Kyle Rittenhouse found innocent, vaccine mandates are halted, Kamala is sinking, and the media continues stinking. Plus two scoops of Joe Rogan. It’s the Friday #LinkSwarm!
If you got your facts about the Rittenhouse case from the mainstream media, then just about everything you know is a lie.
Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.
It turns out that account was mostly wrong.
Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting — Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine and Jesse Singal stand out for being ahead of the pack (and pilloried, like clockwork, for not going along with the herd) — you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night.
This wasn’t a disinformation campaign waged by Reddit trolls or anonymous Twitter accounts. It was one pushed by the mainstream media and sitting members of Congress for the sake of an expedient political narrative—a narrative that asked people to believe, among other unrealities, that blocks of burning buildings somehow constituted peaceful protests.
CNN and Rep. Ayanna Pressley examples snipped.
But just as in the cases of Covington Catholic’s Nick Sandmann or Jussie Smollet or the “Russia-collusion” narrative, almost none of the details holding up that politically convenient position (boys in MAGA hats are bigoted; racism is as much a blight as it has always been; Trump conspired with Putin) were true.
Take each in turn:
First, the idea that Kyle Rittenhouse was a white supremacist.
There was zero evidence that Rittenhouse was connected to white supremacist groups at the time of the shooting. He was a Trump supporter, yes, though he wasn’t old enough to vote. He was an admirer of police and firefighters, also true. He was a lifeguard. He’d been part of a “police explorer” program, and was also a firefighter/EMT cadet with the fire department in Antioch, Illinois, where he lived with his mom and two sisters.
That Rittenhouse had no connection to Kenosha.
In addition to having a job in Kenosha, Rittenhouse testified that much of his family lived there: his father, his grandma, his aunt and uncle, and his cousins. He also testified that on the morning of the shootings, he went downtown with his sister and friends to see the damage done by rioting the night before, and spent about two hours cleaning graffiti off of the local high school.
That Rittenhouse drove across state lines with a gun that night to oppose the protests.
This was a line that we heard constantly—never mind that Antioch, Illinois, is about 20 miles from Kenosha, Wisconsin. As the trial has shown, Kyle Rittenhouse did not travel to Kenosha to oppose protesters. He testified under oath that he had traveled to Kenosha for his job the night before the shootings, and was staying at a friend’s house.
So what about the gun?
Rittenhouse didn’t bring the gun to Kenosha. The gun was purchased for Rittenhouse months earlier by a friend and stored in Kenosha at the home of that friend’s stepfather, as then-17-year-old Rittenhouse was too young to purchase it.
But it was illegal for him to even have the gun given that he wasn’t yet 18 years old, right?
That is not true. Under Wisconsin law, 17-year-olds are prohibited from carrying rifles only if they are short-barreled. The weapon Rittenhouse was carrying was not short-barreled. Which is why, during closing arguments, the court threw out the charge.
He was out there looking for a fight, and he got one: He killed two people and severely wounded a third.
Unless there’s evidence we haven’t seen, there’s no clear indication that Rittenhouse sought to kill anyone. What we know is that he showed up with a first aid kit and an AR-15-style rifle. Video evidence, and Rittenhouse’s own testimony, indicates that he offered medical assistance to protestors and ran with a fire extinguisher to try to put out fires—and that later, after being pursued, he killed two people, Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and severely wounded a third. Both video evidence and the only living person that Rittenhouse shot that night, Gaige Grosskreutz, undermined the idea that Rittenhouse was simply an aggressor looking for a fight. During cross examination Grosskreutz acknowledged that Rittenhouse shot him only after Grosskreutz had pointed his own gun at Rittenhouse. Here’s how it went down:
Defense attorney: When you were standing three to five feet from him with your arms up in the air, he never fired, right?
Grosskreutz: Correct.
Defense attorney: It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him, advanced on him with your gun—now your hand’s down pointed at him—that he fired, right?
The Court ordered that “Enforcement of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s ‘COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing; Emergency Temporary Standard’ remain[] stayed pending adequate judicial review of the petitioners’ underlying motions for a permanent injunction.” It further ordered that “OSHA take no steps to implement or enforce the Mandate until further court order.”
Behind this language lies a forceful critique of the Biden mandate. The opinion is here.
One of the factors a court considers in deciding whether to issue a stay is the likelihood that the party seeking it will prevail on the merits. The petitioner must make a strong showing of likelihood of success.
The Fifth Circuit found that the petitioners in this case made that showing. This finding means that the Biden administration almost surely will lose in the Fifth Circuit when the court makes its definitive ruling on the merits.
The court cited a “multitude of reasons” why those challenging the mandate will likely succeed on the merits. The first one, which it described as “obvious,” is this:
The Occupational Safety and Health Act, which created OSHA, was enacted by Congress to assure Americans “safe and healthful working conditions and to preserve our human resources.” See 29 U.S.C. § 651 (statement of findings and declaration of purpose and policy). It was not—and likely could not be, under the Commerce Clause and nondelegation doctrine—intended to authorize a workplace safety administration in the deep recesses of the federal bureaucracy to make sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the profoundest of ways.
