Category: US Politics

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Hate Crimes Targeting Jews Rise for Second Year in a Row

A cemetary caretaker inspects the damage to Jewish gravestones / Getty Images

BY:

More than half of hate crimes motivated by bias against a particular religion in 2016 were aimed at Jewish Americans even though Jewish Americans constitute just two percent of the population, according to a new FBI report.

The hate crime rate come from the FBI’s report, “Hate Crime Statistics, 2016,” the latest release from its Uniform Crime Reporting system. The overall report shows a five percent increase in hate crimes between 2015 and 2016.

Hate crimes targeted at Jewish Americans, meanwhile, increased by 20 percent in that same time period. The number of victims affected by those crimes also rose, by 17.9 percent. Hate crimes targeting Jews accounted for around 11 percent of 2016 hate crimes overall.

Jewish Americans have been the victim of the majority of religiously motivated hate crimes continuously since 1996, the earliest year for which the FBI has reported statistics. The number of offenses in 2016—833—is notably lower than those through the first ten years of reporting, which averaged more than a thousand offenses per year.

However, the number of hate crimes targeting Jews have increased year-on-year for the past two years. This represents a deviation from past trend, as said crimes decreased continually between 2008 and 2014. 2015 saw a 9 percent increase over the preceding year, and 2016’s 20 percent bump confirms this change in trend.

Although 2016 levels remain below the historical average, this two-year increase may signal a concerning increase in targeting of America’s Jews. It should be noted that violent crimes also reversed trend over the same two-year period.

Jonathan A. Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), called the two-year increase “deeply disturbing,” and called for “improving hate crime data collection, advocating for better hate crime legislation, and working closely with law enforcement on hate crime training” to address the rise.

The majority of hate crimes targeting Jews were non-violent. Thirty-seven percent of the crimes were targeted against individuals, the overwhelming majority of which were instances of intimidation. There were also 61 instances of simple assault, and 12 of aggravated assault.

The remaining 63 percent of the crimes were crimes against property. These were by-and-large instances of vandalism/destruction of property: 489 out of the 522 crimes against property.

These property crimes contribute to an overall sense of a targeting of Jewish community gathering places. Threats against synagogues and Jewish community centers have caused concern among many Americans. More than a hundred community centers have dealt with bomb threats, CNN reported in March. That wave of threats led eventually to the arrest of two men, including former Intercept journalist Juan Thompson.

Congress is considering H.R. 1730, the Combating Anti-Semitism Act of 2017, in response to the threats. That bill would increase criminal penalties for targeting religious buildings. The Muslim Jewish Advisory Council (MJAC), a joint project of the American Jewish Committee and the Islamic Society of North America, applauded H.R. 1730 in its response to the new hate crime numbers.

“We look forward to this bill’s adoption by the Congress in order to send a signal of zero tolerance for hate crimes against people of faith,” said Stanley Bergman, co-chair of the Council.

“The Department of Justice should increase its coordination with the states in public education and community relations, as well as in prosecutions and reporting of hate crimes,” said Co-Chair Farooq Kathwari.

As Bergman, Kathwari, and Congress all express concern about rising hate crimes against Jewish Americans, anti-Semitism is receiving a different hearing among some partisans on the left. Later this month, the New School in New York City will host Linda Sarsour, women’s march organizer and controversial activist for a talk on “Antisemitism and the Struggle for Justice.”

Sarsour may argue at the event that anti-Semitism is more often a charge used to silence than to name real problems. “When anti-Semitism is redefined as criticism of Israel,” the event’s description reads, “critics of Israeli policy become accused and targeted more than the growing far-right.”

Sarsour has a history of comments that critics have derided as anti-Semitic, the Free Beacon has noted:

Sarsour is one such critic of Israel who has made a variety of comments that detractors have accused of being anti-Semitic, including praising children who throw rocks at Israeli soldiers and defending former Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh. She has also called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “waste of a human being,” said that “nothing is creepier than Zionism,” and argued that Zionists cannot be feminists.

This past month has also seen an increase in activity by the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS), an organization which calls for economic political action against Israel. Organizations like the ADL have attacked BDS as employing anti-Semitic strategies and rhetoric.

via Washington Free Beacon

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More Confederate Monument Topplers Get All Felony Charges Dropped

Why bother to have any law at all? Just give in to all the anarchists now. They caught them on video, they even raided their houses and got evidence of the planning of the event. But they’re dropping the charges with their lawyer claiming there’s ‘no evidence.’ And this is why George Soros is buying DA positions across the country. You’ll see a lot more of this.

Via Daily Caller:

A North Carolinian judge dropped felony charges Tuesday against seven individuals accused of toppling a Confederate monument.

