Iran's Humiliation Of Barack Obama Is Now Complete

 

By Sean Davis

This was no friendly maritime assist by Iran. It was a coordinated humiliation of Barack Obama by a regime that has embarrassed the president at every turn.

Ten American military personnel were arrested and detained by Iran on Tuesday, and President Barack Obama said not a word about it during his final State of the Union address on Tuesday evening.

His administration swore up and down that Iran was just doing a solid for our sailors and Marines, whose boats, we are told, had apparently broken down. Obama's spokesman said the capture and detention of American servicemen and servicewomen were exactly why we had to lift sanctions on Iran and bless its enrichment of uranium. His surrogates whispered to media allies that rather than provoking the Iranians to attack the U.S., Obama's nuclear deal really made it possible for the U.S. to free its captured personnel who never should have been in Iranian custody in the first place.

The Obama administration gave us its word that Iran had no "hostile intent when it captured ten Americans, forced their surrender at gunpoint, and then demanded an American apology for the whole affair.

And then Iran released these photos of the nine men and one woman who were arrested at sea by the Iranians.

The Iranian humiliation of Barack Obama is now complete. Operation Whatever-The-Farsi-Word-Is-For-BOHICA was a success. This was no friendly maritime assist from an American ally. It was a coordinated public relations coup from a violent regime that wished to humiliate the very president who in just days will bless the transfer of tens of billions of dollars to the terrorists in charge of Iran's government.

The Obama administration told us it was just two friendly countries helping each other with a broken boat. The Obama administration told us there was no "hostile intent." The Obama administration told us no apology was demanded.

None of it was true. Our military personnel were captured, forced to surrender on their knees, and photographed. Their images were then broadcast to the world  on Wednesday morning by the Iranian regime, a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The American woman who was captured was forced to submit to Islamic law and don a hijab. State-run Iranian media announced that the whole affair was meant to be a "lesson" to "troublemakers" in the U.S. Congress.

And the presidential administration of Barack Obama went right along with the whole charade.
The Iranians have this man pegged. They know he's so desperate for a deal, any deal, to bless Iran's enrichment of uranium and transfer billions to its terrorist-funding government, that he will say and do anything to make sure it happens. Iran knows how desperately this man craves a deal. He will stop at nothing to make sure it happens.

Iran knows this. So how does Iran respond? By declaring "Death to America." By conducting forbidden tests of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles. By capturing American military personnel, holding them at gunpoint, forcing them onto their knees, blindfolding them, and parading their visages all over TV for all the world to see.

Iran does this because Iran knows that at this point in his presidency, a nuclear deal is far more important to Barack Obama than anything else. So Iran will inflict one last humiliation upon the man before extracting $100 billion from him four days from now.

It wasn't enough to make him bow down. Iran wanted Obama on his knees. Iran wanted him and the country he governs humiliated before a global audience.

Unfortunately, Iran got exactly what it wanted. The Iranian humiliation of Barack Obama is now complete.

Photo is a direct result of the endless fecklessness and capitulation of an incompetent president who sees American weakness as a feature and American strength as a bug.

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Provocation in the Gulf: Iran tests American resolve

Union Leader Editorial

As President Barack Obama delivered his final State of the Union Address Tuesday night, 10 members of the U.S. Navy were being held by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

Iran seized two U.S. Navy boats, after they allegedly broke down and drifted into Iranian territorial waters.

Obama declined to mention them, or four other Americans being held by Iran.

The U.S. sailors were released the next day, and the Obama administration apologized for the intrusion.

Obama did congratulate himself for the shaky Iran deal.

"As we speak, Iran has rolled back its nuclear program, shipped out its uranium stockpile, and the world has avoided another war," Obama boasted.

Except Iranian missile tests have already shown the deal is worthless.

The latest provocation undercut a bizarre bit of chest-thumping in the middle of Obama's otherwise flat speech.

"The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It's not even close," Obama said.

But such power is useless in the hands of a President unwilling or unable to wield it properly.

Obama excused more aggression from a rogue nation that shouldn't get the benefit of the doubt. Iran pulled the same stunt in 2007, capturing a British naval vessel in international waters, and holding its crew for 13 days.

Iran's provocative actions tested the Obama administration's resolve. The test has come back negative.

http://www.unionleader.com/Provocation-in-the-Gulf-Iran-tests-American-resolve#sthash.wceWH9Af.dpuf

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The Humiliation
By Mark Steyn

There's no point pretending the illegal seizure and release of America's sailors is anything other a huge propaganda victory for Iran - and a humiliation for the United States. Insofar as there was a strategic calculation behind Obama's outreach to the mullahs, it was that the nuclear deal and the lifting of sanctions would incentivize the Islamic Republic to start behaving like any other house-trained member of the community of nations. In other words, they'd stop pulling this stuff.

As it was, Joe Biden and John Kerry could not resist bragging that the swift resolution of this situation was testament to the new hunky-dory Washington-Teheran relationship.

Vice-President Biden:
They released them, like ordinary nations would do. That's the way nations should deal with one another. That's why it's important to have channels open.

Secretary Kerry:
I'm appreciative for the quick and appropriate response of the Iranian authorities... and I think we can all imagine how a similar situation might have played out three or four years ago.

We don't have to imagine how a similar situation might have played out, you botoxicated buffoon, because it's played out before, with mind-numbing regularity. This time round they seized ten US sailors. Nine years ago they seized 15 Royal Navy sailors and Royal Marines. One of the Brits was of the female persuasion. Here's what I wrote in 2007:

The token gal was dressed up as an Islamic woman...

Does that sound familiar? Why, golly, here we are in 2016, and this time round the token US gal was also made to wear a hijab.

The Royal Navy guys were put on camera and interviewed about what great hosts the Iranians are - even though forcing your captives to participate in a photo-op is, as I wrote, "a breach of the increasingly one-way Geneva Conventions".

