American Influence In Decline? More Disbelief Regarding Comey's Explanations That Do Not Hold Water. David Malpass Advises..

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Has American influence been eclipsed by China?  It would seem so. Why? Because Duerte, President of The Phillipine's, is not longer going to allow his army to hold military exercises with America.

Just one more piece of evidence how Obama, Hillary and Kerry's feckless foreign policy initiatives have cost us allies, respect and power. (See 1 below.)
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More disbelief regarding the FBI weasel's rationale. (See 2 below.)
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David Malpass advises Trump and is concerned about what I have been warning. (See 3 below.)
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I hope these pictures will reprint. (See 4 below.)
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Kim Strassel in Atlanta, Nov. 2.

	SAVE THE DATE  Wednesday, November 2nd  Join the Republican Jewish Coalition and Fulton County GOP as we co-host a special presentation featuring Kimberley Strassel Kimberley Strassel  Gifted Wall Street Journal Columnist and Excellent Investigative Reporter With a Special Introduction by  Bernie Marcus Member of the RJC Board of Directors and Founder of Home Depot "The Intimidation Game" Kim Strassel-one of the preeminent political columnists writing today and member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board-provides an insightful, alarming look at how the Left, once the champion of civil liberties, is today orchestrating a coordinated campaign to bully Americans out of free speech. Her recent articles can be viewed here "The Intimidation Game" will be available for purchase and signing Wednesday, November 2nd 5:15 p.m. | mix and mingle with fellow Jewish Republicans 5:30 p.m. | program will promptly begin  *Light Refreshments will be availableHeritage Sandy Springs 6110 Blue Stone Road NE Atlanta, GA 30328 RSVP is Requested Please click here to RSVP There is no charge to attend.

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Dick
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1)

Philippines Leader to End Joint Military Exercises, Naval Patrols With U.S.

President Rodrigo Duterte wants to avoid upsetting China, with which he wants stronger trade and investment ties

ENLARGE

Philippines' president Rodrigo Duterte speaks in Hanoi on Wednesday to members of the Filipino community in Vietnam, where he said he was halting future military exercises with the U.S. as well as joint patrols in the South China Sea. PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

By

CRIS LARAno

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Wednesday said joint military exercises scheduled next month between the Philippines and the U.S. will be the last for the longtime allies, as he seeks to avoid upsetting China, with which he hopes to build stronger trade and investment ties.

He also said he would end routine joint naval patrols in the South China Sea.

“I will serve notice to you now that this will be the last military exercise,” Mr. Duterte said to an audience of some 350 Filipinos in Hanoi, during a two-day state visit to Vietnam.

Still, the Philippine leader reaffirmed that his country’s cooperation with the U.S. stands. “I will maintain the military alliance—the RP-US pact, which our countries signed in the early ’50s,” Mr. Duterte said.

The military treaty with Washington was recently updated to allow more American troops to stay in the Philippines for an extended period. Mr. Duterte said he was ending the routine joint patrols in the South China Sea because they, too, risk military confrontation between China and the U.S., with the Philippines caught in the middle.

Mr. Duterte met with his Vietnamese counterpart, Tran Dai Quang, on Thursday. A statement from Vietnam’s foreign ministry said they agreed to boost economic ties and to maintain peace and stability in the South China Sea. They agreed to consider extending a rice trade agreement that will expire at the end of this year. The Philippines is among Vietnam’s largest rice export markets, accounting for nearly one-fifth of Vietnam’s total rice shipments. Overall bilateral trade was $2.93 billion last year.“If the battleground will be in San Francisco, or China, then I’m OK with that,” he said.

Mr. Duterte said holding war games with the U.S. might undermine his efforts to improve relations with Beijing, which have soured in recent years as Manila tried to strengthen its claims to part of the South China Sea. China has increasingly asserted sovereignty over that body of water, which is also claimed in part by Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei.

Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay, who was traveling with the president, told reporters Wednesday that the agreement with the U.S. “will be respected and this is what the president clearly meant.” Only joint patrols of the South China Sea were being suspended, as previously announced, not all joint drills, he said.

Mr. Yasay said at a different briefing Thursday that the various military accords between the Philippines and the U.S. don’t specifically cover holding joint military exercises, meaning they could be suspended even as the alliance continues.

