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Houston’s Got No Problem: City Voters Reject Unequal-rights Ordinance

By Selwyn Duke

It was not an idea too big to fail. And it failed big. Voters in Houston, Texas, rejected the controversial and misnamed “Houston Equal Rights Ordinance” (HERO) by a wide margin yesterday. The measure would have extended “special protections” to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and so-called transgender people, along with those in other “protected categories,” while leaving Americans outside those groups without such protections.

Yet what really drove opposition to the ordinance was that it would have allowed “transgender” people to use the bathroom of their choice based on actual or perceived “gender identity.” In other words, men claiming to be women could use women’s bathrooms.

So while the vote was expected to be close, HERO turned out to be a zero, failing by a whopping margin of 61 percent to 39 percent.

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Students Protest: Bring Back Officer Who Got Physical With S.C. Girl

Selwyn Duke

Deputy Ben Fields has been condemned in the media and called names. He has been fired from the Richland County Sheriff's Department. And the federal government has launched a civil-rights investigation into his apprehension of a defiant student who was disrupting her class last Monday. Yet some of the people who know him best are rallying on his behalf: students at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, where Fields was the school resource officer.

On Friday, approximately 100 students walked out of class at around 10:00 a.m. to protest the termination of Fields. They were back in their classrooms after about 10 minutes in response to a diplomatic request from their principal, but not before their voices were heard.

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GOP Media Takedown: A Recipe for Victory

By Selwyn Duke

It’s long been known that a leader can gain power by rallying the people against a boogeyman.

And it helps when that boogeyman is real.

When CNBC’s GOP debate moderators couldn’t help but be sanctimonious, supercilious, and self-important Wednesday night, they did more than provoke a response from their intellectual superiors. They did more than further reveal the Establishment Media as a left-wing monolith, further discredit themselves, and further cement in minds that they’re comic-book versions of journalists.

They quite literally revealed a strategy for GOP electoral gains.

President’s Lies Matter: Obama Defends Black Lives Matter Movement

By Selwyn Duke

It’s a phenomenon that has led to riots and the killing of police officers. But that didn’t stop Barack Obama from defending the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement last Thursday at a White House criminal-justice forum. It was an action that, critics say, reinforced divisive misconceptions — ones that have contributed the murder and mayhem.

While Obama paired his defense of BLM with praise for the “overwhelming majority” of police who want “to do the right thing,” he also spoke of “a specific problem that's happening in the African-American community that's not happening in other communities.” Yet he wasn’t referring to the black community’s 72 percent out-of-wedlock birthrate or that blacks are approximately 50 percent of the United States’ homicide victims (while only 13 percent of the population) — or that 90 to 93 percent of these victims are killed by other blacks. Rather, referencing the notion that an inordinate number of black suspects are shot by police officers, the president said, "We as a society, particularly given our history, have to take this seriously. And one of the ways of avoiding the politics of this and losing the moment is everybody just stepping back for a second and understanding that the African-American community is not just making this up. It's not just something being politicized.”

The truth, however, is that made up and politicized describe BLM’s claims perfectly.

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The Muslim Migrants and the Death of the West

By Selwyn Duke

Death can happen suddenly, as when being shot or hit by a truck. But it’s more often a process involving steady and observable decline. It’s also true that symptoms can be confused with causes. Such is the case with listing Western civilization and the Muslim migrant crisis, opines the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens. In a rather insightful piece entitled “In Defense of Christendom,” he writes:

The death of Europe is in sight. Still hazy and not yet inevitable, but nevertheless visible and drawing nearer—like a distant planet in the lens of an approaching satellite. Europe is reaching its end not because of its sclerotic economy, or stagnant demography, or the dysfunctions of the superstate. Nor is the real cause the massive influx of Middle Eastern and African migrants. Those desperate people are just the latest stiff breeze against the timber of a desiccated civilization.

Of course, critics point out that most of the migrants aren’t “desperate” at all. Estimates inform that 75 percent are males, mostly young and strong. Contrary to the narrative, only 25 percent are Syrian; moreover, as Muslim refugee and Jordanian opposition leader Dr. Mudar Zahran pointed out, “Seventy-five percent of those arriving from Syria come from safe area[s]; actually, the ones in disaster areas cannot … leave.” They are economic migrants, he tells us, seizing the opportunity of the current crisis to emigrate to a “rich nation with a generous welfare system,” such as Germany or Sweden. A good example is the tragic early September story of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, who washed up on a Turkish beach. The unfortunate child’s death was used to beat the drum for open European borders, but here’s the truth: He, along with his parents and brother, had been living safely in Turkey for three years. And why did his father take the family on a journey, destination Greece, on a 15-foot dinghy?

