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January 2019

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Gender, Likability and Opportunity Are reporters too busy telling tales about female politicians to notice female non-politicians? By James Freeman

By on January 7th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gender-likability-and-opportunity-1154688864

Did you notice Friday’s news that the American jobs boom is proving especially beneficial to U.S. females? For some reason media folk seem focused only on two particular job seekers who tend to look for work in Washington, D.C.

Nationwide, conditions are highly encouraging. “Women have been driving this year’s improvements in labor force participation,” notes the Journal’s Lev Borodovsky. “Participation among women aged 25-34 years hit a multi-year high.”

Whether young or old, U.S. women are not just entering the labor market; they are gaining jobs. In the last 12 months, the number of employed U.S. women age 20 years and older has increased by more than 1.6 million, according to the Department of Labor’s household survey.

Labor’s separate establishment survey of employers shows more good news for female job seekers, with women rising as a percentage of the U.S. workforce. At the margin, as America approached the end of year two of the Trump era, it appears the U.S. economy was becoming more hospitable to women relative to men. This doesn’t easily fit into the popular media narrative about our times, so it may soon be lost in a flood of politicized analysis.

Money isn’t everything and not every new job represents a happy story. Some new hires are working by necessity more than by choice. But the overall picture is one of expanding opportunity and the robust job market for women surely exerts a positive impact on many more lives than most politicians will.

Though the latest economic news is particularly good for the gals, the guys also have a lot to celebrate given what can only be considered a blowout month of job creation and rising wages. Outside of government, both sexes seem to be waging a war on the post-2008 new normal.

But of course it’s what happens inside government that fascinates most of the press corps. Therefore many reporters have lately been most concerned about the opportunities available to two particular members of the U.S. labor force who, respectively, attended Yale’s law school and taught at Harvard’s.

Despite their expensive skills, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) are, in a popular media telling, not well liked because of sexism. Annie Linskey and David Weigel recently wrote in the Washington Post:

Just hours after Elizabeth Warren announced her plans to run for president, a question began surfacing about a possible weakness. It wasn’t derived from opposition research into some facet of her life. It had nothing to do with her policy ideas.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Gamble of Israel’s ‘New Right’ BY: David Isaac

By on January 7th, 2019

https://freebeacon.com/blog/the-gamble-of-israels-new-right/

“Boom!” read the headline of a supplement in Israeli weekly Makor Rishon, after two leading politicians, Education Minister Naftali Bennett and Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, announced on December 29 that they were jumping ship from the Jewish Home Party to create the New Right Party. The question Israeli pundits are trying to answer now is whether that boom—or “blast” as most of the press characterizes it—is an explosion or an implosion. Will it strengthen the national camp or will it bring it to its knees?

The ruling Likud Party wasted little time in slamming the New Right as a threat to the entire right. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “It will break the right into slivers of slivers. Parties won’t make it past the electoral threshold.” Netanyahu referred to the 3.25 percent of the vote a party must win in order to enter the Knesset. Passing that threshold gives a party four seats. Failing to pass means the loss of all the votes that had gone to that party.

Netanyahu counts on those slivers to build his government. In Israel’s parliamentary system, a government must have a majority of at least 61 votes in the 120-seat Knesset. How does Likud fare in the polls? Much better than the others, but still with only 30 seats.

Netanyahu has repeatedly raised the specter of 1992, when a plethora of right-wing parties caused two of them to fail to make it into the Knesset, wasting their votes. The result was a Labor government led by Yitzhak Rabin, which brought about the Oslo Accords, long viewed as a disaster by the right. (It’s a view now held by most of Israel’s electorate, judging from the fact that no party outside of the extreme Meretz wants to be identified with it.)

Likud fears are more than mere scare-mongering. Polls place two to three right-wing parties perilously close to the abyss, and some analysts estimate that even the loss of one right-wing party is enough to hand the reins of government to a center-left coalition.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

New ISIS Threat Tells Jihadists to Bomb Electrical Infrastructure By Bridget Johnson

By on January 7th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/new-isis-threat-tells-jihadists-to-bomb-electrical-infrastructure/

A new online threat from ISIS supporters encourages jihadists to target critical infrastructure, with the suggestion of bombing power stations.

The image shows a faceless figure in a black hoodie with the Islamic State flag holding a bomb with a lit fuse with transmission towers and lines in the background. Along the power lines is the phrase “Just Terror” — the ISIS slogan for lone jihadist operations — and blood-spattered ground.

The poster directs jihadists to “make a surprise for the Crusaders.”

The infrastructure threat is uncommon in ISIS propaganda, which has focused more on knife, vehicle or gun attacks in crowded areas such as festivals or music venues. Suggested targets have ranged from well-fortified locations, such as the U.S. Capitol or UN Security Council, to soft targets with little symbolic significance.

At the end of last month, another ISIS-allied media group encouraged jihadists to “kill the infidels in ways which no one else ever used” including “electricity” among methods such as snakes, poison gas, poisoned arrows, and wild animals.

