President Obama’s last week in office has brought with it a flood of breaking news. The biggest story, of course, is his commutation of Chelsea Manning’s 35 year prison sentence. My own impression is that his decision is designed as a cynical bit of legacy-building, with the added benefit of perhaps inducing Julian Assange to leave the Ecuadorian embassy. Although that prospect appears increasingly remote, it very well might have factored into his judgement. Overlooked in news coverage of the Manning commutation is the grant of clemency to Oscar Lopez Rivera, a leader of the Marxist-Leninist Puerto Rican terror group FALN. Like Bill Clinton’s pardon of previously released FALN terrorists, which was intertwined with his wife’s Senate bid in New York, this decision was politically-based. In this case, as a parting gift to violent socialists who still comprise a significant portion of the Democratic base and will populate future revolutions.

Another early Christmas present for the hard left  comes in the form of the President’s revocation of the federal government’s Wet Foot, Dry Foot policy. It should be recalled that the policy itself was implemented prior to a pivotal election year, when former President Clinton was attempting to empty Guantanamo Bay of Cuban refugees. In order to prevent a repeat of Mariel-which sunk a young Bill Clinton’s chances of being reelected governor of Arkansas-he struck a deal with Fidel Castro which limited the number of Cubans who would be allowed to enter the United States. As Humberto Fontova astutely points out, one of the unreported effects of this adjustment will be an increase in the number of dependents flowing into the United States with a commensurate decrease in the amount of skilled professionals immigrating.

Even as the Obama administration’s days draw to a close, it continues to imperil the health and safety of ordinary American citizens, as ICE and CBP effectively serve as a shuttle service for unidentified illegal aliens under the pretext of being reunited with family. How many innocent people will meet the same fate of Sarah Root because of this willful indifference to the lives of Americans? Even  as people living throughout the United States are placed in imminent danger through the reckless ideology of the outgoing administration, the tide of refugees from Asia, Africa, and broken nations like Haiti shows no signs of ebbing. The conditions Barack Obama and his lawless bureaucracy have established bear all the hallmarks of the disaster we’ve seen unfold across Europe over the past 2 years.

Unfortunately, there are also ominous hints being dropped by President-Elect Donald Trump, who has responded favorably to proposals to salvage his predecessor’s patently unconstitutional administrative amnesty. In addition to going back on one of the central planks of the platform upon which he was elected-and deflating any enthusiasm felt by his staunchest supporters-this maneuver would significantly enhance the prestige and power of the very worst people, e.g. Paul Ryan, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham. The idea that one of the first domestic policy decisions will be to embrace the instincts of open borders fetishists and neoconservatives is unconscionable. If Trump had campaigned on a promise to continue the disastrous immigration policies of the current administration, he never would have made it past New Hampshire. This is an idea which needs to be categorically rejected by any right-thinking immigration patriot.

In order not to black pill the majority of our audience, we should leave you with a bit of good news from abroad. It seems that Norway has finally shown some of the Scandinavian backbone which Sweden surrendered several centuries ago. While the Norwegians haven’t ejected every jihadist apologist and Muslim fifth columnist from their nation, 2016 did see a record number of deportations. Although too many of these deportees were Europeans, it’s significant that there is a growing movement within that country to assert its sovereignty in the face of a Muslim population that has grown to nearly 150,000.

Perhaps it’s not too late to save Europe.

We learned of Nat Hentoff’s death last night from his son, who was the first to tweet this sad news to the rest of the world. You can read his full obituary in the New York Times, but I would suggest combing the Internet to read his words for yourself. Even though he was a product of a pre-Internet age, Hentoff deftly utilized the tools of the late 20th and 21st century to spread his message of individual liberty and the rule of law. A perfect example being this Web video from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, an organization committed to preserving free expression on college and university campuses across the country.

A fierce opponent of the past 3 occupants of the Oval Office, as well as Executive overreach in general, a man who refused to defend anti-white racism masquerading as diversity,  an idiosyncratic liberal turned libertarian-who defended the human rights of the unborn-and a lifelong advocate of the Bill of Rights, Nat Hentoff was a truly remarkable public figure. Like fellow civil liberties advocate Wendy Kaminer, he was a scathing critic of the synthetic liberals at the ACLU, who run what is essentially a left wing affinity group under the guise of defenders of the Constitution.

He was a unique man whose absence will be missed by all who cared about the fundamental freedoms enshrined in this nation’s cornerstone document. Even as progressives across the Western world silence our voices in order to placate the rainbow coalition, Hentoff bravely spoke out against the attempt to replace the 1st Amendment with sharia. He was a man from a different era, but one whose life should be a lesson for anyone hoping to preserve American freedoms into the 21st century. He will be missed.

