Because it is raining I had the time and could not resist!
===
This from a very dear friend and fellow memo reader. (See 1 below.)
and
Another op ed re Hillarious and the web of deception she has spun for herself. (See 1a below.)
===
This from a very dear friend and fellow memo reader. (See 1 below.)
and
Another op ed re Hillarious and the web of deception she has spun for herself. (See 1a below.)
===
Soon the Iran Deal will either be debated and/or possibly thwarted from a vote because of an effective filibuster. Even if a vote is allowed and is successful,Obama will have obtained his veto proof vote because members of his party chose to remain loyal to the party and not the nation they took an oath to defend.
Those who remain blind to the consequences of their action will have to live with their decisions and the potential dangers that could ensue. (See 2 below.)
Meanwhile, perhaps the Sen. from Tenn. is appropriately named and his plan will prove to be a "corker.'"(See 2a and 2b below.)
===
My friend, Bret Stephens, minces no words as he makes mince meat of The Donald. (See 3 below.)
On the other hand perhaps Peggy Noonan is on to something (See 3a below.)
Of all the Republican candidates, Jeb Bush is the most presidential looking. Until recently he chose
to rise above the fray and attacks from Trump but either his slipping campaign and/or his advisors and financial backers got to him and said fight back. Jeb's response ads are good and they make the point that The Donald is suspect when it comes to who he really is and what he really stands for other than mouthing off about matters that matter but in a way that is demeaning both to those he attacks as well as to himself .
However, so far Trump remains effective. One cannot ignore the fact that Trump has connected with the disaffected but the way in which he has conducted himself can ruin the upside of the Republican Party's opportunity in 2016 and create discord among the various candidates.
The rise in Carson suggests the same Trump disaffected types want a non-politico but one who conducts himself in a more dignified and understated manner.
I like Dr. Carson but were he to be the nominee he would have even less qualifications than Obama and save for the fact that he is bright and has a proven record as an achiever his total lack of political and executive experience are worrisome.
The Chinese Torture release of e mails that will continue to afflict Hillarious provides an opening which Republicans must not squander. The Donald could offend the broad mass of voters and they could refuse to vote for a worthy candidate simply because he is a Republican. On the other hand, according to Noonan, America is in play and Trump has a far broader appeal among those supposedly offended by his comments than is being captured by the press and media.
I admit The Donald appeals to my baser instincts and distaste for wimpy politicians, who are controlled by monied lobbyists and special interests who pass laws they do not read and are not subjected to because they have become elitists.
On the other hand I also expect some level of social decorum be displayed by my president and that he/she not be self-enamored.
Perhaps Stephens has over -reacted and Noonan is on to something. Time will tell.
Meanwhile, the upcoming CNN debate should provide another sorting out opportunity and I am delighted Fiorina has been allowed to climb aboard..
===
Are we losing the war of ideas? (See 4 below.)
and
You decide whether it matters and what, if anything, you intend to do about it if it does.. (See 4a below.)
==
Now for some Labor Day chicken humor! (See 5 below)
===
Soon the Iran Deal will either be debated and/or possibly thwarted from a vote because of an effective filibuster. Even if a vote is allowed and is successful,Obama will have obtained his veto proof vote because members of his party chose to remain loyal to the party and not the nation they took an oath to defend.
Those who remain blind to the consequences of their action will have to live with their decisions and the potential dangers that could ensue. (See 2 below.)
Meanwhile, perhaps the Sen. from Tenn. is appropriately named and his plan will prove to be a "corker.'"(See 2a and 2b below.)
===
My friend, Bret Stephens, minces no words as he makes mince meat of The Donald. (See 3 below.)
On the other hand perhaps Peggy Noonan is on to something (See 3a below.)
Of all the Republican candidates, Jeb Bush is the most presidential looking. Until recently he chose
to rise above the fray and attacks from Trump but either his slipping campaign and/or his advisors and financial backers got to him and said fight back. Jeb's response ads are good and they make the point that The Donald is suspect when it comes to who he really is and what he really stands for other than mouthing off about matters that matter but in a way that is demeaning both to those he attacks as well as to himself .
However, so far Trump remains effective. One cannot ignore the fact that Trump has connected with the disaffected but the way in which he has conducted himself can ruin the upside of the Republican Party's opportunity in 2016 and create discord among the various candidates.
The rise in Carson suggests the same Trump disaffected types want a non-politico but one who conducts himself in a more dignified and understated manner.
I like Dr. Carson but were he to be the nominee he would have even less qualifications than Obama and save for the fact that he is bright and has a proven record as an achiever his total lack of political and executive experience are worrisome.
The Chinese Torture release of e mails that will continue to afflict Hillarious provides an opening which Republicans must not squander. The Donald could offend the broad mass of voters and they could refuse to vote for a worthy candidate simply because he is a Republican. On the other hand, according to Noonan, America is in play and Trump has a far broader appeal among those supposedly offended by his comments than is being captured by the press and media.
I admit The Donald appeals to my baser instincts and distaste for wimpy politicians, who are controlled by monied lobbyists and special interests who pass laws they do not read and are not subjected to because they have become elitists.
On the other hand I also expect some level of social decorum be displayed by my president and that he/she not be self-enamored.
Perhaps Stephens has over -reacted and Noonan is on to something. Time will tell.
Meanwhile, the upcoming CNN debate should provide another sorting out opportunity and I am delighted Fiorina has been allowed to climb aboard..
===
Are we losing the war of ideas? (See 4 below.)
and
You decide whether it matters and what, if anything, you intend to do about it if it does.. (See 4a below.)
==
Now for some Labor Day chicken humor! (See 5 below)
===
Dick
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)
The Clintons’ Achilles Heel?
by Paul R Hollrah For most of the 20th century, until 1989, the major public accounting firms in the U.S. and the U.K. were known as the Big Eight. Listed alphabetically, they were Arthur Anderson, Arthur Young & Company, Coopers & Lybrand, Ernst & Whinney, Deloitte Haskins & Sells, Peat Marwick Mitchell, Price Waterhouse, and Touche Ross.
However, in 1987,
Peat Marwick Mitchell merged with Klynveld Main Goerdeler, a mid-sized European
firm, to become KPMG. Then, in 1989,
Ernst & Whinney merged with Arthur Young to form Ernst
& Young, and Deloitte Haskins & Sells merged with Touche Ross to
become Deloitte & Touche. Finally, in
1998, Price Waterhouse merged with Coopers & Lybrand to become Pricewaterhouse
Coopers. Along with Arthur Anderson,
they made up the Big Five.
Arthur Anderson
was founded in 1913. Its namesake founder,
Arthur Anderson, was a man who held closely to the highest standards of the
accounting profession, insisting that the accountant’s first responsibility was
to his client’s investors, not to his client’s management. However, by the 1980s, because of intense
competition between the top accounting firms for non-accounting consulting
services, that standard was beginning to show signs of erosion. Within each firm, the commitment to audit
independence was slowly eroded as they strove to win more-lucrative non-accounting
consultancy contracts with their major clients.
One of Arthur Anderson’s principal clients was the Houston-based energy company, Enron. And as the firm’s revenues from their non-accounting consultancy at Enron far exceeded their audit and accounting revenues, those involved in the audit and accounting end of their business were increasingly pressured to do what was necessary to keep Enron’s top management happy. In other words, Arthur Anderson experienced an ongoing internal struggle, attempting to balance the need to maintain the highest of accounting standards, while contributing to the client’s desire to produce the most attractive quarterly and annual earnings reports.
Finally, in 2001, it was learned that Enron had maintained
its position as an attractive investment opportunity in large part through
systematic accounting fraud… none of which could have been accomplished without
the active complicity of their accounting firm, Arthur Anderson.
When accounting irregularities involving some $100 billion
were alleged, the members of Enron’s board of directors appointed a committee,
the Powers Committee, to look into the matter.
The committee’s final report stated that, “The evidence available to us suggests that
Andersen did not fulfill its professional responsibilities in connection with
its audits of Enron's financial statements, or its obligation to bring to the
attention of Enron's Board (or the Audit and Compliance Committee) concerns
about Enron's internal contracts over the related-party transactions.”
On December 2,
2001, Enron filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and six months later, on June 15, 2002, Arthur Andersen was
convicted of obstruction of justice, having been found
guilty of shredding documents related to its auditing of Enron. And while the conviction was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme
Court, the negative publicity resulting from the high profile scandal,
combined with the findings of criminal complicity, ultimately destroyed the
firm. On August 31, 2002, Arthur
Anderson agreed to surrender its CPA license and its right to practice before
the SEC… and then there were four.
Of the remaining
top four accounting firms, Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) has been seen, until
now, as the “cream of the crop.” In
fact, among the Big Four, PwC has been ranked by Vault Accounting as the
best accounting employer for two
consecutive years, 2014 and 2015. But
now, because of their association with the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton
Foundation, PwC is about to learn, first hand, the meaning of the old adage,
“Lie down with dogs; get up with fleas.”
