I am out of town…..rsk
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/transgender_surgery_or_female_genital_mutilation__are_they_different.html
In 2012, The United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution urging countries to ban the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), calling it an “irreparable and irreversible abuse.” The resolution was considered a major step forward in protecting women and girls. FGM has been recognized internationally as a violation of the human rights of girls and women. Sweden was the first Western country to outlaw FGM, followed in 1985 by the UK. In the United States it became illegal in 1997, and in the same year the WHO issued a joint statement with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) against the practice. Moreover, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation called for abolishing the practice.
Fast forward and it would appear that the new wave of transgenderism among youth is reminiscent of FGM practices. But while the leftwing establishment rightly condemns female genital mutilation, it praises transgenderism as “gender-affirming” and an act of courage.
Some key facts about female genital mutilation include:
The partial or total removal of external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.
The practice has no health benefits for girls and women.
FGM is mostly carried out on young girls between infancy and age 15.
FGM is a violation of the human rights of girls and women.
There is evidence suggesting greater involvement of health care providers in the practice. This is known as medicalization.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/ron-desantis-is-right-on-the-executive-duty-to-enforce-the-law/
The Florida governor may look like he’s engaging in a power grab, but as the executive, he’s standing up for a core rule-of-law value.
The rule of law is vital to the American system of government. Our system is designed, in the words of John Adams, “to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.” That core value imposes a variety of different obligations on different actors in the system. Today’s big announcement by Ron DeSantis, suspending a county attorney who refused as a matter of policy to enforce Florida laws he disliked, highlights one of those obligations: the duty of the executive to enforce the laws written by the legislature.
The people choose the government and retain the power to remove its officials: That makes us a democracy. Nobody has an inherited role or a privileged status above the law: That makes us a republic. The rules are written down: That makes our system constitutional. The rule of law binds these strands together. Once the constitution and the laws are written down, there are only two choices: Challenge the laws in court as conflicting with the written constitution, or change the constitution or the laws through the democratic process. In the meantime, there are only two outcomes: Either the rules are binding as written on everyone, or the people are no longer in charge of the government.
Adams used the phrase “a government of laws and not of men” in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 to justify the rigorous separation of powers: Only the legislature writes laws, only the executive enforces them, and only the judiciary interprets them. John Marshall used the same phrase in Marbury v. Madison to emphasize a related but distinct point: Judges have not just the power to declare laws invalid if they violate the Constitution, but a duty to do so in order to restrain the legislature: “To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained? The distinction between a government with limited and unlimited powers is abolished. . . .”
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18682/north-korea-threat
China’s urging “flexibility” on North Korea appears to coincide with the Chinese Communist Party’s ambitions in the region.
“According to unclassified intelligence reports to Congress, there are five key Chinese banks and a specially created holding company that funds the North Korean missile and nuclear technology programs.” — Peter Huessy, Real Clear Defense, August 10, 2017.
China’s main strategic concern when it comes to the Korean peninsula is apparently to end the US presence there and keep it out of US hands so that China can finally establish itself as the hegemon in the region.
North Korean escalation in the form of increased missile tests and resumption of ICBM and nuclear tests to pressure the US to make concessions — in the shape of troop withdrawals from South Korea — would play directly into the hands of China, enabling it to replace the US and establish itself as the primary power in the region.
“They are looking to take actions, which we believe are fundamentally destabilizing, as a way to increase pressure.” — US official in Washington to journalists, France24.com, January 31, 2022.
China, however, seems to have no interest in cooperating with the US on North Korea. Attempts to secure “Beijing’s cooperation” to build necessary economic leverage over North Korea are therefore exercises in futility.
China clearly cannot be relied on voluntarily to use its leverage over North Korea to persuade Kim Jong-un to give up his missile and nuclear program. To resolve the impasse, it is necessary to employ means that will leave China no choice other than to cooperate on North Korea.
A highly efficient way of doing that, Gordon Chang has suggested, would be to cut off the large Chinese banks and businesses that support the North Korean missile and nuclear technology from the global financial system by designating them a “primary money laundering concern” under Section 311 of the Patriot Act.
“In short, American policymakers know how to get China to begin acting responsibly.” — Gordon G. Chang, Newsweek, May 10, 2021.
The question now is — will the Biden administration muster the political will to designate those large Chinese banks under Section 311 of the Patriot Act?
https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/04/the-evasive-mr-wray/
It was time for him to fly.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee for the first time since July 2021, insisted he had to leave the hearing by 1:30 p.m. sharp. (It began at 10:00 a.m. on Thursday morning.)
Despite leading a scandal-ridden agency quickly losing the trust of the American people and congressional Republicans, Wray somehow believes that setting aside less than four hours to answer questions by lawmakers responsible for checking and balancing his work is sufficient.
