http://www.katc.com/story/3426
Talk about why Trump needs to drain the swamp. That is one big ugly politician.
And
Condell on The U.N:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toiVELzZ79g
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Israel, Trump and The Hezbollah threat. (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
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I did not write this but the writer seems to beg these questions; can true heroes diminish their achievements by subsequent actions? Can a good man outlive his deeds?
You decide. (See 2 below.)
I have received mostly favorable comments about my LTE and this is a typical one from a friend and fellow memo reader: "Dick, You are spot on as usual. Obama could have done so much to improve race relations in this country, and he failed miserably.He only used his race to his sole advantage and like everything else he did, it became only about him. Arrogance and narcissism are his stock in trade. I feel the same way, so I guess for the first time in my life, i’m a racist. J---"
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Today Trump's nominee for Sec. of Education comes before a committee and most of the Democrat members are interested in defending the right of all teachers to teach, whether they are good or bad, whether they belong in the class room or not. The issue is not education but job retention and placating the NEA.
Betsy DeVos has spent her career advocating for the education of children and their right to have a good one, to be challenged by the best not crippled by the system Democrats continue to protect.
She will be scarred, bruised and then will be allowed to do her job after Warren, Sanders and Franken use their hatchets and whoop their war dance..
The Department should be shut down based on tracking education's progress with when it was established. The department siphons money away from education into the pockets of bureaucrats who then give tons of money to re-elect politicians who keep them employed. This is the swamp Trump would like to drain but it will not happen.
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One should never gloat when a legitimate charitable foundation falls on hard times but in the case of The Clinton Foundation, it's influence peddling demise is long overdue. Having lost their ability to trade their position of influence, for favors and money, The Clinton Foundation is having to dismiss staff.(See 3 below.)
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42 petulant Members of Congress have decide to thumb their noses at Trump and join Rep. Lewis.
Their presence will not be missed among the hundreds of thousands who will attend but it is a slap in the face that speaks more about them than it does about the nature of their protest.
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Dick
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1)OUR WORLD: TRUMP, THE PISTOL AND THE OLIVE BRANCH
With a gun on is hip, on November 13, 1974, PLO chief Yasser Arafat stood before the UN General Assembly and made the West an offer that it didn’t refuse.
At the end of a long speech in which he rewrote history to erase all connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and criminalized the very notion of Jewish freedom, Arafat declared, “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. I repeat: Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”
Arafat’s offer has served since that time as the foundation of European relations with the Palestinians and the wider Islamic world. It has also been the basis of US-PLO relations for the better part of the past four decades.
His trade was simple and clear.
If you stand with the PLO in its war to annihilate Israel and deny Jewish freedom, then PLO terrorists and our Arab state supporters will leave you alone.
If you refuse to join our war against the Jewish state, we will kill you.
Today, Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, is reiterating Arafat’s offer.
Speaking Saturday at the Vatican after the Holy See decided to recognize “Palestine,” Abbas said that if US President-elect Donald Trump goes ahead with his plan to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, it will “fuel extremism in our region, as well as worldwide.”
Abbas’s spokesman was more explicit. Saturday night, Osama Qawasmeh, spokesman for Abbas’s Fatah PLO faction and member of Fatah’s Revolutionary Council, said that if the US moves its embassy to Israel’s capital city, “The gates of hell will be opened in the region and the world.”
Abbas and Qawasmeh also said that the PLO expects that members of the international community will make Trump see the light and abandon his plan.
French President Francois Hollande’s “peace conference” on Sunday was the international community’s way of fulfilling Abbas’s demand.
As multiple commentators have noted, the conference’s purpose wasn’t to promote the prospects for peace. It was to constrain Trump’s policy options for handling the Palestinian war against Israel.
By bringing together representatives of some 70 countries to insist that Israeli homeowners are the moral equivalent of Palestinian terrorists, Hollande and his comrades hoped to box Trump into their PLO-compliant policy.
Spelling out the demand Trump is required to accept, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc-Ayrault parroted the Palestinian threats.
Asked by the French media Sunday if moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem would provoke the Palestinians, Ayrault said, “Of course.”
He then demeaned Trump’s plan to move the embassy as nothing but the regular bluster of American politicians.
In his words, “I think he [Trump] would not be able to do it. It would have extremely serious consequences and it’s not the first time that it’s on the agenda of a US president, but none has let himself make that decision.”
Ayrault is correct about Trump’s predecessors.