The Durham County Court previously dropped felony charges against three individuals implicated in the toppling a statue of a Confederate soldier in August, reported WNCT 9. The court dropped felony charges against another seven individuals Tuesday.

Police arrested and charged a total of 12 individuals after the Confederate statue was torn down. (RELATED: Rioter Who Toppled Confederate Statue In Durham May Received Scholarship)

Roger Echols, Durham’s district attorney, said there was no evidence indicating that “physically participated in taking the statue down,” according to WNCT 9. He also noted that the court “filed voluntary dismissals for three of the individuals charged.”

Keep reading…

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Kneeler League Ratings Continue Slide as Anti-Police National Anthem Protests Continue

The NFL has already lost 2.5 million viewers so far this year.

After decades of American tradition of standing at attention during the National Anthem the National Football League started their own tradition last year and allowed players to kneel, sit, or stretch during the National Anthem before the games.


The Bears-Packers game was half empty on Sunday.

NFL viewership also continues to slide.

Monday Night Football ratings reached a season low this week as Pantherss beat the Dolphins.

Via Free Republic:

The post Kneeler League Ratings Continue Slide as Anti-Police National Anthem Protests Continue appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

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BOW DOWN: Companies That Vowed To Stop Advertising On “Hannity” Back Down

And I knew they would.

In response to a smear campaign against Fox News host Sean Hannity led by Media Matters maggot Angelo Carusone following the host’s widely praised interview last week with Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore, a number of advertisers vowed to stop advertising on his weeknight news program.

According to The New York Times, however, most of these advertisers appear to be backing down:

[B]y Tuesday, those companies were clarifying — or even deleting — statements they had made on the platform that indicated they had pulled ads from Mr. Hannity’s show. …

Realtor.com said in a tweet over the weekend that “we are not currently, and will not be running TV ads on Hannity.” Later, it deleted the tweet and posted a statement on its website saying the company advertises across “dozens of television networks” and will continue placing ads on Fox News and its top shows.

“Some staff didn’t realize that we have a practice of not engaging in boycotts,” a spokeswoman said of the deleted tweet. “Senior management at Realtor.com became aware over the weekend of the error, and the tweets were taken down Sunday and the policy was posted on our corporate website.”

Volvo Car USA apparently responded to a tweet from a consumer on Monday to say, “We have spoken with our media agency and have advised them to cease advertising on the show.” But that message has disappeared. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

You damn right, mothertouchers!

Here’s Volvo’s deleted tweet:

Yes, it did, you little weasel.

Like the other advertisers, Volvo likely realized that going to war against Hannity and his millions-strong fan base would not be wise. The coffee-maker company Keurig learned this the hard way over the weekend.

As of Wednesday, Keurig had long ago apologized and made it clear it intended to keep advertising on Hannity’s. Thank you, Keurig.

As for Angelo …

I got some advice for you, you little bitch, via the slightly remixed words of Westside: “Bow down when you come to my town, bow down when we [conservative] bound, ’cause we ain’t no haters like you, bow down to some [ladies and gentlemen] that’s greater than you!”

Image H/T Pho.to

Note: The feature image shows Chinese people because trying to find an image of “businessmen bowing down” is way harder than it sounds.

via Downtrend.com

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Silence on Sleaze-Bob Menendez

Silence on Sleaze-Bob Menendez
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2017

The verdict is in.

I pronounce Democrat leaders, left-wing feminists and Beltway journalists guilty of gross negligence and hypocrisy over a dirty rotten sleazeball in their midst.

For the past 11 weeks, Bob Menendez has been on trial for 18 counts of bribery, fraud and corruption involving nearly $1 million in gifts and donations. The jury remained deadlocked as of Tuesday. A new Media Research Center analysis reported that ABC, CBS and NBC devoted 40 times more of their morning and evening TV newscast coverage this past week to Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore’s alleged sexual assault accusers than to the ongoing federal trial of one of the Democrats’ most powerful, visible and entrenched figures on Capitol Hill.

Four years ago, when the FBI raided the Florida home of creepy Democratic donor and eye doctor Salomon Melgen, Menendez suddenly remembered that he had failed to pay back his “hermano” $60,000 for private-jet flights to the Caribbean — where Melgen owns a tony home in the private Casa de Campo resort.

As the party-boy buds tell it, their two decades of favor-trading were innocent, brotherly acts of affection. That little reimbursement thing for joy rides shuttling Menendez, his girlfriend, his son and his son’s office manager around the world? It “fell through the cracks,” the former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and lawyer explained.

Oopsie.

