PrairiePundit

Daily Mail: Trump is RIGHT that illegal voting hit the presidential election, say experts - even if it wasn't in the millions, his critics have NOT proven he was wrong  Experts tell DailyMail.com that Trump was 'more right than his critics' in claiming illegal voting hit the presidential election - but that his 'millions' figure is unlikely to be proven when proper data is examined Past studies indicated between one and two million illegal votes were cast in US general elections.  Democrats have made it difficult to detect illegal voting by refusing to support voter ID laws.  They have also facilitated it by granting drivers licenses to illegal aliens  in states like California which could result in voter registration under the "motor voter" laws. California is where Clinton racked up her largest totals.  In addition, there where immigration activist urging people to register to vote regardless of their citizenship status.  Some courts have also he...

The Hill: The top U.S. military commander in the Middle East said Wednesday he has seen a "bit of an uptick" in bad behavior by Iran since the nation's nuclear deal was signed in January. Army Gen. Joseph Votel said the agreement, which lifted sanctions on Iran in exchange for limits to its nuclear program, was being "implemented appropriately," but that it has not changed Iranian behavior. "I am concerned about continued malign activities of Iran across the region," Votel, commander of U.S. Central Command, said at a forum hosted by the Foreign Policy Initiative. Those included Iran's cyber activities, the use of surrogate forces, facilitation of lethal aid, buildup of missile and anti-access capabilities, and unprofessional and aggressive activities in the Persian Gulf, he said. ... The Iranians do not seem too grateful for the rewards they got for foregoing their nuclear weapons activity for a few years.  They appear to be intent on h...

Washington Post: I interviewed the Ohio State attacker on the first day of school. It felt important. Now it’s chilling. Artan seemed measured and intellectual, not violent or angry. But he was also concerned about how Muslims are treated. That is one of the funny things about radical Islamists.  They seem to feel that they are the victims when in reality it is their religious beliefs that make victims of anyone who has a different point of view.  They cannot accept people who reject radical Islam.  It is their rejection of the rest of the world that leads them to want to commit mass murder in the name of their religion.  The mavens of political correctness do not seem to comprehend that this is the driving force behind radical Islam.

CNN: ... There are two strategies intended to deter a Crimea scenario in Norway: Firstly, the presence of armored vehicles, which would enable them to confront the little green men effectively, and would force their backers, Russia, to introduce armored vehicles into the conflict, making it clear that any attacking forces have state backing. Secondly, the presence of US Marines, ensuring that any interference in Norwegian territory automatically involves the United States in the fight. And this heightened threat comes at a time of unprecedented political uncertainty in Washington. ... There is much more about this Marine operation above the Arctic Circle.  It is a strategy to defeat the Russian hybrid warfare threat and stymie the "little green men" approach used in Ukraine.

David French: It’s Time for Honest Talk about Muslim Immigration Some immigrants from jihad zones will be involved in murdering Americans. Is this an acceptable price for compassion? I am not sure that Democrats are ready for an honest debate about this issue.  They would rather shut down the debate by accusing opponents of the phony disease of Islamaphobia.

Bill McKibben: Standing Rock Is the Civil Rights Issue of Our Time One is tempted to say that you have to be dumb as a rock to think like this.  Standing Rock is a good metaphor of the lack of intelligence of the anti-energy left. The "keep it in the ground" left is just using the tribe as an excuse to try to block infrastructure to get oil to market in a safe manner.  Their argument is bogus on its face. Pipelines are the safest way to transport oil and gas.  They are much safer than transporting by rail which is the current method for getting North Dakota oil to market.  Pipelines run throughout much of Texas and any difficulty with them is rare.

NY Times: More Law Degrees for Women, but Fewer Good Jobs Female law students tend to be clustered in lower-ranked law schools, a new study found, putting them at a disadvantage in landing top legal jobs. The fact is that men who graduate from the same law schools have the same problem as the women.  The supply of lawyers greatly exceeds the jobs available, and the top legal jobs have always gone to the top five or 10 percent of students at the top law schools.  That leaves those who did not get the top grades at the top law schools looking for jobs in smaller communities are setting up a practice in specialties like divorce. I graduated from the University of Texas School of Law in 1971.  By the 1980's there were more lawyers in the city of Houston than there were in the whole state of Texas 10 years earlier.  That led to many graduates taking jobs in unrelated fields.  I think it is why you are also seeing law graduates as reporters...