In a June 17, 2015, posting on WorldNetDaily (WND), bestselling author Dr.
Jerome Corsi, reports that, according to
respected Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel, “The Big Four
accounting firm, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, failed to detect and report the
Clinton Foundation’s ‘apparent massive diversions of funds’ from a global
charity that fights HIV/AIDS.”
Although the methodology
is a bit difficult for non-accountants to grasp, Ortel charges that the
Clintons siphoned off tens of millions of dollars annually from pass-through funds
received by the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) from UNITAID, a Geneva-based
global health organization which negotiates low prices for drugs and diagnostic
equipment and supplies, working through groups such as CHAI to deliver drugs
and health services where needed.
The pool
of funds used to finance UNITAID’s activities is derived from a US$1 surcharge
on coach-class airline tickets (up to US$40 on business and first class
tickets) in nine countries: Cameroon, Chile, Congo, France, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Niger and
the Republic of Korea. According
to records of the French Civil Aviation Authority, the tax imposed on airline
tickets by the French government alone has produced more than $1 billion in a six
year period.
According
to the WND article,
Ortel contends that PwC “allowed
the Clintons to continue diverting millions of dollars donated for charitable
purposes to the personal enrichment and benefit of themselves and their close
associates, perpetrating a crime called inurement. (The “inurement” prohibition of
the Internal Revenue Code prohibits the use of the income or the assets of a
tax-exempt organization, such as the Clinton Foundation, to directly or
indirectly benefit any person with a close relationship with the organization,
or one who is in a position to exercise significant control over the
organization.)
In order to reach that conclusion, Ortel used
financial information drawn directly from UNITAID sources, comparing it to financial
reports of the Clinton Foundation contained in their PwC audit for 2013. Ortel contends that “PwC failed to conduct
the basic due diligence required of auditors, neglecting to discover and report
the diversion of funds.” He found that,
as has been reported in recent stories of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as U.S.
Secretary of State, the Clintons purportedly used their international prestige and
political power to “leverage” international manufacturers of prescription
quality drugs and various health care products and sell them to Third-World
countries at a discount to combat AIDS/HIV.
WND quotes Ortel as saying that, if any of
the 50 state attorneys general should present the available evidence to a
federal judge, he believes “an injunction would be ordered, shutting down the
Clinton Foundation and placing the organization in receivership.”
He is quoted as saying,
“Ironically, the Clinton Family holds itself out for praise when Clinton
Foundation financial statements are inaccurate and riddled with material,
uncorrected errors.” He concludes.
“Those who take requisite time to study public financial filings should see
what I see – that the Clintons are playing ‘Robin Hood,’ but in reverse, now
with a major accounting firm of PwC’s magnitude participating in the cover-up.” In other words, what Ortel suggests is that
the Clintons, instead of taking from the rich and giving to the poor, are profiting
from the poor to give to the rich… i.e. the Clintons and their toadies.
What is
surprising… perhaps not so surprising where the Clintons are concerned… is the
fact that neither PwC, nor any other Clinton Foundation auditor since 2006, has
bothered to reconcile Clinton Foundation receipts from UNITAID, as reported on
their IRS Form 990, with audited annual financial statements published by
UNITAID. In other words, in examining
the financial dealings of the most corrupt political family in America, none of
the most highly paid accounting professionals in the country thought to look
for corruption in any of the most logical places.
So where
did the Clintons get off on the wrong track?
Upon leaving the White House in disgrace in January 2001, Bill Clinton, a
disbarred lawyer who narrowly avoided criminal prosecution for perjuring
himself before a federal judge, was desperate to find some way to salvage a
positive legacy for the history books.
Like modern
era Republican presidents… Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Bush (41) and Bush (43)… he
could have retired gracefully into relative obscurity. He could have retired to a posh hilltop
mansion near Hot Springs where he could spend all of his free time patronizing
the spas and nudie bars of that famed Arkansas gambling mecca. But that’s not what he chose to do. Like his Democrat predecessor, Jimmy Carter,
Clinton could not find happiness and contentment outside the political spotlight. Instead, he decided to establish a path to respectability
by creating a foundation dedicated to helping the poor and downtrodden of the
Third World. That was the genesis of the
Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative. And while the Clinton Foundation and the
Clinton Global Initiative may have washed a bit of the seediness off the
Clinton image, it is the excesses of the Clinton Foundation that may ultimately
destroy Hillary Clinton’s dream of ever becoming the first female president of
the United States.
But more
than that, the Clintons’ unbridled greed and their unquenchable thirst for
power could easily reduce the Big Four of the accounting profession to the Big
Three… taking thousands of accounting executives and their families down with
them. If Ortel’s findings are ultimately
confirmed, the Clinton era of American politics may finally be at an end. More than Benghazi, the missing emails, the private
email server, the outlandish speaking fees, and the suspected pay-to-play quid pro quo’s of Hillary’s state department tenure, the alleged fraudulent
accounting provided by PwC, the country’s top accounting firm, may yet be the
Clintons’ Achilles heel.
Now all
we have to do is to get one of our fine conservative state attorneys general to
get off their backsides and take the available evidence before a federal
judge. Bill and Hillary will soon learn
that attempting to hoodwink the IRS and the SEC is almost certain to meet with
disaster.
Paul R. Hollrah is a
retired government relations executive and a two-time member of the U.S.
Electoral College. He currently lives
and writes among the hills and lakes of northeast Oklahoma’s Green Country.
1a) Hillary Clinton vs. Ashley Madison
1a) Hillary Clinton vs. Ashley Madison
A website for adulterers faces more accountability than a U.S. secretary of state.
By WILLIAM MCGURN
What a world we live in when a website promoting adultery is held more accountable than a U.S. secretary of state.
Only weeks after a hack exposed the names and other confidential information aboutAshley Madison’s mostly male clientele, it’s hard to see how the company can recover. By contrast, Hillary Clinton remains the Democratic Party’s likely 2016 nominee for president, even though we’ve known since at least March 2013 (thanks to a Romanian hacker named Guccifer) that she conducted State Department business over her private email, which has in turn helped her evade the normal oversight and accountability for White House appointees.
How can this be?
One big reason is that much of the back-and-forth about Mrs. Clinton’s emails has focused on secondary disputes: the latest batch of emails coughed up by State in response to a federal judge’s order, the classified information that may be on these emails, and whether what she did was akin to the mishandling of classified information that resulted in a deal for Gen. David Petraeus under which he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.
These are all serious issues, and anyone who has worked in a White House and handled classified information (as this reporter has) understands how flimsy Mrs. Clinton’s excuses are. Not to mention how extraordinary her behavior was.
Even so, in a perverse way the public arguments over the classified content may be helping Mrs. Clinton in her continuing effort to confound and obscure. We now have two fresh examples. The first was a column last Thursday in the Washington Post in which the author concluded there was nothing criminal in how Mrs. Clinton handled classified info; the second was a Monday USA Today op-ed in which the former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Gen. Petraeus says there’s no comparison between the two cases.
Neither author addresses the smoking gun: Why Mrs. Clinton set up a private server for all her official email in the first place. Mrs. Clinton herself has avoided the server question, which is no surprise. Because there is no credible explanation that doesn’t implicate her in willful deceit.
It’s true that many officials have at one time sent emails over a personal instead of official account. But a personal email does not require a personal server. Nor does the Colin-Powell-Did-It defense apply here, because while Mr. Powell as secretary of state did send some work emails over his personal email, he never set up his own server.
Only one explanation makes any sense: Mrs. Clinton entered the Obama administration determined to put in place a system to help her avoid accountability. Democratic operative James Carville admitted as much on ABC’s “The Week” in March when he said: “I suspect she didn’t want Louie Gohmert”—a Republican congressman from Texas—“rifling through her emails.”
Remember, a private server has nothing to do with the convenience of having all your email accounts on one smartphone, Mrs. Clinton’s original excuse for mixing personal and official emails. It has nothing to do with whether classified information is marked. And it has nothing to do with whether her emails were about yoga or Chelsea’s wedding—or Benghazi or some looming Clinton Foundation conflict of interest.
Mrs. Clinton’s private server was about one thing: control. She used it to ensure she would be in a position to thwart effective oversight and accountability.
Shannen Coffin, a Bush administration lawyer who worked for both the Justice Department and Vice President Dick Cheney, points to the section of the U.S. Code that deals with officials who deliberately conceal, alter or destroy records belonging to government. It’s hard to see how this isn’t exactly what Mrs. Clinton intended when she set up her server.
“Prosectors at the Justice Department have to be considering that basic question,” Mr. Coffin says. “If Mrs. Clinton is cleared of mishandling classified info, and no one asks about the legality of the email system in general, then this isn’t a real investigation.”
We already know Mrs. Clinton did in fact conceal her emails from legitimate inquiries. To begin with, her emails were concealed from Freedom of Information requests and congressional subpoenas, because State did not have her private server and thus could not search it. We further know that she also edited—i.e., altered—some of the emails before she did turn them over. What we don’t yet know, and may never know, is what was on the 31,000 emails Mrs. Clinton destroyed.
