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February 2018

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s Moment of British Truth He’s right. The U.K. health system is ‘broke and not working.’

By on February 8th, 2018

Sometimes Donald Trump is right. The President set off another tempest in a teapot in Britain Monday with a tweet telling the truth about the U.K. National Health Service. Criticizing Democrats for proposing single-payer in America, Mr. Trump said Britain’s NHS is “broke and not working.”

In classic Trump style, he undermined his credibility in the same tweet by wrongly claiming Brits are marching against the NHS because they know the system is broken. Recent protests against Prime Minister Theresa May have been orchestrated by the left to demand more cash, not reform. The real scandal is that so many British politicians and commentators who know better claim the NHS is working fine.

The NHS is in the middle of its annual winter crisis—wherein central planners forget which season follows spring, summer and autumn and must reschedule surgeries and leave the ill in hospital hallways because the health service hasn’t prepared for its busiest time. Hospitals are running at 95% occupancy, and patients are waiting longer for urgent treatment. Only 85% of emergency-room patients were seen within four hours of arrival in December, the lowest share on record and well short of the NHS goal of 95%. January was probably worse.

The pressure for more spending is constant but it must compete against other demands in a country with already high tax rates. Spending on the NHS has increased by 1.3% annually in inflation-adjusted terms since 2010. That’s faster than British living standards are growing as wage increases have lagged inflation since the 2008 financial panic.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

More Doubts About Mr. Steele Including an appearance by none other than Sidney Blumenthal.

By on February 8th, 2018

The case of the FBI and Christopher Steele gets curiouser and curiouser. In the latest news, GOP Senators Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham late Tuesday released a less redacted version of their criminal referral letter to the Justice Department concerning Mr. Steele, who wrote the now famous dossier alleging Russian collusion with Donald Trump. The letter supports the recent House Intelligence Committee claims of surveillance abuse and offers new evidence that the Clinton campaign may have been more involved than previously known.

Democrats claim the House Intel memo distorts the FBI’s actions in obtaining in October 2016 an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor former Trump aide Carter Page. But the Grassley-Graham referral makes public for the first time actual text from the FBI’s FISA application, as well as classified testimony the FBI gave the Senate Judiciary Committee about the dossier and FISA application.

In particular, the referral rebuts the Democratic claim that the FBI told the FISA court about the partisan nature of the Steele dossier. “The FBI noted to a vaguely limited extent the political origins of the dossier,” says the letter. And “the FBI stated that the dossier information was compiled pursuant to the direction of a law firm who had hired an ‘identified U.S. person’—now known as Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS,” the firm that hired Mr. Steele.

But, adds the referral letter, “the application failed to disclose that the identities of Mr. Simpson’s ultimate clients were the Clinton campaign and the DNC [Democratic National Committee].” That’s not being honest with the judges who sign off on an eavesdrop order.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Feminism, Swedish Style by Bruce Bawer

By on February 8th, 2018

A Swedish court ruled against the parental rights of Alicia, a Swedish citizen, and handed over her children (also Swedish citizens) to a foreigner who is known to have raped their mother, in the context of an Islamic sharia “marriage,” when she herself was a child.

Sometimes, when one points out these rules, people will respond: “Well, the Bible says such-and-such.” The point is not that these things are written in Islamic scripture, but that people still live by them.

Swedish officials have not made any “mistakes” in Alicia’s case. Every single action on their part has been rooted in a philosophy that they thoroughly understand and in which they deeply believe. They are, as they love to proclaim, proud feminists, whose ardent belief in sisterhood ends where brutal Islamic patriarchy, gender oppression, and primitive “honor culture” begin. That is feminism, Swedish style.

In practice, as it happens, this compulsion to respect the different priorities of other cultures is most urgent when the culture in question is the one in which female inequality is most thoroughly enshrined and enforced.

“Sweden has the first feminist government in the world,” brags the Swedish government on its official website. Meaning what, exactly?

“This means that gender equality is central to the Government’s priorities… a gender equality perspective is brought into policy-making on a broad front… The Government’s most important tool for implementing feminist policy is gender mainstreaming, of which gender-responsive budgeting is an important component.”

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

US Palestinian policy – water or gasoline? Amb. (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on February 8th, 2018

President Trump’s Palestinian policy aims to avoid the critical errors of his predecessors, who joined the 1993 Oslo Process, which relocated 100,000 PLO members – headed by Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas –- from their terrorist headquarters and bases in Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Yemen and Lebanon to Gaza, and the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria. It dramatically intensified the terror and hate-education infrastructures of these regions and misrepresented Arafat and Abbas as partners for peaceful-coexistence.