To one degree or another, since the early 1970s, successive US administrations have joined the Europeans in selling Israel down the river to prevent Arafat’s minions from pointing their guns at the American people.
Like the Europeans, the Americans have upheld their side of this bargain even when the PLO failed to uphold its end. For instance, in 1973 Arafat ordered his terrorists to storm the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum and take US ambassador Cleo Noel, his deputy, George Curtis Moore, and Belgian diplomat Guy Eid hostage. Arafat then ordered his henchmen to murder the diplomats after then president Richard Nixon rejected his demand to release Robert F. Kennedy’s Palestinian murderer, Sirhan Sirhan, from prison.
Instead of responding to the execution of US diplomats by siding with Israel against the PLO, the US covered up and denied the PLO’s responsibility for the attack for the next 33 years.
The US is still covering up for the PLO’s murder of US embassy personnel in Gaza in 2003. At the same time, it is providing the PLO with nearly three quarters of a billion dollars in direct and indirect annual aid, including the training and provision of its security forces.
The Europeans for their part have egged the US along throughout the years. France has generally led European efforts to convince the Americans to side with Palestinian as well as Hezbollah terrorists in their war against Israel in the name of “peace.”
Sunday morning, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the Paris conference as a “futile” relic of a period that is about to end.
Netanyahu said that the conference’s goal of boxing Israel into an untenable framework for dealing the Palestinians was nothing more than the “final palpitations of a yesterday’s world.”
“Tomorrow,” he intoned, “will look a lot different. And tomorrow is very close.”
Trump will take office on Friday. Since he was elected, he has given every reason to believe that Abbas and his deputies and their European and American enablers will have to either put up or shut up.
Speaking of the president-elect, Henry Kissinger said that Trump is the first man in recent memory who doesn’t owe anybody anything for his victory.
The only people he is answerable to are the voters who elected him.
Trump’s electoral victory owes to his success in tapping into the deep reservoir of popular disaffection with the elitist culture and policies that have governed post-Cold War West. He has used the mandate he received from American voters to revisit the basic assumptions that have driven US policies for the past generation.
His skepticism at NATO and the EU are examples of his refusal to simply accept the received wisdom of his predecessors. Just this weekend he told Germany’s Bild magazine that he continues to question the purpose of NATO, which is a drag on US taxpayers and doesn’t fight terrorism.
He similarly restated his ambivalence toward the EU and that its open border policy has been a “catastrophic failure,” and he expects more countries to follow Britain’s lead and exit the EU.
Trump’s position on the PLO and the Palestinian war on Israel is of a piece with his wider rejection of the common wisdom of Western elites. Just as he didn’t hesitate to say that the EU mainly serves as an instrument for Germany to dominate the European market, so he has made no mystery of his rejection of the moral equivalence between Israel and Palestinian terrorists which forms the basis of the twostate formula.
Not only won’t Trump join the Obama administration and the French in criminalizing Israeli homeowners, Trump is celebrating them. He has invited the leaders of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria – that is, the so-called “settlements” – to attend his inauguration.
And he appears dead serious about moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem.
Under these circumstances, Israel has the opportunity and the obligation to end the PLO’s ability to threaten the US, not to mention itself. It is Israel’s duty to ensure that the next time the PLO tries to exact a price in blood for America’s refusal to abide by the terms of Arafat’s blackmail, his terrorist group is finally destroyed.
Similarly, Israel is now obliged to take the lead and abandon the PLO-friendly two-state policy, which blames Israel for Palestinian terrorism, and adopt a strategy that works in its place.
Netanyahu has refused to consider any alternative until after Barack Obama is out of office.
Consultations must be scheduled for Saturday night.
1a)TRUMP PRESERVES HIS OPTIONS ON ISRAEL AND IRAN
Washington - In an interview with British and German press over the weekend, President-elect Donald Trump roiled European capitals for repeating his skepticism of the NATO alliance, support for Brexit and criticism of Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, for accepting "illegal" refugees into her country by the hundreds of thousands.
But Trump was disciplined in his silence on his plans for Israel and Iran— two critical portfolios that were rallying cries for his supporters during his campaign as forces of good and evil.
On Iran— and the nuclear deal he has long called the worst diplomatic agreement brokered in modern history– Trump reiterated his concerns with the deal. Beyond that, he declined to comment.
