Trump Takes off From Campaign Trail to Honor 9/11 Victims

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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will not be actively campaigning or placing campaign ads on the 15th anniversary of Sep. 11, 2001.

The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will likewise pause her campaign for the day.

The one-day pause from the intense campaigns of both politicians raised eyebrows from former President George W. Bush’s White House press secretary Ari Fleischer.

“It’s just so hard to take anybody who does that seriously when September 10 and September 12 are so chock full of juicy politics,” he said. “Taking September 11 off feels nothing but contrived.”

The political positives and negatives of taking off that day — which falls on a Sunday this year — have been debated by Republican figureheads.

“I’m not sure that pulling the ads or even avoiding politics on 9/11 needs to continue,” said Weekly Standard’s William Kristol. “What strikes me is how little either campaign has been serious in terms of debating the implications of 9/11 — a debate that was robust in 2004, 2008 and 2012.”

However, Josh Holmes, former chief of staff to Senate Major Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said even after 15 years, 9/11 is still a sacred day.

“Whatever a campaign may think it gains by plowing forward is erased by a story suggesting they are politicizing 9/11,” he said. “You’ll never lose a vote by taking the time to remember the day, the Americans who were lost, and our continued fight against terrorism.”

Taking off the day will result in both candidates losing envied television ad spots.

“…perhaps even more critically, it coincides with the first Sunday of a new NFL season and the largest captive audience available for ads since the Olympics,” Politico reported.

Although the day had been honored in past presidential campaigns with a day free from campaigning, this year saw a particular effort to keep the day politics-free through a petition drive led by the mother of a 9/11 victim.

“Instead of running campaign ads and posting ‘tweets,’ I ask each of them, and other candidates running for office, to observe a ‘political moment of silence’ for the day, pledging instead to dedicate time on 9/11 to helping others, and engaging in private moments of reflection and prayer, in the spirit of national unity and remembrance, and in observance of the federally recognized September 11 National Day of Service and Remembrance,” wrote Alice Hoagland, mother of Mark Bingham, who was killed in the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pa.

Trump, in his recollections of the attacks on New York City 15 years ago, recalled viewing the horrific sight of the the World Trade Center from his Trump Tower apartment.

“Many people jumped and I witnessed it, I watched that. I have a view — a view in my apartment that was specifically aimed at the World Trade Center,” Trump said during a rally in Columbus, Ohio.

“And I watched those people jump and I watched the second plane hit … I saw the second plane hit the building and I said, ‘Wow that’s unbelievable,’” Trump said. (For more from the author of “Trump Takes off From Campaign Trail to Honor 9/11 Victims” please click HERE)

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A Candidate’s Death Could Delay or Eliminate the Presidential Election

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The presidential election could be delayed or scrapped altogether if conspiracy theories become predictive and a candidate dies or drops out before Nov. 8. The perhaps equally startling alternative, if there’s enough time: Small groups of people hand-picking a replacement pursuant to obscure party rules.

The scenarios have been seriously considered by few outside of the legal community and likely are too morbid for polite discussion in politically mixed company. But prominent law professors have pondered the effects and possible ways to address a late-date vacancy.

“There’s nothing in the Constitution which requires a popular election for the electors serving in the Electoral College,” says John Nagle, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, meaning the body that officially elects presidents could convene without the general public voting.

“It’s up to each state legislature to decide how they want to choose the state’s electors,” Nagle says. “It may be a situation in which the fact that we have an Electoral College, rather than direct voting for presidential candidates, may prove to be helpful.”

Both major parties do have rules for presidential ticket replacements, however, and Congress has the power to change the election date under Article II of the Constitution, which allows federal lawmakers to set dates for the selection of presidential electors and when those electors will vote. (Read more from “A Candidate’s Death Could Delay or Eliminate the Presidential Election” HERE)

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Catholic Hospital System to Provide Contraceptives in Walgreens Partnership

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A Catholic hospital system has confirmed that it will provide contraceptives as part of its partnership with Walgreens, in violation of the American Catholic bishops’ directives. SSM Health describes itself as “a Catholic, not-for-profit health system,” and in its mission statement says that through its work, “we reveal the healing presence of God.”

