Daughter, Amy, and Son-in-Law Israeli Cousin, Gil Appel, gets award
Steve at Derby
Today Trump did what he basically said he would. He opted out of Obama's lousy Iran Deal which was never submitted as a treaty. Obama knew it would not pass so he took his pen and squirted the ink in the eyes of Americans while he was on his cell phone.
In renouncing the deal Trump was factual, stayed on message and left little room about his future intentions. His rejection comments revealed the distinct input from Pompeo and Bolton.
We should all be thankful these two are aboard as Trump goes to N Korea.
The trouble with Trump is he is unlike most politicians. He actually tries to do what he campaigned on and that makes him un-trustworthy.
It is interesting how the anti-Trump crowd are jumping on him now because he walked away from the Iran Deal. They are now finding reasons why it is wrong to part ways with the Iranians who were going to be allowed to achieve nuclear status in 8 more years. They ignore the fact that Iran continues to build missiles which will be nuclear tipped. Why do they need these missiles if they only wanted nuclear for energy? The anti-Trumpers are willing to believe U.N inspectors who say Iran was in compliance when time and again the U.N has proven unreliable. They attack Trump because he has no next step program yet, he has stated he will re-impose sanctions.
Trump is doing fine in foreign relations because he is using logic as the basis of his strategy. Our opponents are used to fecklessness and do not know how to cope with rational behaviour where you do what you say you will. The fresh air approach is apparently confusing our adversaries.
Meanwhile:
The scummy New York Attorney General fell on his own sword and resigned. Amazing how the swamp is beginning to clean itself. Progressive hypocrites who have been living in glass houses and throwing rocks are finally paying the price.
No doubt his many liberal friends knew about him and his exploits but he was too important a fund raiser to diss. As long as liberals can keep bad things under wrap they can deny they ever happened and when things get exposed they can claim they never knew and remain self-righteous. After all, they and their media buddies did this with the Kennedy's, the Clinton's and Harvey among others. It is all a charade.
Even Mueller's run-away train has been stopped, for the moment, by a courageous district judge.
As for the market, the earnings season's releases are about over and the market will have to re-focus on political events and that should cause some increased volatility. The market's direction, near term, should be determined by real news. I still favor select health care names like ABBV, energy related, ie. KMI and DVN. T has been sluggish because of a declining customer base and the un-resolved law suit.
Trump is going to campaign hard to help his party retain The House and faces an uphill battle but his ratings and coat-tails are lengthening and the Democrats have yet to devise a counter strategy other than to be against everything he is accomplishing despite their obstruction.
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Iran continues making friends among our southern neighbors just as Russia tried decades ago. (See 1 below.)
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Soros' new shtick is to finance attorney general races of those most radical and left wing:
| Soros Drops $1.5 Million in San Diego for Far-Left District Attorney Candidate. https://tiny.iavian.net/mue4 |
Guns kill, we all know that. (See 2 below.)
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Hanson continues to explain Trump who is not understood by those who hate him and that is why he is a threat to them. (See 3 and 3a below.)
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1)
Iran in the US Backyard
By Judith Bergman
- Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif went on a tour of six Latin American nations in 2016. Iran's diplomatic efforts resulted in, among other things, access to the use of Venezuelan territory to advance Iran's solid rocket-fuel production.
- Culturally, Iran has helped Hezbollah establish itself as the dominant force among Shia Muslim communities throughout Latin America, and has taken control of their mosques, schools and cultural institutions.
- In 2012, there were 32 Iranian cultural centers across Latin America, to facilitate the spread of the Iranian Islamic revolution; today, less than a decade later, the number of centers has grown to more than 100.
Iran and Hezbollah have been operating in Latin America since the 1980s, effectively undisturbed. During this time, Iran and its proxy, the terrorist organization Hezbollah, have been Islamizing Latin America, seemingly to create a forward base of operations for the Islamic Republic in the backyard of the United States.
No Latin American country has designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization: Hezbollah can operate with relative impunity there. In April 2017, a Hezbollah operative, Mohamad Hamdar, arrested in Peru, was acquitted of all terrorism-related charges. The Peruvian court found that Hamdar's role within Hezbollah was in itself insufficient to consider him a terrorist[1]. This legal vacuum regarding Hezbollah might also be why Islamic terrorism, drug-trafficking and organized crime in the region is frequently underestimated.
According to testimony at a United States House of Representatives panel hearing on Iran's global terrorism network on April 17, 2018, Iran and Hezbollah have converted and radicalized thousands of Latin Americans to Shia Islam. In some Latin American countries, such as Venezuela, Iran's and Hezbollah's efforts have even been promoted by local political elites. Venezuelan Vice President Tareck El Aissami — of Lebanese and Syrian origins and with ties to both cocaine trafficking and Hezbollah — oversaw the illicit sale and distribution of at least 10,000 Venezuelan passports and other documents to persons from Syria, Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries. These reportedly included Hezbollah terrorists and members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. More than a decade ago, a US congressional report warned that Venezuela was providing support to radical Islamic groups, including the supply of identity documents. El Aissami could, in the foreseeable future, become president of Venezuela.
