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July 2019

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ROD LIDDLE ON ANTI-SEMITISM IN 2018

By on July 6th, 2019

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/
Roderick E. Liddle is an English journalist, and an associate editor of The Spectator.

‘This new rise in antisemitism, which I had thought long dead, was not shaven-headed white imbeciles from the far right. It was Muslims, a large chunk of it…. Suddenly I grasped that the British far left didn’t want people to know about antisemitism because it pointed the finger at people they really, really liked. From that moment on, it all fell into place…. Time and again the same tropes emerged, the same sort of stuff that Streicher and Goebbels would have commended – and uttered…. And from that a whole bunch of other stuff emerged: the old blood libel business (a favourite of the repulsive Jenny Tonge)….

Nice, avuncular, Jeremy Corbyn, with his peace badges, happily laying a wreath at the graveside of Palestinian terrorists who murdered innocent Jewish athletes, oh, and much much more…. It is the same antisemitism, exactly the same: the obsession with Israel to the exclusion of everything else, the conspiracy theory paranoias, the derangement…. Here’s the test – if you cannot see the flagrant racism in the BDS movement, and if you are obsessed with the perfidy of the Middle East’s only democracy to the exclusion of all else, you are an antisemite. That means a good proportion of the Labour Party, including the leader, and almost all of Momentum: no brown shirts, no marching bands, but the same old filth, dressed in the clothes of a polytechnic geography lecturer.’
Rod Liddle (2018)

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Russian Oligarch Scoffed at FBI’s Collusion Theory By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on July 6th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/oleg-deripaska-fbi-russia-collusion-theory/

Oleg Deripaska did not exculpate Paul Manafort, but he raises more questions about Christopher Steele.

John Solomon is a terrific reporter, and he has done excellent work on the Trump-Russia investigation. Nevertheless, legal analysis is not his specialty. That is evident in his otherwise intriguing report at The Hill about Oleg Deripaska’s dealings with the FBI.

Deripaska is an aluminum magnate who is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s oligarch” thanks to his close relationship with the Russian strongman. He was also Paul Manafort’s business partner.

Manafort, of course, was Donald Trump’s campaign chairman for about four months in mid 2016. He has paid dearly for entering Trump World.

In 2014, an investigation of Manafort’s work for the deposed Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych was closed. Manafort joined the Trump campaign in early 2016. The FBI and the Obama Justice Department reopened the Manafort case, helped along by pro-Clinton officials in Ukraine’s government. In August 2016, the latter leaked a ledger of questionable provenance, purporting to show over $12 million in cash payments to Manafort. The leak of the ledger led to Manafort’s dismissal from the Trump campaign. He was eventually indicted and convicted in the Mueller investigation for tax evasion and other financial-fraud charges. He is serving a 90-month prison sentence. (Manafort has never denied being paid by Yanukovych and his Party of Regions; he has maintained that he was paid by wire, not in cash. As Solomon has reported, the current Ukrainian government does not vouch for the authenticity of the ledger.)

Deripaska has credibly accused Manafort of swindling him in connection with an investment in a grossly overvalued Ukrainian telecom firm. He has sued the political consultant in various jurisdictions for over $25 million.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Grandstanding at the Border Democrats finally admit there’s a problem. How about helping to solve it?

By on July 6th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/grandstanding-at-the-border-11562367921

Ironic good news in the immigration wars: Democrats are finally admitting there’s a crisis at the southern U.S. border, judging by their visits the last two weeks with reporters and TV cameras in tow. Now will they help to stop it?

Nearly every presidential candidate has posed for a border photo op, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as always took it to the limit by claiming migrants were forced to drink from toilets and the U.S. is now heading toward fascism. There’s no confirming evidence about the toilet charge, and the Congresswoman has no standing to complain after she voted against the funding bill last week to get more humanitarian money to the border.

***

And, by the way, where has she been? The “breaking point has arrived this week at our border,” then commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Kevin McAleenan warned way back on March 27. “CBP is facing an unprecedented humanitarian and border security crisis all along our Southwest border.”

He was ignored. But suddenly Democrats and their media friends are flogging a pair of new inspector general reports, including one on May 30 that documents the “dangerous overcrowding” at a border control station in El Paso. It describes how one “cell with a maximum capacity of 35 held 155 detainees,” and how migrants were “standing on toilets in the cells to make room and gain breathing space.”

At a CBP facility in the Rio Grande Valley, says a July 2 IG report, “some single adults were held in standing room only conditions for a week.” Some migrants were desperate enough to clog the “toilets with Mylar blankets and socks in order to be released from their cells during maintenance.”