Nevertheless, on August 25, SSM Health announced it would provide clinics in 26 Walgreens locations in the St. Louis, Missouri, area, and maintain their provision of contraceptives. A spokesperson for SSM Health told The Stream that “SSM Health continues to offer the same services that were previously available at Walgreens Healthcare Clinics” — services that have included selling and giving prescriptions for contraceptives. Walgreens’ national website notes that the chain sells condoms and a wide variety of birth control products.

A SSM Health press release likewise claimed thir new clinics would provide all previously offered services, though it did not mention providing contraceptives. The day after the partnership became official, a SSM Health spokesperson told The Associated Press (AP) the Walgreens clinics

will provide 30-day refills for contraceptive pills previously prescribed by a physician — the same policy carried by the clinics previously run in-house by Walgreens. A website for the clinics shows a long list of services, everything from vaccinations and wellness checkups to treatment for illness and injury, but it makes no reference to birth control.

The Catholic Bishops’ directive states that “Catholic health institutions may not promote or condone contraceptive practices but should provide, for married couples and the medical staff who counsel them, instruction both about the Church’s teaching on responsible parenthood and in methods of natural family planning.”

The ACLU Wants Answers

Before the partnership was formally announced, the ACLU had written Walgreens’ Chief Medical Officer. The liberal group — which has long pressured Catholic health institutions to provide contraceptives, abortifacients and abortions against the bishops’ health directives — asked how SSM-run clinics would provide care and treatment for women seeking birth control and how clinic employees would treat LGBT patients and customers. A spokesperson for the ACLU declined The Stream’s request for comment.

Through its spokesperson’s statement to The Stream, SSM Health addressed the ACLU’s concerns about treatment of LGBT customers. “SSM Health is proud to treat every patient with dignity and respect. This commitment to inclusivity, justice and equality defines who we are as a Mission-and values-driven organization. In fact, we have been recognized as a Leader in LGBT Healthcare Equality by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.”

SSM received the award in 2014. According to a press release the company issued at the time,

Facilities awarded this title meet key criteria, including patient and employee non-discrimination policies that specifically mention sexual orientation and gender identity, a guarantee of equal visitation for same-sex partners and parents, and LGBT health education for key staff members.

Despite the provision of morally problematic products, the ACLU and the groups that signed its letter said they still want to meet with Walgreens and SSM. A Walgreens spokesperson told AP that the ACLU’s letter included attempted to address some “services that are not applicable to a retail health care clinic setting, regardless of the provider.” (For more from the author of “Catholic Hospital System to Provide Contraceptives in Walgreens Partnership” please click HERE)

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15 Conspiracy Theories for Why Hillary’s September Schedule … Is Blank

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The folks over at The Last Refuge blog noticed something peculiar the other day: According to her schedule, Hillary Clinton has no campaign events on the calendar between now and the first presidential debate September 26 at Hofstra University. See for yourself.

If you check the website under “Hillary Clinton’s Events” you find this list for September:

Hillary-Schedule-Without-Hillary-

However, when you put in Hillary Clinton’s name in the filter of people who will actually be at those events, you get this:

Hillary-Schedule

Now, since Hillary Clinton has never struck anyone as the “Freebird, Go With The Wind, Schedules are for Repressed Spirits” type, we have to wonder what she’s up to … or not up to, as the case may be.

Naturally, given the illness rumors swirling around Hillary, which The Stream debated a few weeks back, it’s tempting to explain her absence from the campaign trail as evidence her health is too fragile for the rigors of a presidential contest. However, as both CNN and MSNBC have explained, questioning the potential commander-in-chief’s health and fitness is “sexist.”

So let’s consider some other possibilities.

15 Possible Reasons Hillary has Cleared Her September Schedule

15. Absence Makes the Voter Grow Fonder: Traditionally, Hillary Clinton polls better when nobody actually sees or listens to her. In other words, “generic Democratic candidate” does better than living-breathing-sounds-like-the-adults-in-Peanuts Hillary.

14. Running Out the Clock: Politico reported on this strategy last week. The idea is to simply ignore the email and Clinton Foundation scandals and see “a shrinking calendar as her friend.” That’s one reason you’re more likely to find Colin Kaepernick at a policeman’s ball than Hillary Clinton at a press conference.