She continues to benefit, moreover, from the way she, the Obama administration and the FBI have dragged their feet, even as a new Quinnipiac poll reveals that the top three words voters associate with her are “liar,” “dishonest” and “untrustworthy.” The point is, even though we know that she used her personal emails accounts to carry out State Deparment business, the most important emails may well remain hidden through the 2016 election—which she could win.
Not so for Ashley Madison, whose CEO has been forced out and whose planned public offering has been killed. Seems the market for adulterers has more exacting standards than the market for a Democratic presidential nominee.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)-
U.S. president who would, just a few years later, actively try to strengthen Iran’s geopolitical and financial position while providing international legitimacy to the Iranian nuclear program. But sometimes truth is scarier than fiction.
BARACK OBAMA: Let me be perfectly clear, if the chickens like their eggs they can keep their eggs. No chicken will be required to cross the road to surrender her eggs. Period.
JOHN McCAIN: My friends, the chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to engage in cooperation and dialogue with all the chickens on the other side of the road.
HILLARY CLINTON: What difference at this point does it make why the chicken crossed the road.
DICK CHENEY: Where's my gun?
COLIN POWELL: Now to the left of the screen, you can clearly see the satellite image of the chicken crossing the road.
BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with that chicken.
AL GORE: I invented the chicken.
JOHN KERRY: Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road, I am now against it! It was the wrong road to cross, and I was misled about the chicken's intentions. I am not for it now, and will remain against it.
AL SHARPTON: Why are all the chickens white?
DR. PHIL: The problem we have here is that this chicken won't realize that he must first deal with the problem on this side of the road before it goes after the problem on the other side of the road. What we need to do is help him realize how stupid he is acting by not taking on his current problems before adding any new problems.
OPRAH: Well, I understand that the chicken is having problems, which is why he wants to cross the road so badly. So instead of having the chicken learn from his mistakes and take falls, which is a part of life, I'm going to give this chicken a NEW CAR so that he can just drive across the road and not live his life like the rest of the chickens.
ANDERSON COOPER: We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have not yet been allowed to have access to the other side of the road.
NANCY GRACE: That chicken crossed the road because he's guilty! You can see it in his eyes and the way he walks.
MARTHA STEWART: No one called me to warn me which way the chicken was going. I had a standing order at the Farmer's Market to sell my eggs when the price dropped to a certain level. No little bird gave me any insider information.
DR SEUSS: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I've not been told.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: To die. In the rain. Alone.
JERRY FALWELL: Because the chicken was gay! Can't you people see the plain truth? That's why they call it the 'other side.' Yes, my friends, that chicken was gay. If you eat that chicken, you will become gay too. I say we boycott all chickens until we sort out this abomination that the Liberal media whitewashes with seemingly harmless phrases like 'the other side.' That chicken should not be crossing the road. It's as plain and as simple as that.
GRANDPA: In my day we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Somebody told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.
BARBARA WALTERS: Isn't that interesting? In a few moments, we will be listening to the chicken tell, for the first time, the heartwarming story of how it experienced a serious case of molting, and went on to accomplish its lifelong dream of crossing the road.
ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.
JOHN LENNON: Imagine all the chickens in the world crossing roads together, in peace.
BILL GATES: I have just released e-Chicken2015, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents and balance your checkbook. Internet Explorer is an integral part of e-Chicken2015. This new platform is much more stable and will never reboot.
ALBERT EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?
2)-
Surviving the Obama Presidency and the Iranian Bomb
U.S. president who would, just a few years later, actively try to strengthen Iran’s geopolitical and financial position while providing international legitimacy to the Iranian nuclear program. But sometimes truth is scarier than fiction.
In my thriller, 35 Israeli submariners must decide what to do after Iran gets the bomb. In an unexpected twist on fiction, a small group of undecided members of Congress may similarly have to determine the course of history. They represent the last chance for a democracy to reject the nuclear appeasement of the Ayatollahs. There are reportedly 26 Senate Democrats currently in favor of President Obama’s Iran deal, so eight more are needed to sustain Obama’s veto of a Congressional resolution disapproving of the Iran agreement.
But, as ineptly negotiated as the Iran agreement is, defeating it would probably be worse, given the political realities. The best possible outcome, at this point, would be a Congressional resolution that rejects the Iran deal but then gets vetoed by Obama. Why? Because if Congress overrides Obama’s veto and defeats the deal, Iran will likely use that as an excuse to abandon whatever limited and temporary constraints it accepted under the agreement. Iran can then – at a time of its choosing – race towards nukes while Obama is still in office, secure in the knowledge that Obama wouldn’t dare to stop Iran militarily.
If Obama cowered from enforcing his no-chemical-weapons “red line” against the far weaker Syrian regime in 2013, there is no chance that Obama would militarily confront Iran over its nuclear program (and he essentially admitted as much in an Israeli television interview). Lest anyone doubt Obama’s enforcement laxity, he has already accepted Iran’s brazen violations of existing sanctions.
Incidentally, Obama claimed that “diplomacy” could handle the Syrian chemical weapons threat more effectively than force could, but now ISIS is gassing the Kurds with impunity, which undermines any notion that diplomacy will prevent nuclear abuses. In the Middle East, strength is far more respected than diplomacy, and it’s clear that Obama projects weakness to foes and friends alike. Indeed, senior Iranian military leaders have openly laughed at the emptiness of Obama’s military threats.
Not only will Obama fail to take any military action against Iranian nukes, he will probably thwart any Israeli operations to that effect. The Obama administration reportedly floated the idea of attacking Israeli jets en route to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Incredibly, Obama’s Iran deal arguably obligates the U.S. to help Iran protect its nuclear program from an Israeli attack.
The Islamic Republic couldn’t have a greater ally in the White House, and therefore would probably exploit a Congressional defeat of the Iran deal in order to race towards a nuclear weapon with impunity.
American Jews would also be harmed by the defeat of Obama’s Iran deal: Obama and his supporters would fuel antisemitism by alleging excessive Jewish power even more than they already have, and Jews and Israel would be blamed if Iran abandoned the agreement and dashed towards nukes – particularly if any military conflagration ensued.
As dangerous and risky as it is for Israel to undertake a unilateral military strike on Iran’s hardened and dispersed nuclear sites, such an operation is effectively impossible as long as Obama is in office. During Operation Protective Edge last summer, Obama reminded Israel that he could endanger the tiny state in the middle of war by refusing to resupply its military, and his FAA isolated Israel by imposing a ban on flights to Israel after just thirteen days of conflict ( it took about three years of war in Syria for the FAA to take the same action there).
On the diplomatic front, Obama has already threatened to withhold diplomatic support for Israel at the UN on the Palestinian issue, so on the Iranian nuclear issue – his legacy foreign policy “achievement” – he would be far more dangerous to Israel at the U.N.
The Obama administration has also leaked highly sensitive information to Israel’s detriment, from Israel’s attacks on Syrian weapons transfers to Hezbollah, to details about Israel’s nuclear program.
In addition to the already abundant evidence of Obama’s anti-Israel animus, Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the U.S., detailed Obama’s hostility towards Israel in his recently published memoir, Ally.
Given the Obama administration’s willingness to harm Israel, the Jewish state simply cannot risk a major military operation as long as Obama is in office. Thus, the pro-Iranian nuclear deal is now, thanks to Obama, the only way to stop Iranian nukes until Obama leaves office.
Fifty-six percent of Americans think Congress should reject the deal with Iran, and 60% disapprove of Obama’s handling of the U.S. relationship with Iran, according to the latest CNN/ORC poll. Congressional rejection of the deal will officially reflect these sentiments and undermine the deal’s legitimacy (despite Obama’s subsequent veto) – particularly because Obama purposely rammed the accord through the U.N. Security Council in order to make it a fait accompli that deprives Congress of any meaningful constitutional role in the process.
But if Congress officially rejects Obama’s disastrous deal and it survives only by Obama’s veto, the next president can more legitimately rescind it and – with the help of traditional Mideast allies – stop Iranian nuclear ambitions and hegemony.
Unfortunately, Obama’s policies have made the job of his successor much harder. The next president will face a far stronger and less isolated Iran, economically empowered by a world rushing to do business with the Ayatollahs. Iran’s $150 billion post-sanctions windfall will increase Iranian financial support for terrorist groups (as Obama officials now concede) and boost Iran’s military capabilities ( Russia just agreed to sell Iran its advanced, S-300 long-range, surface-to-air missile systems, complicating future missions to destroy Iranian nukes).
Until the 45th president assumes office on January 20, 2017, those concerned about Obama’s reckless and feckless foreign policy and his increasingly imperial presidency need to keep him on the defensive by focusing public attention on Obama administration controversies, many of which involve abuses of power that should interest the mainstream media. The busier Obama is defending his prior excesses, the less he can commit new ones during the rest of his tenure.
Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis , an apocalyptic novel about Iranian nukes and other geopolitical issues in the Middle East.
2a)
With the number of Democrats announcing their support for the Iran nuclear deal growing in recent days, the White House is no longer worried much about the need to secure enough votes to sustain a veto of a resolution of disapproval of the pact that was expected to be passed by Congress. Now, with their efforts to pressure Democrats into voting for the deal out of loyalty to President Obama and their party, it appears they have a chance to stop such a resolution from even being voted on. With only two Senate Democrats announcing their opposition (Chuck Schumer and Robert Menendez), there now appears to be a chance that the White House will be able to orchestrate a filibuster of the bill if at least three more Democrats join a unanimous Republican caucus. That will make a mockery of the approval process that Congress has been going through. If it does, the blame will belong to a president who has not hesitated to use inflammatory rhetoric and heavy-handed tactics to stop Congress from interfering with a policy of appeasement of Iran. But Obama didn’t do it alone. He could never have succeeded had he not had the unwitting help of Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. Without Corker’s foolish belief in working with the White House and pusillanimous unwillingness to push for an approval process in line with the Constitution’s provisions about foreign treaties, the administration might never have been able to get away with sneaking through the most important foreign policy decision in a generation.
How did this happen?
When the Republicans won control of the Senate in last November’s midterm elections, the one concern that some conservatives had about this stunning victory was the man who was slated to become the new chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. Corker’s elevation to chairman was the cause of some concern, especially for those who hoped the committee would take a leadership role in the fight to prevent the Obama administration from pushing through what was expected to be a weak nuclear deal with Iran in the event the negotiations succeeded in reaching an agreement. Unlike his Democratic predecessor Senator Robert Menendez, who had been a tough adversary of the administration run his own party, Corker talked a lot about working with the White House on the issue.
The Tennessee Republican didn’t get much cooperation from the administration. However, he did listen to a lot of his Democratic colleagues who were unhappy about confronting Obama but wanted to preserve some sort of Congressional oversight on the Iran negotiations. Thus, hoping to maintain the bipartisan consensus on Iran, Corker shifted the emphasis in the Senate away from a bill that would toughen sanctions against Iran that had been proposed by Menendez and Illinois Republican Mark Kirk. Instead, Corker’s attention was focused on something else: something that would compel the administration to present any deal with Iran for a Congressional vote.
Thus was born the Corker-Menendez bill that would be renamed Corker-Cardin after Menendez was forced out as ranking member of the Foreign Relations Committee and replaced by Senator Ben Cardin. Considering that the administration had openly said that it did feel compelled to present any agreement with Iran for Congressional approval, some sort of response was required. But the only thing Corker could get Corker and other Democrats to sign on to was a bill on an Iran nuclear deal that would provide for a simple up and down vote in both the House and the Senate.
What was wrong with that? The Constitution explicitly states that foreign treaties must be presented to the Senate where they must get a two-thirds vote to be approved. The impetus for this high bar was the thought that treaties ought to be a matter of national consensus since they involve the security of the nation and their impact will be felt beyond the current Congress or the incumbent president.
Corker’s bill turned that approval process upside down. Instead of 67 votes to pass a deal that would give Iran Western approval for becoming a nuclear threshold state and a nuclear power once the deal expired in 10 to 15 years, all Obama would now need was 34 votes in the Senate or one-third plus one vote in the House.
It can be argued that Democrats would never have gone along with a bill that would have designated the Iran deal as a treaty as it should have been. The administration knows that there is no legal argument for not designating the deal as a treaty. As Secretary of State John Kerry admitted in his testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the only reason they didn’t present it as a treaty is because it is too hard to pass a treaty.
As I wrote at the time that Corker-Cardin was passed, it could be argued that a bill that required a vote of any kind was better than Congress merely standing by and watching as Obama negotiated and implemented a treaty with Iran without doing a thing to stop him. But as bad as that would have been, at least Congress would not then be complicit in the farce of a nuclear deal that failed to achieve the administration’s own objective of ending Iran’s nuclear program.
Though its passage was seemingly a defeat for the administration, the president was laughing up his sleeve as he “reluctantly” signed it into law. The odds of overriding a veto of a resolution of disapproval were always low but by whipping most Democrats in line and forcing Schumer to vow not to try and persuade other Senators to follow him into opposition, the White House has done better than get 34 votes. If they get 41 of the 45 senators that caucus with the Democrats to oppose cloture, there will not even be a vote on the measure.
Corker is flummoxed by this prospect, telling the New York Times that he cannot imagine that a Senate will do it.
“Ninety-eight senators voted to give themselves the right to vote on this,” he said. “Surely they are not going to deny themselves a final vote on the deal.” …“To block a vote on the deal would be a fascinating turn of events at a minimum,” Mr. Corker said.
Fascinating isn’t quite the word I’d use for such a turn of events. A better description of what is happening is that a tough-minded administration has run rings around an inept Corker. Did he really trust liberal Democrats who promised that they wanted a vote? If so, he is clearly not smart enough to be left in the position of influence he has been given. Far from his accommodating attitude rebuilding the consensus on Iran that Obama has been busy destroying, Corker’s willingness to bend over backwards has facilitated Obama’s disastrous policy.
A filibuster will enable the president to say that Congress never defeated his Iran deal. That’s something that he would have been denied if he had been forced to veto the bill. Even a complete end run by the administration around congress where no vote at all would have been held would have been preferable to a successful Iran deal filibuster. Then opponents would have been able to point to the extra-legal way the president was sneaking his treaty with Iran through. A failed effort to designate the deal as a treaty would also at least have set the record straight about Obama’s disregard for the Constitution. But now Obama can say the deal was reviewed and in a sense passed. This will strengthen his efforts to undermine existing sanctions and make it harder for the deal to overturn it in the future once he leaves office.
For that he can thank Corker. No wonder most of the public, and especially the conservative voters whose efforts made Corker a committee chair, are disgusted with Congress. If that’s the best the Republicans can do, it’s not surprising that many of their adherents want to throw all of the bums out of Washington, theirs as well as the Democrats.
It’s been apparent for months that Congressional opponents of the Iran nuclear deal didn’t have the votes to override President’s Obama’s veto of a resolution of disapproval of the pact. But it’s only been in the last couple of weeks that the White House’s campaign of pressure on Democrats might result in there being enough votes to sustain a filibuster of such a measure. Either way, the deal is almost certain to survive — albeit by the backward approval process that a credulous Senator Bob Corker was suckered into accepting by the Democrats earlier this year rather than a constitutional treaty ratification that it could never get through. That leaves those worried about the immediate after-shocks of the deal’s triumph thinking that there must be another way to stop or at to at least slow the president’s push for détente with the Islamist regime. As the Wall Street Journal reports,the route they’ve chosen is an attempt to stage a fight over the renewal of the act that mandates sanctions on Iran for its nuclear violations and its support of terrorism. If the administration has the votes to stuff the nuclear deal down the throats of a wary American public and Congress, it surely has enough to stop this measure. But by forcing the country to discuss Tehran’s role as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, the plan has merit.
The administration’s arguments against an effort to renew the Iran Sanctions Act starts with the fact that it doesn’t expire until the end of 2016. To speak of it being premature on those grounds doesn’t take into account the dysfunctional nature of Congress. But the real reason is that the White House has no interest in renewing that act at any point in the future but especially not now when their entente with Tehran is still in its infancy.
The deal with Iran left the door wide open for the regime to either cheat their way to a bomb or to get one by waiting patiently for it to start expiring in a decade. But just as damning was the administration’s decision to ignore every other dangerous aspect of Iranian behavior. The pact makes no mention of Iran’s support for terrorism as well as its ballistic missile program, which shows the target of their nuclear program is the U.S. and Europe and not just Israel. But by renewing the act, the deal’s critics hope to not only draw attention to Tehran’s funding of Hamas and Hezbollah. They also hope to get back some of the economic leverage over Iran that Obama discarded during the course of the negotiations.
One of the talking points used about the deal by administration apologists, including Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, was the conceit that existing penalties on Iranians accused of terrorism would not be lifted when the nuclear sanctions were tossed out. This was always a subterfuge since money is fungible. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is not just a military organization and the funnel for terror funding but also a mainstay of the Iranian economy. The IRGC have their fingers in just about every Iranian pie and they will, despite Obama’s disclaimers, profit greatly from the nuclear agreement along with everyone else in Tehran.
The administration is no more enthusiastic about merely keeping the sanctions law on the books than it was for the measures that created the economic pressure that brought Iran to the negotiating table. It will claim, as it did when Congress tried to toughen the sanctions already on the books that doing so is provocative and breaking faith with their negotiating partners. That’s especially true since the one thing that we know the deal will accomplish will be to enrich Iran with $100 billion in unfrozen funds and countless billions more in the profits it will reap from Western business partners once sanctions are lifted.
But what a debate about sanctions renewal will make clear to the country is that this administration isn’t so much worried about Iranian sensibilities as they lack all interest in holding the regime accountable.