The Philippine defense department said Thursday that it was in the dark about any disruption to the Philippine military’s regular drills with American forces.

“Defense Secretary Delfin N. Lorenzana will discuss this with the President to seek more clarification and guidance,” it said in a statement. “All agreements and treaties with the U.S. are still in effect.”

The Philippine military earlier this month invited U.S. troops to joint exercises in October, shortly after Mr. Duterte’s called for the Americans to withdraw their remaining military advisers from the southern island of Mindanao. Mr. Duterte had said their presence hurt efforts to find a peace with Muslim rebels.

Earlier this week, Mr. Duterte said he plans to establish trade alliance with China and Russia. He previously had ordered his defense secretary to seek military equipment from suppliers in China and Russia to fight drug traffickers and insurgents.

Mr. Duterte has made provocative remarks against U.S. President Barack Obama, the United Nations and the European Union since coming to power on June 30. He has bristled at Western criticism of his bloody war on drugs that has claimed the lives of more than 3,000 people, according to police figures.

Mr. Duterte has said he won’t surrender the legal victory the Philippines won in July before an international tribunal in The Hague that dismissed China’s claims to ownership and economic rights over most of the South China Sea. Vietnam has voiced support for the ruling, which has emerged as a main legal challenge against China’s widening maritime presence in the area, including its building of artificial islands housing infrastructure such as airfields and port installations.His words and behavior have frightened foreign investors, who have been pulling back from the country, weakening Manila’s stock market and sending the peso this week to its lowest against the U.S. dollar since September 2009.
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2)Nothing James Comey Says About The Hillary Clinton Investigation Makes Any Sense

By protecting her inner circle, the Department of Justice gave Hillary immunity.

By David Harsanyi

Rather than striking immunity deals with virtually every person who had intimate knowledge of Hillary Clinton’s illegal private server and emails, the Justice Department would have saved everyone some time by offering Hillary protection instead.

FBI Director James Comey, who testified in front of two congressional committees this week, still maintains he was unable to recommend that the Justice Department charge Clinton with mishandling classified documents because of insufficient evidence proving “intent” — although the actions themselves are irrefutably illegal.

Well, how exactly did he anticipate gathering this proof when the Justice Department had proactively shielded the five people tasked with setting up the private system and then destroying it? Was he hoping to extract a confession directly from Hillary?

Why would, for instance, a Clinton functionary like Cheryl Mills help prosecutors once she’d already secured safeguards against any criminal prosecution? While testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee, Comey claimed Mills was already “cooperative” and the Justice Department had assured the FBI she had done nothing wrong. Hence the deal.

If she was accommodating and completely innocent, why would she seek, and be given, immunity? A lawyer for Mills and Heather Samuelson had already admitted the deal was struck to protect her clients from potential prosecution arising from “classification” on their laptops. Apparently, the Justice Department was more convinced of their innocence than their lawyer was.

In the FBI’s summary statement, Mills alleged she didn’t know about Hillary’s email server until after the secretary of State’s tenure was over. Emails since uncovered, however, show this to be untrue. Remember also that President Obama claimed he first learned about Clinton’s illegal server through “news reports?” If that’s true, why did he email Clinton on her private server under a pseudonym?

Comey admitted Wednesday that one of Hillary’s lawyers — “it might have been Cheryl Mills” — told Paul Combetta to delete e-mail files from Clinton’s secret server only days after Congress ordered them to be preserved.  The FBI director assures us that none of this is obstruction of justice. (Rep. Darrell Issa, incidentally, also revealed that one of the deals — he did not mention which — included immunity, not only for a transaction, but for “destruction” of material.)

Then, at another point, Comey told the committee that the Justice Department agreed to immunity because the FBI didn’t feel like wrangling with lawyers for years. “The FBI judgment was we need to get to that laptop. We need to see what it is,” he explained. “This investigation’s been going on for a year.” So I guess Mills was less than cooperative, yes?

And why is Comey, who doesn’t “give a hoot about politics,” concerned about timetables rather than making the best case? If the laptop was important enough to hasten a deal that protected a potential witness from prosecution, why wasn’t it important enough for the FBI to subpoena? If Mills’ lawyer is worried about potential criminality, why take a plea bargain off the table? Is this how it works for everyone?

