Targeting cancer.

There used to be a time when we thought that there might be a cancer gene that if activated can cause cancer. Then, it became obvious that there might be a gene that if inactivated sets off cancer. Since the early days over a dozen receptors have been discovered that activate a cancer pathway (CD28, OX40, GITR, CD137, CD27, HVEM) or are inhibitory receptors (CTLA-4, PD-1, TIM-3, BVTLA, VISTA, LAG-3). There are more.

A comprehensive article on studies involving these factors is published here:

http://www.partnering360.com/dynfiles/feature/upload/comp_23381/Cancer_Immunotherapies_Report.pdf

For a while, the stocks of companies dealing with these studies have been high fliers, but lately, they have been clobbered. NVAX had dropped 21% yesterday, ADX went from 20 to 10 in a week and INO fell from 7.5 to 5.5 in 3 days.

The probability of success of immunotherapy has not changed. What has changed is the Stock Market as we are preparing for a severe drop.

Francis became Pope as part of a Vatican Coup.

Posted on September 27, 2015 by Steven Hayward in Religion

The Mystery of Pope Francis: Was There a Vatican Coup?

One thing that that has puzzled a lot of people since the selection of Pope Francis two years ago is how a left-leaning Pope could succeed two very serious conservative Popes—John Paul II and Benedict XVI—who you would have thought had stacked the ranks of the Cardinals with clergy that would perpetuate their theological and philosophical outlook. Was Benedict hounded out of office by some kind of internal Vatican scandal perhaps? Was there some ecclesiastical version of a coup?
There’s no evidence that I’m aware of—until now. Three days ago the National Catholic Register ran a very curious article about the contents of a newly published authorized biography of retired Belgian cardinal Godfried Danneels. The Register article reports:

Further serious concerns are being raised about Cardinal Godfried Danneels, one of the papal delegates chosen to attend the upcoming Ordinary Synod on the Family, after the archbishop emeritus of Brussels confessed this week to being part of a radical “mafia” reformist group opposed to Benedict XVI. . .
At the launch of the book in Brussels this week, the cardinal said he was part of a secret club of cardinals opposed to Pope Benedict XVI.
He called it a “mafia” club that bore the name of St. Gallen. The group wanted a drastic reform of the Church, to make it “much more modern”, and for Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to head it. The group, which also comprised Cardinal Walter Kasper and the late Jesuit Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, has been documented in Austen Ivereigh’s biography of Pope Francis, The Great Reformer.

Over at The American Conservative, Rod Dreher has gone to the trouble of translating an Italian report that is even more curious:

The Italian Vaticanist Marco Tosatti writes (in Italian; I’ve modified the Google translation):

The election of Jorge Bergoglio was the result of secret meetings that cardinals and bishops, organized by Carlo Maria Martini, held for years in St. Gallen, Switzerland. This, according to Jürgen Mettepenningen et Karim Schelkens, authors of a newly published biography of the Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who calls the group of cardinals and bishops a “Mafia club”.
Danneels according to the authors, worked for years to prepare for the election of Pope Francis, which took place in 2013. Danneels, moreover, in a video recorded during the presentation of the book in Brussels, admits that he was part of a secret club of cardinals who opposed Joseph Ratzinger. Laughing, he calls it “a Mafia club that  bore the name of St. Gallen”.
The group wanted a drastic reform of the Church, much more modern and current, with Jorge Bergoglio, Pope Francis, as its head. They got what they wanted. Besides Danneels and Martini, the group according to the book were part of the Dutch bishop Adriaan Van Luyn, the German cardinal Walter Kasper and Karl Lehman, the Italian Cardinal Achille Silvestrini and British Basil Hume, among others.

I underscore that this is not some secretly sourced claim, but it’s from an advance copy of Cardinal Danneels’ official biography, approved by himself. 
This is the first confirmation of rumors that had been going around for years about Benedict being thwarted by a liberal conspiracy, one that eventually forced him out. These men — Danneels, Van Luyn, Kasper, Lehman, and Hume, at least — all preside over dying churches. And they killed the Benedict papacy.

This might explain a few things. . .

Is the Pope Catholic?

That was a way we used to indicate that something was very obvious, because the Pope used to be Catholic. Not Francis I. In his speech to the US Congress, Francis I did not mention God even once. His economic philosophy had been praised by Raul Castro (an atheist), Barak Hussein Obama (a closet Muslim) and Bernie  Sanders, a Jewish Socialist. Here is an evaluation of Francis that appeared in Conservative Tribune:

Fox News Welcomes Socialist Pope to US With Stunning Attack… Compares to EVIL Biblical Villain

Pope Francis’ visit to the White House Wednesday was already causing controversy, mainly because of President Barack Obama’s guest list that seemed to be a slap in the face of the religious values the pope represents. However, at least one man thinks this Pope may not represent those values at all and may be “leading his flock to a dangerous place.”
Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote an op-ed for Fox News that ripped into the Pope and made an accusation that seemed harsh, yet strangely credible.

In the piece, Napolitano stated that the role of the pope has always “been preservation of traditional teachings about faith and morals and safeguarding the sacraments.”
This is to keep the faith strong and unwavering even in the midst of an increasingly secular society. In fact, in times likes these, religious teachings must remain steadfast to combat the a rising tide of immorality.
However, Pope Francis, according to Napolitano, has been attacking the traditional values of Roman Catholicism, and as such deserved to be labeled “a false prophet.” The reasoning Napolitano provided was hard to dismiss lightly.

“The first is an assault on the family, and the second is an assault on the free market — two favorite political targets of the left,” wrote Napolitano, before giving his examples.
One is the issue of annulments, the pope has recently made it much easier and less time-consuming to prove the invalidity of a marriage. Therefore, even though Roman Catholic couples are forbidden from divorcing, they can annul a marriage swiftly and administratively within 45 days rather than go through a lengthy trial to prove the merit of the invalidity claim.
Sounds a bit like divorce to me.
Second, the Church has always taught that abortion is murder due to the innocence of the victim, and mothers who chose to commit this murder were denied access to the sacraments.
Now the pope has “ordered that any priest may return those who have killed a baby in a womb to the communion of the faithful,” Napolitano stated in the piece.
Napolitano also considers the pope’s obviously socialist, if not communist, economic philosophies not only errant, but evil.
“In his papal exhortation on capitalism, Pope Francis spectacularly failed to appreciate the benefits of capitalism to the health, wealth and safety of the poor,” Napolitano pointed out. “Instead, he has reworked the Peronism of his youth to advocate government-mandated redistribution of wealth.”
If Napolitano is right, this could be a very scary time that we are living in, considering that a false prophet is one of the signs of the end times according to Revelations 13 and 19. Napolitano’s comments amount to a massive accusation — but it’s up to you to determine if they are also a word to the wise.
H/T The Gateway Pundit

Majority of US Muslims prefer Sharia Law.

Check out the poll results and pronouncements of prominent US Muslims.

http://www.wnd.com/2015/09/poll-most-u-s-muslims-would-trade-constitution-for-shariah/

Here are a few differences between the US and Sharia:

Gerald Celente predicts QEIV.

Gerald Celente, Trend Forecaster, predicts that the FED will launch QEIV, driving gold prices much higher.

The reason for the prediction is the global danger of a financial and economic implosion. China's excesses of building ghost cities is finally catching up with them, causing a (for China) severe slowdown.