A December report from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, a panel established by President Bush after the 9/11 attacks composed of industry executives along with state and local government officials, warned that “increasing threats — whether severe natural disasters, cyber-physical attacks, electromagnetic events, or some combination — present new challenges for protecting the national power grid and recovering quickly from a catastrophic power outage.”

The report also noted that America’s foes could take advantage of chaos after a natural disaster to attack energy systems. Attacks on critical infrastructure could also be a combination of cyber attack and physical attack, further complicating the response and expanding the damage.

“The United States should respond to this problem in two overarching ways: 1) design a national approach to prepare for, respond to, and recover from catastrophic power outages that provides the federal guidance, resources, and incentives needed to take action across all levels of government and industry and down to communities and individuals; and 2) improve our understanding of how cascading failures across critical infrastructure will affect restoration and survival,” the panel said, requesting the National Security Council join with lead agencies to prepare a report on steps being taken to address the threat. CONTINUE AT SITE

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

President Trump Calls for America to Recruit ‘the Smartest People in the World’ By David P. Goldman

By on January 7th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/president-trump-calls-for-america-to-recruit-the-smartest-people-in-the-world/

Not a word appeared in the mainstream media about President Trump’s call for more legal immigrants to build America’s talent pool. The liberal media is so anxious to portray the president as a jingoist xenophobe that it ignored a key policy statement on immigration. Trump declared in his Jan. 4 press conference on the government shutdown that the U.S. should convince the hundreds of thousands of foreign students who attend our universities to stay here and contribute to the U.S. economy. He’s been listening to U.S. tech companies, who need the talent. And he’s exactly right:

At the same time, [people] can apply to come into our country legally, like so many people have done. And we need people, Major. We have to have people. Because we have all these companies coming in. We need great people. But we want them to come in on a merit basis, and they have to come in on a merit basis. They can’t come in the way they’ve been coming in for years.

I get calls from the great tech companies, and they’re saying we don’t allow people at the top of their class, at the best schools in the country, we don’t allow them to stay in our country. So they end up going back to China and Japan and so many other countries all over the world, and we don’t keep them. They get educated at our finest schools, and then we don’t allow them, through a various set of circumstances, to have any guarantees of staying. So we lose out on great minds. We can’t do that.

We have companies that, if we don’t change that — and we’re working on that, and we discussed that with the Democrats, and I think they agree. We’re working on that. But we don’t want to lose our great companies because we have a ridiculous policy that we won’t accept smart people. So, call it politically correct or not, but we have to let these great, brilliant companies have the smartest people in the world.

Only 7% of U.S. undergraduates major in engineering, compared to a third in China. Russia, with roughly a third of our population, graduates as many engineers. We need more opportunities in STEM for Americans. We should subsidize engineers, mathematicians, and scientists and starve the resentment-studies programs that pollute American universities. To train more engineers and scientists, though, we would have to recruit more teachers from overseas, as Edward Dougherty, distinguished professor of engineering at Texas A&M University, explained in a recent essay in Asia Times. CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Marco Rubio Blasts Rashida Tlaib’s Dual Loyalty Suggestion: ‘Typical Anti-Semitic Line’ By Debra Heine

By on January 7th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/marco-rubio-blasts-rashida-tlaibs-dual-loyality-suggestion-typical-anti-semitic-line/
Freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) is certainly making an impression in her first few days in the House of Representatives. Last week, she distinguished herself by vowing to “impeach the motherf***er,” referring to President Donald Trump at a MoveOn.org event in Washington, D.C. hours after being sworn into office. She also created a stir last week when one of her friends replaced Israel with a Post-It note that says “Palestine” on a map in Tlaib’s congressional office.

Tlaib stepped in it again over the weekend when she suggested in a tweet that several U.S. senators have dual loyalties to both the United States and Israel.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and the American Jewish Committee on Monday pushed back at Tlaib, decrying her statement as “outrageous” and “anti-Semitic.”

Rubio, along with Senator James Risch (R-Idaho), last week reintroduced pro-Israel legislation that did not get passed in the last Congress. The Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019 combines several Middle East-related items into a single bill, including Syria withdrawal and financial aid to Israel.

One section of the bill, called Combating BDS Act of 2019, would protect states that penalize Israel boycotters. According to Rubio, Democrat leaders are trying to avoid a vote on his bill because it would expose how many Democrat BDS supporters are now in the Senate.

The bill empowers “state and local governments in the United States to counter the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement’s discriminatory economic warfare against the Jewish state,” a press release on Senator Rubio’s website says.

“They forgot what country they represent,” Tlaib, a Palestinian American, wrote on Twitter Sunday. “This is the U.S. where boycotting is a right & part of our historical fight for freedom & equality.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trade Talks with China Begin amid Naval Spat By Mairead McArdle

By on January 7th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/china-trade-talks-begin-amid-naval-spat/

China urged the U.S. on Monday to provide a good atmosphere for trade talks, even as it made “stern complaints” about an American warship sighted in what it claims are Chinese waters.

The U.S.S. McCampbell, a guided-missile destroyer, ventured near the disputed Paracel Islands in the South China Sea on a “freedom of navigation” mission, intended to “challenge excessive maritime claims,” the Pacific Fleet said.

