06/10/15

New Report Heralds Existential Threat To America

PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 10, 2015

For More Information Contact:
Alex VanNess | [email protected]

NEW REPORT HERALDS EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO AMERICA

Washington, D.C.: The Center for Security Policy today released a new report by investigative journalist James Simpson: The Red-Green Axis: Refugees, Immigration and the Agenda to Erase America.

This report extensively details the networks of radical left non-profits, foundations, government agencies and the personalities behind them. Unbeknownst to most Americans they are using refugee resettlement as a pretext to import waves of immigrants from third-world nations as a key front in Obama’s strategy of “fundamentally transforming” America. These refugees have little interest in assimilating. Many are from Muslim countries, view immigration as “Hijra” i.e. a subversive means to invade a foreign nation, and have demonstrated a willingness to either support or engage in terrorism both in America and abroad.

These groups are coached by leftist non-profits to capitalize on our generous welfare programs and shown how to maneuver around legal impediments – all at our expense – but are not being taught how to assimilate. The report conservatively estimates welfare costs at $10 billion per year. Additionally, government resettlement contractors receive $1 billion annually in federal tax dollars and non-profits supporting the agenda are provided billions of dollars from non-profits like George Soros’ Open Society Institute.

The President has launched a “Welcoming America” initiative, which seeks to “seed” refugees throughout our communities and weed out “pockets of resistance” with a full-throated effort vilifying anyone opposing his radical agenda. It is literally an offensive to erase American laws, traditions and culture, and replace them with a pliable, multi-cultural society that will vote the Left into the “permanent progressive majority” it seeks.

Center for Security Policy President, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. states:

Jim Simpson has done a characteristically exacting investigation of the extent to which the red-green axis – the radical left, with its activists, contractors, philanthropies and friends in the Obama administration, and Islamic supremacists – have joined forces to use U.S. refugee resettlement programs as a prime means to achieve the ‘fundamental transformation’ of  America. His expose is particularly timely against the backdrop of the government sponsored effort to ‘Welcome New Americans’ and suppress those who understand the imperative of “resisting” the migration to and colonization of this country, or hijra, that Shariah-adherent Muslim believed they are required to undertake.

For additional information about the new Red-Green Axis report, visit www.SecureFreedom.org or contact Alex VanNess at [email protected].

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About The Center for Security Policy

The Center for Security Policy is a non-profit, non-partisan national security organization that specializes in identifying policies, actions, and resource needs that are vital to American security and then ensures that such issues are the subject of both focused, principled examination and effective action by recognized policy experts, appropriate officials, opinion leaders, and the general public. For more information visit www.securefreedom.org


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06/10/15

Will the Sharia save Morsi?

By: Ashraf Ramelah
Voice of the Copts

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death-sentence

Just three weeks ago the Egyptian court sentenced Egypt’s former Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohammed Morsi, to the death penalty after evidence presented from Egyptian intelligence documents proved him guilty of spying for Qatar, Iran and Turkey.

There are more than one hundred names on the list with him who are all convicted of the same crimes: murdering protesters, transferring top secret military documents to foreign countries, and burning the museum library which destroyed rare manuscripts and ancient artifacts.

Included on the death-penalty list is Mohamed Badie, the former Muslim Brotherhood spiritual head and his two deputies, Khairat El-Shater and Mahmud Ezzat, as well as Yousef Al Qaradawy, Hamas’ spiritual leader now living in Qatar.

As required by Egyptian law, the Egyptian court directly transmitted the list of the sentenced to the Grand Mufti of Cairo for his pronouncement of the Sharia opinion (approval) on the court’s verdict and sentencing. This past week, a few hours before the court resumed on June 2, a sealed envelope was passed to the court containing the Grand Mufti’s decision.

The court postponed the June 2 proceedings until June 16, and the envelope remains sealed at this moment.  Some say the court did so to protect the country and President Al-Sisi who was in Germany on June 2 — waiting for his return in case violence erupts as a result of the announcement.

What are the chances that the Mufti has approved the death penalty? After all, the hundred or so Morsi aides and accomplices condemned to death along with the former president are guilty of nothing more than consistency with the cleric’s ideological and religious views.

