PrairiePundit

Mediate: Mother of Slain Benghazi American Explodes on Andrea Mitchell Reports: ‘You Can’t Understand!’ Smith says that Clinton never answered the question of who was responsible for denying the aid requested 600 times.  She was in charge and she still can't explain why with all those red flags waving it never came to her attention.  

Breitbart: FAMILIES OF VICTIMS MURDERED BY ILLEGAL ALIENS STORM WASHINGTON: ‘THE KILLER OF MY ONLY CHILD SERVED ONLY 35 DAYS IN JAIL!’ The lives lost to the actions of those who should not have been in the country to begin with if the government was doing its job is a real tragedy that does not seem to get any empathy from the liberal empathy police.

Richard Tol: ... Cook and co selected some 12,000 papers from the scientific literature to test whether these papers support the hypothesis that humans played a substantial role in the observed warming of the Earth. 12,000 is a strange number. The climate literature is much larger. The number of papers on the detection and attribution of climate change is much, much smaller. Cook’s sample is not representative. Any conclusion they draw is not about “the literature” but rather about the papers they happened to find. Most of the papers they studied are not about climate change and its causes, but many were taken as evidence nonetheless. Papers on carbon taxes naturally assume that carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming – but assumptions are not conclusions. Cook’s claim of an increasing consensus over time is entirely due to an increase of the number of irrelevant papers that Cook and co mistook for evidence. The abstracts of the 12,000 papers were rated, twice, by 24 volunteers...

Wall Street Journal: A 10-year-old Russian boy, Matvei Tcepliaev, recently made an extraordinary discovery in Jerusalem. Working as a volunteer in the Temple Mount Sifting Project, he found a 3,000-year-old seal—engraved limestone about the size of a thimble, with a hole at one end so it could be hung from a string—from the time of King David. The artifact was nestled in the hundreds of tons of earth and rock that had been illegally excavated from below the Temple Mount in the late 1990s by the Muslim Waqf, a trust that retains authority over the contested site. The Temple Mount is sacred ground for Jews, Muslims and Christians, but Jewish historical claims are denied by many Muslims. The sifting project in Emek Tzurim National Park in Jerusalem, started in 2005 and has uncovered several historically significant objects, but the seal may be the most important. Dating from the era of King David’s conquest of Jerusalem and the building of the Jewish First Temple by his son and successo...

David Holt: Earlier this year, during a five-month timespan, gasoline imports in California increased more than 10 times above their typical level, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said. The reason, officials said, was the Feb. 18 explosion at a refinery in Torrance, Calif. The facility, a vital source of gasoline and distillate fuels, has the capacity to refine more than 150,000 barrels of gasoline per day and supply 10 percent of California’s gasoline supply. The refinery’s reduced capacity triggered supply shortfalls that sent regional wholesale and retail prices soaring to make up for the cost of importing more gasoline from nations like India, Russia, and the United Kingdom, the EIA says. Import quantities ranged from 28,000 to 68,000 barrels per day. And that’s with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), a major energy artery for the lower 48 states, in operation. Imagine how much worse would it have been had the pipeline been offline. That worst-case scenario, on...

Daily Mail: Ben Carson opens up yuuuuge lead over Trump in Iowa as The Donald finds himself trailing by 14 Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson is once again on top of the Republican presidential field in Iowa, as a third straight poll has shown him leading the pack of candidates in the Hawkeye State. While Iowa does not often pick the eventual winner, it seems clear that Carson has touched a chord with voters in that state that Trump has not.  He is a very likable person.  I think his chief weakness is as a debater.  His style does not fit the sound bite nature of most debates.

Daily Mail: Manhattan's rich and famous support Hillary Clinton at star-studded fundraiser hosted by Anna Wintour at designer Vera Wang's luxurious New York home Anna, Vera Wang, Marchesa designer Georgina Chapman (bottom right), and her husband, producer Harvey Weinstein top right), organized the A-list event on Sunday night. Tickets to the fundraiser cost a donation of at least $2,700, though guests were invited to raise or donate more. Matthew Morrison (bottom left), Martha Stewart (top left), designers Michael Kors and Jason Wu, photographer Annie Leibovitz, and Real Housewives' Countess LuAnn de Lesseps were also in attendance. Hillary, who turns 68 today, arrived holding hands with her husband Bill, who sported a campaign pin. You can catch the photos referenced at the above link.  I am sure they were all begging top have their taxes raised. There is also this at the Washington Free Beacon: Top 10 ZIP Codes Contributing To Hillary Are Not ‘Everyday America...