The FED's effort to stimulate the economy by printing money has failed, so they double down.

Speaking of insanity - how about the Pope?

Pope Blames Refugee Crisis on 'God of Money,' 'Socio-Economic System That Is Bad, Unjust'

Craig Bannister | September 14, 2015 5:42pm ET    MRC TV                  

In an interview with Portugal-based Radio Renascença aired yesterday, Pope Francis declared that the current refugee crisis in Europe is being caused by a “bad, unjust” socio-economic system that worships “the god of money.”

In the interview, where questions were posed in Portuguese and the responses were given by Pope Francis in Spanish, the pontiff said coveting money will bring about both human and ecological ruin:

“This is the tip of the iceberg. We see these refugees, these poor people who are escaping from war, escaping from hunger, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. But underlying that is the cause, and the cause is a socio-economic system that is bad, unjust, because within an economic system, within everything, within the world, speaking of the ecological problem, within the socio-economic society, in politics, the person always has to be the center. And today’s dominant economic system has removed the person from the center, and at the center is the god of money. It’s the fashionable god today. I mean, there are statistics. I don’t remember very well, but — this is not exact and I could be making a mistake— 17% of the population has 80% of the wealth.”

Pope Francis said that refugees from rural areas are being “deforested” and driven into big cities:

“Why are ‘favelas’ (shantytowns) formed in big cities?” It’s the people who come from the country because they have been deforested. They have made a mono-cultivation. They have no work, and they go to big cities.”

Ultimately, the world “is at war against itself, the Pope declared:

“Today, the world is at war, is at war against itself. That is, the world is at war -- as I say -- a war in parts, piecemeal. But it is also at war against the earth, because it’s destroying the earth, that is, our common home. The environment, the glaciers are melting. In the Arctic, the polar bear goes increasingly northward to survive."

AJ adds: This Pope is insane. Just like Barak Hussein.  Just to mention: the ice caps are getting bigger and there are more polar bears than before. There is no global warming. Nada. ZIP. The "refugees" are jihadist Muslims that are coming from areas where Western capitalism is despised and certainly not practiced.

A crisis of leadership/sanity.

A noted Commentator has dubbed the crisis that haunts W Europe and the United States as a crisis of leadership/sanity. The best way to put it is that Western leaders have been infected by a form of insanity that makes them propose/implement insane policies. In the coming days I will try to discuss some of the outcomes of such insanity in detail.


The prevailing (Liberal) attitude is that we must judge our leaders by their intentions. This, of course, is self-serving, because the outcome of Liberal/Progressive thinking is rather dismal. And that is how come we find ourselves morally, intellectually and even economically threatened.


The Elites in DC do not see the danger because they are insulated from it. They do not face the hordes of illegal aliens trampling their fences, stealing their goods and brutalizing their families. The elites live around DC and its suburbs in well-policed apartments or near palatial housing, have their own medical care and incomes that are above the national average. They want to preserve what they have and are not bothered by the invaders of Europe from the Middle East or the invaders from Latin America. For them it means cheap labor, but for the Country it is a threat.

The "Debt Ceiling Scam" - how it is operated.

The National Debt had increased $940B since last year. That is, it increased till March 15,2015 and it has been at 18.152 Trillion Dollars since then. Like so much of the "facts" reported by the Media, it is a fraud, a scam.

Congress passes laws, among them the budget for the various government programs. Most of the programs run a deficit which is financed by borrowing money. The money borrowed is added to the National Debt.

Some of the programs have trust funds, money set aside in computer programs. When the Debt Ceiling is reached, the deficit is financed from draining these trust fund entries. Then it comes budget approval time. In order to have a new budget, Congress raises the Debt Ceiling, which "replenishes" the money spent from the trust funds that were used to maintain the fiction that the Debt Ceiling was frozen.

Are the trust funds real? NO! There is no box where currency is deposited to keep the Social Security Trust Fund.  Numbers are computer entries.

Does the deficit matter? College students are taught that the deficit does not matter because we owe it to ourselves. But, the National Debt is real and we must pay interest on it. Keeping the interest low causes deflation and low growth. That is what we have now. The FED is trying desperately  to raise interest rates to get out of the deflationary cycle without printing more money.

GOP strategy to deceive us: Surrender then play fight.

How the GOP Pretends Not to Authorize Obama’s Agenda

By Andrew C. McCarthy — September 8, 2015 in National Review. 

In my weekend column I offered a concrete plan to undermine President Obama’s atrocious Iran deal. It is an easy one, because all that the Republican-controlled Congress has to do, if it really wants to derail this thing, is follow the law that they wrote and Obama signed, the Corker law — the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015, sometimes also known as “Corker-Cardin,” after Senate sponsors Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) and Ben Cardin (D., Md.).

Sadly, in another iteration of the anger that is the wind beneath Donald Trump’s wings, many readers insist that GOP leadership has no intention to block Obama on Iran. If that is so, it is passing strange. The national-security threat here is grave. Plus, how much credibility can Republicans have (maybe I should just end the sentence there) in complaining about Obama’s disregard of federal law if they won’t even follow the law they themselves enacted just four months ago?
In my column I demonstrate that Obama has failed to comply with the crystal-clear conditions spelled out in the Corker law. This is indisputable. “Side deals” that the statute explicitly requires to be disclosed to Congress — involving, for example, IAEA inspection terms and Iran’s prior nuclear work — have been withheld. Moreover, not addressed in my column is yet another alarming side deal Obama has refused to disclose: one that shows the president is deceiving the public when he preposterously claims that sanctions will “snap back” if Iran is caught cheating. (I’ll have more to say about this in another post. For now, see this important Real Clear World report, particularly the subsection “Fallacious ‘Snapback’ Sanctions.”)

