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October 2020

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Big Tech Masks COVID-19 Realities Julie Kelly

By on October 20th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/19/how-big-tech-masks-covid-19-realities/

Dr. Scott Atlas warns the country is in dangerous territory if people who show data contrary to conventional wisdom are silenced.

Since the early stages of the coronavirus crisis, any viewpoint or research running afoul of the accepted doctrine conceived by the credentialed class has been censored.

Social media platforms, internet search engines, and other monopolistic guardians of information decided at the very beginning that they would determine which content would be available for public consumption; “false claims or conspiracy theories that have been flagged by leading global health organizations and local health authorities that could cause harm to people who believe them” would be subjected to Facebook’s reject button, according to a January 2020 statement released by the company.

Twitter announced it would prompt users to follow “credible, authoritative information” on the virus. None other than the World Health Organization, the agency that has flubbed the pandemic every step of the way, partnered with Twitter to judge what is credible and what is not.

A YouTube video produced in March by Dr. John Ioannidis, an early critic of the government’s handling of the virus, was removed for violating the company’s terms of service. Another widely-viewed video featuring two California emergency room doctors describing their experiences with people suffering the consequences of lockdowns and the emerging data about the virus’ lethality met the same fate in April. Ditto for a July video that showed several doctors condemning the detrimental effects of the lockdowns and promoting the reopening of schools and businesses nationwide.

Posts about hydroxychloroquine, including a tweet by the president’s son, are also banned. The president’s tweet earlier this month claiming the flu is as deadly as COVID-19 was flagged by Twitter for “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information” about the virus.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Elect Joe Biden: He’ll Be The Worst President In U.S. History

By on October 20th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/20/elect-joe-biden-hell-be-the-worst-president-in-u-s-history/

Ranking modern presidents, from first to worst, is an entirely subjective matter. That said, we’re quite sure Joe Biden will be, if elected, the most destructive president of our lifetimes if not of all time.

At I&I we tend to look at Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama as being the worst presidents from our lifetimes. Carter saw himself as the caretaker of the country’s inevitable decline rather someone who would lift it from its malaise. Obama managed the worst economic recovery in our post-war history, allowed ISIS to grow into a terrorist power, and rolled over for Iran’s mullahs. His was the most divisive presidency of modern times. If this nation is on the brink of another civil war, as some suggest we are, it’s because he set the tone for the bitter separation we see today among Americans.

At least Carter led the deregulation of the airline, trucking and rail industries, and in his 1978 State of the Union address acknowledged “we really need to realize that there is a limit to the role and the function of government.”

Biden would neither do nor say any such thing.

Here, though, is what can expect from a Biden presidency:

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

American Synagogue Under Siege Here’s how to fight back. Charles Jacobs and Ben Poser

By on October 20th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/american-synagogue-under-siege-heres-how-fight-frontpagemagcom/

In an outrage to the Jewish community, it has apparently become acceptable for people to picket synagogue services, and accuse the Jews inside of murder, imperialism, and the very acts of genocide visited upon them by the Nazis.

The members of Beth Israel Congregation in Ann Arbor, Michigan, endure the vile taunts of protesters holding signs reading “Resist Jewish Power,” “Jewish Power Corrupts,” “No More Holocaust Movies,” “Boycott Israel,” “Stop U.S. Aid to Israel,” and “End the Palestinian Holocaust” every Shabbat. What’s more, this unconscionable behavior has not just been the weekly norm recently, but every single Shabbat (Saturday) since 2003.

“They portray themselves as kindly types who bring their detractors tea and wish them a nice day, while they espouse Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic global conspiracy theories… And their hate fails to alarm some progressive leaders who would be rightfully shouting from the rooftops if this were a mosque,” Beth Israel’s rabbi, Nadav Caine, told Ryan Stanton of Michigan Live.

The local protest group in question, Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends, is led by Henry Hirskovitz: “We’re not there because they’re Jews. We’re there because they’re Jewish Zionists,” he told the same reporter. Hirskovitz, apparently a former congregant who fell out with the temple due to political differences, leads an organization whose website proudly features a picture of a woman holding a sign saying, “Zionists Picnic While Palestinians Starve. The World is Watching.” This is Jewish anti-Semitism at its purest.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump Doubles Support Among Young Black Voters Daniel Greenfield

By on October 20th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/10/trump-doubles-support-among-young-black-voters-daniel-greenfield/

“Trump has also gained real ground among nonwhite voters. To be clear, he still trails Biden considerably with these groups, but in UCLA Nationscape’s polling over the past month, he was down by 39 points with these voters, a double-digit improvement from his 53-point deficit in 2016.

While older Black voters look as if they’ll vote for Biden by margins similar to Clinton’s in 2016, Trump’s support among young Black voters (18 to 44) has jumped from around 10 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in UCLA Nationscape’s polling.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

How Trump Might Be Winning By Kyle Smith

By on October 20th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/how-trump-might-be-winning/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

I’m far too dumb to be able to shed any light on polls, but I do know something about celebrity and I think I can guarantee this: If President Trump wins re-election, Robert Cahaly is going to become very famous very quickly.