"I don’t want to say what I’m gonna do with the Iran deal. I just don’t want to play the cards," he said. "I mean, look—I’m not a politician, I don’t go out and say, ‘I’m gonna do this — I’m gonna do —’. I gotta do what I gotta do. But I don’t wanna play. Who plays cards where you show everybody the hand before you play it?"
While Trump said during his campaign that he would rip up the nuclear agreement, his national security cabinet posts all testified this week before the Senate that they would advise strict enforcement. He has not commented on their testimonies or on Iran policy since.
Similarly, Trump offered strategic opacity on whether he truly plans to move America's embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem— a move that has been discussed extensively by his staff in private and in public, and was touted by his choice for Israel ambassador, David Friedman, as one of his top priorities.
"I don’t want to comment on that, again, but we’ll see what happens," Trump said of his embassy plans.
With these two crucial countries, Trump is putting his doctrine of unpredictability to the test— preserving for himself space and flexibility just days before taking the oath of office.
Trump has laid out broad strokes for policy on the Middle East— embracing of Israel, hostile to Iran and aggressive against non-state Islamist organizations.
But now, mere hours away from the presidency, Trump is offering more caution– an acknowledgment, perhaps, of the challenges that lay before him in a complex region and of the policy nuance that will be required for him to make progress.
"I don’t want to comment on that, again, but we’ll see what happens," Trump said of his embassy plans.
With these two crucial countries, Trump is putting his doctrine of unpredictability to the test— preserving for himself space and flexibility just days before taking the oath of office.
Trump has laid out broad strokes for policy on the Middle East— embracing of Israel, hostile to Iran and aggressive against non-state Islamist organizations.
But now, mere hours away from the presidency, Trump is offering more caution– an acknowledgment, perhaps, of the challenges that lay before him in a complex region and of the policy nuance that will be required for him to make progress.
1b)The attack near the Mezzeh Airport, early Friday
All signs indicate that the strike which took place early Friday morning near the Mezzeh Military Airport west of Damascus, according to Syrian reports, was aimed at destroying a shipment of accurate Iranian surface-to-surface missiles to Hezbollah.
The Syrian general staff already announced in the past, in the assassination of murderer Samir Kuntar in a Damascus suburb, that Israeli planes had attacked Syria while circling the Sea of Galilee. It was. In that incident too, the Syrians claimed that the strike was carried out by missiles.
The victory in Aleppo has instilled confidence in the Damascus regime and in its security forces, with Russian and Iranian backing. Today, they appear less sensitive and less afraid of an Israeli response, which is why Israel must take the Syrian general staff’s promise to respond seriously.
These may be empty words like in the past, but in light of the recent successes in the war against the rebels, it’s quite possible that the Syrian army will try to implement some sort of retaliation, whether in the Golan Heights or in northern Israel. The IDF is aware of that and is preparing for such a possibility. One thing is clear: The damage caused by the attack early Friday near the Mezzeh Airport appears to be big and will significantly harm Hezbollah’s ability to target Israeli territory.
Experts say this is part of the war between wars, in which the IDF is supposedly trying to minimize casualties among the civilian population and damage the essential facilities in Israel, in case a war breaks out. It’s a Sisyphean battle which has to be waged constantly, as the other side is also finding ways and means to smuggle improved, high-quality weapons to Hezbollah. That is exactly what Israel is trying to thwart – both vis-à-vis Hezbollah and vis-à-vis Hamas
Israel’s war on Hezbollah’s accurate missiles
Analysis: All signs indicate that the strike attributed to the IAF in the Damascus area early Friday was aimed at destroying a shipment of accurate Iranian surface-to-surface missiles, which threaten most essential facilities in Israel. This is part of the war between wars, in which the IDF is supposedly trying to minimize casualties and damage in the next battle with Hezbollah.
This can be concluded from the claim that the attacked targets were near the airport and from the knowledge that Iran transfers the missiles it supplies to Hezbollah through cargo planes that land in the Damascus area, and mainly in the military airport which is located not far from the Lebanon border.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and senior commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards announced recently that the Lebanese organization was receiving missiles, and even accurate missiles, from Iran—likely satellite-guided missiles (GPS) that could reach central and even southern Israel and threaten most of the essential facilities and civilian and military airports in the State of Israel.
They were likely referring to improved Fateh-111 or Fateh-110 missiles, and maybe even Zelzal missiles that are produced in Iran, which have a range of 200-300 kilometers (125-186 miles). Their warhead weighs about 400 kilograms (880 pounds). Hezbollah has already declared that it plans to use these missiles to attack the General Staff at the Kirya Base in Tel Aviv and other essential targets across Israel.