Under the Corker statute, in order to get the benefit of the review process that enables him to “win” approval of his Iran deal with the support of only one-third (plus one) of one house of Congress, Obama had to provide the entirety of the Iran deal, including all relevant side deals between any parties, by July 19. He has failed to do this. Thus, Congress must not go forward with the review, because (a) that is what the law says, (b) forcing full disclosure is the solemn political commitment Republicans made to voters in justifying the wayward Corker review process, and (c) if they go through with the review process, they will be deemed to have forgiven Obama’s default.
In this connection, it is necessary to address what has brought us to this perilous point: the GOP scheme I call “Surrender . . . Then Play-Fight.” It is a form of political gamesmanship that, as we are seeing, has dire legal and national-security consequences.
RELATED: Some ‘Victory’ — Two-Thirds of the Senate and the Public Oppose Obama’s Iran Deal
“Surrender . . . Then Play-Fight ” is Republican leadership’s shameful approach to “governing.” The quotes around “governing” are intentional. After voters, having trusted the GOP’s 2014 campaign promises to block Obama’s agenda, gave Republicans control of both houses of Congress, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) notoriously said that the party’s primary objective was to show the public that it could “govern.” As I countered at the time, this was gibberish. Governing is principally an executive exercise. Presidents govern, while legislators prescribe. Prescribing law and monitoring the administration’s execution of it are crucial functions, but they are not governing, because lawmakers are powerless to carry out policy.
Worse, the “show we can govern” tripe is just a rationalization for capitulating to Obama. GOP leaders said they must prove they can overcome legislative gridlock and (all together now) “get things done.” Perforce, the way a legislature “gets things done” is by helping the president do the things he wants to do.
Since the president is currently Obama, the people who elected Republicans obviously wanted them to stop things from getting done. The resulting rage of its increasingly estranged base puts the GOP in a quandary: Republicans must avoid being seen as supporting the things they are getting done — i.e., the Obama agenda. So some sleight-of-hand is in order, some schemes to grease the wheels for Obama while posing as staunch Obama opponents.
Among the most pernicious is “Surrender . . . Then Play-Fight.”
It is a legislative template for obscuring the GOP’s enabling of Obama, a ruse designed to make it appear that the president is getting his way with only minority support (i.e., his hardcore Democratic supporters), while Republicans stridently condemn what they have actually voted to allow. Obama is delighted to play along, because he gets what he wants.
RELATED: Congress Should Torpedo Legislation to Approve ObamaNuke Deal
Surrender . . . Then Play-Fight is what Republican leadership choreographed in the Corker legislation. As I’ve pointed out before, they did not make up the Corker scheme on the fly. Senators Corker and Cardin used the template designed by Senator McConnell, his Democratic counterpart Harry Reid (D., Nev.), and House speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) to increase the debt ceiling.
Here is how the Surrender . . . Then Play-Fight razzmatazz works — and follow closely or you’ll lose track of where Republicans are hiding the ball.
Step one: Obama wants to do something bad. The Republicans decide to let him do it, while appearing to oppose it. Why? Maybe because they secretly agree that it should be done but know it will infuriate their base (think: raising the debt ceiling). Maybe because, although Republicans know it is bad, they are less concerned about the danger to the country than about the media-Left wrath that will rain down on them if they block Obama. Making a calculation rooted in politics rather than statesmanship, they conclude: It’s better to let the bad thing happen than be blamed for “gridlock,” “partisanship,” etc.; plus, if they can pull off the “enable Obama while ostensibly opposing Obama” trick, their empty rhetorical opposition will poll better than taking real steps to stop the president (think: Iran deal).
Step two: The legislative template — Surrender . . . Then Play-Fight — is deployed. Republicans engineer the enactment of an authorizing statute that fully permits the bad thing Obama wants to do, but it attaches a “process” that has two conditions: 1) Obama must take certain measures to formally propose the bad thing (even though the bad thing has already been conditionally authorized); and 2) congressional Republicans must be given an opportunity to “disapprove” of the bad thing they have already approved in the authorizing statute. As GOP leadership well knows, this opportunity to disapprove is sheer theater: Obama will veto the “disapproval” and needs only one-third-plus-one support in just one chamber (i.e., 34 senators or 146 House members) to prevent an override.
#share#Note how truly cynical this is. The ball Republicans are hiding is the original authorizing statute, which makes everything else happen. Nonetheless, it is orchestrated so that a) Obama must make the proposal and then b) Republicans get to vote against it not once but twice (first on the “resolution of disapproval,” then in the inevitably unsuccessful veto-override vote). By then, after a months-long drumbeat of Republican anti-Obama diatribes and futile disapproval votes, leadership figures you’ve long forgotten that Republicans have already approved the bad thing against which they are inveighing and voting.
It is critical to sort out the law (the authorizing statute) from the theatrics (the disapproval process). If you miss this point, you will miss why it is crucial that Republicans, if they really want to derail Obama’s Iran deal, must not go through with the farcical process of voting on a “resolution of disapproval.”
RELATED: Facing Reality on Iran
In a Surrender . . . Then Play-Fight scheme, as a matter of law, the bad thing is actually accomplished by the authorizing statute. The disapproval process is just for show. Of course, Republicans try to make the disapproval process look like the whole game — because it’s then that they pose as staunch Obama adversaries. But it is a lot of hot air, designed to have no actual legal effect.
The condition that really matters in the authorizing statute is not the disapproval process; it is the measures Obama is required to take in formally proposing the bad thing and triggering the farcical disapproval process. As long as the president takes those measures — i.e., as long as he complies with the conditions laid out in the authorizing statute — he is guaranteed victory because the disapproval process is rigged in his favor. But he must comply with the conditions. The condition in the Iran deal was that he was required to provide the entire agreement to Congress by July 19. Obama can be undermined only if he fails to comply with the conditions and Republicans call him on it.
The debt ceiling is the concrete example of Surrender . . . Then Play-Fight in action. When they are in campaign mode, today’s Republicans rail against-out of-control deficit spending; but when in office, they are incorrigible offenders. While there is never enough spending as far as Democrats are concerned, deficit spending is a big political problem for Republicans because their base opposes it and the Constitution makes Congress, not the president, accountable for it. Republicans have been in control of at least one congressional chamber since 2011, and Obama’s unprecedentedly astronomical deficit spending could not be carried out without their approval.
RELATED: The Iran Deal and Obama’s Fatally Misguided View of the World
To keep the gravy train rolling while pretending to oppose it, Senator McConnell and Speaker John Boehner designed Surrender . . . Then Play-Fight. With the cooperation of the White House and Democrats, they orchestrated a law that authorized a massive, multi-trillion-dollar increase in the debt ceiling, subject to a process consisting of two conditions: 1) Obama had to take steps to propose the increase incrementally; and 2) Republicans had to be permitted to register their opposition — to what they’d already authorized — by passing a “resolution of disapproval.”
In enacting the authorizing statute, Republicans of course knew that the eventual resolution of disapproval would be meaningless because Obama would veto it and was assured of the one-third-plus-one support of Democrats needed to sustain the veto. But they calculated that the process would make it appear that Obama alone was pushing for more spending: Republicans could rail against Obama’s recklessness and then cast two show votes against it.

