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February 2017

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Still More Oscar Hypocrisy — Now foreigners get in on the act By Ethel C. Fenig

By on February 27th, 2017

As you may have heard, or even watched (that’s ok, don’t be embarrassed, many people did) the bash President Donald J. Trump (R) specially wrapped into a self-love-fest known as the Academy Awards simpered for four hours Sunday night. Attired in outfits that cost more than a month’s salary for the average citizen — and that’s just the men — while surrounded and protected by guards (some even with guns) and other protective barriers, (sort of like uhm, walls) several of the presenters, the winners, and the host, Jimmy Kimmel, threw in digs at the president while proclaiming their own superiority and love. Yeah, that smugness will pack the 48% of the people who voted for Trump into the theaters.

Even an aging Warren Beatty, who did more than grab his you-know-what (I can’t really tell you as this is a blog suitable for family reading) in his prime, did manage to squeeze in a few cliches of love and peace and getting along with everyone which proved handy when he mistakenly announced the wrong winner of the best film at the finale. And so, quite suitably, the messy program ended as it began. And the lo-o-o-ng in-between wasn’t much better.
Of course the foreigners, (or should I say non-citizens?) got into the self-righteous act. Graciously nominated for best foreign language film, the nominees released a puffy, self-righteous statement two days before the big event, knocking the host country, the U.S., while

condemning “the climate of fanaticism and nationalism” in the U.S. and other countries.

They dedicated the Oscar, no matter which film wins, to those working toward unity.

They directors symbolically rejected the borders that define their category’s nominees, saying, “We believe there is no best country, best gender, best religion or best color. We want this award to stand as a symbol of the unity between nations and the freedom of the arts.”

The statement does not name President Trump but points in his direction, referring to an unhealthy climate stoked by parts of the population, “including leading politicians.” (snip)

On Friday, Farhadi joined with the other directors — Martin Zandvliet, Land of Mine (Denmark); Hannes Holm, A Man Called Ove (Sweden); Maren Ade, Toni Erdmann (Germany) and Marin Butler and Bentley Dean, Tanna (Australia) — to decry division and dedicate themselves to using the power of film to bring people together.

The statement opens with a condemnation of the political mood: “On behalf of all nominees, we would like to express our unanimous and emphatic disapproval of the climate of fanaticism and nationalism we see today in the U.S. and in so many other countries, in parts of the population and, most unfortunately of all, among leading politicians.”

The directors then spoke against division by gender, race, religion and other categories.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump to Propose Significant Increase in Defense Spending President won’t push to cut spending on Social Security, Medicare By Nick Timiraos and Kristina Peterson

By on February 27th, 2017

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump’s first budget will seek a sizable increase in military funding but won’t make changes to the largest future drivers of government spending: Social Security and Medicare.

Work to prepare the president’s first budget proposal, expected to be released in mid-March, ramped up last week following the Feb. 16 confirmation of Mick Mulvaney as director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The White House plans to send federal agencies their proposed budget allocations on Monday, a person familiar with the matter said. Mr. Trump will preview some of the budget priorities in his speech to Congress on Tuesday and release a budget outline in mid-March after gathering information from federal agencies.

The budget outline due next month will include only targets for discretionary spending programs and not any new proposals on taxes or mandatory spending programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, said John Czwartacki, a White House budget office spokesman. The decision to defer the release of part of the budget blueprint is due in part to the delay in Mr. Mulvaney’s confirmation, he said, and those additional proposals will be included in Mr. Trump’s full budget submission later this year.

“It would be premature for us to comment or anyone to report on the specifics of this internal discussion before its publication,” said Mr. Czwartacki.

The president’s budget proposal marks the opening of the monthslong process to set funding levels for the following year. Spending bills originate with Congress and need 60 votes to clear procedural hurdles in the Senate.

In his address to Congress, Mr. Trump also is expected to emphasize two of his top legislative priorities: simplifying the tax code and dismantling the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with something else, White House officials said Sunday.

Speaking Sunday on Fox News, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the budget outline won’t include any changes to entitlement spending programs. “We are not touching those now. So don’t expect to see that as part of this budget,” he said.

Mr. Mnuchin, in an interview last week, said an increase in military spending “is an important priority, and I think it’s likely that you’ll see that reflected in the president’s budget.”

By pushing for more military funding and taking entitlement spending changes off the table, the Trump administration also would need to propose funding cuts for nondefense programs to avoid sending deficits much higher.

Mr. Trump, for example, is expected to seek cuts at the Environmental Protection Agency and in other areas of domestic spending.

Congressional Republicans have said they would look to Mr. Trump’s speech for hints about the first budget proposal his administration will send to Capitol Hill, expected in mid-March. CONTINUE AT SITE

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Perez Democrats The Obama wing wins, but Republicans are foolish to gloat.

