Displaying posts published in

December 2021

The Union Mandated School Shutdowns Are Having Major Consequences School violence rises, mental health days proliferate, and thousands of kids are leaving government schools nationwide. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/08/the-union-mandated-school-shutdowns-are-having-major-consequences/

Recently, a report compiled by Mike Antonucci for the Defense of Freedom Institute confirmed that the teachers unions had a heavy-handed role in the COVID-related shutdowns that consumed much of the country starting in March 2020. And the “never let a good crisis go to waste” unions were in prime form in the process. The California Teachers Association, for example, issued a “bargaining advisory” in May of 2020, in which it states, “When exercising a ‘get for the give’ approach to bargaining concessions, locals should consider strengthening or implementing consultation procedures language in the CBA (collective bargaining agreement).” The union added, “Now is the time to secure (contract) language improvements that we have wanted for some time.”

While the California Teachers Association was busy instructing its local teachers unions how to milk the shutdown, Antonucci notes that it was successful on a statewide basis by “winning a ban on teacher layoffs, a substantial reduction in required instructional minutes, and the elimination of public accountability data collections for 2020, including those for academics, absenteeism, graduation and suspension rates, and college readiness.”

While most schools opened full time across the country in the fall of this year, many unions are now demanding “mental health days,” thus shuttering the schools once again. This time the closures are of variable time spans, and are, in part, due to kids acting out and often becoming violent. As Burbio, the invaluable school reopening tracker, notes, by November 22, there were 3,145 school closures for “mental health” out of a total 8,692 for the school year.

January 6 Police Beating Victim Speaks: ‘I Could Have Died’ The first of a two-part interview with Victoria White, a Trump supporter who was beaten by police inside the tunnel on the lower west terrace of the Capitol building on January 6. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/08/150045/

The first time Victoria White visited the nation’s capital was on January 6, 2021. Listening to President Trump’s speech—with her teen daughter and three friends alongside her—would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, White thought.

Instead, the day turned into a personal nightmare with real-time flashbacks to her years as a victim of domestic abuse.

White, a mother of four, recounted to me this week by phone in horrifying and heartbreaking detail how at least two D.C. Metropolitan police officers viciously assaulted her inside a tunnel on the lower west terrace of the Capitol building on January 6. Fierce battles between police and protesters took place inside the tunnel, which leads to a set of doors that allows access to the building. It is the location where Rosanne Boyland, a 34-year-old Trump supporter from Georgia, died.

Amid video evidence, court filings, and firsthand witness accounts, new questions have emerged about the exact cause of Boyland’s death. A report issued by the D.C. Medical Examiner’s office in April claimed Boyland, a recovering addict, died of an accidental drug overdose. But others in the vicinity of Boyland when she lost consciousness insist her death was caused by law enforcement officers, who deployed a toxic chemical spray and, in some cases, used metal sticks, riot shields, and their own fists against Trump supporters.

White, 39, found herself in the tunnel near Boyland—and her harrowing account describes nothing short of criminal misconduct by still-unidentified members of the D.C. Metropolitan Police department. Further, her experience bolsters allegations that police contributed or directly caused the death of a second unarmed female Trump supporter on January 6.

Like hundreds of thousands of Americans, White traveled from her home to Washington, D.C. to hear President Trump’s speech and protest the results of the rigged 2020 presidential election. A resident of Rochester, Minnesota, White, her daughter, and friends took turns driving so they would arrive in Washington on time. They stayed at the home of one of her friend’s parents in suburban Virginia.

Hillary Clinton reminds us what an awful president she would have been By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/hillary_clinton_reminds_us_what_an_awful_president_she_would_have_been.html

Yes, Joe Biden is far and away the worst president in the history of the United States. However, the four-year Trump interlude between Obama and Biden gave the U.S. at least a little resiliency to stand against Biden’s hard-left administration. Imagine how much worse things would have been if Hillary had immediately stepped into Obama’s shoes. America wouldn’t have stood a chance. And lest you forget just what a horrible human being Hillary was, she just gave us a reminder as she spoke with Today’s Willie Geist about her decision to read her “victory speech” aloud for a MasterClass.

A snippet of her reading the speech made headlines because Hillary started to cry when she got to the part in the speech that saw her imagining telling her long-deceased mother that Hillary was America’s first woman president. Ironically, this emotional breakdown occurred in a masterclass the topic of which is “the power of resilience.” A woman who has spent the last five years whining about losing the election and now cries because she couldn’t, in her imagination, tell her mommy she won, is not resilient.

Still, any student who signs up for a MasterClass taught by Hillary Clinton has already drunk the Democrat Kool-Aid and will already have taken the side of a woman who rode her husband’s coattails as far as he could take her, at which point she fell down all by herself. A presidential candidate who calls at least half of the American electorate “deplorable” is a fool and deserves to lose.