As government investigators discovered, the “friendship” entailed much more than backslaps and beach nights. Melgen was convicted this spring on 67 counts of massive Medicare fraud totaling $90 million. Prosecutors allege Menendez and his staff pulled strings and put pressure on public officials to back off Melgen’s billing blow-up. Menendez asserts he did nothing illegal and acted not out of obligation to a high-dollar donor, but because of his sincere policy concerns about how Medicare is run.

How noble.

My favorite M&M production involves what I dubbed the 36DD visa program. This is not in dispute: Menendez and his staff pressured the State Department to expedite the foreign tourist and student visa approval processes for a bevy of buxom foreign beauties. One of them, Brazilian actress and porn pinup star Juliana Lopes Leite (a.k.a. “Girlfriend 1”), had her F-1 student visa application moved to the top of the pile in 2008 after Menendez and his staff intervened as a favor to model-lovin’ Melgen.

Another, Rosiell Polanco-Suera, testified that her rejected visa application (along with her sister’s) received reconsideration and instant approval after Melgen promised to “fix it” by reaching out to Menendez.

Flying the crony skies on taxpayer time. Systematically bilking sick old people. Turning America’s visa programs into an international dating app for Dem donors.

Ho-hum.

Top Democrat leaders, so quick to call for the resignation of GOP candidates convicted in the court of public opinion, remain noncommittal about where they’ll stand if Menendez is convicted. Liberal media partisans are deliberately ignoring the story because they are incapacitated by Trump Derangement Syndrome. Women’s advocates looked the other way at Justice Department court filings on “specific, corroborated allegations that defendants Menendez and Melgen had sex with underage prostitutes in the Dominican Republic.”

The collective silence on Sleaze-Bob — busy raising more than $6 million for his re-election campaign and legal defense fund — roars louder than Melgen’s private jet engines.

Turns out “The Resistance” can’t and won’t resist a crapweasel when Democratic Party coffers and the balance of power in Washington are at stake.

via MichelleMalkin.com

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400 Students Take Matters Into Own Hands After Atheists Tell Coach Not to Pray

When the atheist group Freedom from Religion Foundation sent a letter to Georgia’s East Coweta High School warning them that a tradition of coaches leading or participating in prayer with student athletes was impermissible, they probably thought they had already won the battle.

In a way, they did: the coaches didn’t lead the students in prayer. But that didn’t mean the players — or the fans — weren’t going to bow their heads before the Lord.

Instead, when East Coweta took the field Friday night, according to WAGA-TV, they had more than just the football players bowing their heads.

“Our students have done a great job and our students took it upon themselves to organize a prayer with our students in the stands before the game. Instead of it being 100 players praying, it turned into 400 students praying,” East Coweta coach John Small told the Christian Post. That’s their right and we are going to support them in that.”

And, as you can see, things seemed to have worked.

TRENDING: Mike Huckabee Destroys Colin Kaepernick After GQ Made Him “Citizen of the Year”

The whole thing began when the FFRF sent a letter to Superintendent Steve Barker on Oct. 25 about Coach Small’s praying with the team.

In a statement, the FFRF said they informed the district “that it is illegal for public school athletic coaches to further personal religious beliefs by leading their teams in prayer. Coach-led prayers, FFRF points out, equate to a government advancement and endorsement of religion — a stark violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.”

“Not only must public school coaches refrain from leading prayer themselves, but also from participating in students’ prayers, FFRF informed the district. When a public school employee in that official role organizes and advocates for team prayer, religion is endorsed on the district’s behalf.”

A memorandum drawn up by the school district said that the coaches couldn’t “bow their heads” or “manifest approval” if students led the prayer themselves, but they could still be there for it.

“We are not allowed to be in the middle of it but we have a right to be there with our players. We don’t have to flee (the scene),” Small told the Christian Post.

“If my head is bowed, nobody can tell me what I am thinking. I am not leading the prayer. I am there supporting my kids. Whether I am praying or not, nobody can say I am or I ain’t.”

As you can see, the new student-led prayer certainly didn’t make for any less prayer on the football field.

RELATED: Trump Squashes Obama’s PC Culture, Tells Conservatives Not to Be Silent

Small says that it’s “really turned into a positive” for the team.

“I think what is happened with this organization (FFRF), whatever their intent was, you tell teenagers they can’t do something, surely they are going to do it,” Small noted. “It has really turned into a positive because at the end of the day, we are trying to teach students about leadership and they should be the ones taking the charge on it anyway.”

Amen to that — literally.

H/T Faithwire

Please like and share on Facebook and Twitter if you support what the East Coweta High School football team did.

What do you think about what this team did? Scroll down to comment below!