Get Free Exclusive NR Content

Understand: The debt ceiling was increased by the authorizing statute, not by the process prescribed by the authorizing statute. The authorizing statute was the governing law; the “disapproval” process was just theater — as long as Obama complied with the required steps (in this instance, proposing incremental increases).
Republicans have reprised Surrender . . . Then Play-Fight for Obama’s Iran deal. Just as GOP leaders intend, our attention is now riveted to the Corker review process, in which Congress is scheduled to debate and vote on the Iran deal in the coming days. But the Corker law is not just a process for registering disapproval (rigged to guarantee that Obama wins); it is an authorizing statute.
Specifically, when enacted in May, the Corker law authorized the lifting of the statutory anti-nuke sanctions against Iran, subject to two conditions: 1) Obama had to provide the entire deal to Congress within five days after it was reached (i.e., by July 19), and 2) Congress had to be given an opportunity to register its disapproval of what it had already authorized.
Here’s the salient point: As a matter of law, the anti-nuke sanctions will be deemed repealed by the Corker law if Obama is deemed to have complied with his obligation to provide the full deal to Congress. The disapproval process is just for show. With Republicans unable to muster the votes needed to override Obama’s veto (as they well knew they would be), the disapproval process has no legal possibility of stopping the lifting of sanctions.
But alas, we cannot say that this theatrical disapproval-vote exercise would be as harmless as it would be pointless. As I explained in the weekend column, if Republicans go forward with the Corker review process, this would very likely be legally construed as forgiving Obama’s failure to disclose the entire Iran deal. That is, Obama would be deemed to be in compliance with the authorizing statute’s conditions, even though he has not complied. Therefore, the anti-nuke sanctions against Iran would be lifted — but lifted by the Corker authorizing statute as enacted back in May; the upcoming show vote to feign disapproval of what Congress has already conditionally approved has nothing to do with it.
Again, asserting Obama’s failure to disclose the full scope of the deal is the only chance Republicans have to preserve the statutory anti-nuke sanctions. Otherwise, they will be deemed repealed by the Corker law.
“But wait,” some critics counter, “Obama has refused to treat his Iran deal as a formal treaty; so doesn’t that mean it is just a non-binding executive agreement and the next president can just renounce all its terms?”
This is an understandable error. As I’ve emphasized many times, the Corker law reverses the Constitution’s treaty clause, which would have required Obama to convince 67 senators to support his agreement. So critics are right to say that the Corker law does not legally bind our nation to much of Obama’s Iran deal. To that extent, it is just an executive agreement that can be renounced by the next president.
Unfortunately, that cannot be said for all of the Iran deal. The anti-nuke sanctions are statutory. They can therefore be repealed by a statute, such as the Corker law. While a statute can be repealed by a treaty, it is not necessary to have a treaty to repeal a statute. It is irrelevant, as far as the statutory anti-nuke sanctions are concerned, that the Corker law does not satisfy the Constitution’s treaty clause.
Consequently, Republicans must abandon the Corker disapproval process and pass a resolution explaining that Obama has failed to comply with the condition that would trigger that rigged process — the duty to provide the entire Iran deal to Congress by July 19. If Republicans fail to do this, they may get their high-profile opportunity to express futile political opposition to Obama’s appeasement of Iran. But they will very likely have forfeited their only legally meaningful way to preserve the anti-nuke sanctions Obama is desperate to repeal.
Surrender . . . Then Play-Fight is political gamesmanship. But this is not a game. This is a call for statesmanship to preserve legal restrictions that impede terror-promoting enemies of the United States from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

698K Native-Born Americans Lost Their Job In August: Why This Suddenly Is The Most Important Jobs Chart

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/08/2015 06:14 -0400

 

After the Fed admitted over a year ago that the US unemployment rate (which in 2012 was supposed to be a rate hike "threshold" once it hit 6.5% and is now at 5.1%) has become irrelevant in a country where a record 94 million people have left the labor force, and with the Fed poised to hike rates even though US hourly wages have not only not increased for the past 7 years, but for the vast majority of the labor force continue to decline, some have asked - is there any labor-related chart that matters any more?

The answer: a resounding yes, only it is none of the conventional charts that algos and sometimes humans look at.
The one chart that matters more than ever,has little to nothing to do with the Fed's monetary policy, but everything to do with the November 2016 presidential elections in which the topic of immigration, both legal and illegal, is shaping up to be the most rancorous, contentious and divisive.
The chart is the following, showing the cumulative addition of foreign-born and native-born workers added to US payrolls according to the BLS since December 2007, i.e., since the start of the recession/Second Great Depression.


The chart is especially important because what it shows for just the month of August will be enough to provide the Trump - and every other - campaign with enough soundbites and pivot points to last it for weeks on end: namely, that in August a whopping 698,000 native-born Americans lost their job. This drop was offset by 204,000 foreign-born Americans, who got a job in the month of August.


But the punchline: since December 2007, according to the Household Survey, only 790,000 native born American jobs have been added. Contrast that with the 2.1 million foreign-born Americans who have found a job over the same time period...


AJ adds: Government statistics have become suspect.

It isn't only our elites...it's the Swedes, too.

AJ begins: it is not only our Media and Courts that are populated by Left-wing numbskulls, but Sweden's too. As a result, Swedes (especially women) have been subjected to rape by multicultural dregs of society. Worse, in Sweden, the crimes are concealed and those who complain can be prosecuted.

