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February 2022

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Biden’s transformational presidency is failing His administration lacks the vision to solve big problems By Peter Morici

By on February 23rd, 2022

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/feb/22/why-bidens-transformational-presidency-is-failing/

President Biden’s transformational presidency is unraveling. He simply lacks energy and ideas and is surrounded by top officials with resumes that nominally check the boxes on experience but lack the vision to solve big problems.

The whole justification for his candidacy was he was not Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose socialism many voters feared, or former President Donald Trump, whose character many disliked but whose policies voters never rejected.

In 2020, Mr. Biden managed to win, but Democrats lost seats in the House. In 2021, the off-year election went badly for liberals in Virginia and elsewhere. In 2022, the president’s approval ratings are lower than a snake’s belly, and generic polls favor the Republican Party to take back the House.

Mr. Biden chose Vice President Kamala Harris for her race and gender and charged her with addressing the southern border crisis. As with most issues, she is more concerned with politics than the substance and is accomplishing little.

Often, she doesn’t do her homework and then blames the staff for poor results. Frustrated by her resulting lack of clout in the administration, key staffers have left.

Mr. Biden was warned his stimulus package was much too large, and now the country bears 7.5% inflation, declining real wages and many benefits of asset bubbles going to Wall Street bankers.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

What Putin Has Already Gained From Biden: Claudia Rosset

By on February 23rd, 2022

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/what-putin-has-already-gained-from-biden/92076/

While President Biden warns President Putin that invading Ukraine would bring drastic sanctions in some misty tomorrow, the Russian dictator is leveraging the current crisis to humiliate and shake down the West today. Whatever Putin’s next move, it’s worth tallying what he’s already gained.

Mr. Biden, for all his warnings, has so far imposed no serious costs on Mr. Putin for threatening Ukraine by land and sea. The Russian ruler has spent months assembling a strike force of war ships along Ukraine’s coast and more than 150,000 troops along its land borders. In April he threatened to invade Ukraine with a smaller force, for which he paid no price.

The precedent now taking shape is that Mr. Putin can with impunity threaten, terrorize, and engage in a dress rehearsal for invasion, as long as the troops then go home — at least for a while. This routine provides useful training in the field for Russia’s military, should Mr. Putin decide at some stage to go ahead.

While Mr. Putin has been readying his guns, America has defaulted to talks, with senior officials proffering diplomatic off ramps as if Mr. Putin were stuck in a runaway truck. Yet the problem is not that Mr. Putin lacks off-ramps. Rather, Putin is expert in creating crises he can manipulate, and he created this one.

Mr. Putin makes no secret of his desire to reassemble a Russian empire. He has already attempted an invasion in 2008 of Georgia, created a mascot state in Belarus, seized Crimea in 2014, intervened recently in an upheaval in Kazakhstan, and fueled separatist conflict in Eastern Ukraine for years. If he has yet to make up his mind on Ukraine, it might just be that he is taking time to marvel at the limp American response.

Mr. Biden’s threat to stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline bringing Russian gas to Germany in the event Russia were to invade Ukraine would probably be more daunting were Germany more clearly on board, and if Mr. Biden had not waved ahead the same pipeline last year as a fait accompli.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Left’s Covid Insanity is Creating a Once in a Lifetime Opportunity for Conservatives

By on February 23rd, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/23/the-lefts-covid-insanity-is-creating-a-once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity-for-conservatives/

How many times can leftists reveal themselves to be intolerant, close-minded, dogmatic, bigoted, cruel, unforgiving, race-mongers while claiming to be the virtuous ones? Two recent events – both of which took place in uber-liberal San Francisco – suggest that the time for leftists honoring themselves might soon be at an end.

Last week, San Franciscans voted overwhelmingly – and we’re talking an average margin of 75-25 – to recall three school board members for, as the Washington Post put it, being “too focused on racial justice.”

Actually, the last straw for parents was the fact that, instead of reopening schools, the board was fixated on renaming 44 of them that carry names of those currently disfavored by leftists. You know, deplorables such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln​, Paul Revere, and … California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Robert Spencer’s ‘The Critical Qur’an’ A must-read, essential book. Danusha V. Goska

By on February 23rd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/robert-spencers-critical-quran-explained-key-danusha-v-goska/

If I were queen, I would reward every reader who completed Robert Spencer’s new book, The Critical Qur’an: Explained from Key Islamic Commentaries and Contemporary Historical Research. The Critical Qur’an is an essential book that every thinking person would benefit from reading. About one in four humans is a Muslim. Given child marriage, polygyny, and women’s low status, Muslims have high fertility rates and the percentage of the world’s population that is Muslim is predicted to increase till Islam is the world’s majority religion in 2075. While it is true that the Qur’an is often not read or understand by most Muslims, Muslims do revere the Qur’an. Muslims may have little idea what the book contains, but they are ready to kill over it. When, in 2005, Newsweek circulated false rumors that Americans were flushing Qur’ans down toilets – which is of course impossible – at least seventeen people were killed in ensuing violence and “a council of more than 300 mullahs …threatened to declare holy war.”

