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Ruth King

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Israeli Elections 2021 Naftali Bennett is projected to be the kingmaker. Joseph Puder

By on February 16th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/israeli-elections-2021-joseph-puder/

Although Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu is facing a long-delayed trial, his party – the Likud – is rising in the polls. Six weeks to Election Day, on March 23, 2021, is a long time in Israeli politics, and it has the potential for many surprises. The discernible trend has been an upward climb for the Likud, which remains the largest party with a wide margin between it and the next party. Netanyahu, moreover, has been polled consistently as the most qualified to serve as prime minister.

The Irony about the upcoming election is that it is more than likely to end up in another draw, and possibly a fifth election in two years. The last two years have been essentially a story of two blocs: the anti-Bibi camp, which includes all the center-left parties, of Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid,  Merav Michaeli’s Labor party, Nitzan Horowitz’s Meretz, and Benny Gantz, the current Defense Minister and leader of the Blue and White party.  They are joined by Gideon Saar’s New Hope party and Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beitenu.  Naftali Bennett’s center right Yamina  (rightward), is potentially in this camp, too.

In this election cycle, Naftali Bennett (48, pictured above) is the clear kingmaker. While ideologically Bennett is much closer to the pro-Bibi bloc, which includes the Orthodox parties of Shas (Sephardic), Torah Judaism (Ashkenazi), and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism.  (Netanyahu pushed Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir of Jewish Strength or Otzma Yehudit, to merge, since separately neither would cross the electoral threshold of 3.25% of the vote, and thus, right wing votes would go to waste.) Bennett has however, declared his ambition to replace Netanyahu as prime minister.  He believes that he is qualified for the job.  

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Palestinians: What Real Education Means by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on February 16th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17060/palestinians-election-education

The result of the 2006 election showed that a majority of Palestinians fully supported Hamas’s call for ending corruption in the Palestinian Authority, imposing Islamic law and, most importantly, continuing the armed struggle against Israel.

Hamas does not recognize Israel’s right to exist. It seeks to replace Israel with an Islamic state.

Palestinians did not buy Fatah’s talk about ending corruption: they saw how Fatah’s leaders had enriched themselves after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars that were lavished on them without a shred of accountability by the US, the European Union and other Western donors.

The reason that Fatah, unlike Hamas, did not talk about the “liberation of all of Palestine” or promise to launch an armed struggle against Israel is because its leaders were afraid that the US and EU would halt financial aid to the Palestinians.

Any Palestinian, like Fayyad, who runs in the election on a platform that talks about peace and coexistence with Israel will lose.

Real education starts at home, not necessarily in the classroom…. Palestinian leaders need to tell their people that Israel has the right to exist. They need to tell their people that peace and normalization is good not only for Israel, but also for the Palestinians. They need to tell their people that cooperation with Israel is better than boycotts.

Under the current circumstances, in which anti-Israel sentiments are at an extreme high, one wonders whether it is a good idea to proceed with the plan to hold new elections. They are certain only to strengthen the radical camp among Palestinians even further.

The last Palestinian parliamentary election, held on January 25, 2006, resulted in a victory for Hamas, the Islamist movement controlling the Gaza Strip. The next parliamentary election is scheduled to take place on May 15, 2021, although the parliament, known as the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) was elected for a four-year term.

The Hamas victory in 2006 triggered a bitter dispute with Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, effectively paralyzing the PLC and creating two separate mini-states for the Palestinians — one in the West Bank and another in the Gaza Strip.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Rising Republican Rotters To Look Out For Representatives Nancy Mace and Adam Kinzinger flex their Beltway bona fides by telling their MAGA constituents to stuff it. By Ilana Mercer

By on February 16th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/15/rising-republican-rotters-to-look-out-for/

The defining difference between Democrats and Republicans is this: Republicans live on their political knees. They apologize and expiate for their principles, which are generally not unsound. Democrats, conversely and admirably, stand tall for their core beliefs, as repugnant as these mostly are. 

The Left most certainly didn’t rush forward last year to condemn the Black Lives Matter and Antifa riffraff, as they looted and killed their way across urban America. Instead, Democrats defended the déclassé, criminal arm of their party. “Riots are the language of the unheard,” they preached, parroting Martin Luther King, Jr.  

What of the trammels of despair that drove the Trump protesters of January 6? Trust too many Republicans—goody two-shoes, teacher’s pet-types all—to trip over one another in order to denounce that ragtag of disorganized renegades, the protesters aforementioned, who already have no chance in hell of receiving due process of law. 

Consider Nancy Mace. With the dizzying speed of a whirling dervish, the Republican freshman representative from South Carolina rushed to make a name for herself posing as a heroic “survivor” of January 6.

Following the incident on the Capitol, Mace quickly transformed herself into the young, go-to GOPer on the “hive media,” bad mouthing MAGA folks (to the likes of CNN’s supercilious Don Lemon, of all people) at every turn, and generally making hay over . . . well, it was not over the pillaging and killings courtesy of the criminal class, acting now as the armed wing of the Democratic Party. 