If the death penalty is not approved and the civil court ignores the disapproval and goes forward to implement the death penalty, this could mean that the court is secured by the backing and protection of the President in order to serve justice. This in turn reveals that Al-Sisi is truly willing and able to go forward with cleaning corruption and rolling back religious extremism in an effort to reform the country.

But Al-Sisi is a mystery. He recently gave a statement to the German press indicating his agreement with the official story of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood wherein Morsi was elected fairly and democratically and won with 55 percent of the vote. This is very odd since Al-Sisi’s own legitimacy as the people’s president rests on the opposite view — the well-known truth that Morsi became president through corrupt elections, violence, fraud, and outside interference.

The second alternative would be for the civil court to comply with the Grand Mufti’s disapproval of the death sentences, subjecting itself to the authority of the religious clerics which is current practice. In an unreformed Egypt this can be expected from the court.

If we find that the Mufti has approved the death sentences, we are experiencing Al-Sisi’s power for the first time within his term of office and know as well that he is genuine.  If so, the promise of modern reform has real potential, and Al-Sisi will have succeeded in spite of outside pressures (Merkel, Obama, and the CIA), Egypt’s political legacy (Mubarak, Sadat, and Nasser) and religious ultra-conservatives threatening secular initiatives (Salafists, Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Ahzar Institute).

The Coptic minority remains under the same pressures today as during previous administrations ruling Egypt. Muslim supremacies prevail, often with violence, against the sub-class within Egypt’s population. Al-Sisi, the man and the president, is yet a sign of hope for the country – Muslim and Christian watch Al-Sisi teetering between positions usually by omissions but not defaulting to the comfortable pattern of his predecessors.

06/10/15

The Clinton Record on Libya

By: Kenneth Timmerman
Accuracy in Media

Exclusive to Accuracy in Media
The emails show more than you might think

On August 21, 2011, a top aide to Hillary Clinton penned a memo lauding his boss for steering U.S. policy in Libya, aimed at convincing the media of her accomplishments as Secretary of State.

“HRC has been a critical voice on Libya in administration deliberations, at NATO, and in contact group meetings—as well as the public face of the U.S. effort in Libya. She was instrumental in securing the authorization, building the coalition, and tightening the noose around Qadhafi and his regime,” Clinton aide Jake Sullivan wrote.

Sullivan’s memo to Mrs. Clinton’s inner circle is, of course, embarrassing today, which is one reason you are not reading about it on the front pages of The New York Times or The Washington Post.

But that’s not the only reason.

The memo, as well as other critical State Department correspondence, was withheld from multiple committees in Congress that have been investigating the September 11, 2012 attacks in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, State Department communications officer Sean Smith, and two former Navy Seals then working on contract to the CIA, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.

It finally surfaced on May 22, 2015, in response to a subpoena from the Select Committee on Benghazi chaired by South Carolina Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy. That was six months after Gowdy’s initial request to the State Department for all documents relating to Benghazi, and more than two-and-a-half years after a similar request from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which initiated its investigation into Benghazi just days after the attacks.

In Sullivan’s memo, Mrs. Clinton was the driving force in getting the Russians to drop opposition to a UN-imposed no fly zone on Qadhafi’s Libya. She alone got Turkey, Qatar and Jordan to join the coalition military operations and to provide critical support to the anti-Qadhafi forces.

To convince skeptical allies to embrace her policies, Sullivan noted that Mrs. Clinton had traveled to Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, Abu Dhabi, Addis Ababa and Istanbul. She visited with “House Democrats and Senate Republicans to persuade them not to de-fund the Libya operation.”

Sullivan’s memo provided background for media appearances by Secretary Clinton in the ensuing months, including a famous encounter with a TV news reporter in Afghanistan, just three days after Mrs. Clinton’s October 2011 visit to Libya to proclaim victory against the then-still-missing Libyan dictator.

In video outtakes, Clinton aide Huma Abedin hands the Secretary a Blackberry, with information that Colonel Qadhafi has been killed, apparently just hours after Mrs. Clinton’s brief visit to the country.

“We came, we saw, he died,” Mrs. Clinton joked.

In short, without Mrs. Clinton’s vigorous intervention, Qadhafi would still be in power, Libya would still be a country, and the jihadis who now own the place would be toast. And, of course, Chris Stevens, Smith, Doherty and Woods would still be alive.