Does that also sound familiar? Well, whaddaya know? This week the Iranians broke the same Geneva Conventions with the same impunity. Why? Well, again from that 2007 column:

Power is only as great as the perception of power. The Iranians understand that they can't beat America or Britain in tank battles or air strikes so they choose other battlefields on which to hit them. That's why the behaviour of the captives gives great cause for concern: There's no point training guys to be tough fighting men of the Royal Marines when you're in a bloody little scrap in Sierra Leone (as they were a couple of years ago) if you allow them to crumple on TV in front of the entire world.
That goes for the US Navy, too. All day long Iranian TV has been broadcasting video of one of their captives, in apparent breach of the US military's code of apologizing, very generously:

"It was a mistake that was our fault and we apologize for our mistake," said the U.S sailor, who was identified by Iran's Press TV as the commander... "The Iranian behavior was fantastic while we were here. We thank you very much for your hospitality and your assistance."

I wonder what other videos Iran took. With the British hostages, I recall they mocked one of the lads because he reminded them of Mister Bean. I'm not sure that's specifically mentioned in the Geneva Conventions, but I reiterate my point: The ayatollahs can't - yet - beat our tanks and planes, so they pick battlefields where they can win, very easily. We should know that by now, and train our guys to act accordingly.

Let's go back even further - to an earlier hijacking of naval personnel. Here's me in The Daily Telegraph, back in 2004:

Six Royal Marines and two Royal Navy sailors were intercepted in Iraqi waters, forcibly escorted to Iranian waters, arrested, paraded on TV blindfold, obliged to confess wrongs and recite apologies, and eventually released.

But don't worry about any of that Geneva Conventions stuff:

If pictures had been unearthed of some over-zealous Guantanamo guards doing to our plucky young West Midlands jihadi what the Iranian government did on TV to those Royal Marines, two thirds of Fleet Street (including many of my Spectator and Telegraph colleagues) would be frothing non-stop.
Instead, they seem to have accepted the British spin that there's been no breach of the Geneva Convention because the Marines and sailors weren't official prisoners of war, just freelance kidnap victims you can have what sport you wish with.

Which is marginally less insane than the Biden-Kerry line that illegally seizing foreign sailors, forcing them to their knees and to submit to the dress codes of someone else's religion, using them for propaganda videos and making them issue public apologies testifies to how the new Iranian-American friendship is just peachy and going gangbusters.

In fact, the Iranians are doing exactly what they've always done. They got their nuclear deal, and it's business as usual. The only difference is that, a decade ago, they did it to America's allies but they never quite dared to do it to America itself.

Now they do.

http://www.steynonline.com/7420/the-humiliation

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Remember the Pueblo
By Scott Johnson

Questions abound in the case of the two ships and ten sailors captured by the IRGC in the Persian Gulf earlier this week. We can be grateful that the sailors have been released by Iran, but the groveling exhibited by the Obama administration is a matter of profound national embarrassment, which seems to be exactly what the Iranians intended. The administration, of course, prefers to present the matter as a triumph of diplomacy. 'Twas a famous victory. Recalling the great Jeremiah Denton, Seth Lipsky writes:

It's too soon to say how our sailors were treated when they were in the hands of the Iranians who seized them and held them overnight. It's not too soon to say that it is nauseating to watch our state secretary, John Kerry, himself a former sailor, gushing thanks to the Iranian regime, over to which he is preparing to turn more than $100 billion as part the Iran deal. The spin the administration is putting on this incident is one of the most cynical exercises in memory.

Yesterday Secretary Carter asserted that the boats "stray[ed] accidentally into Iranian waters due to a navigation error." An IBD editorial raises questions about the purported navigation error, but this is far from the only unanswered question.

IBD quotes Christopher Harmer, retired operations commander for the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Harmer told CNN there was "no reason for a small vessel to be out that far and especially without escorting ships around it," and "the Navy has to explain why you have small ships transiting 300 miles of open ocean."

IBD notes that Iran claims the IRGC seized the boats' GPS gear and that it revealed U.S. espionage: "As reported in Defense News, House Armed Services Committee member Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a Marine who served in the Iraq War, claimed there was no way the Iran military 'didn't reverse engineer, or look at and copy everything that they possibly could' of the two commandeered boats' high-tech equipment."

Video released by the Iranians shows the sailors surrendering abjectly on their knees with their hands over their heads. In another video one of the sailors meekly extends his apology for their transgression. "It was a mistake, that was our fault, and we apologize for our mistake," said the sailor, who was identified by the Iranian interviewer as "commander" of the crew detained Tuesday.

Seth Lipsky's reservation to the contrary notwithstanding, Aaron MacLean takes up this aspect of the incident in the Washington Free Beacon column "Standard nautical malpractice."

He observes:

The bad news isn't only at the top. There are so many unanswered questions about this incident, not least regarding the uncomfortable fact of one American sailor's on-camera apology to his captors. When I was being trained as a Marine officer in Quantico in 2008, a similar incident had just occurred wherein Iran had taken 15 British naval personnel prisoner for almost two weeks. We studied the affair and I remember having the Armed Forces Code of Conduct, which we had to memorize, stressed by my instructors-who took a dim view of the performance of the Brits.

The Code includes passages like "I will never surrender of my own free will." Those boats were sovereign American territory. Were the sailors ordered to give them up? The Code also includes the injunction to "evade answering further questions" beyond the usual name-and-rank stuff, and to "make no oral or written statements disloyal" to the serviceman's country.

Regardless of the applicability or terms of the Code of Conduct, the spirit of resistance was conspicuous by its absence. What happened? As Seth writes, it's too soon to answer the question, but it's certainly not to soon to ask. We must insist that question be answered lest the question be suppressed in the service of the Obama administration's continuing abasement of the United States.
I think back to the capture of the USS Pueblo. The case of the Pueblo seems to me to provide a useful contrast with the events to which we have just been witness. Because my memory of the events is so vague, I've taken the following accounts from the Wikipedia entries on the Pueblo and on LLoyd Bucher.

I've also revisited Steve Hayward's account of the events in the first volume of his Age of Reagan books.

