killers!”

    With the smaller summer class size, UT police estimated that over 1,000 fatalities would occur on August 24, the first day of the fall semester.

    “When will the madness end?” asked Strong. “Oh, the humanity!”

    (Filed Under: Things That Never Happened)

    Democrats Are Scared

    August 2nd, 2016

    Publicly Democrats are confident that their crooked queen can defeat Donald Trump because, well, he’s Donald Trump.

    Privately they’re terrified:

    Every assertion about Trump during the primary battle proved wrong: he’ll never run; he won’t file financial disclosures; he’ll be forced out by his own words; all those people at this rallies won’t actually turn out to vote; he has a ceiling; the party will coalesce around an alternative; the institutional wing of the party will never accede to his nomination. Perhaps most importantly, it was hard for many insiders to imagine that when voters were truly asked to fill in the bubble beside the name “Donald Trump” on a presidential ballot, they wouldn’t be jolted back to reality and vote for a real candidate.

    None of those things happened. The establishment folded; Trump’ ceiling just got higher, and he ended up collecting more primary votes than any Republican candidate in history, wiping out a generation of ambitious, aspiring GOP leaders with serious track records. To say the least, this record does not inspire confidence that the normal patterns will hold in a general election.

    Indeed, at a panel of Democratic pollsters last week, Hart Research president Geoff Garin warned that 2016 would be “a close competitive election. The country,” he added, “is largely frustrated with the status quo, and, as one NBC poll found, huge majorities wanted change even if they don’t know what that change is.”

    Moreover, as they say in ads for investment banks, past results are no guarantee of future performance. For instance, the prognosticators say that for Trump to win with the expected electorate, he’d need almost two-thirds of the white vote, and that target is all but out of reach. But why? All through the primaries, Ted Cruz’s campaign was arguing that their data-analytics tool would be able to finally find the “missing millions” that conservatives have always dreamt of and get them out in places like central Pennsylvania in November. What if Trump can draw them out with his blisteringly effective strategy of tweets, rallies and free TV?

    This does not require a revolution. What it requires is enough white voters to get excited in the right states. Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher, president of Brilliant Corners Research & Strategies, framed the election outlook for Clinton in blunt terms: “If turnout is 70 percent white, I like her chances,” he said. “If it’s 74 percent … I’m very worried.”

    2016 is not a good year to have to rely on common wisdom…

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

    Venezuela Re-institutes Slavery

    August 1st, 2016

    On June 2, 1816, Simon Bolivar landed in Venezuela and declared all slaves in Spanish America free. In 2016, the “Bolivarian Revolution” in Venezuela reinstitued slave labor on farms:

    Venezuelan ministry last week announced Resolution No. 9855, which calls for the establishment of a “transitory labor regime” in order to relaunch the agricultural and food sector. The decree says that the government must do what is “necessary to achieve strategic levels of self-sufficiency,” and states that workers can be forcefully moved from their jobs to work in farm fields or elsewhere in the agricultural sector for periods of 60 days.

    (Hat tip: Instaundit.)

    I’m sure if you went into Houston’s Fifth Ward or Atlanta’s south side and announced “Hey, due to a food emergency, we’re going to need to put you back on the plantations. But it’s only for 60 days!” I’m sure they’d be totally understanding…

    This follows months of food riots. Animals are starving to death in Venezuela’s zoos because they can’t afford to feed them. “Danta from the Caricuao zoo died from hunger.” There you go, liberals: An animal with a name! Now we just wait for all that spontaneous outrage…

    Danta Tapir

    So what is country whose people are literally starving due to the Magic Power of Socialism™ to do? Why, institute censorship, of course! And why reform your failing socialist econmy when you can threaten to arrest international executives because their local factories can’t produce goods due to a lack of raw materials?

    Leftist leaders around the world love proclaiming “Socialism or Death!” But as Venezuela proves yet again, socialism is death…

    Texas Attorney General Sues Austin for Breaking the Law

    July 31st, 2016

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is so unreasonable as to expect that the City of Austin actually obey the law, and is now suing them for failing to do so:

    Section 411.209 prohibits state agencies and political subdivisions from wrongfully excluding handgun license holders from property owned or leased by the government. The law prohibits the City from providing not ice by a communication described in Texas Penal Code § 30.06, or by any sign expressly referring to that law or to a concealed handgun license, that a license holder carrying a handgun is prohibited from entering or remaining on a premises or other place owned or leased by the governmental entity unless the license holder is prohibited from carrying a handgun on the premises or other place by Texas Penal Code §§ 46.03 or 46.035. Id. § 411.209(a).

