HALF-FULL REPORT 11/10/17

Saudi Arabia is shaking up the world. Among those most rattled are Iran, Islamist terrorists, DC swamp things, Democrats and Twitter.

The earthquake began last weekend when police arrested dozens of prominent Saudis – including 11 princes and 4 government ministers– in an anti-corruption crackdown.

Prince Mansour bin Muqrin was killed in a helicopter crash near the border with Yemen Sunday (11/5) “while performing an inspection in remote parts of the Governate.”

A few hours later, Prince Abdul Aziz was shot to death while resisting arrest.

The biggest fish is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a grandson of Saudi Arabia’s founder, whose personal fortune is estimated at $17 billion.

Alwaleed bin Talal is a major donor to the Clinton Foundation, a client of the Podesta Group, and – bye the bye – the guy who paid Barack Obama’s tuition at Harvard.

Also bye the bye, bin Talal owns four floors of the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas.

Among the non-royals arrested was Bakr bin Laden, Osama’s older brother, who heads one of the world’s largest construction companies.

The fat bank accounts of those arrested (1,700 so far) have been frozen. KSA hopes to recoup at least $500 billion (yes, half a trillion $) from those found guilty.

This is just phase 1 of the anti-corruption crackdown, KSA’s attorney general said.

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The Saudis intercepted a ballistic missile fired from Yemen at Riyadh Saturday (11/4). KSA’s foreign ministry blamed Iran, called this “an act of war.”

They used a Patriot ABM to shoot down the missile, the Saudis said, but the interceptor looks faster than that to me.

KSA and GCC allies closed all ground, air and sea access to Yemen in retaliation.

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Also Saturday, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri resigned during a visit to Riyadh. There was a plot to kill him, Hariri said. Hariri’s father, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, was murdered in 2005.

Hariri is a Sunni Muslim. In Lebanon’s political system, the prime minister must be a Sunni, the president a Maronite Christian, the Speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim. The real power is the terror group Hezbollah, heavily subsidized by Iran.

“Wherever Iran settles, it sows discord, devastation and destruction,” Hariri said in a televised address from Riyadh.

Aggressions by Hezbollah are tantamount to a declaration of war against Saudi Arabia, KSA’s Gulf Affairs minister said Tuesday (11/7). Leave Lebanon, KSA, the United Arab Emirates (Saudi Arabia’s closest ally), Bahrain and Kuwait warned their citizens yesterday (11/9).

All in all, it was an eventful weekend for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

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The Saudi crackdown “spells trouble for Trump,” said CNN, which always gets everything bass ackwards.

President Trump doesn’t think so.

….Some of those they are harshly treating have been “milking” their country for years!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2017

Many of the Saudis arrested were funders of Islamist terror – and of Democrats, leftwing think tanks, and radical mosques in the USA. That’s over. We soon may learn more about the Saudi role in 9/11… and if anybody here covered it up.

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Freezing the bank accounts of those arrested in KSA put a crimp in the finances of Citigroup and Twitter, where Alwaleed bin Talal is a major stockholder, caused panic among Swamp Things who took Saudi money under the table. They know KSA prosecutors have means of obtaining confessions not available to authorities here.

Daniel Drezner, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, which has taken tens of millions of dollars from supporters of Islamist terror, wrote an op ed for the WaPo likening MbS to Kim Jong Un.

A more accurate comparison is with Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), Peter the Great, or even Cyrus the Great. MbS is yanking Saudi Arabia into the future, increasing liberty and opportunity for its citizens, among whom he is enormously popular.

Thanks to Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia is about to get its first real government, said David Goldman (Spengler).

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MbS is bold, but he isn’t reckless. The anti-corruption crackdown evidently was planned over three years. So I wouldn’t worry (much) that KSA’s bellicose rhetoric toward Iran and her proxies in Lebanon and Yemen will trigger a wider ME war.

There is legitimate concern the utter defeat of ISIS in Syria this week will permit Hezbollah to concentrate forces in southern Lebanon. There’ve been rumblings for months Hezbollah is planning another war with Israel.

Hezbollah’s leader said today (11/10) Saudi Arabia is trying to provoke an Israeli strike on Lebanon.

Remember (a) Israel and Saudi Arabia are allies; (b) together they’ve developed super weapons nobody else has; (c) that somebody killed (just about all) Hezbollah leaders in Syria.

In August, the U.S. began delivery of 32 Bradley fighting vehicles to the Lebanese army. If, as many assume, the Lebanese army is under the thumb of Hezbollah, that would be a very stupid thing to do. I can’t imagine Mattis being that stupid.

Methinks Israel and KSA think Hezbollah has been hollowed out so much it can be pushed out of power in Lebanon.

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When will the storm winds from KSA blow into the USA? Before the next HFR, I bet.

Richard Pollock summarizes here why now it’s the Democrats who have a Russian problem.

President Trump’s longtime chief of security drove another nail into the credibility of the Steele dossier, as more evidence emerged the FBI used the bogus document to obtain a FISA warrant to surveil Trump associates.

Contrary to his earlier testimony, Fusion GPS chieftain Glenn Simpson met with Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya before and after her meeting with Donald Trump Jr, Fusion wrote the memo she took with her to the meeting.

The House Intelligence Committee has obtained Fusion’s bank records. Simpson won’t take the 5^th in testimony before it next week, because he knows, now, the jig is up.

Tony Podesta’s designated successor has left the firm, told employees not to count on checks after Nov. 15. Kimberley Fritts was a bundler for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign.

An unusually high number of sealed warrants are piling up in the district courts for the District of Columbia and the Eastern District of Virginia.

