Search Called off for Missing Marines

By Stars and Stripes. The Marine Corps has ended an extensive search for five Marines missing after their KC-130J Hercules collided with an F/A-18 Hornet last week off Japan’s southern coast.

“After an update from the Joint Personnel Recovery Center, and a review of all available information, I have made the determination to end the search and rescue operations for the crew of our [Hercules] … and to declare that these Marine warriors are deceased,” III Expeditionary Force commander Lt. Gen. Eric Smith said in a statement posted Tuesday afternoon to the organization’s official Facebook page.

“Every possible effort was made to recover our crew and I hope the families of these selfless Americans will find comfort in the incredible efforts made by US, Japanese, and Australian forces during the search,” he added.

Seven Marines were involved in the training accident, which occurred just before 2 a.m. Thursday about 200 miles south of Muroto Cape on Shikoku Island, U.S. and Japanese officials said. (Read more from “Search Called off for Missing Marines” HERE)

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U.S. Marines Declare 5 Service Members Dead, Ending Search After ‘Aviation Mishap’

By NPR. Five days after a pair of U.S. military aircraft crashed off the coast of Japan, the Marine Corps has called off its search-and-rescue efforts for five of the crew members involved. The III Marine Expeditionary Force declared the service members dead in an announcement released on Tuesday local time. . .

The announcement marks a tragic conclusion to a search operation that began Thursday, after what the Marines have described as an “aviation mishap” during a routine overnight training exercise, between an F/A-18 Hornet fighter jet and a KC-130 Hercules refueling aircraft.

The Corps said it has opened an investigation into the cause of the accident.

A total of seven Marines were aboard the two aircraft at the time of the crash. The two F/A-18 Hornet crew members were found in the hours immediately afterward, during the joint search efforts of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, the Japan Coast Guard and the U.S. 7th Fleet. But only one ultimately survived.

The other, identified as Capt. Jahmar F. Resilard, a 28-year-old F/A-18 pilot with Marine All Weather Fighter Attack Squadron 242, was declared dead soon after he was recovered from the water.

(Read more from “U.S. Marines Declare 5 Service Members Dead, Ending Search After ‘Aviation Mishap'” HERE)

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Jamal Khashoggi, Fake Journalist, Shares Time’s 2018 Person of the Year

The big Khashoggi lie continues.

TIME magazine has decided to include the late Jamal Khashoggi as one of the “Guardians” — a group of journalists that on Tuesday were named TIME’s 2018 Person of the Year.

As Conservative Review readers probably know by now, Jamal Khashoggi was anything but journalist. He was an Islamist activist, a Saudi regime change conspirator, an ally to terrorists and their organizations, and a former correspondent for several state-controlled media operations, but never a journalist. Real journalists aspire to seek the truth above all else. Khashoggi was an information operative, not a journalist.

The TIME profile of “The Guardians” begins by lavishing praise on “journalist” Khashoggi.

The stout man with the gray goatee and the gentle demeanor dared to disagree with his country’s government. He told the world the truth about its brutality toward those who would speak out. And he was murdered for it.

Khashoggi may have had a “gentle demeanor” on the surface, but he did not hide his radical beliefs and his bloodlust for the destruction of Israel and the toppling of Middle East allies. In 2014, writing in a Muslim Brotherhood-run outlet, Khashoggi hoped that Israel would violently “die by force” at the hands of Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist group that runs the Gaza Strip.

Khashoggi certainly did “disagree with his country’s government,” but he disagreed with the Saudi monarchy because it decided to declare an end to long-standing peaceful relations with political Islamists both inside and outside the country. Last year, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman vowed to return to a “moderate Islam” and announced that radical preachers and activists had no role in Riyadh’s future. This was devastating news to Jamal Khashoggi, who until his last days sought to empower these actors not only in Saudi Arabia, but also in Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Gaza, Egypt, and elsewhere.

Describing his death using unproven, poorly sourced information, the TIME piece continues:

Every detail of Jamal Khashoggi’s killing made it a sensation: the time stamp on the surveillance video that captured the Saudi journalist entering his country’s Istanbul consulate on Oct. 2; the taxiway images of the private jets bearing his assassins; the bone saw; the reports of his final words, “I can’t breathe,” recorded on audio as the life was choked from him.