After the attacks, Mrs. Clinton quickly forgot her leading role on Libya, sending a clueless Susan Rice to the Sunday talk shows to be the “public face” of the Obama administration’s Libya policy.

In her only public appearances to address what happened in Benghazi, she portrayed herself as a disengaged onlooker, called upon to pick up the pieces when the hired help failed to get things right. “[It] was very disappointing to me that the [Accountability Review Board (ARB)] concluded there were inadequacies and problems in the responsiveness of our team here in Washington to the security requests that were made by our team in Libya. And I was not aware of that going on. It was not brought to my attention,” she told the House Foreign Affairs committee in January 2013.

She reminded House and Senate panels in January 2013 that the State Department’s ARB, which she appointed, had determined that the failures in Benghazi were entirely the responsibility of lower level officials, even though Libya was among the top ten most dangerous postings in the world at the time of the attacks. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler busily helped to reinforce that fiction in a “fact-checking” blog aimed to show that there were simply too many cables going in and out of the State Department for a busy Secretary to see all of them.

Interestingly, in the approximately 300 Clinton emails the State Department has released so far, there is no record of Mrs. Clinton’s original request to her staff to draft a memo lauding her achievements in Libya. Did Sullivan simply dream up the idea and forward it up the chain of command to see if it would please his boss? Or was Mrs. Clinton’s request for these talking points one of the 30,000 “personal” emails the former Secretary of State deleted as irrelevant to her official duties?

Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills forwarded Sullivan’s August 2011 memo to a second private Hillary email address. Remember how she insisted that she had just one private email account? The memo included a note that said, “Here’s the memo.” That sounds an awful lot like, “Here’s the memo you requested.”

Hillary sent it on to her personal assistant with the instruction, “Pls print for me.”

This type of exchange gets repeated many times in the Clinton emails released so far, suggesting that Mrs. Clinton was not given to making substantive comments via email, or that she deleted material that is relevant to the House Select Committee on Benghazi and is therefore guilty of obstructing justice. The other possibility is that the State Department Freedom of Information office is inexplicably dragging its feet in clearing Mrs. Clinton’s correspondence, even though the delay casts Mrs. Clinton in an embarrassing light.

Judicial Watch and other watchdog organizations—including this author—had been trying to get Mrs. Clinton’s emails and other U.S. government documents relevant to the Benghazi attacks for the past two-and-a-half years without success until the subpoena from the Select Committee on Benghazi compelled a response.

Now, thanks to a federal court order in Washington, DC, compelling the State Department to produce additional documents it previously had said did not exist or were properly categorized as classified, we can now put Mrs. Clinton’s emails into a broader context.

As the first reports of the attacks on Benghazi were whizzing through the State Department Operations Center, bouncing off the computers of lower level employees, one is impressed by their professionalism.

For example, the British security firm that had the contract to guard the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi sent several ungrammatical missives through a State Department contact to update him on what was happening during the attacks.

Dylan Davies, one of the contractors working for the security firm, was apparently holed up in his hotel room (not at the scene of the Compound leading a daring rescue attempt, as he told CBS’ 60 Minutes), with no information at 11:55 p.m. local time—by which time, Ambassador Stevens and Sean Smith were dead, the CIA contractors led by Ty Woods had driven the attackers away from the burning diplomatic compound, and evacuated back to the CIA Annex.

A half hour later, Davies sent a second report, claiming there had been “no casualties,” and relaying a hearsay report from his “Benghazi facilitator,” who claimed that sources on the street were telling him the attack was either a September 11th anniversary attack, or caused by an Internet movie “disrespecting Mohammed.”

In relaying those reports, the State Department’s Command Center cautioned that they should be “taken with a grain of salt as the Employee may not be aware of the extent of the situation.”

And yet, less than four hours later—with no other independent reporting that had been released—Hillary Clinton issued her statement blaming the attacks on an Internet video.

What happened in the meantime? Who pushed the idea of the Internet video?

The short answer is that:we still don’t know. Either Mrs. Clinton destroyed the emails and other documents showing how she latched onto a report her own specialists had rejected as hearsay, or perhaps the Archangel Gabriel whispered in her ear while she had her head in a closet in her 7th floor office suite.

Several emails released to Judicial Watch show the intense involvement of the Bureau of Public Affairs in scouring the Internet for information on the attacks, but nothing to suggest the Secretary of State was asking the intelligence community what they knew.