13. The Known Commodity: Nothing Hillary can say or do will change people’s opinions of her, so why spend the steamy last weeks of summer huffing and puffing around the country?

12. It’s All About Trump Anyway: Either America buys a ticket for the roller coaster and buckles up, or it says “No Way, Jose” and ducks into the safety of the familiar ol’ Hillary-go-round.

11. It’s Her Job By Rights: Hillary’s been busting her buns to become president since her graduation speech at Wellesley. Nearly half a century of sweat and she’s supposed to compete head-to-head with a guy who suddenly wants the gig because he’s bored sitting in a fake TV boardroom?

10. Going Old School: Hillary’s returning to the days when it was thought unseemly for a presidential candidate to actually campaign for themselves.

9. Campaign Fundraising: She needs to raise hundreds of millions of dollars so she can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to convince Americans she’ll be more wise with their money than Trump. Besides that, hanging with Cher and Justin Timberlake is way more fun than mingling with the little people.

8. Double Downward Dog: Rebuilding all those yoga routines her people deleted from her server is no easy task.

7. Waiting for Assange: Hillary doesn’t want to be anywhere near a camera when the next WikiLeaks stash drops.

6. The Worker Deserves Her Wages: Normally, Hillary bags up to $250,000 a speech, and now she’s just supposed to keep doing it for free?!

5. Supergirl on CW: Who has time for campaigning when you’ve got the new fall TV season to tend to? Or perhaps she’s weighing replacing Thomas Gibson on Criminal Minds.

4. The Globalist Fix: Hillary doesn’t want to bother going through the motions. After all, her 2016 election was guaranteed on June 5, 2008 during a secret Bilderberg meeting with Obama in Northern Virginia. Sure, it’s crazy, but not much crazier than saying a video nobody saw inspired people thousands of miles away to carry out a planned, coordinated attack on our Benghazi consulate on what happened to be the anniversary of 9/11. And far less crazy than thinking a non-secured unclassified server could secure classified secrets.

3. Babysitter: Somebody has to look after the grandkids while Chelsea does the real family business of raising millions for the Clinton Foundation. It’s not like she’s going to hire Anthony Wiener to do it. Which gets to …

2. A Friend in Need: Pal Huma Abedin needs her right now more than the campaign trail does.

And… the number 1 one reason why Clinton may be taking a break:

1. Donald Trump — The Clubber Lange of Debaters: You’re not going to beat him unless you lock yourself away with Apollo Creed and regain the “Eye of the Tiger.” (Yes, I did a Rocky marathon while my wife was away last week.)

All fun and fanciful analysis aside, there could be a much simpler reason Hillary Clinton has no campaign events scheduled between now and the first debate September 26. The polling is so fluid, the election map so upended, the old rules so out the window, her able campaign strategists can’t know where her time would be best served more than a couple of days in advance.

And with polls showing a noticeable drop for Hillary Clinton in recent days, the day-to-day chess match with the Trump campaign will be growing even more crucial. So have no fear. Hillary likely will be coming soon to a town near you … assuming you live in a swing state. (For more from the author of “15 Conspiracy Theories for Why Hillary’s September Schedule … Is Blank” please click HERE)

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Hacking of Election Data Raises Concerns for States Without Voter ID

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Hacking incidents at voter registration systems in Arizona and Illinois could demonstrate the need for stronger voter identification laws and the flaw with pushing for online voting and registration, experts said.

“We can’t afford this vulnerability in our election systems,” Mark Meckler, president of Citizens for Self-Governance and a former internet technology lawyer, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.

“We know it can disrupt the integrity of an election,” Meckler said. “There are so many states with no voter ID laws, that hacking into voter registration is a danger.”

The FBI is investigating the hacking of 200,000 voter records in Illinois and a hacking that forced Arizona to take its statewide voter registration system offline.

Illinois officials told news agencies that no information was changed. The Arizona hacking was perpetrated by Russian actors, according to news reports—although investigators have not said whether they believed it to be the work of Moscow or a private criminal enterprise.

As of June, 31 states and the District of Columbia allowed voter registration online, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A total of 34 states had some form of voter ID laws in place. However, some states only request that voters present ID, rather than require it.

