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Ruth King

The Texas Voting Melodrama Joe Biden says it’s ‘an assault on democracy.’ The facts say otherwise.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-texas-voting-melodrama-11622495406?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

As the Texas legislative session drew near its end Sunday, lawmakers appeared set to pass a bill overhauling the state’s elections, until Democrats did one final maneuver: They snuck out of the building. “Members, take your key and leave the chamber discreetly,” a Democratic leader in the state House told his caucus in a 10:35 p.m. text message.

The extraordinary move deprived the House of a quorum, killing the bill for now, at the cost of undermining the legislative process. But what do you expect after months of Democratic alarms about “voter suppression”? President Biden on Saturday called the Texas plan “un-American” and “part of an assault on democracy.” At least this time he didn’t say it’s worse than Jim Crow, which was the political bomb he lobbed at Georgia’s bill.

The reality is more prosaic. To start with the controversial, the 67-page bill would roll back Covid-19 innovations like Harris County’s drive-through voting and 24-hour voting. Those options were used disproportionately last year by black and Hispanic residents. But when did emergency procedures amid a 100-year pandemic suddenly become the new baseline? It’s hardly crazy to think polling-place shenanigans might be more likely at 3 a.m.

The bill says that on the last Sunday of early voting, polling places may not open until 1 p.m. This is a political mistake, at minimum, in that it’s being spun as an attack on black churches that have a “souls to the polls” tradition. One lawmaker supporting the bill argued: “Those election workers want to go to church, too.” But some people take care of their religious obligations on Saturdays, and in any event Texas repealed most of its blue laws in 1985. Lawmakers would be wise to drop this provision.

Under the bill, Texas would still offer some two weeks of early voting. Mr. Biden’s beloved Delaware won’t have any early voting until 2022, when it will get 10 days. The Texas bill would also raise minimum hours. In the final week, counties with 100,000 people must currently open their “main” polling place 12 hours on weekdays and five hours on Sunday. That population threshold would drop to 30,000, and six hours would be mandated on Sunday.

Diplomats Abase America The State Department is supposed to advance U.S. interests and burnish the country’s image abroad. By Dave Seminara

https://www.wsj.com/articles/diplomats-abase-america-11622494456?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

American diplomats take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. A foreign-service officer’s job is to advance American interests. But officials are now asking diplomats to function as social-justice warriors to the detriment of the country’s image abroad, as revealed by a leaked State Department cable encouraging embassies and consulates to fly Black Lives Matter flags.

Nearly 20 years ago, when I was sworn in as a foreign-service officer by Secretary of State Colin Powell, he said: “The most important of all the jobs that we are sending you out to do is to take with you the value system of the American people.” BLM’s values are shared by only half the country, if that, according to a recent USA Today/Ipsos poll. Another USA Today survey indicated that only 18% of Americans and 28% of blacks support the group’s signature goal, defunding the police.

Yet from reading the State Department’s May 21 cable, you’d think the country is in lockstep agreement. The cable asserts that protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing “sparked a movement to confront systems perpetuating deep-seated inequities rooted in colonialism and the oppression of racial, tribal, ethnic, and other minority communities.” It continues: “Mr. Floyd’s murder prompted an international outcry to seek racial justice and equity by dismantling systemic racism and eradicating police brutality affecting communities of color, most acutely, people of African descent.” The missive asserted that federal law allows diplomats to “engage in BLM-related activity while on duty or in the workplace” but not to combine such advocacy with “political activity.”

That’s doublespeak. BLM activity is political advocacy. The group’s co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors is a self-described Marxist. Until recently, BLM’s website called on “comrades” to make efforts at “dismantling cisgender privilege and heteronormative thinking” and “disrupting the Western prescribed nuclear family structure requirement.”

Twilight of the Netanyahu Era? Israel may get a new government, but don’t expect a left turn.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twilight-of-the-netanyahu-era-11622495465?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Western democracies produce all manner of governments: Left- or right-wing, centrist, populist. But the new government taking shape in Israel defies categorization. If negotiations go through as planned, Israel could soon be led by a religious-nationalist Prime Minister backed by a centrist dealmaker, with the support of Arab and leftist parties.

American liberals will surely celebrate the departure of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has come to symbolize the Democratic Party’s rift with Israel over the last decade. But it would be a mistake to interpret it as a rejection of Israel’s rightward political and security direction, which the new government is likely to maintain.