At 9:30 p.m,—just 40 minutes before Mrs. Clinton issued her official statement blaming the attacks on a YouTube video—Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Dana Shell Smith sent out a request to her reporting officers to find information “in the aftermath of today’s demonstrations at Embassy Cairo.” For whatever reason, her request failed to mention Benghazi.

Rebecca Brown Thompson, head of a State Department media office called the “Rapid Response Unit” (reminiscent of the Clinton campaign “war room”), responded by sending snippets from Facebook postings gleaned by Arabic language media analysts.

“I see a variety of responses spanning from conspiracy theories (that is what the Americans and Israelis are doing on purpose to hurt Arabs and Muslims, they financed the offensive movie), to those who condemn the attacks as ‘UnIslamic and barbaric,’” one analyst reported.

Two hours after Mrs. Clinton issued the statement blaming the attacks on the “inflammatory material posted on the Internet,” a second Arabic media analyst tasked with justifying that statement found a lone tweet about the film, but also reported that “some Twitter users in Libya and Egypt are spreading reports that the attacks in Libya may not be related to the infamous film but to the killing of Al Qaeda’s second in command, who is Libyan.”

The “infamous” film, which was much less well known in Libya than in Egypt, became the subject of a scurrilous account appearing the very next morning that was penned by Max Blumenthal, son of the infamous Sid “Vicious” Blumenthal who was advising Mrs. Clinton. It was picked up and amplified in a second attack blog posted at 6:56 a.m. the same morning, suggesting that the real blame for the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi fell on Mitt Romney and his “extremist” backers who produced this YouTube video in the first place.

Once information from the professionals rose to the level of Jake Sullivan, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills in Clinton’s office, it just seemed to disappear, replaced with a weird concoction of politics, public relations and outright fantasy, such as the YouTube video concoction or the Sid Blumenthal “intelligence” reports. (When Mrs. Clinton sent those around to the professional diplomats, the comments she received in response were rarely complimentary.)

The 300 recently released Clinton emails give the impression that the 7th floor of the State Department was inhabited by a bunch of grad students, pretending to be government officials.

The most tragic example of the apparent ignorance of how the State Department and the federal government actually worked appeared in Mrs. Clinton’s order to not engage the Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST), an interagency team on 24/7 stand-by alert, that had been created to respond to just such an emergency as the Benghazi attacks.

Counterterrorism Bureau official Mark Thompson, who helped to establish the FEST after the 1998 Africa embassy attacks, testified at length before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about this on May 8, 2013.

The Judicial Watch emails include a frustrated note he sent to the State Department Operations Center at 9:01 p.m. on the night of the attacks, complaining that Secretary Clinton was trying to get the FBI to send an evidence response team to Libya, when “the State (CT) led Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST) would include those folks, along with experts from other agencies. We should avoid multiple requests for assistance and rely on the comprehensive FEST approach.”

In his Congressional testimony, Thompson said he had tried to get Mrs. Clinton’s office and the White House to approve activating the FEST as soon as he first learned about the attacks from the State Operations Center, but was told “it was not the right time and it was not the team that needed to go right then.”

The redacted portions of Thompson’s email undoubtedly included a reference to the heavily-armed special operations component of the FEST whose job would be to secure the facility under attack. Had Secretary Clinton not told the FEST to stand down early on, there’s a chance they might have arrived in Benghazi before Woods and Doherty were killed in the 5 a.m. mortar attack the next morning.

At the very least, they would have been able to secure the compounds and gather evidence on the spot, instead of waiting three weeks as the FBI was ultimately forced to do.

Mrs. Clinton’s aversion to any overt U.S. military presence in Libya was well-known at U.S. Africa Command, which had been supplying the ambassador’s security detail up until just weeks before the attacks. “We were not allowed to wear uniforms outside the embassy compound, not even our boots,” the head of Stevens’ U.S. Special Forces security detail told me. “People high up at State resented like Hell us being there and doing what we did.”

And in the end, those same people ordered the Ambassador’s Special Forces security detail to leave Libya—with disastrous consequences.

06/10/15

Sick Minds in the Media Getting Sicker

By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Remember the wholesome programs “Touched by an Angel” and “Highway to Heaven?” How things have changed. Fox is preparing a new show simply called “Lucifer,” starring Satan as a good guy.