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IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How to Put Citizenship Back in the Census The 14th Amendment gives the Trump administration the justification it needs. By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Gilson B. Gray

By on July 6th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-put-citizenship-back-in-the-census-11562264430

The Trump administration said Wednesday it will attempt to add a citizenship question on the 2020 census while complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Department of Commerce v. New York. Five justices held that the Census Act allows the question, but a separate five-justice majority found the rulemaking that added the question was procedurally deficient. There is a way forward. The Constitution itself requires the collection of citizenship information.

Section 2 of the 14th Amendment provides that if a state denies the franchise to anyone eligible to vote, its allotment of House seats shall be “reduced in the proportion which the number of such . . . citizens shall bear to the whole number of . . . citizens . . . in such state.” This language is absolute and mandatory. Compliance is impossible without counting how many citizens live in each state.

The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, and this provision meant to secure the voting rights of newly freed slaves. But it wasn’t limited to that purpose. An earlier version of Section 2, introduced in 1865, specifically referred to limits on suffrage based on “race or color,” but the Senate rejected that limitation. The amendment forbids state interference with the rights of all eligible voters (then limited to males over 21).

Section 2 also applies to every state, a point Rep. John Bingham, the amendment’s principal drafter, emphasized during the floor debate: “The second section . . . simply provides for the equalization of representation among all the States in the Union, North, South, East, and West. It makes no discrimination.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Cultural Casualties of Life in the Fast Lane Patrick Morgan

By on July 6th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/07

Milan Kundera observed in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

In times when history moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip … No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.

The present time and the public realm have upended the past and the private. Give us this day our daily drama of the news cycle. Life on the iPad, Google, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter take up a good deal of each day, not to mention reading newspapers, watching television and answering the day’s emails, letters and recorded messages. Longer-term projects are postponed in the face of pressing, but passing, matter. (On the positive side, the internet provides an enormous library at our instant disposal.) You may get a lot of “likes”, but this merely reinforces your own views at the expense of more challenging inputs. T.S. Eliot said he didn’t read the newspapers because they were too exciting. We become vicarious actors, expert media sleuths in a continuing global drama, fulfilled by being in touch with vital contemporary currents. The spheres of our inner world and the world conversation happily align. The personal moves to the public sphere.

The ancients juggled carpe diem (living for the day) with vanitas vanitatum (the futility of human endeavour), but for us it’s a no-brainer. In the past, delayed gratification and instinctual renunciation were the ways to achieve long-term goals, but large swathes of our culture have settled for hedonism, stroking of the ego, and instant entertainment. The Bible taught the Jewish and Christian peoples there was nothing new under the sun, but since the 1960s we have been propelled by the shock of the new. This has come about because a unidirectional tendency has overtaken contemporary thought, moving discussion into ever narrower channels and towards the present. Unlikely notions, sometimes originating in the academies, filter down to the media where they are given wider credence by public opinion-formers who act as gatekeepers to the wider community. A sign of coming times was the fad of brainstorming which threw people with limited knowledge together in a room, and provided a wonderful impression that something was going to eventuate, but was futile, as the process lacked any shared pool of information and any criteria of judgment. Ideas don’t appear out of nothing.

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

US and Iran: What is NOT a Smart Policy by Majid Rafizadeh

By on July 6th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14498/trump-iran-policy

Rooting for President Trump to fail in his policy with Iran means calling for empowering and emboldening a theocratic regime that has consistently threatened “Death to America” — with nukes, presumably, if it had the capability, which it is busy acquiring.

The core revolutionary pillars of this Iranian government are anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. This country, which some people say they would like to see prevail over President Trump, has also been named, several times, the leading executioner of children. It has killed thousands of Americans, including in the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, and has committed — and continues to commit — the most unspeakable human rights abuses, including flogging and executing minors….That documentation is just a limited accounting of the horrors it has committed; the list goes on.

During President Obama’s eight-year administration, Obama and Kerry made unprecedented concessions, fully respected the Iranian leaders, lifted sanctions, offered them a fast-track to legitimate deliverable nuclear capability and showered the regime with $150 billion — all in an attempt to appease the ruling mullahs. How did that turn out?

Iran gained legitimacy, directed the billions of dollars to Iran’s military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as Iran’s militias and terror groups, and, through its proxies, has been deepening its foothold in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and strengthening its hold on Hezbollah in Lebanon, Venezuela and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

There are policy analysts, scholars or politicians I have come across who say, “I hope Trump fails.” One area particularly focused on is the president’s policy on Iran. The statement “I hope Trump fails,” however, is not a sound strategy.

Those who hold this view would apparently rather see the country fail than see President Trump do well. Rooting for President Trump to fail in his policy with Iran means calling for empowering and emboldening a theocratic regime that has consistently threatened “Death to America” — with nukes, presumably, if it had the capability, which it is busy acquiring.

