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November 2021

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

White House messaging chaos inadvertently reveals the sinister intentions of Biden’s puppet masters By Thomas Lifson

By on November 18th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/white_house_messaging_chaos_inadvertently_reveals_the_sinister_intentions_of_bidens_puppet_masters.html

With Democrats quaking in their boots over the plunging public support for Joe Biden and the political party that sold him as a moderate and as physically and mentally capable of doing the job, the White House messaging team and their media supporters face an enormous challenge.  And they are bungling it as badly as the rest of the administration is bungling economic policy, diplomacy, and national security.  The gist of the messaging lately is:

Things are really going well; don’t believe your lying eyes or empty pocketbook
It’s your fault.
All this suffering is in a good cause, forcing you to go along with green new deal policies. You’re going to learn to like having less stuff.

First point: White House chief of staff Ron Klain, claimed by some to be the de facto real president, actually went gaslighting on CNN yesterday claiming that things are better now than a year ago.

“Well, look, I do think, as I said Jake, things are a lot better in this country than they were a year ago, with regard to COVID, with regard to the economy, but we have a lot of work left to do,” Klain stated.  “And I think voters are in show me don’t tell me mode, I don’t think they really care as much about what I’m saying on TV, or what you’re saying on TV as much as putting results into their lives.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Merrick Garland Must Go

By on November 18th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/18/merrick-garland-must-go/

A new memo shows that Attorney General Merrick Garland lied to Congress about the FBI snooping on parent groups upset with local school boards for their use of Critical Race Theory in the classroom. If so, it doesn’t warrant a slap on the hand, but swift removal from office.

Presidents deserve to have the people they nominate serve their entire term. But that’s not the case when that person lies under oath to Congress and, by extension, the American people. That’s a criminal offense.

This allegation comes from an official letter sent to the Justice Department by Rep. Jim Jordan, ranking GOP member of the House Judiciary Committee, in response to an email from a whistleblower.

If you’ll recall, on Oct. 21, Garland appeared before Congress and said he couldn’t “imagine any circumstances in which the Patriot Act would be used in the circumstances of parents complaining about their children, nor … a circumstance where they would be labeled as domestic terrorists.”  

He went on to say, “I do not think that parents getting angry at school boards for whatever reason constitute domestic terrorism. It’s not even a close question.”

The only problem is, neither statement is true.

Garland in fact proposed using the FBI to investigate parents indignant over schools subjecting their children to the Marxist, anti-American ideological propaganda of Critical Race Theory. For all we know, he’s still doing it.

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Media’s Verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse Why so many got this story so wrong. Bari Weiss

By on November 18th, 2021

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-medias-verdict-on-kyle-rittenhouse?

Here is what I thought was true about Kyle Rittenhouse during the last days of August 2020 based on mainstream media accounts: The 17-year-old was a racist vigilante. I thought he drove across state lines, to Kenosha, Wisc., with an illegally acquired semi-automatic rifle to a town to which he had no connection. I thought he went there because he knew there were Black Lives Matter protests and he wanted to start a fight. And I thought that by the end of the evening of August 25, 2020, he had done just that, killing two peaceful protestors and injuring a third.

It turns out that account was mostly wrong.

Unless you’re a regular reader of independent reporting — Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine and Jesse Singal stand out for being ahead of the pack (and pilloried, like clockwork, for not going along with the herd) — you would have been served a pack of lies about what happened during those terrible days in Kenosha. And you would have been shocked over the past two weeks as the trial unfolded in Wisconsin as every core claim was undermined by the evidence of what actually happened that night.

This wasn’t a disinformation campaign waged by Reddit trolls or anonymous Twitter accounts. It was one pushed by the mainstream media and sitting members of Congress for the sake of an expedient political narrative—a narrative that asked people to believe, among other unrealities, that blocks of burning buildings somehow constituted peaceful protests.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

The Book of Ruth Ruth R. Wisse’s new memoir is sharp, examined, and a more urgent read than ever By Phyllis Chesler

By on November 18th, 2021

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/book-of-ruth-wisse-phyllis-chesler

Like the poet John Masefield, I also suffer from “sea fever” and so down I went to the “seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky.” I needed no “tall ship,” only a room on the beach with a terrace—and all the time in the world to read Ruth R. Wisse’s new book, Free as a Jew: A Personal Memoir of National Self-Liberation.

Reader: I could not put it down. I still chose to read it slowly, to savor it, take it all in. I must have underlined at least a quarter of the book. Wisse commands an aerial view of Jewish history, bringing it to bear on Israeli politics and on the demonization of the only Jewish state. She continues to issue her clarion call about the plague of “political correctness” that threatens to devour the entire Western enterprise.

Free as a Jew is an “intellectual memoir,” but it is also a family history replete with charming photos; a story of European Jews before, during, and after the Holocaust; and a warm introduction to Yiddish literature, and to many of the major Yiddish writers whom Wisse and her parents knew, hosted, and supported in Montreal, where they lived after fleeing Romania. Wisse introduces us to many of these writers: Sholem Asch, Sholem Aleichem, Itzik Manger, Mendele Mokher Sforim, Abraham Sutzkever, and Chaim Grade, as well as to Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Leonard Cohen, Hillel Halkin, Yehuda Amichai, Irving Howe, and Norman Podhoretz.

For Wisse, Yiddish is not a social justice enterprise, nor is it mainly associated with “progressivism.” Rather, it is a rich language, “associated with the actual Yiddish-speaking communities, which remained what they had always been: outposts of Jewish separatism, consisting mainly of religiously observant Jews living culturally apart from the surrounding population.” Yiddish—the language, the culture, the works—is not meant to be politicized.