In the past, reading the Qur’an was difficult. Some translations used pseudo-King-James English, for example archaic forms like “thee, thou, thine,” in an attempt to make the Qur’an sound Biblical, and, therefore, holy. Some translations attempt to paper over the Qur’an’s lack of clarity by adding parenthetical fixes. For example, Qur’an 2:1 begins “Alif Lam Meem.” No one knows what this means. One translation tries to “help” the reader with a parenthetical explanation: “Alif-Lam-Mim. [These letters are one of the miracles of the Quran and none but Allah (Alone) knows their meanings].” The reader is left to wonder how the incoherent equals the miraculous. Translators try to draw a smiley face over darker Qur’anic passages. “Jihad,” which clearly means actual warfare to claim territory, booty, corpses, and slaves for Allah, is translated as “struggle.” Spencer’s new translation avoids these pitfalls, and, on the sentence level, it is easy to read.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Can Israel Anchor a Defense Alliance of Moderate Arab States? Or will the balance of Middle East power tip toward Iran? Joseph Puder

By on February 23rd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/can-israel-anchor-defense-alliance-moderate-arab-joseph-puder/

The Biden administration debacle in Afghanistan has convinced America’s enemies of the administration’s weakness and vulnerability. The timing of Vladimir Putin’s march on Ukraine is undoubtedly connected to the perception in Moscow of Washington’s lack of will to engage in a confrontation. Communist China is astutely waiting for the right time to seize Taiwan. Should Moscow achieve its objectives, Xi Jinping, China’s dictator would follow Putin’s example and act, knowing full well that the Biden administration would pay lip service to the violation of Taiwanese sovereignty, and perhaps demand UN sanctions, but ultimately, Washington would live with the new reality.

The radical and theocratic Ayatollahs also sense an opportunity to take advantage of the Biden administration’s willingness to have a deal at all costs, and thus have been successfully pressing their demands, and it appears that the Biden administration might cave in. Tehran also realized that there will not be military consequences from the US with their continued advancement toward a nuclear bomb. Iran continues to develop its ballistic missiles range and payload, to possibly carry a nuclear device. At the same time, the Iranians have continued their adventurism and terror throughout the region. Tehran also considered the fact that North Korea has never suffered the military consequences of becoming nuclear. Economic boycotts by the West are clearly no longer a deterrent against Iran, North Korea, China, or Russia.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Russia and the West A conflict born in failures of imagination. Bruce Thornton

By on February 23rd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/russia-and-west-bruce-thornton/

After weeks of feints, offers to negotiate, threats, and counter-threats, Vladimir Putin has put the question to the West by creating facts on the ground. On Monday he ordered Russian troops to enter the eastern Ukraine Donbas region where in 2014-15 he helped ethnic Russian separatists seize a territorial enclave. He has also created two puppet states which he has promised “friendship and mutual assistance,” and he is sending them “peacekeepers” to defend the new nations, and perhaps expand their territory beyond what they already hold.

So far, the West has responded with bluster and economic sanctions that are unlikely to make Putin back off. Anticipating this move, Russia has already stockpiled $638 billion in reserves and redirected trade from the West. With China’s support, and with oil over $100 a barrel and rising, Putin calculates he can ride out sanctions just as Iran and North Korea have. He also knows Germany and other EU nations needs the Nordstream 2 natural gas pipeline, the opening of which Germany has suspended, more than Russia does. We’ll see how stalwart European sanctions are when energy prices start biting even harder.

In short, Putin acts and drives events, while we react with “words, words, words,” as Hamlet put it.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s Putin Appeasement Has Been Years in the Making By David Harsanyi

By on February 23rd, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/bidens-putin-appeasement-has-been-years-in-the-making/

As VP, he mocked Russia hawks, treated Putin as a partner, and helped Russia join the WTO. Then came his presidency.

O ne small thing to be thankful for is that DJT is not in the White House as the Ukraine crisis unfolds. He’d side with Russia,” tweeted Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man. The headline on Eugene Robinson’s Washington Post column reads, “With Biden standing firm, Putin must wonder: Where’s Trump when I need him?” You could find similar sentiment from foreign-policy experts strewn across social media.

Surely, even Trump’s most passionate antagonists must be slightly curious as to why Putin didn’t move on eastern Ukraine after successfully installing the orange man as an alleged infiltrator in the White House. What better time could there have been for an invasion or annexation? Why now, and not then?

Then again, the notion that Biden has shown firmness or deftness on foreign policy is at odds with not only recent events — most notably the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan — but also 50 years of his history. On the issue of Putin, Biden has been relentlessly wrong.