NY Times: Mass Graves Dug by ISIS in Iraq Renew a Ghastly Ritual As the Iraqi security forces retake territory from the Islamic State, more mass graves are being uncovered. The sites are reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s industrial-scale killings. This is more evidence that you cannot retreat your way to victory.  George W. Bush warned of the consequences of leaving prematurely and intelligence leaders such as General Flynn, also warned Obama of the consequences of his actions.  But Obama thinks he is smarter than all his advisors, so there you have it.

Take a look at the sad look on the faces of the men in this clip.  You get the feeling they know they did it to themselves.

Fox News: Carrier says it has deal with Trump to keep jobs in Indiana The deal will keep 1,000 jobs that were slated to be eliminated with a production shift to Mexico. Carrier is part of a larger corporation that among other things is a defense contractor supplying the US military.  That probably gave the President-elect some leverage.

Telegraph: A German intelligence officer has reportedly been arrested over a suspected Islamist plot to bomb the agency's headquarters in Cologne. The 51-year-old official was said to have made a "partial confession" to the plot, according to Der Spiegel. The suspect attempted to pass on "sensitive information about the BfV (Germany's domestic security agency), which could lead to a threat to the office", an official told the newspaper. "He is accused of making Islamist remarks online under a false name, and offering internal information during chats," a BfV spokesman said. ... The German leadership made the mistake of thinking that Islamists could be trusted with classified information.  The attempt of liberals to normalize the Islamists is allowing the barbarians inside the gates.

Marc Thiessen: ... But perhaps the most riveting part of the book is what KSM told Mitchell about what inspired al-Qaeda to attack the United States — and the U.S. response he expected. Today, some on both the left and the right argue that al-Qaeda wanted to draw us into a quagmire in Afghanistan — and now the Islamic State wants to do the same in Iraq and Syria. KSM said this is dead wrong. Far from trying to draw us in, KSM said that al-Qaeda expected the United States to respond to 9/11 as we had the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut — when, KSM told Mitchell, the United States “turned tail and ran.” He also said he thought we would treat 9/11 as a law enforcement matter, just as we had the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the USS Cole in Yemen — arresting some operatives and firing a few missiles into empty tents, but otherwise leaving him free to plan the next attack. “Then he looked at me and said, ‘How was I supposed to know that cowboy G...

Bloomberg/Fuel Fix: OPEC is near an agreement to cut production for the first time in eight years, sending oil prices surging on optimism a deal with start to drain record global inventories. Under the terms being discussed by ministers in Vienna, the group would cut production by 1.4 million barrels a day, equivalent to about 1.5 percent of global production, according to a delegate. In addition, oil producers outside OPEC, including Russia, would contribute cuts of about 600,000 barrels a day, they said. The outlines of the deal emerged as ministers on their way into the meeting struck a markedly more optimistic tone than in recent days, signaling the group’s three largest producers — Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq — have overcome differences on how to share the burden of cuts. It appears Iran will be able to raise production as it recovers from sanctions on its oil industry. “I am very optimistic we’re going to come up with very fruitful results,” Iraqi Oil Minister Jabbar al-L...

Daily Caller: Two years ago, Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC nations declared an oil war with America. On November 30h OPEC will meet to admit they have lost that conflict. At this month’s meeting OPEC will try to decide about the possibility of a global production cut or even a freeze in crude oil production in order to raise prices. The speculation about this conference is the fact that the production increase war failed and OPEC is on the verge of extinction. The Saudi’s and OPEC thought by flooding world markets with oil, they could eliminate competition and also put oil companies in America out of business. Having done so, they would gain a larger market share and reassert their power to control global economies. There is no question that many people lost billions of dollars in this power play by the OPEC countries. The mistake that OPEC and the Saudis made, in my opinion, was the failure to understand the resolve of American oilmen. This foreign effort did shut down prod...

Wall Street Journal: When Rick Chevalier wants to ship raw materials from Mexico to his company’s coffee plant in Canada, all it takes is a quick email. As U.S. distribution manager for Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee, Mr. Chevalier arranges a single trucking or train company to whisk the materials, used for coffee-machine capsules, from the Mexican state of Querétaro up through the U.S. and into Ontario in Canada. Because of the North American Free Trade Agreement, what was once a seven-day trip might now take only five and saves his company money, he said. “It’s free trade that simplifies it,” said Mr. Chevalier, who works from Fort Worth, where Mother Parkers has a roasting plant with 300 employees. Far from abandoned mills and factories of the industrial Midwest, where simmering anger over trade deals and jobs shipped overseas helped catapult Donald Trump to victory, Texas’ export economy is powered by Nafta. As a candidate, the president-elect blasted the 22-year-old agr...