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif (left) meets with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on August 27, 2016 in Caracas, Venezuela. (Image source: Euronews video screenshot)
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Not only has Latin America's passive acceptance of Iranian infiltration also allowed the Islamic Republic to create large networks of mosques and cultural centers across the region; in addition, Iran and Hezbollah operate in multiple areas and across multiple sectors, both licit and illicit, apparently to strengthen and expand their influence in Latin America and to enrich Hezbollah as a way to finance its growing terrorist and paramilitary activities.
These areas of operation encompass diplomacy, commercial enterprise, religious dominance, and perhaps most significantly, substantial criminal activity. Iran has employed diplomacy to evade sanctions imposed on it before the Iran “nuclear deal.” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran, visited Latin America six times during 2005-2012, and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif went on a tour of six Latin American nations in 2016. These diplomatic efforts resulted in, among other things, access to the use of Venezuelan territory to advance Iran's solid rocket-fuel production.
Culturally, Iran has helped Hezbollah establish itself as the dominant force among Shia Muslim communities throughout the region, and has taken control of their mosques, schools and cultural institutions. In 2012, there were 32 Iranian cultural centers across Latin America the purpose of which is to facilitate the spread of the Iranian Islamic revolution; today, less than a decade later, the number of centers has grown to more than 100. Among other ways of presumably spreading its influence, Iran also runs a Spanish-language 24-hour news broadcast, HispanTV — operated by IRIB, Iran's state-owned public broadcasting corporation — which broadcasts across Latin America.
Hezbollah has become a substantial international crime syndicate, which utilizes its position in Latin America to deal in drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, human trafficking, trade in counterfeit goods and money laundering, the proceeds of which it uses to finance its activities.
Drugs, such as cocaine, are funneled into the United States to be sold there. Some investigators believe that Hezbollah amasses $ 1 billion a year from its criminal activities, which involve close cooperation with Latin American drug cartels and criminal syndicates. Together, these create havoc in Latin America and contribute to driving immigration into the United States. One expert recentlydescribed Hezbollah as “the gold standard” of the crime-terror convergence.
In 2008, the US began a secret law enforcement project, Operation Cassandra, to stop Hezbollah's activities in Latin America. According to an exposé in Politico, however, the Obama administration obstructed that operation:
“In practice, the administration's willingness to envision a new role for Hezbollah in the Middle East, combined with its desire for a negotiated settlement to Iran's nuclear program, translated into a reluctance to move aggressively against the top Hezbollah operatives, according to Project Cassandra members and others.”
After Israel's revelations on April 30, 2018, that the Iran deal was based on Iranian lies, it is probably safe to conclude that the Obama administration empowered Iran and its proxy in Latin America to ensure the Iran deal, which has apparently turned out to be nothing but a smokescreen for Iran's nuclear plans.
Having a seasoned and generously state-funded terrorist organization such as Hezbollah in the US's backyard unsurprisingly poses a genuine threat to the US homeland. According to Emmanuel Ottolenghi, speaking at the April hearing on Iran's global terrorism networks:
“A survey of cases prosecuted against Hezbollah operatives in the past two decades shows that the terror group remains a threat to the security of the U.S. homeland and the integrity of its financial system. Iran and Hezbollah sought to carry out high casualty attacks against U.S. targets multiple times. Additionally, they built networks they used to procure weapons, sell drugs, and conduct illicit financial activities inside the United States.…“operatives blend in; they nestle within existing expatriate communities; they find spouses; and set up seemingly legitimate businesses, acquiring permanent residency and citizenship in the process – all attributes that are part of their cover story”.
One recent example of Hezbollah operatives in action in the United States was the arrest of Samer El Debek and Ali Mohammad in New York. Both held US citizenship and had been trained by Hezbollah — including in the use of weapons such as rocket-propelled grenade launchers and machine guns — and acted on its behalf in the US. The two were charged with serious terrorism charges, such as conducting surveillance of potential targets in America[2].
The question is, whether the US government will adopt a comprehensive strategy to counter the ongoing efforts of Iran and Hezbollah to solidify their base of operations in Latin America against the United States and US interests. Such a strategy, as pointed out by several experts at the April 17 hearing, does not currently appear to be in place.
Judith Bergman is a columnist, lawyer and political analyst.
After the 2016 election, the so-called deep state was confident that it had the power easily to either stop, remove, or delegitimize the outlier Donald Trump and his presidency.
Give it credit, the Washington apparat quite imaginatively pulled out all the stops: implanting Obama holdover appointees all over the Trump executive branch; filing lawsuits and judge shopping; organizing the Resistance; pursuing impeachment writs; warping the FISA courts; weaponizing the DOJ and FBI; attempting to disrupt the Electoral College; angling for enactment of the 25th Amendment or the emoluments clause; and unleashing Hollywood celebrities, Silicon Valley, and many in Wall Street to suffocate the Trump presidency in its infancy.