The core revolutionary pillars of this Iranian government are anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. This country, which some people say they would like to see prevail over President Trump, has also been named, several times, the leading executioner of children. It has killed thousands of Americans, including in the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, and has committed — and continues to commit — the most unspeakable human rights abuses, including flogging and executing minors.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

More Independence Day celebrations: June jobs report up, up, and up! By Ethel C. Fenig

By on July 6th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/07/more_independence_day_celebrations_june_jobs_report_up_up_and_up.html

President Donald J. Trump (R)’s Independence Day celebrations honoring the freedoms of America continued Friday morning as the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its June 2019 jobs report.  It was a definite cause for celebration…but not for Democrats, who strive to keep people dependent on a government ruled by Democrats in secure jobs.  

In dry bureaucratese, the BLS stated:

THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION — JUNE 2019

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 224,000 in June, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 3.7 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Notable job gains occurred in professional and business services, in health care, and in transportation and warehousing. …

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rates for adult men (3.3 percent), adult women (3.3 percent), teenagers (12.7 percent), Whites (3.3 percent), Blacks (6.0 percent), Asians (2.1 percent), and Hispanics (4.3 percent) showed little or no change in June. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)

The number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was little changed at 1.4 million in June and accounted for 23.7 percent of the unemployed. (See table A-12.)

The labor force participation rate, at 62.9 percent, was little changed over the month and unchanged over the year.  In June, the employment- population ratio was 60.6 percent for the fourth month in a row. (See table A-1.) …

Construction employment continued to trend up in June (+21,000), in line with its average monthly gain over the prior 12 months.

Manufacturing employment edged up in June (+17,000), following 4 months of little change.  So far this year, job growth in the industry has averaged 8,000 per month, compared with an average of 22,000 per month in 2018. In June, employment rose in computer and electronic products (+7,000) and in plastics and rubber products (+4,000).

Employment in other major industries, including mining, wholesale trade, retail trade, information, financial activities, leisure and hospitality, and government, showed little change over the month.

In June, average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 6 cents to $27.90, following a 9-cent gain in May.  Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have increased by 3.1 percent. Average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees increased by 4 cents to $23.43 in June. (See tables B-3 and B-8.)

The average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls was unchanged at 34.4 hours in June. In manufacturing, the average workweek edged up 0.1 hour to 40.7 hours, while overtime was unchanged at 3.4 hours. The average workweek for production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls held at 33.6 hours. (See tables B-2 and B-7.)

In real life, this means that the increase of 224,000 jobs was well above the 165,000 jobs the Labor Department expected.  

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Amazing Deflatable Buttigieg By Christopher Skeet

By on July 6th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/the_amazing_deflatable_buttigieg.html

A scenario unfolded last week that has become boringly predictable.  Bad guy does bad things.  Good guy with authority shows up to stop him.  Bad guy attacks good guy with weapon.  Good guy shoots bad guy.  Bad guy’s “community” allege good guy is racist.  Craven politician holds town hall meeting.  Craven politician gets shouted down by angry mob.  Craven politician folds like wet paper to angry mob’s demands.  Craven politician appoints special prosecutor to investigate good guy, who determines good guy was justified in shooting the bad guy.  Angry mob insists the “system” is rigged against them.  Bad guy’s kindergarten graduation picture circulates Internet.  Bad guy’s relatives give interview explaining how much bad guy had always dreamed of being an astronaut.  Media salivates all over itself.  Other good guys question the sanity of risking their lives to stop bad guys.  Less good guys volunteer to do so.  Crime increases.  Angry mob blames the “system” for neglecting rising crime.  Meanwhile, another bad guy does bad things.  Good guy with authority shows up to stop him.  Rinse.  Repeat.

Okay, only the first half of this scenario has happened so far, but who wants to bet against the second half playing out as predicted?  In this specific biopunk performance, the role of the craven politician who succumbed to the mob of his own creation was none other than America’s Aww Shucks Mayor, Pete Buttigieg.  In his charming hometown of South Bend, Indiana, a white police officer shot a black car burglar Eric Logan who, ignoring the officer’s verbal instructions to halt, came at him with a knife.  In a move he now certainly regrets, Buttigieg took a break from his presidential campaign to return to South Bend to chaperone a grotesque orgy of racist invective, during which was made evident that his constituents have determined the officer’s guilt solely based on his skin color (as well as Logan’s innocence, for the same reason).  There was zero interest in factual evidence, and even less in the presumption of innocence.  Not one to get hung up on such trivialities, Buttigieg made clear from his more passionate ripostes that his sole interest was placating the mob.  Everyone, it’s all my fault.  I might as well have pulled the trigger myself.  I’ll try to do better.  I’m calling in everyone from DOJ to Scotland Yard to come investigate.  The Stasi?  Yeah, I can call them too.  Your wish is my command, but please just stop yelling at me.  (I paraphrase, but that was basically the gist).  From the opening gambit he allowed the inmates to run the asylum, and with every panicked concession he gave, the circling sharks simply grew more frenzied at the scent of blood.

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