    Snip.

    On or about April 4, 2016, the Attorney General received a citizen complaint that the City was in violation of §411.209 based on: (a) the display of a permanent etched glass “no guns” sign; and (b) oral warnings prohibiting the carrying of handguns on the premises of Austin City Hall, a building that does not fall within any exception under Texas Penal Code §§ 46.03, .035.

    (Wonky spacing via PDF.)

    And this is already after they had taken down one (illegal) sign due to an earlier citizen complaint.

    Paxton is asking for $1,500 a day in fines, plus fees.

    Austin’s city government evidently feels that they have no need to comply with state law, Because Liberalism. I expect that they’re about to find that the Texas judicial system feels otherwise.

    (Hat tip: Stuff From Hsoi.)

    LinkSwarm for July 29, 2016

    July 29th, 2016

    Finally, the Democrats have a presidential candidate that combines the honesty of Bill Clinton, the electrifying personality of Walter Mondale, the down-to-earth demeanor of Adlai Stevenson, the even temper of Lyndon Johnson, and the humility of Barack Obama.

    In short: The candidate they deserve.

    A LinkSwarm:

  • Angela Merkel decides that she isn’t going to let a little thing like repeated terrorist attacks and mass rape dissuade her from welcoming lots more Muslims into Germany. It’s like she’s a sleeper agent designed to destroy the CDU from within…
  • DNC unable to fill seats, hires actors to fill them up.
  • Did Palestinian flags outnumber American flags at the DNC? I’m sure they did Monday, when the DNC realized they had no American flags…
  • John Stossel explains how Clinton Cash works. (Disclaimer: You just can’t read that site without AdBlock.)
  • Clinton Foundation investigation referred to IRS. I wouldn’t get my hopes up that anything comes of it.
  • It seems some disgruntled DNC delegates altered their HILLARY signs to read LIAR.
  • Seen on Facebook:

  • You’re not allowed to tweet about the Olympics without approval. So much for my live tweeting the 100 Meter Zika Infection…
  • Speaking of futile bans, China bans Internet news reporting. That’s not in any way the last-gasp desperation move of a country whose smoke-and-mirrors economy is imploding…
  • Trump gets big post-convention bounce.
  • UK Union of Students works to make the organization Judenfrei. Funny how “antizionism” starts to look a whole lot like garden-variety antisemitism…
  • Examining top world fighter planes, including the F-22, China’s Chengdu J-20, Russia’s T-50/PAK FA, the Eurofighter and the Sino-Pakistani JF-17. (Hat tip: Bad Blue.)
  • “Nearly 15 Years After 9/11, Retired Colonel Meets the Man Whose Life He Helped Save.” Man, there sure is a lot of pollen in the air today… (Hat tip: Ted Cruz’s Facebook page.)
  • NFL all-pro cornerback Richard Sherman reiterates that all lives matter. I find it hard to believe this is even remotely controversial… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Alden Ehrenreich as Han Solo? Could work pretty well. He was excellent in Hail, Caesar!.
  • Woman assaults man with burrito, then knife.”
  • Florida Man Charged With Picking Magic Mushrooms While Carrying An Alligator. Oh Florida Man, don’t ever change…
  • Wyoming Man Found with 30 Eyeballs in His Anal Cavity. Authorities are keeping an eye on him…
  • Why Poor People Support Trump

    July 28th, 2016

    If you’re looking to figure out the Donald Trump phenomena, you could do a lot worse than reading this interview with J.D. Vance, the author of the book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. It’s a look at rural poverty and desperation most people never witness firsthand.

    And Trump speaks to them in a big way:

    RD: A friend who moved to West Virginia a couple of years ago tells me that she’s never seen poverty and hopelessness like what’s common there. And she says you can drive through the poorest parts of the state, and see nothing but TRUMP signs. Reading “Hillbilly Elegy” tells me why. Explain it to people who haven’t yet read your book.

    J.D. VANCE: The simple answer is that these people–my people–are really struggling, and there hasn’t been a single political candidate who speaks to those struggles in a long time. Donald Trump at least tries.