Broadcaster Jerry Kenney suggests a new title, “I Love Lucifer,” which more accurately captures the trends in the media these days.

A popular network show, ABC’s “The Bachelorette,” took a surprising turn when two men competing for the same attractive woman suddenly took a sexual interest in each other.

But showering praise on the gay lifestyle is getting to be old hat.

Our media are indeed consumed with the most extreme of the sexual minorities available, and they can’t wait to seize on another oddball behavior to promote on national television. Hence, the “rights” of so-called transgenders are the big new thing. Thanks to Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, they have taken center stage.

Here’s the promo for the latest ABC show, “Becoming Us,” which aired on Monday night on the ABC Family network: “Ben, from Evanston, Ill. is your typical 17-year-old. He goes to school, hangs out with his girlfriend, and enjoys spending time with his family. But there’s something unique about Ben’s situation: His father is becoming a woman.”

ABC Family is owned by Disney, once known for pro-family programming. It is the parent company of ABC News. It was the ABC Family show “The Fosters” which featured a gay kiss a couple of months ago between two of the family drama’s 13-year-old male characters.

This is how the wholesome term “family” is being twisted into something it is not.

You can’t even switch channels without getting hit in the face with the endless promotion of “alternative” lifestyles and sexual perversion.

CNN’s lesbian commentator Sally Kohn was offended by Republican GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee joking about transgenders, about how a boy, or even a man, could claim to be a girl just to go into the girls’ dressing rooms. “For those who do not think that we are under threat,” Huckabee said, “simply recognize that the fact that we are now in city after city watching ordinances say that your 7-year-old daughter, if she goes into the restroom, cannot be offended and you can’t be offended if she’s greeted there by a 42-year-old man who feels more like a woman than he does a man.”

“Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school, that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE [physical education],” said Huckabee. “I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.’”

Turning to his audience, he said, “You’re laughing because it sounds so ridiculous, doesn’t it?

When WorldNetDaily posted the joke, its entire YouTube channel was suspended. Kohn determined that Huckabee, not the behavior he was describing, was creepy.

In another indication of current trends, when Catholic Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco commented on the Bruce Jenner problem by noting that the “clear biological fact is that a human being is born either male or female,” The Huffington Post ran a story about his “sad but predictable” comments.

That’s right: it’s now “sad” to point out the biological facts of life.

Cordileone added, “Yet now we have the idea gaining acceptance that biological sex and one’s personal gender identity can be at variance with each other, with more and more gender identities being invented.”

If present trends continue, he warned of “a reversion to the paganism of old, but with unique, postmodern variations on its themes, such as the practice of child sacrifice, the worship of feminine deities, or the cult of priestesses.”

But the media, it seems, just can’t do enough for this particular sexual minority group, inevitably paving the way for recognition of the next stage in the sexual revolution—pedophile rights.

The New York Times ran a front-page story headlined, “Transgender Children’s Books Fill a Void and Break a Taboo.” The paper reported, “This year, children’s publishers are releasing around half a dozen novels in a spectrum of genres, including science fiction and young adult romance, that star transgender children and teenagers.”

In competition with The New York Times in “breaking news” coverage of the transgenders, The Washington Post has run such titles as:

  • Embracing transgender equality, high schools move to one graduation robe
  • Learning how to be a lady? For the transgender market, coaches help
  • Court overturns transfer of transgender teen to prison
  • 8 critical facts about the state of transgender America?

It’s almost as if the state of “transgender America” is at a crisis point and that the American people are demanding coverage of this urgent national issue. But I doubt it.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, June 13, the gay Pride Parade gets underway, presented by Marriott, with a Parade Family Fun Zone, face painting, balloon art, snacks, and more!

To be sure, there are stories about other alarming developments in America, such as the Post’s account of “pot-smoking” parents, desperate to hide their addiction from their children.

Against this trend of one perversity after another, we see a few conservative personalities in the media giving in, while claiming that their adoption of what used to be radical liberal standards of morality now constitutes the new conservative position.

Hence, Greg Gutfeld of Fox News has declared that “gay marriage, in my opinion, is a conservative idea.”

Professor Paul Kengor, author of Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage, obliterates Gutfeld’s alleged conservative rationale, noting in The American Spectator that “Conservatism aims to conserve the time-tested values, ideas, and principles that have been sustained over time by previous generations and traditions.”