Dansk

Deutsch

Español

Bahasa Indonesia

Italiano

Nederlands

Português

Svenska

Türkçe

Sweden: Rape Capital of the West by Ingrid Carlqvist and Lars Hedegaard February 14, 2015 at 5:00 am http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5195/sweden-rape   Forty years after the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the formerly homogenous Sweden into a multicultural country, violent crime has increased by 300% and rapes by 1,472%. Sweden is now number two on the list of rape countries, surpassed only by Lesotho in Southern Africa. Significantly, the report does not touch on the background of the rapists. One should, however, keep in mind that in statistics, second-generation immigrants are counted as Swedes. In an astounding number of cases, the Swedish courts have demonstrated sympathy for the rapists, and have acquitted suspects who have claimed that the girl wanted to have sex with six, seven or eight men. The internet radio station Granskning Sverige called the mainstream newspapers Aftonposten and Expressen to ask why they had described the perpetrators as "Swedish men" when they actually were Somalis without Swedish citizenship. They were hugely offended when asked if they felt any responsibility to warn Swedish women to stay away from certain men. One journalist asked why that should be their responsibility. In 1975, the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the former homogeneous Sweden into a multicultural country. Forty years later the dramatic consequences of this experiment emerge: violent crime has increased by 300%. If one looks at the number of rapes, however, the increase is even worse. In 1975, 421 rapes were reported to the police; in 2014, it was 6,620. That is an increase of 1,472%. Sweden is now number two on the global list of rape countries. According to a survey from 2010, Sweden, with 53.2 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants, is surpassed only by tiny Lesotho in Southern Africa, with 91.6 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants. Rape rate per 100,000 population, comparison by country (selected top and bottom countries), 2012 statistics taken from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons) According to figures published by The Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brottsförebyggande rådet; known as Brå) -- an agency under the Ministry of Justice -- 29,000 Swedish women, during 2011, reported that they had been raped (which seems to indicate that less than 25% of the rapes are reported to the police). Strange explanations Rather than doing something about the problem of violence and rape, Swedish politicians, public authorities and media do their best to explain away the facts. Here are some of their explanations: Swedes have become more prone to report crime. The law has been changed so that more sexual offences are now classed as rape. Swedish men cannot handle increased equality between the sexes and react with violence against women (perhaps the most fanciful excuse). A long-held feminist myth is that the most dangerous place for a woman is her own home -- that most rapes are committed by someone she knows. This claim was refuted by Brå's report: "In 58% of cases, the perpetrator was entirely unknown by the victim. In 29% of cases the perpetrator was an acquaintance, and in 13% of cases the perpetrator was a person close to the victim." Brå reports that there are no major differences between women of Swedish and foreign background when it comes to the risk of being raped. Significantly, the report does not touch on the background of the rapists. Without parallel Back in 1975, the year when politicians decided that Sweden was to become multicultural, the Swedish population stood at 8,208,442. By 2014 it had grown to 9,743,087 -- an increase of 18.7%. This growth is entirely due to immigration, as Swedish women on average give birth to 1.92 children compared to the 2.24 average of immigrant women. One should, however, keep in mind that in the statistics, second-generation immigrants are counted as Swedes. Sweden's recent population growth is without parallel. Never before in the country's history has the number of inhabitants increased so fast. Sweden is now the fastest growing country in Europe. Over the past 10-15 years, immigrants have mainly come from Muslim countries such as Iraq, Syria and Somalia. Might this mass influx explain Sweden's rape explosion? It is difficult to give a precise answer, because Swedish law forbids registration based on people's ancestry or religion. One possible explanation is that, on average, people from the Middle East have a vastly different view of women and sex than Scandinavians have. And despite the attempts by the Swedish establishment to convince the population that everyone setting foot on Swedish soil becomes exactly like those who have lived here for dozens of generations, facts point in an altogether different direction. The latest statistical survey of immigrant criminality compared to that of Swedes was done in 2005. The results are practically never mentioned. Not only that; anyone who dares refer to them, for example on social media, is viciously attacked. Denigration of ethnic groups Michael Hess, a local politician from Sweden Democrat Party, encouraged Swedish journalists to get acquainted with Islam's view of women, in connection with the many rapes that took place in Cairo's Tahrir Square during the "Arab Spring". Hess wrote, "When will you journalists realize that it is deeply rooted in Islam's culture to rape and brutalize women who refuse to comply with Islamic teachings. There is a strong connection between rapes in Sweden and the number of immigrants from MENA-countries [Middle East and North Africa]." This remark led to Michael Hess being charged with "denigration of ethnic groups" [hets mot folkgrupp], a crime in Sweden. In May last year, he was handed a suspended jail sentence and a fine -- the suspension was due to the fact that he had no prior convictions. The verdict has been appealed to a higher court. For many years, Michael Hess lived in Muslim countries, and he is well acquainted with Islam and its view of women. During his trial, he provided evidence of how sharia law deals with rape, and statistics to indicate that Muslims are vastly overrepresented among perpetrators of rape in Sweden. However, the court decided that facts were irrelevant: "The Court [Tingsrätten] notes that the question of whether or not Michael Hess's pronouncement is true, or appeared to be true to Michael Hess, has no bearing on the case. Michael Hess's statement must be judged based on its timing and context. ... At the time of the offense, Michael Hess referred neither to established research nor to Islamic sources. It was only in connection with his indictment that Michael Hess tried to find support in research and religious writings. The Court therefore notes that Michael Hess's pronouncement was obviously not a part of any reasoned [saklig] or trustworthy [vederhäftig] discussion. Michael Hess's pronouncement must therefore be viewed as an expression of disdain for immigrants with an Islamic faith." Statistical evidence What may one conclude from the available statistics? As part of the evidence Michael Hess presented in court, he made use of whatever statistics existed on immigrant criminality in Sweden before the statistical authorities stopped measuring. Michael Hess tried to find answers to two questions: Is there a correspondence between the incidence of rape and the number of people with a foreign background in Sweden? Is there a correspondence between the incidence of rape and some specific group of immigrants in Sweden? The answer to both questions was an unequivocal Yes. Twenty-one research reports from the 1960s until today are unanimous in their conclusions: Whether or not they measured by the number of convicted rapists or men suspected of rape, men of foreign extraction were represented far more than Swedes. And this greater representation of persons with a foreign background keeps increasing: 1960-1970s – 1.2 to 2.6 times as often as Swedes 1980s – 2.1 to 4.7 times as often as Swedes 1990s – 2.1 to 8.1 times as often as Swedes 2000s – 2.1 to 19.5 times as often as Swedes Even when adjusted for variables such as age, sex, class and place of residence, the huge discrepancy between immigrants and Swedes remains. Research reports on crime in Sweden have become a rarity, but among the eighteen that were done during the 1990s and the 2000s, eleven dealt with rape. Two of these reports dealt with the connection between rape and immigration, and they both confirmed that there is a link. These figures are available to the authorities, the politicians and the press, yet they insist that these numbers do not mirror reality. Glaring discrepancy How is it, then, that in 2008, Sweden's neighbor Denmark only had 7.3 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants compared to 53.2 in Sweden? Danish legislation is not very different from Sweden's, and there is no obvious reason why Danish women should be less inclined to report rape than their Swedish counterparts. In 2011, 6,509 rapes were reported to the Swedish police -- but only 392 in Denmark. The population of Denmark is about half the size of Sweden's, so even adjusted for size, the discrepancy is significant. In Sweden, the authorities do what they can to conceal the origin of the rapists. In Denmark, the state's official statistical office, Statistics Denmark, revealed that in 2010 more than half of convicted rapists had an immigrant background. Foreigners overrepresented Since 2000, there has only been one research report on immigrant crime. It was done in 2006 by Ann-Christine Hjelm from Karlstads University. It emerged that in 2002, 85% of those sentenced to at least two years in prison for rape in Svea Hovrätt, a court of appeals, were foreign born or second-generation immigrants. A 1996 report by the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention reached the conclusion that immigrants from North Africa (Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia) were 23 times as likely to commit rape as Swedish men. The figures for men from Iraq, Bulgaria and Romania were, respectively, 20, 18 and 18. Men from the rest of Africa were 16 times more prone to commit rape; and men from Iran, Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, 10 times as prone as Swedish men. Gang rapes A new trend reached Sweden with full force over the past few decades: gang rape -- virtually unknown before in Swedish criminal history. The number of gang rapes increased spectacularly between 1995 and 2006. Since then no studies of them have been undertaken. One of the worst cases occurred in 2012, when a 30-year old woman was raped by eight men in a housing project for asylum seekers, in the small town of Mariannelund. The woman was an acquaintance of a man from Afghanistan who had lived in Sweden for a number of years. He invited her to go out with him. She obliged. The Afghan man took her to a refugee housing project and left her defenseless. During the night, she was raped repeatedly by the asylum seekers and when her "friend" returned, he raped her too. The following morning she managed to call the police. Sweden's public prosecutor has called the incident "the worst crime of rape in Swedish criminal history." Seven of the men were sentenced to between 4.5 and 6.5 years in prison. Prison time is usually reduced by a third, so it won't be long before the men will be ready for new assaults -- presumably on infidel women. In cases of gang rape, culprits and victims are most often young and in almost every case, the perpetrators are of immigrant background, mostly from Muslim countries. In an astounding number of cases, the Swedish courts have demonstrated sympathy for the rapists. Several times the courts have acquitted suspects who have claimed that the girl wanted sex with six, seven or eight men. One striking incident occurred in 2013, in the Stockholm suburb of Tensta. A 15-year-old girl was locked up while six men of foreign extraction had sex with her. The lower court convicted the six men but the court of appeals acquitted them because no violence had occurred, and because the court determined that the girl "had not been in a defenseless position." This month, all major Swedish media reported on a brutal gang rape on board the Finnish Ferry Amorella, running between Stockholm and Åbo in Finland. Big headlines told the readers that the perpetrators were Swedish: "Several Swedish Men Suspected of Rape on the Finland Ferry" (Dagens Nyheter). "Six Swedish Men Raped Woman in Cabin" (Aftonbladet). "Six Swedes Arrested for Rape on Ferry" (Expressen). "Eight Swedes Suspected of Rape on Ferry" (TT – the Swedish News Agency). On closer inspection, it turned out that seven of the eight suspects were Somalis and one was Iraqi. None of them had Swedish citizenship, so they were not even Swedish in that sense. According to witnesses, the group of men had been scouring the ferry looking for sex. The police released four of them (but they are still suspects) whereas four (all Somalis) remain in custody. The internet radio station Granskning Sverige called the mainstream newspapers Aftonposten and Expressen to ask why they had described the perpetrators as "Swedish men" when they were actually Somalis. That is irrelevant, said the journalists. They were hugely offended when asked if they felt any responsibility to warn Swedish women to stay away from certain men. One journalist asked why that should be their responsibility. "If the women knew, then perhaps they would have stayed away from these men and avoided being raped," said the reporter from Granskning Sverige. Whereupon the journalist slammed down the phone. Ingrid Carlqvist and Lars Hedegaard are editors-in-chief of Dispatch International.