Amir Taheri: The late Ayatollah Khomeini dreamed it; President Barack Obama is trying to deliver it: the end of Pax Americana. The topic was at the center of a daylong seminar in Tehran last week attended by ambassadors from Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela, plus a number of Islamic Iranian officials and scholars. The five Latin American nations with left-wing regimes represent one of the “clusters” that former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tried to organize as points of anti-American “resistance” across the globe. Another “cluster” consisted of Lebanon, controlled through the local branch of Hezbollah, Syria, under Bashar Al-Assad, and parts of Iraq dominated by pro-Tehran armed groups. The plan was to set up another “cluster” by breaking up the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) bloc through the Finlandization of some of its members while seizing control of Yemen through local Trojan outfits. Next month, Tehran is scheduled to host the fifth annual “End of America” confe...

Brietbart: Texas Governor Greg Abbott admonished Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez over her recent decision to consider honoring immigration detainers on a “case-by-case” basis. The governor said sanctuary city policies like this will “no longer be tolerated in Texas.” Governor Abbott wrote the tersely worded letter to Sheriff Valdez after her decision to scale back on honoring immigration detainers sent to her jail by the federal government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Her announcement was reported by Breitbart Texas on October 12. ... The governor laid out actions he and the state of Texas could take in response to the renegade actions of this sheriff. Those include the following: Passing laws that prohibit any policy or action that promotes sanctuary to people in this state illegally.  Enacting laws that make it illegal for a Sheriff’s Department to not honor a federal immigration detainer request.  Evaluating the extent to which local taxpayers should...

NY Times: Ruins of Village Show Russia’s Role in Syrian Refugee Crisis An escalation in the fighting, along with Russian airstrikes, is fueling the kind of desperation that led more than 9,000 migrants a day to cross into Greece last week, the most since the beginning of the year. The Europeans have found themselves the dumping grounds for the results of the Syria civil war and the Russians are delighted to add to their misery.  It is a lack of leadership on the continent as well as from Obama that has let the situation deteriorate to the point that the Russians stepped it to make it worse.  It looks like an extension of Putin's new form of warfare against the West.

Washington Times: For any Democrat anxious to see the unpopular Iran nuclear agreement fade from public view between now and November 2016, it’s been a rough couple of weeks. Headlines about the GOP Senate ’s failed battle to stop the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action had all but disappeared when Iran launched an Oct. 11 test of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Suddenly foes of the deal were back in the news, accusing Iran of breaking the agreement. The White House and Iran countered that the launch did not violate the nuclear deal because it does not include missile testing. Even so, a group of Senate Democrats responded with a letter to Secretary of State John F. Kerry denouncing Iran ’s move as a violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929 and calling for “unilateral and multilateral responses.” “There must be no ambiguity in our willingness to enforce Iran ’s obligations under UN resolutions and the JCPOA,” said the Oct. 21 letter signed by 11 Democratic ...

Washington Examiner: The Obama administration's strategy for convincing Americans that its efforts against the Islamic State are succeeding is all in the numbers: a careful tally of dead extremists, destroyed equipment and degraded capabilities. The daily barrage of metrics is reminiscent of the daily "body counts" used to define success in another war half a century earlier: Vietnam. In that war, the body counts added up to defeat for the United States, which many former officials and analysts warn is where the administration's approach is headed if it doesn't take a broader view. "We are due for a comprehensive review of the administration's strategy against ISIS," said Bilal Saab, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. "We can continue to step up our kinetic efforts, but the overall plan to the extent that one is discernable lacks clear strategic guidance. Killing one bee at a time when you're dealing with a massive whole beehive is n...

Washington Post: No sign that Israeli-Palestinian violence is ending, despite Kerry plan Israeli police said they shot and killed a Palestinian woman in Hebron after she approached officers and pulled out a knife. The problem with Kerry's "plan" is that it relies on logic and the Palestinian murder binge has nothing to do with logical arguments or disputes.  It is based on their bogus and fraudulent claims to the Temple Mount and their insulting and demeaning rhetoric toward Jews.  They have let loose their inner ethnic and religious bigotry and are not willing to compartmentalize it even in the face an agreement that deals with their crazy objections to Jews visiting their own holy site.  These people lack the maturity and judgment to have their own state.

