A Republican from Mississippi, Hiram Revels took office on February 25, 1870. He became the first Black senator a mere three weeks after Black men gained the right to vote with the 15th Amendment. During his time in office, Revels fought for Black Americans’ civil rights and education.
https://civicrm.unwatch.org/civicrm/mailing/view?reset=1&id=1889
Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer
As member states targeted Israel at the 45th Session of the UN Human Rights Council, UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer took the floor to give credit to Iran’s escalating aggression, sponsorship of terror, and subversion across the Middle East for achieving the impossible: convincing Arab nations to abandon “ardent, age-old antagonism, to open unprecedented new relations with Israel.”
Mr. Chair,
They said it could not be done. They said it was impossible.
But after the latest remarkable advances toward resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, the world must acknowledge and say to the Islamic Republic of Iran: You did the impossible.
For decades, Arab states and Israel fought each other in wars, while the Arab League enforced a global economic boycott of the Jewish state. Whatever happened, the Arab states would always blame Israel.
But since around 2006, this began to change. And if anyone most deserves the credit, it’s Iran.
If not for Iran’s escalating aggression across the Middle East; if not for its sponsorship of wars and terror through Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and other proxy militia in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Gaza; if not for Iran’s subversion in other countries, like the terrorist plot by the Qassam Suleimani Brigade just uncovered this week in Bahrain, Arab nations might never have concluded that the greatest threat to their security is not Israel, but, on the contrary, that both Arabs and Israelis face a common and increasingly dangerous threat: the hatred, terror and war fomented by Iran.
Indeed, if not for Iran’s aggression, imperialism and terrorism, it is impossible to imagine that so many Arab nations would be abandoning ardent, age-old antagonism, to open unprecedented new relations with Israel.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/31/kennedy-center-received-270-million-from-congress-and-paid-their-president-5-million-since-2016/?sh=3d1baad236d6
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. disclosed that it has received $269.4 million in federal funding since 2016 – including $42 million in grants and last year’s $25 million coronavirus earmark that was mostly used for payroll.
Even during the 2020 pandemic, the Center grew their net assets by $3.3 million to $505 million. Since 2016, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found a $114.4 million increase in net assets – from $390.6 million.
During this five-year period, their president, Deborah Rutter, received pay and benefits amounting to $5.1 million. Peak earning years were 2018 and 2019 when she was paid $1.3 million annually. During the 2020 pandemic year, she cut her pay to $507,375, which is still more than the U.S. President makes at $400,000.
We reached out for comment and Chairman David M. Rubenstein provided this response:
“Deborah Rutter is at the top of her field and her salary is competitive with peers at the country’s largest performing arts organizations. In her more than six years at the Kennedy Center’s helm, Deborah’s vision, leadership, and artistic and financial results have exceeded the board’s expectations. Even before the pandemic forced a complete shutdown, she voluntarily offered to take no salary until further notice. Her outstanding leadership and dedication to the Center, both before and during the pandemic crisis, have proven that she is the right person at the right time.”
https://bit.ly/2McRa4h
Track record
President Biden’s foreign policy and national security team reflects a resurgence of the State Department’s worldview. An examination of this worldview and its track record is required, in order to avoid past mistakes.
This track record consists of such critical issues as:
*In 1948, the State Department led Washington’s opposition to the recognition of the newly established Jewish State, contending that the Jewish State would be helpless against the expected Arab military assault, would be pro-Soviet, would undermine US-Arab relations, destabilize the Middle East, threaten the US supply of oil and cause severe long-term damage to US interests. Deputy Secretary of State, Robert Lovett, claimed: “recognizing the Jewish State prematurely would be buying a pig in a poke.”
*During the 1950s, the US courted Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, considering him a potential ally and extending non-military aid, while Egypt evolved as a key ally of the USSR, supporting anti-Western elements in Africa, intensifying anti-US sentiments among Arabs, and attempting to topple every single pro-US Arab regime.
*In 1978/79, the US betrayed the pro-US Shah of Iran, while embracing Ayatollah Khomeini – including intelligence sharing during the initial months of the Khomeini regime – under the assumption that he was controllable and seeking freedom, democracy and positive ties with the US.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/the_political_storm_ahead.html
It looks to me as if we are about to enter a very dark and dangerous political storm such as our nation has not seen. The sunlight of a free exchange of ideas, of thought-provoking discussion, of attending church, of tolerating a simple different point of view appears close to being extinguished. History is being rewritten and even statues of Lincoln are being brought down. One must wonder, how long it will be until we are no longer allowed to have cities, counties, colleges, or streets named Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Jackson or Roosevelt. Is Darkness now falling in America?
The cabal of Big Tech, the Deep State, and the progressive/socialist party is for all practical purposes ignoring and curtailing the Bill of Rights. At this time, the Thought Police appear to be winning. This “Digital Kristallnacht” by Big Tech oligarchs is moving forward without impediment. By the way, where is the American Civil Liberties Union? Where is the ACLU when it actually comes to basic liberties? They are strangely silent. Since the controversial Election of 2020, The left has “disappeared” citizens, outlawed free association, cancelled books, had people fired or made them unemployable because they thought or voted in a different way. This new regime has actually discussed publicly, re-education camps. Publishers are being threatened.
This Orwellian dystopia from the left will get worse before it gets better. It appears the only prominent souls brave enough to take on this regime are Rush Limbaugh, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump. For the most part the opposition party, the GOP, is oddly quiet and mute. Most of the GOP leadership seem to be hiding from this storm under the covers. Some actually appear to resemble those Frenchman who sided with the Nazis when the Germans overran France. Very few at this time appear to be a part of the Resistance. The rise of populism, both political and economic, has the totalitarian left scared and angry. Thus. their indiscriminate purge of American citizens who think and value differently.
