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January 2019

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The Times in the Gutter By Marilyn Penn

By on January 5th, 2019

http://politicalmavens.com/

There were two firsts in the NYT of Jan 5, 2019. One was the pronouncement by new congressperson Rashida Tlaib (D Mich) to her young son who congratulated her on her victory by saying, “Momma, look you won. Bullies don’t win” to which she responded, “Baby, they don’t. Because we’re going to go in there, and we’re going to impeach the motherf—er.” The other was the fact that the word was spelled out completely, something I had never seen in the Times. I googled to see whether that had happened before but came up short with references only to the Times’ squeamishness about printing the word and numerous examples of what permutations they used to avoid it.

Several thoughts occurred to me. Would they have done so if it was used to refer to Obama? to Lewis Farrakhan? Would they even have printed the “n” word to refer to those two? The answer to those questions is obvious – they would not have printed motherf—er in reference to anyone but the man who gets trashed in their pages every day. The picture that accompanies the article shows the congressperson smiling as she is sworn in to office with the American flag behind her and her young son in front of her – the boy looks like he is under 10. I don’t know any educated mothers who teach their children to refer to people with that word, especially not when it’s a person holding the highest office in our country. I hope that her son would be seriously reprimanded at school for referring to his teacher or principal that way; if this is the congressperson’s judgment when it comes to dealing with the son she loves, what might we expect when she must talk with adversaries?

Rashida was fortunate to have been born in this country of free speech and on occasion, to have been the recipient of government welfare to her family of 14 children while she was growing up. As a Muslim woman, she was able to go to college and Law School and be elected to the legislature of her state and her country. Regardless of how she feels about our current president, he has been duly elected and the least that can be expected from other elected officials is respect for the office of president, if not its occupant. The example that she sets for her children does not bode well for her civility in dealing with political antagonists, something borne out by the map in her office displaying the word Palestine where Israel is located.

The NYTimes regularly refers to the Trump rhetoric, blaming that for the increasing divisiveness in our country No Republican was ever quoted in the press of in the media referring to a Democrat president with that word and I can’t think of another politician who would refuse to apologize if their insult became front page news. Lately, people have resigned from both public and private sector jobs for less. Who would have guessed that a single 12 letter word printed in the newspaper of record could push the level of discourse to a new low – a debasement as damaging to our culture as the unrestrained person who was quoted.

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Is the Right Underestimating Ocasio-Cortez? In time, she could be a bigger rock star to the left than Obama in 2007. Mark Tapson

By on January 5th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272458/right-underestimating-ocasio-cortez-mark-tapson

The gaffe-prone new U.S. Representative for New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been an easy target for rightwing mockery thanks to her tenuous grasp of economics and the self-mythologizing of her youth on the Brooklyn streets (the daughter of an architect, she actually grew up mostly in an affluent town in Westchester County, New York). Conservatives are having great fun online with internet memes ridiculing the proud “Democratic Socialist” as a brainless fraud. But if those who dismiss her aren’t careful, it will be Ocasio-Cortez who has the last laugh.

A self-declared “radical,” Ocasio-Cortez wants to tax the wealthy as high as 70% to fund her climate change plan called the “Green New Deal.” She supports Medicare for all, tuition-free public college, the cancelation of all student loan debt, and housing as a federal right. Steeped in the oppressor/oppressed paradigm of identity politics, she is predictably pro-Black Lives Matter, anti-Israel, and wants to abolish ICE. She lacks both knowledge of and reverence for the U.S. Constitution. In other words, she checks off all the right boxes among a growing number of young Americans who find the idea of “democratic socialism” appealing, despite the fact that they can’t actually define it. It helps her enormously that new-Latina-on-the-block Ocasio-Cortez has a hip, youthful, multicultural appeal in a party burdened with doddering old white people like Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Hillary Clinton.

As Ocasio-Cortez was being sworn in to Congress on Thursday, a LiveLeak video featuring the rising star of the Democratic Party began going viral on Twitter after being shared by an anonymous account called, well, AnonymousQ1776. “Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is,” the tweet read. “High School video of ‘Sandy’ Ocasio-Cortez.”

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AOC: Shadow Speaker By Julie Kelly

By on January 5th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/04/aoc-shadow

To get a sense of how powerful freshman Congressmember (her preferred title) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is, just look at her effect on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Specifically, look at the difference between Pelosi’s inaugural speech in 2019 and her speech in 2007, when the California Democrat was elected the first female speaker in U.S. history.

Back then, Pelosi offered several tributes to American soldiers fighting in Iraq. We must honor our military, veterans and first responders as “the heroes that they are,” she graciously offered. That sentiment was met with a rousing standing ovation from both sides of the aisle. The question of climate change—then gaining attention as a key issue thanks to Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” released the year before—merited only one sentence.