While monitoring North Korea on January 23, 1968, the Pueblo came under attack by North Korean naval forces. North Koreans boarded the ship and took her to the port at Wonsan. For the next 11 months, Pueblo Commander Bucher and his crew were held as POWs by the North Koreans. Initially, they were treated relatively well, with good food and living accommodations. However, their treatment turned harsher when the North Koreans realized that crewmen were secretly giving them the finger, which they explained as being a "Hawaiian good luck sign," in staged propaganda photos they had been taking of the crew. From then on they were regularly beaten by the North Koreans.



[North Korean Propaganda Photograph of prisoners of USS Pueblo. Photo and explanation from the Time Magazine article that blew the Hawaiian Good Luck Sign secret. The soldiers were flipping the middle finger, as way to covertly protest their captivity in North Korea, and the propaganda on their treatment and guilt. The North Koreans for months photographed them without knowing the real meaning of flipping the middle finger, while the sailors explained that the sign meant good luck in Hawaii.]

North Korean Propaganda Photograph of prisoners of USS Pueblo. Photo and explanation from the Time Magazine article that blew the Hawaiian Good Luck Sign secret. The soldiers were flipping the middle finger, as way to covertly protest their captivity in North Korea, and the propaganda on their treatment and guilt. The North Koreans for months photographed them without knowing the real meaning of flipping the middle finger, while the sailors explained that the sign meant good luck in Hawaii.

Bucher was psychologically tortured such as being put through a mock firing squad in an effort to make him confess. Eventually the Koreans threatened to execute his men in front of him, and Bucher relented and agreed to "confess to his and the crew's transgression." Bucher wrote the confession and the North Koreans verified the meaning of what he wrote, but failed to catch the pun when he said "We paean the North Korean state. We paean their great leader Kim Il Sung."

Following an apology, a written admission by the United States that the Pueblo had been spying, and an assurance that the United States would not spy in the future, the North Korean government decided to release the 82 remaining crew members. On December 23,1968, the crew was taken by buses to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) border with South Korea and ordered to walk south across the "Bridge of No Return." Exactly 11 months after being taken prisoner, Bucher led the long line of crewmen, followed at the end by the Executive Officer, Lieutenant Ed Murphy, the last man across the bridge. The United States then retracted the ransom admission, apology, and assurance.

Following his release, Bucher was subjected to a court of inquiry by the Navy for having given up the Pueblo without a fight (as Steve Hayward notes at pages 181-182 of the first of his Age of Reagan books.) A court martial was recommended. Secretary of the Navy John Chafee then intervened on Bucher's behalf to foreclose action against him. Bucher seems to have followed orders not to start any international incidents. Bucher continued his Navy career until retirement in the rank of Commander. The Pueblo, incidentally, remains in the hands of North Korea.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/01/remember-the-pueblo.php

Don't Miss Seeing The New Martin Luther King Family Documentary

 

In the Hour of Chaos (2016) 1 of 2

Don't miss seeing and acquiring IN THE HOUR OF CHAOS from Block Starz Music Television: https://vimeo.com/blockstarztv

SYNOPSIS

Set against a backdrop of sociopolitical intrigue, racial and labor unrest stretching from late 19th to early 20th century America, BOOK 1 of IN THE HOUR OF CHAOS charts the King family patriarch's rise from an impoverished childhood in the violent backwoods of Georgia to a teenage runaway in the sinister rail-yards of Atlanta; as well as, his efforts to re-invent himself through faith, education and his courtship and eventual marriage to Alberta Williams.



IN THE HOUR OF CHAOS is the much anticipated sophomore effort from award-nominated writer/director Bayer Mack and executive producer Frances Presley Rice (makers of the critically-acclaimed 2014 documentary film OSCAR MICHEAUX: THE CZAR OF BLACK HOLLYWOOD), which documents the life and times of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr. (1899-1984) and the King family history.

Watch Trailer at:
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You may also watch Part 1 of IN THE HOUR OF CHAOS on Cambridge Community Television (CCTV)



Below is the CCTV schedule:

CCTV Channel 9 - Friday, January 15, 2016 - Midnight
CCTV Channel 96 - Friday, January 15, 2016 - 8:00 am
CCTV Channel 8 - Friday, January 15, 2016 - 11:15 am
CCTV Channel 9 - Saturday, January 16, 2016 - 11:00 am
CCTV Channel 8 - Saturday, January 16, 2016 - 6:00 pm
CCTV Channel 96 - Saturday, January 16, 2016 - 11:00 pm
CCTV Channel 9 - Monday, January 18, 2016 - Midnight
CCTV Channel 8 - Monday, January 18, 2016 - 10:15 am
CCTV Chanel 96 - Monday, January 18, 2016 - 5:15 pm

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Obama's Empty Chair

The State of the Union and the president's taste for the grand but futile gesture.

By Willilam McGurn



Photo: Getty Images

As Barack Obama puts the finishing touches on his final State of the Union address, a White House teaser reveals one of his planned props for the evening: "We leave one seat empty in the First Lady's State of the Union Guest Box for the victims of gun violence who no longer have a voice."

Blame Woodrow Wilson.

Until Wilson, presidents stretching back to Jefferson had been content to fulfill their constitutional requirement to inform Congress about the state of the union in writing. In 1913, alas, Wilson elected to deliver his assessment in person. Speechwriters of both parties (I served my time in the George W. Bush years) have been embellishing ever since.

The spectacle is made for President Obama. After all, this is the man who strode out on a stage of foam Greek columns when he accepted his party's nomination for the presidency. How appropriate that in his last State of the Union he now opts for the empty chair routine used to such derision by Clint Eastwood at the last Republican National Convention.

Then again, for Mr. Obama the maneuver has always been the message. From his 2008 campaign appearance before the Berlin Wall (where he declared himself "a fellow citizen of the world") to his decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize before he had in fact done anything, the stage has always upstaged the substance. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama's penchant for the beau geste carries a high price for Americans, not to mention other, less fortunate citizens of the world.

Start with foreign policy. Though Candidate Obama inveighed mightily against the U.S. intervention in Iraq, he also campaigned on the idea that Iraq had distracted us from winning "the necessary war" in Afghanistan. When he announced to the American people his own surge of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in December 2009, the cadets at West Point were drafted to serve as the dramatic backdrop.