The spat comes just as representatives from China and the U.S. meet for trade negotiations Monday and Tuesday, addressing U.S. allegations that China steals technology information.

“The two sides both have responsibility to create necessary and good atmosphere to this end,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said. “As for whether this move has any impact to the ongoing China-U.S. trade consultations . . . to properly resolve existing issues of all kinds between China and the U.S. is good for the two countries and the world.”

Last year, President Trump imposed duties as large as 25 percent on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods, leading China to respond by levying duties on $110 billion in U.S. goods. On December 1, the two economies agreed tentatively not to raise tariffs further.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Dem. Rep. Denies Responsibility for Mistakenly Labeling Girl’s Murder ‘Hate Crime’ By Jack Crowe

By on January 7th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/representative-sheila-jackson-lee-denies-responsibility-for-mistakenly-labeling-girls-murder-hate-crime/

Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D., Texas) refused to take responsibility Sunday for labeling the murder of a seven-year-old African-American girl a “hate crime” before sufficient evidence materialized to support the claim.

Jackson Lee, who encouraged the public to treat Jazmine Barnes’s murder as a hate crime during a rally days after her death, claimed Sunday that her earlier statements, made before the police arrested and charged an African-American man with the murder, were not irresponsible.

While addressing a crowd of hundreds gathered near the Houston, Texas street where Barnes was shot and killed on December 30, Jackson Lee urged her audience to call the murder a hate crime, citing eyewitness accounts that suggested a white man was responsible.

“Do not be afraid to call this what it seems to be — a hate crime,” Jackson Lee said.

On Sunday, Houston Police arrested and charged Eric Black, a 20-year-old African-American man, with the killing. Asked at a news conference Sunday afternoon whether her initial characterization of the murder as a hate crime was irresponsible, Jackson Lee responded, “absolutely not.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joe diGenova: ‘Cardinal’ James Comey — The man who destroyed the FBI

By on January 7th, 2019

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/joe-digenova-cardinal-james-comey-the-man-who-destroyed-the-fbi

Wyatt Earp. Elliot Ness. J. Edgar Hoover. Inspector Clouseau. James Comey. The names reflect a continuum of greatness to farce and mediocrity. In the annals of U.S. law enforcement, no individual has reached the depths of disgrace as James “Cardinal” Comey.

The “Cardinal” was a sobriquet FBI agents used to denigrate their leader. As Deputy Attorney General, he was called “drama queen.” Known for his pomposity and self-regard, Comey cut a swath of arrogance unknown in either of those illustrious organizations. He was the cult of personality. He surrounded himself with sycophants, people dedicated to his promotion and their advancement. The Bureau and the public became the losers.

James Comey politicized the FBI, America’s premier law enforcement agency. It started on July 6, 2016, when he usurped the authority of Attorney General Loretta Lynch in violation of the Constitution, the law and DOJ regulations.

He destroyed Hillary’s campaign when he unethically and unprofessionally described her conduct with pejorative words such as “criminal” and then illegally exonerated her of the crimes.

President Obama should have fired him that day. But he did not. Why? Perhaps because he had knowledge of Hillary’s avoidance of any protected email channels because he communicated with her on her private server using a pseudonym.

Comey is a poseur. He pretends to be Thomas Becket but he is, in fact, the assassin, Henry II. He claims in his memos he doesn’t do sneaky things, leak or do weasely things. Yet in his interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier he pretended not to know what a leak is.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump to deliver prime-time address, travel to Southern border amid shutdown standoff

By on January 7th, 2019

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-to-t

President Trump announced that he will address the nation on Tuesday night before traveling later in the week to the U.S.-Mexico border, as he seeks to highlight border security and presses Democrats for wall funding amid the protracted standoff that triggered a partial government shutdown now stretching into its 17th day.

“I am pleased to inform you that I will Address the Nation on the Humanitarian and National Security crisis on our Southern Border. Tuesday night at 9:00 P.M. Eastern,” Trump tweeted on Monday.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Health of Nations By J. D. Vance

By on January 7th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/tucker-carlson-health-of-nations-markets/

Conservatives should heed Tucker Carlson’s advice. We shouldn’t assume that what is good for markets is good for all of us.

Tucker Carlson’s monologue heard round the world is interesting on its own terms. In it, he argues against a conservatism that consistently prizes commercial interests above those of everyone else. I encourage you to watch or read it in full. Yet the response on the right is as interesting as Carlson’s monologue itself, for it reveals a discomfort among some conservatives for balancing the tensions that exist in our coalition and in our ideology.

There is, by many on the right, an effort to sing the praises of market capitalism without acknowledging the tensions between our pro-market principles and everything else. I respect Ben Shapiro a great deal, but I found this paragraph in his response to Carlson curious:

Supply and demand economics has powered most of the world’s human beings out of extreme poverty, and led to the richest society in human history. It has allowed us to live longer, in bigger houses, in more comfort. It has meant fewer dead children and more living parents. If we’ve blown that advantage, that’s our own fault. Traditional conservatives recognized that the role of economics is to provide prosperity — to raise the GDP. The role of a social fabric and a value system is to provide meaning.

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