After all, we know right now that Iran is smuggling funds and equipment into Gaza to help Hamas build new terror tunnels along the border with Israel aimed at facilitating kidnapping and murder. And we also know that they use Hezbollah as an auxiliary armed force both to maintain a northern front against Israel and to prop up their Syrian ally, dictator Bashar Assad.
These factors alone ought to justify the maintenance of sanctions on Iran no matter whether or not they cheat on a nuclear deal with the sort of loose inspections process (self-inspecting at Parchin and 24-day notice of inspections elsewhere). But that is precisely the sort of discussion that the administration wants. Why? Because the real point of the deal — made clear in many statements by the president — is to allow Iran to “get right with the world.” The goal here is not to isolate Iran and to make it impossible for it to export terror but to make them our partners. As Iran’s leaders who encourage “Death to America” chants by their followers have indicated, that’s a fool’s errand. Yet that is the reason why we have a deal with them in the first place and why this administration will fight tooth and nail against any effort to renew sanctions on Iran.
Some will also accuse the deal’s opponents of playing politics with this effort. That isn’t entirely wrong. Republicans want to put liberal Democrats who claim to be tough on Iran and supporters of Israel, on the spot about a measure that would hold Iran accountable for its funding of Hamas and Hezbollah. But unlike with their votes on the nuclear deal, there will be no cover from the White House that will enable them to complain they are doing the right thing for U.S. security and the alliance with Israel.
No, if Democrats oppose the renewal of the sanctions act they are putting themselves on record on an issue where there isn’t much wiggle room. Those who can’t be persuaded to vote for a measure that penalizes Iran for its terrorist activities will be forced to expose themselves to the charge that they prefer to mollify the ayatollahs to stopping the regime from helping to murder Israelis.
Is that fair? Actually, yes, it is.
If Democrats want to commit themselves to détente with Iran they can certainly do so. But they can’t oppose terror sanctions renewal without placing themselves in a camp that views Iran’s feelings as more worthy of consideration than the lives of terror victims. If sanctions renewal fails, that is an issue that ought to be hung around the necks of those members of Congress that have chosen to do the president’s dirty work.
Jonathan S. Tobin is senior online editor of COMMENTARY magazine and chief political blogger at www.commentarymagazine.com. He can be reached via e-mail at:jtobin@commentarymagazine.com.
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3)The Donald and the Demagogues
Democracies that trade substance for charisma don’t last. Trump is America’s answer to Hugo Chávez.
By
If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.
If you have reached physical maturity and still chuckle at Mr. Trump’s pubescent jokes about Rosie O’Donnell or Heidi Klum, you will never reach mental maturity. If you watched Mr. Trump mock fellow candidate Lindsey Graham’s low poll numbers and didn’t cringe at the lack of class, you are incapable of class. If you think we need to build new airports in Queens the way they build them in Qatar, you should be sent to join the millions of forced laborers who do construction in the Persian Gulf. It would serve you right.
Since Mr. Trump joined the GOP presidential field and leaped to the top of the polls, several views have been offered to explain his popularity. He conveys a can-do image. He is the bluntest of the candidates in addressing public fears of cultural and economic dislocation. He toes no line, serves no PAC, abides no ideology, is beholden to no man. He addresses the broad disgust of everyday Americans with their failed political establishment.
And so forth and so on—a parade of semi-sophisticated theories that act as bathroom deodorizer to mask the stench of this candidacy. Mr. Trump is a loudmouth vulgarian appealing to quieter vulgarians. These vulgarians comprise a significant percentage of the GOP base. The leader isn’t the problem. The people are. It takes the demos to make the demagogue.
There will be other opportunities to write about the radical affinities and moralizing conceits of Democrats and liberals. For now let’s speak plainly about what the Trump ascendancy says about the potential future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
It says that we may soon have a conservative movement in which the American creed of “give us your tired, your poor” could yield to the Trumpian creed that America must not become a “dumping ground” to poor immigrants from Latin America, as if these millions of hardworking and God-fearing people are a specimen of garbage.
It says that a party that carries on about the importance of e pluribus unum and rails against the identity politics of assorted minorities is increasingly tempted to indulge the paranoid (and losing) identity politics of a dwindling white majority.
It says that a sizable constituency in a party that is supposed to favor a plain reading of the Constitution objects to a plain reading of the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
It says that a movement that is supposed to believe in defending old-fashioned values and traditions against the assorted degradations of the postmodern left might allow itself to be led by a reality-TV star whose meretricious tastes in trophies, architectural and otherwise, mainly remind me of the aesthetics of Bob Guccione.
It says that a party that is supposed to believe in the incomparable awesomeness of America thinks we are losing the economic hunger games to the brilliant political leadership of . . . Mexico. It says that a movement that is supposed to believe in economic freedom doesn’t believe in the essence of economic freedom: to wit, the free movement of goods, services, capital and labor.
It says that many of the same people who have bellyached nonstop for the past seven years about the cult-of-personality president currently in the Oval Office are seriously willing to consider another cult-of-personality figure on the off-chance he’s peddling the cure America needs. Focus group testing by pollster Frank Luntz suggests that Mr. Trump’s fans could care less about his flip-flopping political views but responded almost rapturously to his apparently magnetic persona.
When people become indifferent to the ideas of their would-be leaders, those leaders become prone to dangerous ideas. Democracies that trade policy substance for personal charisma tend not to last as democracies. They become Bolivarian republics. Donald Trump may be America’s Hugo Chávez, minus the political consistency.
***
Because the Republican Party has not lost its mind—at least not yet—I doubt that Mr. Trump will be its presidential nominee. A single bad poll could break him. The summer before an election-year summer tends to be a political clown-time. Voters, like diners in a fancy restaurant, may entertain the idea of ordering the pigeon, but they’ll probably wind up with the chicken.
Still, Mr. Trump’s political star is rising in a period when fringe politics, both on the right and the left, are making a comeback in the West. Marine Le Pen in France. Beppe Grillo in Italy. Jeremy Corbyn in Great Britain. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party. Every now and then some of these characters get into office. Look at Viktor Orbán in Hungary, or Alexis Tsipras in Greece.
Republicans like to think of America as an exceptional nation. And it is, not least in its distaste for demagogues. Donald Trump’s candidacy puts the strength of that distaste to the test.
3a)
America Is So in Play
Donald Trump’s staying power in the polls reflects a change in the electorate only now coming into focus.
By PEGGY NOONAN
So, more thoughts on Donald Trump’s candidacy, because I can’t stop being fascinated.
You know the latest numbers. Quinnipiac University’s poll this week has Mr. Trump at a hefty 28% nationally, up from 20% in July. Public Policy Polling has Mr. Trump leading all Republicans in New Hampshire with 35%. A Monmouth University poll has him at 30% in South Carolina, followed 15 points later by Ben Carson.
Here are some things I think are happening.
One is the deepening estrangement between the elites and the non-elites in America. This is the area in which Trumpism flourishes. We’ll talk about that deeper in.
Second, Mr. Trump’s support is not limited to Republicans, not by any means.
Third, the traditional mediating or guiding institutions within the Republican universe—its establishment, respected voices in conservative media, sober-minded state party officials—have little to no impact on Mr. Trump’s rise. Some say voices of authority should stand up to oppose him, which will lower his standing. But Republican powers don’t have that kind of juice anymore. Mr. Trump’s supporters aren’t just bucking a party, they’re bucking everything around, within and connected to it.
Since Mr. Trump announced, I’ve worked or traveled in, among other places, Southern California, Connecticut, Georgia, Virginia, New Jersey and New York’s Long Island. In all places I just talked to people. My biggest sense is that political professionals are going to have to rethink “the base,” reimagine it when they see it in their minds.
I’ve written before about an acquaintance—late 60s, northern Georgia, lives on Social Security, voted Obama in ’08, not partisan, watches Fox News, hates Wall Street and “the GOP establishment.” She continues to be so ardent for Mr. Trump that she not only watched his speech in Mobile, Ala., on live TV, she watched while excitedly texting with family members—middle-class, white, independent-minded—who were in the audience cheering. Is that “the Republican base”? I guess maybe it is, because she texted me Wednesday, saying: “I registered to vote today! I am a Republican now!!!” I asked if she’d ever been one before. Reply: “No, never!!!”
Something is going on, some tectonic plates are moving in interesting ways. My friend Cesar works the deli counter at my neighborhood grocery store. He is Dominican, an immigrant, early 50s, and listens most mornings to a local Hispanic radio station, La Mega, on 97.9 FM. Their morning show is the popular “El Vacilón de la Mañana,” and after the first GOP debate, Cesar told me, they opened the lines to call-ins, asking listeners (mostly Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican) for their impressions. More than half called in to say they were for Mr. Trump. Their praise, Cesar told me a few weeks ago, dumbfounded the hosts. I later spoke to one of them, who identified himself as D.J. New Era. He backed Cesar’s story. “We were very surprised,” at the Trump support, he said. Why? “It’s a Latin-based market!”