“It’s not just foreign hackers, but domestic hackers as well,” Meckler said. “All of us are vulnerable to hacking. No matter how good we get at preventing hacking, the hackers will always get better.”

The Obama administration is taking the threat seriously, but believes Americans should not lose confidence in the system, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said.

“People can have a lot of confidence in the election system in part because it’s not centralized,” Earnest told reporters during Tuesday’s press briefing, adding:

Elections are administered and conducted by state and local authorities, which means you have a patchwork of systems across the country that maintain the records of elections. Sometimes the consequences for that kind of that very system means that it’s hard to make reforms across the board. That also makes it harder to hack the system.

As The Daily Signal previously reported, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson last week had a conference call with election officials from across the country in which they discussed the possible protection of state election systems as “critical infrastructure.”

“The response from DHS is a pretty good indication of how seriously we take this,” Earnest told reporters. “There is an active discussion on the president’s national security team of designating election administration systems in the United States as critical infrastructure. If so, that would qualify those systems for enhanced protections and resources from the federal government.”

Election experts—including Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation—agree it’s highly improbable a national election could be hacked, because of the decentralized system.

However, von Spakovsky contends that a targeted hacking of certain states has the potential to shift an election.

“If it’s an organized effort, and someone hacks into a system and falsely registers bogus voters, you could hire a crew of people to vote multiple times under different names,” von Spakovsky told The Daily Signal. “That’s a problem for states with no voter ID laws. There is no way to prevent that.”

This should be a further lesson to states and localities to avoid online voter registration and especially online voting, which could be particularly vulnerable to hackers, he said.

Von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission, noted that the Republican Party of Utah “stupidly” allowed online voting for its presidential primary in March. That resulted in numerous problems, primarily with voters accessing the system.

Voting machines are not on a network, thus any tampering would have to take place with the individual machine using an available device that allows someone to reset the voting machine, then vote more than once.

Conversely, voter registration information typically is on a network at either the state or local level—making it available for hackers. If citizens can register to vote online, the information would become even more vulnerable, von Spakovsky said.

“Online voter registration would give hackers another point to access information online,” he said. (For more from the author of “Hacking of Election Data Raises Concerns for States Without Voter ID” please click HERE)

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Russia’s Military Exercises Fuel Fears of Continued Aggression

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As the late summer weather begins to cool, Russian military exercises have kept the tensions hot in Ukraine and across Eastern Europe.

Periodic flare-ups in the ongoing war in Ukraine’s embattled Donbas region this summer have renewed fears of a full-on Russian invasion and spurred an unprecedented post-Cold War redeployment of NATO military forces toward the alliance’s eastern flank to deter further Russian aggression in the region.

The latest headache for Kyiv and NATO: Russian military exercises scheduled for Eastern Europe and the Black Sea region in September in addition to Russian snap military exercises launched Aug. 25 in military districts near Ukraine and the Baltic countries.

“If there is an interest in Moscow in stability and predictability, then these exercises are not the way to go,” NATO Deputy Secretary-General Alexander Vershbow said Monday.

Russia has staged about a dozen snap military exercises in the past two years, while NATO member countries have not held any since the end of the Cold War, according to news reports.

In September, Russia has plans for a large-scale strategic military exercise called Kavkaz-2016. The exercise, which is an annual event, will include units deployed near the borders of Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan—including two Russian military districts in the Southern and Northern Caucasus, the Russian Black Sea Fleet (headquartered in occupied Crimea), and the Caspian Flotilla.

It is not immediately clear the exact size of this year’s exercise, but last year it comprised 95,000 troops, 7,000 vehicles, and 150 aircraft, according to a report by IHS Markit, a U.K.-based intelligence and analysis firm.

“It is important to assess our capabilities for protecting national interests in the southwestern strategic direction amid the uneasy international military and political situation,” Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said in January while commenting on plans for Kavkaz-2016, according to the Russian news agency RIA Novosti.

Some military experts say the combination of snap military drills with the planned Kavkaz-2016 exercise have the hallmarks of Russian military maneuvers that served as smoke screens for the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the hybrid warfare invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014.

Yet, others argue Russia’s strategic military objectives have more to do with diplomatic leverage than military outcomes.