Shortly after the incident Democrats are likening to September 11, during a pit-stop on Fox News with the forgiving Martha MacCallum, Miss Congeniality attempted to redeem herself as a “constitutional conservative.” 

Oh, and how Mace had suffered! You don’t know the half of it!

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Impeachment – And Opening Pandora’s Box Dems fail again – and build a haunting model for years to come. Matthew Vadum

By on February 16th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/impeachment-and-opening-pandoras-box-matthew-vadum/

As the overpowering stench of hypocrisy invaded their nostrils, Democrat senators voted for a second time in a year to convict President Donald John Trump, now out of office three weeks, on make-believe charges that sought to criminalize his lawful activities as president.

Now that the show trial is complete, we may soon witness an era of presidential impeachments as a regular occurrence in America.

“We’ve opened Pandora’s box to future presidents,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said, according to The Blaze.

“If you use this model, I don’t know how Kamala Harris doesn’t get impeached if the Republicans take over the House, because she actually bailed out rioters and one of the rioters went back to the streets and broke somebody’s head open,” Graham said, referring to Harris encouraging people to donate to a bail fund for Black Lives Matter-Antifa rioters last summer.

One lawmaker has already filed articles of impeachment against Joe Biden, the nation’s new placeholder president.

Ahead of the curve, freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) filed articles against Biden the day after he was inaugurated. In a press release, her office explained that she was taking action because of Biden’s “corrupt actions involving his quid pro quo in Ukraine and his abuse of power by allowing his son, Hunter Biden, to siphon off cash from America’s greatest enemies Russia and China.”

Democrats lost the latest round in the impeachment wars when they failed to get the two-thirds Senate vote they needed. In the process these desperate radicals cheapened and trivialized the impeachment process, which is supposed to be reserved for actual baddies like current Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), a Teflon lawmaker who was impeached by the House in 1988 and convicted and removed from a federal judgeship on corruption charges by the Senate in 1989.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Smoking gun: Comey told Clapper FBI unable to ‘sufficiently corroborate’ Steele — then signed FISA In January 2017 email to intel chief coughed up under court order, the former FBI director contradicted sworn avowal to FISA court that Steele dossier was verified.By John Solomon

By on February 16th, 2021

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/comey-told-intel-chief-steele-dossier-was-not

The very day in January 2017 that then-FBI Director James Comey signed a FISA surveillance warrant application declaring content from Christopher Steele’s dossier had been “verified,” he wrote President Obama’s outgoing intelligence community chief with a very different assessment of the British spy’s intelligence on Russia collusion, a newly released memo shows.

“We are not able to sufficiently corroborate the reporting,” Comey wrote in a Jan. 12, 2017 email to then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that was declassified and made public through an open records lawsuit by the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

The memo recounts an internal debate inside the U.S. intelligence community during one of the most delicate moments in the FBI’s then six-month old Crossfire Hurricane probe.

CIA officials had already informed Comey’s FBI that the target of the FISA warrant, Carter Page, wasn’t a Russian spy but rather an asset helping U.S. intelligence. The bureau had received warnings about Steele and the reliability of his source network, including that it might have been compromised by Russian disinformation. Agents had also just recommended on Jan. 4, 2017 shutting down the probe’s inquiry into incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lack of evidence.

The FBI had been warned the previous summer that Hillary Clinton’s campaign may have planted the false Russia collusion story as a way to “vilify” Trump and distract from her email scandal, and agents were about to interview Steele’s primary sub-source, who would discount much of the information in the dossier attributed to him as bar talk and unconfirmed rumor not worthy of official intelligence.

And the larger intelligence community had decided it did not want to vouch for the Steele dossier in its official Intelligence Community Assessment about Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Do Dems’ Care Minimum-Wage Hike Will Devastate Poor, Minorities?

By on February 16th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/16/do-dems-care-minimum-wage-hike-will-devastate-poor-minorities/

Democrats like to talk about helping the “little guy” struggling to make it in an economically hostile world. But instead of providing help, their policies often punish the most vulnerable among us. So it is with the fight to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, as recent research shows.

Democrats have included a federal $15-an-hour minimum wage in the $1.9 trillion pork-a-palooza reconciliation bill they call “stimulus.” The left-media, predictably, have supported the idea. But a minimum wage hike is not stimulus. It is, in fact, a devastating blow to small, struggling businesses and, worst of all, for the poorest Americans; it’s a recipe for fewer jobs, lower incomes and lasting economic inequality.

We’ve written about this numerous times (for example, here, here, and here) because, as policies go, the minimum wage is awful. While sounding as if it’s a great gift to working people (in polls, it routinely garners more than 50% approval), the minimum wage’s real beneficiary is one of the Democrats’ major financial backers: Organized labor.

Unions love minimum-wage hikes because many of their contracts have clauses that automatically raise union wages or allow the unions to renegotiate contracts when minimum wages go up.

So, not by coincidence, Democrats love minimum-wage hikes, too. Unfortunately, recent research has bad news for minimum-wage hike supporters.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

House Republicans Demand Answers From Pelosi on Jan. 6 Security Failures By Mark Tapscott

By on February 16th, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/house-gopers-demand-answers-from-pelosi-on-jan-6-security-failures_3697484.html

Ranking Republicans on four key House committees concerned with security at the Capitol complex are demanding answers from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) about her actions before, during, and after the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol building.

