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July 2018

Michael Danby a great stalwart champion of Israel, Member of the House of Representatives in Australia is Retiring

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2018/07/thank-you-best-wishes-michael-danby.html

Gregg Sheridan- Foreign Editor of The Australian- ” A Labor lion has decided to roar no more in Parliament.”

Danby’s words:

“My love of the Australian Jewish community emerges from having a similar background to many families in the community who endured the Holocaust…writes Michael Danby.

I think my obituary for the much-loved Rabbi of the holocaust survivors, Rabbi Chaim Gutnick (of blessed memory), reflects that https://bit.ly/2MQ4xSC. Even before the murder of the Jewish school children by a Jihadist at the Jewish school in Toulouse, I insisted that the Australian government see Jewish Students all over the country were protected. Security funding to fortify Jewish schools all over Australia has seen that every parent and grandparent can be assured that all our children can freely attend to their education in the best safety the Australian government can provide.

Before I was elected to Parliament in 1998, there hadn’t been a single MP visit Israel for more than a decade. Thanks to the support of philanthropists Sol Lew and David Goldberger, I took the first mission of Australian Labor MPs to Jerusalem (led by the then opposition leader Simon Crean). Since then, the atmosphere has totally improved in Parliament, with many Members and Senators having visited Israel, the Australia-Israel Parliamentary Friendship Group having one of the largest memberships in Parliament, we having regular speakers and functions thanks to the ECAJ, AIJAC and the Israeli Embassy. Words cannot speak highly enough of my regard for our long-standing Labor stalwart Senator Glenn Sterle. He works with love and passion to continue my work with the Australia-Israel Parliamentary Friendship Group. The same applies to my dear Liberal friend, the chairman of the Australia-Israel Parliamentary Friendship Group and the chairman of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade (which I used to chair), Senator David Fawcett. Israel visits have generally benefitted Australian national security. The visits to Israel have had an important transformative effect on our national politics. You don’t have to explain to MPs and Senators Iran, Jihadism, counter terrorism, the extremism of Erdogan, of Hezbollah and Hamas’ role as terrorist organisations and threat, once parliamentarians have visited there.

The left’s personal destruction machine turns its focus on Jim Jordan By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/the_lefts_personal_destruction_machine_turns_its_focus_on_jim_jordan.html

Jim Jordan has been one of the most effective investigators in pursuing the cabal that weaponized the FBI and intelligence agencies to fight the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump. Rather than answer him with facts and documents, the left is out to destroy him, which tells anyone paying attention that he is on to something.

This campaign began to tar him with scandal, no matter how far-fetched. George Rasley explains at Conservative HQ:

NBC News published an article on Tuesday, quoting Mike DiSabato and Dunyasha Yetts, two former Ohio State University wrestlers, claiming that when Jim Jordan worked as assistant wrestling coach at OSU, he ignored sexual abuse carried out by a university physician named Richard Strauss. …

Jordan, a two-time NCAA wrestling champion, denied back in April that he knew about Strauss’s alleged activities. But Yetts told NBC News that Jordan was either a “liar” or taking part in a cover-up of the abuse. DiSabato called Jordan a “coward.”

Jordan, a leading House conservative and candidate for Speaker, has vehemently denied the allegations, saying that he was never told of sexual abuse against athletes during his stint at OSU, which stretched from 1986 to 1994. He said he would have taken action had he known about any abuse by Strauss, who killed himself in 2005. …

And interestingly enough, looking through the articles about the allegations you can’t find any mention of head coach Russ Hellickson’s name, who would have been the logical person to whom allegations of abuse should have been reported, if they occurred.

Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller checked out the bona fides of the two accusers and found ample reason to doubt their integrity:

One accuser, Mike DiSabato, is also being accused of bullying the widow of a Marine over a memorial fund set up in her husband’s name.
DiSabato is also facing a defamation lawsuit.
The other accuser, Dunyasha Yetts, served prison time for a $1.8-million fraud scheme

Further tainting the charges is the involvement of Perkins Coie, which, as Paul Mirengoff of Powerline points out, is:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez alters her campaign bio to fudge ‘girl from the Bronx’ misrepresentation By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/alexandria_ocasiocortez_alters_her_campaign_bio_fudge_girl_from_the_bronx_misrepresentation.html

Now that she’s the “it girl” of the Democrats, who “represents the future of our party,” according to the party chair Tom Perez, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s biographical claims have come under scrutiny, and cannot withstand the sunshine. Most notoriously (for now!) her claim that she commuted 40 minutes from her home in the Bronx to school in Westchester doesn’t pass the smell test. Mark Lungariello, of her actual home town (not the Bronx) Rockland/Westchester Journal News, writes:

U.S. congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s online bio was tweaked days after she faced scrutiny over where she grew up. (snip)

Her bio was called into question by some conservatives after the victory because she lived and went to school in Westchester County, New York, which some critics charged contradicted her Bronx girl campaign narrative.