Furthermore, the “sweeping pronouncements” implicit in OSHA’s order are badly flawed. For example, the court noted that the mandate is both over-inclusive and under-inclusive. On one hand, it covers employees in nearly every industry regardless of their risk of exposure (there is “little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night
shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse”) and “doesn’t exempt those with natural immunity.” On the other hand, it arbitrarily excludes employers with fewer than 100 workers.
Fatally to the mandate, the court found that its promulgation “grossly exceeds OSHA’s authority.” It noted that OSHA’s statutory authority to establish emergency temporary standards “is an ‘extraordinary power’ that is to be ‘delicately exercised’ in only certain ‘limited situations.’”
And, miracle of miracles, OSHA announced that they will actually heed the court’s opinion and suspend vaccine mandate enforcement. A federal agency heeding a rational federal court decision shouldn’t be a surprise, yet here we are.
How unpopular is Kamala Harris? Democratic Media Complex house organ CNN published a scathing hit piece on her.
Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.
The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers — who spoke extensively to CNN — reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president’s circle fume that she’s not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically.
Wait, the warm bucket of spit feels “constrained”? Do tell…
And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden’s team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.
Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff — deciding there simply isn’t time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.
The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers — who spoke extensively to CNN — reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president’s circle fume that she’s not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically. And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden’s team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.
Social justice “first woman of color” blather snipped. But lets skip down to where Team Harris gets all snippy over a potential rival:
Last month, White House aides leapt to the defense of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who was being hammered with outrage by Fox News host Tucker Carlson and like-minded online pundits for taking paternity leave after the adoption of his twins in September. Harris loyalists tell CNN they see in that yet another example of an unfair standard at play, wondering why she didn’t get similar cover any of the times she’s been attacked by the right.
“It’s hard to miss the specific energy that the White House brings to defend a White man, knowing that Kamala Harris has spent almost a year taking a lot of the hits that the West Wing didn’t want to take themselves,” said a former Harris aide, reflecting conversations last month among several former aides and current allies.
(Imagine there’s an animated hissing cat gif here.)
Anyway, it’s worth reading the whole thing to read how incompetent she and her staff seem at just about everything, and to tote up all the petty slights to Harris, who was only there to bring in black votes in (and didn’t do a great job of that), and now she’s completely disposable.
Despite ending her lackluster campaign for president with a mere 3 percent support among the Democratic electorate, Harris was nevertheless the most obvious pick within the narrow bucket to which Biden had been confined. (Never mind that the apex of her support during the primary campaign came when she savagely attacked Biden on the debate stage, essentially calling him a racist for opposing busing during his time in the Senate, and that she repeatedly said she believed women who had accused Biden of sexual misconduct.)
The simple fact is that Harris is not a good national politician. She is ineffective and unlikeable at best, and, at worst, so unpopular that she’s actively damaging to the administration, likely why Psaki has had to turn to absurdities in an effort to defend her. (Democrats have developed a nasty habit of responding to voters who don’t like them by accusing said voters of racism.)
In Harris’s case, these excuses are because the truth hurts. She has little to no sway with key votes in Congress. She has next to no relevant policy or diplomatic expertise. These facts shouldn’t come as a surprise, seeing that she holds her office not because of her popularity or any relevant skillset but primarily because of her identity.
Had she not been picked as Biden’s running mate, she would’ve remained in a far more advantageous position, keeping a comfortable position in the Senate that would be nearly impossible for her to lose. She was already a media darling, popular among progressives for her supposed ability to “own” conservative nominees during hearings. Rather than winding up in a position with little chance to showboat or collect media accolades, she might’ve remained right there, where her lack of popularity with the national electorate was essentially irrelevant.
In a backwards way, Harris finds herself holding a position in which she’s ill-equipped to succeed precisely because of identity politics, which motivated Biden to pick a running mate so ill-suited to the job.
How unpopular? 28% approval. Usual poll caveats apply. So her numbers might not even be that high!
That America’s voters disdain Harris as much as they obviously do gives me an extraordinary amount of hope for our future. In December of 2019, I celebrated Harris’s departure from the presidential primary with a “good riddance” that turned out to be woefully premature: “May Harris’s failed attempt,” I hoped, serve to “destroy her career and sully her reputation for all time.” Alas, the first part did not happen; on the contrary, Harris was springboarded up to within a heartbeat of the most potent office in the land. But the second part? Well, I got that in abundance. We are now ten months into this baleful presidency, and already Harris is the most unpopular vice president in history. And they say Christmas doesn’t come early!
