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July 2019

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express and the art of unequal justice The nexus of power, money, and influence is why this scandal is likely to widen Charles Lipson

By on July 9th, 2019

https://spectator.us/jeffrey-epstein-lolita-express-unequal-justice/

Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest on federal charges of sex trafficking minors has all the features of a tabloid extravaganza: money, sex, power, and serious crimes. No one deserves the notoriety more. The billionaire financier was already convicted of similar crimes in 2008 and received a very light sentence. Epstein’s plea bargain ended the earlier investigation before any of his friends were implicated. That won’t happen again. The floodlights are on this one.

In 2008, the prosecution negotiated the plea deal while it kept victims in the dark. The underage girls Epstein exploited were not notified in advance about the agreement or allowed to object. A federal judge recently ruled the case was mishandled and the victims should have been heard.

The old case resonates today, not only because the new charges echo the old ones but because the US attorney in charge then, Alex Acosta, is now secretary of labor. The unusual deal had to be approved in Washington, though it is still unclear which Department of Justice officials gave it the green light or why. We’ll undoubtedly learn more about the old case as the new one unfolds.

One thing is certain about the new charges. They will not proceed quietly through the courts, away from inquiring eyes. This time, they are front-page news. The DoJ has already devoted serious attention to them, and they won’t be interested in a backroom deal. The press will be interested, too. The more big names and juicy details, the better.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

William Barr says he sees legal way to add citizenship question to 2020 census

By on July 9th, 2019

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/barr-census-citizenship-question-sees-legal-way-to-add-it/

Edgefield, S.C. — Attorney General William Barr said Monday he sees a way to legally require 2020 census respondents to declare whether or not they are citizens, despite a Supreme Court ruling that forbade asking the question.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Barr said the Trump administration will take action in the coming days that he believes will allow the government to add the controversial census query. Barr would not detail the plans, though a senior official said President Trump is expected to issue a memorandum to the Commerce Department instructing it to include the question on census forms.

The Supreme Court recently blocked the question, at least temporarily, saying the administration’s justification “seems to have been contrived.” That was a blow to Mr. Trump, who has been pressing for the government to demand information about citizenship.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s experts have said requiring such information would discourage immigrants from participating in the survey and result in a less accurate count. That in turn would redistribute money and political power away from Democratic-led cities where immigrants tend to cluster to whiter, rural areas where Republicans do well.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday that Mr. Trump wants to add the demand for citizenship information because he wants to “make America white again.”

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is replacing the legal team that has been pursuing Mr. Trump’s efforts, putting in place a new team consisting of both career and politically appointed attorneys.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

In Praise of Crowdfunding By Douglas Murray

By on July 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/noah-carl-andy-ngo-in-praise-of-crowdfunding/

The deranging effects of tech are visible every day. But there are also positive aspects — among them a tool that strikes me as having many of the capabilities needed to restore some sanity to our times. I refer to the process of crowdfunding. In recent weeks I have been struck by the response to two crowdfunding efforts in particular, which are vital in different ways.

The first relates to the case of Andy Ngo, the young Portland-based journalist whom I wrote about here last week. Ngo, readers will remember, was recently assaulted by so-called “Antifa” in broad daylight as the police stood aside. In the hospital afterwards it became clear that he had suffered a brain hemorrhage, among other injuries. Another journalist immediately set up a crowdfunding site to try to help pay Ngo’s substantial medical bills and to replace the equipment that the Portland Antifa thugs had broken or stolen from him. The goal of that crowdfunding appeal was reached (and indeed exceeded) in a matter of days by American citizens and others horrified at what had been allowed to happen on their streets.

Now another crowdfunder has been set up, this time to launch legal proceedings against those responsible for assaulting the journalist. Among those who may be in the firing line of legal proceedings are not just the thugs who the authorities have allowed to run rampant through an American city, but also the authorities themselves. A link to the legal appeal can be found here.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Kentucky Democrat Amy McGrath Announces 2020 Challenge to McConnell By Mairead McArdle

By on July 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kentucky-democrat-amy-mcgrath-announces-2020-challenge-to-mcconnell/

Kentucky Democrat Amy McGrath on Tuesday announced that she will run to unseat Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell in 2020.

The former Marine fighter pilot and mother of three, who lost her 2018 bid to defeat Republican representative Andy Barr, made her announcement in a video message posted to Twitter.

McGrath says in the video that she wrote a letter when she was 13 to McConnell, her senator, telling him she wanted to fly fighter jets in combat.