Alex Kokcharov, IHS Markit’s principal analyst for Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, said the Kremlin is probably maneuvering to destabilize the post-revolution government in Kyiv, and consequently gain leverage for negotiating sanctions relief at the G20 summit to be held in Hangzhou, China, from Sept. 4 to 5.

“War is a continuation of policy,” Kokcharov told The Daily Signal. “And the Kremlin’s policy is to keep Ukraine sufficiently destabilized to stall the implementation of its reform agenda and economic recovery, and thus to engineer a fall of the current pro-Western government in Kiev.”

Fighting Seasons

A combined force of pro-Russian separatists and Russian regulars has been fighting a limited war against Ukraine’s military in the southeastern Donbas region of the country since spring 2014.

One year ago, the war’s intensity dropped precipitously as both sides to the conflict renewed their commitment to the terms of the ineffectual second cease-fire, called Minsk II.

In theory, the war in Ukraine was supposed to end in September 2015. But it didn’t.

On Tuesday, the Ukrainian military announced that during the previous 24 hours combined Russian-separatist forces had attacked Ukrainian positions with more than 690 mortars and 250 artillery shells, including a Grad rocket attack near the southern port city of Mariupol.

One Ukrainian soldier was killed, Ukrainian military spokesman Col. Andriy Lysenko told reporters Tuesday in Kyiv.

Attacks on Ukrainian forces have spiked several times this summer, most notably around the time of the NATO summit in Warsaw (during which NATO members proclaimed their support for Ukraine), and after the Aug. 10 skirmish on the border of Russian-occupied Crimea and Ukraine.

The Crimean border incident was serious enough to prompt Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to place Ukraine’s military on its “highest level of alert,” and for Western media outlets to momentarily divert their attention back to the only ongoing land war in Europe.

In an Aug. 24 interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Poroshenko compared Russia’s support for separatists in eastern Ukraine with the Russian bombing campaign on Aleppo, Syria.

Poroshenko claimed Russia’s overall objective was to “destabilize the global security situation” and for Ukraine to be “part of the Russian empire.”

Status Quo

The war’s escalations this summer have not resulted so far in any significant change in territory or military offensives. The war in Ukraine remains locked in a static artillery back-and-forth fought from within trenches and the artillery-blasted ruins of towns scattered along the front lines.

And domestic troubles inside Ukraine, such as the July 20 car bomb assassination of a journalist in downtown Kyiv, also highlight the steep road ahead for Ukraine’s ongoing transition to a democratic society free of the vestiges of communism and the follow-on decades of corrupt oligarchic thug rule.

The next potential inflection point for the Ukraine war is September’s G20 summit in China. Russian President Vladimir Putin will likely use the sidelines of the summit to discuss the Ukraine crisis with other world leaders and press for the lifting of sanctions put on Russia for its 2014 Crimean land grab.

“Russia certainly has the military capability to invade Ukraine but the benefits of grabbing new land in Ukraine would be much smaller than the costs, both direct, and indirect, such as potential new economic sanctions,” Kokcharov said.

He added:

I still continue to hold the view that Putin aims to use intimidation to raise the stakes in the diplomatic game in order to push for negotiations on Donbas settlement that excludes Ukrainian government from the negotiating table, by branding them illegitimate and terrorists.

(For more from the author of “Russia’s Military Exercises Fuel Fears of Continued Aggression” please click HERE)

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After Double-Digit Win, Establishment McCain Will Face Establishment Democrat in November

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John McCain, R-Ariz. (F, 34%) fended off a primary challenge from Kelli Ward in the Arizona Senate Republican primary Tuesday night, leaving Grand Canyon state conservatives with a lose-lose situation going into November.

Multiple outlets called the race just after 8:30 p.m. local time, with initial returns showing McCain at a 20-point margin over Ward with a final breakdown of 55-35 percent of the vote.

Ward, a 47-year-old osteopathic physician and former state legislator, ran a hardline, anti-establishment campaign that tried to tap into the populist wave precipitated by the rise of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. However, her fiery rhetoric and supposed Tea Party street creds failed to pass the muster necessary to obtain key endorsements from national conservative groups like Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund.

Ward told Conservative Review in an interview earlier this year that she believed in many of the same “populist conservative values” as Donald Trump, hitting the incumbent senator on his record on the Armed Services Committee and his previous actions on immigration.

