Politics

Barack Obama just secretly signed last-minute regulations costing $7.4 billion over the New Year holiday season.  In the space of just one night Obama pumped out a set of “midnight” regulations that could end up costing the taxpayer over $44 billion. Dailycaller.com reports: Sam Batkins, director of regulatory policy at the right-leaning American Action Forum (AAF), compiled a list of regulations published Wednesday night in the Federal Register. The administration released more than $7.4 billion in regulations last night.

The Trump administration have said that they believe Hillary Clinton should be punished for illegally trying to influence the outcome of the election.  Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, said that Putin and Russia are being wrongly blamed for unduly influencing the US elections, and said that the blame should lie squarely with the Clinton Campaign. “Why aren’t we talking about the other influences on the election? Why aren’t we talking about Hillary Clinton getting debate questions ahead of time?” Thinkprogress.org reports: “No one is asking those questions.

The final numbers are in, and according to AFP, Saudi Arabia carried out 153 executions in 2016 based on official announcements, fractionally lower than the year before.

As AFP adds, the ultra-conservative kingdom is one of the world’s most prolific executioners and has a strict Islamic legal code under which murder, drug trafficking, armed robbery, rape and apostasy are all punishable by death. Once charged, the likelihood of avoiding a terminal sentence is nominal.

Over the past 68 years, Israel has done nothing but deliberately subjugate Palestinians to humiliation, suffering, death and destruction, all in front of a gobsmacked world. Israel has not just committed unspeakable acts of genocide against the Palestinian people but done so with absolute transparency. 4thMedia reports: Last week, the world stood fixated at a largely symbolic gesture by the United Nations in which it found the continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank of Palestine to be illegal. Or did it?

Submitted by Daniel Greenfield via FrontPageMag.com,

It was the end of the big year with three zeroes. The first X-Men movie had broken box office records. You couldn’t set foot in a supermarket without listening to Brittney Spears caterwauling, “Oops, I Did It Again.” And Republicans and Democrats had total control of both chambers of legislatures in the same amount of states. That was the way it was back in the distant days of the year 2000.

In 2016, Republicans control both legislative chambers in 32 states. That’s up from 16 in 2000.