“He never wrote back,” McGrath says in the video. “I’ve often wondered, how many other people did Mitch McConnell never take the time to write back or even think about.”

“Everything that’s wrong with Washington had to start somewhere — it started with him,” she wrote in an accompanying tweet.

McGrath argued that “the things that Kentuckians voted for Trump for are not being done” thanks to McConnell, who she explained has blocked legislation his constituents supported, such as measures that would have lowered drug pricing.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

A Modest Immigration Proposal By Victor Davis Hanson

By on July 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/progressive-colleges-can-house-illegal-immigrants-dorms/

College campuses have lots of empty housing during the summer. Proudly progressive institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford should welcome illegal immigrants.

R epresentative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) believes that American detention centers that house illegal aliens — over 1 million illegal arrivals during the last six months alone — are similar to “concentration camps.” A storm of criticism met her historically fallacious comparisons. Ocasio-Cortez doubled down on her Hitlerian reference by pedantically claiming that she was referencing “concentration” rather than “death” camps, and thus despite sloganeering “Never Again,” with a wink and nod, she was supposedly not suggesting that Auschwitz was quite comparable to America’s border facilities.

She then doubled down again by visiting the border. On the basis of no evidence, she was soon claiming that detained illegal aliens were drinking out of toilets, as well as alleging that immigration officers met her social-welfare activism with rudeness and sexual innuendo.

Where to start with her abject historical ignorance?

One, America’s detention centers bear no resemblance to concentration camps of the past. Illegal aliens know that there is some chance that, after they enter the U.S. illegally, they may be apprehended and detained. If they really believed the conditions of their detention resembled “concentration camps,” which historically are scenes of mass death, they would never have come.

Millions of Russians by summer 1942 were not voluntarily flooding across German lines on the expectation that they’d survive, much less thrive, in Nazi “concentration camps.” The German public did not pressure the Nazi hierarchy to allow lawyers and counselors into Soviet POW camps. Boer children did not migrate to British territory on the rationale that their detention would be without hazard.

Certainly, undocumented immigrants — receiving, for example, “free” transgendered counseling and hormonal treatment while in American custody — do not resemble the inmates of “concentration camps.” American immigration authorities are trying to facilitate brief detentions and expedite both deportations and refugee hearings to curb the number of detainees. In exact opposite fashion, the wardens of concentration camps historically have wanted to lock up as many people as possible — not release them.

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

THE TRUMP EFFECT: AMB. (RET.) YORAM ETTINGER

By on July 9th, 2019

https://bit.ly/2S1WeHb

The initial two and a half years of President Trump’s national security policy have departed sharply from those of President Obama, his predecessor at the White House.

The nature of Trump’s national security policy may be assessed through the worldview of Vice President Mike Pence and the two most crucial appointments:Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was a “Tea Party” leader in the US House of Representatives, and National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has been a consistent advocate of a bolstered US posture of deterrence – in the face of rogue regimes and organizations – by flexing political, economic and military muscle. In 1991, it was Bolton who led the successful US campaign to revoke “Zionism is Racism” from UN records. Both Pompeo and Bolton have been consistent critics of Obama’s national security policy. 

The worldview of President Obama (and his Secretary of State, John Kerry) was shaped by the following principles:

1. No US moral, political, economic exceptionalism;

2. Preference of multinational – over unilateral – initiatives;

3. Considering the UN as a key factor in shaping the global arena;

4. Viewing non-assertive Western Europe as a role model;

5. Embracing the worldview of the State Department establishment, which has been persistently divorced from Middle East complexity (e.g., the “Arab Spring” illusion);

6. Adopting negotiation, reconciliation and containment as key tactics when dealing with rogue regimes (e.g., the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement);

7. Approaching rogue Islamic entities as potential allies rather than lethal opponents and enemies (e.g., “Islam has always been a part of the American Story,” Cairo, June 4, 2009);

8.  Playing down Islamic terrorism by designating the murder of 13 Fort Hood, TX, US soldiers by radical Muslim Major Nidal Hasan, as “workplace violence” (and later on, as “combat related casualties”), prohibiting the use of the term “Islamic terrorism;”

9. Defining the Palestinian issue as the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a core cause of Middle East turbulence and a crown-jewel of Arab policy-makers;

10. Assuming that a resolution – not management – of conflicts is a realistic option in the unpredictable, violent, intolerant, volcanic Middle East, which has never experienced long-term intra-Muslim peaceful coexistence.