Harris’s apologists like to insist that she is as unpopular as she is because she’s a non-white woman. But this explanation gets the cause of the disapproval backwards. Kamala Harris isn’t disliked because she’s a non-white woman; Kamala Harris was chosen as vice president because she’s a non-white woman, and she’s disliked because she has nothing to recommend her beyond those facts. In the highest of high dudgeon, her defenders will propose that this is Joe Biden’s fault, for not “using” Harris correctly in her role. But this too is unjust. In truth, there is no good way to “use” Kamala Harris, because Kamala Harris is a talentless mediocrity whose only political flair is for making things worse than they were before she arrived.
And her staff knows it. “Kamala Harris’s communications director Ashley Etienne is leaving the vice president’s office after reports staff are in-fighting and her boss is being sidelined.”
want to thank the Democrats for giving me, a trial lawyer living in Los Angeles, exactly what I need – a big, heaping tax cut. In their reconciliation bill, there are plenty of giveaways for lay-abouts, losers, and grifters, but also for us living by the beach getting hit with huge state taxes rendered un-deductible by that evil Donald Trump, notorious friend to the rich who he…shafted. Anyway, the Dems are going to wrong this right and fix this manifest justice, though – they are going to make essentially all the money I hand over to the socialist clique that runs the formerly Golden State (and it is a lot) deductible once again.
Cool. Well, for me and other lawyers and similar blue state swells.
People often ask me why I stay in California, to which I reply, “I don’t explain myself to people – buzz off.” But if I were to explain myself to people, I would point out that despite being awash with Californians, California has beautiful weather, my family is nearby, and here I get to be part of the feudal aristocracy sucking the life from working people to fuel my extravagant lifestyle.
See, California was designed for lawyers and similar high-status low-lifes, and the beachside communities where the petty royals dwell do not experience a fraction of the hellish nightmare you see on TV. Oh, what you see is real, just not for those in the Birkenstock nobility. You see videos of hordes of hobos leaving their junkie spoor on the sidewalks and that happens, just not to the people that Prince Gavin of Newsom cares about. I don’t think he cares about me personally mind you, but he cares a lot about my ZIP code.
You can drive ten minutes from my castle and be worried about someone stealing your hubcaps. Once you start heading east over the 405 (That’s I-405 to people who don’t live in LA) real life comes and bites you hard, and the farther east you go, the harder it bites. The roads are trash – gee, I sure expect the infrastructure bill will totally make them nice again – and the schools are cesspits of violence and commie indoctrination, but the peasants just need to accept their lot in life and not complain. Their bitching would ruin our wine tasting.
Of course, I might have more sympathy for these poor devils if they had not lobbied so hard for the role of “Serf #3” in California’s production of “Game of Bums.” They voted for this. They got this. It’s all theirs.
“It’s Not Just White People: Democrats Are Losing Normal Voters of All Races.” Results from a focus group of Virginia voters “who voted Democrat, Democrat, Republican in the last three elections.”
When asked which party had better policy proposals, the group members overwhelmingly said Democrats. But when asked which party had cultural values closer to theirs, they cited Republicans.
The biggest disconnect came on education. Barefoot found that school closures were likely a big part of their votes for Youngkin and that frustration at school leadership over those closures bled into the controversy, pushed by Republicans, around the injection of “critical race theory” into the public school setting, along with the question of what say parents should have in schools. One Latina woman talked about how remote school foisted so much work on parents, yet later Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee and former governor, would insist that parents should have no input in their children’s education. (That’s not exactly what he said, but that’s how it played.) As she put it: “They asked us to do all this work for months and then he says it’s none of our business now.”
The anger they felt at Democrats for the commonwealth’s Covid-19 school closure policy became further evidence of a cultural gap between these working people and Democratic elites, who broadly supported prolonged school closures while enjoying the opportunity to work remotely. Those with means decamped: Enrollment in Fairfax County schools dropped 5 percent, and fell by 3.9 percent and 3.4 percent in Arlington and Loudoun counties, respectively. Those who were left behind organized parent groups to pressure the schools to reopen. Though the groups tended to be nonpartisan or bipartisan at the start, Republican donors and conservative groups poured money and manpower into them, converting them into potent political weapons that blended anger at the closures with complaints about Democratic board members prioritizing trendy social justice issues — all of it aimed at the November elections.
“They keep saying ‘a strong return to school,’ but there’s no details,” said Saundra Davis on Fox News over the summer, co-founder of one large group, called the Open Fairfax Public Schools Coalition. “Their attention is on other things, like their pet projects and social justice issues, and the kids have been left to flounder and there’s still no plan for fall.”
“You’ll be surprised to know I’m a Democrat,” she said. “I’ve tried to warn them that there’s a bipartisan tidal wave coming their way. They don’t look us in the eye, they don’t write us back. If we can’t recall them one by one, there’s an election in November.”
Ignore the parts where the writer regurgitates Democratic Party talking points (“for the portion of the Republican base heavily predisposed to racial prejudice,” “Few people read the full 1619 Project put out by the New York Times in 2019, which is a rich tapestry of thoughtful essays and reporting about the role of slavery in the development of the United States.”) and pay attention to what the focus group members of all races are saying. “The Democratic problem with working-class voters goes far beyond white people.”