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Happy birthday Marines! You gotta love a service that was born in a bar (the Tun Tavern in Philadelphia), whose first mission was to the Bahamas.

https://twitter.com/USAMilitaryUSA/status/928683637150687232

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Democrats won big Tuesday (11/7) in New Jersey (ho hum), and in Virginia (big deal). Ed Gillespie did worse than any GOP gubernatorial candidate in more than 30 years.

Exit polls make clear the reason for the debacle. Democrats turned out to vote (41

percent). Republicans didn’t (31 percent). Gillespie won narrowly among Independents, but only 26 percent of them bothered to vote.

Republicans need to figure out, fast, why the Dem base was motivated, theirs wasn’t.

It’s because the GOP is saddled with Trump, say NeverTrumpers and the Lying Swine.

It’s because Ed Gillespie is an Establishment guy who put distance between himself and the president, ran a bland, squishy campaign, say some Trump supporters.

Knee jerk spin is comforting, but it doesn’t change reality.

Only 40 percent of the Virginians who voted approve of the job President Trump is doing. If that doesn’t change by this time next year, the midterms could be very disappointing.

Republicans do better when they “paint with bold colors, not pale pastels,” Ronald Reagan demonstrated. But when Barry Goldwater offered “a choice, not an echo,” he got creamed.

They sure better pass tax reform, the takeaway for Republicans in Congress should be. The perception in the base they’re as useless as a two-legged stool depresses turnout.

Both Trump supporters and GOPe types (who aren’t Swamp Things) need to realize if they don’t hang together, they’ll hang separately.

In the aftermath of the storm he’s orchestrating, President Trump figures to be more popular, Dems less.

If so, the most significant result of the Virginia election will have been that it made Democrats think they can turn further left with impunity.

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In 1979, when he was 32, Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore felt up a 14-year-old girl, the Washington Post reported yesterday (11/9).

The allegations are “completely false,” Moore said. His wife, Kayla, said she plans to sue the WaPo for defamation.

If the allegations are true, Moore should resign. I doubt they are, for two reasons:

First, pedophiles rarely strike just once. The odds Moore molested a 14-year-old in 1979, but no other adolescent before or since, are vanishingly small.

Second, Moore has been a controversial figure in Alabama for decades. If the charges were true, odds are they’d have emerged in one of his many earlier campaigns.

Leigh Corfman has a checkered past.  Evidently she’s made (unsubstantiated) accusations of sexual harassment before. A woman allegedly has told the district attorney in Etowah County she was offered $1,000 to make up a story about Judge Moore.

If this turns out to be a smear, it’ll backfire big time on Dems, NeverTrump Republicans, and the Lying Swine. The election is Dec. 12.

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A lunatic armed with an AR-15 rifle killed 20, injured 27 in the First Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas Sunday (11/5).

Devin Patrick Kelley, 26, was finishing off the wounded when Stephen Willeford, 55, who lived half a block away, heard the shots, grabbed his own AR-15, ran to the church barefoot, and shot the bastard.

Strangely, though the MSM described Kelley’s AR-15 as an “assault rifle,” they described Willeford’s AR-15 as a “gun,” or a “rifle.”

The usual suspects blamed the massacre on the National Rifle Association, called for more gun control laws.

It was already against the law for Kelley – who got a bad conduct discharge from the Air Force for, among other things, fracturing the skull of his infant son — to own a firearm.

But the Air Force didn’t report Kelley’s court martial to the National Criminal Instant Check System (NCIC). This negligence is all too common, Defense Secretary James Mattis reported.

In 2010, 48,000 felons lied on the application forms to buy a gun, Sen. Ted Cruz reported. That’s a federal crime, a felony, but Obama Justice prosecuted only 44 offenders.

Passing a new law to make illegal what’s been illegal for 20 years will not correct a problem caused by failure to enforce existing law.

The MSM have difficulty acknowledging the massacre was cut short by a good guy with a gun. Plays hob with the narrative.

No mass shooter ever has been a member of the NRA, or a registered Republican. Three mass shooters in just the last five months have been registered Democrats (Bernie bros or farther left).

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Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) introduced a bill to ban what she called “assault rifles.” It will go nowhere. In a Gallup poll early last month, only 31 percent supported such a ban, 61 percent opposed it.

Support for an “assault weapons ban” was 44 percent in 2012, 57 percent in 1996.

I suspect support has fallen further, because exposure of the government’s gross negligence makes clear we must protect ourselves.

Gun control has been poisonous for Democrats in the past, so it isn’t smart for them to highlight the issue going into a midterm election in which 10 Dem senators must run for re-election in red states.

The massacre provided the Lying Swine with another opportunity to demonstrate utter ignorance of how guns work. Most hilarious was USA Today’s fretting about a “chainsaw bayonet” for an AR-15.

A look at the gun used in the Texas church shooting. https://t.co/xdxIf5fR77 pic.twitter.com/sUY1mCCLZC

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) November 8, 2017

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The leftist neighbor who assaulted Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is expected to face federal charges for a “politically motivated” attack.

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ESPN’s football pregame show is tanking. ESPN plans to lay off more than 100 more employees after Thanksgiving. Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones wants NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell fired.

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We’re still in the calm before the storm, but the straws in the wind indicate it is nearly upon us. Batten the hatches, and stock up on popcorn.

The Hero of the Week – and maybe of the year, decade, century and millennium – is Crown Prince (soon to be king) Mohammed bin Salman.

Jack Wheeler will be back at his post next week.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret, and was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan Administration.  Until his retirement in January 2017, he was the national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.