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December 2020

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Pennsylvania House Leaders File Brief to Support Texas in Supreme Court Lawsuit Against Pennsylvania By Jack Phillips

By on December 11th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/pennsylvania-house-leaders-file-brief-to-support-texas-in-supreme-court-lawsuit-against-

Pennsylvania’s House speaker and majority leader on Thursday filed an amici curiae brief with the Supreme Court against the state of Pennsylvania and in favor of Texas’s lawsuit against the commonwealth and three other states.

A brief (pdf) filed by Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler and Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff, both Republicans, requests that the Supreme Court “carefully consider the procedural issues and questions raised by the Plaintiff concerning the administration of the 2020 General Election in Pennsylvania.”

“The unimpeachability of our elections requires clear procedures of administration so that everyone gets a fair shake. Unfortunately, outside actors have so markedly twisted and gerrymandered the Commonwealth’s Election Code to the point that amici find it unrecognizable from the laws that they enacted,” they wrote, adding that the state of Texas “raised important questions about how this procedural malfeasance affected the 2020 General Election.”

In the lawsuit, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton alleged that Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin introduced changes to election laws, deeming them unconstitutional. The suit also contends that by doing so, those states treated voters unequally and created significant voting irregularities by rescinding certain ballot-integrity measures.

Filed on Monday night, the lawsuit is requesting the Supreme Court to declare the four states carried out their respective elections in violation of the U.S. Constitution.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why the cultural elite truly despises Hanukkah By Ari Lamm

By on December 11th, 2020

https://nypost.com/2020/12/09/why-the-cultural-elite-truly-despises-hanukkah/

Our cultural elites’ least ­favorite Jewish holiday has arrived: Hanukkah, of course.

Why did Hanukkah irk everyone from the late Christopher Hitchens, who memorably ­derided it as a “celebration of tribal Jewish backwardness,” to author Sarah Prager, who took to the pages of The New York Times recently to explain that she won’t be teaching her kids about it?

Well, because Hanukkah is about as out of step with the contemporary elite consensus as any religious tradition can be.

If you haven’t reviewed the story in a while, here’s how it goes. One fine day in 167 BC, a crowd of Jews was gathered in the town square of Modi’in, a suburb of Jerusalem.

They were there ­because the Seleucid Empire — the successors of Alexander the Great’s expansive dynasty — had recently moved into town. The conquerors believed that their Greek culture was the only path to enlightenment. The Seleucids had resolved to Hellenize this peculiarly stubborn people, the Jews, and they sought out the right kind of Jewish collaborator — you know, those who weren’t too bearded or too weird — to persuade the rest of the locals to abandon their backward mountain God and primitive laws.

And then, just as one of those Hellenizing Jews stepped up to sacrifice to almighty Zeus, out came a priest named Mattathias. Having precisely zero ­patience for idolatry, the fiery-eyed zealot killed not only the Jewish collaborator but the ­Seleucid governor, as well. Mattathias thus launched a war — partly an internal Jewish conflict, partly a rebellion against Greek imperial power — that would end with that well-publicized victory of the priest and his sons, the Maccabees, aided by one miraculous vat of oil.

So what’s Hanukkah truly about?

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The Disgraceful Hunter Biden Cover-Up By David Harsanyi

By on December 10th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/the-disgraceful-hunter-biden-cover-up/?itm_campaign=headline-testing-the-disgraceful-hunter-biden-cover-up&itm

It was a ‘conspiracy’ theory shouted down and stifled by the media establishment. Until it wasn’t.

I t’s now clear that the Hunter Biden story was real, with Hunter himself acknowledging a federal probe into his taxes — one that reportedly began in 2018. Really, it was always clear. Yet, when the New York Post broke the details, virtually the entire journalistic establishment and left-wing punditsphere defamed the newspaper, claiming it was passing on Russian “disinformation” or partisan fabrications.

The political media quickly began pumping out process stories about the alleged discord in the Post’s newsroom and about the problems with the reporting. In so doing, of course, they did practically no reporting on the substantive allegations that Joe Biden’s family had spent years cashing in on his influence. Tech companies, spurred on by these censorious journalists, shut down the account of one of America’s most-read newspapers to inhibit users from reading the story. It was completely unprecedented.

At the time, I argued that the Post (where I contribute to the editorial page) used the same ethical and journalistic standards that the media have employed for decades. But, in truth, it exercised a higher standard of professionalism than most outlets reporting on the Russia collusion hysteria did for three-plus years. It certainly exhibited a higher ethical standard than Jeffrey Goldberg did in his Atlantic piece claiming that Donald Trump had besmirched the American military — which political journalists had no problem sharing as irrefutable and unimpeachable fact.