But Pelosi’s message on Thursday was almost directly and proportionately reversed. After an obligatory shout-out to our troops and their families, Pelosi urged her colleagues to face “the existential crisis of our time, the climate crisis, a crisis manifested in natural disasters of epic proportions.” (A claim that is patently false, but unlikely to be scrutinized by the media’s biased fact-checkers.)

A new select committee on climate change would be convened, Pelosi announced, to “put an end to the inaction and denial of science that threaten the planet and the future.” The cure for the working class would be the creation of green jobs from sea to shining sea, she promised. Pelosi’s Democratic subjects rose to applaud her.

The military earned one other brief mention at the end of her speech, and the existential threat of Islamic terrorism officially was replaced by carbon dioxide emissions.

Even though the wealthy, septuagenarian from San Francisco now wields the speaker’s gavel, it is the bartender-turned-representative Millennial from the Bronx who possesses the power. Cortez essentially is this Congress’s shadow speaker, agitating the Democrats’ policy agenda and creating her own caucus of diverse, radical soulmates. Further, she is the poster girl for a left-lurching Democratic Party. Democrats now view socialism more positively than capitalism, according to an August 2018 poll and also want to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service as they impeach the president.

Ocasio-Cortez is earning the media attention and adoration other politicians can only dream of having. Hours before she was sworn-in on January 3, a cute video surfaced of Ocasio-Cortez dancing with friends in college—putting an “I’m just like you” face on her dangerous left-wing ideology. Her Twitter posts go viral immediately; other politicians now are trying to emulate her unpretentious approach on social media, such as when she whips up a quick dinner while talking about political issues to her 1.3 million Instagram followers. (In a cringe-worthy Instagram video this week, Senator Elizabeth Warren popped open a beer in her kitchen and chatted about her newly-formed presidential exploratory committee. Let’s just say it didn’t go over as her handlers had hoped.)

But Ocasio-Cortez is more than a pretty face with a devoted social media following. Armed with a hubris born out of inexperience and a leftist worldview born out of economic and historical ignorance, Ocasio-Cortez’s real charm is that she is unafraid to confront the old-guard leadership on Capitol Hill.

Her raison d’etre is human-caused climate change, the refuge of international socialists for the past three decades. Every means to dramatically alter the way people live—the mendacious objective of the Left—can be masqueraded as a noble desire to save the planet. Climate change largely was ignored by both Republican and Democratic candidates in 2016 and 2018; in fact, most climate-mitigation ballot proposals were defeated across the country in November. But thanks to Ocasio-Cortez’s aggressive activism—and hundreds of millions in political contributions flowing from billionaire environmentalists—it’s likely that issue will take center stage in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

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The Character That Matters By Roger Kimball

By on January 5th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/04/the-character

A few days ago, American Greatness published some thoughts of mine about Jonah Goldberg’s contention that “President Trump is not a man of good character” and that, consequently, his administration “will end poorly.”

“Character,” Jonah says, “is destiny.” Trump’s character is bad. Therefore his destiny is grim.

While acknowledging that the president is an imperfect man (but at whom can that criticism not be leveled?), I also defended Trump’s character. Quoting Cardinal Newman, I noted that character was a multifaceted attribute. A man, said Newman, “may be great in one aspect of his character, and little-minded in another. . . . A good man may make a bad king; profligates have been great statesmen, or magnanimous political leaders.” I believe President Trump has been astonishingly successful during his first two years. I believe further that his success is a testament to the strength of his character.

Jonah disagrees with me absolutely about Trump’s character and, in a more qualified way, about my assessment of Trump’s successes. I am pleased that his explanation of those disagreements provides me an opportunity to expand on and clarify a couple of points.

To start with a clarification. Jonah says that in my earlier column I seemed determined “to minimize, dispute, divert, and debunk the contention that Donald Trump is a person of bad character, while never actually denying it. The goal seems to be less to rebut my argument than to confuse the issue.”

I apologize for my lack of clarity. Let me rectify that by stating baldly I do believe Donald Trump is, in the ways that matter for a president, a man of good character.

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Trump Keeps Giving Mueller Reasons to Pursue the ‘Collusion’ Probe By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on January 5th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/politics-policy/The special counsel is going to keep digging until Trump stops this.

I t’s a new year with a new Congress, but it’s the same question: When is Special Counsel Robert Mueller going to file his much-anticipated final report?

My 2018 answer was: When he’s good and ready.

I have a caveat for 2019, though: Maybe when President Trump stops giving him additional reasons to keep digging.