Evidently one American sport is willing to stand up to China: Women’s tennis.
The head of the Women’s Tennis Association Steve Simon has said he is willing to lose hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business in China if tennis player Peng Shuai’s safety is not fully accounted for and her allegations are not properly investigated.
“We’re definitely willing to pull our business and deal with all the complications that come with it,” Simon said in an interview Thursday with CNN. “Because this is certainly, this is bigger than the business,” added Simon.
“Women need to be respected and not censored,” said Simon.
Peng, who is one of China’s most recognizable sports stars, has not been seen in public since she accused former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of coercing her into sex at his home, according to screenshots of a since-deleted social media post dated November 2.
Her post on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, was deleted within 30 minutes of publication, with Chinese censors moving swiftly to wipe out any mention of the accusation online. Her Weibo account, which has more than half a million followers, is still blocked from searchers on the platform.
The mother of a Virginia girl who was raped by a classmate inside a school bathroom reportedly said that she and her husband had been pressured to keep quiet about the incident — and had no clue the 15-year-old boy was then transferred to another school until last month.
“We were silenced for many months,” Jessica Smith told the Daily Mail in her first interview since her daughter was raped at Stone Bridge High School in Loudoun County in May. “We were told not to say a word that could jeopardize our daughter’s case.”
The boy was found guilty last month of the sexual attack, which sparked a heated confrontation between the victim’s father and school board members.
There seem to be no crimes the left wing won’t condone in their quest to impose “Social Justice” on resisting Americans.
While talking with Joe Rogan, Dr. Peter Attia tells a story about woke ideology in a medical school Urology lecture. It’s remarkable. pic.twitter.com/mftjjNZww1
“A Virginia university has placed an assistant professor on administrative leave after the educator sparked heated backlash for saying it isn’t necessarily immoral for adults to be sexually attracted to children.” Allyn Walker, step right up, you’re the next contestant on The Perv is Wrong!
This week marked the 50th anniversary of the world’s first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. There have been a lot of milestones on the road to the high tech world we live in today, but that was one of the biggest.
The rare good kind of irony: A team of firefighters was practicing water rescue when a car drove into the water and they had to perform a real water rescue.
I missed this news a few days ago: Mohamed Morsi, the leader who briefly and disastrously lead Egypt as its first (and hopefully last) Muslim Brotherhood President, died of a heart attack in a Egyptian court room at age 67. He’d been under a death sentence since 2015.
Following widespread protests that forced previous strongman President Hosni Mubarak out of office, Morsi came to power in arguably Egypt’s first free elections in 2012, then promptly began the process of trying to install a one-party Islamic state on Egypt at top speed, casting aside the rule of law and using widespread violence against political opponents and religious minorities like the Copts. He was deposed in a widely popular coup in 2013 following constant corruption, violence and unrest. This ushered in the presidency of former General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a mildly repressive strongman who marked a radical improvement over Morsi, who immediately set about the necessary task of crushing the Muslim Brotherhood like a bug.
Morsi’s mistake was in trying to Islamicize Egypt all at once rather than gradually taking over the country’s institutions, as his ally Recep Tayyip Erdogan did in Turkey. Having witnessed life under a radical Islamist regime, Egyptians are both sadder and wise and probably won’t try it again for at least another generation. Meanwhile, an actual functioning democracy in an Islamic nation in the Middle East is as elusive as ever.
Ironically, the deposed Mubarak was released from prison in 2017, and as far as I can tell (and despite briefly being declared “clinically dead” in 2012) is still alive at age 91…
I saw this video about Qatar buying influence at a number of American media outlets and think tanks. It’s 23 minutes long, but worth you’re time if you’re interested in the subject.
A few takeaways:
Qatar has poured a lot of money into the Brookings Institute, so much that their scholars are forbidden to criticize it. And no one knows just how much they’re pouring into Brookings’ Doha branch.
I knew that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had sidelined many hardline Wahhabist clerics in 2017, but I didn’t know that (as this video asserts) he at least some threatened with a sentence of beheading. But that does appear to be the case.
Nick Muzin, Ted Cruz’s deputy chief of staff for strategy in his 2016 Presidential campaign, opened lobbying agency Stonington Strategies and became a registered agent for Qatar, specifically for pitching them to the American Jewish community. According to Tablet, Muzin’s firm was pulling down $300,000 a month from Qatar, though he says he cut ties with them last year (which is not in the video).
Qatar has evidently launched hacking attacks against many of its critics.