By on February 27th, 2017

Meet the Donald Trump-era Democrats, same as the Barack Obama Democrats. That’s the essential meaning of the election Saturday of Tom Perez, the Obama Labor secretary and man of the left, as the new head of the Democratic National Committee.

Mr. Perez, who supported Hillary Clinton for President, won a close race on the second ballot, 235-200, against Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, who was supported by progressive activists and Bernie Sanders. Mr. Perez won because more DNC regulars think he will be better able to rebuild the party for the midterm elections in 2018, and they may be right. Mr. Ellison, with his anti-Israel record, might have alienated some major donors. Mr. Perez also had support, including personal lobbying, from Mr. Obama and Joe Biden.

Messrs. Perez and Ellison agree on most policies, and party mainstays aren’t doing any ideological soul-searching. They don’t think their defeat in 2016 had much to do with Mr. Obama’s policies or record. They view it as an accident of FBI Director James Comey’s intervention, Russian hacks, and at worst Mrs. Clinton’s campaign mistakes. Mr. Perez, whom Mr. Obama describes as “wicked smart,” will make no concessions to the GOP on taxes, health care or military spending.

Mr. Perez quickly made Mr. Ellison his deputy, but some progressive activists who supported Mr. Ellison are grousing that the party establishment shut them out. No less than President Trump piled on by tweeting that “The race for DNC Chairman was, of course, totally ‘rigged.’ Bernie’s guy, like Bernie himself, never had a chance.” He added that “I could not be happier for [Mr. Perez], or for the Republican Party!”

He might want to hold the triumphalism. Mr. Trump has failed to enjoy a new President’s typical honeymoon, as his low 44% approval rating in the WSJ/NBC News poll suggests. Democratic opposition to Mr. Trump and the polarizing politics of aide Steve Bannon is likely to overwhelm any hard feelings from the DNC fight.

The message for Republicans is that the Democratic strategy going into 2018 will be remobilizing the Obama coalition in total opposition to the Trump Presidency. Democrats are betting that Mr. Trump will fail to govern successfully, fail to repeal ObamaCare or improve the economy, and so they can prosper without a political rethink.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

And the Academy Award for Insanity Goes to… A historic onstage blunder creates an Oscar moment for the ages by Jason Gay

By on February 27th, 2017

Well, that was nuts, even for Hollywood.

Let’s be clear: the Oscars were already a fairly ridiculous exercise. A cathedral of glamour and ego, the movie industry’s annual awards conclave is a bloated exercise of hype and self-satisfaction that takes as long to complete as the second year of medical school. This is, of course, why we watch it. An Oscars ceremony that isn’t too long, inane and occasionally infuriating—that’s not a proper Oscars, buddy!

And yet, what happened late Sunday in Los Angeles redefined the already high standard for absurdity at the Academy Awards. An event that once gave us a Rob Lowe duet with Snow White, as well as Telly Savalas,Pat Morita and Dom DeLuise singing “Fugue For Tinhorns” from “Guys & Dolls,” now has its signature moment of insanity: “Bonnie & Clyde” compatriots Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway erroneously awarding Best Picture to “La La Land”— rather than the actual winner, “Moonlight.”

I’ve watched the sequence on replay several times now and, to be honest, it’s way too bizarre to be infuriating. It appeared that Mr. Beatty and Ms. Dunaway were somehow in possession of an incorrect envelope, containing not the Best Picture winner, but the Best Actress, which had just been awarded to Emma Stone of “La La Land.” Opening the crimson envelope, 79-year-old Mr. Beatty seemed baffled, pausing briefly before handing it off to Ms. Dunaway, who announced “La La Land” as the winner.

The most painful thing, really, is that mistake wasn’t recognized immediately. Where was the production team? Already tucking into steaks at Musso & Frank? Even Steve Harvey botching the prize for Miss Universe 2015—the previous gold standard for bungled awards show finales—was faster to repair the damage of a winner incorrectly named.

Instead, the poor “La La Land” producers, cast and crew are allowed to ascend the stage, deliver speeches and experience the weightless feeling of capturing moviemaking’s greatest honor. Think about this for a second: They really thought they had won. Everyone had thought they had won. With 14 nominations, the film was a heavy favorite; a Best Picture win was utterly plausible.

They’re close to wrapping up their acceptance speeches before an anxious-looking production person in headgear starts barreling around the stage, looking like a guy who forgot his iPad on an airplane.