CNN reported over the weekend that “I can’t breathe” were Khashoggi’s last words. However, there’s no firm evidence that this is actually the case. CNN’s Nic Robertson, who reported the quote, did not appear to actually hear the supposed audio tape of his killing firsthand. CNN relied on “a source with knowledge” to read a transcript of the supposed tape to the CNN correspondent. It still remains unclear how exactly the Turkish intelligence services got an audio tape of what was happening inside the Saudi diplomatic building during the Khashoggi incident. We do know, however, that Turkey, a rival of Riyadh’s, has pushed out countless pieces of false information to keep the Khashoggi killing in the news as much as possible.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has admitted to running the Khashoggi information operation through Ankara’s intelligence services. Yes, the same Turkey that is the world’s foremost jailer of journalists is doing its best to feed a constant stream of information to click-hungry journalists and convince them that the unsourced data obtained about Khashoggi’s death is accurate.

It’s no coincidence that President Donald Trump is mentioned sixteen times in TIME’s “Guardians” piece. Turkey has geopolitical goals for the Khashoggi information operation that its intelligence services is running. Mostly, Turkey seeks to chip away at the legitimacy of the Saudi monarchy, so that Ankara can fill that vacuum with its own power and influence.

To the U.S. media, however, Khashoggi has to be a journalist, because the real Khashoggi — the caliphate-seeking regressive Islamist and anti-Semite with genocidal aspirations — could not be used as an instrument to attack the president. In this post-truth era, the legacy media has decided that “journalists” like Khashoggi no longer need to seek the truth. They just have to be useful tools to attack and sabotage the legitimacy of one’s political opponents. (For more from the author of “Jamal Khashoggi, Fake Journalist, Shares Time’s 2018 Person of the Year” HERE)

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Roberts and Kavanaugh Prove the Myth of the ‘Conservative’ Supreme Court

This year at the Supreme Court has been extremely boring so far. If we didn’t have lawless hyperactive lower courts engaging in a daily constitutional convention, that would actually be a good thing, as the judiciary should be a boring place with no input into political issues, which should be left up to the political branches. John Jay hated the court because it didn’t get to throw its weight around in politics. Unfortunately, with lower courts permanently altering the trajectory of our politics, culture, sovereignty, and even national security, the passivity of the Roberts court is a recipe for judicial hell.

Once we agree to legitimize judicial supremacy, we have lost our nation, regardless of the orientation of the Supreme Court. That was on full display at the high court on Monday. In a new trend where several members of the “conservative wing” of the court allow very consequential bad lower court rulings to stand, Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh refused to hear an appeal on the issue of forcing states to fund Planned Parenthood.

Five federal circuit courts created a right for Planned Parenthood to obtain state funding or for private citizens to sue the state for not giving them access to any provider they choose through Medicaid. Never mind that some of these same circuits believe an individual doesn’t have a Second Amendment right. They now believe there is a private right to sue states over termination of Medicaid contracts in federal court, a power never granted to them by Congress.

The sheer fact that the Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, and even Fifth Circuits signed on to this insane idea demonstrates, as I’ve long warned, that almost all of the circuits are irremediably broken, and even two terms of Trump’s presidency will only change the margins. The Eighth Circuit was the only appeals court that sided with the state (Arkansas, in this case) against abortion funding. Such a circuit split on a vital issue concerning state powers would normally have triggered a review from the Supreme Court upon appeal. Yet on Monday, in the appeal from the Fifth and Tenth circuits, the Supreme Court denied certiorari to the states of Louisiana and Kansas respectively. Only Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito would have heard the case. It takes four justices to grant cert.

Thomas wrote an impassioned dissent from the denial of cert because this is a dangerous trend we are seeing from his colleagues. We are seeing it with immigration, public prayer, global warming cases, and election law, where lower courts are either violating precedent or all sorts of legal norms, and Roberts and one or two others of the conservative wing join with the Left to allow the lower court insanity to continue.