I think their overall take, that Qatar continues to fund the Muslim Brotherhood and other terrorist groups, and that Mohammed bin Salman is largely cleaning up Saudi Arabia’s act when it comes to sponsoring terrorism, is general correct. This does not make the Saudis our friends, but it does make them somewhat less repugnant allies.
for all the talk of the crown prince’s brashness (former State Department officials Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky described the crown prince as a “ruthless, reckless, and impulsive leader”), some of the changes he has brought to his country have benefitted the United States. Not least among them are his efforts to drastically curtail Wahhabi clerical influence at home by detaining dozens of radical clerics and drastically limiting the power of the religious police and to empower Saudi women by better integrating them into the workforce.
And despite what many in the West see as Saudi Arabia’s missteps during his tenure—including its involvement in the war in Yemen, blockading Qatar, detaining Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, the imprisonment and alleged torture of women’s rights activists, the detention of Saudi political and moneyed elites, and the diplomatic spat with Canada—Saudi Arabia has also used its considerable diplomatic and financial leverage to support key U.S. policies throughout the Middle East. These include efforts at Arab-Israeli peace and stabilization and reconstruction initiatives in Iraq and northeastern Syria.
The United States should remember that Mohammed bin Salman’s successes as well as some of his mistakes are products of the same qualities: his youth and drive. He is 33, which is an asset insofar as it aligns him with the needs, wants, and hopes of a country in which 70 percent of the population is under 35. Youth entails boldness and an increased appetite for risk—essential qualities in a leader who is trying to bring about the type of total social and economic transformation the kingdom requires.
I think that this analysis is largely correct as well, but a large measure of caution is always in order where the Saudis are concerned.
After making noises about vetoing the liberal-provision-packed omnibus spending bill, President Donald Trump signed the bill anyway. This is certainly a bad and base-depressing move, but shouts that this has “doomed” Republicans in this year’s midterms are premature.
Some links:
But the omnibus spending bill does provide $500 million to build a border wall. In Jordan.
“Saudi Arabia is seeking to purge its school curriculum of any influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and dismiss employees who sympathise with the banned group, the education minister said.” Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is starting to look like an actual, real-life Muslim reformer.
Seems like a good idea:
I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.
Ohio high school student suspended for not walking out of school. One most never challenge the latest and most sacred dogma of the overclass… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
“How Facebook Went From ‘Ideal Way’ to Reach Voters to Being ‘Weaponized’ (Hint: a Republican won).”
Starting next year they may become subject to new import regulations that will significantly complicate the process of buying old books, prints and manuscripts from sources outside the EU. The purpose of the changes is to combat the looting and smuggling of antiquities and prevent the financing of terrorism through the illicit trade in cultural goods. While the need for the new regulations is presented almost entirely in relation to the war on terror, the sweeping new rules themselves will be applied comprehensively and include no provisions for exempting goods from areas which are free from armed conflict or terrorist activities.
The new regulations apply to a broad range of cultural goods, but none will be impacted more adversely than books. The new procedures are as follows:
If a book, engraving, print, document or publication of “special interest” that is more than 250 years old is presented for import in any EU member state the owner or “holder of the goods” will be required to submit a signed importer statement to customs authorities in the country of entry. The statement must include a declaration that the books have been originally exported legally from their source country. However, in cases where the export country (distinct from the source country) is a “Contracting Party to the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property” then the holder of the books must provide a declaration that they have been exported from that export country in accordance with its laws and regulations. Needless to say, while the proposal specifies books and documents of “special interest” it does not give any more explicit criteria for defining what this means and the notion of “special interest,” on its own, is sufficiently vague and subjective to include, in practice, virtually any book that someone might want to import.
Militants have launched a bomb and gun attack on a mosque in Egypt’s North Sinai province, killing 235 people, state media say.
Witnesses say the al-Rawda mosque in the town of Bir al-Abed, near al-Arish, was targeted during Friday prayers.
It is the deadliest attack of its kind since an Islamist insurgency in the peninsula was stepped up in 2013.
Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi has held emergency talks with security officials to decide how to respond.
Local police said gunmen arrived in four off-road vehicles and bombed the packed mosque before opening fire on worshippers, the Associated Press reported.
Pictures from the scene show rows of bloodied victims inside the mosque. At least 100 people were wounded, reports say.
“They were shooting at people as they left the mosque,” a local resident who had relatives there told Reuters news agency. “They were shooting at the ambulances too.”
No group has yet claimed responsibility for what is one of the deadliest militant attacks in modern Egyptian history.
Who was targeted?
Locals are quoted as saying that followers of Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, regularly gathered at the mosque.
Sufis are among the least likely of Muslims to take up terrorism. The Islamic State certainly targets them as heretics, but the Muslim Brotherhood is not too keen on them either, so both are natural suspects as being behind the bombing.
At best, Awan is a fraudster who, working with his family, bilked the U.S. taxpayers out of over four million in IT fees and overpriced computer equipment. At worst he’s an agent of Pakistan’s ISI in league with Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, or even ISIS. There are other possibilities in between that are also of a frightening nature, including (although more remote) the mysterious death of Seth Rich.
He also has a number of questions:
Why did Debbie Wasserman Schultz keep this man in her employ right up until he was arrested Tuesday night when he has been under suspicion for months. Does he have something on her or other people?