Don’t get me wrong. I am reasonably confident that the bottom line will be that there is no criminal collusion case. That is, the original rationale for the investigation that the FBI commenced during the 2016 presidential campaign and that Mueller inherited in 2017 — pretextually opened as a counterintelligence investigation but conducted as a criminal investigation in search of a crime — is a dry hole: There was no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to commit cyber-espionage against Democratic email accounts. Putin did not “hack the election.” If there had been a collusion conspiracy, the indictments Mueller has filed would look very different; the potential witnesses would have pleaded guilty to a collusion conspiracy — and they’d be preparing to testify against the president, not being sentenced for lying to the FBI.

Unjustified Appointment
It also remains true that there was no justification for Mueller’s appointment. The FBI was formally conducting a counterintelligence investigation. In the Justice Department, counterintelligence investigations do not have a prosecutor assigned; the point is not to prosecute but to collect information about a foreign power. In counterintelligence, if the FBI needs assistance in getting surveillance warrants from the FISA court, lawyers in the Justice Department’s National Security Division handle that. There is no need for a prosecutor — not just for a special counsel but for any prosecutor at all — unless concrete evidence emerges that gives rise to good-faith suspicion that a crime has been committed.

Moreover, there is no need for a special counsel (a creature of federal regulation) in the absence of a conflict of interest with respect to the suspected crime — a conflict so profound that DOJ is ethically incapable of investigating the matter. Here, there was no crime and no conflict. The FBI, aided by DOJ’s National Security Division, could easily have conducted an aggressive investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — and were doing so before Mueller’s appointment, even after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself.

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Israel Replaced With Palestine on Rashida Tlaib’s Office Map By Tyler O’Neil

By on January 5th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/israel-replaced-with-palestine-on-rashida-tlaibs-office-map/

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a newly-minted Muslim congresswoman now infamous for calling President Donald Trump a “motherf**ker,” supports Palestine over Israel and now has a world map where Israel has been re-marked as “Palestine” with a sticky note.

Tlaib has not responded to multiple requests for comment on whether or not she approved the alteration and what it might mean. She has, however, celebrated with Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour, who has urged Muslims not to “humanize” Israelis.

“Someone has already made a slight alteration to the map that hangs in Rashida Tlaib’s new congressional office,” BuzzFeed reporter Hannah Allam tweeted Thursday, showing the map with a sticky note reading “Palestine.”

While the note was clearly intended as a replacement for the name of the Jewish state, it includes an arrow that points just barely north of Cairo, the capital of Egypt.

According to reports, Tlaib herself may not have posted the note. BuzzFeed’s Allam reported that a comedian in the crowd put up the sticky note, and Forward identified him as Palestinian-American comedian Mo Amer. Amer did not respond to PJ Media’s request for comment as to whether or not he had Tlaib’s permission.

Whether or not the sticky note remains, and whether or not Amer got permission, Tlaib opposes the two-state solution that would allow both Israel and Palestine to have separate governments. Instead, she supports a one-state solution with Palestine essentially subsuming Israel. She has also advocated for the withdrawal of all U.S. funds from the Jewish state.

She framed this withdrawal of funds as preventing “American foreign aid” from being “used to violate the human rights of people of any race, nation, or ethnicity.”

In fact, her support for the one-state solution is a minor scandal, since her early support for a two-state solution gained her the endorsement of J Street, a pro-Israel organization. She changed her position shortly after winning the Democratic primary, and faced no Republican opponent last November. CONTINUE AT SITE

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European Court of Human Rights Promotes Human Wrongs by Tommaso Virgili

By on January 5th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13376/european-court-human-wrongs

One might also wonder where, in the European Convention on Human Rights, “feelings” are mentioned. Following the court’s logic, would it be appropriate to cover the windows of steakhouses not to hurt the feelings of animal activists? Or only if they threatened to riot? Is the new ruling just a capitulation to extortionistic threats of violence?

The supposition seems to be, “If you had just kept quiet, these bad things (fill in the blank) would not be happening.” It is both a false premise — the “bad things” might have happened anyway, as they did, for example, when the Bataclan Theater in Paris or the Brussels airport were attacked — and it is a demand for enforced self-censorship. Moreover, who gets to decide who is accountable? Who watches the watchers?

How soon will the public be asked to stop other activities — drinking alcohol, men and women dancing together, ringing church bells, art that depicts the human image, separation of religion and state, and equal justice under the law for women, to name just a few — that also might hurt “religious feelings?”

Will the ECHR’s Grand Chamber — the only authority that could reverse the decision — correct this treacherous path?

October 26 marked a historic day for Ireland, where citizens, in a national referendum, overwhelmingly voted to repeal the country’s blasphemy law.

Blasphemy remains a serious offence in many parts of the world, in some Muslim countries even requiring the death penalty.

More astonishing is that even some European countries are criminalizing “defamation of religion”.

Recently, an actor was detained in Spain for failing to appear in court where he would face the accusation of “having insulted God and the Virgin Mary”.