Until recently, Roberts hid behind the fact that there weren’t any circuit splits in many contentious cases. After all, the Left shops its cases so effectively that it often wins every time. But now we are seeing, as with the public prayer case, that even when there is a circuit split, Roberts is going out of his way to avoid ruling on these cases. The problem is, as Thomas notes, this allows the lower courts to permanently alter the political trajectory of state governments.

Not only are the lawsuits themselves a financial burden on the States, but the looming potential for complex litigation inevitably will dissuade state officials from making decisions that they believe to be in the public interest. State officials are not even safe doing nothing, as the cause of action recognized by the majority rule may enable Medicaid recipients to challenge the failure to list particular providers, not just the removal of former providers.

Thus, anything conservatives ever want to accomplish, even if they win elections, is essentially dead on arrival because of lower court judges allowed to reign supreme. The legal profession erroneously believes that lower courts can grant standing to anyone so they can babysit the other branches on clear political questions, yet the Supreme Court refuses to babysit their own quite inferior courts.

Even when the Supreme Court is forced to take up a case and overturn it, it never does so categorically, as Thomas does. This allows the lower courts and their allies to come back for more and shut down our sovereignty, election law, and fiscal and cultural decisions in 100 other ways.

Absent wholesale judicial reform, if we continue to legitimize judicial supremacy, even with “the right sort of judges,” we should just abolish the other two branches and the state governments in favor of the robed masters. (For more from the author of “Roberts and Kavanaugh Prove the Myth of the ‘Conservative’ Supreme Court” please click HERE)

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Watch: Google CEO Forced to Explain Why Trump’s Photo Appears When You Search for ‘Idiot’

By Raw Story. Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Tuesday found himself having to explain why his company’s search engine retrieves photos of President Donald Trump when a user enters in a search for the word “idiot.” . . .

“We provide search today for any time you type in a keyword… we have gone out and stored copies of billions of pages in our index, and we take the keyword and match it against the pages and rank them based on over 200 signals,” Pichai replied. “Things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. And based on that, you know, at any given time, we try to find the best results for that query.”

(Read more from “Watch: Google Ceo Forced to Explain Why Trump’s Photo Appears When You Search for ‘Idiot'” HERE)

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Google Must Sway Congress on Regulations or Tech Will Face ‘Direct Threat,’ Says Cybersecurity Expert

By CNBC. Google could run into problems with privacy policies if Congress is more receptive to consumer advocates than to the company’s views on regulations, former Facebook privacy and public policy advisor Dipayan Ghosh told CNBC on Tuesday.

“If things do go in that direction, then I think the business model underlying Google, and companies like Google, will be under a more direct threat,” he said on “Closing Bell.”

The comments came after Google CEO Sundar Pichai appeared before a congressional committee, the first time Google parent Alphabet has sent an official to Capitol Hill for a hearing since skipping a Senate hearing on foreign interference in elections earlier this year.

Pichai testified before the House Judiciary Committee, whose members pressed him on a variety of concerns including data privacy, transparency and Google’s development of a censored search engine in China.

Shares of Alphabet had a relatively uneventful day, falling 1.5 percent before climbing to close up nearly 1 percent at $1,061.65. (Read more from “Google Must Sway Congress on Regulations or Tech Will Face ‘Direct Threat,’ Says Cybersecurity Expert” HERE)

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Members of Unofficial Chinese Church Vow to Defy Crackdown and Keep Meeting

More than 100 Protestant Christians from the Early Rain Covenant Church – one of China’s few openly operating unofficial house churches – were snatched from their homes and streets across Chengdu, Sichuan province, in a crackdown that began on Sunday night. Among those detained were church pastor Wang Yi, his wife Jiang Rong, church leaders, members and seminary students.

The round-up in Chengdu is part a broader crackdown on unofficial or underground churches that Beijing launched early this year, bolstered by amendments to the Religious Affairs Regulation that gave grass-roots officials more power to act against churches and impose tougher penalties for “unauthorised religious gatherings”. . .

[The jailed pastor of the church] also called on church members to keep worshipping and meet outdoors if venues could not be rented, adding that the group would never give up on practising its faith publicly. . .

[The church] has about 500 followers but its weekly gatherings spread across more than a dozen meeting points around Chengdu, attracting more than 800 church-goers each week, according to church leaders. It also has about 100 seminary students and a primary school catering to about 40 children.