NY Times: ISIS Says Ohio State University Attacker Was a ‘Soldier’ The student, who ran over people with a car and also used a knife, was reported to have spoken about sleeper cells. The vetting process for Muslim refugees does not appear to be effective at predicting which among them will go off like a mad pit bull and start attacking people who are not Muslims.  There appears to be something about this ideology that defies common sense.

NY Times: Trump’s Call to Revoke Rights of Flag Burners Defies Rulings President-elect Donald J. Trump proposed that Americans who protest government policies by burning the flag could lose their citizenship. The proposal conflicts with an array of Supreme Court precedents. I suspect he knows about the court rulings and also knows they are deeply unpopular with many of the people who voted for him . Trump does have a knack for trolling the left and it would not surprise me if that was his intention with this message.  When you get the leading liberal paper in the country to put his remarks as their lead story, he probably looks at the reaction as a success.

Washington Post: ISIS’s second-in-command hid in Syria for months. The day he stepped out, the U.S. was waiting. Abu Muhammad al-Adnani’s death in a missile strike was the biggest prize in what U.S. officials describe as an increasingly successful campaign to track and kill the Islamic State’s senior commanders. At least six high-level ISIS officials have died in U.S. airstrikes in the past four months, along with dozens of deputies and brigadiers. The war of attrition continues against the ISIL leadership making it difficult for them to exercise command and control of their forces.  It is not the most effective way to win a war but it does make it difficult for the enemy to operate.  It does little to stop the mass murder attacks and the genocide against certain religious and ethnic groups.  It is going to take boots on the ground to do that and the US is relying on Iraqis and Kurds for that chore.

NY Times: Assad May Win the War in Syria, but New Troubles Await If President Bashar al-Assad of Syria defeats the rebels, he may preside over an economic wasteland hampered by a low-level insurgency and difficulty in finding financial aid to rebuild. Most of the smart Syrians have already left and they are unlikely to willingly return.  He may get some funding from his two main allies, Russia and Iran.  Russia believes its port facilities in Syria are worth fighting for and Iran has indicated that it would also like a port in Syria.  Iran does have the money Obama gave it to get the bad nuclear deal and might spend some of it on building a port facility.

NY Times: Sharp Critic of Health Law Is Said to Be Pick to Oversee It President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Tom Price to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, a transition official said. The six-term Republican congressman from Georgia has been a leading opponent of the Affordable Care Act. Price strikes me as one of those guys who always turned his homework in on time and always got straight A's in school.  He regularly has sent me emails stating his position on Obamacare and proposing alternatives .  I think he is another excellent choice by the President-elect.  Price is not a demagogue.  His criticisms are knowledgeable and substantive.

Red States: Gov Abbott Prepared To Ban Sanctuary Cities In Texas Austin and Dallas are two of the most prominent sanctuary cities and Austin leaders have stated their intent to keep that policy even if President-elect Trump cuts off federal funding.  It might be more difficult for them if the state is also opposed to the policy.

Washington Times: What attracted Team Trump to retired Marine Gen. John F. Kelly for a Cabinet post was a dissertation on the southern border he delivered to the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2015. Gen. Kelly’s supporters told The Washington Times that his hawkish testimony caught the eye of Donald Trump’s key adviser, Steve Bannon, and won him an audience Nov. 19 with the president-elect at his New Jersey country club. “In my opinion, the relative ease with which human smugglers moved tens of thousands of people to our nation’s doorstep also serves as another warning sign: These smuggling routes are a potential vulnerability to our homeland,” Gen. Kelly told the Senate committee. President Obama’s aides at the time frowned on his testimony depicting the porous border as a threat to the nation. Gen. Kelly has been endorsed by fellow retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, who is in the mix for defense secretary. Gen. Kelly reciprocated by plugging Gen. Mattis, supporters say. ...

Fuel Fix: Saudi Arabia’s push for OPEC’s first oil production cut in eight years comes as its finances fall into disarray. The Saudi government’s budget deficit has ballooned to one-fifth of its economic output this year despite its $57 billion in spending cuts since oil prices collapsed. That’s about twice the size of the U.S. deficit in 2009, the worst year of the so-called Great Recession, energy research firm Wood Mackenzie estimates in a new report. The Kingdom has pushed back major infrastructure projects, cut state employee wages and burned through $180 billion in financial reserves, a quarter of its coffers, as oil prices have languished under half the $92 a barrel oil price it needs to balance its government budget. Mounting financial pressure on Saudi Arabia and other key Middle Eastern oil producers is one reason analysts believe the Saudi-led Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has a better chance of reaching a deal to curb oil production at a formal meeti...