Therefore, it has failed to advance the cause of peace, while undermining US interests.
The Israeli architects of the Oslo Accord – and their US partners – genuinely aimed at extinguishing fire, but failed to realize that their pumps were filled with gasoline, not water.

Departing from the political-correctness of his predecessors and the State Department establishment, Trump has recognized the reality of hateful and non-peaceful coexistence nature of the Palestinian Authority, concluding that peaceful statements, on the one hand, and hate-education, incitement, the funding and heralding of terrorists and their families, on the other hand, constitutes an outrageous oxymoron. On May 23, 2017, he stated, in Ramallah: “Peace can never take root in an environment where violence is tolerated, funded and even rewarded.”

Contrary to previous US presidents and Secretaries of State, since 1993, Trump does not ignore the significance of the K-12 Palestinian hate-curriculum – which has been shaped since 1993/94 by Mahmoud Abbas – as the most authentic reflection (much more than Palestinian statements for Western consumption) of the Palestinian Authority’s long-term strategy and worldview, and a most effective production-line of terrorists.

In contrast to previous tenants of the White House and Foggy Bottom, Trump has identified Mahmoud Abbas’ inherent rejection of a sovereign Jewish State, as articulated by Abbas’ January 14, 2018 speech, which was consistent with the 1959 and 2007 constitutions of Fatah and the 1964 and 1968 Charters of the PLO – both ruled by Mahmoud Abbas. These documents highlight the Palestinian rejection of the existence – not the size – of Jewish sovereignty west of the Jordan River.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Academic Bias Worsens Frank V. Vernuccio, Jr., J.D.

By on February 8th, 2018

Academia has, for many decades, been a bastion of leftist orthodoxy. But the current extremity of its actions and beliefs have reached a level that should trouble the majority of Americans, and call into question the wisdom of funding, through taxes, tuition, grants or donations, of institutions that may be doing the nation far more harm than good.

Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arnn notes that in a survey of young Americans, “one in two ‘millennials’ say they would rather live under Socialism or Communism than a capitalist democracy. This follows trends from the 2016 elections, in which more millennials in the primaries voted for avowed Socialist Bernie Sanders than for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump combined.”
The reasons for that preference become abundantly clear upon examining the educational experience they have been subjected to.

A survey of reported incidents and academic attitudes across the nation indicate that it’s not a liberal perspective that is purveyed, promulgated, and forced upon students, but something significantly more extreme, including attitudes that oppose the very founding principles of the United States.

Writing in Commentary, Sohrab Ahmari worries that , “the most celebrated education-reform organization in the U.S.” has “transformed itself into an arm of the progressive movement? Teach for America, or TFA, the national corps of recent graduates who commit two years to teaching in underserved classrooms across the country, was founded to help close the achievement gap between rich and poor students. But now it increasingly functions as a platform for radical identity politics and the anti-Trump “resistance…In remaking itself, TFA has subtly downgraded the principles that had won it allies across the spectrum…TFA’s message seems to be that until numerous other social ills are cured-until immigration is less restricted, policing becomes more gentle, and poverty is eliminated-an excellent education will elude the poor. That was the status-quo defeatism TFA originally set out to challenge…TFA’s leaders have now fully enlisted the organization in the culture war-to the detriment of its mission and the high-minded civic sensibility that used to animate its work.”

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Giulio Meotti: The West sleeps peacefully because of Israel Note how the UN condemns every room built in Judea and Samaria, but has stayed silent on the murder of two rabbis in just as many weeks.

By on February 8th, 2018

While Turkish President Erdogan and Pope Francis were in Rome complimenting each other on Jerusalem and the European Union was rolling out red carpets to Mahmoud Abbas, Israel was protecting the West.

This small state has hitherto prevented Iran from manufacturing the atomic bomb, it has ruined the nuclear plans of Saddam Hussein and Bashar el Assad thanks to two solitary bombings, it guards the security of Jordan that without Israel would collapse today like a cooked pear, it has foiled attacks by ISIS on European civilian flights and we now discover that Egypt’s el Sisi has recently asked Israel to bomb ISIS’ posts in Sinai.

Israel today is the fireman of the Middle East. Imagine the region, from time to time, without Israel as the anti-Semites of the whole world dream of it. A Middle East of beheaders facing the Mediterranean, a Middle East of planes full of Westerners flying from Sharm el Sheikh and sinking in the Red Sea, a Middle East of a race to atomic weapons by dictatorships of all kinds, a Middle East of even more millions of refugees going to Europe. Tonight we will sleep more peacefully thanks to Israel.

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