Another major house church, the Living Stone Church in Guiyang, Guizhou province, was also banned three years ago. Li Guozhi, one of the church’s two pastors, was sentenced to 30 months in prison for releasing a document outlining an official plan to destroy the church. (Read more from “Members of Unofficial Chinese Church Vow to Defy Crackdown and Keep Meeting” HERE)

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Watch: Jim Jordan Grills Google CEO Over Efforts to Turn out Latino Vote ‘in Key States’

On Tuesday, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, grilled Google CEO Sundar Pichai over emails from a Google employee discussing an effort by the tech giant to encourage Latinos to vote in the 2016 election.

Jordan read email excerpts from Google’s multicultural marketing head, Eliana Murillo, describing how Google had bolstered efforts to turn out the Latino vote and was “surprised” to find that President Donald Trump won 29 percent of the Latino vote.

Pichai said an internal review found there was no evidence to support the claim that Google had engaged in partisan political activities.

An incredulous Jordan hammered Pichai for denying what the emails indicate in plain English.

Watch:

(For more from the author of “Watch: Jim Jordan Grills Google CEO Over Efforts to Turn out Latino Vote ‘in Key States’” please click HERE)

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Public School Continues to Allow Bullying, Harassment of Jewish Students

In response to several anti-Semitic incidents, Americans for Peace and Tolerance (where I work) launched an extensive investigation into anti-Semitic bullying and harassment of Jewish, pro-Israel students by radical left-wing history teachers at Newton North High School in Massachusetts. The investigation is ongoing, with thousands of internal emails and other documents already obtained and examined under the Massachusetts Public Records Law. Thousands more are on their way. . .

Two years ago, a Jewish student at Newton North — we’ll call her Becky — was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a bone cancer with a 60-70 percent survival rate, just before she was to start her junior year. Her parents moved her to Israel for a year of treatment by its amazing doctors. Becky wanted to attend a U.S.-accredited international school in Israel, because she wanted to graduate with her friends back in Newton after she got better and returned home.

In response to this plan, and to Becky’s desire to take an AP class, Jonathan Bassett, the chair of the Newton North history department, stated: “This is, of course, somewhat ridiculous.” He then wrote: “I’m not going to entertain requests … to take [a course] pass/fail, or any other modification.” He finished with, “I’m not going to have them play the cancer card on me if it doesn’t go well.”

At Newton South, Newton’s other high school, a more sympathetic attitude appears to prevail. An Israeli student was given the choice to take an entire semester of classes pass/fail simply because a visa issue forced him to miss a few days of school.

Bassett has been intensely hostile to community members concerned about anti-Israel bias in his school, telling teachers to “ignore the noise” and, in the words of a former school committee member, “wax[ing] poetic about this garbage,” referring to the community members’ concerns. Two years ago, Bassett dismissed a Jewish parent’s concerns about anti-Israel and pro-Islam history lessons in class, telling the principal, “She has some mental health issues and is visibly unwell.” . . .

Earlier this year, a Newton North history teacher had someone who apparently turned out to be a visiting former student reported to the Newton Police Department, because the former student came into the history office looking for a couple of teachers and happened to be wearing a sweatshirt with an Israel Defense Forces logo. The teacher felt that the former student represented a threat to the school. (Read more from “Public School Continues to Allow Bullying, Harassment of Jewish Students” HERE)

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Radio Station Lifts Ban on Popular Christmas Song

Sometimes the crowd is full of stupid. But sometimes the crowd is full of wisdom. A Bay Area radio station’s decision to lift the ban on the popular Christmas song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” due to an audience poll is an example of the latter.

According to CBS News, San Francisco’s KOIT radio station will be returning the allegedly controversial “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” to the airwaves this season after audiences overwhelmingly expressed disapproval of the ban.

The ban occurred last week when KOIT Program Director Brian Figula announced the station would be shelving the song while asking listeners for feedback. In the end, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” won the day. . .

“After hearing from thousands of Bay Area listeners via polling, phone calls, emails and social media, KOIT has concluded that the vast majority consider the song to be a valuable part of their holiday tradition, and they still want to hear it on the radio,” Figula said in a statement on Monday. . .