***

The unusual coalition is coming together after Israelis went to the polls four times since 2019, most recently this March. Though his security policies had wide support, Mr. Netanyahu—who has been Prime Minister since 2009—was unable to form a majority coalition from among Israel’s 13 fractious parties.

The conventional wisdom this month said Hamas had given Mr. Netanyahu a new political lease on life by launching its rocket assault on Israel, elevating the security issue that built Mr. Netanyahu’s career. Yet a week after the fighting stopped, Naftali Bennett of the conservative Yamina party announced that he would accept an offer from the centrist Yair Lapid to form a government without Mr. Netanyahu. Under the agreement, Mr. Bennett will be Prime Minister immediately, with Mr. Lapid taking over in 2023, if the government lasts that long.

Racist Mayor: Lori Lightfoot Another Democrat carries the Left’s torch of hate. John Perazzo

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/racist-mayor-lori-lightfoot-john-perazzo/

Shortly after 9 p.m. on the night of May 24, a 17-year-old black youth named Keyshawn Williams was standing on a sidewalk along Chicago’s South Oakley Boulevard when someone in a silver BMW opened fire and killed him in a drive-by shooting.

The night before that, a 25-year-old African American named Ladell Arnold was riding in a vehicle along West Flournoy Street in Chicago at 7:10 p.m. when he was shot and killed by a nearby gunman.

The night before that, a 46-year-old black man named Johnnie Williams was standing on a sidewalk along Chicago’s South Michigan Avenue at 7:30 p.m. when some people riding in two passing vehicles shot him dead while also wounding two others.

And at 11:50 p.m. the night before that, a 15-year-old black boy named Dajon Gater was on the front porch of a West Lexington Street house in Chicago, when two armed males approached and killed him with a gunshot to the head.

Like four tiny grains of sand among many thousands in an hourglass, the names of these four dead victims blend imperceptibly into the long list of African Americans whose lives in recent years have been snuffed out by other blacks in the killing field known as Chicago. During the past 12 months alone, more than 820 people have been victims of homicide in The Windy City. And most of them were blacks killed by other blacks.  

Of course, you’ve never before heard of any of the four individuals cited above – nor will you ever come across their names again – for the simple reason that none of their deaths can be traced to the actions of a white police officer – or to the actions of any white person at all, for that matter. Thus, there will be no Black Lives Matter protest marches held in their honor; no $25,000 celebrity-funded golden caskets eternally encasing their bodies in the grave; and no gaggle of reporters or “civil rights leaders” repeatedly recounting, with pained and pious countenances, the tragic stories of how these four individuals died, far too young, in America’s third largest city. No, the only words publicly memorializing these four people will be the names etched silently on their tombstones.

The chief political executive of the hell hole called Chicago is Lori Lightfoot, the latest in an unbroken, 90-year line of exclusively Democrat mayors extending all the way back to 1931. Under Lightfoot’s stewardship, homicides in Chicago increased by an astonishing 40 percent from 2019 to 2020 – a pattern that was seen in a host of Democrat-run cities after George Floyd’s death a year ago. And Chicago’s stratospheric homicide rate has continued well into 2021.

The Barbary Pirates Circa 2021 By David F. Eisner

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/the-barbary-pirates-circa-2021/

A lesson on ransomware from the Founding Fathers.

Colonial Pipeline CEO Joseph Blount recently admitted that Colonial paid a ransom of $4.4 million to the criminal hackers who caused the company to shut down the country’s largest transporter of fuel. One news source reported that the decryption tool provided was not effective in restoring operations. Colonial managed, however, to recover by reliance on backup systems.

In the wake of the Colonial cyberattack, the Biden administration has indicated that it is looking again at the government’s “approach to ransomware actors and ransoms overall.” On the theory that the payment of ransoms encourages more attacks, the FBI has had a longstanding policy against paying ransoms.

It is the right policy and has been since the early days of the United States. The administration would do well to heed the wisdom of the Founding Fathers who found themselves in the ransomware crisis of their day — attacks by the Barbary pirates.