Who is Robert Cahaly? The chief pollster for the Trafalgar Group, the only major polling organization that publishes its results and correctly predicted Donald Trump’s 2016 victories in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Cahaly predicts Trump is again going to win Michigan, along with Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Texas. He calculates that Trump will be reelected with roughly 280 electoral votes.

You can, and should, listen to Cahaly make these bold predictions on a special edition of The Editors podcast in which Rich Lowry interviews Cahaly for an hour (he writes about it here). I’ve been bobbing along with the conventional wisdom that says Trump is headed for a blowout defeat in the popular vote and the Electoral College, but Cahaly has a completely different take. It’s wild.

The pollster says that he employs different methods from his competitors and warns that the others are badly underestimating how social-desirability bias is artificially inflating Joe Biden’s numbers. People who hate Trump are willing, indeed eager, to give up their time to talk about how much they hate Trump, according to this view. And some polls take a long time, offering a slate of 20 or 25 questions to go through. You have to really want your opinion to be counted if you’re willing to give away that much of your time for nothing.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trouble in Putin’s Neighborhood Chaos in Russia’s near-abroad shows the limits of Kremlin power.

By on October 20th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trouble-in-putins-neighborhood-11603149025?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Changes to the Russian constitution approved earlier this year allow Vladimir Putin to remain president well into his 80s. While he has consolidated power at home, one of the little-remarked events of the year has been the authoritarian’s inability to stop disorder in Russia’s near-abroad.

In 2005 Mr. Putin said “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” More than a decade later, the former KGB officer mused that if he could go back in time he would prevent the 1991 collapse. The USSR isn’t coming back, but the Russian Federation still tries to maintain stability on its periphery through deep economic, military and cultural ties with former Soviet Republics.

This project hasn’t been going well, even in countries that generally view Moscow favorably. The latest headache comes from Russian ally Kyrgyzstan. Opposition parties accused ruling elites of voter fraud after Oct. 4 parliamentary elections, and chaos continued even after the results were annulled last week.

President Sooronbai Jeenbekov announced his resignation Thursday. The nationalist Sadyr Japarov, newly sprung from prison, has become prime minister and acting president. But a Kremlin spokesman said Thursday that Russia would pause economic support for Bishkek because “there is no government as such, as far as we see.” Mr. Putin has reason to worry about instability in the resource-rich country, which hosts a strategically important Russian air base.

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BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Crosswinds’ Review: Middle East Balancing Act An exploration of the Saudi temper that has both the interpretative heft of scholarship and the anecdotal brilliance of literary travelogue. By Martin Peretz

By on October 20th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/crosswinds-review-middle-east-balancing-act-11603149873?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

Search for recent news articles about Saudi Arabia and the first name certain to appear is that of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist and inside player of Saudi power politics who was exiled from the kingdom, became an outspoken critic of the House of Saud, and in October 2018 met his gruesome end in an ambush inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul—an attack about which Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman denies any foreknowledge. The Khashoggi incident was met by world-wide revulsion; it’s been a blow to Saudi Arabia’s reputation that, in comparison to those of the kingdom’s neighbors, is warranted but not deserved. Every day, for example, more evidence surfaces of the top-down human-rights abuses in Iran and the unending human wreckage caused by the Syrian genocide. Still, Khashoggi’s fate has become a more potent symbol than either of these, emblematic of an increasingly hardline, conservative regime that the American foreign-policy establishment, and much of the American public, dislikes and distrusts.

Actions don’t exist outside of contexts. Insisting on a less myopic look at Saudi Arabia doesn’t mean excusing Khashoggi’s murder, but it does mean contextualizing it, bringing to it an analytical commitment to complexity too often attenuated in our times. This is the indirect achievement of “Crosswinds,” a posthumous book by Fouad Ajami that makes sense of the Saudi kingdom on its own terms—terms dense and tense with possibilities.

The Lebanon-born Ajami, who died in 2014 at age 68, was director of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and America’s most prominent pragmatic idealist about the possibilities of liberalization in the Middle East. “Crosswinds,” completed in 2010 and drawing on 30 years of anecdote and analysis, attempts to gauge those possibilities in Saudi Arabia, not as an apologia for the kingdom but as a corrective to facile critiques.

In this work, more penetrating than argumentative and more deepening than sweeping, Ajami shows that behind its deliberately opaque exterior, modern Saudi Arabia has been defined by the calibration of tensions between competing forces: deep conservatism and yearnings for modernity; the ferocity of radicalism and the dependability of oil revenues; pressures from America to move left and from Iran to move right. The role of the monarchy in negotiating these crosswinds implicitly repudiates the brutal despotic repressions of regional neighbors like Iran and Syria: the Saudis may be authoritarians but they are also pragmatists.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

U.S.-Sponsored Arab-Israeli Rapprochement Gaining Steam By P. David Hornik See note please

By on October 19th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/columns/p-david-hornik/2020/10/19/u-s-sponsored-arab-israeli-rapprochement-gaining-steam-n1067479

David Hornik is one of the best commentators and writers in Israel today. He is also a wonderful writer of fiction and his new novel is: “And Both Shall Row.”