It was rather amazing to hear Comey concede that the Justice Department’s immunity spree was “unusual.” More unusual, perhaps, was that three of the people with those deals still ended up taking the Fifth, and another didn’t even bother showing up when Congress called him. It’s also unusual that a high-profile case featuring numerous immunity deals resulted in no charges.

It was also “very unusual,” according to Comey, that the FBI would conduct an interview with the target of an investigation — where wholly innocent Hillary Clinton was surrounded by nine lawyers — with two of the immunized witnesses in the case present. That’s something Comey admitted had never happened in his career.

As Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University and who first defended the FBI’s decision not to prosecute Hillary, recently put it:

Of all of the individuals who would warrant immunity, most would view Mills as the very last on any list. If one assumes that there may have been criminal conduct, it is equivalent to immunizing H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman in the investigation of Watergate.

Comey claimed it was not his purview to decide who people use as their lawyers. That is true. What he failed to mention was that he determined the parameters of the interview. He could have pressured Clinton to leave Mills home by impelling the target of the investigation to appear rather than allowing it to be voluntary interview. In a deposition about the email scandal, Mills claimed client-attorney privilege, though she wasn’t Hillary’s lawyer but chief of staff during her tenure at the State Debarment.

Comey attempted to distance himself from the immunity deals by pointing out that he had not personally struck them. “It’s a decision made by the Department of Justice, I don’t know at what level inside,” Comey said in House panel. “In our investigations, any kind of immunity comes from the prosecutors, not the investigators.”

Surely the Justice Department doesn’t offer witnesses protection from prosecution in high-profile cases without asking FBI investigators. If they did, then it would suggest a politicized process — something this case reeks of already.

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3) Eight Outrages Urge Trump To Upend Washington

By David Malpass

IT’S HARD TO KNOW which government outrage is the most objectionable. Everyone has his or her own list of major grievances. I’m tendering economic advice to the Trump campaign, so here’s mine–the short version.

–As Secretary of State and afterward, Hillary Clinton transmitted secret information through open Internet channels. As a former State Department official, I find it inconceivable that she was this reckless and that the State Department system looked the other way as it was happening.

President Obama ransomed American hostages for $400 million in currency that was air-freighted to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, one of the world’s most dangerous forces.

–The President “self-ratified” the Paris treaty on global warming, scorning the Senate’s treaty authority, one of the fundamental pillars of the U.S. Constitution.

The Federal Reserve has incurred trillions of dollars in taxpayer liabilities to buy a $4.4 trillion bond portfolio that it intends to hold on to for years, maybe decades. It pays banks–many of them foreign-owned–nearly $12 billion per year in financing, yet the Constitution is clear that the power for appropriations and debt rests solely with Congress.

At the end of August the Fed went even further, raising the specter of its buying a “broader range of assets”–its current portfolio includes Treasury bonds, as well as complex government-guaranteed mortgage securities and the debt of Fannie Maeand Freddie Mac . This Fed trial balloon lays the groundwork for a possible Clinton Administration to reward helpful corporations with Fed bond purchases or to fund infrastructure projects boosted by investments from the Fed.

Without a single Republican vote the President implemented a sweeping new health care system that was designed to fail from the get-go. It has harmed millions of people and cost billions of dollars.

–Failed inner cities operate in a one-party world of corrupt nonprofits and pay-to-play cronyism that leaves millions of people in the lurch. In late August the Fed claimed that the economy was nearing ”maximum employment.” This makes a mockery of the labor statistics, which show that 94 million adults aren’t being counted in the labor force.

The national debt will surpass $20 trillion in 2017. It should be refinanced at much longer maturities, but the Fed is buying back the long-maturity debt, leaving taxpayers exposed to higher interest rates.

The Congressional Budget Office says that current policies will cause economic growth to be only 2% per year. That stagnation will push debt up another $10 trillion over the next decade.

Politicians claim to have a debt limit, but it’s written in such a way that they can keep spending freely. Washington has tapped into an endless supply of money. The debt limit doesn’t really cut into spending, because it comes into play after the spending has occurred. That’s like saying you won’t eat a single bite until you’ve lost ten pounds, calling that a diet and renewing the pledge every month.

The only solution that will help taxpayers is to rewrite the debt limit so that it provides actual restraint on spending once the government exceeds it. One concept for the rewrite is to require a gradual decline in debt as a share of GDP. If violated, apply additional spending restraint. Escalate the restraint with more powerful rules until the debt gets back to its downward glide path.