From the Crusades until the early 19th century, the Barbary pirates dominated nautical activity around northern Africa. They captured ships, stole cargo, and enslaved crews. Between 1530 and 1780, an estimated 1 million Europeans were enslaved in North Africa. In his best-selling book Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, acclaimed historian and former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren wrote that from the 12th century until the early 19th century, Barbary piracy was Europe’s “nightmare.”

Piracy during the early centuries was mainly religiously motivated — Al-jihad fi’l-bahr, or holy war at sea. However, when the Moroccans gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in the late 18th century, piracy became a tool of foreign and trade policy. In many cases, pirates were given private commissions by the ruling pashas.

Rather than go to war, most of Europe mollified the Barbary states by paying “tribute” — the colonial equivalent of “ransomware.” According to Oren, this was a “cold calculation that tribute was cheaper than the cost of constantly defending the vital Mediterranean trade routes.”

GENERAL DOUGLAS MacARTHUR: FAREWELL SPEECH TO CONGRESS APRIL 19, 1951

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/douglasmacarthurfarewelladdress.htm

Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, and Distinguished Members of the Congress: April 19, 1951

I stand on this rostrum with a sense of deep humility and great pride — humility in the wake of those great American architects of our history who have stood here before me; pride in the reflection that this forum of legislative debate represents human liberty in the purest form yet devised. Here are centered the hopes and aspirations and faith of the entire human race. I do not stand here as advocate for any partisan cause, for the issues are fundamental and reach quite beyond the realm of partisan consideration. They must be resolved on the highest plane of national interest if our course is to prove sound and our future protected. I trust, therefore, that you will do me the justice of receiving that which I have to say as solely expressing the considered viewpoint of a fellow American.

I address you with neither rancor nor bitterness in the fading twilight of life, with but one purpose in mind: to serve my country. The issues are global and so interlocked that to consider the problems of one sector, oblivious to those of another, is but to court disaster for the whole. While Asia is commonly referred to as the Gateway to Europe, it is no less true that Europe is the Gateway to Asia, and the broad influence of the one cannot fail to have its impact upon the other. There are those who claim our strength is inadequate to protect on both fronts, that we cannot divide our effort. I can think of no greater expression of defeatism. If a potential enemy can divide his strength on two fronts, it is for us to counter his effort. The Communist threat is a global one. Its successful advance in one sector threatens the destruction of every other sector. You can not appease or otherwise surrender to communism in Asia without simultaneously undermining our efforts to halt its advance in Europe.

Beyond pointing out these general truisms, I shall confine my discussion to the general areas of Asia. Before one may objectively assess the situation now existing there, he must comprehend something of Asia’s past and the revolutionary changes which are — which have marked her course up to the present. Long exploited by the so-called colonial powers, with little opportunity to achieve any degree of social justice, individual dignity, or a higher standard of life such as guided our own noble administration in the Philippines, the peoples of Asia found their opportunity in the war just past to throw off the shackles of colonialism and now see the dawn of new opportunity, a heretofore unfelt dignity, and the self-respect of political freedom.

MY SAY: NORTH KOREA IN CONTEXT

On June 25, 1950, the Northern Korean People’s Army crossed the 38th parallel dividing the Communist North from the Republic of South Korea in the South. The invasion was staged at various checkpoints with the avowed goal of unifying Korea under the Norths’ Communist regime.
President Harry S. Truman responded by adding American forces to the United Nations combined armies assigned to aid the Republic of South Korea, and named General Douglas MacArthur as Commander General of defense of the South.
After a series of forays and defeats and renewed advances the 38th parallel was restored and the South’s capital Seoul was retaken.
By 1951, President Truman bowing to pressure, abandoned the goal of unifying Korea and issued strategy for limited conflict to avoid escalation of hostilities which could provoke China and the Soviet Union.
General MacArthur publicly challenged the President which led to his dismissal.
The rest is history. On July 27, 1953, seven months after his inauguration, President Eisenhower implemented an armistice. There was to be no surrender or victory such as obtained when Shinto Imperialism and Nazi Germany were vanquished. After almost 50,000 U.S. troops died, the Korean Peninsula remained divided by the 38th parallel and the Kim dynasty remained in control of the North.
Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong il, and Kim Jong un, successively imposed brutal tyranny on its citizens. Furthermore, every American administration has been bedeviled by North Korea’s military adventurism in capturing the USS Pueblo in 1968, continued support of Iran with arms and technology shipments, and more recently, a buildup of nuclear capability and long-range missiles.
Truman may have been correct in firing General Mac Arthur but history has vindicated the general whose speech to Congress is dazzling in its prophetic clarity. It is posted below in its entirety. Rsk