Why did Nancy Pelosi lie when she said she never heard of Awan? Email revealed by Wikileaks says Awan had access to Pelosi’s iPad. (Wiklileaks has never been shown to be inaccurate.)
What is on the smashed hard drives Awan is trying to retrieve from the FBI? (Oh, those Democrats and their hard drives.)
Why is Awan suddenly being legally represented at the highest level by Clinton ultra-loyalist Chris Gowan — a fact-checker for Bill Clinton’s memoir of all things? (They are already using the same right-wing conspiracy baloney they used in the Lewinski case.) Does this make sense if Awan’s just a low-life fraudster? Why not let him dangle?
Just what is the relationship, if any, between the Awan case and the unsolved Seth Rich murder? Is it entirely an accident that Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s brother Steven is accused of blocking the investigation? Denials from Debbie aren’t worth much anymore.
Where did the Wikileaks come from anyway? Was it really Russia?
I doubt there’s actually a Seth Rich angle here, but you never know. And do all Democrats in the House have iPads that Awran and his co-conspirators had access to?
“Unlike Russiagate, this is an investigation that already has a crime.” He says the case deserves a special prosecutor, and I concur.
It’s no coincidence that the most vocal outcry against President Trump’s measures have come from urban elites and the corporations that cater to them. It’s easy to spot the class divides in the scoffing at Andrew Puzder, CEO of the company behind Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, getting a cabinet position instead of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg who had been tipped for Treasury Secretary by Hillary.
Carl’s Jr and its 4 Dollar Real Deal are a world away from Facebook’s Gehry designed Menlo Park headquarters. Or as a WWE tournament is from Conde Nast’s Manhattan skyscraper.
It’s hard to imagine a clearer contrast between coastal elites and the heartland, and between the new economy and the old. On the one side are the glittering cities where workforces of minorities and immigrants do the dirty work behind the slick logos and buzzwords of the new economy. On the other are Rust Belt communities and Southern towns who actually used to make things.
Facebook’s top tier geniuses enjoy the services of an executive chef, treadmill workstations and a bike repair shop walled off from East Palo Alto’s Latino population and the crime and gang violence. And who works in Facebook’s 11 restaurants or actually repairs the bikes in the back room? Or looks through the millions of pictures posted on timelines to screen out spam, pornography and racism?
Behind the illusion of a shiny new future are Mexicans getting paid a few dollars an hour to decide if that Italian Renaissance painting you just shared violates Facebook’s content guidelines.
If you live in the world of Facebook, Lyft, Netflix and Airbnb, crowding into airports shouting, “No Borders, No Nations, Stop The Deportations” makes sense. You don’t live in a country. You live in one of a number of interchangeable megacities or their bedroom communities. Patriotism is a foreign concept. You have no more attachment to America than you do to Friendster or MySpace. The nation state is an outdated system of social organization that is being replaced by more efficient systems of global governance. The only reason anyone would cling to nations or borders is racism.
The demographic most opposed to President Trump is not a racial minority, but a cultural elite.
This isn’t a revolution. The revolutions happened in June in the UK and in November in the US. Brexit and Trump were revolutions. The protests against them are a reaction.
In the midst of freaking out, Instapundit notes that our elites are displaying why they’re unfit to rule:
Why all the anger over Trump?
As I’ve pondered this, I’ve gone back to Tyler Cowen’s statement: “Occasionally the real force behind a political ideology is the subconsciously held desire that a certain group of people should not be allowed to rise in relative status.”
I think that a lot of the elite hatred for Trump, and for his supporters, stems from just such a sentiment. For decades now, the educated meritocrats who ran America — the “Best and the Brightest,” in David Halberstam’s not-actually-complimentary term — have enjoyed tremendous status, regardless of election results.
An election’s turn might see some moving to the private sector — say as K street lobbyists or high-priced lawyers or consultants — while a different batch of meritocrats take their positions in government. But even so, their status remained unchallenged: They were always the insiders, the elite, the winners, regardless of which team came out ahead in the elections.
But as Nicholas Ebserstadt notes, that changed in November. To the privileged and well-educated Americans living in their “bicoastal bastions,” things seemed to be going quite well, even as the rest of the country fell farther and farther behind. But, writes Eberstadt: “It turns out that the year 2000 marks a grim historical milestone of sorts for our nation. For whatever reasons, the Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then — and broke down very badly.
“The warning lights have been flashing, and the klaxons sounding, for more than a decade and a half. But our pundits and prognosticators and professors and policymakers, ensconced as they generally are deep within the bubble, were for the most part too distant from the distress of the general population to see or hear it.”
Well, now they’ve heard it, and they’ve also heard that a lot of Americans resent the meritocrats’ insulation from what’s happening elsewhere, especially as America’s unfortunate record over the past couple of decades, whether in economics, in politics, or in foreign policy, doesn’t suggest that the “meritocracy” is overflowing with, you know, actual merit.