“He’s the man,” Cesar said of Mr. Trump. This week I went by and Cesar told me that after Mr. Trump threw Univision’s well-known anchor and immigration activist, Jorge Ramos,out of an Iowa news conference on Tuesday evening, the “El Vacilón” hosts again threw open the phone lines the following morning and were again surprised that the majority of callers backed not Mr. Ramos but Mr. Trump. Cesar, who I should probably note sees me, I sense, as a very nice establishment person who needs to get with the new reality, was delighted.
I said: Cesar, you’re supposed to be offended by Trump, he said Mexico is sending over criminals, he has been unfriendly, you’re an immigrant. Cesar shook his head: No, you have it wrong. Immigrants, he said, don’t like illegal immigration, and they’re with Mr. Trump on anchor babies. “They are coming in from other countries to give birth to take advantage of the system. We are saying that! When you come to this country, you pledge loyalty to the country that opened the doors to help you.”
He added, “We don’t bloc vote anymore.” The idea of a “Latin vote” is “disparate,” which he said generally translates as nonsense, but which he means as “bull----.”
He finished, on the subject of Jorge Ramos: “The elite have different notions from the grass-roots working people.”
OK. Old style: Jorge Ramos speaks for Hispanic America. New style: Jorge Ramos speaks for Jorge Ramos. Old style: If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America. New style: How touching that an American president once thought if you lost a newsman you’d lost a country.
It is noted that a poll this week said Hispanics are very much not for Donald Trump. Gallup had 65% with an unfavorable view of him, and only 14% favorable. Mr. Trump and Mr. Ramos actually got into that, when Mr. Ramos finally questioned him after being allowed back into the news conference. Mr. Trump countered with a recent Nevada poll that has him with a state lead of 28%—and he scored even higher with Nevada’s Hispanics, who gave him 31% support.
I will throw in here that almost wherever I’ve been this summer, I kept meeting immigrants who are or have grown conservative—more men than women, but women too.
America is so in play.
And: “the base” isn’t the limited, clichéd thing it once was, it’s becoming a big, broad jumble that few understand.
***
On the subject of elites, I spoke to Scott Miller, co-founder of the Sawyer Miller political-consulting firm, who is now a corporate consultant. He worked on the Ross Perot campaign in 1992 and knows something about outside challenges. He views the key political fact of our time as this: “Over 80% of the American people, across the board, believe an elite group of political incumbents, plus big business, big media, big banks, big unions and big special interests—the whole Washington political class—have rigged the system for the wealthy and connected.” It is “a remarkable moment,” he said. More than half of the American people believe “something has changed, our democracy is not like it used to be, people feel they no longer have a voice.”
Mr. Miller added: “People who work for a living are thinking this thing is broken, and that economic inequality is the result of the elite rigging the system for themselves. We’re seeing something big.”
Support for Mr. Trump is not, he said, limited to the GOP base: “The molecules are in motion.” I asked what he meant. He said bars of support are not solid, things are in motion as molecules are “before combustion, or before a branch breaks.”
I end with this. An odd thing, in my observation, is that deep down the elite themselves also think the game is rigged. They don’t disagree, and they don’t like what they see—corruption, shallowness and selfishness in the systems all around them. Their odd anguish is that they have no faith the American people can—or will—do anything to turn it around. They see the American voter as distracted, poorly educated, subject to emotional and personality-driven political adventures. They sometimes refer to “Jaywalking,” the old Jay Leno “Tonight Show” staple in which he walked outside the studio and asked the man on the street about history. What caused the American Civil War? Um, Hitler? When did it take place, roughly? Uh, 1958?
Both sides, the elites and the non-elites, sense that things are stuck.
The people hate the elites, which is not new, and very American. The elites have no faith in the people, which, actually, is new. Everything is stasis. Then Donald Trump comes, like a rock thrown through a showroom window, and the molecules start to move.
Corrections & Amplifications
Georgia voters are not required to register by party affiliation. An earlier version mischaracterized one of the texts from the woman in Georgia.
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4)“… in January 2015, Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi said that Baghdadi is a member of the Brotherhood. Organizational cooperation, including military cooperation between IS and the Brotherhood, which is the largest organization in Egypt has grown steadily over the past two years since then defense minister Abdel Fattah Sisi overthrew the Brotherhood regime in July 2013”
Our World: Losing the war of ideas
Ideas are the most powerful human force. And the idea of jihad that the Obama administration will not discuss is perhaps the most powerful idea in the world’s marketplace of ideas today.
By Caroline Glick
A masked Islamic State militant reads the charges of two men tied to a cross. (photo credit:SCREENGRAB/JUSTPASTE.IT)
We have arrived at the point where the consequences of the West’s intellectual disarmament at the hands of political correctness begins to have disastrous consequences in the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
Speaking last month at the memorial service for the five US marines massacred at a recruiting office in Chattanooga, Tennessee, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said, “The meaning of their killing is yet unclear, and what combination of disturbed mind, violent extremism, and hateful ideology was at work, we don’t know.”
US Vice President Joe Biden claimed, the “perverse ideologues...may be able to inspire a single lone wolf, but they can never, never threaten who we are.”
Both men were wrong, and dangerously so. The meaning of the killings was no mystery.
Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez shot his victims down in cold blood because he was a jihadist. He wrote of his devotion to the Islamic war for global domination on his blog. He downloaded messages from Anwar Awlaki, the American al-Qaida commander killed in a drone attack in Yemen in 2011.
Awlaki’s most prolific follower to date was US Army Major Nidal Malik Hassan who massacred 13 soldiers and wounded 32 in his November 2009 assault at Ft. Hood, Texas. Yet, just as the Obama administration denies to this day that Hassan operated out of devotion to the cause of Islamic global supremacy through genocidal war, so Carter pretended away Abdulazeez’s obvious motive. And Biden stood before those whose lives were shattered by jihad last month and told them that jihad was not a threat to their way of life.
Ideas are the most powerful human force. And the idea of jihad that the Obama administration will not discuss is perhaps the most powerful idea in the world’s marketplace of ideas today.
The notion of jihad is fairly simple. It asserts that Islam is the only true religion. All other faiths are wrong and evil. It is the destiny of the one true faith to reign supreme. The duty of all Muslims is to facilitate Islam’s global rise and dominion.
How this duty is borne varies. Some take up arms. Some engage in indoctrination. Some engage in subversion. And some cheer from the sidelines, providing a fan base to encourage those more directly engaged. What is most important is the shared idea, the creed of jihad.
The jihadist creed is a creed of war. Consequently, its adherents cannot live peacefully with non-jihadists.
By definition, those who subscribe to a jihadist world view constitute a threat to those who do not share their belief system. Rather than contend with the idea of jihad, the West, led by the US, insists on limiting its focus to the outward manifestations of jihadist beliefs.
Physical bases of jihadists in places like Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen are targeted to kill specific people – like Awlaki. But the ideas that inspire them to action are ignored or dismissed as irrelevant and interchangeable with other ideologies, like Zionism and fiscal conservatism.
Unlike the Americans, the jihadists understand the power of their idea. And they invest hundreds of millions of dollars to propagate it. MEMRI recently reported that Islamic State (IS) runs at least three production companies. They disseminate professional- quality videos daily. The videographers, composers and singers who produce these films are IS members, no different from its beheaders, sex traders and chemical weapons purveyors.
Like IS’s battle successes and its sex slave industry, these videos have already had a profound impact on the shape of the Islamic world and the threat jihadist Islam constitutes for its opponents worldwide.
From Nigeria to Egypt to the Palestinian Authority to Pakistan, in Europe, the US and South America, jihadist armies and individual Muslims are embracing the idea of the caliphate – the ultimate aim of jihad – and pledging or weighing the option of pledging loyalty to IS and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
As a result, the never reasonable notion that you can limit war against jihad to the physical bases of IS and other terrorist groups while ignoring the idea that motivates their actions has become downright deadly.
Consider Egypt. As Yoni Ben-Menachem reported last month for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, on August 20, Baghdadi officially asked the Muslim Brotherhood to join IS and pledge loyalty to his caliphate. His request was completely reasonable.
Both IS and the Brotherhood share the same ideology, including the goal of Islamic domination through the renewed caliphate. Like the Brotherhood, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Ansar el-Makdis in the Sinai and other jihadist groups in Asia and Africa have already accepted Baghdadi’s invitation, pledged allegiance to the caliphate and changed their names to incorporate into the Islamic State.
Ben-Menachem noted that in January 2015, Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi said that Baghdadi is a member of the Brotherhood. Organizational cooperation, including military cooperation between IS and the Brotherhood, which is the largest organization in Egypt has grown steadily over the past two years since then defense minister Abdel Fattah Sisi overthrew the Brotherhood regime in July 2013.
IS’s goal is apparently to convince the young Brotherhood members to join forces. If the bid is successful, Egypt will become a tinderbox whose destructive force will be cataclysmic.