 

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Twice as Many Americans Have Confidence in Police than the Media Daniel Greenfield

By on July 9th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/274246/twice-many-americans-have-confidence-police-media-daniel-greenfield

You might think that doesn’t mean much.

I have more confidence in your average schizophrenic homeless man screaming at ghosts than I do in the media. And you probably think I’m being too generous.

But the pattern here is that conservative institutions still tend to inspire more confidence than lefty ones.

Just three institutions — the military (73%), small business (68%) and the police (53%) — have garnered majority levels of confidence in all polls Gallup has conducted on each measure over the past two decades. The military has been the top-ranked institution or tied for the top-ranked institution each year since 1986.

Though 38% of Americans say they have confidence in the U.S. presidency, it is exceeded by the percentage of people who have very little or no confidence in this branch of government (44%), giving this institution a net-negative score.

Slightly more than a third of Americans also express confidence in the Supreme Court (38%), organized religion (36%) and the medical system (36%), while slightly less than a third have confidence in banks (30%), public schools (29%) and organized labor (29%).

Fewer than one in four Americans have confidence in the criminal justice system (24%), newspapers (23%) and big business (23%).

Americans have the least confidence in television news (18%) and Congress (11%). 

I wonder why.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The White Supremacist Bogeyman By Julie Kelly

By on July 9th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/08/the-white-supremacist-bogeyman/

They are everywhere.

I am talking, of course, about white supremacists. The news media, Democrats, and NeverTrump Republicans would have us believe the country is under siege by a sinister cabal of Americans who want to return to the days of Jim Crow, or better yet, the era of slavery. Since the election of Donald Trump, white supremacists, we are warned, occupy the White House and control the Republican Party.

The signs are everywhere.

A MAGA hat is the new white hood. A common hand signal for “OK” actually is a way to send a message of solidarity to other white supremacists. So is drinking a glass of milk. Or owning a dog. Or selling an athletic shoe embossed with an American flag designed by Betsy Ross.

Public schools can now access a “toolkit” with lots of advice about how to combat the “rise” in white nationalism. (It is important to note that the terms “alt-right,” “white nationalist,” and “Nazi” are interchangeable with white supremacist.) Last March, Facebook announced “a ban on praise, support and representation of white nationalism and white separatism” and will offer its own kind of virtual intervention by “connecting people who search for terms associated with white supremacy to resources focused on helping people leave behind hate groups.”

White supremacists have an entire cable channel—Fox News—populated by white supremacists such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham who use coded language and dog whistles and whatnot to provoke their fellow klansmen. Don’t believe me? Well, certainly you will believe Representative Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), brother of Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro, who flatly called Ingraham a “white supremacist” on Twitter last week after she compared the conditions at a migrant detention center to U.S. military facilities.

You can’t escape them. 

These fanatics have been spotted at the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and within the friendly confines of Wrigley Field. Restaurant owners are urged to banish them from their eateries while other Americans bravely confront these wannabe George Wallaces at barbecue joints in the nation’s capital. Trump-supporting knitters are censored on a popular website because, according to Ravelry, any “support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.”

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Questions the Candidates Must Answer And the one question that will expose those who actually hate you. Michael Cutler

By on July 9th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274223/questions-candidates-must-answer-michael-cutler

The questioning of an individual in a formal setting comes in two forms, the initial question and the follow-up question(s). I compare this to boxing. The initial question is not unlike the jab while the follow-up question is like the punch to the jaw and may actually score the knockout.

During the first two Democratic Primary debates many issues were raised that actually have relevance to the immigration crisis, yet this connection was never made.

Inasmuch as the “war on terror” continues and the “all clear” has not sounded and is not likely to sound for quite some time, I would want to start out by asking each and every candidate for any significant political office, but particularly for the Presidency, if he/she had read the 9/11 Commission Report and the companion report, 9/11 and  Terrorist Travel in their entirety.

The 9/11 Commission was convened specifically to learn from our mistakes to protect America and Americans from future terror attacks.

The President of the United States is also the Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces and is also of all federal law enforcement agencies.

Any serious candidate for the Presidency must consider those reports to be “required reading.”

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Prager U Video: What is the Muslim Brotherhood? Exposing the organization’s plans within America.

By on July 9th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274248/prager-u-video-what-muslim-brotherhood-prager-university

The Muslim Brotherhood is a dangerous organization, seeking to destroy Western civilization from within and to establish a global Islamic state. In this new Prager U video, Ami Horowitz exposes the organization’s plans within America. Don’t miss it!

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