“[McCain] basically failed us [on immigration]. He lied; He said he wanted to build a [border] fence and then he ran right to the gang of eight amnesty bill, and the comprehensive immigration reform that we all know is code for amnesty,” she said in the interview. “So that on the ground here in Arizona is very, very important.”

“Stop holding hearings,” she added later, “Stop holding town halls, stop writing letters and actually do something for the veterans who served our country so honorably.”

In recent days, Ward even went after McCain’s age, saying that the 80-year-old establishment Republican could die on the job, if re-elected. “I’m a doctor. The life expectancy of the American male is not 86. It’s less,” she said in an interview with Politico.

According to a report at Politico Monday morning, McCain was already preparing for a narrow win, saying: “It’s not so much I think it’s close. I just don’t think you should heighten expectations … The one thing you never want to do in politics is heighten expectations. You always want to lowball it. That’s just the best way to handle it. Plan for the worst and hope for the best.”

Much like the case of Paul Nehlen’s failed campaign against Speaker Paul Ryan (F-53%) in Wisconsin, riding Donald Trump’s coattails did not translate into victory for a Republican primary challenger. Voters didn’t buy it and the establishment won.

Now, McCain is looking ahead to what is sure be the toughest general election fight of his political career against Arizona Rep. Anne Kirkpatrick, (F-13%) who is bringing the full force of the national Democratic Party, and will have to do so with almost no momentum from his own primary, in a state where he has a longstanding favorability problem, going back to a when he ranked as the least popular senator in the country in 2014, according to Public Policy Polling.

In November, Barry Goldwater’s senate seat will either go to an establishment Republican with an atrocious voting record across the board or an establishment Democrat who consistently votes along party lines.

For conservatives, Tuesday night’s results in Arizona present a no-win situation. (For more from the author of “After Double-Digit Win, Establishment McCain Will Face Establishment Democrat in November” please click HERE)

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Marco Rubio Crushes Opponents in Florida GOP Primary

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Incumbent Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. (C, 77%) claimed victory in Tuesday night’s Florida Republican primary for U.S. Senate, crushing challengers Carlos Beruff, Ernie Rivera, and Dwight Young.

The Orlando Sentinel called the race for Rubio with just over half of all precincts reporting. Rubio claimed upwards of 70 percent of the vote.

After his unsuccessful bid for the Republican presidential nomination, Rubio initially insisted he would not seek reelection to the United States Senate and, come January, he would be a “private citizen.”

But as a cluttered primary field battled each other without a clear frontrunner emerging, Republican party officials, including GOP nominee for president Donald Trump, began to push for Rubio to enter the race and clear the field.

When it became clear Rubio was set to enter the race, Rep. David Jolly (F, 29%) dropped out to focus on his congressional seat in Florida’s 13th District.

Rubio announced his change of heart and candidacy in June, claiming the stakes were too high for him to sit out.

“Control of the Senate may very well come down to the race in Florida,” he said. “That means the future of the Supreme Court will be determined by the Florida Senate seat. It means the future of the disastrous Iran nuclear deal will be determined by the Florida Senate seat. It means the direction of our country’s fiscal and economic policies will be determined by this Senate seat. The stakes for our nation could not be higher.”

After Rubio’s announcement, Freedom Caucus member Rep. Ron DeSantis (A, 90%) also ended his senate candidacy to seek reelection in Florida’s 6th District.

Fresh off his presidential campaign, Rubio entered the senate primary with a massive fundraising advantage, spending nearly $50 million. His next closest opponent, businessman Carlos Beruff, spent approximately $8 million during his campaign.

Rubio will face Democratic nominee Patrick Murphy in November. (For more from the author of “Marco Rubio Crushes Opponents in Florida GOP Primary” please click HERE)

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As Obama Promised, 10,000 Syrian Refugees Have Been Admitted to the US

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Surprise, surprise: The State Department announced Monday that the Obama administration is not only going to meet President Obama’s goal of 10,000 Syrian refugees before day’s end, but that the actual number by the end of the year may actually be closer to 12,000, according to Joel Gehrke of the Washington Examiner.