An example of why Trump is popular.

AJ: Rush does a wonderful analysis of how the Media tries to trip up Republicans.

Pop Quiz Won't Hurt Trump

September 04, 2015

Windows Media

Windows Media

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, let's get... First, I think probably what everybody here wants some clarification on -- or at least some analysis of or explanation of or discussion of -- is Trump and his inability to identify certain names thrown at him on the radio, names of Al-Qaeda leaders, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iranian Quds Force leaders and so forth.  It's real simple here, folks, and I guess I should address this to the Republican establishment and like-minded.  If you think this is going to harm Trump with his supporters, it won't.
It didn't hurt George W. Bush when he was unable to do the same.  It didn't hurt Ronaldus Magnus when he was unable to do the same thing.  But it specifically isn't gonna hurt Trump's people because Trump, A, had a fairly decent answer. (summarized) "It doesn't matter. These guys are all gonna be gone by the time I'm elected." But, anyway, that's not the point.  I want to get some historical perspective.  Let's start here first off with what Trump said.  This was on the Hugh Hewitt show last night.  He's interviewing Trump.
This guy Hewitt, by the way, is one of the CNN moderators.  He is the conservative Republican moderator CNN has chosen. He used to be in the Reagan White House.  He's a graduate of Harvard. Solid guy, nice guy. No problem with Hugh Hewitt. He has his own technique, has his own way of doing his program and vetting presidential candidates.  He asked the same questions later of Carly Fiorina.  She was able to ace them all.   So now we got comparisons, by the way.


"You know what? You know what?" they're saying in the Drive-By Media. "Why, this just like Sarah Palin! Sarah Palin, she didn't do the homework. She didn't study. She thought she could wing her way through and look what happened to her." They're saying that Trump is on the same path that Sarah Palin was on.  Not, of course, noting the profound differences.
Anyway, here's the question.  We have one of two.  "At the debate..." Hugh Hewitt was telling Trump, "At the debate, I may bring up Nasrallah being with Hezbollah and al-Julani being with al-Nusra and al-Masri being with Hamas.  Do you think if I asked people to talk about those three things and the differences, that that's a gotcha question?"
TRUMP:  Yes, I do.  I totally do. I think it's ridiculous.  I'm a delegator.  I find great people. I find absolutely great people and I'll find them in our Armed Services, and I find absolutely great people.  When you start throwing around names of people and where they live and -- you know, "Give me their address" -- I think it's ridiculous.  The names you just mentioned they probably won't even be there in six months or a year.
HEWITT: So the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas does not matter to you yet, but it will?
TRUMP:  It will when it's appropriate.  I will know more about it than you know -- and believe me, it won't take me long.  It won't matter.  I will know far more than you know within 24 hours after I get the job.
RUSH:  By the way, you might think that Trump is putting Hewitt down.  What he's actually saying is, "I'm gonna have some experts in there. We'll know everything there is to know about these guys 24/7 after I'm be elected. We're gonna know everything. We're gonna know everything we want to know. We're gonna know everything about who they are because we're gonna destroy them in the first 24 hours that I'm there. We're gonna get rid of them."  That's the unspoken message that the Trump supporters will hear.  So let's go back to November 4 of 1999.  This is Boston on the educational staked WHDH TV.  Political correspondent Andy Hiller is interviewing former governor of Texas, George Bush.
HILLER:  Can you name the president of Chechnya?
BUSH:  No.  Can you?
HILLER:  Can you name the president of Taiwan?
BUSH:  Yeah, Lee.
HILLER:  Can you name the general who's --
BUSH:  Wait.  Is this a 50 questions?
HILLER:  No, it's four questions of four leaders in four hot spots.
BUSH:  The new Pakistani general that's just been elected -- not elected.  This guy took over office.  He appears he's gonna bring stability to the country, and I think that's good news for the subcontinent.
HILLER:  And you can name him?
BUSH:  General... I can't name the general.
RUSH:  Bush got away with it 'cause he called it "the subcontinent."  See, only the insiders in foreign policy know what the hell "the subcontinent" is.  Do you know what the subcontinent is, Snerdley? (interruption) You don't know what it is? (interruption) Are you kidding me?  You don't know what the subcontinent is?  This is my point.  I remember.  I'm gonna get back to Trump here just a second, but when this all happened I remember Condoleezza Rice.
They sent her out for damage control after this and she kept using the term. "The governor was clear in his understanding of the subcontinent and the issues of the subcontinent and what was happening in the subcontinent," and I'm thinking, "Okay, I know what the subcontinent is, but nobody ever talks about it except in these circles." This is sort of like foreign policy lingo they're entitled to use but you aren't.
Not that you're not entitled. They use and you don't.  It's one of those words or ways of referring to a geographical place on the planet that lets you know, "These people are special. They are talking about the subcontinent, and only real insiders do that." It's like the way economists talk about their business. They start throwing around these terms that most people don't know, and it lets you know that they are insiders and you aren't.
So Bush using the word "subcontinent" overcame all of the other things he wasn't able to answer because he knew what the subcontinent was; that meant he was schooled and of the right mind-set. (interruption) You still don't know what the subcontinent is?  Do you know...? (interruption) Do you know what sub-Sahara is?  What is it?  (interruption)  Right.  Right.  Sub-Saharan Africa is what?  (interruption)  No.  No.  No.  (laughing)
Let me take a break here before.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So when you talk about sub-Saharan Africa, most people when they hear the word "sub" (not all but a lot of people) think "substitute." "Okay sub-Saharan. Substituting what for Africa?" They don't get it.  Rather than thinking of sub as in submarine, as in underneath.  So sub-Saharan is about half of the continent, maybe a little bit more.  It's the green part.  It's everything below the Sahara Desert.
The Brits are responsible for this, folks.
The British and their foreign policy diplomats -- trying to distinguish themselves and the plebes that make up the rest of the world, don't you know -- created all these terms.  The subcontinent is essentially India.  You have Europe.  It's just a blob up there.  And you have this thing like an udder.  It's sticking down there from the continent, and it's India.  The subcontinent, it's beneath the continent. So to make themselves out to be really sophisticated, "Yes, of course! India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka? The subcontinent, don't you see?"  So when Bush started talking about the subcontinent in that answer 2000, I knew it was okay.
And then Condoleezza Rice went out doing damage control, and she kept talking about how (she kept calling him "the governor," 'cause that's what he was at the time, governor of Texas), "The governor is clearly versed on the issues ranging foreign ones subcontinent." She never defined what subcontinent was, never talked about it in the issues. Just kept using the term.  So it was all okay.  This was even done to Reagan, folks.  Reagan was running for president.
He and the other candidates were asked if they knew the names of various obscure heads of state. These questions are never asked of Democrats, by the way.  Make note of this: The question that Trump got, Democrats will never get those questions in the normal ebb and flow of things.  Hillary will never get them.  Clinton will never get 'em. Never did.  It's just... They are questions that are designed to further the narrative that Republicans are just not bright; they're just not hip.
And when it works on one of them, then every other Republican is gonna start getting the same treatment.  For example, if they can expose, say, a Sarah Palin who doesn't know an answer like this, "A-ha! Let's start asking the others, too."  So Reagan got questions like this. He was asked to name various obscure heads of state. Reagan's answer was the best.  Reagan said... I'm paraphrasing.  He said, "It doesn't matter if I know their names.  They need to know mine," and that shut it down.  Trump saying, "It doesn't matter. They're not gonna be there by the time I get inaugurated, and even if they are, in 24 hours I'm gonna know more about these people.
"Because I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna find the wonks, and I'm gonna find the geeks. I'm gonna find the foreign policy experts are gonna tell me all about this. I'm a delegator. I'm gonna tell 'em to deal with it. We're gonna deal with it once and for all.  Hamas, Hezbollah, what do you need to know?  They're terrorist organizations, and they need to be wiped out.  That's all anybody needs to know," and answers like that are gonna resonate.  Trump's inability to name names or identify certain names? It's not gonna hurt him with his supporters.
One more theory on this and we're gonna keep going after this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Now, one of the names that Donald Trump was given -- and he knew who he was.  He was not stumped by this -- the head honcho, the leader of the Quds forces in Iran. That's the equivalent of their Delta or Ranger, SEALs, you name it, Special Forces, and this guy is an absolute bad guy.  His name is General Qasem Soleimani.  He heads the Quds forces.
Obama just lifted all sanctions on Soleimani and the Quds in this Iran deal.  Part of the original sanctions prevented Soleimani from traveling and doing nuclear related business with, say, the Russians or anybody else.  It was recognized what a viciously, dangerous bad guy he was and the sanctions limited his movement, if they abided by them.  Those sanctions now have been lifted, and this guy, Soleimani, is free to travel all over.  Obama (paraphrasing), "It's accidental. We didn't intend for this to happen," lifted all sanctions on Soleimani and the Quds in this Iran deal.
Soleimani is also the guy who sent all of the IEDs to Iraq that maimed and killed so many of our troops.  Qasem Soleimani.  He didn't personally manufacture them, of course, but he made sure that they got to Iranian allies in Iraq.  These roadside IEDs, and positioned elsewhere, were used specifically to kill Americans and Iranians.  So let me ask you, which is worse?  Not knowing his name off the top of your head, but knowing who he is. Trump knew who he was, or is. But what's worse here, not knowing the name of this guy off the top of your head or rewarding him with sanctions relief, as the Obama administration has done.
I tell you, folks, there's even a part of me that is disgusted.  I'm not sure if that's the right term.  We have to know the names of these thugs, as though it's giving them some sort of respect?  The only thing we need to know, and if identifying their names helps, is where they are so they can be targets.  Every one of these groups, every one of these names, Al Zawahiri, everybody knows that Zawahiri inherited Al-Qaeda from bin Laden. Ayman al-Zawahiri, he's Egyptian. He's been running Al-Qaeda for 14 years essentially, even before bin Laden was captured and killed.
To the extent that these guys are known because they become targets, fine and dandy, but I guarantee you, I think the American people are sick and tired of these names.  They're sick and tired of hearing about these names. They're sick and tired of nothing being done about these names, if you ask me.  I would go so far as to say that a majority of the American people want these names out of our lives.  The American people want something done about this.  We're not fighting a War on Terror.
I haven't spoken much about this on this program, because it's a bit, I think, in the weeds for a lot of people.  