On September 15, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain signed a U.S.-sponsored deal in Washington on normalizing relations between Israel and the two Arab Gulf states.

Since then things have been moving fast. On Sunday, at a ceremony in Bahrain’s capital of Manama, Israel and Bahrain inked an agreement formally establishing diplomatic ties between them. It was accompanied by memoranda on cooperation in a wide range of fields from aviation to agriculture. The U.S. was represented by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who called the signings “a remarkable accomplishment.”

Things are moving forward with the UAE as well. Also on Sunday, Israel and the UAE agreed to enable 28 weekly flights between Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi. Calling it “one of the first, important fruits of the peace agreement,” Israel’s Transportation Ministry said the flights would smooth the way to “tourism, trade, and business between the countries.”

It’s all a far cry from the days of the “Arab-Israeli conflict,” when the Arab states were perceived — not entirely accurately, but considerably so — as a united bloc of hostility toward Israel.

With the Trump administration claiming it’s hard at work on further normalization deals between Israel and Arab countries, speculation centers on which of those countries may be next.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Election Interference? Big Tech Censored Trump More Than 60 Times, Left Biden Unscathed By Tyler O’Neil

By on October 19th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/election/tyler-o-neil/2020/10/19/election-interference-big-tech-censored-trump-more-than-60-times-left-biden-unscathed-n1068955

Is Big Tech interfering in the 2020 election? If so, tech companies did not start with the suppression of The New York Post‘s Hunter Biden bombshell story last week — although that act was arguably the most egregious.

Facebook and Twitter have censored President Donald Trump or his reelection campaign 65 times but have not censored Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his campaign a single time, according to a new report from the Media Research Center’s (MRC) Techwatch.

Techwatch analyzed two years of social media posts from Trump, Biden, and their respective campaigns, between May 2018 and October 16, 2020. The analysis did not include any ads from political action committees (PACs) or super PACs in support of Trump or Biden. It also focused on social media posts, not paid advertisements, from the campaigns.

Twitter

Twitter labeled, fact-checked, and removed tweets from the president and his campaign 64 times since Trump’s election in 2016. The company appears to have ramped into high gear this past May.

Twitter put “public interest” notices on Trump’s tweets about mail-in voting, COVID-19, and the Black Lives Matter protests. The company deleted a satirical video retweeted by the president following a fact-check from the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact. The company also deleted three Trump tweets about hydroxychloroquine on July 28, 2020.

Twitter has also cracked down on memes that Trump tweeted or retweeted. The company removed a meme from his June 30 tweet showing the president saying, “In reality, they’re not after me. They’re after you.” Logan Cook, a meme creator who goes by the handle Carpe Donktum, made a video mocking the Democrats’ reaction to Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address. After Trump retweeted it, Twitter removed the video following a copyright complaint. Twitter also removed a Carpe Donktum video showing two toddlers hugging one another with fake CNN chyrons at the bottom after Trump retweeted it.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Pennsylvania Rejects 372,000 Mail-in Ballot Applications, as Voters Err By Matthew Vadum

By on October 19th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pennsylvania-rejects-372k-mail-in-ballot-applications-as-voters-err_3543483.html

The presidential election battleground state of Pennsylvania has rejected 372,000 requests for mail-in ballots, a development that is causing confusion among election officials and the voting public.

Pennsylvania is among the most hotly contested states for the Nov. 3 presidential election. President Donald Trump narrowly won Pennsylvania in 2016 by 44,292 votes out of more than 6 million cast. The Republican candidate secured 48.2 percent of the popular vote in the state, beating Democrat Hillary Clinton, who won 47.5 percent, according to Ballotpedia.

Pennsylvania has 20 electoral votes out of the 270 needed to be elected president.

Voting-by-mail, whether by absentee ballot or by the military overseas, has been around for many years, but the current pandemic has made it a significantly more popular means for discharging one’s democratic duty. It allows the voter to take action without risking exposure to the CCP virus that causes the disease COVID-19 by attending a polling place in person.

The revelation of the rejected ballot applications highlights the reportedly widespread public anxiety about using the U.S. Postal Service as a primary means of conducting elections in the country, something that has never been attempted before.

It also highlights the difficulties in switching from largely voting in person to voting by mail, without sufficient time allowed to educate the public about how to complete the sometimes confusing mail-in balloting paperwork properly.

Pennsylvania officials blame the denials largely on duplicate requests initiated by voters who recently applied for mail-in ballots without knowing that they had already applied for the ballots during the June primary elections.

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