A pick that threatens all the work done by Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch.

It seems like racial arsonist and world-class grifter Al Sharpton has stumbled upon the truth of the matter. The left’s opposition to Jeff Sessions is not driven by a genuine fear of how he’ll approach civil rights issues-almost all of these objections are based upon falsehoods or distortions, and the primary accusers have suspect characters, to say the least-but is based upon the realization that he’ll attend to the rank corruption which has permeated the Justice Department over the past 8 years.

Senator Sessions is not a racist, and has never been a racist. The man now being slandered by cultural Marxists and those who traffic in racial calumnies is the same person who desegregated schools and put the KKK out of business in his home state. What’s occurring now is the quintessential Borking, which makes sense when you realize that Jeff Sessions was the first Republican judicial nominee to be Borked, even before Judge Bork himself. The only problem is that this tactic no longer works, as the election of Donald Trump to the presidency illustrates.

The public can no longer be intimidated into accepting bien pensant opinion or swallowing blatant lies about patriotic, normal American citizens. They realize implicitly that the stated reasons for these attacks are untruths. They’ve watched as the Obama administration has used its remaining time to force small, peaceful towns to acquiesce to the whims of Muslims and hire non-citizens to enforce American law. They’ve seen a Department of Justice willing to collude with the husband of a presidential candidate, a former President himself, under criminal investigation. They’ve watched hundreds die in the United States and Mexico as a result of this White House’s gun trafficking to Mexican drug cartels.

Leftists should be afraid, but not for the reasons they’ve outlined in hysterical cable news jeremiads over the past week. They should be fearful because Jeff Sessions is the person entrusted to drain the swamp that the Justice Department has become under President Obama.

After over a year of campaigning, countless campaign ads, and several groan-inducing paeans to Hillary Clinton by post-punk rock bands, we’ve arrived at the moment of truth. The day when all of the bickering over polling averages will be rendered moot and we will see who America, in its infinite wisdom, has selected to lead her for the next 4 years. Although we’ve highlighted the perspective of conscientious non-voters in the past, we’re well aware that anywhere from 57 to 64% of eligible voters will participate in Election Day 2016, to say nothing of the millions of voters who might have already decided who wins. If current polling is to be trusted, then it will have proven this City Lab article from earlier this year exploring the Democrats demographic advantages correct. Even if it’s not, the problems facing the Republican Party in the future won’t decrease in the years ahead. 

Although predicting the future is a notoriously tricky business, it’s hard to imagine an ethical Clinton administration. Perhaps because the last one left so much to be desired in the way of scrupulous adherence to the law. It’s worth noting that the late Janet Reno-whose chief accomplishment as head of the Department of Justice was the deliberate incineration of over 70 American citizens-attained her position as Attorney General at the behest of Hillary Clinton, whose brother was a colleague while working for the Dade County Public Defender’s office. Something to ponder as you head off to cast your ballot later today.

Just to give you a rough summary of what I thought of the first debate, here are a few rather lengthy observations:

Donald Trump dominated the first 20 minutes to half hour of the encounter. Focusing primarily upon trade, the one public policy he’s immersed himself in-and has a mastery of-played to his strong suit. It also highlighted the stunning hypocrisy at the core of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Trumpeting her opposition to CAFTA merely served to emphasize her political opportunism, as this stance was crafted expressly with the purpose of securing her left flank in any future Democratic contest. Supporting one of President Bush’s signature foreign policies would have made her path to victory in 2008 that much more difficult. We should recall that Barack Obama was not on her political radar at the time.

Likewise, her opposition to TTP-a pact she enthusiastically promoted as Secretary of State-was born of political opportunism, not genuine conviction. Even without the surprisingly successful Sanders campaign, endorsing a plan which was almost universally opposed by organized labor-the backbone of the Democratic Party even in its current corporatized, Clintonian shell-could have proved fatal to her presidential ambitions. Her labored attempt at triangulation, combined with Trump’s implicit appeal to disenchanted supporters of her primary opponent, was unquestionably the highlight of the debate from his perspective.

Unfortunately, the discipline and preparation Trump exhibited during the beginning of this debate was squandered over the course of the next hour. We needn’t rehash the explicitly stacked nature of this event, which might as well have been hosted by a Democratic partisan and has been explored in detail throughout the conservative blogosphere over the past 2 days. We all knew beforehand-as Trump should have known-that Lester Holt is not an impartial referee so much as an active participant in the media’s universal quest to install Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office-even as they attempt to delegitimize this self-evident fact.