Telegraph: Intelligence of attack plots across Europe is being uncovered as Islamic State’s caliphate is beaten back, the top British officer in the military coalition fighting the extremists has disclosed. A trove of information has already been found and the capture of the Iraqi city of Mosul is expected to deliver more on the plans, finances and members of Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (Isil). Maj Gen Rupert Jones warned there were “no quick answers” in the fight to liberate Iraq’s second city, which has now entered its second month. ... The volume of intelligence being found is so large the coalition has set up a lab in the Gulf to plunder militants’ laptops, phones and drives for their secrets and then pass them to intelligence agencies. The capture of the Syrian town of Manbij, which acted as a gateway for jihadists travelling into Turkey and on to Europe, was an intelligence breakthrough, he said. But he warned the militants would still be able to direct plots while...

Washington Post: Deporting convicted criminals is not as easy as it sounds President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to kick out undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, but dozens of countries don't want them back. One of the things the US could do is deny visas to citizens of those countries who refuse to take back a criminal alien.  The Obama administration has been lax in using this power, but it would be effective for any country wishing to do business with the US.   If they still refused, I would consider strapping them in a parachute and dropping them into those countries.

McClatchy: The parade of Texans to Trump Tower continues, but this time the president-elect is turning to a lesser-known individual for policy advice. Kathleen Hartnett White, a director of energy policy at a conservative Texas think-tank and a Donald Trump energy adviser during the campaign, met with the president-elect Monday afternoon. White told The Texas Tribune she has been contacted by the Trump transition team. “I think a lot of things are way too premature to try to characterize meaningfully, but it would be my lifelong work — it would be an honor to serve in his administration,” White said. White serves as the director of the Armstrong Center for Energy and the Environment at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based conservative think-tank. She formerly led the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality , a state agency with the goal of “clean air, clean water, and the safe management of waste.” White’s background as a regulator and environmental policymaker woul...

NY Times: Suspect Is Killed in Attack at Ohio State That Injured 9 A man veered his car onto the sidewalk at the campus, leaped out, and stabbed several people with a butcher knife, law enforcement officials said.   The times seems reluctant to identify the assailant as a Muslim refugee.  It is one of those inconvenient facts that does not fit the liberal narrative that there is nothing to fear from the influx of Muslim refugees.  A court recently sentenced a group of Somalis who were evidently keen on supporting ISIL.  There appears to be no currently effective screening policy to stop the spread of the cancer of radical Islam that infects some of them.

CNN: US military prepares for the next frontier: Space war It would be close to the equivalent of an EMP attack on earth that could potentially shut down the US economy and transportation.

Charles Gasparino: It’s fair to say the stock market is over its early jitters about a Donald Trump presidency. All major indices have risen to record levels for the first time in nearly 20 years, and the Dow Jones industrial average is up more than 800 points since Trump’s victory. And what’s not to like — at least so far? As I pointed out on these pages both before and after Trump’s victory, the market’s initial reaction to a wild card like Trump was overwrought, his free-market prescriptions were exactly what was missing from the eight years of Obamanomics — and stocks were bound to show their appreciation. Now, with the GOP controlling the House as well as the Senate, traders see real economic growth on the horizon, not just a Fed-induced stock-market bubble where interest rates are so low, there’s no other place to put your money. What, specifically, does the market like about Trump’s plans? His promise to cut both corporate taxes and red tape will translate into higher co...

Daily Caller: PropOrNot, a fledgling nonprofit organization with completely anonymous members, got the Washington Post to uncritically publish a story Thursday about over 200 sites that purportedly disseminate Russian propaganda to millions of Americans. Obama’s former senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer asked on Twitter, “Why isn’t this the biggest story in the world right now?” MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid took the findings in the report as fact. National correspondent of The Atlantic James Fallows tweeted out the story and mentioned that The Washington Post broke the Watergate story. Despite the hype behind this story, the credentials of the members of PropOrNot have not been revealed and the guidelines they establish define anyone outside the mainstream as Russian propagandists. TheDC reached to PropOrNot to find out specific information about who is in the organization, and they responded in an email, “Yes, we can absolutely provide quite a bit of information about the members of our o...

AP/Stripes: When Islamic State militants in Mosul discovered that Ahmed's brother had served in the army, they went to his house, pulled him into the street, and shot him dead as his parents watched. Now, it was time for revenge, and after two years of ferrying the extremists around as a taxi driver, Ahmed had plenty of information to offer special forces at a command post in an east Mosul apartment on Friday. "They're in this church, and only God knows what goes on in there," he told intelligence officers, pointing out map coordinates during a half-hour session. They met in a living room used to receive residents just a few blocks away from the battle, some seeking help, others being questioned, while the unlucky ones faced interrogation or stern reprimands for various infractions. Ahmed asked his full name be withheld for fear of reprisals. With heavy weapons less useful in the dense urban alleyways of Iraq's second city, local intelligence is growing in...