In 2009, Biden went to Munich and delivered the Obama administration’s first major foreign-policy speech, arguing that it was “time to press the reset button” after eight years of purported American antagonism toward Russia. The speech was framed as a return to diplomatic normalcy after the tumultuous Bush years. “The leaders of Germany and France as well as the deputy prime minister of Russia — all countries that clashed with Mr Bush — were all in the audience for Mr Biden’s speech,” reported The Financial Times. It was Biden who then spearheaded the effort to reward Moscow by giving Russia access to the World Trade Organization: He told nominal Russian president Dmitri Medvedev that Russia’s access to the WTO was “the most important item on our agenda.” At the time, a Reuters headline announced, “Biden backs Russia WTO bid, praises Medvedev.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why is the left silent on Trudeau’s crackdown? Civil liberties have been sacrificed to the culture war. Heydon Powse

By on February 23rd, 2022

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/21/why-is-the-left-silent-on-trudeaus-crackdown/

Last month I gave a speech at the ‘Kill the Bill’ rally in Westminster, with a bunch of fellow lefties who were rightly angry at Priti Patel’s proposed Policing Bill, which would have essentially outlawed protests. Jeremy Corbyn was there (obviously), as were other well-known names from the left, many of whom I am friendly with and respect a lot. There was much impassioned rhetoric about the worrying resurgence of authoritarianism around the world.

Yet all of those speakers I demonstrated with in London have remained eerily silent on Justin Trudeau’s crackdown on the Canadian truckers’ protests (with the exception of Extinction Rebellion). As has practically every major civil-rights organisation on the planet for that matter, from the ACLU in the US to Liberty in the UK.

Over the past few weeks, Trudeau’s government has enacted emergency powers, used pepper spray and stun grenades on the truckers’ Freedom Convoy, and has labelled these legitimate protesters as ‘terrorists’, threatening to freeze their bank accounts. Had this been an equally narcissistic North American head of state – with a comparably lousy record on human rights and the environment, and whose name also begins with T – my fellow lefties probably would have had one or two things to say on Twitter. But this was Trudeau, not Trump, and so they all ignored it when GoFundMe seized $10million in legitimate donations to the truckers. They ignored it when Trudeau called a Jewish politician a Nazi sympathiser in parliament for questioning his crackdown. They ignored it when another fundraising site, GiveSendGo, was hacked, outing the names of 92,000 Freedom Convoy donors, some of whom lost their jobs as a result.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

There is no such thing as ‘Black America’ The success of black immigrants shows that America is not ‘systemically racist’. Rakib Ehsan

By on February 23rd, 2022

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/02/22/there-is-no-such-thing-as-black-america/

In much of the West, there is a tendency to lump together culturally and economically different groups on the grounds of race. This is particularly pronounced in the case of ‘Black America’.

This category, to which many progressives still cleave, hides significant differences among the US’s black population – such as those between US-born black Americans and recently arrived black immigrants and refugees. The lives of the black immigrants, originating from countries such as Jamaica, Haiti, Nigeria, Ethiopia and the Dominican Republic, simply do not fit the pessimistic narratives of ‘Black America’ that we always hear from the identitarian left. These tend to focus on the plight of US-born black Americans.

Instead, among immigrant black Americans there are myriad success stories. Stories of people achieving academically, getting well-paid jobs and generally doing well. The lives of these black Americans, obscured by the term ‘Black America’, fly in the face of those who insist that America is systemically racist, or in the grip of white supremacy.

Recent data produced by the Migration Policy Institute bears this out. Take, for instance, the very different educational and employment outcomes for black immigrants compared to those for US-born black Americans: 31 per cent of black immigrant men and 28 per cent of black immigrant women are college graduates. This compares to 17 per cent of US-born black men and 24 per cent of US-born black women.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Iran’s anti-US operations in Africa: US policy toward Iran – Deja’ Vu?Yoram Ettinger

By on February 23rd, 2022

https://bit.ly/3hdmQ57

In 1979, US policy toward Iran crashed against the rocks of reality, when Ayatollah Khomeini assumed power with the help of the US, but – contrary to US expectations – transformed Iran, “The American policeman of the Gulf” into the world’s leading epicenter of anti-US subversion, terrorism and drug-trafficking.

In 2015, US policy toward Iran crashed, again, against the rocks of reality, when – contrary to US expectations – Iran’s Ayatollahs did not harness the mega-billion-dollar bonanza, yielded by the nuclear accord (JCPOA), to upgrade domestic standards of living. Instead – as expected – this bonanza bolstered Iran’s preoccupation with anti-US subversion, terrorism and the development, manufacturing and proliferation of non-conventional military systems.

In 2022, once again, US policy-makers seem to stick to the 1979 and 2015  practice of basing their Iran policy on assessments of the future behavior of Iran’s Ayatollahs, rather than on the Ayatollahs’ rogue, systematic track record since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
US policy-makers base their policy on the hope that a mega-generous Western gesture could induce Iran’s Ayatollahs to depart from their 1979-2022 systematic and rogue anti-US policy, which is driven by a 1,400-year-old religious, cultural, historical and imperialistic vision.

The hope (rather than reality)-driven policy toward Iran has led to a display of eagerness to conclude an agreement with Iran’s Ayatollahs, downplaying the Ayatollahs’ non-good-faith conduct, and waving the military option and the regime-change option.

However, on February 1, 2022, Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, the powerful Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, delivered a strident warning to President Biden on the Senate floor: “Hope is not a national security strategy!”

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