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Hillary Clinton Unchained: Gun Ban “Worth Looking at”

By Selwyn Duke

Would Hillary Clinton ban guns in the United States? She apparently supported the idea last Friday, but then supposedly dismissed it three days later. It’s the difference between an on- and off-Teleprompter candidate.

During an October 16 town hall meeting at Keene State College, a questioner asked Clinton if we could follow Australia’s lead and ban handguns. She replied that the nation’s confiscation of firearms was a “good example” and was “worth looking at” when formulating U.S. gun policy. Here's more of her unguarded-moment answer....

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Ahmed the “Clock Boy” Meets with Obama and War Criminal

By Selwyn Duke

The media has dubbed him “Clock Boy,” but critics have pointed out that he’s really just Crock Boy. This hasn’t prevented Ahmed Mohamed (shown), the 14-year-old Texas student arrested for bringing to school a device that could be taken for a bomb, from making the rounds as a celebrity and meeting world leaders. This included an encounter Barack Obama at the White House’s Astronomy Night last evening, even though the meeting was left in doubt after Mohamed met last Wednesday with an African president wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

The boy’s dubious meeting with Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir — accused of orchestrating genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur — put the White House in an uncomfortable position. Obama had already committed to the now-discredited narrative that Mohamed was a fertile-minded inventor victimized by “Islamophobia,” and revoking his Astronomy Night invitation would have been a blow against that victim narrative. Ultimately, the administration decided to walk a fine line. Press Secretary Josh Earnest played down Mohamed’s visit at a press briefing yesterday, saying he didn’t believe Obama would “have an opportunity to meet one-on-one with Ahmed” as “several hundred people” would participate in the event. And so it transpired: Obama met with the high-school student while mingling with the attendees, but didn’t showcase his visit.

Unfortunately, Mohamed’s tale is an example of how, as Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…” And a tall tale Mohamed’s is.

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The Evil of Gun-free Zones

By Selwyn Duke

One thing worse than supporting bad policy is knowingly supporting bad policy.

Worse still is knowingly supporting bad policy and shielding yourself from its destructive effects — while visiting that policy on children.

There has been much debate recently surrounding so-called “gun-free zones,” places such as schools, where law-abiding people won’t carry guns. But really there should be no debate. This is because it’s plain that even the zones’ defenders — liberals — don’t really believe they’re a good idea.

For evidence, consider a largely forgotten video made in 2013 by Project Veritas (PJ) after The Journal News in Westchester, N.Y., printed the names and addresses of registered handgun owners in its coverage area. Posing as "Citizens Against Senseless Violence," PJ operatives visited the homes of Eric Holder and various liberal journalists to ask them if they’d “support the cause” and post on their lawns a sign stating "THIS HOME IS PROUDLY GUN FREE."

"Us-versus-them" Obama Again Slams Christianity

By Selwyn Duke

Some have mockingly called Barack Obama “Dear Reader” for his reliance on a Teleprompter. But considering that while speaking extemporaneously he has uttered comments such as Middle American voters “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them” and women shouldn’t be “punished with a baby,” his recourse to such technology is no mystery. And now we learn that, again, when the Telee's away Obama’s tongue will play.

The latest revelatory comment was made during a conversation the president had with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson for a New York Review of Books piece published Monday. While discussing Gilead, the author’s book about a 1950s Iowa pastor, Obama asked, “How do you reconcile the idea of faith being really important to you and you caring a lot about taking faith seriously with the fact that, at least in our democracy and our civic discourse, it seems as if folks who take religion the most seriously sometimes are also those who are suspicious of those not like them?” The president also said, “Sometimes Christian interpretation seems to posit an ‘us versus them [mindset].’”

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Muslim Refugee Warns: This Is the “Islamic Conquest of the West”

By Selwyn Duke

He’s a Muslim refugee living in Europe. And he has a warning:

Keep the Muslim “refugees” out of Europe.

He’s Dr. Mudar Zahran, a Jordanian Palestinian academic and a leader of the Jordanian Opposition Coalition who is currently living in the United Kingdom, where he sought political asylum. Describing himself as an “orthodox Muslim,” he nonetheless says there’s a “genuine problem with Muslims in Europe” and calls the current wave of migrants entering the continent “the soft Islamic conquest of the West.”

Dr. Zahran issued these and more dire warnings on a Thursday segment of The Glazov Gang (video below).

Read the rest here.