On that basis, he goes on, “Gay marriage, merely by its total newness alone, fails that rudimentary definition. Gay marriage has never been done before. One would never expect a conservative to rush into something as utterly unprecedented—and that directly repudiates the laws of nature and nature’s God…”

The Gutfeld commentary is truly “sad,” to use the term from The Huffington Post.

It is really sad because Gutfeld was one of the young conservatives who went through the National Journalism Center of the late M. Stanton Evans. Evans understood what conservatism really was, and warned that acceptance of gay rights constituted a return to pagan practices.

It is probably the case that Gutfeld is trying to appear “hip” and cool,” in order to appeal to the libertarians and progressives, and hype the ratings for his new show on the Fox News Channel.

Ironically, however, in his new book, Not Cool, Gutfeld tries to come across as politically incorrect, saying, “The cool fawn over terrorists, mock the military, and denigrate employers.”

But he’s fawning over one of the latest progressive causes, that of gay marriage. Can his endorsement of transgenderism be far behind?  After all, doesn’t Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner claim to be a Republican?

This trend caught the sympathetic eye of the Media Matters group, run by a homosexual and former conservative by the name of David Brock. Media Matters ran the item, “Has Fox News Evolved On Marriage Equality, Too?”

It turns out Gutfeld is not alone at Fox. During the January 21 edition of Fox’s program “The Five,” co-hosts Dana Perino and Eric Bolling, according to Media Matters, “admitted that they agreed with the President on same-sex marriage, opting instead to half-heartedly criticize Obama for changing his position on the issue.”

The far-left “media watchdog” noted that the program returned to the topic the next night and that Gutfeld declared, “I was for gay marriage before Obama!,” while Perino “denied that the Republican Party was opposed to marriage equality” and asked, “who talks about gay marriage anymore?”

It appears that those who are talking about gay marriage in a negative manner are not going to be getting much attention from Fox News.

This is how the so-called herd mentality of the media operates, and how views that used to be conservative are marginalized and even transformed into something they are not.

This is what in fact has happened in Britain, where the Conservative Party has enthusiastically embraced gay marriage and Christians are losing their jobs—and even being arrested for objecting to the new politically correct view.

There is, however, some good news from Britain, where a woman named Sarah Mbuyi has won her case for wrongful dismissal. She had been fired for a conversation with a colleague about homosexuality and gay marriage.

The group Christian Concern reports that the 31-year-old Mbuyi was fired from her job at a nursery in West London after having a conversation with a homosexual colleague in which she explained the biblical position on homosexuality and marriage. An employment tribunal found that Mbuyi had been discriminated against because of her beliefs.

It is this dangerous anti-Christian trend that traditional conservatives are trying to resist. It would be nice if they could find some support from the “conservative” Fox News Channel.

06/10/15

Our Watcher’s Council Nominations – 06/10/15

The Watcher’s Council

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I’ve avoided this topic, but since it seems so important, here’s my one comment on the matter.

I could care less what Bruce/Caitlyn chooses to call him or herself, what he/she did or didn’t do to their body, or any personal details whatsoever. I don’t regard it as a matter of courage and could care less about the emotions involved or the motivation.

What does bother me is how much oxygen in the room this is taking up and how quickly it’s become a major media story, eclipsing real issues like the Clinton’s criminally corrupt Foundation scandal, Obama’s secret trade bill, what’s really going on with the president’s executive Amnesty for illegal aliens, the continuing attempts to encroach on our liberties and similar stories.

Jenner is estimated to make as much as $500 million from reality TV, book deals, interviews and the usual nonsense. It bothers me that as a nation, this is that important.

Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday morning.

Council News:

My latest is up at the Times Of Israel, Jew Hatred, Cellphones And Boycotts.

This week, Doug Ross, Michael Haltman and Seraphic Secret earned honorable mention status with some great articles.

You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.

To bring something to my attention, simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title and a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address (mandatory, but of course it won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6 PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category. Then return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week when it comes out on Wednesday morning.

Simple, no?

It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?

So, let’s see what we have for you this week…

Council Submissions:

Honorable Mentions:

Non-Council Submissions:

Enjoy! And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter… ’cause we’re cool like that! And don’t forget to tune in Friday for the results!