    What many don’t understand is how truly desperate these places are, and we’re not talking about small enclaves or a few towns–we’re talking about multiple states where a significant chunk of the white working class struggles to get by. Heroin addiction is rampant. In my medium-sized Ohio county last year, deaths from drug addiction outnumbered deaths from natural causes. The average kid will live in multiple homes over the course of her life, experience a constant cycle of growing close to a “stepdad” only to see him walk out on the family, know multiple drug users personally, maybe live in a foster home for a bit (or at least in the home of an unofficial foster like an aunt or grandparent), watch friends and family get arrested, and on and on. And on top of that is the economic struggle, from the factories shuttering their doors to the Main Streets with nothing but cash-for-gold stores and pawn shops.

    The two political parties have offered essentially nothing to these people for a few decades. From the Left, they get some smug condescension, an exasperation that the white working class votes against their economic interests because of social issues, a la Thomas Frank (more on that below). Maybe they get a few handouts, but many don’t want handouts to begin with.

    From the Right, they’ve gotten the basic Republican policy platform of tax cuts, free trade, deregulation, and paeans to the noble businessman and economic growth. Whatever the merits of better tax policy and growth (and I believe there are many), the simple fact is that these policies have done little to address a very real social crisis. More importantly, these policies are culturally tone deaf: nobody from southern Ohio wants to hear about the nobility of the factory owner who just fired their brother.

    Trump’s candidacy is music to their ears. He criticizes the factories shipping jobs overseas. His apocalyptic tone matches their lived experiences on the ground. He seems to love to annoy the elites, which is something a lot of people wish they could do but can’t because they lack a platform.

    The last point I’ll make about Trump is this: these people, his voters, are proud. A big chunk of the white working class has deep roots in Appalachia, and the Scots-Irish honor culture is alive and well. We were taught to raise our fists to anyone who insulted our mother. I probably got in a half dozen fights when I was six years old. Unsurprisingly, southern, rural whites enlist in the military at a disproportionate rate. Can you imagine the humiliation these people feel at the successive failures of Bush/Obama foreign policy? My military service is the thing I’m most proud of, but when I think of everything happening in the Middle East, I can’t help but tell myself: I wish we would have achieved some sort of lasting victory. No one touched that subject before Trump, especially not in the Republican Party.

    Also this:

    And what do you have to say to liberals?

    Well, it’s almost the flip side: stop pretending that every problem is a structural problem, something imposed on the poor from the outside. I see a significant failure on the Left to understand how these problems develop. They see rising divorce rates as the natural consequence of economic stress. Undoubtedly, that’s partially true. Some of these family problems run far deeper. They see school problems as the consequence of too little money (despite the fact that the per pupil spend in many districts is quite high), and ignore that, as a teacher from my hometown once told me, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids, but they ignore that many of them are raised by wolves.” Again, they’re not all wrong: certainly some schools are unfairly funded. But there’s this weird refusal to deal with the poor as moral agents in their own right. In some cases, the best that public policy can do is help people make better choices, or expose them to better influences through better family policy (like my Mamaw).

    There was a huge study that came out a couple of years ago, led by the Harvard economist Raj Chetty. He found that two of the biggest predictors of low upward mobility were 1) living in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty and 2) growing up in a neighborhood with a lot of single mothers. I recall that some of the news articles about the study didn’t even mention the single mother conclusion. That’s a massive oversight! Liberals have to get more comfortable with dealing with the poor as they actually are.

    Read the whole thing.

    (Hat tip: Borepatch.)

    Clinton Corruption/DNC/Election Update

    July 27th, 2016

    Yeah, I’m in a rush, so it’s going to be one big list tar-ball. (Or if you prefer, tarball. Call it clintoncorruption.tar.gz.)

  • Nate Silver at 538 now gives Donald Trump a 55% chance of winning the presidency over Hillary Clinton. This is a big, big reversal, given he had Clinton up by over 87% chance of winning at one point.
  • The Wikileaks drop of DNC emails is starting to yield some very interesting information, especially about just how far in the tank the MSM was for Hillary Clinton and against Bernie Sanders.
  • “The e-mails confirm the party establishment was in the tank for Clinton long before the primaries were decided.” To which I can only reply: Duh. Also this: “In one oddball e-mail chain, a DNC deputy communications director plotted to create a fake Craigslist ad that portrayed Donald Trump as sex crazed.”
  • Here are some quick and dirty highlights. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Washington Post and DNC hold joint fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. Despite that being, you know, illegal.
  • Did CBS News actually change poll wording to be more favorable to Hillary and less favorable to Sanders?
  • Indeed, the emails reveal a pattern of the DNC not hesitating to bully news organizations for daring to mention Sanders favorably. “DNC communications director Luis Miranda, expressing his displeasure with “Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough in a note to DNC press secretary Mark Paustenbach, wrote: “(Expletive) Joe claiming the system is rigged, party against (Sanders), we need to complain to their producer.”
  • DNC confiscates the signs of Bernie Sanders supporters.
  • “Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to get this close to becoming president of the United States.”
  • Is the Clinton Foundation next up on the FBI investigation list. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Man admits to helping funnel illegal foreign contributions to Obama campaign.
  • Sanders supporters file suit over DNC and DNC law firm Perkins Coie LLP illegally favoring the Clinton campaign before Sanders dropped out. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Now it’s time for Hillary’s Thought Police to begin the hard work of grinding those kids down.”

