Displaying posts published in

August 2019

As Police Prestige Declines, Crime Increases and Civilization Weakens The unraveling of law and order. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274441/police-prestige-declines-crime-increases-and-bruce-thornton

In the latest of a string of municipal police stand-downs, New York City officers slunk away after a jeering crowd dumped water on them. In a separate incident in Harlem, an officer was hit on the head with a hard-plastic bucket. This retreat from an assault on the law was not as consequential as that of Portland police who did nothing as journalist Andy Ngo got assaulted and injured by Antifa thugs, but it bespeaks a dangerous trend: The growing disdain for the prestige of law enforcement officers, who now are politically handcuffed and prevented from doing their jobs.

That this latest embarrassment happened in NYC makes it even more revealing. Throughout the Nineties, crime in the city plummeted: Violent crime dropped by more than 56%, and property crimes 65%. Murders peaked at 2245 in 1990, then started to decline, particularly after Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor in 1993 and instituted changes in policing, such as the “broken windows” crackdown on misdemeanors like subway turn-style-jumping that created an atmosphere of disorder and lawlessness. Along with more police on the streets, more criminals put in jail, and tactics like “stop-and-frisk” of suspects, these changes contributed to the steep decline in murders. By 1999, murders had fallen by 73%. In 2018, there were 289 murders, almost half as many as Chicago, which has about one-fourth the population of New York.

That success demonstrated how the prestige of the police, their success at stopping crimes, and the respect for their authority that follows from their active presence in the public square, deters potential miscreants and improves the quality of life for citizens––especially minorities, who are the most frequent victims of violent crime in big cities.

Menacing Invective Against Trump Creates Dangerous Climate By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/31/menacing-invective-against-trump-creates-dangerous-climate/

Former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden has bragged on two occasions that he would like to beat up President Donald Trump.

In March 2018, Biden huffed, “They asked me would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”

Biden’s tough-guy braggadocio was apparently no slip. A year later, he doubled down on his physical threats.

“The idea that I’d be intimidated by Donald Trump? … He’s the bully that I’ve always stood up to. He’s the bully that used to make fun when I was a kid that I stutter, and I’d smack him in the mouth.”

Had former Vice President Dick Cheney ever dared to say something similar of President Obama, what would the media reaction have been?

Recently, Sen. Corey Booker (D-N.J.), another presidential candidate, took up where Biden left off:

“Trump is a guy who you understand he hurts you, and my testosterone sometimes makes me want to feel like punching him, which would be bad for this elderly, out-of-shape man that he is if I did that. This physically weak specimen.”

One trait of the Democratic field of presidential candidates is always to sound further to the left than any of their primary rivals. Apparently, a similar habit is to see who can most effectively imagine beating up the president. For now, Booker seems to be in first place.

California Bans Trump The state passes a law to bar him from the primary ballot. ????!!!!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-bans-trump-11564614674

Remember all that angst and anger expressed by progressives that President Trump would ignore judicial orders, rig election laws, and maybe even refuse to give up power if he loses in 2020? We’re still waiting for any of that to happen. But that hasn’t stopped Democrats from stretching the Constitution to defeat Mr. Trump.

The latest example came Tuesday from California when Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law that would bar Mr. Trump from the state primary ballot unless he discloses his tax returns. That’s right. California Democrats are trying to keep a sitting President from running for re-election in their state.

“These are extraordinary times and states have a legal and moral duty to do everything in their power to ensure leaders seeking the highest offices meet minimal standards, and to restore public confidence,” Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, said in a statement.

Even if this means rigging the ballot to defeat an opponent they loathe? Apparently so. We’re on record saying Mr. Trump should release his tax returns, but there’s nothing in the Constitution that says he must. Americans can factor his refusal into their voting calculations, and most Democratic presidential candidates have released their tax returns or promised that they will.

California may be violating the Constitution with this law. Mr. Trump’s lawyers are promising a legal challenge, and they have a strong case that a state can’t add onerous qualifications for ballot access that go beyond the Constitution’s requirements for age, citizenship and residency. That was the basis for the Supreme Court decision barring term limits in Congressional elections.

This is one reason that Jerry Brown, Mr. Newsom’s predecessor, vetoed a similar bill in 2017. “First, it may not be constitutional,” Mr. Brown wrote in a veto statement, and the rest is worth quoting at length:

Debate: Tulsi Gabbard knocks Kamala Harris from her pedestal By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/debate_tulsi_gabbard_knocks_kamala_harris_from_her_pedestal.html

If there was anything that made the sludge of lies, hypocrisies, and panders of the fourth Democratic debate worth watching, it was that one little moment when Rep. Tulsi Gabbard effectively slapped Sen. Kamala Harris upside the head over her checkered record as a prosecutor. That was an ambush. And Harris responded like a deer in the headlights.

Harris’s abysmal record as someone who’s refused to correct false testimony, thrown petty drug criminals in jail even as she laughed about her own pot use, and the death penalty she advocated for, are indeed liabilities and  something conservatives have been complaining about for years. Now coming from Gabbard, it was, if anything, even more effective. Here’s some of the New York Times’s transcript:

Gabbard: I want to bring the conversation back to the broken criminal justice system that is disproportionately, negatively impacting black and brown people all across this country today. Now, Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president. But I’m deeply concerned about this record. There are too many examples to cite but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.

She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so. She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California, and she fought to keep a cash bail system in place that impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.