NY Times: Obama Expands War With Al Qaeda to Include Shabab in Somalia The administration’s move to stretch a 2001 war authorization will strengthen Donald J. Trump’s authority to combat thousands of Somali militants, and has drawn objections from some experts. The Obama administration has been actively fighting the terrorist in Somalia for years. There have been several special operation raids as well as bombing attacks against their sanctuaries as well as the pirate havens.  The  Somali terrorists have attacked in Kenya and Somali terrorist recruiting has been active in the Somali immigrant community in Minnesota.

NY Times: Cities Vow to Fight Trump on Immigration, Even if They Lose Millions Officials in what are known as sanctuary cities say they will act as a bulwark against mass deportations, even at the risk of losing federal money for local services. There is also a movement to make mayors and leaders who operate sanctuary cities criminally liable as accessories for the crimes committed by illegals.  In addition, the cities and the officials could be held liable for damages by victims and their families for crimes committed against them by illegals. The immigration scofflaws could have much more to lose beyond federal funds for crime fighting.  They need to come to grips with the fact that they have lost the argument for their lawless policies.

Erick Erickson: It is impossible to take seriously any person who thinks Donald Trump is a threat to freedom and democracy when that same person mourns the loss of Fidel Castro. But that is what we are seeing from the American left. Many are hailing him as a hero of the poor, though he kept people in poverty. They hail his success at universal healthcare, though the Cuban healthcare system is in shambles. They hail him as a hero for equality despite his implementation of racist policies that kept black Cubans out of government and in the shadows. They turn a blind eye to how he treated gays and AIDS patients. They ignore the many people tortured and killed by Fidel Castro. But they obsess about Donald Trump. ... What this tells you is that their arguments against Trump are typical of the bad faith in which they treat political opponents while they embrace leftist despots. See also 13 Facts about Castro .

Daily Signal: For more than three months, thousands of protesters, most of them from out of state, have illegally camped on federal land in Morton County, North Dakota, to oppose the construction of a legally permitted oil pipeline project that is 85 percent complete. The celebrities, political activists, and anti-oil extremists who are blocking the pipeline’s progress are doing so based on highly charged emotions rather than actual facts on the ground. This 1,172-mile Dakota Access pipeline will deliver as many as 570,000 barrels of oil a day from northwestern North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa to connect to existing pipelines in Illinois. It will do this job far more safely than the current method of transporting it by 750 rail cars a day. The protesters say they object to the pipeline’s being close to the water intake of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. However, this should be of no concern as it will sit approximately 92 feet below the riverbed, with increased p...

Mark McKinnon: ... Even when I was in charge of advertising for the George W. Bush campaigns in 2000 and 2004, I thought a lot of money spent on TV ads was wasted. And argued the campaign should think about other ways to spend the money. Donald Trump got that. And took it to an extreme. He spent more money on hats than ads or field organization, which seemed crazy at the time. But in retrospect, they were obviously better investments. All the research when averaged out over the campaign had Hillary Clinton ahead the whole campaign. President Obama’s smartest strategist predicted there was 100 percent chance Clinton would win. 100 percent! Which fogged everyone’s lenses, including mine. It seems likely that when it came to polling, Trump supporters participated in a “spiral of silence.” They don’t trust the establishment. Or the media. Why would they trust or talk to pollsters? Or acknowledge their support publicly only to be called ignorant, uneducated, misogynist, or racist? I ...

Reuters: U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders turned up the pressure on President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday about his pledge to try to stop an Indiana air conditioner manufacturer from moving 1,400 jobs to Mexico. Both Sanders, who challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, and Trump seized on an announcement earlier this year by United Technologies Corp's Carrier division that it would shift production to Mexico as an example of how trade deals hurt U.S. workers. Sanders on Saturday warned "it is not good enough to save some of these jobs" and said Trump should use as leverage United Technologies' defense contracts, Export-Import Bank financing, and tax breaks. "I call on Mr. Trump to make it clear to the CEO of United Technologies that if his firm wants to receive another defense contract from the taxpayers of this country, it must not move these plants to Mexico," the senator from Vermont said in a statement. A representative for Carr...