    The idea is to turn those kids into useful political beings by using their own slogans and reference points against them. First, though, they must be softened up by shaming. And the pro-Hillary media (and most of the media is decidedly pro-Hillary) has been relentless at shaming them to keep them in line since that DNC leaks story broke.

    Shaming has been going on relentlessly on social media since these kids first touched a keyboard. They know how it works, they understand its conventions, if not its real purpose, which is to herd stubborn political ideas.

    They’ve been described by some pundits as spoiled children, as whiny babies too witless to understand simple arithmetic, even though the party arithmetic was rigged from the onset. The DNC supplied Superdelegates for Hillary, all but guaranteeing her victory, something first explained months ago by columnist Paul Jacob.

    And now many in my business who consider themselves progressives — even as they cleave to the Establishment Queen — are telling those Sanders kids two things:

    Shut up and behave.

    The goal is to take these scraggly revolutionaries, break them down and deliver zealots in November.

    And so now what you’ll see over the next few days from Philadelphia is the Democratic National Convention transformed into Operation Trust Hillary.

    Also this:

    Those leaked emails tell a story of supreme cynicism: The email asking that Sanders’ religious status be attacked in southern states; the emails outlining collusion between top officials and the Hillary camp. There are more to come.

    The most fantastic part of this moving story is that Hillary decided to blame it all on a singular villain: Russian strong man Vladimir Putin. Team Hillary said Putin was doing it to help Trump.

    (Full disclosure: Putin rode over and insisted on writing my column but my editor just said no.)

    Hackers targeted the DNC emails. And if hackers got Hillary’s vanished emails from her time as secretary of state, let’s hope they have the decency to release them before the presidential election.

    I must admit, there may be a Putin connection with the DNC leaks.

    But here’s the thing:

    Putin didn’t write the emails from the Democratic National Committee. Putin didn’t make fun of a black woman’s name; Putin didn’t scold American journalists and expect them to jump and help shape the news or offer government jobs to donors.

    The DNC officials did all that.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Disruption at the Texas Democratic delegation breakfast.
  • Yes, Hillary does want to ban guns.
  • Lifelong Democrat explains why he’s voting for Trump:

    Clinton Global (and its related entities) is a department store of political, multinational, corruption. The charity is under investigation, it was the middle man in weapons deals to foreign nations, it brokered a treasonous uranium deal to Russia, it stole money from Haiti and small contributors after the earthquake, it was deeply involved in a larcenous private college, Laureate University, it has allied with some of the worst dictators in the world and it may unravel slowly as the greatest charity fraud in history.

  • Hillary’s VP pick Tim Kaine is all over helping big banks dodge regulations.
  • So Paul Simon sang at the DNC. I love Simon’s work, but he’s not exactly the performer I’d pick to connect with today’s voters. However, Ann Althouse’s Meade came up with this inspired rewriting of Bernie’s theme music “America”:

    Let’s not be suckers, we’ll marry extortions together
    I’ve got some emails right here in my bag”
    So you’ll pay all of my campaign debts and I’ll buy your Wall Street lies
    And we’ll walk off and sell out America

  • DNC Day One: Soviet flags and Palestinian flags, but no American flags. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • A wall around the conevntion center wasn’t enough: Democrats actually built a makeshift wall around their own stage.
  • Clinton Cash dominates Facebook trends.
  • What is It With the Clintons Hiring Employees With Ties to the Muslim Brotherhood?

    July 26th, 2016

    I can certainly understand the Clinton clan’s self-centered greed and avarice. What I struggle to understand is why they keep repeatedly hiring employees with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

    Take, for example, former Clinton Foundation employee Gehad El-Haddad, who was just sentenced to life in prison in Egypt for his work as the mouthpiece for Mohamed Morsi’s short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government.

