Displaying posts published in

July 2019

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Supreme Court: Defense Funds Can Be Used To Build Border Wall A win for Trump — and for Americans. Michael Cutler

By on July 29th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274443/supreme-court-defense-funds-can-be-used-build-michael-cutler

President Trump and, more importantly, Americans just got some really great news.  On July 26, 2019 The Hill reported, Supreme Court rules Trump can use military funds for border wall construction.

The news report began with this statement:

The Supreme Court on Friday ruled that the Trump administration can start using military funds to construct a wall on the southern border, handing the president a major legal victory.

The ruling allows the administration to use $2.5 billion in military funds to begin construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border while litigation plays out. A lower court had issued an injunction blocking officials from using those funds.

The article went on to quote Chuck Schumer, the Minority Leader in the U.S. Senate in this excerpt:

Democrats blasted the move Friday night, with Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer (D-Calif.) calling it “a deeply regrettable and nonsensical decision.”

Schumer argued the ruling “flies in the face of the will of Congress and the Congress’s exclusive power of the purse, which our founders established in the Constitution.”

“It’s a sad day when the president is cheering a decision that may allow him to steal funds from our military to pay for an ineffective and expensive wall for which he promised Mexico would foot the bill,” Schumer added in a statement.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump is right about Baltimore — and the Democrats know it

By on July 29th, 2019

https://nypost.com/2019/07/28/trump-is-right-about-baltimore-and-the-democrats-know-it/

“The operative rule in politics these days seems to be that any criticism of a non-white politician from anywhere to their right is, by definition, a racist attack. Nothing Trump said pertained in any way to Elijah Cummings’s skin color or ethnicity, only to his failure as a legislator and political leader to do anything to improve his district. The real question is: Is he right?”

President Trump blistered Representative Elijah Cummings on Twitter, calling out the chairman of the House Oversight committee for raising the hue and cry over conditions on the Mexican border, “when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA.” Trump went on to describe Cummings’s West Baltimore constituency as “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”

Predictably, the Left—including most of cable news—rushed to condemn Trump as a racist. Speaker Nancy Pelosi — whose father was once mayor of Baltimore — called Cummings “a beloved leader in Baltimore, and deeply valued colleague. We all reject racist attacks against him and support his steadfast leadership.” Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted, “Donald Trump’s tweets are ugly and racist.” Beto O’Rourke called him “the most openly racist president we’ve had in modern history.” Senator Bernie Sanders chimed in, too.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

‘The Millionaire Was a Soviet Mole’ Review: Whose Side Was He On? David Karr was the young American communist on the make, his eye ever alert for the main chance, his hand ever open to Soviet largess. By David Evanier

By on July 29th, 2019

In the 1930s and ’40s, there were any number of American communists so enamored of Joseph Stalin and the shining tomorrows he promised that they would do anything for the Soviet Union, disdaining payment of any kind.

David Karr was not one of them.

Karr, writes Harvey Klehr in his riveting biography of the man, was something else entirely: He was the young American communist on the make, his eye “ever alert for the main chance,” his hand ever open to Soviet largess. Born in Brooklyn in 1918, the son of Jewish immigrants, he gained access to power—and methodically amassed a $10 million fortune—by his wits, intelligence, radiant personality and, above all else, a matchless talent for Soviet-American networking. His early career was that of an idealistic sympathizer, working first as a freelancer for communist and far-left periodicals, including the Daily Worker. His later career, however, saw him assume an array of overlapping, ever-shifting personae, “from muckraking columnist to public relations flack, from corporate raider to corporate executive, from moviemaker to hotel executive, from business fixer to Olympic Committee confidant.”

According to some sources—and to stories unverifiable because the corroborating evidence remains classified or kept from public view by his former associates—Karr was also an “arms smuggler, . . . protector of Jewish emigrants from Russia, [and] behind-the-scenes political fixer.” Throughout it all, writes Mr. Klehr, “Karr cooperated with Soviet intelligence agencies, tried to act as a middleman between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. on several issues, and attempted to get close to American officials and politicians at the behest of the KGB.” He had an uncanny ability to befriend major American business figures, including corporate raider Art Landa, health-care innovator Henry Kaiser and Occidental Petroleum’s Armand Hammer. He knew or met with every president from FDR to Gerald Ford and was a trusted adviser to many politicians, including Sargent Shriver, Scoop Jackson and Jerry Brown.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Portland’s Antifa Impunity No one has been charged in the assault on journalist Andy Ngo.

By on July 29th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/portlands-antifa-impunity-11564348707

Portland, Ore., thinks of itself as a tolerant progressive city. Yet four weeks after a left-wing mob severely beat journalist Andy Ngo, there have been no arrests or charges for the assault.

Mr. Ngo was battered on June 29 as he reported on dueling protests. One demonstration included the far-right Proud Boys, and the counterprotest featured leftist groups associated with the extremist Antifa movement. Mr. Ngo has been a critic of Antifa’s militant tactics and its failure to disavow violence and vandalism, and that made him a target. Video footage shows Mr. Ngo being punched and kicked by people in black attire including hoodies and face masks, Antifa’s preferred uniform.

Mr. Ngo was hospitalized for his injuries, which included a brain bleed. A month later he’s still experiencing complications. Mr. Ngo says he sometimes has trouble finishing sentences or remembering common words, and he’s shown symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He’s undergoing neurophysical and speech therapy, including for a cognitive communication deficit.

The assault “was brief, but it did end up being really traumatic,” he says. Mr. Ngo adds that far-left activists also spread his home address online, and he has continued to receive threats.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Mueller’s Lawyers Spun the OLC Guidance on Indicting a Sitting President By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on July 29th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/the-olc-guidance-against-indicting-a-sitting-president/

After Mueller, it is worth another look at its role in the report and its fallout.