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Dartmouth Prof To Donate Half Of Book Proceeds To Antifa

Does he make the check payable to George Soros?

Via Campus Reform:

A Dartmouth College professor plans to donate half of the proceeds from his latest book to Antifa, the radical protest group labeled as “domestic terrorists” by the federal government.

Mark Bray, a lecturer at the elite college, gained popularity after publishing Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, in which he openly admits that the group rejects the classical understanding of free speech.

“At the heart of the anti-fascist outlook is a rejection of the classical liberal phrase incorrectly ascribed to Voltaire that ‘I disapprove of what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’” the professor writes, noting that “after Auschwitz and Treblinka, anti-fascists committed themselves to fighting to the death the ability of organized Nazis to say anything.”

While it is unclear how personally involved Bray is in the organization, a recent profile of the controversial professor in The Chronicle of Higher Education briefly notes that he plans to donate half of the proceeds from his book to an unnamed fund that helps support the legal, medical, and personal expenses of Antifa activists.

Keep reading…

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Tax Dollars Fund Active Military Member’s Sex-Change Surgery

On Tuesday, the Pentagon confirmed that an active-duty United States Military member underwent sex-reassignment surgery which was funded by taxpayer dollars.

“Pentagon confirms an active-duty military member received sex-reassignment surgery today, and it will pay for the procedure for the first time,” reports BuzzFeed’s Jon Passantino.

According to Defense Department spokesman Dana White, the surgery was determined to be “medically necessary” and was thus paid for by the Military’s Supplemental Health Care Program.

“Military hospitals do not have the surgical expertise to perform this type of surgery, therefore it was conducted in a private hospital,” said White, in a statement. “Since this service member had already begun a sex-reassignment course of treatment, and the treating doctor deemed this surgery medically necessary, a waiver was approved by the director of the Defense Health Agency. The Supplemental Health Care Program will cover this surgery in accordance with the Department’s interim guidance on transgender service members.”

In July, President Donald Trump restored a longstanding ban on individuals who suffer from psychological disorders like gender dysphoria, reversing a last-minute Obama Administration directive which lifted the exclusion of transgenders.

“​After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military,” wrote Trump, via Twitter. “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you.”

As noted by Fox News, the president directed Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to pause federal funds paying for sex-reassignment surgeries and medications, “except in cases where it is deemed necessary to protect the health of an individual who has already begun the transition.”

The Pentagon was given six months to form and implement the ban Trump announced on Twitter. In September, General Mattis released a memo indicating trans folks could continue to enlist until the Trump Administration’s plan is finalized.

As reported by The Daily Wire on October 30, a federal judge temporarily blocked Trump’s proposed transgender plan “as a case against his ban works its way through court.” ​

via Daily Wire

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Report: Police Body Cameras Can Threaten Civil Rights Of Black And Brown People…

Social justice warriors wanted police body cameras, they got body cameras.

Via Newsweek:

The number of U.S. police departments outfitting their officers with body cameras increases each year, but the cameras can pose a threat to civil rights if the departments fail to set rules that govern when officers review footage from their cameras, according to a new report.

The vast majority of the nation’s biggest police departments allow officers to watch footage from body cameras whenever they want, including before they write their incident reports or make statements, said the report, which was released Tuesday by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

“Unrestricted footage review places civil rights at risk and undermines the goals of transparency and accountability,” said Vanita Gupta, former head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and current head of the Leadership Conference, in the report’s introduction.

Because an officer’s memory of an event may be altered by watching body camera footage, doing so will likely alter what officers write in their reports. That, in turn, can make it more difficult for investigators or courts to assess whether the officer’s actions were reasonable based on what he or she perceived at the time of the incident, states the report, “The Illusion of Accuracy: How Body-Worn Camera Footage Can Distort Evidence.”

Body camera programs are in place at 62 of the 69 largest U.S. police departments, according to a scorecard released Tuesday by the Leadership Conference. Most of those departments—55, or almost 80 percent—allow officers to view their footage whenever they want.

The Leadership Conference report advises that police departments institute a “clean reporting” policy, under which officers write an initial incident report before reviewing any footage. Only afterward would they watch the footage and write a second, supplementary report.

“We make the case that in the interests of consistency, fairness, transparency and accountability, clean reporting should be adopted as a standard practice for all police departments with body-worn camera programs,” writes Gupta in the introduction.

Some policing experts say officers should view the footage before writing a report to make sure the account is correct.