The accuracy of these missiles can hit targets within a radius of only several meters, instead of hundreds of meters with unguided missiles. For this reason, Israel is interested in reducing the number of such missiles in Hezbollah’s possession. The higher the number of accurate missiles in the hands of Nasrallah’s people, the greater Hezbollah’s ability to target more and more essential facilities in a conflict with Israel and deal more losses on Israeli territory.
According to reports from oppositional sources in Syria, early Friday’s strike also included military facilities in the Jabal Qasiun area, the mountain range overlooking Damascus where many military camps and facilities are located. If facilities were indeed attacked on Mount Qasiun, they were likely, at least according to Syrian opposition sources, missile depots and antiaircraft systems intended to serve Hezbollah’s aerial defense system.
An interesting fact is that the Syrian general staff noted in its official statement that the strike was carried out by Israel Air Force planes which circled the Sea of Galilee area, but did not enter Syrian airspace. According to the Syrians, these planes launched accurate guided missiles at the targets near the airport in the Damascus area. The images from the area of the strike indicate that the attack was indeed carried out using accurate means, as there were many additional bombings in the area and maybe even casualties.
The Syrians are interested in emphasizing the fact that Israel did not enter their airspace, so that they will not have to explain why the strike attributed to Israel was carried out successfully without the Syrians targeting the planes or disrupting their activity. On the other hand, if the strike was indeed carried out by the IAF, Israel has no interest and no need to enter Syrian territory in order to attack targets in the Damascus area, so as to avoid friction with the antiaircraft systems and the planes operated by Russia on Syrian territory.
It’s a known fact that very accurate air-to-surface missiles can be launched from distances of dozens and even hundreds of kilometers and hit the target at an accuracy of 1 or 2 meters. There are of course additional reports from the Syrian opposition about F-35 IAF planes which attacked for the first time, but it’s safe to assume that even if the IAF did use planes, the Syrian opposition sources had no way of detecting and knowing that.
Damaging Hezbollah’s abilities
Israel, presumably, has no interest in clarifying the uncertainty, and so the IDF is keeping quiet. Apart from keeping operational information confidential, Israel is not interested in challenging the Syrians in a way which will call for a response on their part. While the Syrians specifically announced that the strike was carried out by Israel, as they have been doing recently, if Israel refrains from claiming responsibility – the possibility of an escalation is reduced.
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2)Seventy-six-year-old Congressman John Lewis once did something so heroic, so noble, that it helped to change the course of a nation for the better. The Georgia Democrat was beaten up savagely by white Southern racists in 1965, and everyone appreciates very much his personal sacrifice to advance civil rights.
But what has this radical leftist blowhard done for America lately?
Like the civil rights movement he served, he has become corrupt and destructive. He is a hateful old man who lies about his political adversaries and spews ugliness.
At what point does this man, who has been dining out on his good deeds for more than a half-century, have to account for the truly awful, anti-American things he has done?
To be clear, Lewis is revered by Americans of all political stripes, and rightly so, because, among other things, he helped to run the Mississippi Summer Project for voter registration back in 1964, when Democrats believed that electoral fraud was real and dangerous. The following year, as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he helped to lead hundreds of protesters in a historic voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama's state capital.
On March 7, 1965, a day that became known as Bloody Sunday, 150 Alabama state troopers stopped the march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge as the activists were leaving Selma. They were ordered to disperse.
According to an account in the National Archives:
One minute and five seconds after a two-minute warning was announced, the troops advanced, wielding clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. John Lewis, who suffered a skull fracture, was one of fifty-eight people treated for injuries at the local hospital.
Lewis has suffered mightily because of his good deeds.
There is no question that Lewis circa 1965 deserves to be honored for taking a stand against oppression and furthering certain aspects of the civil rights agenda in the 1960s. Lewis was brutally beaten (by Democrats) – reportedly almost to death – for his courageous activism, and he deserves recognition.
And he has been getting recognition and praise for what he did for a half-century. President Obama honored him in 2011 by awarding him the nation's highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom.
Obama said at the time:
[T]ime and again, he faced down death so that all of us could share equally in the joys of life. It's why all these years later, he is known as the conscience of the United States Congress, still speaking his mind on issues of justice and equality. And generations from now, when parents teach their children what is meant by courage, the story of John Lewis will come to mind – an American who knew that change could not wait for some other person or some other time, whose life is a lesson in the fierce urgency of now.