There’s also the little problem of Hillary’s incredible corruption (making her and Biden birds of a feather). And of course, the fact that Hillary’s unsecure server damaged national security in a way that would have seen an ordinary, politically unconnected person spend the rest of her life in prison—which, not coincidentally, is where Papa Joe belongs for using his debauched son Hunter as the bagman for decades of anti-American corruption.

Still, even considering all those bad things about Hillary, there was still something worse: It was clear that she ran for office, not for America, but for Hillary. Sure, she wanted to turn the country as far left as Joe Biden is doing but, just as with Biden, Hillary was in it for self-aggrandizement. Biden, though, being a more savvy politician (it pains me to say that), hid his enormous self-centeredness a bit better than Hillary ever did.

And that gets us to Hillary’s prepared victory speech. You can listen to the part where she cries because that’s the newsworthy part, but I found most interesting what she told Willie Geist about her thinking as she wrote the thankfully unused speech (emphasis mine):

I worked on a speech that really was about my journey and that had a real emphasis on my mother’s life and journey as a way of, you know, making it clear that, yes, I would be the first woman president but I, like everybody, stood on the shoulders and lived the lives and experiences of those who came before us.

Arabs to Biden: Do Not Let Iran Play You for a Fool by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17995/arabs-biden-iran

Iran has been insisting on its conditions and demands, including that Washington and the Western powers release frozen Iranian funds before reaching an agreement, according to Tariq Alhomayed, a Saudi journalist and former editor-in-chief of the Arabic-language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat. He added that Iran was refusing to discuss ballistic missiles, drones and its terrorist militias in the Middle East as the mullahs continue their alarming rate of uranium enrichment.

“It is evident that Washington has been begging Iran to return to the negotiating table,” he said. “Washington did not threaten Iran with the use of force. It is true that we hear statements from Washington about impatience, but they are neither serious nor real. The Americans did not convey any serious message to the Iranians.” — Tariq Alhomayed, Asharq Al-Awsat, November 24, 2021.

Iraqi writer Ali Alsarraf believes that by seeking guarantees that the US will not reimpose sanctions on Iran in the future, the mullahs in Tehran are hoping that they will become immune from anything that their militias do in the Middle East, including striking American bases and forcing them to leave Iraq and Syria.

“As with North Korea, the world would be forced to grapple with Iranian aggression very cautiously because of the likelihood that it could rain down ballistic and nuclear weapons upon neighbors. Unlike North Korea, Iran has proxy forces deployed throughout the region which henceforth could act with impunity, shielded by Iran’s nuclear umbrella.” — Baria Alamuddin, award-winning Lebanese journalist and broadcaster, Arab News, November 28, 2021.

It is impressive to see that a growing number of Arabs, especially those… whose countries are occupied by Iranian-backed militias, share Israeli fears of the mullahs’ evil plans.

The message these Arabs are sending to the Biden administration: take a tough stance towards Iran before it is too late. Far from being a danger to Israel alone, Iran is terrorizing Arab countries and threatening world peace and security.

On the eve of the resumption of the Iran nuclear talks in Vienna, Arabs have again warned the Biden administration against being duped by the mullahs of Tehran.

The Arabs, who share Israel’s concern over Iran’s accelerated efforts (and deceptive tactics) to achieve nuclear weapons, also warned the Biden administration against reaching a temporary deal that would give Iran more time to proceed with its disastrous and dangerous plans.

Woke Got What It Wanted—and Then What? Of the collapse of the woke appeal, perhaps we could say, “It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of zealots.” By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/12/08/woke-got-what-it-wanted-and-then-what/

The woke movement was giddy after January 20, 2021. The Left controlled both houses of Congress.

Joe Biden was drafted as the necessary veneer of 1980s Democratic normality to ram through an otherwise hard Left agenda. 

All the major cultural, financial, economic, entertainment, and media institutions had played various roles in seeing Donald Trump not just defeated, but also impeached twice. He was written off as persona non grata after the January 6 riot at the Capitol.  

So, academia, the corporate boardroom, Hollywood, the media, the Pentagon, professional sports, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street in near hysterical fashion all boarded the woke train. 

All now boasted of ferreting out “white rage,” and hiring legions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” czars. 

Critical race theory would be mainstreamed to excise racism and discrimination by embracing racism and discrimination. 

“Crime” was to be seen now mostly as a construct created by the elite to protect their own privilege, prerogatives, and property. Shoplifting, looting, and street thuggery were just part of living in a normal city. 

Social justice warriors could replace defunded police. Gone would be most bail, incarceration, mandatory jail time, stop-and-frisk, and broken-windows deterrent policies. 