In the United States, the result has been Trump. In Britain, the result was Brexit. In both cases, the allegedly elite — who are supposed to be cool, considered, and above the vulgar passions of the masses — went more or less crazy. From conspiracy theories (it was the Russians!) to bizarre escape fantasies (A Brexit vote redo! A military coup to oust Trump!) the cognitive elite suddenly didn’t seem especially elite, or for that matter particularly cognitive.
In fact, while America was losing wars abroad and jobs at home, elites seemed focused on things that were, well, faintly ridiculous. As Richard Fernandez tweeted: “The elites lost their mojo by becoming absurd. It happened on the road between cultural appropriation and transgender bathrooms.” It was fatal: “People believe from instinct. The Roman gods became ridiculous when the Roman emperors did. PC is the equivalent of Caligula’s horse.”
You have to read this Glenn Greenwald piece on what’s wrong with the Democratic Party. “The more alarmed one is by the Trump administration, the more one should focus on how to fix the systemic, fundamental sickness of the Democratic Party. That Hillary Clinton won the meaningless popular vote on her way to losing to Donald Trump, and that the singular charisma of Barack Obama kept him popular, have enabled many to ignore just how broken and failed the Democrats are as a national political force.” Never mind that Greenwald ignores one of the big elephants in the room (the Social Justice Warrior/victimhood identity politics brigade doing such a bang-up job alienating American voters). His description of the other elephant in the room, the party’s fundamentally corrupt and anti-Democratic nature, is fairly acute.
All the Trump Derangement is masking the Democratic Party’s own civil war. “There is no Barack Obama among the ranks of current Democrats. He simply does not exist. That truth, and Hillary’s defeat, means the years ahead will be ones of rebuilding and rebranding. So far, it’s not going well.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Seven days in February. “Why were former Obama-administration appointees or careerist officials tapping the phone calls of an incoming Trump designate and then leaking the tapes to their pets in the press?” Also this: “The Democratic party has been absorbed by its left wing and is beginning to resemble the impotent British Labour party. Certainly it no longer is a national party.”
“The Social Security Administration paid $1 billion in benefits to individuals who did not have a Social Security Number.”
“This is what Chuck Todd and others like him fail to accept or comprehend: The mainstream media have delegitimized themselves. Republicans and independents watched for eight long years as Todd and others of his ilk did their best to help and support the last administration; not only refusing to hold President Obama to account (the way they are imploring each other to do with Trump) but providing cover for him.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Turns out that patiently explaining to the deplorable redneck freaks of JesusLand why they’re ignorant rubes that need to be ruled for their own good doesn’t win votes.
Marine Le Pen is winning over French women. In addition to refusing to wear a headscarf, “Le Pen again vowed to protect French women after the mass sexual assault by groups of men in Cologne, Germany, just over a year ago in an op-ed that tied together immigration and women rights.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Cahnman’s Musings has a roundup of what various school district Superintendents make. It’s an interesting list, though I personally would not have broken it up by Texas House committee chairman. I’m not surprised that they average a low six figures, or that the Superintendents of Houston and Dallas ISD make in excess of $300,000. Why I don’t understand is why the Superintendent for Galena Park ISD, a working class school district with 22,549 students and a single 4A high school, makes $270,531, or 90% of the what the HISD Superintendent makes…
Feminist derangement syndrome: “I was walking into a gas station for a bottle of water when the man behind me stepped up to open the door for me. With that act of kindness, something inside me snapped and I flew into a blind rage. I began screaming at him at the top of my lungs.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
“I would say 98 percent of the women in the WNBA are gay women” says ex-WNBA player Candice Wiggins, who says she was bullied and harassed for being straight. This is not exactly a surprise, thought that 98% number may be slightly high. I casually followed the WNBA back when the Houston Comets were dominating the league, but haven’t paid attention since they folded. Today half of the teams still lose money. But I’m sure their popularity will skyrocket any day now…
Following any electoral disaster, the recriminations come think and heavy, and after watching an election all America’s left-wing elites thought was in the bag slip away, Democrats have thrown an absolute hissy fit of rage.
It’s against that backdrop, and the backdrop of Bernie Sanders supporters disgruntled at Debbie Wasserman Schultz putting both thumbs, a big toe, and half a cankle on the scale to tip the primaries to Hillary Clinton, that Democrats will choose their next Democratic National Committee chair sometime between now and March 31, 2017.
So here’s a roundup of the contenders, pretenders, and offenders in the DNC Chair race:
Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota. Ellison gets victimhood identity politics points for being both black and a Muslim (in fact, the only Muslim in congress). Among prominent Democrats who have publically declared they’re backing Ellison are:
Both of Minnesota’s Senators (Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken).
Michigan Rep. John Conyers, who is, in fact, still alive, having spent more than 51 years in congress. (Congrats on your son showing up safe, by the way.)
