Displaying posts published in

May 2019

Pelosi’s Pre-Emptive Smear The Speaker is worried about what Bill Barr might reveal about 2016.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosis-pre-emptive-smear-11556838611

Doing her best to raise the level of civility in Washington, Nancy Pelosi called William Barr a liar on Thursday. The House Speaker even accused the Attorney General of committing a “crime” when he testified to Congress about a memo he issued outlining the main conclusions of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

The Speaker says the AG lied last month when he said he didn’t know what members of the special counsel’s team were referencing when they complained his memo didn’t accurately portray their findings. Mr. Barr said he didn’t know but that “they probably wanted more put out.” At most this is a small evasion. Mr. Barr had talked to Mr. Mueller, who had told him nothing in the AG’s summary was inaccurate and was unspecific in his objections beyond wanting more of his report released. The AG should have anticipated that Mr. Mueller’s March 27 letter to him would leak, but he didn’t lie about its contents.

The real reason for Mrs. Pelosi’s slander is what else Mr. Barr said the last time he was before Congress. He said that spying on a political campaign was a “big deal,” that he thought the FBI did spy on the Trump campaign in 2016, and that he intends to find out what happened and why. Democrats want to intimidate him to drop this or discredit him before he can release his findings.

WHAT AMAZON KNOWS ABOUT YOU

https://www.axios.com/what-amazon-knows-about-you-2df28404-b975-4bc8-b2da-ac702e601cf8.html

Depending on how much you shop, watch and read with Amazon, the e-commerce behemoth may know more about you than any other company on earth.

The big picture: Naturally, they know what you’ve browsed or bought on their main service. They also know what you’ve asked Alexa, watched on Prime, and read on your Kindle. They know even more thanks to their ownership of Whole Foods, Ring, Eero, Twitch, Goodreads, IMDB and Audible.

Details: As with Google or Facebook, what Amazon knows depend on how much you rely on its services. That said, these days Amazon’s services are all around us. Here are some of the different types of information gathered by various Amazon services.

Amazon.com: Everything you have bought, plus the things you have just put in your cart, or searched for, or added to a wish list, or just browsed on Amazon (and Amazon-owned sites like Zappos and Diapers.com). And they know all of your addresses and the names and addresses of anyone you’ve ever sent stuff to.
Kindle (digital books) and Audible (audio books): All the books you’ve read, plus how far into the book you got. Amazon also knows which books you have browsed or sampled, and what passages you’ve highlighted in Kindle.
Fire tablets: Amazon’s tablets run a custom version of Android, providing the company with lots of data since it, not Google, powers the browsing and app store on the devices. For search, users have a choice of Bing, Yahoo, Google or DuckDuckGo.
Prime Video (streaming video): What you’ve watched, browsed and search for.

Obama-Era Spying Is Now a Political Risk for Biden . By Charles Lipson

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/05/02/obama-era_spying_is_now_a_political_risk_for_biden_140226.html

It’s been a very good week for Joe Biden. The former senator and vice president is the clear frontrunner in a crowded Democratic field for 2020. His poll ratings and campaign fundraising surged after he announced his presidential run last week.

One of Biden’s biggest assets is his close association with Barack Obama. He may not have the former president’s endorsement yet (Biden says, unconvincingly, that he didn’t want it), but Joe knows how popular Obama still is and how much his candidacy benefits from that reflected glow. Expect him to talk a lot about the Obama-Biden years.

Anything that undermines the 44th president’s legacy hurts all Democrats, and Biden most of all. That’s the danger posed by Attorney General Bill Barr’s commitment to investigate how the massive, prolonged investigation into “Trump-Russia collusion” began, whether it was conducted properly, and how information from it was illegally leaked to the media.

Right from Wrong: No wonder antisemites hate us Jews cannot escape targeted hatred by changing their address. By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-Wrong-No-wonder-antisemites-hate-us-588552

It was horrifically fitting that Israel marked Holocaust Remembrance Day mere days after a crazed Jew-hater went on a shooting spree at the Chabad of Poway synagogue in San Diego, killing 60-year-old Lori Gilbert Kaye and costing Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, 57, his index finger. In an additional tragic twist, the two other congregants who miraculously survived with shrapnel injuries were 34-year-old Israeli Almog Peretz and his eight-year-old niece, Noya, whose parents fled incessant Hamas rocket fire in their hometown of Sderot to live in the United States. You know, for a little peace and quiet, away from blood-thirsty terrorists trying to murder them for being Jews. That was eight years ago.

Sadly for the Dahan family, the synagogue attack was not their first brush with antisemitism in America. In 2012, their house in Sunny southern California was spray-painted with a swastika.

This unfortunate but age-old fact hit home again hard in two new reports, one by the Anti-Defamation League, and the other by Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry in conjunction with the European Jewish Congress, or EJC. According to the ADL report, which was released on Tuesday, “The US Jewish community experienced near-historic levels of antisemitism in 2018, including a doubling of antisemitic assaults and the single deadliest attack [the Tree of Life Synagogue slaughter in Pittsburgh] against the Jewish community in American history.”

My Problem With Yom HaShoah…Holocaust Memorial Day by Gerald A. Honigman

May 1, 2019 was Holocaust Memorial Day, this year–Yom HaShoah.
I’ve attended most commemorations over the years and thus obviously agree that it’s good to have a day set aside for remembering the Holocaust.

Indeed, I’ve worked most of my life trying to see to it that “Never Again” will be a truism forever by defending Israel, its right to thrive–not just survive–in relatively secure, far more defensible, real borders than those imposed upon the reborn Jewish State by the United Nations armistice lines in 1949. Those made Israel smaller in width (9-15 miles) at its strategic waist than the size of some Texas driveways–at least according to President George W. Bush. I’ve also fought for relative justice for all peoples, Jew and non-Jew alike, with my pen, via other media, and additional means of communication and education for over half century now.

This year, however, I did not attend.

In honesty, however, there was another reason, eating away at me for quite some time, for my hesitancy to join once again in this annual public display of sympathy for dead Jews.

Westernization of Arab demography Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

https://bit.ly/2VBub5l

“The fertility declines recorded in the Arab world over the past 30 years (1988-2018) have been profound, even revolutionary…The Arab world is in the midst of one of the most dramatic fertility declines in world history….From among the highest to among the lowest [fertility levels] in the world…without major economic development or strong family planning programs….” (Prof. Marcia Inhorn, Yale University, Spring/Summer 2018 issue of The Brown Journal of World Affairs).

This dramatic transformation of Arab/Islamic demography was also documented by American Enterprise Institute’s Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt.

In 2019 – in defiance of conventional wisdom and the demographic establishment – the Westernized Arab fertility, throughout the Middle East, is a byproduct of a dramatic transformation of Arab society:

(a) A radical shift from rural (farming) to urban society has drastically reduced Arab families’ need for manpower, resulting in a much smaller nuclear family.