T his is Part Two of a two-part series. In Part One, we took a look at the OLC guidance that bars the indictment of a sitting president. (The OLC is the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.) In particular, we looked at (a) how, in investigating President Trump for purported obstruction, special counsel Robert Mueller’s staff distorted the guidance into a prohibition against even considering whether an offense occurred; and (b) the futile hope of congressional Democrats, during Wednesday’s hearings, that Mueller would contradict his final report on this point.

In Part Two, we explore why Mueller’s staff of very able lawyers, many of them activist Democrats, twisted the OLC guidance. (Spoiler: Their priority was to get their evidence to Congress, intact and as quickly as possible, in hopes of fueling an impeachment drive, or at least damaging Trump politically.) We also analyze how attorney general Bill Barr deftly dealt with the Mueller staff’s gamesmanship.

As we observed at the end of Part One, Mueller’s report makes the whopper of the claim that prosecutors construed to OLC guidance to forbid them to make a charging decision on obstruction because they were trying to protect President Trump.

How’s that?

Well, Justice Department protocols prohibit prosecutors from prejudicing suspects by publicizing the evidence against them unless and until they are formally charged. The idea is that the government must refrain from speaking until it files an indictment. For at that point, the person becomes an “accused” under the Constitution, vested with all the due process guarantees our law provides: assistance of counsel, confrontation of witnesses, subpoena power — the full array of rights to challenge the government’s indictment.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Red Sea Diving Resort (2019) Operation Brothers

By on July 29th, 2019

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4995776/
Coming Soon Release Date: July 31 Israel’s Mossad agents attempt to rescue Ethiopian Jewish refugees in Sudan in 1977.
Director:  Gideon Raff

Writer: Gideon Raff

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Review:David Isaac: A Review of ‘The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist’ by Julien Gorbach

By on July 29th, 2019

https://freebeacon.com/culture/review-the-notorious-ben-hecht-iconoclastic-writer

Julien Gorbach’s The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist is the second book to come out this year on the reporter, playwright, screenwriter, essayist, novelist, polemicist, and pioneer of the gangster movie and the screwball comedy. Hecht is a more remarkable character than any he created in his hugely successful Hollywood career. (It has received far less attention than the first biography, Adina Hoffman’s Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures, largely because she beat him to market.)

Gorbach’s focus is different from that of any other Hecht biographer. All the others, including Hecht’s own autobiography A Child of the Century, devote no more than a fifth of their space to Hecht’s “Jewish period.” Gorbach turns the customary allotment on its head, devoting four fifths of his biography to this phase of Hecht’s life. The disproportion is warranted, both because the other aspects of Hecht’s life have been well-covered by previous biographers and because, in the end, Hecht will be best remembered for his efforts to save Jews during the Holocaust and for his support of the Irgun, the underground organization in Palestine that deserves chief credit—as Winston Churchill himself attested—for driving the British from Palestine.

For most of his life Hecht was an assimilated Jew, indifferent although never hostile to his Jewish roots. Hecht wrote that he “turned into a Jew in 1939.… The German mass murder of the Jews, recently begun, brought my Jewishness to the surface.” When he thought of the Jews being slaughtered in Europe, he thought of his own kin, cherishing the memories of his warm, Yiddish-speaking extended family, which “remained like a homeland in my heart.”

As Hecht became more politically aware, he wrote columns for the newspaper PM. In one, titled “My Tribe Called Israel,” Hecht said, “I write of Jews today, I who never knew himself as one before, because that part of me which is Jewish is under a violent and ape-like attack.” It was these columns that caught the attention of Peter Bergson, who led a small group of Palestinian Jews recently arrived in the United States to build support for a Jewish army to fight Hitler. After some coaxing, Hecht joined their effort.

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Should We Be Optimistic About The Future Of The United States?Francis Menton

By on July 29th, 2019

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=1d2351192c

At the Manhattan Contrarian family dinner table the other day, the subject of conversation turned to this question: Should we be optimistic about the future of the United States? Good and valid points were made on both sides of the issue. But the most important point weighed for the side of optimism. That point was that, of all the countries in the world, the United States is the place where the people — rather than the government — really run the country. Here, more than anyplace else, people can pursue their own initiatives and dreams without the government having the ability to obstruct and stymie private efforts, and force resources into pathways chosen by elite government functionaries.

Why does this matter? It’s not complicated. From the perspective of aggregate economic performance, the simple answer is that a trial-and-error process with hundreds of millions of participants will come up with much better and more numerous solutions to human problems than the small number of the very smartest people with government authority can ever come up with. From the perspective of the individual, the answer is that the only worthwhile life to lead is the life of freedom, where you make your own choices and take responsibility for your own success or failure.

As Exhibit A of how personal freedom and autonomy from the government leads to better economic performance, consider the fracking revolution. At the time of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008, U.S. crude oil production had been dropping for decades, and had reached the level of barely 5 million barrels per day. President Obama had drunk the climate Kool Aid, and he and his administration made it a priority to keep oil production as low as possible in order, they thought, to “save the planet.”. They blocked drilling on federal lands, ceased granting offshore oil leases, refused permits for pipelines, issued negative environmental reviews, and otherwise did everything in their power to obstruct and stymie any and all new oil production and/or transmission. Yet by the time Obama left office in January 2017, U.S. crude oil production had soared to around 9 million barrels per day. The fact is that a presidential administration, under existing law, simply did not have the power to stop private actors from carrying the fracking revolution forward. (U.S. crude oil production has since further increased under the more energy-friendly Trump administration to 12.2 million barrels per day as of June 2019.)

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