Free as a Jew is also a story about Ruth’s love affair with Israel, and about Montreal’s Jews (told through the lens of Ruth’s long career, both at McGill and in publishing, long before she accepted a position at Harvard).

But this work is primarily a quintessential history of ideas, and about the law of unintended intellectual consequences. Wisse now questions her founding Jewish studies, just as I’ve questioned my founding of women’s studies because all identity-based academic studies have become weaponized in the war against Western civilization, which has also come to mean a war against America and Israel.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, MEDIA Comments turned off

If You Read It In The Mainstream Media, It’s Wrong — Plastics Edition Francis Menton

By on November 18th, 2021

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-11-16-if-you-read-it-in-the-mainstream-media-its-wrong-plastics-edition

By now you must have noticed how many of the big news stories that have political significance to the left, and are hyped for months or years (or even decades) on end throughout the mainstream media, turn out to be false. Donald Trump colluded with the Russians to hack and steal the 2016 election. Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist vigilante who went to Kenosha to make trouble. There is no such thing as Critical Race Theory taught in K-12 schools. “Climate change” is an existential crisis that can be easily solved at little cost by building wind turbines and solar panels. Saturated fat in your diet is bad for you. Feel free to add your own ten or a hundred examples to this list.

One that I had paid little attention to up to now was the narrative about the evils of plastics — that they cause terrible pollution problems, that they have accumulated in vast amounts in the oceans, that they kill sea creatures by the millions, that they accumulate forever and never degrade, and so forth. While I haven’t been paying attention, this narrative, like so many others, has swept to universal acceptance in progressive precincts, which of course includes my own New York City.

It was a couple of years ago, as this anti-plastics narrative gained traction, that plastic straws first began to disappear from New York City restaurants, generally replaced by paper straws that are much less pleasant to drink from. And the campaign against plastic convenience items has only accelerated. A ban on single-use plastic bags in grocery stores was enacted to take effect in March 2020. That ban got delayed by litigation, but the state prevailed, and enforcement has gradually kicked in over the intervening period. Today, if you go to a grocery store, the formerly standard plastic carry-home bags are gone. You will need to pay to get a paper grocery bag, or alternatively pay even more for a “reusable” bag made of some kind of textile. The disappearance of plastic straws in restaurants has been gradual, but according to this article in the Daily News, an actual ban took effect just a couple of weeks ago on November 1 of this year.

So clearly, there must be something really horrible about these plastic bags and straws, and probably everything else made of plastic. At this point it’s one of those things that everybody just knows.

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Iran – the anti-US ripple effect Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on November 18th, 2021

https://bit.ly/3wQd3ZO

The ripple effect theory

An underlying assumption behind any US agreement with Iran’s Ayatollahs is that the Ayatollahs would utilize the resulting financial and diplomatic bonanza for butter rather than guns.

Moreover, it is assumed that Iran’s Ayatollahs are amenable to good-faith negotiation and peaceful-coexistence.  

These assumptions have been quashed by the systematic, rogue, non-compliant and anti-US track record of the Ayatollahs since their violent ascension to power in 1978/79, and especially by their use of the $150bn bonanza showered upon them by the 2015 JCPOA (nuclear accord): intensified regional and global subversion, terrorism, wars, drug trafficking, and the development, manufacturing and proliferation of ballistic technologies.

In fact, the Ayatollahs’ Constitution requires “the uninterrupted process of the revolution of Islam.”

Furthermore, the assumption that the threats posed by the rogue regime in Teheran is limited to the Persian Gulf and the larger Middle East ignores the ripple effect reality.
Thus, just as a single pebble thrown into a puddle creates a series of ripples throughout the puddle, the eruption of a single local conflict in the Middle East – especially when driven by a 1,400-year-old fanatic, imperialistic, Islamic vision – triggers a series of violent ripples throughout the global puddle. Moreover, a limited-size wave of violence, driven by a megalomaniacal vision – which is accommodated and negotiated rather than crushed – is bound to spark a series of violent waves, evolving into a mega-size lethal wave, which may sweep many regions of the world.

The Iran-driven ripple effects are well-documented in the Persian Gulf, Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin and North America. Ignoring the Iranian ripple effects is bound to undermine the US homeland and national security.

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Peace-processing Like it’s 1993 Note to Dennis Ross: The world has changed since the signing of the Oslo Accords. Shoshana Bryen

By on November 18th, 2021

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

In a meeting in May with then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken outlined the Biden administration priority “to continue to rebuild our relationship with the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Authority.” Now, after announcing it wants to open a U.S. consulate in Jerusalem for the Palestinians, come reports that the administration is working on a plan for a Palestinian “unity government” of Hamas and Fatah to negotiate the “two-state solution” with Israel.

Veteran “peace processor” Dennis Ross wrote the long rationale, including his belief that Israel has to bow in the direction of the anti-Israel progressive “Squad” and “woke” on Capitol Hill:

“Israel cannot ignore the Palestinian issue for its own reasons—the Palestinians aren’t going anywhere. But with an evolving political landscape in the U.S., Israel needs to show it is not deepening occupation and is not acting in a way that makes a two-state outcome impossible, even as an option. Drifting toward a one-state outcome in which Palestinians will demand one person, one vote is certain to extend the influence of progressives far beyond where it stands today … . Israel must also deal with the reality that how it approaches the Palestinians will affect how it is seen in the U.S.”  Dennis Ross

Ross also notes that the Palestinians are “divided and show neither the inclination nor capability to adjust any of their positions.” He doesn’t elaborate, and that is his mistake. Hamas and Fatah have been fighting a bloody civil war since 2007—Hamas’s rocket war in May was aimed as much as establishing itself as the more powerful Palestinian faction as it was at Israel. Constructive engagement between Hamas and Fatah is a fantasy.

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