Lewis has received more than 50 honorary degrees from institutions of higher learning across the fruited plain, including Harvard University, Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Duke University, and Morehouse College.
In addition to the Medal of Freedom. he has received:
... the Lincoln Medal from the historic Ford's Theatre, the Golden Plate Award given by the Academy of Excellence, the Preservation Hero award given by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Capital Award of the National Council of La Raza, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Non-Violent Peace Prize, the President's Medal of Georgetown University, the NAACP Spingarn Medal, the National Education Association Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Award, and the only John F. Kennedy "Profile in Courage Award" for Lifetime Achievement ever granted by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.
Lewis is co-author of the #1 New York Times bestselling graphic novel memoir trilogy MARCH. The books in the series have been showered with literary honors from the American Library Association and other organizations. The trilogy was described as one of the best books of 2013 by publications including USA Today, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and Publishers Weekly.
A Roll Call magazine article reposted on Lewis's congressional website explains:
The MARCH series is used in schools across the country to teach the Civil Rights Movement to the next generation of young activists, and has been selected as a First-Year common reading text at colleges and universities such as Michigan State University, Georgia State University, Marquette University, University of Utah, Henderson State University, University of Illinois Springfield, Washburn University, and many others.
And there's more.
Lewis has a ship that will be named after him. It will be the first in an entire class of U.S. Navy ships named after him.
"As the first of its class, the future USNS John Lewis will play a vital role in the mission of our Navy and Marine Corps while also forging a new path in fleet replenishment," Navy secretary Ray Mabus announced a year ago.
"Naming this ship after John Lewis is a fitting tribute to a man who has, from his youth, been at the forefront of progressive social and human rights movements in the U.S., directly shaping both the past and future of our nation," Mabus said.
And there many other important honors and accolades the congressman has received over the years that space here does not allow.
But when Donald Trump defended himself against Lewis's claim that Trump is "illegitimate," the left and its friends in the mainstream media lost their minds, attacking the incoming president and his supporters vigorously for daring to fight back by criticizing the lawmaker's record.
Without disparaging Lewis, Tucker Carlson said Monday on Fox News Channel that Lewis "is the one out of 435 congressmen you're not allowed to attack."
Carlson is right. We should resist the temptation to deify our elected leaders. Lewis's performance in office should be fair game.
And there is so much to criticize.
In his years in Congress, Lewis has done little for the district in southeast Atlanta he represents. Dr. Tina Trent, a former liberal Democrat activist who lived in that district for a long time, explains why she is not impressed by Lewis.
As somebody who spent almost two decades in John Lewis' district trying to fix the problems of crime, poverty, and family disintegration created entirely by Lewis' politics and his political party, I speak with authority when I say that Donald Trump is completely correct when he accuses John Lewis of being all talk, no action.
But, I'd go farther than Trump. Nearly every time John Lewis has "acted" legislatively, life for the poorest in his district has grown more dangerous, destabilized, and tragic.
While John Lewis spent the last 50 years growing rich and influential by repeating the same speech about being beat up on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965, the people living in the crime-ridden parts of his district have spent the 50 years since then being subjected daily to violent crimes and threats of crime at least as bad and frequently far worse than what Lewis experienced, day after day, week after week, year after year – decade after decade, unabated.
There are no federal monuments to the crime victims of John Lewis' district. These victims are barely acknowledged by Lewis himself.
For all his years in Congress, Lewis has "opposed every piece of criminal justice or welfare reform legislation that would make the people of his district safer, more self-reliant, and more prosperous," Trent writes.
The robustly self-righteous lawmaker is now in the media spotlight because he refuses to attend the inauguration of Donald Trump, who becomes president Friday. He pigheadedly insists that Trump is not "a legitimate president" based on the flimsy, unproven theory that, in his words, "the Russians participated in helping this man get elected" at the expense of Democrat Hillary Clinton.
In light of all this, Lewis's slight of Trump and his embrace of the trendy myth, risen from the fever swamps of the left, of all-powerful Russian electoral interference are so insignificant in the vast catalog of horrors that is his career in activism and electoral politics that they are barely worth mentioning.
Lewis has spent decades trying to undermine America and siding with its enemies, as Discover the Networks has documented.
In the 1960s and '70s, he worked with members of the Socialist Workers Party and a Communist Party USA (CPUSA) front group called the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.