“It has been widely reported and confirmed by multiple sources that when [then-Capitol Hill Police] Chief [Steven] Sund requested the National Guard be activated ahead of the January 6th Joint Session of Congress, the response from the Sergeant-At-Arms (SAA), acting on your behalf, was that the ‘optics’ of having the National Guard on-site were not good and the intelligence didn’t support the move. The request was not approved,” the four GOP representatives told Pelosi in a lengthy letter made public on Feb. 15.

“Furthermore, on January 6th, in the middle of the on-going attack of the Capitol, Chief Sund again notified the SAA of his request for approval to authorize the National Guard. It took over an hour for his request to be approved because the SAA had to run the request up the chain of command, which undoubtedly included you and your designees.”

The four signers of the letter are Rep. Rodney Davis of Illinois, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Administration, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Rep. Devin Nunes of California, the senior Republican on the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Free World Should Draw ‘Red Line’ Against Communist China: Former Pompeo Adviser By Cathy He and Jan Jekielek

By on February 16th, 2021

https://www.theepochtimes.com/free-world-should-draw-red-lines-against-communist-china-former-pompeo-advisor_3697498.html

The world needs to wake up to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) bullying and lay down its own rules to deter the regime’s aggressions, the China adviser to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says.

Miles Yu, a Chinese-born academic who helped shape the Trump administration’s China policy, called out the CCP’s tactic of threatening the United States, telling it not to interfere in issues deemed to be the regime’s “internal affairs,” including Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang—which it dubs “red lines.”

“This is [the] Chinese Communist Party’s ‘red line,’ that’s all. It’s not red lines based upon international law,” Yu said in an exclusive interview with The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” program.

Most recently, the regime’s top diplomat warned the Biden administration that “any trespassing would end up undermining China–U.S. relations and the United States’ own interests.”

When the regime tells countries that the topic of Xinjiang is a “red line,” what it’s really saying, according to Yu, is, “We’re going to lock up a million Uyghurs in concentration camps, we torture them, we suppress their freedom.

“And you, the international community, … are not allowed to say a word in protest. Otherwise you’re not respecting us.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden’s Rough Start With the World This has been one of the shortest and coldest diplomatic honeymoons on record. By Walter Russell Mead

By on February 16th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-rough-start-with-the-world-11613430041?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

It hasn’t been the most promising start. Less than a month into Joe Biden’s presidency, and his administration is already engaged in spats with China, Russia and Iran. It is also discovering that U.S. allies are not quite as happy with Mr. Biden’s Feb. 4 announcement that “America is back” as many Democrats might have hoped.

In Asia the administration’s Myanmar policy—imposing sanctions that signal displeasure without materially affecting the army’s ability to rule—has attracted little enthusiasm. On Feb 15, India’s foreign minister hailed Indo-Japanese cooperation on regional infrastructure projects that link Myanmar with its neighbors, a not-so-subtle signal that India intends to go on cooperating with Myanmar no matter what Washington wants. Simultaneously, the large portion of the Indian press that supports the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party is aflame with resentment that Vice President Kamala Harris’s niece, Meena Harris, seems to be siding with protesters against BJP policies.

European leaders are also dismissive of American moralism. French President Emmanuel Macron denounced the importation of U.S.-academic and cultural wokeness as a threat to the French way of life, while pragmatists on the Continent are pushing to strengthen economic relations with Russia and China—virtually ignoring the Biden administration’s efforts to raise the pressure on human-rights abusers in Moscow and Beijing. With the U.S. trade representative’s recent announcement that Trump-era retaliatory tariffs on European wine, cheese and food imports aren’t going away soon, this has been one of the shortest and coldest diplomatic honeymoons on record.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

A Deep Green Freeze Power shortages show the folly of eliminating natural gas—and coal.

By on February 16th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-deep-green-freeze-11613411002?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Gas and power prices have spiked across the central U.S. while Texas regulators ordered rolling blackouts Monday as an Arctic blast has frozen wind turbines. Herein is the paradox of the left’s climate agenda: The less we use fossil fuels, the more we need them.

A mix of ice and snow swept across the country this weekend as temperatures plunged below zero in the upper Midwest and into the teens in Houston. Cold snaps happen—the U.S. also experienced a Polar Vortex in 2019—as do heat waves. Yet the power grid is becoming less reliable due to growing reliance on wind and solar, which can’t provide power 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

While Texas is normally awash in gas and oil, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the state’s wholesale power market, urged residents this weekend to conserve power to avoid power outages. Regulators rationed gas for commercial and industrial uses to ensure fuel for power plants and household heating.

Texas’s energy emergency could last all week as the weather is forecast to remain frigid. “My understanding is, the wind turbines are all frozen,” Public Utility Commission Chairman DeAnn Walker said Friday. “We are working already to try and ensure we have enough power but it’s taken a lot of coordination.”

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