Under current policies the CBO is projecting a steady increase in the public debt-to-GDP ratio to 85.5% in 2026 versus 75.6% today and 39.3% in 2008. It’s imperative to reverse this uptrend. The reality is that debt as a share of GDP is likely to go up unless policies change dramatically in favor of faster GDP growth and slower spending growth.

Soon after the January 2017 inauguration, a new President will have to tackle the national debt, reestablish checks and balances and set health care on a better course, as well as tackle a long list of major problems.

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4)

Which Direction Will America Lunge? The New Norm - Prepare For Terrorism. America's French Royalty and Their Cake.

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Our Orlando real estate daughter receives an award and recognition: "Dear  Mrs. Nelson,

On behalf of the Orlando Regional REALTOR® Association, I am pleased to announce that you have been chosen as one of YPN’s “20 under 40” Rising Star Award recipients!

As a real estate professional, we appreciate the commitment to your personal and professional development, as well as the role you are playing in “raising the bar” on the professionalism of REALTORS®.

It is your hard work and dedication which makes you stand out among others. We are sure if you continue to perform in this manner you will continue to excel as a REALTOR®.

Again, my congratulations to you. This is just the beginning of your bright career. Keep up the good work!

Please plan on attending the “White Party” on October 11 to receive your “20 under 40” Rising Star Award.  For your complimentary registration for the event, please contact TashaG@orlandorealtors.org by October 7^th.

Please invite your friends, family and co-workers for the celebration. We are asking for a $10 donation per person that will go to The Boys and Girls Club.

Sincerely,

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Some Trump facts. (See 1 below.)
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Fearing the packing of The Supreme Court and an imperial president or the end of small and Constitutional government.  Which direction will America lunge? (See 2 below.)
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Comey may have fine tuned his holier than thou status but he still comes off as a weasel who flinched. (See 3 below.)

What does America's new elitist crowd have in common with the French Royalty of Hameau? (See 3a below.)
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Both Comey and Johnson's warnings, that Americans should prepare for the Terrorist Diaspora becoming the new norm, have become politically fashionable. (See 4 below.)
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I repeat The Happiest and Healthiest and Best Ever New Years to my Jewish friends and family. Would it be nice if it were one of peace.
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Dick
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1)

See The 5 Facts That Prove Trump Is ACTUALLY Beating Hillary Quite Badly                            

re                               

Donald Trump has been taking names and not taking prisoners. He is killing Hillary Clinton and has even had to do it by going up against the media’s rigged polls.

The following five statistics that prove that Trump is really winning.

Let’s take a look at the facts that the media completely ignores or covers up. Instead, they have been giving Clinton the lead despite the fact that she can’t get anyone to even show up to her rallies.

Clinton Rally In Omaha where she used mostly High School kids to fill the gym where a lot of her statements were incorrectly read from her teleprompter.

FACT #1: Trump has nearly three times the number of followers on Facebook.

Trump: 12,174,358 likes.
Clinton: 4,385,959 likes.

Look what Trump’s live stream videos do when compared to Hillary’s.

Trump Live Stream Post — 21 hours ago: 135,000 likes, 18,167 shares, 1.5 million views

Clinton Live Stream Post — 25 hours ago: 9,000 likes, 0 shares, 121,000 views

That does not look good at all for her!

Fact #2: Trump has 18.6 million twitter followers.

Hillary Clinton has only 6.1 million.

The best part is that most of Hillary’s are actually fake. According to the Washington Examiner, 41 percent of Hillary’s “followers” are not even real people.

In contrast, The Daily Caller says that Trump’s followers are 90% real with 90% of them having a previous voting record.

Fact #3: Trump averages 160k viewers per live stream.

Clinton averages 400 viewers per live stream.

Wow. That is bad. Trump also gets 5,000 percent more eyeballs focused on the screen than Clinton. Yep. She really is that boring to the folks.

Fact #4: Instagram.

Trump has 6.2 million followers.

Clinton has 800,000 followers.

Instagram is a platform with mostly all pictures and not much substance – exactly what Hillary supporters love. And still she does very poorly in this medium.

Fact #5: On Reddit.