Even so, Trump seemed at a loss as to how to combat this two-headed attack during the actual debate. Lester Holt’s contrived attempt at connecting the irrelevant Birther issue to the parlous state of American race relations is a perfect example of how Trump failed to seize the initiative. The correct response to this tendentious line of attack was to refuse to play a hand with the stacked deck given to him by the moderator. He should have pointed out this is simply a Democratic talking point crafted with the purpose of arresting his growing popularity among black voters, which has absolutely no relevance to any domestic policy even tangentially connected to race.

While Trump deserves credit for highlighting the grim body count piling up in the city where President Obama made his political bones, as well as the threat posed to African-Americans by our government’s lax immigration policies, he gave more substance to this inane discussion than was necessary, reliving his own involvement in a completely irrelevant issue which has no purpose other than its use as a cudgel against the 1 candidate despised by the fourth estate. Trump could have used this opportunity to simultaneously highlight the bleak prospects of African-American males-who have been shortchanged by our first black President-and the insularity of our wretched journalistic establishment.

By contrast, Hillary Clinton had very few unforced errors. While she didn’t do anything to change her public image, i.e. that of a viscerally unlikable, overly scripted, opportunistic career politician, she didn’t step on any land mines either. She came across as a technocratic, seemingly competent liberal Democrat. She managed to persuasively advance the argument that Donald Trump, the anti-thesis of Bushism and country club Republican virtues, was simply a reincarnation of George W. Bush on tax policy. And that she, a woman desperately trying to attach herself to the Bush family, is somehow an agent of change. Trump rightly pointed out the economic stagnation of the past 8 years, which has nothing to do with the Bush clan, but dropped the ball by not explicitly pointing out that the Bush and Clinton families are part of the same circle of elites which have run this country into the ground over the past 3 decades.

More importantly from Clinton’s perspective, she avoided casting herself as the the candidate of social justice fanatics, despite pandering to them relentlessly throughout this campaign-going so far as to write an open letter to Ella Dawson, otherwise known as herpes girl. The only departures from this appeal to normality were an aside where she accused our country of engaging in systemic racism and her Jezebelesque complaint that Donald Trump likes attractive women. While I’m sure the latter played well with her base of feminist, baby boomer female voters, it also highlighted the fact that she’s alienated from the concerns of anyone who doesn’t belong to the coalition of the fringes, particularly working class white men.

The Alicia Machado exchange is illuminating for other reasons, including its almost perfect distillation of the central flaw in the reasoning of open borders propagandists. Namely, that we need the millions of people who have been imported from the third world over the past half-century. We are told repeatedly that these immigrants or illegal aliens are essential to our functioning as a republic, yet the men and women who serve as poster children for this policy are without exception terrible people. Or, at the very least, not vital cogs in the machinery of American democracy.

Although Machado might not have been involved in an assassination plot, she is a confirmed philanderess and egregious hypocrite. However, because she intends on casting a ballot for the Democratic presidential candidate, like millions of other immigrants from Latin America, she is by definition an asset to this country. While I can understand why leftists and Democrats would believe that importing men and women who’ll increase the size of the state is good for this country, I fail to see how this is a good thing from an objective, patriotic standpoint. Trump could have challenged the assumption that what’s good for Democrats is good for the country, but conspicuously failed to do so. He could have also pointed out that the woman across the stage had spent decades slandering the reputation of women who had been victims of sexual assault at the hands of her husband.

The cumulative impact of these lost opportunities is hard to quantify, but it can’t be dismissed out of hand. For those of you looking for positives to take away from this debate, Donald Trump’s closing remarks emphasized a key point which could become part of a winning message if articulated in a coherent manner to the American people. The United States should not be the policeman of the world. Even if we were to concede the good intentions of those advocating continuous intervention in countries across the globe, the fact remains that this posture is counterproductive to America’s strategic interests. Our government’s sclerotic invade the world, invite the world foreign policy has been a catastrophic failure and needs to be abandoned.

That should be Donald Trump’s message going forward. Ignore media-generated talking points about personal tax returns and obese former beauty queens. Focus on the central issues of our time and communicate your ideas to the American public. We need to be debating the future of our country, not the trivialities that dominated the Hofstra debate.

While Pravda on the Potomac and its competitors in the DNC talking points echo chamber devote countless hours to contrived moral posturing over the latest Muslim makes good story, it’s worth remembering what implacably corrupt people Hillary and the future First Husband are.

Thankfully, Black Pigeon Speaks is here to remind us. Everyone who needs a refresher course on how diabolical the Clintons are needs to watch this video. It’s simply a coming attraction of things to come, should Hillary and her enablers in the media get their wish. This is a couple which views corruption as merely a public relations problem, not a parasite eating away at the fundamental properties of our republic.

Rather than sit through the inevitable anticlimax which is Sir Hillary’s acceptance speech, why not watch the documentary which crystallizes just how nakedly corrupt the would-be First Family is? BTW, isn’t it funny how none of the critics of this ground-breaking documentary and book have taken up its author’s challenge to debate the merits of his well-documented dissection of Clinton family corruption? I wonder why that is.