AFP: Israeli forces killed four gunmen linked to the Islamic State group after they fired on soldiers Sunday, the military said, in the first such attack on the occupied Golan Heights. The Israeli soldiers were targeted with machinegun fire and mortars and they shot back, before the air force bombed the vehicle carrying the gunmen identified as members of "Shuhada al-Yarmouk, an IS affiliate", said spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Peter Lerner. The soldiers, from the Golani Brigade, were beyond the fence separating Israeli-occupied Golan from Syria but on Israeli territory, Lerner told AFP, noting none was wounded in the clash. Since the beginning of the internal Syrian conflict in 2011, stray fire from government and rebel forces has hit Israel, as have attacks by the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah and its affiliates. Sunday's clash marked the first time Syria-based jihadists opened fire on Israeli soldiers on territory under Israeli control, according to...

Washington Post: Retired Marine generals touted each other to Trump as Pentagon chief Longtime colleagues James N. Mattis and John F. Kelly are seen as contenders for a Cabinet position. When President-elect Donald Trump met last weekend with them, each recommended the other as secretary of defense, a source said. I am not surprised.  They are both successful Marines who are well respected by the troops.  Mattis does have a flare that tends to grab the attention of his troops and his enemies.  I like that.

NY Times: Perils of Climate Change Could Swamp Coastal Real Estate Homeowners are slowly growing wary of buying property in the areas most at risk, setting up a potential economic time bomb in an industry that is struggling to adapt. Over 50 years ago when I was taking a geology course as an undergraduate at the University of Texas in Austin we were taken on a field trip to explore limestone that is native to the area.  One of the things we learned is that this limestone had fossils of sea creatures even though at the time we were hundreds of miles from the Gulf of Mexico.  What that tells me is that long before "climate change" was an issue the seas were coming and going, and burning fossil fuels had nothing to do with it. The fact is that with or without "climate change" coastal areas are a dynamic environment with constant changes.  Just look at the history of such places as Atlantis and more recently remains of an ancient city were found off the coast of ...

NY Times: U.S. Seeks Death for Charleston Suspect, but Families Don’t In the coming trial of Dylann S. Roof, who is accused of killing nine black churchgoers last year, no issue is more disputed than whether he should face execution. Roof's defense counsel can make their case for mercy, for a guy who allegedly showed none and attempted to start a race war.  The families should also get a chance to make their case for a lesser sentence if they so desire.  Under the circumstances, I would have little mercy for such a heinous crime.

Sunday Telegraph: Donald Trump ally backs free trade deal with Britain to show America's 'solidarity with our indispensable ally' Ryan would like to see a deal that would be effective as soon as Britain exits the EU.  Obama had said that Britain would have to go to the back of the line for a trade agreement, but the Republicans disagree.

Watchdog.org: Four days after Watchdog reported that a Mexican border surveillance program was being dismantled, three Texas officials pressed the Department of Homeland Security to reverse course. “Given the continuing surge of migrants along the southern border … we believe DHS should be requesting more surveillance and security resources, not less,” stated the officials’ letter to DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson on Tuesday. The letter was signed by Gov. Greg Abbott, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo. DHS spokesman Dan Hetlage told Watchdog that flights of Operation Phalanx are “funded through the end of December and [a funding] request is in for next year.” Hetlage said the 2017 request was made on Nov. 16, two days before the Watchdog story appeared. He did not specify the amount of funding sought. In their Tuesday letter, Abbott, Cornyn and Cuellar declared, “DHS has not requested any flight hours to support Operation Phalanx for calendar year 2017,” ...

Fox News: Turkey threatened Friday to open the migrant floodgates if the European Union halts its membership talks, as criticism grows of Ankara's heavy-handed response to a failed military coup. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's warning — the latest in a series of heated speeches about Europe from top Turkish officials — came a day after EU lawmakers called for a freeze on the talks over the post-coup arrests, dismissals and jailing of tens of thousands of people. Erdogan's claims that his country has been "betrayed" are a sign of how Turkey's pride has been wounded by the lack of international solidarity Ankara feels has been shown since its political foundations were rocked by the July coup attempt. "We are the ones who feed 3-3.5 million refugees in this country. You have betrayed your promises," Erdogan said. "If you go any further, those border gates will be opened," he added. The European Parliament vote Thursday was a respo...