Trump: 297,696 subscribers
Clinton: 21,429 subscribers
But on Hillary for Prison: she gets 255,228 subscribers.

Trump has more subscribers than Clinton on every major social media outlet but what is even funnier is that there are nearly 3 times as many people subscribed to “Hillary for Prison” than there are subscribed to the Clinton page.

The best part is that the DNC's leaked emails from WikiLeaks have proven that Clinton pays people to support her online. Trump supporters on the other hand willingly actually like and follow him on Social media.

Trump actually has the support of the people. He is going to win this election come November no matter what the mainstream media would like you to believe.

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2)The Next President Unbound

By Victor Davis Hanson

Donald Trump's supporters see a potential Hillary Clinton victory in November as the end of any conservative chance to restore small government, constitutional protections, fiscal sanity and personal liberty.

Clinton's progressives swear that a Trump victory would spell the implosion of America as they know it, alleging Trump parallels with every dictator from Josef Stalin to Adolf Hitler.

Part of the frenzy over 2016 as a make-or-break election is because a closely divided Senate's future may hinge on the coattails of the presidential winner. An aging Supreme Court may also translate into perhaps three to four court picks for the next president.

Yet such considerations only partly explain the current election frenzy.

The model of the imperial Obama presidency is the greater fear. Over the last eight years, Obama has transformed the powers of presidency in a way not seen in decades.

Congress talks grandly of "comprehensive immigration reform," but Obama, as he promised with his pen and phone, bypassed the House and Senate to virtually open the border with Mexico. He largely ceased deportations of undocumented immigrants. He issued executive-order amnesties. And he allowed entire cities to be exempt from federal immigration law.

The press said nothing about this extraordinary overreach of presidential power, mainly because these largely illegal means were used to achieve the progressive ends favored by many journalists.

The Senate used to ratify treaties. In the past, a president could not unilaterally approve the Treaty of Versailles, enroll the United States in the League of Nations, fight in Vietnam or Iraq without congressional authorization, change existing laws by non-enforcement, or rewrite bankruptcy laws.

Not now. Obama set a precedent that he did not need Senate ratification to make a landmark treaty with Iran on nuclear enrichment.

He picked and chose which elements of the Affordable Care Act would be enforced -- predicated on his 2012 re-election efforts.

Rebuffed by Congress, Obama is now slowly shutting down the Guantanamo Bay detention center by insidiously having inmates sent to other countries.

Respective opponents of both Trump and Clinton should be worried.

Either winner could follow the precedent of allowing any sanctuary city or state in the United States to be immune from any federal law found displeasing -- from the liberal Endangered Species Act and federal gun registration laws to conservative abortion restrictions.

Could anyone complain if Trump's secretary of state were investigated by Trump's attorney general for lying about a private email server -- in the manner of Clinton being investigated by Loretta Lynch?

Would anyone object should a President Trump agree to a treaty with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the same way Obama overrode Congress with the Iran deal?

If a President Clinton decides to strike North Korea, would she really need congressional authorization, considering Obama's unauthorized Libyan bombing mission?

What would Americans say if President Trump's IRS -- mirror-imaging Lois Lerner -- hounded the progressive nonprofit organizations of George Soros?

Partisans are shocked that the press does not go after Trump's various inconsistencies and fibs about his supposed initial opposition to the Iraq War, or press him on the details of Trump University.

Conservatives counter that Clinton has never had to come clean about the likely illegal pay-for-play influence peddling of the Clinton Foundation or her serial lies about her private email server.

But why, if elected, should either worry much about media scrutiny?

Obama established the precedent that a president should be given a pass on lying to the American people. Did Americans, as Obama repeatedly promised, really get to keep their doctors and health plans while enjoying lower premiums and deductibles, as the country saved billions through his Affordable Care Act?

More recently, did Obama mean to tell a lie when he swore that he sent cash to the Iranians only because he could not wire them the money -- when in truth the administration had wired money to Iran in the past? Was cash to Iran really not a ransom for American hostages, as the president asserted? Did Obama really, as he insisted, never email Clinton at her private unsecured server?

Can the next president, like Obama, double the national debt and claim to be a deficit hawk?

Congress has proven woefully inept at asserting its constitutional right to check and balance Obama's executive overreach. The courts have often abdicated their own oversight.