END TRANSCRIPT

Cultural war flares up.

The Left on campus is not content on merely expunging Christian values from student life, they want to brainwash students to redefine masculinity. Vanderbilt University is holding a "Healthy Masculinities Week." The student body had been leafleted. The advertisement for “Healthy Masculinities Week,” which was emailed to members of the student body, includes a portrayal man with a thought bubble, thinking, “Don’t cry,” “Have sex,” “Major in business,” “Play sports,” and “Man up.” Allegedly, these are examples of unhealthy masculinity.
Vanderbilt’s “Healthy Masculinities Week” is scheduled to run from Sept. 10-17.

St Petersburg police are being instructed on how to deal with transgender people.

The Department of Justice has accused a business of discrimination due to the company requiring employees to show proof of citizenship for employment.
The DOJ claims that Nebraska Beef Ltd., a Nebraska-based meat packing company, “required non-U.S. citizens, but not similarly-situated U.S. citizens, to present specific documentary proof of their immigration status to verify their employment eligibility.”
After receiving pressure from the government, Nebraska Beef agreed to pay $200,000 in a civil penalty settlement and said they will establish an uncapped back pay fund for people who lost wages because they could not prove they are in the country legally.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump's suggestion that Jeb Bush should speak English at campaign appearances drew criticism and was labeled "controversial."

The crazies are running loose.

Eurozone shows some growth.

One of the reporting facilities on the economy of various European countries is MARKIT. According to these reports a reading of 50 is neutral, readings above 50 denote expansion and readings below show contraction.


Germany and Italy have hit 55, while Spain and Ireland scored 58.8 and 59.7 respectively. The Eurozone has registered a growth of 0.5%, even though the French MARKIT number came in at 50.2.
Fears of a Grexit had receded at least for now. Opinion polls ahead of the Greek election show the Conservatives gaining although a defeat of Syriza is not yet forecast.


England is slowing but it still shows a number of 55. Have the Europeans solved their economic Crisis? Hard to tell at this point. Larry's cycles predict doom and gloom and a fiscal meltdown starting Oct 7. I don't see it unless European figures are doctored.

Ukraine and Hungary: European trouble spots.

The Ukraine.


The news is mixed. Ukraine has serious economic problems, including a chronic trouble to pay on its loans. Then there is the problem of extremists and 'oligarchs' challenging govt power, such as the nationalist attacks on the police while the Ukraine parliament was debating the autonomy laws for Eastern Ukraine. Then there is the military problem with Russia and the Separatists. If that were not enough, two children became paralyzed by polio in Western Ukraine. The Ukrainian navy (a shade of its former self after losing Crimea) is having exercises with a few US boats in the Black Sea. But, the Ukrainian State has survived and improved its military. It did serious butt kicking as evidenced by the report that there were almost 5,000 Russian casualties in the Donbas.


Hungary.


Hungary is having a serious problem with the unarmed Muslim invaders trying to move through the country. West European elites (like our own) are profoundly anti-Christian, so they welcome the invasion and accuse the government of Xenophobia. Of course leftism is a disease of the mind and the elites do not want to acknowledge that compared to the weak influence of Christianity, Islam would impose far harsher restrictions on their hedonistic ways. There are not so covert threats against Hungary in the Press and governments. Also, there are economic threats.

Attempts to whitewash Hillary's crimes about her private/govt server.

by Andrew C. McCarthy September 1, 2015 4:00 AM


                             The former prosecutor who let Petraeus slide weighs in on the e-mail scandal. Well, well, well: The Obama-appointed prosecutor who gave Obama’s former CIA director a sweetheart plea deal when he was caught mishandling classified information now says there’s no case against Obama’s former secretary of state for mishandling classified information. How very persuasive.