Today we can see the same speech shows that more important to him than winning this war was the withdrawal date he tucked in the next sentence. Later his own defense secretary, Robert Gates, would record in his memoir how he came to the conclusion that his boss "doesn't believe in his own strategy, and doesn't consider the war to be his." Meanwhile, Americans in uniform would continue to die for this strategy.

Ditto for Iraq and Iran. In Iraq, the president inherited a victory thanks to the surge he'd opposed as a senator. His commanders recommended he leave some American forces to cement the victory, but Mr. Obama again was after what he would call "a historic moment in the life of our country"-his December 2011 announcement at Fort Bragg that the last U.S. troops in Iraq would be coming home. We are now reaping the harvest.

As for Iran, the president will no doubt remind us that he came to office seeking a nuclear-arms deal. Once again, the nitty-gritty would be less important than the opportunity to pretend something large had been accomplished. The result? Not even a year after it was announced, American hostages still rot in Iranian jail cells and Tehran is testing ballistic missiles.

The domestic side has also been decided by high theater. When Mr. Obama was first elected, such was his popularity (and the low standing of the GOP), he could have done almost anything. On cue he opted for what he called "the most sweeping economic recovery package in our history," an $800 billion stimulus that never did stimulate.

ObamaCare followed a year later. Notwithstanding lopsided Democratic majorities in both houses, Mr. Obama still had trouble getting his signature issue through. A more modest president might have found ways to address the problem-i.e., the millions of Americans who could not afford health insurance-without upending the entire market.

Not Mr. Obama. Naturally, he went for what his vice president so eloquently called "a big f-----g deal."

This has been the steady fare of the Obama years. Overseas his insistence on the grand gesture has led the president to pretend that the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan means we're no longer at war. This may be popular in the faculty lounge, but in the real world Islamic State beheads Americans, Afghanistan teeters on chaos and Iraqi cities such as Ramadi, liberated from al Qaeda in the original surge, now have to be re-liberated all over again from Islamic State.

At home the president's Big Ideas (unintended consequences be damned) have seen millions of citizens losing the health-care plans the president promised them they could keep, a record number of Americans giving up on work, and an anemic growth rate of 2%.

The gimmick Mr. Obama has now chosen for his final State of the Union, meant to highlight his end run around the Second Amendment, is fully consistent with this past. But seven years in, an empty chair in the first lady's box only reinforces images of an empty suit at the podium.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-empty-chair-1452556542

Defy America, pay no price

By Charles Krauthammer

 

Iran Supreme leader Ali Khamenei

If you're going to engage in a foreign policy capitulation, might as well do it when everyone is getting tanked and otherwise occupied. Say, around New Year's Eve.

Here's the story. In October, Iran test-fires a nuclear-capable ballistic missile in brazen violation of a Security Council resolution explicitly prohibiting such launches. President Obama does nothing. One month later, Iran does it again. The administration makes a few gestures at the U.N. Then nothing. Then finally, on Dec. 30, the White House announces a few sanctions.

They are weak, aimed mostly at individuals and designed essentially for show. Amazingly, even that proves too much. By 10 p.m. that night, the administration caves. The White House sends out an email saying that sanctions are off - and the Iranian president orders the military to expedite the missile program.

Is there any red line left? First, the Syrian chemical weapons. Then the administration insistence that there would be no nuclear deal unless Iran accounted for its past nuclear activities. (It didn't.) And unless Iran permitted inspection of its Parchin nuclear testing facility. (It was allowed self-inspection and declared itself clean.) And now, illegal ballistic missiles.

The premise of the nuclear deal was that it would constrain Iranian actions. It's had precisely the opposite effect. It has deterred us from offering even the mildest pushback to any Iranian violations lest Iran walk away and leave Obama legacy-less.

Just two weeks ago, Iran's Revolutionary Guards conducted live-fire exercises near the Strait of Hormuz. It gave nearby U.S. vessels exactly 23 seconds of warning. One rocket was launched 1,500 yards from the USS Harry S. Truman.

Obama's response? None.

The Gulf Arabs - rich, weak and, since FDR, dependent on America for security - are bewildered. They're still reeling from the nuclear deal, which Obama declared would be unaffected by Iranian misbehavior elsewhere. The result was to assure Tehran that it would pay no price for its aggression in Syria and Yemen, subversion in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and support for terrorism.

Obama seems not to understand that disconnecting the nuclear issue gave the mullahs license to hunt in the region. For the Saudis, however, it's not just blundering but betrayal. From the very beginning, they've seen Obama tilting toward Tehran as he fancies himself Nixon in China, turning Iran into a strategic partner in managing the Middle East.

This is even scarier because it is delusional. If anything, Obama's openhanded appeasement has encouraged Iran's regional adventurism and intense anti-Americanism.

The Saudis, sensing abandonment, are near panic. Hence the reckless execution of the firebrand Shiite insurrectionist, Sheik Nimr Baqr al-Nimr, that has brought the region to a boil. Iranians torched the Saudi Embassy. The Saudis led other Sunni states in breaking relations with Tehran.

The Saudis feel surrounded, and it's not paranoia. To their north, Iran dominates a Shiite crescent stretching from Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean. To the Saudi south, Iran has been arming Yemen's Houthi rebels since at least 2009. The fighting has spilled over the border into Saudi Arabia.

The danger is rising. For years, Iran has been supporting anti-regime agitation among Saudi Arabia's minority Shiites. The Persian Gulf is Iran's ultimate prize. The fall of the House of Saud would make Iran the undisputed regional hegemon and an emerging global power.

For the United States, that would be the greatest geopolitical setback since China fell to communism in 1949. Yet Obama seems oblivious. Worse, he appears inert in the face of the three great challenges to the post-Cold War American order. Iran is only the most glaring. China is challenging the status quo in the South China Sea, just last week landing its first aircraft on an artificial island hundreds of miles beyond the Chinese coast. We deny China's claim and declare these to be international waters, yet last month we meekly apologized when a B-52 overflew one of the islands. We said it was inadvertent.