Green agendas would fundamentally transform America to put an immediate stop to man-made “climate change.” So, lots of oil and gas leases were either canceled or their fees vastly increased. 

Vaccine Mandates, Public Health Theater and an Endgame that Makes No Sense Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/12/vaccine-mandates-public-health-theater-and-endgame-daniel-greenfield/

State Democrats are discovering that a big chunk of their base hates vaccine mandates. And that mandates familiarly pit the minority and working-class elements of their base against the white leftist hipster upper-class chunk of their base. Much like Latinx.

And they’re having to choose.

Three months ago, as California Gov. GAVIN NEWSOM was turning around his fate in the state’s recall election, many Democrats came to the conclusion that they’d struck political gold. Mandates to get the Covid-19 vaccine weren’t just extremely valuable public health policy but they were electorally powerful too.

Now, moderate and frontline members of the party are singing a different tune.

I like the implicit acknowledgment that Newsom is an extremist. Or rather California Dems are.

 The most recent Democratic lawmaker to voice her concern was Michigan Gov. GRETCHEN WHITMER. Once considered to be Biden’s vice president, Whitmer said she opposes mandates, citing the impact on the state’s workforce — as Michigan grapples with upticks in cases and residents are split on whether or not to get the vaccine.

Gov. PHIL MURPHY (D-.N.J.), shortly before an unexpectedly close re-election win, shied away from embracing a strict vaccine mandate for teachers and other public workers. Gov. KATHY HOCHUL (D-N.Y.), who is running for election after taking over for disgraced former Gov. ANDREW CUOMO (D-N.Y.), has stated her opposition to a “broad-based mandate for all private-sector workers in New York.”

The Biden administration is still doubling down.

Lying Democrats and the Evolution of Fake News and Activist Journalism-John Hinderaker

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/john-hinderaker-and-joe-concha-speak-restoration-frontpagemagcom/

EXCERPT: Lawyer and co-Founder of the  Power Line blog John Hinderaker discusses  the evolution of media bias, fake news;

Transcript:

John Hinderaker: What I want to talk about in my presentation here is the evolution of the issue of media bias over the last 15 or 20 years.  And I want to do that primarily by comparing and contrasting two significant milestones in that story of media bias, which I think sheds a lot of light on how things have changed since the early 2000s.

So we started the website Power Line in 2002.  And media bias was one of the topics that we wrote on all the time.  And in those days, reporters for newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times were relatively accessible.  Their email addresses were public.  And if we emailed them, as we did rather frequently, to comment on and to critique their news stories, they usually would respond.  And so we got into some very interesting colloquies with some of those reporters, which resulted in a number of corrections being made to news stories.  Now, those corrections were generally subsilentio, unacknowledged, certainly, as to the source.  But nevertheless, that would sometimes happen.  Reporters in those days wanted at least to be seen as objective and fair, even though most were, in fact, biased in the direction of the Left.

Then in 2004, an episode that became known as Rathergate occurred.  “60 Minutes” tried to help swing the presidential election to John Kerry by publishing fake documents that put the service of President George Bush in the Texas Air National Guard, way back in the early 1970s, in a bad light.  It was a complete fraud.  The documents were fakes.  And the fraud unraveled quickly, as we at Power Line and others on the internet showed that the documents were clumsy forgeries that were full of substantive errors as well as the typographical errors that made most of the news.

How the Associated Press Covered Israeli President Herzog’s Candle-Lighting in Hebron The twisted world of anti-Israel bias. Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/how-associated-press-covered-israeli-president-hugh-fitzgerald/

The AP covered, in its peculiar way, the latest contretemps between Arab and Jew in Hebron, the second holiest city in Judaism. It involved President Herzog’s lighting of the first candle for Hanukkah at a menorah in the Cave of the Patriarchs. When he first announced his intention to do so, Hamas reacted furiously, warning that if he went through with his candle-lighting, Israelis in Hebron, and perhaps elsewhere in the West Bank, would be attacked. He went ahead anyway, and so far those threatened attacks have not taken place, because the IDF has reinforced its presence in Kiryat Arba, that part of Hebron where 7,236 Jews bravely live, in the face of the 200,000 Palestinian Arabs who are living in the rest of Hebron. .