Except he’s Lucy, about to rip the football away from Charlie Brown. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Scientists: We Know What Really Causes Climate Change (And It Has Nothing To Do With Human Beings)

By on February 27th, 2017

From rocks in Colorado, evidence of a ‘chaotic solar system’Alternating layers of shale and limestone near Big Bend, Texas, characteristic of the rock laid down at the bottom of a shallow ocean during the late Cretaceous period. The rock holds definitive geologic evidence that the planets in our solar system behave differently than the prevailing theory that the they orbit like clockwork in a quasiperiodic manner. Photo: Bradley Sageman

Plumbing a 90 million-year-old layer cake of sedimentary rock in Colorado, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Northwestern University has found evidence confirming a critical theory of how the planets in our solar system behave in their orbits around the sun.

The finding, published Feb. 23, 2017 in the journal Nature, is important because it provides the first hard proof for what scientists call the “chaotic solar system,” a theory proposed in 1989 to account for small variations in the present conditions of the solar system. The variations, playing out over many millions of years, produce big changes in our planet’s climate — changes that can be reflected in the rocks that record Earth’s history.

The discovery promises not only a better understanding of the mechanics of the solar system, but also a more precise measuring stick for geologic time. Moreover, it offers a better understanding of the link between orbital variations and climate change over geologic time scales.

Using evidence from alternating layers of limestone and shale laid down over millions of years in a shallow North American seaway at the time dinosaurs held sway on Earth, the team led by UW–Madison Professor of Geoscience Stephen Meyers and Northwestern University Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Brad Sageman discovered the 87 million-year-old signature of a “resonance transition” between Mars and Earth. A resonance transition is the consequence of the “butterfly effect” in chaos theory. It plays on the idea that small changes in the initial conditions of a nonlinear system can have large effects over time.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

SWEDEN: TWO WOMEN RAPED IN A TAXI, PERPETRATORS STILL AT LARGE By Vincent van den Born

By on February 27th, 2017

While Swedish media are fighting the ‘good fight‘ against Trump, Swedish police broke the news that two women were reportedly raped in Järfälla, a community North East of the Swedish capital Stockholm. Alerted to the scene at 4:30, the two victims were, according to police spokesperson Carina Skagerlind,

“taken to the hospital to make the checks needed on these occasions.”

So what happened in Sweden on the night of Saturday to Sunday? Two women are reported to have taken an unbooked minicab from a restaurant. But instead of being driven to their desired location, the driver and another person took them to a wooded area outside of Järfälla.Described as an old military barracks, the area is now a recreational area. There, the women were raped in a way that one report describes as “rough.”

The forensic investigation of the “scene of the alleged crime” has taken almost the entire day. The area was cordoned off and searched with dogs. The technical investigation was closed at 2.52 PM, after which the area was opened to the public again. One person was taken into custody for questioning, but has since been released. According to Skagerlind, “this person is still being investigated.”

This rape case has been the third in about a fortnight. Last week there was an attempted rape, with a woman alerting the police that two men attacked her and dragged her into the woods. This was a day after a woman reported she was subjected to rape on a track course. Skagerlind commented that:

“this case is not like the others. These women came from a place other than Barkarby. So I do not want to speculate on that, but one cannot rule out a connection. We will look at this case alone but also look at any possible similarities.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

HOW CONVENIENT: DON’T BE FOOLED BY LEFT’S DESPICABLE & PHONY ANTI-ANTI-SEMITISM By: Benjamin Weingarten

By on February 27th, 2017

The recent uproar by the media, goading President Donald Trump into condemning anti-Semitism in the wake of various threats against Jewish institutions across the United States, has little to do with actual concern for anti-Semitism and everything to do with spreading a toxic false narrative to discredit the president.

Since the Left has learned nothing from the 2016 election — believing we are still operating in a world in which identity politics trumps all other considerations — it has been doing its damnedest to smear the Trump administration as a white nationalist if not outright Nazi regime practically since the day the Trump campaign commenced.

Such baseless accusations are justified at best by a wholly disingenuous conflation of the belief in the primacy of the rule of law, national sovereignty and a jihad-focused national security and foreign policy with racism and bigotry. Such an argument is of a piece with leftist illogic which says that “states rights” is code for “racism” — a code that only progressives have cracked.

Perhaps the cries of “Hitler” based on the president’s policies give the Left too much credit, however. For let us not forget that President George W. Bush championed a fundamentally different agenda from President Trump, and was cast as a Führer reincarnate by progressives as well.

The Left’s supposed newfound concern with anti-Semitism — like its supposed newfound concern with Russia — rings particularly hollow, and not just because of the president’s Jewish family members, friends and senior political appointees and advisors, his pro-Israel and counterjihadist agenda or the glowing words of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu affirming the president’s philosemitism.

What is remarkable about the Left’s anti-anti-Semitism is that it ignores the entire context of the progressive-Islamist nexus that bolstered the aims of Jew haters worldwide during President Obama’s tenure and beyond.