The world sees and takes note. As it does our response to the other great U.S. adversary - Russia. What's happened to Obama's vaunted "isolation" of Russia for its annexation of Crimea and assault on the post-Cold War European settlement? Gone. Evaporated. John Kerry plays lapdog to Sergei Lavrov. Obama meets openly with Vladimir Putin in Turkey, then in Paris. And is now practically begging him to join our side in Syria.

There is no price for defying Pax Americana - not even trivial sanctions on Iranian missile-enablers. Our enemies know it. Our allies see it - and sense they're on their own, and may not survive.

Uh Oh: FBI's Hillary Probe Expands Again, Now Investigating Public Corruption, Sources Say

By Guy Benson

 

After lying mostly dormant for weeks amid intensive media focus on the Republican presidential race, Hillary Clinton's scandals have exploded back into the headlines over the past four days.

On Friday, the State Department released email that appeared to show then-Secretary Clinton instructing a colleague to strip an identifying heading -- which includes classification notices -- off of a sensitive memo and send it "nonsecure."

The episode may prove criminal mishandling of classified material, and at the very least underscores the Democratic frontrunner's reckless and cavalier approach to safeguarding national secrets. More than 1,300 emails that passed through Clinton's unsecure private email server contained classified information, including top secret intelligence.

With Clinton lamely and misleadingly defending herself on that front over the weekend, Fox News' Chief Intelligence Correspondent Catherine Herridge breaks this significant news today:

The FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of private email as secretary of state has expanded to look at whether the possible "intersection" of Clinton Foundation work and State Department business may have violated public corruption laws, three intelligence sources not authorized to speak on the record told Fox News.

This track is in addition to the focus on classified material found on Clinton's personal server. "The agents are investigating the possible intersection of Clinton Foundation donations, the dispensation of State Department contracts and whether regular processes were followed," one source said.

The development follows press reports over the past year about the potential overlap of State Department and Clinton Foundation work, and questions over whether donors benefited from their contacts inside the administration.

Three separate sources, who point to several indications of major escalation-- including the overlapping of two high-profile Clinton controversies:

Inside the FBI, pressure is growing to pursue the case. One intelligence source told Fox News that FBI agents would be "screaming" if a prosecution is not pursued because "many previous public corruption cases have been made and successfully prosecuted with much less evidence than what is emerging in this investigation."

The FBI is particularly on edge in the wake of how the case of former CIA Director David Petraeus was handled...In the Petraeus case, the exposure of classified information was assessed to be limited......It is unclear which of the two lines of inquiry was opened first by the FBI and whether they eventually will be combined and presented before a special grand jury.

One intelligence source said the public corruption angle dates back to at least April 2015. Fox News is told that about 100 special agents assigned to the investigations also were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements, with as many as 50 additional agents on "temporary duty assignment," or TDY.

The request to sign a new NDA could reflect that agents are handling the highly classified material in the emails, or serve as a reminder not to leak about the case, or both.

Separately, a former high-ranking State Department official emphasized to Fox News that Clinton's deliberate non-use of her government email address may be increasingly "significant." "It is virtually automatic when one comes on board at the State Department to be assigned an email address," the source said.

Much to unpack. At some point in the course of its probe, the FBI expanded its inquiry from simply examining possible large-scale and unlawful handling of classified material to also looking into a potential obstruction of justice element of Mrs. Clinton's dodgy arrangement.

Today's news suggests a third, very serious, prong to the investigation that may date back as far as last spring. If Herridge's sources are correct, federal agents are also scrutinizing whether Clinton's work as America's top diplomat was unethically influenced by her personal and financial interests vis-a-vis the Clinton Foundation -- which charity and former employees have described as a "slush fund  and something quite different from a bona fide charitable organization.

Various deep dives into the Clinton Foundation's books and history have turned up serious questions involving national security-compromising deals, pay-to-play access-peddling, cronyist favoritism, unseemly greed and unvetted foreign donations (in violation of signed transparency agreements and egregiously inaccurate tax filings.

Which brings us to the final bolded portion of the excerpt above.

One of the questions voters may have asked themselves throughout this email imbroglio is why Mrs. Clinton would go through the trouble and expense of setting up a rules-violating private server on which she intended to conduct all of her official business.

Why not just use the secure State Department system, as required?

Hillary's explanation is that she did so for "convenience," a ludicrous assertion on its face. Paying someone -- who has since pleaded the fifth by the way -- to install and maintain an entire separate email scheme is the opposite of convenient. Furthermore, her follow-up claim that the primary goal of the server was to allow her to only use a single mobile device has been completely shot to pieces.

Critics argue that Mrs. Clinton proactively sought to wield complete control over the contents of her emails in order to insulate herself politically and limit the probative potency of future investigations. With absolute control over her discrete server, Hillary and her team could unilaterally pick and choose which messages ever saw the light of day. They could also permanently delete anything they determined to be legally or politically problematic.

We already know that Hillary withheld or deleted a number of work-related emails, which she swore under penalty of perjury that she hadn't done. What else did she and her henchmen attempt to wipe ("like, with a cloth?") from the record? The FBI has reportedly managed to recover many of the files Team Clinton sought to destroy, which may help explain what prompted today's newly-revealed branch of the bureau's widening investigation.

As they sifted through tens of thousands of deleted emails, might the feds have uncovered additional evidence of Mrs. Clinton effectively selling access to the highest rung of US statecraft? Phil Kerpen advances the argument that if the whole purpose of Hillary's email set-up was to enable other underhanded dealings without the risk of oversight, the entire shady enterprise represents a single scandal:

The other attention-grabbing passage in Fox's exclusive report is the apparent confirmation that many agents and officials will be livid if the Obama Justice Department refuses to pursue an indictment in this case.

These sources say previous instances of official malfeasance have been successfully prosecuted with "much less evidence" than what has already been gathered in the Hillary probe.

If politics prevails, expect to see an avalanche of ugly leaks and recriminations from whistleblowers. Which would Democrats prefer: An indicted nominee, or endless questions and accusations about banana republic-style political fixing, under which their nominee was spared an indictment for transparently partisan reasons? Unpleasant options, both.