Former Vermont Governor, former DNC chair, onetime Presidential contender and dance remix inspiration.
South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison has also launched a DNC chair bid. Harrison, like Ellison, is black, but what other qualifications does he have? As Republicans hold the state House, Senate and Governor’s mansion in South Carolina, Harrison does not seem to have accomplished notably much as state chair. However: “Harrison also joined the Podesta Group, a lobbying and consulting firm founded by Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.” Presumably Harrison is either the designated Clinton Machine candidate, or a guy trying to raise his national profile for his own reasons.
Arizona Congressman Ruben Gallego is said to be considering a run, supposedly with the backing of fellow Rep. Linda Sanchez, Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The fact the most prominent link I could find focusing on Gallego’s prospects is from “NewsTaco” should give you some idea of the outlook on his chances.
Ilyse She Wolf of the SS Hogue, chairman of the National Abortion Rights Action League, is claimed to be considering a run. One wonders why. After getting knifed in the back over ObamaCare, the party’s vestigial pro-life wing was pretty much wiped out in 2010. To paraphrase This Is Spinal Tap: You ask yourself how much more pro-abortion could the Democratic Party be. And the answer is none, none more pro-abortion.
California Rep. Xavier Becerra gets tossed in at the end of many lists, much like a college basketball team appears near the bottom of the “also receiving votes” of weekly polls.
Baring an unlikely heavyweight stepping in (like Hillarysaurus or the Golfer in Chief), the race will probably come down to Ellison vs. Dean.
As DNC chair from 2005 to 2009, Dean was either very effective at pursuing a 50-state strategy that paved the way for Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008, or else he was very lucky at coming in just as Republican dissatisfaction with Bush43 was cresting. (As Charlemagne notes in the musical Pippin, “It’s smarter to be lucky than it’s lucky to be smart.”) Dean won his chairmanship the first time around as a liberal firebrand (“Yeaggggh!”), but as a prominent Hillary backer in 2016, he’s getting pegged as the default “status quo” candidate compared to Ellison.
Ellison was the first Muslim elected to federal office when he won his seat in 2006. Ellison also has had ties with Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.
Ellison repeatedly has been regarded as one of the most liberal members of Congress.
He supported impeaching then-Vice President Dick Cheney, compared President George W. Bush to Hitler, and blamed Bush for the September 11 attacks.
Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Yet ISNA has actually admitted its ties to Hamas, which styles itself the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Justice Department actually classified ISNA among entities “who are and/or were members of the US Muslim Brotherhood.”
It gets worse. In 2008, Ellison accepted $13,350 from the Muslim American Society (MAS) to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. The Muslim American Society is a Muslim Brotherhood organization: “In recent years, the U.S. Brotherhood operated under the name Muslim American Society, according to documents and interviews. One of the nation’s major Islamic groups, it was incorporated in Illinois in 1993 after a contentious debate among Brotherhood members.”
Given that, it’s no surprise that Ellison is not a fan of Israel, supporting the “divestment” movement and hanging around with anti-Israel groups like The U.S. Campaign.
As a result, Jewish Democrats are becoming increasingly alarmed at the prospect of Ellison heading the DNC: “The rise of Ellison could drive Jews out of the Democratic Party, according to Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a private wealth manager who worked in the administrations of New York City Mayor Ed Koch, a Democrat, and New York Governor George Pataki, a Republican. “There are many longtime Jewish Democrats who are on the fence about whether to stay in a party that has been tilting away from Israel—and if Ellison is elected, I believe a good percentage of them will leave the party.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
As the Minnesota’s Fifth District representative in Congress, Keith Ellison has a good gig. He’s a hustler who is accustomed to exploiting the ignorance of voters in a one-party district in a town with a one-party newspaper. Ellison has exploited the ignorance of his constituents in lying repeatedly about his personal history, as I tried to show in “Louis Farrakhan’s first congressman.”
As a Republican, I’d be delighted to see Ellison win. Like Wasserman Schultz, he’s be a part-time Chair at a moment in history they desperately need a full-time chair. More importantly, he’d drag the Democratic Party even further left, double-down on the victimhood identity politics that’s driving normal people out of the party, and do everything possible to make 2018 look an awful lot like 2010. On the plus side, as a Bernie backer, he might finally cleanse the DNC of the Clinton Machine’s stench once and for all (assuming current felony investigations don’t do that for him).
I fear that Dean, far closer to being a centrist, would concentrate on building up the Democratic Party’s election infrastructure in all 50 states like he did in his previous tenure. Dean was also very successful at fundraising, and would probably be far more likely to keep “big money” donating to the Democrats in the Age of Trump than Ellison. Dean would be bad for the Republican Party, but possibly good for America if he also junked the Social Justice Warrior wing of the party and put a stop to the endless victimhood identity politics race baiting. That would be a real service. The downside is that the Clintonistas would probably keep lurking in the party machinery.
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.
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.)
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,”
“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.)
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.
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?