But the press is the most blameworthy. White House press conferences now resemble those in the Kremlin, with journalists tossing Putin softball questions about his latest fishing or hunting trip.

One reason Americans are scared about the next president is that they should be.

In 2017, a President Trump or President Clinton will be able to do almost anything he or she wishes without much oversight -- thanks to the precedent of Obama's overreach, abetted by a lapdog press that forgot that the ends never justify the means.

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3)

The Legend of Saint Comey

The FBI chief passes the buck on immunity for Clinton’s aides.

No one has cultivated an image of public virtue better than FBI director James Comey, so he was in high dudgeon Wednesday when mere mortals like elected Member of Congress challenged his investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email violations as Secretary of State.

“You can call us wrong, but don’t call us weasels. We are not weasels,” Mr. Comey declared Wednesday at a House Judiciary Committee hearing. Weasels or not, Mr. Comey did little to rebut the suspicion that he handled the Clinton probe with tender loving political care.

Recall that in July Mr. Comey held a remarkable press conference in which he announced that Mrs. Clinton shouldn’t be prosecuted for mishandling classified information. But it isn’t his job to make prosecutorial decisions. That’s the duty of Justice Department prosecutors. Mr. Comey’s unprecedented declaration had the effect of letting Justice officials off the hook.

Yet there was Mr. Comey on Wednesday passing the buck to the same Justice Department. Republicans wanted to know how and why Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson had been granted immunity from prosecution. Don’t ask Saint Jim.

That was “a decision made by the Department of Justice” and the FBI wasn’t “part of those discussions,” he said. Seriously? The FBI was willing to bug out of a decision on immunity that would be directly relevant to its ability to collect evidence?

Mr. Comey also didn’t have a credible explanation for why immunity was necessary. South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy noted that the lawyer for both women—Beth Wilkinson—stated that “the Justice Department assured us that they believed my clients did nothing wrong.” So why did they need immunity?

Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) noted that the FBI obtained a computer and thumb drive from David Kendall, another of Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers. Mr. Kendall was happy to hand over that data, but Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson demanded immunity before they would turn over their laptops that they had used to sort Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Mr. Comey repeated that immunity is crucial to helping investigators “build” a case against a target. Yet everyone now knows—based on the FBI notes—that neither Ms. Mills nor Ms. Samuelson offered the FBI any evidence against their boss, beyond laptops that the FBI could have seized without any immunity deal.

Pennsylvania Republican Tom Marino, a former federal prosecutor, asked why the FBI and Justice didn’t go through the standard process of empaneling a grand jury, which could provide the government subpoena and warrant authority necessary to seize evidence? Mr. Comey replied that it was “faster” to work with “informal agreements.” No doubt.

Mr. Comey also ducked and covered on why Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson were allowed to represent Mrs. Clinton as her attorneys during her FBI interview. He said the FBI had no control over a subject’s lawyers. Yet as John Ratcliffe (R., Texas) dryly noted, he could think of no “reasonable” prosecutor who would allow two witnesses who might prove “central to the prosecution” to sit in on a target’s interview.

Far be it from us to call Mr. Comey a weasel, but his highly unusual methods in investigating Mrs. Clinton have tarnished the FBI and certainly knocked off his halo.

3a) America’s Versailles Set

By Victor Davis Hanson -   

During the last days of the Ancien Régime, French Queen Marie Antoinette frolicked in a fake rural village not far from the Versailles Palace—theHameau de la Reine (“the Queen’s hamlet”). “Peasant” farmers and herdsmen were imported to interact, albeit carefully, with the royal retinue in an idyllic amusement park. The Queen would sometimes dress up as a milkmaid and with her royal train do a few chores on the “farm” to emulate the romanticized masses, but in safe, apartheid seclusion from them.

The French Revolution was already on the horizon and true peasants were shortly to march on Versailles, but the Queen had no desire to visit the real French countryside to learn of the crushing poverty of those who actually milked cows and herded sheep for a living. It is hard to know what motivated the queen to visit the Hameau—was it simply to relax in her own convenient and sanitized Arcadia, or was it some sort of pathetic attempt to better understand the daily lives of the increasing restive French masses?

The American coastal royalty does not build fake farms outside of its estates. But these elites, too, can grow just as bored with their privileged lives as Marie Antoinette did. Instead of hanging out with milk maids in ornamental villages, our progressive elites, at the same safe distance from the peasantry, prefer to show their solidarity with the dispossessed through angry rhetoric.