But now the administrative state’s multifaceted efforts are starting to unwind, and perhaps even boomerang, on the perpetrators. If a federal judge should end up throwing out most of the indictments of Paul Manafort on the rationale that they have nothing much to do with the original mandate of the special counsel’s office, or if Michael Flynn’s confession to giving false statements is withdrawn successfully because the FBI politicized its investigation and FISA courts were misled in approving the surveillance of Flynn, then the Mueller investigation will implode.
Indeed, the Mueller investigation would likely lose so much public support that the Department of Justice could probably dismiss it with impunity. So, in an ironic sense, Mueller’s overreach might well end once and for all the absurdities of the special counsel/prosecutor law that for nearly half a century has plagued the nation.
Until recently, deep-state apparatchiks such as John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe seemed immune from accountability after lying either to Congress or to federal authorities. In a perverse sort of way, the more Robert Mueller plays the role of the obsessed but impotent Inspector Javert, the more he demonstrates that there is no Russian-Trump collusion. Meanwhile, he is establishing precedents that those whom he exempts from his own zeal will inevitably have to account for their own lawbreaking. One cannot justifiably hound Michael Flynn for supposedly misleading FBI agents, when agency investigators were told by Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills that they had known nothing about Hillary Clinton’s private server during her tenure as secretary of state — despite evidence that they themselves had communicated over it (as had the former president of the United States).
In his increasing desperation, Mueller may manage to finish off the declining reputation of FBI’s Washington office to the degree that there is not much left of it after the work of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok. And he may only fuel more criminal complaints against deep-state bureaucrats who worked at the FBI and the DOJ.
In truth, the multiplex world of the establishment is crumbling in a variety of arenas, from entertainment to the workplace. Certainly, the NFL is both bleeding viewers and now seen as an ancillary of the progressive movement. The sports channel ESPN is losing its audience that is tired of being lectured about its supposed ethical shortcomings instead of being enlightened about three-point shots and no-hitters. The century-old White House Correspondents’ Dinner is going the way of the 90-year-old Oscars: It’s an increasingly incestuous night of progressive virtue-signaling, crudity, and mediocrity that permanently turned off millions of former viewers. Americans can forgive a lot of shortcomings in their entertainers; boredom is not one of them.
Between the Me Too movement and the Russian-collusion hysteria, not much remains of the reputations of Hollywood and the media. When, fairly or not, Tom Brokaw is lumped into the ranks of Mark Halpern, Dustin Hoffman, Garrison Keillor, Larry King, Matt Lauer, Ryan Lizza, Charlie Rose, Tavis Smiley, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, and a host of others, there is really not much left of the old power brokers. Once upon a time, Americans assumed that a Tom Brokaw, Matt Lauer, Dan Rather, or Charlie Rose were their go-tos for ethical and sober journalism. Again, justly or not, that norm no longer holds. NBC and CNN, which have long routinely parodied Fox News, are far less likely than Fox to permit ideological and political diversity on the air.
Silicon Valley likewise has lost its luster. Once upon a time, America loved a hip Steve Jobs, decked out in black, fiddling with a new Apple gadget on stage in front of an entranced televised audience of millions. Jobs appeared as a brilliant and typically American entrepreneur, not a partisan talking down to hoi polloi.
Things have radically changed since then. The reputation of Big Tech is one of hyper-partisan politics, data miners, snoops, Bowdlerizers and censors, monopolists, progressive multibillionaires, and adolescents in arrested development who exempt themselves from the consequences of what their ideologies inflict on others.
If the deep state really wanted to dismantle and disarm Donald Trump, it would have been wise first to carefully learn how he was constructed and wired — and thus why he was especially dangerous to them.
In Wizard of Oz fashion, it’s as if the public is no longer frightened of the omnipotent imperial faces on their screens — once it drew apart the high-tech curtains and exposed tiny little nerds with nasal voices furiously working levers and gears to project deceptive all-powerful images. Even a four-trillion-dollar industry can take only so many scandals like those at Theranos, Facebook data mining, deliberately slowed-down iPhones, fatally texting drivers, and Mark Zuckerbergs.
Donald Trump proved to be a catalyst for much of the implosion of the deep state. Land mines require careful handling. Only arrogant naïfs think that they can rush in, grab them, and carelessly and safely toss them away — clueless that they themselves are exposed as reckless moments before they blow themselves up.
If the deep state really wanted to dismantle and disarm Donald Trump, it would have been wise first to carefully learn how he was constructed and wired — and thus why he was especially dangerous to them. Then to disarm him, elites would have had to offer superior agendas to his supporters, while engaging in reasoned debates and alternative visions — working with him when they found common and shared solutions, playing the loyal opposition when there did not.
Instead, the government, the political apparat, the media, tech, and entertainment conglomerates sought to reduce Trump to some monstrous entity deserving of hanging, stabbing, decapitation, incineration, and shooting. It sought to indict, impeach, and remove a sitting president, as the ancien régime rushed to break federal law with assumed ethical exemption — tapping, surveilling, lying, and leaking with impunity, assured that supposedly morally superior ends justified any means necessary to achieve them.
In other words, the custodians of the status quo arrogantly grabbed up the Trump land mine and thought they could easily toss it away — as it has blown them sky-high.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won.@vdhanson
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