If the media and the Left more broadly were truly concerned with anti-Semitism, and not merely engaging in the politics of personal destruction, then how to explain their broad support for the Iran Deal which aids, abets and enables the world’s leading state sponsor of jihad dedicated to a Second Holocaust through the annihilation of the Jewish state of Israel?

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

U.N. Human Rights Council Quicksand: Get Out or Drown by Anne Bayefsky

By on February 27th, 2017

The U.N. “Human Rights” Council starts its main annual session on Monday in Geneva with elected members and human-rights aficionados such as Saudi Arabia, China, and Qatar settling into their seats. The question hanging over the head of President Trump is whether his administration will take its place beside these other states and legitimize the most anti-Israel, twisted bastion of moral relativism in the U.N. system.

Barack Obama deliberately designed a quicksand trap before leaving office. He put the U.S. forward for Human Rights Council membership in a U.N. election that occurred just ten days before the American presidential election. Attempting to rule from the grave, Obama knew full well that the U.S. would be occupying a three-year spot that officially commenced on January 1, 2017. The Bush administration had refused to join the Council, or to pay for it, when the Council was first created as a faux renovation of the discredited U.N. Human Rights Commission back in 2006. Joining the Council was one of Obama’s very first foreign-policy moves in 2009.

The only way out of the quagmire for the Trump administration, therefore, is to resign.

The State Department’s Obama holdovers are pushing hard for the status quo. State Department spokesman Mark Toner told Politico: “Our delegation will be fully involved in the work of the HRC session which starts Monday.” This result would be the very opposite of draining the swamp.

Moreover, the only survivors in the U.N. Human Rights Council swamp are the crocodiles. There is a permanent agenda of ten items that governs proceedings at every Council session. One agenda item is devoted to human-rights violations by Israel and one generic agenda item is for all other 192 U.N. member states that might be found to “require the Council’s attention.” In classic State Department double-talk, the Obama administration promised that by joining the Council, the U.S. could reform the Council agenda from the inside. The Obama administration tried and predictably failed. But the Obama administration then justified staying on the Council — despite back-of-the-bus treatment for the Jewish state — as a price worth paying for other people’s human rights. Pitting minorities against each other was, after all, an Obama specialty.

Every year at the Council’s main March session, the Council’s Israel agenda item gives rise to four or five resolutions condemning Israel. That is four or five times more than the Council condemns any other state on the planet. Ten years of Council practice incontrovertibly indicates that we can expect a small handful of other countries to be subject to a single resolution and that about 95 percent of states can count on none at all.

Fully aware of this scenario, the Obama routine went like this. The United States would vote against the anti-Israel resolutions, often 46 to 1, with slight variations for the times that European Union states screwed up the courage to abstain. Team Obama would make a nice speech for public consumption about supposedly unacceptable bias against Israel at the U.N. and then turn around and spend American taxpayer dollars to implement those very resolutions.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Jerusalem of Science and Culture By Barbara Pfeffer Billauer

By on February 27th, 2017

On October 12, 2016, the United Nations Education, Science, and Culture Organization, commonly known as UNESCO, adopted a resolution that snubbed Jewish ties to the Temple Mount by referring to in the resolution exclusively by its Arabic name. As described by the UK Guardian, (and echoed by many other newspapers including the Boston Globe): “ UNESCO’s tendentious semantics play into an ongoing propaganda campaign by the Palestinian Authority to “de-Judaize” the identity of Jerusalem, the foremost Jewish city on earth. UNESCO erred by allowing itself to be dragged into this controversy.”

It is no surprise that the resolution passed: The resolution, proposed by Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar and Sudan passed with 24 of the 56 members governing council voting for it, six against and 26 abstentions. Of the 24 who favored the motion, at least 9 (more than a third) have heavily Muslim ties.

What is surprising, however, is that UNESCO would violate its charter and raison d’etre to wade into the political fray, that it would allow itself to be hijacked by the current prevalence of Arab states on its governing board to self-immolate — and that it that it deliberately fostered international dissension by enacting a resolution in direct contravention of one of its enumerated goals. What is sad is that UNESCO would abandon its designated mission of impartiality and wade into the political turf. And what is disappointing is the rather impoverished, pedantic and pedestrian Israeli response.

As its name implies, UNESCO is charged with employing scientific, cultural and educational initiatives as a means to bridge divides, “to contribute to peace and security by promoting international collaboration” in these areas — rather than create them. Specifically, it is charged with (inter alia) the promotion of cultural diversity, translations of world literature, international cooperation agreements to secure the world cultural and natural heritage (World Heritage Sites).

Immediately after the vote, Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO criticized the committee’s stance, predictably arguing that: “You have just adopted a [resolution] against historical truth and one that stands in complete and utter contradiction to all values,” without further amplification. In response, Palestinian officials insisted that because the resolution refers to issues at Muslim places of worship, it justified the language.

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