In October, the New York Times ran a piece headlined, “New York Post Published Hunter Biden Report Amid Newsroom Doubts.” Today, the same Times reports that, “Biden team has rejected some of the claims made in the Post articles, but has not disputed the authenticity of the files upon which they were based.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Gideon Sa’ar and another referendum on Netanyahu Ruthie Blum

By on December 10th, 2020

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/gideon-saar-and-another-referendum-on-netanyahu

All of the details surrounding the campaign, which will be shifting regularly during the coming weeks, are secondary to the big picture that’s gotten lost in the fray.
After the Knesset voted last week to dissolve itself and set a date for what will amount to the fourth election in less than two years, the political echelon went into a customary flurry of behind-the-scenes activity. Most of the bustle has been focused on unseating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Yesh Atid-Telem MK Moshe Ya’alon was the first to declare his intention to establish his own list to run in the next election. In an interview with Channel 12 last Friday, he said that former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot was likely to join his party – as number two, of course. Eisenkot promptly denied it.

Then came MK Gideon Sa’ar’s dramatic announcement on Tuesday that he was quitting Likud to establish his own party. Reminding the public about his unsuccessful attempt a year ago to replace Netanyahu as head of Likud, he went on the say that everything disastrous that has happened in the country since then underscores just how necessary it was for him to have tried.

Sa’ar further stated that it was a painful decision for him to leave Likud, of which he has been a loyal member throughout his career. However, he said, the character of the party he once loved so dearly “dramatically changed” and strayed far from its origins.

“The movement became a tool serving the personal interests of its leader, including those relating to his criminal trial,” said Sa’ar, who formally resigned from the party and the Knesset on Wednesday morning. “Replacing Netanyahu is the order of the hour.”

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Book Review: “From Left to Right” — The Story of Holocaust Historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz By Helen Epstein

By on December 10th, 2020

https://artsfuse.org/217348/book-review-from-left-to-right-the-story-of-holocaust-historian-lucy-s-dawidowicz/

This biography of Lucy S. Dawidowicz performs the invaluable function of gathering relevant documents and drafting a narrative that rescues a fascinating historian from oblivion. But it does not add much to the history of the New York intellectuals.

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History by Nancy Sinkoff. Wayne State University Press, 538 pp., $34.99.

There were several reasons I wanted to read a biography of historian and public intellectual Lucy S. Dawidowicz (1915-1990). First, From Left to Right is yet another piece of the extensive feminist project of writing overlooked women back into history. Set mainly in 20th-century Manhattan among the New York Jews who then dominated its intellectual life, From Left to Right foregrounds a wren against a background of peacocks such as Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz — all male, with the notable exceptions of the formidable Hannah Arendt and Diana Trilling.

I was also interested in many particular facets of Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s life. As a girl, Lucy Schildkret was a graduate, like Cynthia Ozick and Hortense Calisher (and later Elena Kagan and Avril Haines), of Hunter College High School — the only American public school for intellectually gifted girls. After school, she pursued a Yiddish-language education at the secular nonpolitically-affiliated Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute. She graduated from Hunter College in 1936 and began a Master’s program in English literature at Columbia University, but dropped out after two weeks. She eventually obtained a Master’s in history but not a PhD.

Like many other intellectually gifted women of her generation, Dawidowicz would spend far too many years — the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s — working out of public view as a secretary, translator, or researcher for men whose publications rarely acknowledged her in print. Finally, in 1967, at the age of 52, she published her own book, a massive anthology of primary sources titled The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, and was hired to teach at Yeshiva University’s all-female Stern College, where she created one of the first courses in what is now called Holocaust Studies.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Essence Of Progressivism Is Refusal To Deal With RealityFrancis Menton

By on December 10th, 2020

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c

Reality is harsh. Let’s face it, our world is imperfect, often even deadly. Not only that, it’s always going to be imperfect. So let’s get to work on enjoying our brief lives as best we can amidst the imperfection, while striving for such incremental improvements to the world as are within our modest capabilities.

If you think that way, you definitely are not “woke.” To be a woke progressive the first requirement is that you must refuse to acknowledge the real world as it exists. You must pretend that the world is something else, something immediately transformable into a fantasy of perfection through coercive collective action. You also must firmly close your eyes to any facts or evidence that might contradict such progressive fantasy, and indeed you must demand that any such facts or evidence be suppressed and never mentioned.

Among numerous illustrations of this point, perhaps the most striking is the current hysteria sometimes going by the name “anti-racism.” Here, the official progressive fantasy is that any under-representation of blacks (or other minority group of your choice) at designated heights of society can only be the result of “systemic racism.” Therefore all must commit to the coerced program of “anti-racism,” whereupon, I presume, perfection will promptly be achieved.

Over the past several months, you cannot have missed the parade of major societal institutions — large corporations, banks, law firms, universities, and so on — caught with insufficient numbers of minorities in their ranks and pledging to rectify the situation immediately if not sooner.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

100 House Republicans sign brief backing Texas lawsuit challenging election results By Juliegrace Brufke and Scott Wong

By on December 10th, 2020

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/529717-100-house-republicans-sign-brief-backing-texas-suit-challenging-election

More than 100 House Republicans on Thursday signed onto an amicus brief in support of the Texas lawsuit aimed at overturning the election results in four swing states — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — that handed Democrat Joe Biden the White House.