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2016/01/11/report-fbis-hillary-investigation-expands-again-now-probing-corruption-n2102799?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm&newsletterad=

News From The Trumpiverse

Commentary

By Frances Rice

The money quote from the below "Time" article:

"It's like this," says Casady, the Army vet. "We're going to go with this guy sink or swim, and we're not going to change our views. It doesn't matter. It's time for us to do a totally insane thing, because we've lost it all. The times demand it, because nothing else is working."

____________________

Donald Trump's Art of the Steal

By David Von Drehle


There is a reason most presidential candidates stump through diners and living rooms this time of year. They can't fill a bigger room.

And then there is Donald J. Trump.

On the second day of January, in the Gulf Coast town of Biloxi, Miss., at least 13,000 stood for hours in a stinging chill to pack an entire sports arena for Trump, and when that venue was full, the overflow spilled into a second megaspace nearby. Trump called it the biggest crowd in Mississippi political history, which is exactly what you'd expect him to say, and also entirely plausible.

A few days earlier, Trump had packed a convention hall in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Two days later, he filled the 8,000-seat Paul Tsongas Center in Lowell, Mass., with people who waited on line in subfreezing cold. The next night, after standing for two hours in single-digit temperatures, locals filled the equivalent of two high school gymnasia on the Vermont-New Hampshire border to catch Trump's revival show.

Given these crowds, the unprecedented Trump-driven television ratings for GOP debates and his unsinkable run at the top of the national polls-a streak of more than five months and counting-even the most mainstream Republicans are coming to grips with an idea they have resisted since last summer. This could be their nominee. And they are asking themselves, could they stop worrying and, perhaps, learn to love the Donald?

Leading Republicans unhappily find themselves deep in "probing" conversation, asking, "perhaps he wouldn't be so bad," says veteran strategist and lobbyist Ed Rogers. True, Trump is a wild card, a flamethrower, a man with no known party loyalties and no coherent political principles, a thrice-married casino mogul and reality-TV star, a narcissist and even a demagogue. On the other hand: Biloxi.

At a time when the crown princes of Republican politics can't mount so much as a two-car parade, Trump is drawing the biggest crowds by far. He has the largest social-media footprint-again, by far-and lodges the sharpest attacks on Hillary Clinton while attracting the greatest number of potential recruits to Republican ranks. As a result, Washington insiders from both parties are now calling around to GOP heavies, asking, "Do you know anybody on Trump's campaign? Who is on his foreign-policy team? I need to get to know them fast." Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, who entertained a discussion of Stop Trump strategies at a meeting late last year, now consults regularly with the front runner by phone. Even if the GOP could resist, should it? "He's got the mo, he's got the masses," says Rick Hohlt, a GOP strategist. "He's attracting a new class of voters." Efforts to stop him have failed miserably; meanwhile, Trump may be getting smarter as a candidate, adds Hohlt. "He knows when to push and when to back off."

The man is moving people, and politics does not get more basic than that. Trump is a bonfire in a field of damp kindling-an overcrowded field of governors and former governors and junior Senators still trying to strike a spark. His nearest rival, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, has traction in Iowa among the evangelical bloc and-in contrast to Trump-is a tried-and-true conservative. But with little more than half the support Trump boasts in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Cruz has a long way to go to show that he can move masses.

Cruz staffers, tellingly, have been studying a 1967 tome titled Suite 3505 as a playbook for their campaign. This F. Clifton White memoir, long out of print, tells the story of the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign. That was the last successful populist rebellion inside the Republican Party, propelling a rock-ribbed conservative past the Establishment insiders-just as Cruz hopes to do. But this triumph of intramural knife fighting proved a disaster at general-election time. Goldwater suffered one of the worst defeats in American political history. It's no wonder that GOP leaders are every bit as wary of Cruz as they are of Trump.

In short, the GOP has awakened less than a month from the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary to find itself in bed between a bombshell and a kamikaze. It's a sobering dawn for a political party that seemed, not long ago, just a tweak or two away from glory. Republicans dominate America's state legislatures and governors' mansions. They control both houses of Congress. So why is their electorate leaning toward the outstretched grip of such a man as Trump?

And could Trump be a sign of something bigger even than himself?

Traditional GOP power brokers have long since lost count of the indignities Trump has inflicted on their rites and rituals. Since entering the race in June with a fantastical promise to wall off America's southern border and send the bill to Mexico, Trump has shredded the political rule book, scattering the pieces from his private helicopter. Have mouth, will travel. Policies that would be preposterous coming from anyone else-like barring all Muslims from entering the country or hiking U.S. tariffs while somehow erasing trade barriers erected by other nations-sound magical to his supporters when served up by their hero. Outrages that would sink an ordinary candidate, like mocking a person who has a congenital disease or giving a pass to Vladimir Putin for the murder of Russian journalists, lifted Trump atop the polls and then helped keep him there. What Flubber was to physics, Trump is to politics: an antidote to gravity, cooked up by a quirky but prodigious amateur.

Other candidates work to relate their lives to the struggles of ordinary voters. Trump does the opposite, encouraging Americans to savor vicariously his billionaire's privilege of saying whatever he damn well pleases. "I love Donald Trump because he's so totally politically incorrect. He's gone after every group," says Greg Casady, 61, an Army veteran who joined an immense Trump rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa. "He's spending his own bucks-therefore he doesn't have to play the politically correct game. He says what we wish we could say but we can't afford to anymore."

Trump is an anomaly, but not the only one in this 2016 campaign. There is Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an avowed socialist who leads the early polls in the New Hampshire Democratic primary-despite the fact that he spent most of his career spurning the Democrats. Though not as shocking or aggressive as Trump, Sanders is no less the darling of a discontented army. He too draws large audiences-but unlike Trump, Sanders faces an even stronger opponent in former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Big Money, the supposed superpower of post-Citizens United politics, is a dud so far. Super-PAC bets by various billionaires have done nothing to fire up such candidates as former Florida governor Jeb Bush. Bush has filled screens in key states with millions of dollars in both positive and negative ads. The result: falling poll numbers. Touted as a front runner a year ago, Bush is mired in single digits and rang in the new year by announcing that he was scrapping a round of ads in favor of more ground troops in early-voting states.