The outcome of the Irish referendum will entail a modification of the Irish Constitution, which states in Article 40.6.1:

“The publication or utterance of blasphemous, seditious, or indecent matter is an offence which shall be punishable in accordance with law.”

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The New York Times Incentivizes Hamas Violence by Alan M. Dershowitz

By on January 5th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13498/the-new-york-times-incentivizes-hamas-violence

While Hamas is happy to boast openly about their fighters tearing at the border fences in Gaza and hiding behind civilians to evade Israeli soldiers—the New York Times makes no mention of this. Israeli soldiers are portrayed as faceless killing machines, without a single reference to the fire kites, terror tunnels, rockets or cross border explosive devices utilized by the Palestinians, or to the double war crime of Hamas targeting Israeli civilians by firing rockets from behind Palestinian civilians.

These Israeli civilians are not occupiers or usurpers. They live in Israel proper not in occupied or disputed territory. This area was built from scratch by Israelis on barren desert land and the Israelis have a right to be protected from fire bombs and mobs determined to breach the protective fence. How would other nations respond to such threats? Certainly not by treating these dangerous mobs as peaceful protestors merely exercising their freedom of speech and assembly.

The Times’s absurd conclusion that the shooter may have committed a “war crime,” ignores the law of war crimes.

Contrast what Israel does with how the Palestinians treat terrorists who willfully target and kill Jewish children, women and other civilians. The Palestinian Authority pays their families rewards – in effect bounties — for their willful acts of murder. Hamas promotes and lionizes terrorists who kill Jews. But you would not know any of that from reading the one-sided New York Times screed….All in all, it is a shockingly irresponsible report.

In the Sunday New York Times — the most widely read issue of the week — the lead story was about a young Israeli soldier whose bullet ricocheted off the ground and killed a young Palestinian medic who had admitted to being a human shield and who was videoed throwing a smoke bomb. The next day— in the less well-read Monday issue — the Times reported on the murder and torture committed at the hands Afghan troops affiliated with and trained by the American CIA. The piece opens with the troops shooting and burning an entire family including a three-year-old girl. The number of deaths associated with these units (who at times were mistaken for ISIS) could not be verified but accounts put them at hundreds in one month. Apparently, the Times’s editors believe that the Israeli story, involving one soldier who shot one Palestinian under questionable circumstances, deserves wider coverage than deliberate massacres perpetrated by Afghan troops trained by the CIA.

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New Muslim Congresswoman Vows to ‘Impeach the Motherf**ker!’ By Tyler O’Neil

By on January 4th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/video/new-muslim-congresswoman-vows-to-impeach-the-motherfker/

Newly minted Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) had been a congresswoman for mere hours before declaring her intention to impeach President Donald Trump using vulgar language.

“People love you and you win. And when your son looks at you and says, ‘Momma, look you won. Bullies don’t win.’ And I said, ‘baby they don’t,'” Tlaib told a crowd Thursday night. “Because we’re going to go in there and impeach the motherf**ker!”

Video of the vulgar declaration drew a great deal of attention on Twitter.

.@RashidaTlaib saying it louder for the people in the back!! ???#116thCongress pic.twitter.com/VeUq0GwI5E
— UndocuNestor (@_NestorRuiz) January 4, 2019

This is far from the first time she has called for Trump’s impeachment. One of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, Tlaib had pledged to impeach Trump during the election. She published an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press urging impeachment on Thursday. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ZOA: NY Times’ Bret Stephens Wrong – Pres. Trump Has Been Good for Israel Daniel Mandel

By on January 4th, 2019

https://zoa.org/2019/01/10383901-zoa-ny-times-bret-stephens-wrong-pres-trump-ha

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has criticized New York Times columnist Bret Stephen’s latest column condemning the Trump Administration as being bad for Israel. ZOA National President Morton A. Klein and Director of the ZOA’s Center for Middle East Policy Dr. Daniel Mandel have issued the following statement in response:

“The ZOA believes that the Trump Administration’s record in this regard is remarkably good and refutes Mr. Stephens’ charge. Indeed, Mr. Stephens himself admits that, ‘I write this as someone who supported Trump moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and who praised his decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal as courageous and correct.’
Mr. Stephens failed to note that the Trump Administration has done far more in the way of being pro-Israel than merely moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, taking numerous steps, both symbolic and substantive, many of which President Obama refused to do or about which he did the opposite.

“So, if President Trump has executed these two steps, both of which Mr. Stephens agrees are pro-Israel, what then are Mr. Stephens’ charges?

“Basically, that moving the embassy is ‘mostly a matter of symbolism’ and thus, presumably, not all that important; and that the withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal makes things only ‘marginally’ better for Israel.

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