It seems as if the alternative media has rallied around the flag, which in Hillary’s case was probably purchased by benefactors like Goldman Sachs and the Gulf Arab slave state of Qatar. After all, who can resist GIRL POWER, even if it’s marshaled on behalf of someone who’s spent much of her career destroying the reputations of Bill Clinton’s comfort women? To get a sense of the cognitive dissonance at work, it’s worth reading this week’s Village Voice, which all but admits its preferred candidate is an inveterate liar, albeit one who can answer that 3 A.M. call!

By the way, does anyone else recognize the absurdity of Clinton backers running a variation on an ad which was universally panned-from a race which she lost-in order to lambast the purported shortcomings of Donald Trump? If there are any calls being made to a Clinton White House after midnight, I’m almost certain they will be made at the behest of sleazy foreign donors who want a return on their investment. That is indeed the purpose of the single greatest legal money laundering scheme on the planet, one which would make even El Chapo green with envy.

With all her seemingly disqualifying character traits and extensive history of semi-criminal actions, not to mention, thralldom to corporate interests, you would expect sincere leftists to express some reservations about her candidacy. You would think that even those who believe her to be the best choice in a binary election have enough integrity to admit that she is a dreadful choice, one who cares not so much about being a progressive as the acquisition and retention of power. The problem is that that is what progressivism, at its core, has become. The Faustian bargain the left has made in this election involves sacrificing its purported principles, including its increasingly hypocritical rhetoric about the underclass, in order to achieve its immediate political aims, e.g. importing millions of immigrants from the third world, cauterizing the 1st and 2nd Amendment to the Constitution, and crushing any remaining opposition to the cultural domination of social progressivism.

Fortunately, there are a handful of leftists who have some degree of integrity, including Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, who was one of only public figures on the left to publicly admit that her Democratic opponent should have been indicted. Her honesty about the deficiencies of Hillary Clinton the candidate-as well as the human being-stand in stark contrast to the pathetic fealty liberal media outlets and talking heads have shown towards a woman who, were she a Republican, would probably be sitting in a federal penitentiary instead of seeking the most powerful office in the world.

Another voice remarkable for its clarity is incendiary cartoonist Ted Rall, who’s pointed out 3 of the biggest reasons why Hillary Clinton does not belong in the Oval Office. Although there are many, many more-including a capacity for deception that is boundless and a wholly repellent personality-the 3 enumerated by Rall should be of particular interest to liberals, who tout their intellectual superiority and routinely hector insufficiently feminist public actors. The fact that most are seemingly unconcerned with these very problematic issues makes one question their purported convictions.

Finally, Doug Henwood has published a book, My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets The Presidency, which should be required reading for any leftist tempted to ignore the consequences of their alliance with the Clinton machine. It begins, appropriately enough, with an epigram by Brad DeLong describing Hillary’s most relevant Executive experience, i.e. her disastrous oversight of health care reform during the first year of the Clinton presidency. Although he has also been brought to heel, this is his description of HRC’s signature issue back then:

My two cents’ worth–and I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994–is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn’t smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly. 

“Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch–the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president. 

To quote another former FLOTUS, Just Say No.

I’m simply going to capitulate to your prodigious dissimulation skills.

It turns out that Loretta Lynch is also an unusually good liar. The chief prerequisite for holding office in a future Democratic administration.

h/t Vlad Tepes.

Update: Jill Stein, Green Party standard-bearer, drops a pipe bomb. 

The plot thickens. 

A Clinton supporter explains what’s wrong with this decision. 

A less than enthusiastic appraisal of Hillary’s problems by a liberal columnist in D.C. 

Spic ‘n’ Span. 

He said, she said. 

Relevant.

One of the most remarkable admissions during this press conference was that Hillary Clinton was not being punished because she is Hillary Clinton. The final point of Patrick Howley’s analysis is worth committing to memory and bringing up the next time someone starts rhapsodizing about the equal application of the law we have in the United States. 

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy’s reaction to today’s events is worth reading. 

I’m loathe to link to Red State, but this seems like a pretty accurate summation of what occurred a few hours ago. 

In unrelated news. 

A foretaste of what another Clinton presidency will look like. 

 Justice is not blind, evidently. 

Dissenting voices.

14 damning revelations from the Comey presser. 

What just happened, in black and white. The scale of Hillary’s non-negligence is staggering. 

Read Comey’s statement in full at the FBI’s website.

It looks like Judge Mukasey’s instincts were wrong. Watch Director James Comey’s press conference as it happens. Apparently, it’s good to have low friends in high places.