“I had a flight that I’m supposed to be high-tailing it to, and I had understood that we were going to be done at 1:30, so that’s how we ended up where we are,” Wray told Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member who asked why the rush. If Wray needed to leave on business, Grassley noted, “you’ve got your own plane,” referring to the taxpayer-funded Gulfstream G550 jet used to ferry the head of the FBI around the country privately.
Wray got his way—the committee wrapped shortly after 1:30 p.m. with no chance for Republicans to ask follow-up questions. It was a symbolic win and another example of how Wray almost always prevails in skirmishes between his agency and members of Congress.
To be fair, an extended appearance only would have resulted in more non-answers and political spin.
Wray, appointed by Donald Trump in 2018, knows a lot about issues that matter to the Biden regime and national news media, such as the imaginary threat of “domestic violent extremists.” But he isn’t so savvy when it comes to issues that matter to Americans, such as a wide-open southern border, exploding crime rates, an aggressive China on the rise, and foreign terrorists who arrived here in the disorderly evacuation of Afghanistan.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/will-republicans-make-education-campaign-issue-larry-sand/
It just doesn’t stop. In Portland, OR, the kindergarten curriculum includes an anatomy lesson featuring “graphic drawings of children’s genitalia.” The words “Boy” and “Girl” are eschewed in favor of “person with a penis” and “person with a vulva,” because, according to the curriculum, girls can have penises and boys can have vulvas. In a West Chester, PA middle school, boys were encouraged to wear dresses at the school’s Gay Pride Month celebrations. And in a New York City middle school, students are encouraged to keep a list of all the “microaggressions” they witnessed – both at schools and at home.
And while kids are getting indoctrinated into the gender and Critical Race Theory cults, their traditional learning has become an afterthought. According to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Nation’s Report Card, only 37% of U.S. public high school seniors are proficient in reading and 24% have reached proficiency in math. Additionally, proficiency is at just 22% in science and a pathetic 12% in U.S. history. This is pre-COVID data, and we can only guess how horrific the scores will be after the prolonged union-orchestrated school shutdowns.
The good news is that the American people have finally awakened to the abuse. A May poll by the American Federation of Teachers revealed that 39% of voters reported that they have more confidence in Republicans on education matters, compared with 38% for Democrats. While the Republican edge is not exactly overwhelming, it still is important, as Democrats have always prevailed in public opinion because of the perception that they were the education party. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess notes, the Democrats’ “broad support for more education spending, outspoken embrace of public education, and close ties to teachers unions and the education establishment have usually added up to a hefty advantage, one that became more significant in recent decades as education assumed a more visible, national profile.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/member-us-army-joins-palestinian-islamic-jihad-joe-kaufman/
Convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) member Hatem Fariz is back in Israel, once again leading a tour for his terrorist supporting friends. This particular trip has them attending different weddings. One of the attendees, Isayed Darawad, is a surprise, as he is a member of the US Army. And though he may wear green camos with a ‘Stars and Stripes’ patch, this is a man who believes America’s friend Israel doesn’t exist and wants to see her Jewish citizens dead. Why is Israel allowing terrorist operatives into her country, and why is the US allowing their supporters into the military?
In February 2003, the FBI announced the arrests of four individuals whom the law enforcement agency described as being members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group recognized by the US government as being a terrorist organization. One of the individuals was Tampa-area resident Hatem Naji Fariz, a then-manager of a medical clinic. After a lengthy trial, Fariz pled guilty to providing material support to PIJ. Following his jail sentence, Fariz became managing director of Al-Qassam, the mosque founded by his PIJ co-defendant, Sami al-Arian, and named after one of the main inspirations for PIJ, deceased Palestinian militant icon, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam.
Through Al-Qassam, a.k.a. the Islamic Community of Tampa (ICT), Fariz runs a travel agency, the Adam Travel Tampa Hajj Group, which he uses to take excursions to Israel, a nation PIJ is sworn to destroy. Many of the people Fariz takes with him on these trips have like feelings towards Israel and Jews in general. They post videos on social media of Israelis being blown up during ambushes and videos of successful rocket attacks on Israeli civilian structures. They post memorials for their favorite dead leaders from Hamas and PIJ. They call on “Allah” to “take revenge on the Jews.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/moral-dimension-crisis-we-face-david-horowitz/
Everyone can sense that the political situation we find ourselves in is anything but normal. Yet the language we use to describe current conflicts is a language designed to frame them in the category of politics as usual – only perhaps more so. In speaking about current conflicts, we focus on the surface “issues” that divide us – a record inflation, off-the-charts crime waves in our urban centers, a humanitarian crisis at our southern border. Sometimes we sum it up as a double standard in the justice system that treats violent leftists as “peaceful protesters” and public school parents concerned about the abuse of their children as “domestic terrorists.” That juxtaposition gets us closer to the true nature of the conflict. But it is still inadequate to the gravity of the political moment, suggesting that progressives simply fail to understand the issues at hand.