Washington Post: France says it uncovered Islamic State ties to ‘imminent’ terrorist plot Possible targets included Paris police hubs and Euro Disney. A prosecutor says five suspects are in custody, and the threat remains “particularly high.” France remains a target and an easy mark because of its large Muslim population which makes it easier for terrorists to blend in.  It is likely to remain a target well after the demise of ISIL as a caliphate.

streiff: The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, the group that runs the Law Enforcement Memorial in Washington, DC, released officer fatality statistics for 2016 today. The number of officers who died on duty increased by 18% over 2015. But that wasn’t the big attention-getter in the report. In 2016, the number of police officers who were shot to death increased from 41 last year to 60. If a 50% increase in the number of police killings wasn’t bad enoough, the number of those firearms deaths due to ambush-style killings increased from 8 in 2015 to 20 this year. In fact, the entire increase in police deaths is explainable by the increase in ambush-style attacks. Why do we think that is? There wasn’t a major terrorist attack on any police department. There was no civil war or even civil unrest (at least until November 8). The odds of a statistical anomaly bordering on a 300% swing is possible, but so is the Second Coming. Even if you subtract the one mass shooting i...

USNI: A General Mattis Christmas Story The story tells how Gen. Krulak found Mattis one Christmas.  

NY Times: Brought Cold War to Western Hemisphere Mr. Castro bedeviled 11 American presidents and briefly pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war. He had held on to power longer than any other living national leader except Queen Elizabeth II. The only said part of this death is that it did not come sooner.  Fidel Castro was the face of evil who destroyed Cuba and spread his evil elsewhere around the world.  Anyone who celebrates his life is dancing on the graves of his victims.

Daily Mail: Al-Qaeda linked Palestinian militant group 'claims responsibility' for devastating Haifa fires which have cost thousands of Israeli families everything  The Palestinian Salafist group Ma'sadat al-Mujahideen has said that it was behind the blazes, which led to 60,000 people in Israel's third largest city Haifa being moved to safety. The fires have destroyed a significant amount of property within Israel but few lives have been lost to date.  The Israeli government has said that they will retaliate against terrorist suspected of setting the fires.

Texas congressman Culberson put the provision in the DOJ funding bill.  The cutoff of federal lawenforcment funding would include the entire state of California.

Washington Post: Elite unit that helped kill bin Laden gets expanded power to hunt terrorists The Obama administration is giving the Joint Special Operations Command authority to track, plan and potentially launch attacks on foreign fighters around the globe, a move driven by concerns of a dispersed terrorist threat as Islamic State militants are driven from strongholds in Iraq and Syria, officials said. I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld proposed just such a program early on in the war against radical Islam.  I would expand the program to all special ops groups who could be moved into place quickly to deal with a threat or take out enemy leadership targets.

NY Times: Trump Has Options to Unravel Obama’s Climate Legacy A little-known office under the control of the White House can keep some environmental regulations from taking effect, and the president can reverse rules not yet completed. Obama has abused the regulatory framework to impose onerous rules on the country and industry that he lacked the political skills to get approved by Congress.   Reversing those abuses will be a top priority for the new administration.

Kelly Riddell: What worries me the most about fake news, isn’t that it’s fake, it’s that it’s being used by the left to try to silence opposing views. Take for example a story reported by the Los Angeles Times that included a professor who put together a Google document of “false, misleading, clickbait-y and satirical ‘news sources’” to help people “cleanse their newsfeeds of misinformation.” The only problem with the list, was it included real news sites of which the professor simply didn’t agree. Conservative blogs, including Red State and The Blaze, were on the list, as was more centrist, but GOP-leaning Independent Journal Review (IJR). None of those sites are fake — they often just peddle in the real news purposely not covered by the mainstream media. “Not all of these sources are always or inherently problematic, neither are all of them fake or false,” the professor, Melissa Zimdars, at Merrimack College in Massachusetts told the Times. ” … They should be considered in conjunct...

Washington Post: Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say Researchers found that Russians used sophisticated tools to boost Donald Trump and target Hillary Clinton, and exploited various platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment. The techniques may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do. The Onion is probably up to the challenge of a competitor like Russia's propaganda arm.  It has even fooled several foreign propaganda arms.  I am looking forward to the Onion story on the fake news outbreak. In the meantime, how about all those polls that showed Clinton winning by double digits?   Was someone manipulating the data to make Democrats look more powerful than they were?  Was it an attempt to manipulate the voters and make Republican voters become discouraged?  Was it a sophisticated effort at voter suppression or were the pollst...

Washington Post: Why people are giving Jill Stein millions for an election recount The former presidential candidate wants recounts in three states. Her effort has generated the largest donation drive for a third party in history. Since it is absurd to think that a recount would change the results of the Green Party  presidential campaign, it seems clear that some Clinton supporters are just using Jill Stein  in a desperate attempt to overturn the results of the real election.  They are having trouble accepting the rejection of the evils of liberalism espoused by Democrats.