    Then there are the well documented familial links between perpetual #1 Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and the Muslim Brotherhood:

    Sheikh Qaradawi is a promoter of jihadist terror. His fatwas endorse terrorist attacks against American personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombing — by both men and women — against Israel. He is a leading supporter of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch. He also runs an umbrella organization called the Union for Good (sometimes referred to as the “Union of Good”), which is formally designated a terrorist organization under American law. The Union for Good was behind the “Peace Flotilla” that attempted to break our ally Israel’s blockade of the terrorist organization Hamas (the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch) in 2010.

    That’s rather interesting — at least to me, though apparently not to Speaker Boehner — because Huma Abedin’s mother, Saleha, who is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s female division (the “Muslim Sisterhood”), is a major figure in not one but two Union for Good components. The first is the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief (IICDR). It is banned in Israel for supporting Hamas under the auspices of the Union for Good. Then there’s the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child (IICWC) — an organization that Dr. Saleha Abedin has long headed. Dr. Abedin’s IICWC describes itself as part of the IICDR. And wouldn’t you know it, the IICWC charter was written by none other than . . . Sheikh Qaradawi, in conjunction with several self-proclaimed members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

    The recently declassified 28 pages of the 9/11 report has more to say about it. “The ‘Abedin family business’ is an academic group called the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs that is based in the London offices of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth and its parent organization, the Muslim World League.”

    About the World Arab Muslim Youth Association:

    According to the FBI. Abdullah Bin Ladin [Osama bin Laden’s half-brother] has a number of connections to terrorist organizations. He is the President and Director of the World Arab Muslim Youth Association (WAMY) and the Institute of Islamic and Arabic Science in America. Both organizations are local branches of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

    According to the FBI, there is reason to believe that WAMY is “closely associated with the funding and financing of international terrorist activities and in the past has provided logistical support to individuals wishing to to fight in the Afghan War.” In 1998, the CIA published a paper characterizing WAMY as a NGO that provides funding. logistical support and training with possible connections to the Arab Afghans network, Hamas, Algerian extremists and Philippine militants.

    Who else calls attention to the World Arab Muslim Youth Association’s ties to terrorism? Would you believe Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?

    Saudi Arabia has enacted important reforms to criminalize terrorist financing and restrict the overseas flow of funds from Saudi-based charities. However, these restrictions fail to include multilateral organizations such as the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), Muslim World League (MWL) and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY.) Intelligence suggests that these groups continue to send money overseas and, at times, fund extremism overseas.

    Despite all this, Saudi pressure has helped keep the International Islamic Relief Organization and World Arab Muslim Youth Association off the official list of groups with terrorist ties.

    And as long as we’re discussing Hillary’s ties to terrorism, we should probably mention “numerous ties between Hillary Clinton and members of the shadowy network surrounding Fethullah Gulen, the controversial Muslim cleric who has been called ‘the Turkish Khomeini,’ and whom the Erdogan regime is accusing of instigating the coup that nearly toppled it.” (Just because I don’t think Gulen had any significant role in the coup doesn’t mean he’s not an Islamist scumbag.)

    According to the Caller, the Gulen camp has been one of Hillary’s numerous sources of cash, in exchange for which she gave access to the President: “a Gulen follower named Gokhan Ozkok asked Clinton deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin for help in connecting one of his allies to President Obama….Ozkok served as national finance co-chair of the pro-Clinton Ready PAC. He gave $10,000 to the committee in 2014 and $2,700 to Clinton’s campaign last year. He is also listed on the Turkish Cultural Center’s website as a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, one of the non-profit arms of the Clinton Foundation. He’s given between $25,000 and $50,000 to the Clinton charity.”

    Ah, money for access. Now the Clinton ties to the Muslim Brotherhood are starting to make more sense. Maybe they helped the Clinton Foundation bring in money from the likes of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Sheikh Mohammed H. Al-Amoudi, Nasser Al-Rashid, etc. Indeed, counting speaking fees and money for “walking away” from an investment partnership with Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum of Dubai, the Clintons have collectively pocketed $100 million from Persian Gulf rulers.

    There’s are other angles to the story I haven’t had time to track down yet. Like why did Hillary Clinton’s new VP pick Tim Kaine appoint the President of the Muslim Brotherhood-tied Muslim American Society, Esam Omeish, to Virginia’s state’s Immigration Commission?

    But I’ll have to leave those for another time.