Oh, and did I mention that the Obama-appointed prosecutor is a donor to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign? In what appears to be an audition for attorney general in a hoped-for Clinton II administration, Anne M. Tompkins, the former U.S. attorney for the western district of North Carolina (appointed by President Obama in 2010), has penned an op-ed for USA Today arguing that Hillary Clinton is not guilty of “knowingly sending or receiving classified materials improperly.”


 Understand: Ms. Tompkins has had nothing to do with the FBI’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information through an unauthorized private e-mail system. She is not privy to the evidence the FBI is gathering — she knows no more about the case than anyone else who reads the papers. To exonerate Clinton, she relies on nothing other than her status as the government lawyer who oversaw the prosecution of David Petraeus. If it weren’t so disingenuous, Tompkins’s reasoning would be comically incompetent. The Petraeus case, she insists, was much stronger than the case — or at least what she frames as the case — against Hillary Clinton. She thus contends that there is “no merit” to the comparison between the Petraeus and Clinton situations offered in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by former Bush attorney general and top federal judge Michael Mukasey. If it weren’t so disingenuous, Tompkins’s reasoning would be comically incompetent. She writes: The key element that distinguishes Secretary Clinton’s email retention practices from Petraeus’ sharing of classified information is that Petraeus knowingly engaged in unlawful conduct, and that was the basis of his criminal liability. [The italics are in Tompkins’s op-ed; I’ve added the bold.] To begin with, Tompkins did not prosecute Petraeus for sharing classified information. Instead, despite Petraeus’s commission of several felonies, Tompkins struck a cozy arrangement with Petraeus’s lawyer, David Kendall (who happens to represent Clinton), allowing the retired general and former CIA director to plead to a single misdemeanor count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents (section 1924 of the federal penal code). As I pointed out at the time of Petraeus’s plea, based on the prosecution’s outline of the evidence it was in a position to prove, Petraeus not only transmitted highly classified information to his paramour/hagiographer; he retained it in a reckless manner, failed to return it on demand, and repeatedly made false statements to the government and investigating agents about his hoarding and disclosure of that information. Tompkins let all these felonies slide. Given her own failure to charge crimes she could easily have proved in a case for which she was directly responsible, she is hardly in a position to judge what crimes should be charged as the result of an investigation she has nothing to do with. It is difficult to decide where to begin with Tompkins’s laughable claim that Petraeus’s certain knowledge that the information he was dealing with was classified is a “key” distinction from Clinton’s state of mind. Let’s start with the most obvious fact: The FBI is not limited to investigating the same misdemeanor offense to which Tompkins chose to let Petraeus plead guilty. The plethora of potential crimes the agents are investigating have a variety of proof elements, including different scienter requirements. For instance, as I’ve previously explained, one of the several felony violations of the Espionage Act (section 793 of the federal penal code) makes it a crime for an official to exercise gross negligence in handling classified information — e.g., to allow national defense information with which she has been entrusted to be lost, stolen, abstracted, destroyed, or improperly transmitted. So if a top government official were to set up an unauthorized private server system for storing and transmitting information under circumstances where she knew that (a) her job involved dealing with vast amounts of classified information and (b) the private system was easily penetrable by foreign intelligence services and other minimally competent hackers, she could be charged with a felony even if she did not have perfect knowledge that any one particular e-mail contained classified information. But more to the point, as any competent prosecutor knows, you cannot make a definitive pronouncement about any suspect’s state of knowledge without knowing all the facts of the case. Tompkins has no idea what facts the FBI is turning up, and she seems to have a decided disinterest in reports that Clinton’s known e-mails are threaded with classified information.


Tompkins seems to believe that unless the prosecution has the kind of slam-dunk proof she had (but shied away from using) in the Petraeus case — namely, proof that Petraeus admitted to someone that the information he hoarded was highly classified — it is impossible to prove knowledge beyond a reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, there are innumerable cases in which investigators and prosecutors establish knowledge, intent, willfulness, gross negligence, and other mental elements without a confession by the suspect. In fact, in virtually every criminal trial, the judge instructs the jury that, because we are not mind-readers, knowledge and intent are usually proved by analyzing the totality of the evidence and the reasonable inferences that flow from it. In Tompkins’s own prosecution of Petraeus, the government described the journals he maintained as containing “the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions, quotes and deliberative discussions from high-level National Security Council meetings, and defendant DAVID HOWELL PETRAEUS’s discussions with the President of the United States of America.” Petraeus, of course, was the director of the CIA and had been the commander of U.S. forces in war zones. I daresay that even if he hadn’t told his girlfriend that the journals he let her read were highly classified, Tompkins wouldn’t have had the slightest difficulty proving that he was well aware of this fact. I imagine that the reason Petraeus pleaded guilty rather than going to trial — other than the fact that Tompkins was offering him a slap on the wrist — is that he realized his high-ranking position left him with no plausible state-of-mind defense. All we can safely say is that the facts that have been revealed publicly raise a very real possibility, if not probability, that Clinton has broken federal laws.


The case that Clinton mishandled classified information appears so daunting that, even as Tompkins attempts to trash it, she can’t help but bolster it. The current iteration of Clinton’s evolving defense is that she did not realize information on her server was classified because it was not marked as such. But Tompkins elucidates that Petraeus’s journals were not marked “top secret” either. So let’s put aside for the moment the fact that the investigation of Clinton potentially involves a quantum of classified information that dwarfs the materials in Petraeus’s case. Tompkins illustrates that the lack of markings on the information in question is immaterial if an official’s high position and familiarity with government’s intelligence-handling protocols make it obvious that the information is classified — exactly the point Judge Mukasey made in his op-ed.


 The rest of Tompkins’s op-ed is just a rehash of talking points peddled by Camp Clinton. She repeats, for example, the Obama State Department’s self-interested claim that none of the information known to have been on Clinton’s server was classified “at the time it was sent or received.” This conveniently omits that (A) the intelligence community’s inspector general has stated that some of the e-mails contained classified information at the time they were created; (B) the sheer volume of classified information currently being deleted from the belated public disclosure of the e-mails that Clinton deigned to turn over to the State Department makes the implausible claim of only-after-the-fact classification increasingly untenable; (C) even if it were true that information was not marked classified until after it was sent or received, many of Clinton’s e-mails involved conversations with foreign officials which, under Obama’s own classification order, would automatically have been deemed classified because their disclosure was presumed to harm national security (see Executive Order 13526, sec. 1.1(d) (“The unauthorized disclosure of foreign government information is presumed to cause damage to the national security”); (D) Clinton provided copies of her server to her attorney and a private maintenance company (Platte River Networks) long after the e-mails were sent and received (and thus, presumably, long after the information in them suddenly became classified); and (E) Clinton destroyed (or at least attempted to destroy) over 30,000 e-mails — e-mails that were never turned over to the State Department but which the FBI’s investigation is reportedly trying to recover. In any event, we will not be able to conclusively assess Hillary Clinton’s state of knowledge or criminal liability until all the facts have been laid bare. As any prosecutor knows, that’s why you do an investigation. At this point, all we can safely say is that the facts that have been revealed publicly raise a very real possibility, if not probability, that Clinton has broken federal laws. Of course, Clinton donors may see things differently.


 — Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment. Did you like this? Share article on Facebook Tweet article Plus one article on Google Plus Get Free NR E-Mails View Comments

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/423340/clinton-e-mail-scandal-a-laughable-defense