Keep reading…

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Venezuela defaults on its debt, blames Trump

Venezuela has been declared a deadbeat on its debt by both Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor’s after it couldn’t cough up $260 million for a couple of sovereign bond payments.  Now any bond with Venezuela’s name on it – and all the bonds issued in the country – will be affected.  This will add up to billions.  All that’s left now is for the repo men of the bond world, the Investment Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), to declare default to trigger cross-default clauses on a type of bond insurance known as credit default swaps for the deed to be complete.  All the help Russia has been able to give to Venezuela, some of which was signed even this morning, was not enough.


So this should be a time of socialist reckoning, right?  The comeuppance of socialism?  Another example of socialism failing every time you try it?  One of the historically richest countries in Latin America, and the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, has been left a smoking ruin.  It’s defaulted on its sovereign debt, run out of money (the WSJ says it has just $1 billion in foreign reserves left), has widespread hunger, mass poverty, and the wreck of its medical system.  The electrical company is bankrupt, the water isn’t running, the bridges are falling apart, and now even the Caracas subway seems to be shutting down.  The wages of socialism are there for all to see, and presumably reject, right?



Not for Chavista socialist Venezuela’s rulers.  They’ve got an answer for us: the problem is Trump.  I kid you not.  


At yesterday’s creditors’ meeting in Caracas, according to the Toronto Star:


Very little was announced and nothing was resolved, according to attendees who said they left just as confused about the government’s intentions as they were going in. Vice President Tareck El Aissami was the only official to speak, and devoted most of his prepared remarks to railing against U.S. President Donald Trump and global financiers who he said have conspired to keep the country from making debt payments on time. He pledged the nation would continue to honour its obligations and work with bondholders to find new ways to get them their money, but offered no concrete proposals for restructuring.


See?  If it weren’t for Trump, all would be hunky-dory.  Pay no attention to their failed socialist model out there for all to see, decades in the making.  The crash is the work of Trump.


Like a delinquent who blames everyone but himself for his misdeeds, they are like leftists everywhere, unable to point the finger at themselves.  It’s that very inability to examine themselves and take responsibility for the horrific errors they engineered that ensures they won’t be reforming any time soon, enough to pay their debts.


For the creditors, that message of incapacity to reform is the surest sign out there of a congenital deadbeat.  So long as they keep blaming Trump for the sanctions on their ruling drug dealers, one of whom is El Aissami himself, they aren’t ever going to crawl out of their hole.


Venezuela has been declared a deadbeat on its debt by both Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor’s after it couldn’t cough up $260 million for a couple of sovereign bond payments.  Now any bond with Venezuela’s name on it – and all the bonds issued in the country – will be affected.  This will add up to billions.  All that’s left now is for the repo men of the bond world, the Investment Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), to declare default to trigger cross-default clauses on a type of bond insurance known as credit default swaps for the deed to be complete.  All the help Russia has been able to give to Venezuela, some of which was signed even this morning, was not enough.


So this should be a time of socialist reckoning, right?  The comeuppance of socialism?  Another example of socialism failing every time you try it?  One of the historically richest countries in Latin America, and the country with the world’s largest oil reserves, has been left a smoking ruin.  It’s defaulted on its sovereign debt, run out of money (the WSJ says it has just $1 billion in foreign reserves left), has widespread hunger, mass poverty, and the wreck of its medical system.  The electrical company is bankrupt, the water isn’t running, the bridges are falling apart, and now even the Caracas subway seems to be shutting down.  The wages of socialism are there for all to see, and presumably reject, right?


Not for Chavista socialist Venezuela’s rulers.  They’ve got an answer for us: the problem is Trump.  I kid you not.  


At yesterday’s creditors’ meeting in Caracas, according to the Toronto Star:


Very little was announced and nothing was resolved, according to attendees who said they left just as confused about the government’s intentions as they were going in. Vice President Tareck El Aissami was the only official to speak, and devoted most of his prepared remarks to railing against U.S. President Donald Trump and global financiers who he said have conspired to keep the country from making debt payments on time. He pledged the nation would continue to honour its obligations and work with bondholders to find new ways to get them their money, but offered no concrete proposals for restructuring.


See?  If it weren’t for Trump, all would be hunky-dory.  Pay no attention to their failed socialist model out there for all to see, decades in the making.  The crash is the work of Trump.


Like a delinquent who blames everyone but himself for his misdeeds, they are like leftists everywhere, unable to point the finger at themselves.  It’s that very inability to examine themselves and take responsibility for the horrific errors they engineered that ensures they won’t be reforming any time soon, enough to pay their debts.


For the creditors, that message of incapacity to reform is the surest sign out there of a congenital deadbeat.  So long as they keep blaming Trump for the sanctions on their ruling drug dealers, one of whom is El Aissami himself, they aren’t ever going to crawl out of their hole.






via American Thinker Blog

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