“This brief presents [our] concern as Members of Congress, shared by untold millions of their constituents, that the unconstitutional irregularities involved in the 2020 presidential election cast doubt upon its outcome and the integrity of the American system of elections,” states the brief from GOP lawmakers.

Outgoing Republican Study Committee Chairman Mike Johnson (R-La.) — one of President Trump’s closest allies in the House, having served on his impeachment defense team — helped lead the effort to garner support from his GOP colleagues on the brief. 

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), another top Trump ally, was not among the signatories.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

HUGE: After 4 Years of Stonewalling Corrupt FBI Finally Admits They’re Holding Seth Rich’s Laptop By Larry Johnson

By on December 10th, 2020

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/12/huge-4-years-stonewalling-corrupt-fbi-finally-admits-holding-seth-richs-laptop/?utm_source=

A stunning development on the legal front that directly impacts the so-called conspiracy theory that the death of Seth Rich was something more than routine street crime. The FBI now admits it has Seth Rich’s laptop. This information has just been posted on Lawflog.com courtesy of Ty Clevenger.

According to an email posted at Lawflog.com and sent to attorney Ty Clevenger, the attorney for the FBI now admits that the:

FBI has completed the initial search identifying approximately 50 cross-reference serials, with attachments totaling over 20,000 pages, in which Seth Rich is mentioned.  FBI has also located leads that indicate additional potential records that require further searching. . . . FBI is also currently working on getting the files from Seth Rich’s personal laptop into a format to be reviewed. As you can imagine, there are thousands of files of many types. The goal right now is to describe, generally, the types of files/personal information contained in this computer.

After more than four years of repeated denials from the FBI that they had searched their files and had no information on Seth Rich, we now know that was a blatant lie. It was David Hardy, a FBI Senior official, who put that denial in writing in September 2017. Hardy was the Section Chief of the Record/Information Dissemination Section (“RIDS”), Information Management Division (“IMD”),1 Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), in Winchester, Virginia. He stated under oath that the FBI had no records on Seth Rich:

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Hunter Becomes the Hunted Roger Kimball

By on December 10th, 2020

https://spectator.us/hunter-biden-tax-investigation/?

Grifter, Sr. and Grifter, Jr.

Are the chickens coming home for Hunter Biden? It certainly seems so, though experts differ on the critical question of whether they are coming home to roost or roast. Wednesday’s news, splashed via an official communiqué from his father’s transition operation, that Hunter is being investigated by the US Attorney’s Office for possible tax fraud makes me want to bet for ‘roast’ not ‘roost’.

Here’s Hunter’s statement from Wednesday, in full:

‘I learned yesterday for the first time that the US Attorney’s Office in Delaware advised my legal counsel, also yesterday, that they are investigating my tax affairs. I take this matter very seriously but I am confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisors.’

When you stop chuckling, get a load the codicil from the ‘Biden-Harris Transition’ (‘transition’ to what is not specified). ‘President-elect Biden is deeply proud of his son, who has fought through difficult challenges, including the vicious personal attacks of recent months, only to emerge stronger.’

How do you spell ‘non-sequitur’?

Please note that either Hunter or his father (or, to be more accurate, the people who write their copy) thought that ‘tax affairs’ sounded nicer than, say, ‘tax fraud’. But a truly fastidious person, canvassing Hunter’s randy romantic life — sleeping with his brother’s widow, for example — might lead them to choose a different word.

But nearly everyone who has reported on the investigation has cut to the chase and used ‘fraud’ so I followed suit, even though the echo of ‘voter fraud’, much on the nation’s mind at the moment, is inescapable.

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hunter Biden news embarrasses media defenders by Byron York

By on December 10th, 2020

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-hunter-biden-news-embarrasses-media-defenders

Late Wednesday afternoon, Hunter Biden announced that he is under investigation by the U.S. Attorney in Delaware. “They are investigating my tax affairs,” Biden wrote, adding that he is confident a “professional and objective” investigation will clear him. For his part, Biden’s father, President-elect Joe Biden, released a statement through his transition office decrying the “vicious personal attacks” on his son in recent years.

Several hours later, Politico reported that the investigation “has been more extensive than a statement from Hunter Biden indicates,” to include “potential money laundering and Hunter Biden’s foreign ties.” The New York Times reported that the money laundering part “failed to gain traction after FBI agents were unable to gather enough evidence for a prosecution.”

The investigation apparently began in 2018 and remained a secret until this week. Besides raising questions about Hunter Biden’s conduct — it’s not surprising that taxes are an issue for a person who has gotten large sums of foreign money under suspicious circumstances — it also raises questions about the politics and media coverage of the president-elect’s son.

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