“KOIT’s listeners have spoken, and the overwhelming message is they do want to hear ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ on our station, as they have throughout the years,” he said. “More than seven out of every ten listeners who responded said although some lyrics of the song may reflect a different era and a different sensibility than today, still they love the tradition and history of the song, and want to hear it as part of their holiday season.” (Read more from “Radio Station Lifts Ban on Popular Christmas Song” HERE)

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Here’s the Outcome of the Stormy Daniels Lawsuit

It’s a win for Trump. The defamation lawsuit filed against Donald Trump by Michael Avenatti on behalf of Stormy Daniels has been tossed—and a judge is ordering her to pay nearly the president’s $294,000 legal tab. Daniels recently toldthe Daily Beast that the defamation suit filed by Avenatti was done against her wishes. The suit claimed that Trump has defamed the adult entertainment actress on his Twitter account. Well, regardless of the circumstances, it’s time to pay up, Stormy (via CNBC):

A federal judge in California has ordered porn star Stormy Daniels to pay President Donald Trump more than $292,000 in his attorneys’ fees and another $1,000 in sanctions in connection with her dismissed defamation suit against Trump.

Trump’s lawyer Charles Harder said that the fees that Daniels was ordered to pay amount to 75 percent of Trump’s legal feels in the case. And he said the sanctions are for Daniels having filed a “meritless” defamation action against Trump. . .

“They received less than one half what they asked for because the request was gross and excessive,” Avenatti said. “Stormy will never have to pay a dime because they owe her over $1 million in attorney’s fees and costs from the main NDA case, especially in light of Cohen’s guilty plea to a felony.

(Read more from “Here’s the Outcome of the Stormy Daniels Lawsuit” HERE)

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Is Team Trump Ready for Pelosi’s ‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’?

By Washington Examiner. The Trump administration is preparing for House Democrats to be a constant thorn in its side for the for the next two years, launching investigations into the president, his family, and members of his administration. . .

Armed with congressional subpoena power, House Democrats are expected to investigate everything from the president’s real-estate holdings and unreleased tax returns to his hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to his termination of former FBI Director James Comey to any potential ties between himself, his associates and Russia. . .

As the administration remains outwardly confident, expressing willingness to work across the aisle, former administration officials and sources close to the White House who spoke to the Washington Examiner paint a different picture. They argue that White House officials underestimate the ability of Democratic inquiries to derail a presidential agenda.

Facing congressional subpoenas, document requests and requests for administration officials to appear before committees, House Democrats are guaranteed to make it difficult for the White House to control the message and promote the president’s “America First” policies. The concern is that even if the administration scores a policy win, like infrastructure, having an official appear before a committee to give sworn testimony will get the media coverage and “suck all the oxygen out of the room.”

“I think they are certainly not prepared for the death by a thousand cuts that is almost undoubtedly coming from Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats,” one source close to the administration told the Washington Examiner. “They are going to take every little thing they can take and use it against the president and the administration. Where it will have the biggest effect is it will derail their ability to communicate their policies or get coverage on their policies.” (Read more from “Is Team Trump Ready for Pelosi’s ‘Death by a Thousand Cuts’?” HERE)

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Pelosi, rebels discuss limiting her time as speaker to 4 years

By Politico. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and a group of House Democratic rebels are discussing a proposal to cap her time as speaker to four years, a move that could clear the way for the California Democrat to clinch the gavel in the coming days.

The idea is part of a broader deal being floated that would limit the time all House Democratic leaders can serve, including Pelosi’s two longtime lieutenants, Reps. Steny Hoyer of Maryland and James Clyburn of South Carolina.

The plan would be a dramatic shift for Pelosi, who has refused to put an end date on her tenure as she works to reclaim the speakership.

Under the terms of the deal, Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn would be able to serve three terms with an option for a fourth term if they can win the support of two-thirds of the caucus, according to multiple Democratic sources. The effect would be retroactive, meaning the two terms the trio ruled in the majority from 2007 to 2011 would count against their tenure. (Read more from “Pelosi, rebels discuss limiting her time as speaker to 4 years” HERE)

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