For decades, America’s foreign-policy establishment has, in the name of peace, incentivized conflict in the Middle East. Now that it’s back in power, can it learn from its mistakes?
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17014/russia-putin-navalny-protests
Navalny has been in and out of Russian jails more than ten times since 2011, when he first became the face of Russian opposition to Putin and coined the phrase that the ruling United Russia party was “the party of crooks and thieves”.
“We came up with this investigation, while I was in intensive care, but we immediately agreed that we would release it when I returned home, to Russia, to Moscow, because we do not want the main character of this film to think that we are afraid of him and that I will tell about his worst secret while I am abroad.” — Alexei Navalny, YouTube video, “Putin’s Palace”, January 19, 2021.
Thousands demonstrated — and were arrested by police armed with stun guns and batons — this weekend as well, voicing anger over falling living standards, shrinking political freedoms, “corruption, a skewed court system” and a political system that is rigged before “another round of fraudulent elections,” possibly this spring and no later than next fall.
Putin, ironically, may largely have himself to thank. If it had not been for the arrest and jailing of Navalny, the current protest movement might have remained dormant.
Aleksei Navalny, opposition leader, anti-corruption activist and fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, returned to Russia on January 17 after recovering for five months in Germany from having been poisoned with a military grade nerve agent, Novichok. It was an event widely reported to have been an assassination attempt by Russian state agents.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/31/democratic-criminal-class-insurrection-against-maga-america/
Peace through strength increasingly is the province of the state, and not the sovereign individual. We live under the law of rule, not the rule of law.
When Uncle Sam threatens some blighted and benighted region of the world—ostensibly on behalf of the American People and for the region’s own good—our representatives call it peace through strength.
It is then that ordinary Americans are encouraged to pipe up in praise of the state’s invariably Orwellian peace-through-strength strategies.
Peace through strength on our front porches, while being menaced by lowbrow looters and assorted louts? For that you can be incarcerated in the land where the criminal roams free.
And when practiced by pale faces, our Second Amendment rights, exercised on the perimeter of our properties, as we stand vigil against the vilest of human beings—that’s tantamount to white supremacy and privilege.
Witness the fate of some courageous homeowners (the McCloskeys of St. Louis, Missouri) exercising age-old rights—also American constitutional rights—when they ventured out onto their verandas with firearms, intending to stand their ground and deter mobs from overrunning hearth and home.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/31/why-are-progressives-so-illiberal/
Progressives adopted identity politics and rejected class considerations because solidarity with elite minorities excuses them from concern for, or experience with, the middle classes of all races.
One common theme in the abject madness and tragedies of the past 12 months is that progressive ideology now permeates almost all of our major institutions—even as the majority of Americans resist the leftist agenda. Its reach resembles the manner in which the pre-Renaissance church had absorbed the economic, cultural, social, artistic, and political life of Europe, or perhaps how Islamic doctrine was the foundation for all public and private life under the Ottoman Sultanate—or even how all Russian institutions of the 1930s exuded tenets of Soviet Marxism.
Pan-progressivism
To be a Silicon Valley executive, a prominent Wall Street player, the head of a prestigious publishing house, a university president, a network or PBS anchor, a major Hollywood actress, a retired general or admiral on a corporate board, or a NBA superstar requires either progressive fides or careful suppression of all political affinities.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, 98 percent of Big Tech political donations went to Democrats in 2020. Censorship and deplatforming on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies is decidedly one-way. When Mark Zuckerberg and others in Silicon Valley donate $500 million to help officials “get out the vote” in particular precincts, it is not to help candidates of both parties.
Google calibrates the order of its search results with a progressive, not a conservative, bent. Grandees from the Clinton or Obama Administration find sinecures in Silicon Valley, not Republicans or conservatives.
The $4-5 trillion market-capitalized Big Tech cartels, run by self-described progressives, aimed to extinguish conservative brands like Parler. Ironically, they now apply ideological force multipliers to the very strategies and tactics of 19th-century robber-baron trusts and monopolies. Poor Jack Dorsey has never been able to explain why Twitter deplatforms and cancels conservatives for the same supposed uncouthness that leftists routinely employ.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/another-promising-vaccine-this-one-from-johnson-johnson-11612131877?mod=opinion_lead_pos7
Some good news this week: Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine looks likely to become the third U.S. Covid-19 vaccine to enter the market. The company released data this week showing the vaccine is about 70% effective against the virus, and its version requires only one shot. The Food and Drug Administration will need to review the evidence thoroughly, but the preliminary data is promising. The company is collecting more information to determine whether a booster shot could provide even better protection.
Crushing Covid will require making the most of the different vaccine candidates, which come with their own pros and cons, and tweaking them to stay ahead of viral mutations. The vaccines all follow a similar basic approach, putting into arms the spike protein found on the surface of the coronavirus. But Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine takes a slightly different approach to delivery than vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna. (I am on the board of Pfizer.) The biotech company Novavax is pursuing a vaccine candidate with its own special delivery system. All four might be available by the summer, which would mean an ample supply.
Americans will wonder which one works best? It will be tempting to compare data across trials. But that isn’t apples to apples; the vaccines and the data aren’t all the same. And new variants of Covid may demand vaccines that offer slightly different layers of protection and target slightly different parts of the virus.
The regulatory process must encourage this kind of portfolio diversification, while allowing tweaks to keep ahead of the virus’s twists and turns. The FDA is working on guidance to address new variants, which will include a pathway for updating vaccines.