NY Times: One by One, ISIS Social Media Experts Are Killed as Result of F.B.I. Program American officials say a secretive campaign of surveillance and drone attacks has cut the Islamic State’s ability to inspire attacks in the West. The attacks are on ISIL's most effective means of mass murder in the West, where it solicits Muslims to kill non-combatants in Europe and the US.   One reason it has taken so long is because the Obama administration has not used adequate resources for the task.

NY Times: Venezuelans Flee in Boats to Escape Economic Collapse Well over 150,000 people have fled Venezuela in the last year alone, the most in more than a decade, scholars say, with the sea route posing special dangers. It is unfortunate that all of those millennials  who supported Bernie Sanders socialist agenda are not there to greet these people fleeing a socialist regime that has left their country in ruins and their people starving.

Daily Caller: A Democratic super PAC made not-so-subtle references to lynching Republicans in an email that, rather ironically, asked supporters for donations to oppose President-elect Donald Trump’s allegedly “racist” chief strategist. Democrats have called Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart News chairman, a “racist” and a “white supremacist” with ties to the alt-right. But a liberal super PAC is now saying they want to tie Bannon’s reputations “around the necks” of Republican senators. “Help us tie Trump’s racist Chief Strategist around the necks of vulnerable Senate Republicans,” Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), wrote in an email to supporters titled “Air this ad on MSNBC?” Wednesday night. “Tomorrow, as people talk politics over Thanksgiving dinner, we want to air this ad in DC and Arizona, home of Sen. Jeff Flake who says he gives ‘deference’ to Trump. This ad says that is not ok. Trump is not normal,” Green wrote. ... There is ...

Washington Examiner: The jailed architect of 9/11 revealed that al Qaeda's plan to kill the United States was not through military attacks but immigration and "outbreeding nonmuslims" who would use the legal system to install Sharia law, according to a blockbuster new book. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed also predicted that intelligence officials using so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques such as the waterboarding he experienced would eventually come under attack from weak-kneed U.S. politicians and media. In Enhanced Interrogation , CIA contractor James Mitchell tells for the first time about his role interrogating al Qaeda principals, many like KSM still jailed at Guantanamo Bay. He details accounts of waterboarding and other interrogation sessions of the nation's most notorious enemies. ... There is much more. He quotes Abu Zubaydah, one of the first subjects water boarded as insisting that the US should continue the practice because that way t...

streiff: Ever since Donald Trump’s election we’ve been bombarded with stories about “fake news.” As best as I can tell, “fake news” is news or information that runs against the current cheerleading by the media for Democrats and progressive politics. For instance, no one called CBS a purveyor of “fake news” when Dan Rather used blatantly obvious bogus documents to try to torpedo George Bush in 2004. No one has called NBC a “fake news” source because of Brian Williams. No one has called Politico “fake news” even though one of their reporters, Josh Gerstein , regularly reported stuff on Clinton’s email travails that was obvious false and declared to be false by even the superficial FBI investigation. “Fake news” did not include the puffery on Obamacare nor does it cover the monthly news stories about job creation that are half-truths at best. Nope. None of that counts because none of that fits the narrative. On Tuesday, Donald Trump met with New York Times reporters. During that meetin...

News.com: AUSTRALIA has finally ceased pouring millions of dollars into accounts linked to Hillary Clinton’s charities. Which begs the question: Why were we donating to them in the first place? The federal government confirmed to news.com.au it has not renewed any of its partnerships with the scandal-plagued Clinton Foundation, effectively ending 10 years of taxpayer-funded contributions worth more than $88 million. The Clinton Foundation has a rocky past. It was described as “a slush fund” , is still at the centre of an FBI investigation and was revealed to have spent more than $50 million on travel . Despite that, the official website for the charity shows contributions from both AUSAID and the Commonwealth of Australia, each worth between $10 million and $25 million. News.com.au approached the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for comment about how much was donated and why the Clinton Foundation was chosen as a recipient. A DFAT spokeswoman said all funding is used “solely...

Daily Mail: Two people are dead and more than 70 monks were being held hostage by a masked man with a knife and sawn-off shotgun in in Montpellier, France. Local residents claim the armed man stormed the retirement home at around 9.45pm but they are unsure of his motives as anti-terror police surround the building. At least 70 monks, who have served as missionaries in Africa, reside in the home in Montferrier-sur-Lez, north of the city. Those killed are thought to be an elderly female survivwoman supervisor who manage to alert police before she was stabbed, and a man who was working with her. ... The gunman is still believed to be in the building which is surrounded by anti-terror police. One source claims on entering the building, police found the body of an elderly woman who had been stabbed several times, the source said. 'Nothing at this stage would indicate that this would be a terrorist act,' another source said. ... I find that last statement not credible...