But they understand them very well. For progressives the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the “revolution” – the
“re-imagining” and transformation of American society into a future where genders are selected and “social justice” prevails. That goal is so worthy and so necessary, it justifies any and all means to achieve it. Once this is understood, one can see that under the surface of the crises we face is a sinister force that poses an existential threat to our way of life – a threat far more immediate than the so-called climate apocalypse.
Morality is about following rules that ensure virtuous ends. Detach the means from the ends and what you get are the totalitarian regimes that have blighted the modern era. At the root of the current American crisis is what can only be described as the moral depravity of the “woke” progressives and their radical agenda.
Is this extreme? How else to describe Senator Elizabeth Warren’s response to the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade with a call – unopposed by her Democrat colleagues – to close the nation’s 3,000 private “crisis pregnancy centers.”[1]
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/great-white-house-jettison-biden-harris/
I like it when I can endorse the other side. It makes me feel like I’m part of the big happy family of man instead of just another snarling partisan. So it was with gratitude that I absorbed David Axelrod’s recent observation about Joe Biden on CNN. Pay attention now: Axelrod was the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and what he doesn’t know about the emotional weather of the left is not worth knowing. “There is this sense that things are kind of out of control,” quoth Axelrod when asked about the Big Guy™, “and he’s not in command.” Right you are, Dave! My only question is: what took you so long?
Of course, Axelrod’s devastating admission was not a disinterested or impartial judgment. Nothing Obama’s main men say is that. Every word is calculated for political advantage. But the question is, whose advantage? I am not entirely sure. I am confident, though, that Axelrod’s breathtaking admission was part of the next step in resetting the political chess board. It was another stage in the emergency effort at damage control that the shadowy cadre of people who actually run the United States have been undertaking ever since the full magnitude of Joe Biden’s incompetence became manifest.
Back in March, I predicted that the Democrats were prepping to eject Biden. One sign of that, I said, was the fact that elements of the regime-propaganda secretariat — in this case the New York Times — had suddenly gone off the reservation by admitting that Hunter Biden’s “Laptop from Hell” was not “Russian disinformation” as they and all their cohort had insisted, but was, in fact, the real deal. And not just the salacious stuff about Hunter’s “private” life, but also all the possibly criminal stuff about Chinese involvement with the Bidens’ finances and, especially, Joe Biden’s personal involvement with various schemes involving millions of dollars.
Why would the Times admit such a thing? For the same reason that David Axelrod would make his admission about things spinning “out of control” and Biden being “not in command,” i.e., bonkers.
One of the big problems for the Dems is that before they can do something about Biden himself, they will need to do something about his cackling number two, Kamala Harris. It was the same sort of problem they faced when the regime decided to jettison Richard Nixon. The junta could easily mount televised congressional hearings and cashier Nixon. But then Spiro Agnew, his vice president, would slide into the top spot. That was unacceptable. So the first task had to be to nobble Agnew. Agnew made this easy because there were pictures of him accepting paper bags of cash in exchange for political favors. It will not be so easy with Harris. Her corruption is of a more systemic but less obviously criminal sort.
https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/05/say-whatever-happened-to-that-new-covid-surge-everyone-was-just-freaking-about/
As recently as two weeks ago, the big story of the day was the coming surge of a new, highly infectious COVID variant, called BA.5. The Biden administration warned about it. Los Angeles county considered renewing its indoor mask mandate. The head of the World Health Organization said that “new waves of the virus demonstrate again that the Covid-19 [pandemic] is nowhere near over.”
Look at some of the headlines:
“BA.5 Will Cause ‘Even Greater Surge,’ Warns UCSF’s Wachter of Highly Infectious COVID Subvariant,” KQED, July 6
“The BA.5 COVID Surge Is Here,” New York Magazine, July 8
“Los Angeles could reinstate mask mandates as COVID cases rise,” CBS News, July 8
“As new COVID variants surge, White House urges caution, pushes boosters,” Boston Globe, July 12
“Experts rue simple steps not taken before latest COVID surge,” ABC News, July 13
“The ‘worst variant’ is here,” CNN, July 14
Well, the data from the Centers for Disease Control show that the number of new infections has remained pretty flat since late May and is now trending downward. In, fact, the rate of new infections appears to have topped out right when the media were playing up the coming “surge.”
CDC data show that the seven-day moving average for new cases peaked at 129,823 on July 17. It had fallen to 119,034 by Aug. 2.