“We will meet the 10,000 figure today, and I would fully expect that you will see additional Syrian refugees admitted into the United States between now and the end of the fiscal year,” said State Department spokesman John Kirby on Monday.

Kirby told reporters he “couldn’t predict” how many more refugees would be coming into the United States, but that the influx “would be roughly on the same pace that we have achieved over the course of the late spring and summer, which has been about 2,000 per month.”

Furthermore, according to CNS News, it is likely that fewer than 50 of the incoming refugees will come from Syria’s Christian population, which has experienced an internationally-recognized genocide at the hand of the Islamic State.

As Conservative Review noted in April, this milestone for the president’s unconstitutional refugee program was achieved thanks in large part to the “surge operation” processing center in Amman, Jordan, which allowed the administration to process thousands of applications every single month — meaning that the majority of the 10,000 were processed in the last few months alone.

This, naturally, has been happening in direct contradiction to the 18- to 24-month vetting process that the American people were promised when the crisis became major international news last year. If you like your national security and public order, you can keep it, right?

This points to one of the biggest problems with Obama’s refugee program — namely that it predicates itself on abuse of statute by treating people who aren’t persecuted religious or ethnic minorities as such (like the administration has also done with Central America), at the detriment to victims who have actually been targeted for their beliefs and/or ethnicity. While Christians made up about 10 percent of pre-war Syria, they’ve made up less than one half of 1 percent of the Obama administration’s admissions.

According to data from the administration’s illegal center in in Amman, just 47 of the 9,902 admitted to the U.S. before Monday were Christians. Members of other faiths include 14 displaced Yazidis (also genocide victims), four Jehovah’s Witnesses, and five listed as “other.”

Aside from the sweeping security concerns posed by bringing in migrants from a war-torn region with a known threat of infiltration — and the fact that it is virtually impossible to screen anyone coming out of the camps specifically for jihadist sympathies — this is simply a program that the American people never voted for and that President Obama has gone well outside of his constitutional authority to enforce. But even though the program has hit its first major benchmark, it isn’t too late to stop it going forward.

Congress currently has the opportunity to stop this by the end of September, when House Speaker Paul Ryan’s failure to bring the budget process back to regular order will once again necessitate a continuing resolution. In effect, the legislative branch will then be able to prohibit the State Department from operating the program.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely, given that it’s a difficult election year. And while stalwart conservatives will be willing to go to bat against this refugee program, most Republicans are going to try to hide from anything that might even remotely resemble controversy until after election day in November. (For more from the author of “As Obama Promised, 10,000 Syrian Refugees Have Been Admitted to the US” please click HERE)

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EX-CLINTON STAFFER: Hillary Very Ill; Sleeping up to 18 Hours a Day; Health Records Will NEVER Be Released

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The Clinton 2016 campaign machine consists of around 1,000 people.

The pace and expectations are unforgiving. A single mistake can get you booted in a nanosecond. According to a report at TruePundit, one well-placed staff who worked with Clinton on a daily basis made just such an error and came forward to reveal what’s really going on in the campaign:

Only a small group of people running her campaign know the specifics of Hillary’s health issues. But she is suffering from something. She sleeps approximately 18 hours a day. And some days, she sleeps more.

I’m serious. This is why no one sees her.

The campaign will never release her medical files to the public. In contrast, they feel if the opposition continues to hammer the issue, it will create a backlash of sympathy…

…That press conference everyone is waiting for? It’s been 270 days since she gave a press conference or 280 days. Whatever it is. Hillary will not be giving any press conferences before the election.

Why? She doesn’t have to, according to campaign handlers. Her poll numbers have not suffered from not talking to the press but more importantly, Hillary acknowledges that the media has become more of a wild card amid all her scandals and campaign staffers agree it is highly unlikely she could field questions competently without giving Trump fodder to boost his campaign. Think of Clinton in her orange pants suit making wipe-the-server jokes…

It would therefore appear that the Democrats have nominated a very sickly woman who won’t speak to the press for fear of putting her foot in her mouth. Not to mention a person who is as crooked as a corkscrew.

But that’s the Democrat Party for you, ain’t it? (For more from the author of “EX-CLINTON STAFFER: Hillary Very Ill; Sleeping up to 18 Hours a Day; Health Records Will NEVER Be Released” please click HERE)

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