Take the case of Colin Kaepernick, the back-up quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers who makes $19 million a year (or about $20,000 per minute of regular season play). He has been cited by National Football League officials in the past for his use of the N-word, yet he refuses to stand for the pregame singing of the national anthem because he believes that his country is racist and does not warrant his respect. His stunt gained a lot of publicity and he now sees himself as a man of the revolutionary barricades. A number of other NFL athletes, as well as those in other sports, have likewise refused to stand for the national anthem to express solidarity with what they see as modern versions of the oppressed peasantry. But Kaepernick and his peers make more in one month than many Americans make in an entire lifetime. Still, for these members of the twenty-first-century Versailles crowd, the easiest way of understanding the lives of the underclass is expressing empathy for them for no more than a minute or two.

Lately, the entire Clinton clan has created a sort of Hameau de la Reine of the mind. Chelsea Clinton, for example, is married to hedge-fund operator Marc Mezvinsky (whose suspect Greek fund just went broke), and she once made over $600,000 for her part-time job as an NBC correspondent. She serves in a prominent role and is on the board of the non-profit billion-dollar Clinton Foundation, which has been cited for donating an inordinately small amount of its annual budget (often less than 15 percent) to charity work, while providing free jet travel for the Clinton family and offering sinecures for Clinton political operatives in between various Clinton campaigns. Explaining why she works at the Clinton Foundation and for other non-profits, Chelsea confessed, in Marie Antoinette style, that “I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t.” She cared enough, though, to purchase a $10.5 million Manhattan apartment not long ago rather than, say, rent a flat in the Bronx.

Her father, the multimillionaire Bill Clinton, is on the stump raking in huge amounts of campaign cash and reifying his liberal fides with accusations of racism against others. At one recent fundraiser, he claimed that he had found proof of Donald Trump’s encoded racism in the trite campaign slogan “Make America great again.” But the real problem with Trump’s signature catchphrase is not its supposed racism, but its banality—and it was borrowed, almost verbatim, from Bill Clinton’s own populist rhetoric from his previous campaigns. Even Marie Antoinette did not try to avoid the guillotine by crying that others also had followed her example of enjoying a fake peasant village.

At a private fundraiser among New York elites, Hillary Clinton also damned the purported illiberal nature of Trump’s supporters and said they were “not America.” She suggested that half of his supporters were haters of America’s victimized—or that nearly one-quarter of the entire country commits race/class/gender thought crimes: “To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it.” At least Hillary did not tell the “deplorables” to eat proverbial cake.

President Obama from time to time flees to his own Hameau de la Reine. He has developed a chronic tic of channeling easy empathy for The Other—and not by vacationing in the south side of Chicago instead of Martha’s Vineyard, but by issuing serial blanket condemnations of middle-class Americans for their purported insensitivity to the less fortunate. In 2008, for example, before a private group of hip San Francisco millionaires, he famously caricatured the working classes of Pennsylvania who voted against him as clinging to their “guns and religion.” Now, as a lame-duck President, Obama once again feels liberated to return to his rhetorical hamlet where he can act like a champion of the victimized by blasting America’s middle classes for their cultural shortcomings.

After golfing much of the time during his recent Martha’s Vineyard vacation, he went on a tour of Asia. In Laos, Obama immediately unleashed a number of accusations against his fellow Americans. “Typically,” Obama intoned, “when people feel stressed, they turn on others who don’t look like them.” (The adverb “typically” recalls Obama’s use of the word “typical” during the 2008 campaign to describe his own grandmother—who scrimped to send him to Hawaii’s most prestigious prep school—as a “typical white person.”)

Obama went on to delight his foreign audience: “If you’re in the United States, sometimes you can feel lazy and think we’re so big we don’t have to really know anything about other people.” Perhaps Obama sought to compensate for his own sense of insularity about the world, given that he knows no foreign languages and regularly mixes up national and world geography. America, to name a few of his gaffes, does not have 57 states; Hawaii is not in Asia; the Falklands are not the Maldives; and Austrians do not speak Austrian.

Obama’s supporters also play-act in their own hamlets. To walk the streets of downtown Palo Alto and Menlo Park in Silicon Valley is to bump into billionaire thirty-somethings dressed in torn jeans, T-shirts, and flip-flops—our modern version of the bonnets and homespun costumes of Marie Antoinette’s Hameau.