A report on the AP’s coverage of the candle-lighting in Hebron is here: “AP Demotes Second Holiest Place in Judaism to ‘West Bank Site’, Ignores Recent Hamas Threat Against Hebron’s Jews,” by Gidon Ben-Zvi, HonestReporting, November 29, 2021:

Imagine if one of the world’s leading news publications in a headline referred to Washington DC merely as a ‘City on the Potomac River.’ Yet this is exactly what The Associated Press, a wire service with more than 1,300 clients, did in a piece titled “Israeli president celebrates Hanukkah at West Bank site.” Beyond diminishing the Jewish people’s historic connection to Hebron, AP also chose to ignore Hamas’ threat of violence against the city’s Jewish residents that was made following the announcement that President Isaac Herzog would be lighting the first candle of Hanukkah at the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

The Associated Press rather belatedly mentions, in the eighth paragraph of the November 28 piece written by Moshe Edri, that “the cave is believed to be the burial site of the Jewish and Muslim patriarch Abraham. It also is revered as the burial site of other Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs and is considered the second holiest site in Judaism.”

Biden’s diplomacy of disaster – The Iranians just checkmated him with the whole world watching Dominic Green

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/bidens-diplomacy-disaster-iran/

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me seven times, shame on the United States, whose leaders seem determined to drive it into a decline whose rapidity and extent is unparalleled in the history of great powers.

Shame on the Democrats too, for putting domestic vanity over the national interest. Shame on Barack Obama and, should he be aware of what’s going on in Vienna, shame on Joe Biden, for pursuing the diplomacy of disaster.

The State Department’s envoys are back in Vienna in the hope of starting a seventh round of negotiations over reviving Obama’s “Iran deal.” But there seems to be nothing left to talk about. Iran is increasingly intransigent, and its latest demands give the US and its allies a choice between surrender or defeat.

The problem with “jaw-jaw” is that when the talking stops, “war-war” is what remains. The Iranian regime has outplayed the American amateurs at every turn. It is often noted that the Iranians play chess and like to haggle, but really, a child could have outplayed the US.

In their colossal self-regard, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his chief negotiator Robert Malley promised Iran what it wanted — sanctions relief and an open path to the Bomb — before the negotiations had even begun. Naturally, the Iranians pushed for more, played for time and prepared for the day of victory. And now, to the shock of the State Department, they’ve announced a new set of demands that undo the hypothetical progress achieved in the previous six rounds of talks.

Checkmate. Now, it is possible that the US will surrender and get some kind of deal that John Kerry will call a return to the JCPOA of 2015. But this will be an exercise in face-saving — and it will only happen if the Iranians let it happen. If I were them, I’d keep pushing. Iran is now not just on the threshold of nuclear weapons; it’s on the threshold of finally defeating the Great Satan, expelling the US from the Middle East and Central Asia, establishing an empire over the Arabs and nuclear-tipped intimidation over Turkey and the Europeans.

Bette Midler: ‘Trump IS the Devil,’ Should Be Arrested for Attempted Murder of Joe Biden Welcome to a particularly virulent strain of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/bette-midler-trump-devil-should-be-arrested-robert-spencer/

Bette Midler is enraged, and the object of her rage is all too predictable. The America-First President has been out of the White House for nearly a year now, but the Left still focuses on him with passionate intensity, using him as an all-purpose scapegoat for everything that has gone wrong (and there is so much) since they took over. Now the washed-up chanteuse, whose claim to fame is that time she brought us a stiff, lukewarm remake of the Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” wants the threat neutralized once and for all: she is demanding that Trump be locked up and charged with attempted murder for trying to infect Old Joe Biden (everyone’s idea of a competent, capable president) with COVID-19.

When did Trump try to kill Old Joe, you ask? Why, it all goes back to the sensationalistic recent fake news claim that Trump had tested positive for the dreaded killer disease with a 99% survival rate before his first debate with Biden. As my PJ Media colleague Matt Margolis noted here Thursday, Trump’s test was actually a false positive, followed by two negative tests before the debate, so Old Joe was never actually in any danger.

Midler, however, was unmoved by these facts. She tweeted Friday to her two million Twitter followers, “#DonaldTrump should be arrested for attempted murder. He tried to infect & kill #JoeBiden at the debate; by turning up too late to be tested, knowing full well he was positive; then screeched, sputtered, spit, and foamed at the mouth, hoping to infect Joe. He IS the devil.” And then: “How many people did #TyphoidTrump knowingly infect with #Covid after he tested positive last year? Between that & producing Don Jr., Eric & Ivanka, it seems like #trumps fluids are hell bent on destroying the world.”

Trump Derangement Syndrome has long been a pandemic on the Left, but Midler is suffering from a particularly virulent strain. She has consistently been one of the most hysterical among the ranks of Leftist hysterics. Back in 2018, when one of Senator Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) neighbors savagely beat him and put him in the hospital, Midler applauded the attacker. In August 2020, she mocked “this awful person,” Melania Trump: “Oh, God. She still can’t speak English.” In February 2021, it was the late Rush Limbaugh’s turn: “#RushLimbaugh has gone to his reward. Bet it’s hot.”