NY Times: Calm Manner Has Ben Carson Rising in Polls The candidate’s gentle demeanor has resonated with supporters as some recent polls show him now in the lead in the early-voting state of Iowa. I find him very likable even when I don't always agree with him.  He is also the opposite of Obama, who tends to act like snark is a substitute for reasoned argument.  The weakness of Carson's persona shows up in debates where he does not speak in sound bites nor have the time to explain his position.

Red States: Hillary says the Libyans were just too dumb to govern themselves But, hey, she still thinks it was the "smart" thing to do.

Jerusalem Post: ... Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei published a letter of guidelines for President Hassan Rouhani, adding new conditions for Iran’s execution of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that was agreed upon on July 14. According to a recent analysis by Yigal Carmon, the president of the Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute and the head of its Iran desk, Ayelet Savyon, the letter was posted on Khamenei’s website last Wednesday in Farsi, tweeted from his Twitter account and posted on his Facebook page in English. “The set of conditions laid out by Khamenei creates a situation in which not only does the Iranian side refrain from approving the JCPOA but, with nearly every point, creates a separate obstacle, such that executing the agreement is not possible,” they wrote. Following the publication of the supreme leader’s letter, Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani and Rouhani fully accepted Khamenei’s stipulations, Savyon told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday. “A comm...

Breitbart: ATTKISSON: ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT CRIME ‘SELF-CENSORED’ BY MEDIA, MOST WOULD BE ‘SURPRISED’ AT HOW LARGE PROBLEM IS I suspect their empathy for illegals colors their reporting of the criminal element. ... Attkisson stated, “I think most Americans would be very surprised to hear how large the problem is, of illegal immigrants who come here, not talking about the law-abiding, deserving citizens we hear about a lot, but the ones who go on to commit felonies in the United States, and then the subset of tens of thousands who nonetheless are then rereleased back into the US where they go on to commit more serious crime, including thousands of murders — or hundreds of murders and thousands of rapes, over just a two year period.” ... I am not surprised.  I have had an ongoing series that is usually titled "Not an act of love."  It highlights some of the more egregious crimes.

BBC: Poland's conservative opposition Law and Justice party has won parliamentary elections. Exit polls suggest it has enough seats to govern alone, with an anticipated 39% of the vote. Its eurosceptic leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski has claimed victory, and the outgoing Prime Minister, Ewa Kopacz of the centrist Civic Platform party, has admitted defeat. Law and Justice has strong support in Poland's rural areas. If the numbers suggested by the exit poll are confirmed, it will be the first time since democracy was restored in Poland in 1989 that a single party has won enough seats to govern alone, the BBC's Adam Easton in Warsaw says. Europe's refugee crisis also proved to be a key topic of debate before the election. While the government has agreed to take in 7,000 migrants, opposition parties have spoken out against the move. ... It is the second European government to turn to conservatives since the refugee crisis began.  The Swiss also recently boosted the conservati...

WUWT: Al Gore and the media were wrong: U.S. Major Hurricane Drought Now One Decade and Counting It looks like another projection based on an invalid assumption by the proponents of "climate change."

Washington Examiner: The number and rate of firearm murders has hit a new low since the sky-high gun killings during the 1990s, with California topping an FBI list despite having some of the toughest anti-gun laws on the books. Data from the FBI and Pew Research Center show that all gun violence has declined since the Clinton era, though suicides blamed on guns has ticked up. In a new report, Pew said that between 1993 and 2000, the firearm murder rate dropped by almost half, from seven homicides to 3.8 homicides per 100,000 people. It also said that all gun deaths -- murder, suicide, police and accidental -- have dropped 30 percent since 1993. The FBI data shows that the actual number of gun murders has dropped from 10,129 in 2007 to 8,454 in 2013 . California had the most at 1,224, though it has several anti-gun laws in force. ... Could it be that making it harder to legally own guns means the criminals have an advantage in states like California?  What seems clear is that ...