'Bergler' steals Clinton's credibility

[Sandy] Berger, you may recall, was President Clinton's national security adviser. Now Hillary Clinton is trying to sock it to you by employing him as her campaign foreign-policy adviser, treating Berger like a respectable foreign-policy expert - exactly what he ceased to be when he was a common criminal heisting classified documents from the National Archives in 2003. While preparing the former President Clinton for his 9/11 Commission testimony (as well as preparing his own), Berger stole top-secret national-defense documents from the National Archives, stuffing them in a briefcase and in his clothing. He destroyed documents, hid others - some at a nearby construction site. He later lied, claiming it was all a mistake, blaming the removal and destruction on "sloppiness" - "an honest mistake," he said, with former presidential backing.

Berger, for the record, wasn't stealing old lunch menus for his scrapbook. While we don't know everything he took (and in some cases destroyed), we know he did take drafts of what people familiar with it have described as a scathing "after-action report," done after the intelligence community failed to foil the millennium plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, which was instead left for an alert customs agent to discover. The report was a brutal internal review of our state of unreadiness - our vulnerability to domestic terrorism. A House government reform committee investigation revealed that Berger had unsupervised access to noninventoried original documents on terrorism for which there were no duplicates.

So perhaps Hillary Clinton is holding Berger close as a "thank you": Thanks for making sure that some hard-hitting internal analysis of the Clinton administration's poor counterterrorism performance won't become breaking news on the way back to the White House. Or maybe Berger simply knows too much of the kind of information that could hurt an aspiring Clinton running on executive experience. That's surely another reason to keep him on board. Perhaps candidate Clinton feels the need to prove that she is up for a challenge. How, after all, can she continue using the Democrats' top talking point - the claim that they are the antidote to a "culture of corruption" in Washington? If Berger's top-secret rampage isn't corrupt, I don't know what corrupt is.

Source

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Brookes News Update

Rightwing columnists stuff up labour market reform debate: A leftwing academic screws up on labour markets - and what do Janet Albrechtsen, Imre Salusinszky and Andrew Bolt do? They attack the man and in doing so reveal that they are every bit as ignorant as he is. With allies like these it's no wonder that the free market gets such a bad press down here
Hillary, Soros, Alinsky, and Rush Limbaugh: The Hillary-Soros smear machine is in top gear. Completely devoid of anything resembling morality Soros' media Brown Shirts are waging war against American democracy. These are the same thugs that that ruthlessly attacked General Petraeus' character and military standing. They are the same thugs who are trying to destroy Rush Limbaugh. And will try to destroy anyone who gets in the way Hillary and Soros' ambitions for a castrated socialist America
Islamic Economics: What Does It Mean?: Islamic economics increasingly has become force to contend with due to burgeoning portfolios of oil exporters and multiplying Islamic financial instruments (such as interest-free mortgages and bonds. But the dirty little secret is that there is no such thing as 'Islamic economics' - it's a fiction, a complete crock
Why and how the Democrats are pushing America toward socialism: Who would ever have imagined that a Democratic presidential candidate could be someone who was a willing and admiring assistant to a self-proclaimed Stalinist and Communist Party member, lawyer. We are speaking of Hillary Clinton
Congress should reject the Armenian Genocide resolution: In this case, the moral high ground should give way to considerations of realpolitik. Congress should reject the resolution at this time. It is not in America's interest to offend our Turkish allies. What's more, why is it that the Dems never seem to take the moral high ground unless it damages the US in some way?

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ELSEWHERE

Stupid Europeans attack China for selling them stuff cheaply: "The European Union launched a concerted attack on China's expanding trade empire yesterday, accusing it of building up surpluses through unfair practices. In a briefing that will significantly ratchet up protectionist tensions, the EU ambassador to China said requests for the issue to be addressed had met with no response. "Apparently China's trade surplus has no limit and we do not see efficient measures," the ambassador, Serge Abou, said. "These facts are considered with a certain bitterness in our leadership" .... nerves have been frayed by an atmosphere of economic uncertainty set against Beijing's currency policies, its $1.4 trillion reserves, much of which is held in US treasuries, and the risks created by such huge imbalances. The EU's trade deficit with China grew to $184bn last year, and would rise by another 20-25pc this year, Mr Abou said.

The market works its usual magic: "The world is rediscovering "Made in USA." American exports are now coursing their way around the world at a record level. In a major shift from the past five years, the US trade deficit, after stabilizing last year, is now shrinking. US companies, faced with slower economic growth in their home market, are now targeting foreign buyers. It doesn't hurt to have the dollar sinking in value - down almost 9 percent so far this year - and a relatively strong global economy. In fact, the US economy would be flirting with recession if it weren't for the 1 percentage point of growth fueled by the export surge. "Exports have suddenly become a key source of growth at a time when the economy is looking for any growth it can get," says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com. [Past deficits caused a fall in the dollar -- which led to American goods being easier to sell aboad. A surprise only to non-economists]

TSA still a joke: "Security screeners at two of the nation's busiest airports failed to find fake bombs hidden on undercover agents posing as passengers in more than 60% of tests last year, according to a classified report obtained by USA TODAY. Screeners at Los Angeles International Airport missed about 75% of simulated explosives and bomb parts that Transportation Security Administration testers hid under their clothes or in carry-on bags at checkpoints, the TSA report shows."

Democrats tell business to pay up or else: "The late Milton Friedman used to rail against what he called corporate America's "suicidal impulse." By that he meant that the business community continually financed the very politicians who were intent on robbing their profits and slitting their throats. It's happening again. The latest quarterly Federal Election Commission Report on political giving, released this week, shows the majority of corporate money flowing to the Democrats. Firms like Comcast, General Electric, Federal Express and UPS have shifted campaign giving away from the GOP. Employees of five major defense contractors including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrup-Grumman spent $104,000 on Democratic presidential candidates, versus $88,800 for the Republican field.... Sen. Charles Schumer runs the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and is playing the role of "good cop" when he dials Wall Street donors. As one hedge-fund manager tells me: "Senator Schumer says on the phone, 'I can make your problems go away.' " Of course, the Democrats created the problems. Mr. Schumer has raised at least $2 million this year from managers at leading PE firms like Carlyle and Blackstone Group"

There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly incorrect themes of race and IQ.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN.

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"Why should the German be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?... We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time... In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.... Indeed, in North America, the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved as its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the Gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of trade... Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist". Who said that? Hitler? No. It was Karl Marx. See also here and here and here.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party".

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