Then there is nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Last week the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Stimson Center published a joint report warning that given Pakistan’s rate of nuclear activity, within five to 10 years Pakistan may have the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, behind only the US and Russia. According to the report, Pakistan is producing nuclear bombs four times faster than India.
The epicenter of Pakistan’s nuclear work is its Baluchistan province. IS’s popularity is high and growing in the area, as it is throughout much of Pakistan.
Indian intelligence reports claim that Pakistan’s security forces are making the same cynical use of IS that they have made of al-Qaida and the Taliban.
ISI, Pakistan’s spy service, facilitates the operations of these groups in order to coerce the US to provide Pakistan with more aid, which it is expected to use to contain the threat it has itself cultivated.
This game has been going on for decades. But there is no reason to assume that as IS gains power and adherents, the same Pakistani security forces that believe they can control IS will not end up joining it. And as a consequence, the danger that bombs they now build will fall under Baghdadi’s control is real and growing.
Last week the Pentagon’s Inspector General announced it is investigating reports that the Obama administration has required US intelligence agencies to minimize their reporting on the threat IS poses. Intelligence officers have allegedly been ordered to exaggerate the success of the US’s anemic campaign against its bases in Iraq and Syria while understating the threat IS constitutes.
Over the past year, jihadists published the home addresses of American soldiers and officers. On numerous occasions, what an FBI alert referred to as “Middle Eastern men” accosted the wives of US soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan outside of their homes.
Speaking to concerned soldiers last week, Carter again pretended away the problem. While insisting that protecting soldiers is “job one for all of us,” Carter insisted that the threat was limited to “a few troubled losers who are on the Internet too much.”
Australian Foreign Minister Julia Bishop warned in June that IS may already have sufficient nuclear material to produce a dirty bomb. As we have seen with IS’s wide-scale use of chemical weapons in Iraq, we must assume that its fighters will use all weapons at their disposal.
Had the West – led by the US – been willing to abandon the intellectual straitjacket of political correctness with which it has willingly shackled itself, IS may very well have been a marginal movement able to attract no more than “a few troubled losers who are on the Internet too much.”
Biden’s pledge that while “perverse ideologues... may be able to inspire a single lone wolf they can never, never threaten who we are” might have been credible.
But because of our voluntary intellectual enslavement, we now face a real danger that IS and its demonic notions will take over Egypt. Because we seek to ignore the creed of jihad, Pakistan’s fast growing nuclear arsenal could very well become the property of the caliphate.
Ideas are the force that drives history. If we aren’t willing to fight for what we believe, then we will lose to those who are. And make no mistake, we are not winning this war.
Speaking last month at the memorial service for the five US marines massacred at a recruiting office in Chattanooga, Tennessee, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said, “The meaning of their killing is yet unclear, and what combination of disturbed mind, violent extremism, and hateful ideology was at work, we don’t know.”
US Vice President Joe Biden claimed, the “perverse ideologues...may be able to inspire a single lone wolf, but they can never, never threaten who we are.”
Both men were wrong, and dangerously so. The meaning of the killings was no mystery.
Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez shot his victims down in cold blood because he was a jihadist. He wrote of his devotion to the Islamic war for global domination on his blog. He downloaded messages from Anwar Awlaki, the American al-Qaida commander killed in a drone attack in Yemen in 2011.
Awlaki’s most prolific follower to date was US Army Major Nidal Malik Hassan who massacred 13 soldiers and wounded 32 in his November 2009 assault at Ft. Hood, Texas. Yet, just as the Obama administration denies to this day that Hassan operated out of devotion to the cause of Islamic global supremacy through genocidal war, so Carter pretended away Abdulazeez’s obvious motive. And Biden stood before those whose lives were shattered by jihad last month and told them that jihad was not a threat to their way of life.
Ideas are the most powerful human force. And the idea of jihad that the Obama administration will not discuss is perhaps the most powerful idea in the world’s marketplace of ideas today.
The notion of jihad is fairly simple. It asserts that Islam is the only true religion. All other faiths are wrong and evil. It is the destiny of the one true faith to reign supreme. The duty of all Muslims is to facilitate Islam’s global rise and dominion.
How this duty is borne varies. Some take up arms. Some engage in indoctrination. Some engage in subversion. And some cheer from the sidelines, providing a fan base to encourage those more directly engaged. What is most important is the shared idea, the creed of jihad.
The jihadist creed is a creed of war. Consequently, its adherents cannot live peacefully with non-jihadists.
By definition, those who subscribe to a jihadist world view constitute a threat to those who do not share their belief system. Rather than contend with the idea of jihad, the West, led by the US, insists on limiting its focus to the outward manifestations of jihadist beliefs.
Physical bases of jihadists in places like Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen are targeted to kill specific people – like Awlaki. But the ideas that inspire them to action are ignored or dismissed as irrelevant and interchangeable with other ideologies, like Zionism and fiscal conservatism.
Unlike the Americans, the jihadists understand the power of their idea. And they invest hundreds of millions of dollars to propagate it. MEMRI recently reported that Islamic State (IS) runs at least three production companies. They disseminate professional- quality videos daily. The videographers, composers and singers who produce these films are IS members, no different from its beheaders, sex traders and chemical weapons purveyors.
Like IS’s battle successes and its sex slave industry, these videos have already had a profound impact on the shape of the Islamic world and the threat jihadist Islam constitutes for its opponents worldwide.
From Nigeria to Egypt to the Palestinian Authority to Pakistan, in Europe, the US and South America, jihadist armies and individual Muslims are embracing the idea of the caliphate – the ultimate aim of jihad – and pledging or weighing the option of pledging loyalty to IS and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
As a result, the never reasonable notion that you can limit war against jihad to the physical bases of IS and other terrorist groups while ignoring the idea that motivates their actions has become downright deadly.
Consider Egypt. As Yoni Ben-Menachem reported last month for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, on August 20, Baghdadi officially asked the Muslim Brotherhood to join IS and pledge loyalty to his caliphate. His request was completely reasonable.
Both IS and the Brotherhood share the same ideology, including the goal of Islamic domination through the renewed caliphate. Like the Brotherhood, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Ansar el-Makdis in the Sinai and other jihadist groups in Asia and Africa have already accepted Baghdadi’s invitation, pledged allegiance to the caliphate and changed their names to incorporate into the Islamic State.
Ben-Menachem noted that in January 2015, Muslim Brotherhood leader Youssef Qaradawi said that Baghdadi is a member of the Brotherhood. Organizational cooperation, including military cooperation between IS and the Brotherhood, which is the largest organization in Egypt has grown steadily over the past two years since then defense minister Abdel Fattah Sisi overthrew the Brotherhood regime in July 2013.
IS’s goal is apparently to convince the young Brotherhood members to join forces. If the bid is successful, Egypt will become a tinderbox whose destructive force will be cataclysmic.
Then there is nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Last week the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Stimson Center published a joint report warning that given Pakistan’s rate of nuclear activity, within five to 10 years Pakistan may have the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world, behind only the US and Russia. According to the report, Pakistan is producing nuclear bombs four times faster than India.
The epicenter of Pakistan’s nuclear work is its Baluchistan province. IS’s popularity is high and growing in the area, as it is throughout much of Pakistan.
Indian intelligence reports claim that Pakistan’s security forces are making the same cynical use of IS that they have made of al-Qaida and the Taliban.
ISI, Pakistan’s spy service, facilitates the operations of these groups in order to coerce the US to provide Pakistan with more aid, which it is expected to use to contain the threat it has itself cultivated.
This game has been going on for decades. But there is no reason to assume that as IS gains power and adherents, the same Pakistani security forces that believe they can control IS will not end up joining it. And as a consequence, the danger that bombs they now build will fall under Baghdadi’s control is real and growing.
Last week the Pentagon’s Inspector General announced it is investigating reports that the Obama administration has required US intelligence agencies to minimize their reporting on the threat IS poses. Intelligence officers have allegedly been ordered to exaggerate the success of the US’s anemic campaign against its bases in Iraq and Syria while understating the threat IS constitutes.
Over the past year, jihadists published the home addresses of American soldiers and officers. On numerous occasions, what an FBI alert referred to as “Middle Eastern men” accosted the wives of US soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan outside of their homes.
Speaking to concerned soldiers last week, Carter again pretended away the problem. While insisting that protecting soldiers is “job one for all of us,” Carter insisted that the threat was limited to “a few troubled losers who are on the Internet too much.”
Australian Foreign Minister Julia Bishop warned in June that IS may already have sufficient nuclear material to produce a dirty bomb. As we have seen with IS’s wide-scale use of chemical weapons in Iraq, we must assume that its fighters will use all weapons at their disposal.
Had the West – led by the US – been willing to abandon the intellectual straitjacket of political correctness with which it has willingly shackled itself, IS may very well have been a marginal movement able to attract no more than “a few troubled losers who are on the Internet too much.”