In 1989, the Sandinista-led Communist government of Nicaragua renounced a ceasefire agreement with the U.S.-backed Contra rebels, the House of Representatives voted 379 to 29 for a resolution deploring the Nicaraguan action. Lewis was one of the 29 Democrats who voted nay.
In 1989, he was a founding member of the Institute for Southern Studies, a North Carolina-based spinoff of the seditious Marxist think-tank known as the Institute for Policy Studies.
In 2003, he wrote an op-ed for the CPUSA paper People's Weekly World, titled "An Open letter to my Colleagues in Congress: Remembering the Legacy of Martin Luther King." In 2015, Massachusetts CPUSA leader Gary Dotterman called Lewis "my hero, my comrade, my inspiration and my friend."
In 2007, he was an honored guest at the national conference of the Democratic Socialists of America, a Marxist group. He provided an introduction to Bernie Sanders.
In 2009, when the House voted 345 to 75 to defund the criminal, corrupt Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), Lewis voted to continue feeding taxpayer funds to the now defunct group.
Lewis supports amnesty for illegal aliens and opposes securing the border. In 2011, he told a rally, "We all live in the same house[.] … If any one of us is illegal, then we all are illegal. There is no illegal human being."
In 2014, after thousands of mostly unaccompanied Central American minors crossed the southern border illegally, Lewis cheered them on. "We are all connected. We can't just build a wall or a fence and say no more. This is America. Our doors are open."
Republicans who don't agree with Lewis are routinely smeared as black-hating racists.
In 2008, Lewis accused presidential running mates John McCain and Sarah Palin of "sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse." For good measure, he threw in a reference to pro-segregation Alabama Gov. George Wallace (a Democrat), implying that McCain and Palin were, like Wallace, creating:
... the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on [a] Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.
In 2010, Lewis and other black Democrat lawmakers falsely claimed that conservative Tea Party activists shouted the "N-word" at them at an anti-Obamacare protest on the steps of Capitol Hill. "It surprised me that people are so mean and we can't engage in a civil dialogue and debate," he said at the time.
At the Democratic National Convention in 2012, Lewis accused Republicans of trying to restore Jim Crow-like segregation in the country.
In January 2016, he hurled the George Wallace smear at Donald Trump.
I've been around a while, and Trump reminds me so much of a lot of the things that George Wallace said and did[.] … Sometimes I feel like I am reliving part of my past. I heard it so much growing up in the South[.] … I heard it so much during the days of the civil rights movement. As a people, I just think we could do much better.
This is not an exhaustive list.
America should give Lewis, on the whole a terrible person, a medal for his civic-minded contributions of long ago and wish him well in his retirement.
Oh, wait – we did that already. Over and over and over again.
Matthew Vadum (personal website) is senior vice president at Capital Research Center, a think-tank in Washington, D.C., and editor-in-chief of its new Bombthrowers blog. He is also an investigative reporter and author of the ACORN/Obama exposé Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Follow him on Twitter. E-mail him at matthewvadum [at] gmail.com.
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3)
BREAKING: Clinton Foundation to Lay Off 22 Staffers
It appears that, at long last, the Clinton Foundation is discovering that trading influence for money doesn’t work out so well when you don’t have any influence to trade.
According to The Daily Caller, 22 staffers are being laid off at the Clinton Global Initiative, one of the multifarious tentacles of the Clinton Foundation. The layoffs will be effective as of April 15, a filing from the group said.
Politico reported on the announcement of layoffs back in September, before the election.
The layoffs come as an investigation by the FBI into the Clinton Foundation is in full swing. Many allege that the foundation was used as little more than a slush fund for the Clinton family, all the while peddling influence during Hillary Clinton’s time at the State Department.
The foundation has also been suffering with cash flow problems since Hillary Clinton’s swan dive at the polls back in November. Apparently, there aren’t too many satrapies willing to pay either Clinton for access when there’s not much access to be bought. Who would have thunk it?
The Clinton Global Initiative was one of the more nebulous arms of the Clinton Foundation. According to its website, CGI “convenes global leaders to create and implement innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.” In other words, it manages conferences. At its height, the Clinton Global Initiative employed about 200 people.
There’s nothing quite as satisfying as seeing heads roll at the Clinton Foundation, even if it’s a bit late in the day for it. We can only hope that the Clinton family’s sick slush fund is dismantled and that the former first family is no longer able to peddle their influence. In the absence of that, however, 22 people being laid off is certainly a good start. We can only hope there’s more to come.
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