Thank You, Representative Ilhan Omar By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/thank_you_representative_ilhan_omar.html

As a congressional representative, Ilhan Omar has masterfully manipulated American freedom in order to make anti-Semitism a more accepted idea.  She has admirably done the work of the Muslim Brotherhood in normalizing anti-Semitism in the land of the free.  By cloaking the evil as merely an expression of her freedom of speech, she has removed the “racist portrayal of Jews from the neo-Nazi fringe into the mainstream.”  She has mastered the art of psychological warfare as she couples “Muslim anti-Semitism with the American left’s vague notion of ‘social justice.'”  She has shown her bona fides as a representative of the jihad on free speech while vigorously claiming this vital freedom.

As Ayaan Hirsi Ali notes, Omar hails from Somalia, where anti-Semitism is taught at an early age.  Thus, she was taught that to destroy the Jews, the Zionists, and the state of Israel is a worthy goal.  Religious teaching is coupled with the political narrative where jihad is the solution to all the ills of the Muslim world.  In addition, there is very little freedom of expression in Muslim-majority countries, and the state-owned media propagate daily expressions of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda.  Everything is tainted with this hatred, from the mosques to the Islamic college campuses.  Refugee camps are another “zone of indoctrination.”

Omar asserts that American Jews have a dual loyalty that should make them suspect.  This anti-Semitic meme has been used since time immemorial to besmirch Jews and to cast aspersions upon them.  Then there is the “all about the Benjamins, baby” statement, which revives the stereotype of Jews using their money and influence to pressure those in power to advance the interests of a foreign nation over their own.

On radio show, Ocasio-Cortez agrees with host who says Israel is ‘criminal, very unjust’

https://www.jns.org/on-radio-show-ocasio-cortez-agrees-with-host-saying-israel-is-very-criminal-very-unjust/

She also endorsed the anti-Israel progressive group IfNotNow, saying it is “amazing” and “organizing for justice.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) agreed on Tuesday with a New York radio host, saying that what’s happening in Israel is “very criminal.”

“Now you look around the globe and you have multiple corrupt governments working together—you’ve got Israel, you’ve got America, you’ve got Russia, you’ve got the Saudis, right—all working in concert. And I bring up Israel because you’ve been vocal about Palestine, the occupation and what needs to go on there. And specifically, I even think people in Israel are trying to get Netanyahu as well,” asked “Ebro in the Morning” host Ebro Darden.

“I agree. I agree with that,” replied Ocasio-Cortez.

Darden continued, “There’s a lot of young Jewish people that I know that are absolutely against the occupation, and I wanted you, because often on this program, we have the freedom to address the fact that something that you know people, it’s an oxymoron, how do you have white-supremacist Jews? How do you have people like Stephen Miller? How do you have these individuals who are legit aligning with racism and white supremacy, but they’re Jewish, and it’s something that most people can’t wrap their brains around. But it’s a real thing, and what’s going on with Israel and Palestine, while it’s very deep, it is very, very criminal. It is very, very unjust.”

Canada Court Sides with BDS Extremists over Israeli Wine Labeling

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/07/31/israeli-wine-from-settlements-must-be-labelled-canada-court-rules/
TEL AVIV – In a move that has been blasted as illegal by critics, Canada’s Federal Court on Monday ruled that Israeli wines from West Bank settlements can no longer be labeled “Made in Israel.”

In her ruling, Judge Anne L. Mactavish determined that saying wines produced in the West Bank are Israeli made is “false, misleading and deceptive.”  The ruling is an ideological victory for the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movemen.

The settlements “are not part of the State of Israel,” the ruling said, and added that “Canadian federal legislation requires that food products [including wines] that are sold in Canada bear truthful, non-deceptive and non-misleading country of origin labels.”

West Bank Jewish-made wines labeled as “made in Israel” do not fall “within the range of possible, acceptable outcomes which are defensible in respect of the facts and law,” the ruling said. “It is, rather, unreasonable.”

In 2015, the European Union also determined that goods produced in the settlements must not be labeled as made in Israel in a move that was denounced by Israeli officials as being comparable to the Nazi boycott of Jewish goods and shops in the 1930s.

The Saudi-Palestinian Labyrinth Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

 https://bit.ly/2LRLGdi

The pro-Palestinian Saudi talk has diminished, increasingly replaced by an adversarial Saudi walk.

The shift in the Saudi attitude has been reflected by a reduction of foreign aid to the Palestinians, partially due to the rift between the PA and Hamas, and in protest of PA corruption; a tighter control of monetary transfers by Palestinians residing in the kingdom; and the increase in the number of Palestinians arrested in – and denied access to – Saudi Arabia.

The transformation of the Saudi attitude toward the Palestinians has been triggered by Palestinian ties with entities which challenge and threaten the House of Saud. For example, the anti-Saudi Muslim Brotherhood (the largest Sunni Islamic terror organization), Iran’s Ayatollahs (the leading mortal enemy of the House of Saud), the anti-Saudi Erdogan’s Turkey (which supports the Muslim Brotherhood and opposes Saudi Arabia in Syria, Iraq, Qatar and Somalia), Hamas Palestinian terrorists (supported by Iran’s Ayatollahs and Turkey), Hezbollah terrorists (supported by the Ayatollahs), Qatar (which maintains close ties with Iran and Turkey, as well as with the USA), etc. 

Saudi homeland security concerns triggered the September 12, 2018 policy, which stopped the issuance of visas for the Haj (the major annual pilgrimage) and Umrah (a secondary pilgrimage) to Palestinians from Jordan, Lebanon and East Jerusalem, who possess only temporary travel documents.