Kamala Harris Runs Aground at Annapolis

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/duty-honor-and-kamala-harris/91527/

Not since President Obama’s speech to graduating cadets of the class of 2014 at West Point have there been remarks to a military academy as atonal as those Vice President Harris just delivered to the midshipmen at Annapolis. Ms. Harris talked to our midshipmen trained for naval warfare of the perils of climate change and the niftiness of solar panels. Not a peep about how Russia, Iran, and Red China are maneuvering for conquest.

What a wan note on which to begin the Memorial Day weekend at which we remember our fallen. It’s similar to the blunder that President Obama made when, as we were at the height of the global war on terror, he went to West Point and tried to inspire the cadets by lecturing them on how not every problem has a military solution. The New York Post headline called it “The Long Gray Whine.”

The remarks of Ms. Harris, like those of Mr. Obama, fit the strategy of retreat and appeasement that seems to have been favored by the Democratic Party in recent decades. It started, in our view, with Vietnam and since has marked the party’s policies in one theater after another — right now in the Middle East and Afghanistan. And it’s not that our liberal traditions don’t offer a prism through which to understand our military academies.

We marked this when five years ago the then-president of Harvard, war historian Drew Faust, spoke at West Point. She had brought ROTC back to Harvard. She then went up the Hudson to deliver a tribute that we called “surprisingly personal and moving.” She spoke of her great-grandfather, who went to West Point and, in the Apache War, appeared in arms against Geronimo and, in World War I, breached the Hindenburg Line.

DEBUNK THIS Kurt Schlichter

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/05/31/debunk-this-n2590206

Maybe it’s the media morons’ boundless self-regard – blue check Twitter is a festival of social media group onanism as journalists compete to most effusively congratulate each other on the hard, brave, courageous work of trying to make the Asterisk *administration look like The West Wing instead of the bathroom scene in There’s Something About Mary.

Or maybe it’s just how bad they all are at their not-that-difficult job – these aren’t ink-stained muckrakers digging out the hidden truth. These are glorified teens watching their DMs waiting for an assistant deputy undersecretary at the Department of the Interior’s Pit Toilet and Fungus Affairs section to leak some inside info designed to trash the GOP. They don’t report the news – they transcribe Democrat press releases.

Our media consists of smug, incompetent adolescents who eagerly submit themselves to the cause of serving the official narrative, yet its flunkies expect you and me to treat them like something other than what the squatting hobo just crowned in front of a gaggle of horrified tourists on Fisherman’s Wharf.

Their new thing is “debunking” stuff, which consists of them encountering an unwelcome fact and declaring it “debunked,” at which point the other blue checks repeat that it has been “debunked,” and then whenever it comes up again, they cite as evidence of the purported debunking, the human centipede of Mutually Assured Debunking tweeted back and forth between the interchangeable cogs in the mainstream media machine.

And they’re always wrong.

It’s a miracle they aren’t in with their chiropractors getting their pencil necks adjusted from the whiplash of the Wuhan lab 180. Remember when Tom Cotton, back when this idiocy began, observed that maybe the fact that there was a Chi Com level-four virology bioweapons lab doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in the middle of the town where this plague started seemed like a pretty big coinky-dink? No, all the smart people of smartness with their Fifth Century Trans Literature of the Andes degrees and their pronouns in their bios assured us that was a crazy, nutty conspiracy theory of crazy nuttiness.

Revenge Racism attacking the soul of America

https://dianebederman.com/revenge-racism-attacking-the-soul-of-america/

Francis Bacon “A man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal, and do well.” 

Today, we are witnessing what I call Revenge Racism promoted by leaders of  Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory and Left Wing Ideologues. As declared by Angela Harris  in her foreword to “Critical Race Theory: An Introduction”:

Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

It is a full frontal attack on western morals, values and ethics that teach all people are born with equal intrinsic value: that we are defined by our character, not characteristics, also known as identity politics.

Today, sadly, we are  witnessing white hatred being promoted as an antidote to “systemic racism” despite the fact that we know racism can lead to physical as well as mental illness that lasts generations because we have witnessed it in the black community.

This is Revenge Racism.