Multimillionaire rappers also feel yearnings to reconnect with the hood to cultivate their grassroots fides. The cover of rapper Kendrick Lamar’s latest album, “To Pimp a Butterfly,” displays the corpse of a dead white judge on the White House lawn­—with crude crosses scrawled over his eyes—surrounded by young African Americans who are shown displaying wads of cash and toasting his honor’s demise.

President Obama cited Lamar Kendrick, whom he invited to the White House­, as his favorite rapper of 2016. By such praise, Obama can channel his street cred and find inner resonance with a romanticized life quite different from his own at the White House. At the same time, he, like Marie Antoinette, does not have to go so far as to visit the inner-city landscapes which inspire such trendy artwork and cheap anti-police lyrics (such as Kendrick’s childish “And we hate po-po.”)

There’s a key difference between today’s elites and those of the Ancien Régime—and it has nothing to do with money or privilege. Instead, Marie Antoinette’s bunch knew that their periodic stints as peasants were farcical, and, as a result, they did not take themselves too seriously. In contrast, our grim visitors to the American Hameau are a far angrier lot. They are convinced that a few cheap slurs or fuming public gestures will, for a moment or two, make them one with the people—unaware that they are as ridiculous as the French royals, but with far less Gallic style and panache.

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4)

DHS Head to America: Brace for More Terror Attacks

BY: Adam Kredo 

Department of Homeland Security head Jeh Johnson informed Americans on Wednesday that the country is likely to suffer more domestic terror attacks, warning that the department cannot make all threats “a priority” and that the likelihood of an extremist “attack is still there,” despite the department’s best efforts.

Johnson, speaking at the Atlantic magazine ideas forum, admitted that DHS sees a range of threats on the homeland, but “can’t say everything is a priority.” He was unable to provide any firm figure quantifying the number of attacks that could be faced in the upcoming months.

The top homeland security official also lamented that the American press only covers “bad news” and that “the good news in homeland security is often no news.”

"You can’t say everything is a priority,” Johnson said during a panel discussion with former DHS head Tom Ridge. “You’ve got threats that are high impact, but not necessarily high probability. Then you’ve got threats that are high probability, but likely, or perhaps, less impact, like a [homegrown violent extremist] attack, which could involve as many as 50, as many as 10” fatalities.

DHS does its best to assess the threat landscape, but “you have to prioritize,” Johnson said. “You can’t say it’s all a priority.”

The likelihood that America will face more terror attacks from homegrown violent extremists, also known as HVEs, “is still there and we need to address it,” Johnson said.

Johnson’s remarks come on the heels of multiple deadly terror attacks across America that have been committed by Muslim extremists affiliated with the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations.

The DHS leader said he has no good way to determine how many terror attacks could be coming down the pike. The threat of a mass shooting, dirty bomb attack, biological attack, terrorism in the air, or even the poisoning of America’s food supply are all real threats—and not all can be given top priority by the agency.

“If you’re asking how many San Bernardino or Orlando type attacks will we have in the year 2017, no national security, homeland security, or law enforcement expert is in a position to quantify it,” he said. “We haven’t ended the scourge, the threat of homegrown violent extremists.”

“People ask me, ‘What keeps you up at night?’ That is thing number one, the prospect of another home-born violent extremist acquiring a weapon or tool of mass violence and carrying out an attack somewhere here in the homeland,” Johnson said.

“It cannot be quantified. It is difficult to detect given the nature of it.”

Johnson said that Americans should take solace in “all the things we’re doing, the 10 or 12 things we’re doing” to keep the populace safe on a daily basis.

“You cannot eliminate all risk, whether it’s a terrorist attack, or mass shooting, or gang violence,” he said.

Johnson also cited the media for its coverage of only “bad news” stories that gives DHS a bad rap.

“If there’s a successful national political convention from a political standpoint,” or other high profile event, “it’s the result of a lot of hard work and dedication,” Johnson said. “That doesn’t always get reported. Bad news is front page news, but the good news in homeland security is often no news.”

He went on to cite “cyber security” as “priority number one” as rogue nations such as Russia, Iran, and China step up efforts to penetrate secure U.S. government networks.

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