The bio previously stated, “She ended up attending public school 40 minutes north in Yorktown, and much of her life was defined by the 40-minute commute between school and her family in the Bronx.”

That sentence in the bio has since been changed, though it still doesn’t explicitly state that she moved out of the Bronx to Yorktown when she was 5 years old.

“She ended up attending public school in Yorktown, 40 minutes north of her birthplace,” it now states. “As a result, much of her early life was spent in transit between her tight-knit extended family in the Bronx & her daily student life.”

Face it: she lied. And she still is fudging the truth. “Tight-knit extended family” is a deceptive term meant to imply she lived in the Bronx when in fact she lived in upscale Westchester.

Would you buy a used biography from this woman?

Victor Davis Hanson: Never Trumpers Told Us Trump Would Be Liberal, He Wasn’t; No Alternative Agenda

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/07/06/victor_davis_hanson_never_trumpers_told_us_trump_would_be_liberal_he_wasnt_no_alternative_agenda.html

Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution is interviewed by FOX News’ Tucker Carlson on the lack of agenda from the left and how the anti-Trump faction was wrong about him.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Barack Obama got elected twice but he was an ungodly disaster for the Democratic party. They lost the supermajority, they lost the Senate, they lost the House, they lost 1,000 local state and local offices, they’re going to lose the Supreme Court. And they can’t come to grips with the fact that they control popular cultural — sports, universities, the media — but that turns into this type of street theater you referenced. It doesn’t transfer into actual political power and they’re very frustrated.

The Never Trumpers told us that Trump would be a moderate or a liberal. He wasn’t. The Heritage Foundation said he was more conservative in his first 2 years than Ronald Reagan. The left said he was going to implode or that the Mueller investigation, or impeachment, or the emoluments clause, or they were going to sue under the 25th Amendment. None of that happened. So Trump is almost 50% approval rating.

And the final thing is there’s no alternative agenda. We don’t know what your speaker, your guest, what do they feel about taxes? Do they want more government? More regulation? Less? Is the Iran deal good or bad? We don’t hear any of that. Instead, they fixate on somebody like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, kind of an obscure 28-year-old who won an election with 20% turnout and suddenly that’s a metaphor for a brave new world. So it’s a frustration that they don’t translate their cultural influence into raw political power.

‘Don’t You Dare Touch Roe!’ — Judicial Confirmation Silly Season Begins By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/supreme-court-unlikely-to-overturn-roe-v-wade/Roe probably won’t be overturned because it probably won’t come up; Casey is the center of abortion law nowadays.

It was my honor to befriend Judge Robert Bork in the last years of his life. Not surprisingly, I don’t find much amusement in the cesspool that judicial-confirmation politics has become since his name became a synonym for slander in 1987 — a debacle that changed history for the worse in more ways than the woodenly whimsical Anthony Kennedy’s assumption of what should have been the Bork seat.

Still, I admit to chuckling over the musings of Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a “moderate” Republican in the Kennedy mold. With the justice announcing his retirement after 30 years on the Court, a confirmation battle royale is shaping up over his successor, whom President Trump is expected to nominate on Monday. On cue, Senator Collins has let it be known that she would look askance at any nominee who has “demonstrated hostility [towards] and an eagerness to overturn Roe v. Wade.”

Go ahead and Roe, Roe, Roe your boat, Senator. Thanks to Justice Kennedy, we’ve actually been living in a Casey world — as in Planned Parenthood v. Casey — for the past quarter century. For good and for ill. “Don’t you dare touch Roe” is the political hyperbole of Democrats and their fellow travelers. It is not a serious legal position — as if serious legal positions had anything to do with confirmation politics.

Here is reality: Casey’s refinement of the right judicially manufactured in Roe granted expansive and expanding room to regulate abortion. The validity of those regulations, not the core holding of Roe, is what dominates abortion litigation nowadays. It is unlikely that cases will present a need to grapple with Roe, it is even less likely that Roe will be overturned, and even if this highly unlikely event were to come to pass, it would not render abortion illegal. Instead, abortion would once again be a question for the states, the vast majority of which would guarantee some degree of access to abortion. We are not going to move into a post-Roe era, but even if we did, no woman who could obtain an abortion today would be unable to get one post-Roe.