Big Media too has been brought low. The collapse of Trump was predicted so often, so erroneously, in so many outlets that the spectacle was almost comic, like a soap opera that keeps killing off the same deathless character. Televised debates became seminars in media ethics, with candidates delivering stern lectures to their questioners, while offscreen, campaigns threatened to boycott networks and blacklist reporters.

What if all of these groundswells are part of the same tsunami? By coming to grips with Trump, Republicans might begin grasping the future of presidential politics, as the digital forces that have upended commerce and communications in recent years begin to shake the bedrock of civic life.

Disintermediation is a long word for a seemingly simple idea: dumping the middleman. It came into use a half-century ago to describe changes in the banking business. A generation later, the term described a key concept of the Internet age. In one field after another, the power of networked computing swept middlemen out of the picture. Ubiquitous retailers like RadioShack and Waldenbooks have either downsized or vanished as their customers go online to buy directly from manufacturers and warehousers. Netflix shutters the Blockbuster chain by mailing movies directly to viewers-then offers streaming, which cuts out the mailbox as well. Craigslist drains the advertising lifeblood from local newspapers, and local libraries reinvent themselves after the web puts the world in your pocket. It's a familiar story, one of the megatrends of our era.

Donald Trump is history's most disintermediated presidential front runner. He has sidestepped the traditional middlemen-party, press, pollsters and pooh-bahs-to sell his candidacy directly to voters, building on a relationship he has nurtured with the public from project to project across decades.

As far back as 1986, Trump began seeding this direct relationship with the public. That was the year he goaded New York City Mayor Ed Koch into handing over the disastrous renovation of the Wollman ice-skating rink in Central Park. The decline of New York was an old story by then, and the ice rink was a sorrow symbol. City bureaucrats had turned a routine rehab into a six-year slog with no end in sight. Trump took the reins, and the project took less than six months. He cut the ribbon on a beautifully finished rink, completed ahead of schedule and below budget, with live TV there to cover it.

He followed up with more self-styled rescue missions: the East Coast shuttle operations of dying Eastern Airlines, for example, and the ruined paradise of Atlantic City. Launched with fanfare (if often abandoned in silence), these efforts burnished Trump's image as a can-do, cut-the-crap businessman-even as he risked his fortune. This is part of the power of owning your image, free of the mediators. You can tell your own story, even if it is not entirely true. Trump's a fine businessman, with a keen eye for bargains and a knack for leverage. Where he is peerless is as a promoter; he is the Michelangelo of ballyhoo.

A masterstroke in 2004 vaulted him free of remaining middlemen; that's when Trump debuted his television show, The Apprentice. Tens of millions of Americans followed the cameras past the gatekeepers and into a direct relationship with the purse-lipped entrepreneur. That this intimacy is an illusion doesn't really matter; it has an undeniable power to create loyal followings for even the unlikeliest characters. From the Kardashians of Rodeo Drive to the Robertsons of Duck Dynasty, from the Cake Boss to Honey Boo Boo, the crafted characters of reality TV experience a different kind of stardom from the TV and movie idols of the past. Fans are encouraged to feel that they know these people, not as fictional characters but as flesh and blood.

Something similar goes on in every celebrity Twitter feed or Instagram account. Properly tended, the social network of skilled disintermediators can grow to encompass tens of millions of people, all sharing a joke or commiserating over a disappointment or comparing breakfasts with their famous "friend." The pop star Taylor Swift's nearly 70 million Twitter followers recently overheard her share a Christmas memory with her brother Austin and chuckled at a picture of her cute elf costume.

Peggy Lemke, 64, from Dows, Iowa, is one of many voters who see what is going on. "Trump is a reality-show phenomenon," she says. "His supporters treat this like American Idol. We treat everything like American Idol. I'm having a really hard time taking this seriously."

Disintermediation is not entirely new. In 1941, the radio personality W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel dealt Lyndon B. Johnson the only defeat of his consummate insider's career. Johnson had the credibility with middlemen, but O'Daniel had a direct connection to his listeners. Nearly 60 years later, the professional wrestler Jesse Ventura used his direct connection with an audience to win a three-way race for governor of Minnesota. But technology now gives the power of direct relationships to everyone, not just media stars; indeed, the line between being a media star and simply having a big Twitter following is blurring into nothingness. It's telling that Trump's rallies often feature appearances by a pair of women who go by the names Diamond and Silk, whose spirited endorsement of Trump on YouTube has been watched by nearly 100,000 people-as many as tune in to some cable news shows.

Trump tends his virtual community with care. Among the candidates, his 5.6 million Twitter followers are matched only by his counterpart at the top of the Democratic polls, Hillary Clinton. Trump has 5.2 million Facebook likes-three times as many as Cruz and 17 times as many as Bush. His 828,000 Instagram followers is nearly a third more than Clinton's 632,000. For many, if not all, of these individuals, their networked relationships with Trump feel closer and more genuine than the images of the candidate they see filtered through middlemen.

This can explain why Trump is unscathed by apparent gaffes and blunders that would kill an ordinary candidate. His followers feel that they already know him. When outraged middlemen wail in disgust on cable news programs and in op-ed columns, they only highlight their irrelevance to the Trumpiverse.

Indeed, the psychology of disintermediation adds another layer of protection to a figure like Trump. For members of an online network, the death of the middlemen is not some sad side effect of this tidal shift; it is a crusade. Early adopters of Netflix relished the fate of brick-and-mortar video stores, just as Trump voters rejoice in the idea of life without the "lamestream" media. Trump gets this: mocking abuse of his traveling press corps is a staple of his campaign speeches.