Biden’s pledge that while “perverse ideologues... may be able to inspire a single lone wolf they can never, never threaten who we are” might have been credible.
But because of our voluntary intellectual enslavement, we now face a real danger that IS and its demonic notions will take over Egypt. Because we seek to ignore the creed of jihad, Pakistan’s fast growing nuclear arsenal could very well become the property of the caliphate.
Ideas are the force that drives history. If we aren’t willing to fight for what we believe, then we will lose to those who are. And make no mistake, we are not winning this war.
4a) DOES IT MATTER?
This is sobering. Thought provoking for sure. Unfortunately, there are a couple of people who block important messages out of their mind. Many of us will not live long enough to see the devastating results…but our grandchildren will.
STEP BY SMALL STEP....
IN HITLER'S GERMANY THEY WATCHED AS THEY CAME FOR THE JEWS.
IN HITLER'S GERMANY THEY WATCHED AS THEY CAME FOR THE GYPSIES.
IN HITLER'S GERMANY THEY WATCHED AS THEY CAME FOR THEIR NEIGHBORS ...
IN HITLER'S GERMANY WHEN THEY CAME FOR THEM IT WAS TOO LATE.
WHEN I FINISHED READING THIS I WAS SHORT OF BREATH.
Looking back through the past 4 years, many "Whens" pop up. Read them all to better understand where we are going as a country.
WHEN - he refused to disclose who donated money to his election campaign, as other candidates had done, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -he received endorsements from people like Louis Farrakhan, Muramar Kaddafi and Hugo Chavez, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -it was pointed out that he was a total newcomer and had absolutely no experience at anything except community organizing, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -he chose friends and acquaintances such as Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn who were revolutionary radicals, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -his voting record in the Illinois Senate and in the U.S. Senate came into question, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -he refused to wear a flag lapel pin and did so only after a public outcry, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -people started treating him as a Messiah and children in schools were taught to sing his praises, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -he stood with his hands over his groin area for the playing of the National Anthem and Pledge of Allegiance, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -he surrounded himself in the White House with advisors who were pro-gun control, pro-abortion, pro-homosexual marriage and wanting to curtail freedom of speech to silence the opposition, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -he said he favors sex education in kindergarten, including homosexual indoctrination, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -his personal background was either scrubbed or hidden and nothing could be found about him, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -the place of his birth was called into question, and he refused to produce a birth certificate, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -he had an association in Chicago with Tony Rezko- a man of questionable character and who is now in prison and had helped Obama to a sweet deal on the purchase of his home - people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -it became known that George Soros, a multi-billionaire Marxist, spent a ton of money to get him elected, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -he started appointing White House Czars that were radicals, revolutionaries, and even avowed Marxist /Communists, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he stood before the Nation and told us that his intentions were to "fundamentally transform this Nation" into something else, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - it became known that he had trained ACORN workers in Chicago and served as an attorney for ACORN, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he appointed cabinet members and several advisers who were tax cheats and socialists, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he appointed a Science Czar, John Holdren, who believes in forced abortions, mass sterilizations and seizing babies from teen mothers, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he appointed Cass Sunstein as Regulatory Czar who believes in "Explicit Consent," harvesting human organs without family consent and allowing animals to be represented in court, while banning all hunting, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he appointed Kevin Jennings, a homosexual and organizer of a group called Gay, Lesbian, Straight, Education Network as Safe school Czar and it became known that he had a history of bad advice to teenagers, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he appointed Mark Lloyd as Diversity Czar who believes in curtailing free speech, taking from one and giving to another to spread the wealth, who supports Hugo Chavez, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -Valerie Jarrett, an avowed Socialist, was selected as Obama's Senior White House Advisor, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -Anita Dunn, White House Communications Director, said Mao Tse Tung was her favorite philosopher and the person she turned to most for inspiration, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he appointed Carol Browner, a well-known socialist as Global Warming Czar working on Cap and Trade as the nation's largest tax, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he appointed Van Jones, an ex-con and avowed Communist as Green Energy Czar, who since had to resign when this was made known, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN- Tom Daschle, Obama's pick for Health and Human Services Secretary could not be confirmed because he was a tax cheat, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - as President of the United States, he bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he traveled around the world criticizing America and never once talking of her greatness, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - his actions concerning the Middle East seemed to support the Palestinians over Israel, our longtime ally, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he took American tax dollars to resettle thousands of Palestinians from Gaza to the United States, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he upset the Europeans by removing plans for missile defense system against the Russians, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he played politics in Afghanistan by not sending troops early-on when the Field Commanders said they were necessary to win, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he started spending us into a debt that was so big we could not pay it off, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he took a huge spending bill under the guise of stimulus and used it to pay off organizations, unions, and individuals that got him elected, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he took over insurance companies, car companies, banks, etc., people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he took away student loans from the banks and put it through the government, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he designed plans to take over the health care system and put it under government control, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he claimed he was a Christian during the election and tapes were later made public that showed Obama speaking to a Muslim group and 'stating' that he was raised a Muslim, was educated as a Muslim, and is still a Muslim, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN -he set into motion a plan to take over the control of all energy in the United States through Cap and Trade, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN - he traded 5 terrorists in Gitmo for 1 deserter/"possible" traitor without consulting Congress, people said it didn't matter.
WHEN-he finally completed his transformation of America into a Socialist State, people woke up- but it was too late. Add these up one by one and you get a score that points to the fact that Barrack Hussein Obama is determined to turn America into a Marxist-Socialist society. All of the items in the preceding paragraphs have been put into place. All can be documented very easily. Before you disavow this do an Internet search. The last paragraph alone is not yet cast in stone. You and I will write that paragraph. Will it read as above or will it be a happier ending for most of America?
Don't just belittle the opposition. Search for the truth. We all need to pull together or watch the demise of a free democratic society. we need to seek the truth and take action for it will keep us FREE. Our biggest enemy is not China, Russia, North Korea or Iran. Our biggest enemy is our complacent selves. The government will not help, so we need to do it ourselves.
Question….will you delete this, or passs it on to others so that they may know the facts, how to vote in November, 2016! Watch out, Hillary Clinton is no different!
It's your decision. Does IT matter?...
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5) WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?
DONALD TRUMP: All Mexican chickens who wish to cross this road must submit to a complete background check, and full body search.
BARACK OBAMA: Let me be perfectly clear, if the chickens like their eggs they can keep their eggs. No chicken will be required to cross the road to surrender her eggs. Period.
JOHN McCAIN: My friends, the chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to engage in cooperation and dialogue with all the chickens on the other side of the road.
HILLARY CLINTON: What difference at this point does it make why the chicken crossed the road.
DICK CHENEY: Where's my gun?
COLIN POWELL: Now to the left of the screen, you can clearly see the satellite image of the chicken crossing the road.
BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with that chicken.
AL GORE: I invented the chicken.
JOHN KERRY: Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road, I am now against it! It was the wrong road to cross, and I was misled about the chicken's intentions. I am not for it now, and will remain against it.
AL SHARPTON: Why are all the chickens white?
DR. PHIL: The problem we have here is that this chicken won't realize that he must first deal with the problem on this side of the road before it goes after the problem on the other side of the road. What we need to do is help him realize how stupid he is acting by not taking on his current problems before adding any new problems.
OPRAH: Well, I understand that the chicken is having problems, which is why he wants to cross the road so badly. So instead of having the chicken learn from his mistakes and take falls, which is a part of life, I'm going to give this chicken a NEW CAR so that he can just drive across the road and not live his life like the rest of the chickens.
ANDERSON COOPER: We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have not yet been allowed to have access to the other side of the road.
NANCY GRACE: That chicken crossed the road because he's guilty! You can see it in his eyes and the way he walks.
MARTHA STEWART: No one called me to warn me which way the chicken was going. I had a standing order at the Farmer's Market to sell my eggs when the price dropped to a certain level. No little bird gave me any insider information.
DR SEUSS: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I've not been told.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: To die. In the rain. Alone.
JERRY FALWELL: Because the chicken was gay! Can't you people see the plain truth? That's why they call it the 'other side.' Yes, my friends, that chicken was gay. If you eat that chicken, you will become gay too. I say we boycott all chickens until we sort out this abomination that the Liberal media whitewashes with seemingly harmless phrases like 'the other side.' That chicken should not be crossing the road. It's as plain and as simple as that.
GRANDPA: In my day we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Somebody told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.
BARBARA WALTERS: Isn't that interesting? In a few moments, we will be listening to the chicken tell, for the first time, the heartwarming story of how it experienced a serious case of molting, and went on to accomplish its lifelong dream of crossing the road.
ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.
JOHN LENNON: Imagine all the chickens in the world crossing roads together, in peace.
BILL GATES: I have just released e-Chicken2015, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents and balance your checkbook. Internet Explorer is an integral part of e-Chicken2015. This new platform is much more stable and will never reboot.
ALBERT EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?
COLONEL SANDERS: Did I miss one??????
ME: Who, in their right mind, really gives a s---?
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