The fading power of middlemen is also visible in less garish manifestations than the Trump campaign. For example, voters used to judge candidates in part on their record of government service. Experience was a middleman, a sort of ticket puncher, that stood between the would-be President and the public. Not anymore. A stable of successful GOP governors-Rick Perry of Texas, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Scott Walker of Wisconsin-have dropped out, unable to understand the new calculus. As for the three current Senators on the trail-Cruz, Florida's Marco Rubio and Kentucky's Rand Paul-experience is the least of their selling points. All are first-term rookies known for defying party leaders, not for passing legislation. Rubio won office by challenging his party's official choice for the seat. Cruz glories in his reputation as the least popular Senator in the cloakroom: he doesn't need Washington's validation. In fact, it's the last thing he wants.

The three Senators-and their colleague Sanders in the other party-have used the Senate as a foil. What they accomplished as Senators, which is next to nothing, pales in their telling compared with what they refused to do. They did not sell out. They did not compromise. They did not break faith with their followers-a virtue that has replaced the ideal of service to a constituency. With disintermediation, the power to set the campaign agenda shifts from the middlemen to the online networks, and those networks, this year, are very angry. Here, again, Trump is far outrunning his rivals in seizing the momentum. Americans are unhappy about an economy that punishes workers, according to opinion polls and conversations with voters. They are tired of politicians who don't deliver on their promises. Trump's strongest backers are angry about illegal immigration. Cruz channels anger over Obamacare. Sanders mines anger from the opposite end of the spectrum, targeting "Wall Street" and "billionaires" to the seething satisfaction of the Democratic base.

These voters don't want someone to feel their pain; they want someone to mirror their mood. Woe to the candidate who can't growl on cue. Perhaps nothing has hurt the Bush campaign-whose money and endorsements, lavished by middlemen, have fizzled on the launchpad-more than Trump's observation that the former Florida governor is "low energy." Translation: he's not ticked off. Voter anger in this sour season is less a data point than table stakes.

At a late-December rally in Council Bluffs, Trump treated his audience to one of his trademark free-form speeches, which are like nothing in the modern campaign repertoire. He sampled alter egos from talk-radio host to insult comic to the fictional Gordon Gekko. ("I'm greedy," Trump bragged. "Now I'm going to be greedy for the United States.") When he wrapped up, Teresa Raus of nearby Neola, Iowa, waited another 30 minutes for Trump's autograph. Why? "I feel real confident that he can make America better. I believe him," she explained. And yes, she's angry. Other politicians "are liars," Raus continued. "They're all liars. I'm sick of politicians. If he's not running, then I'm not voting."

But if Trump voters are angry, that doesn't mean they're crazy. You meet more state representatives and business owners at his rallies than tinfoil-hat conspiracy buffs. In ways, they are a vanguard, catching sight of a new style of politics and deciding early to throw out the old rules. Their radical democracy helps account for Trump's uncanny resilience: the less he honors the conventions of politics, the more his supporters like him. They aren't buying what the political process is selling. They want to buy direct from the source. "It's like this," says Casady, the Army vet. "We're going to go with this guy sink or swim, and we're not going to change our views. It doesn't matter. It's time for us to do a totally insane thing, because we've lost it all. The times demand it, because nothing else is working."

Some powerful forces inside the GOP will continue to fight Trump to the bitter end. As strong and durable as his support appears to be, the number of Americans who tell pollsters they would not vote for Trump is bigger. Trump's intemperate remarks have alienated millions of Latino, Muslim and women voters. His rash pronouncements are the antithesis of the moderate approach that many citizens still value. His proposed religious test for foreigners who want to come to this country is as inconsistent with America's self-image as linoleum floors in a Trump hotel.

The problem is that the party is weak at the national level, deeply divided into hostile camps, while Trump has the strength of a technological epoch at his back. Finding a way to live with Trump might not be a choice for the GOP; those might be the terms of surrender that he dictates at the national convention in Cleveland in July. And in private, even top party officials occasionally admit it.

Unless Cruz can continue to rise through the primaries-aided by members of the congressional Freedom Caucus who share his maximal conservatism-or a candidate like Rubio manages to push aside all mainstream rivals to consolidate the anti-Trump vote, the pot-stirring plutocrat may well steamroll through winter into spring with the lion's share of the delegates. They won't stop Trump because they can't stop Trump.

In that case, party insiders may be forced to decide whether to pull every trick in the rule book to keep Trump from the nomination, with all the havoc that would ensue-including a very real chance that the party could split in two. Faced with that prospect, they may decide instead to swallow hard and follow Trump's glowing blond nimbus into battle this fall. "The pundits don't understand it," Marco Rubio told an audience at a recent campaign stop in New Hampshire. "They don't understand why in this election, why aren't the things that worked in the past working again? Why is it that the people with the most money, or the most endorsements, or the one that all the experts thought would be in first place-why aren't they winning?"

Donald Trump will be happy to tell them.


http://www.donaldjtrump.com/media/donald-trumps-art-of-the-steal

THE RULE OF FIVE - The One Rule To Follow

By Victor Young
Executive Producer

Entrepreneurs live by one rule. The rule is "BREAK ANY RULE AS NEEDED".

However, there is one rule that I highly recommend following at all times to measure your professional development. The RULE OF FIVE. This rule allows you to benchmark your professional development with others in your direct network or industry. Find a salon owner, realtor, fellow student or executive in your industry or field of study and rate their current success compared to yours.

They should have verifiable accomplishments that you would like to reach. They should also share moral, ethical and compliant characteristics that you agree with.

You will need two of these trailblazers to follow up the ladder of success. The goal will be to meet or exceed their performance within a predetermined timeframe.

Once you pass them up, they may become your bottom two and you will need to find a new top two for motivation and knowledge.

Next you should identify two up and coming individuals who turn to you for insight, but bring an innovative and fresh approach to your industry.

They will keep you on your toes and prevent you from becoming complacent.
Smart people without lots of money and resources often create processes and technology which allows them to compete with their larger competitors.

You will become a sounding board for the development of these processes and technology.
This could give you the opportunity for a strategic partnership or growth within your organization while providing them with the industry knowledge to develop their idea fast enough to get ahead of their competition.

Good luck in 2016 and make it a productive year by subscribing to The Daily Life Coach. Share it with your co-workers, friends and family. Stay tuned for episodes on The Daily Life Coach channel on Youtube and www.TheDailyLifeCoach.com