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Ruth King

Arabs states draw closer to Israel to counter non-Arab powers Turkey and Iran By Ariel Ben Solomon

https://www.jns.org/arabs-states-draw-closer-to-israel-to-counter-non-arab-powers-t

The decision by three Arab states to make peace with Israel can be credited both to efforts by the Trump administration and the recognition by these Sunni states that their security would improve against the ongoing threats they face from Turkey and Iran.

Iran and its proxies interfere with Arab states while promoting their Shi’ite revolutionary ideology; likewise, Turkey pushes its Sunni revolutionary ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the region.

Turkey and Iran look to overthrow the Sunni Arab states that do not align with them, such as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. The normalization deals between the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan have greatly upset Turkey and Iran, which ideologically view Israel as the enemy.

“Iran is a tactical enemy for the Gulf states because the regime is controlled by Shi’ite fanatics who want to destroy the Sunni regimes in the Gulf,” Harold Rhode, a longtime former adviser on Islamic affairs in the U.S. Defense Department of Defense who was in Iran during the early months of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, told JNS.

China Squashes a Giant Ant and Nukes Its Financial System by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16751/china-ant-group-financial-system

Beijing has cast doubt on the soundness of China’s equity markets and, more broadly, on the long-term viability of the country’s private sector.

China is not big enough for two big personalities. Xi is building a personality cult, and so is Ma Yun, better known as Jack Ma to the international financial and business communities.

Ant’s lending volumes grew fast because the company was largely unregulated.

“The message is that no big private businessman will be tolerated on the mainland.” — Chen Zhiwu of Hong Kong University, Financial Times, November 6, 2020.

Xi demands absolute obedience, something incompatible with a modern financial system.

Investors in Hong Kong this week dumped more than $250 billion in Chinese tech stocks. Particularly hard hit were Alibaba Group, JD.com, Tencent, and Meituan Dianping.

The rout followed the stunning postponement of what would have been the largest initial public offering in history. Ant Group Co., Ltd., an Alibaba Group affiliate, was set, with the overallotment option, to raise $39.5 billion.

Investors were valuing the six-year-old company at $359 billion, making it worth more than American-based behemoth J.P. Morgan and the world’s largest bank by assets, the state-backed Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

On November 3, Shanghai’s Nasdaq-like STAR Market and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange announced the suspension about 36 hours before the scheduled start of trading in Hong Kong. The unprecedented actions shocked domestic and international investors.

MY SAY: THE SHIP OF STATE

How would you like to be on a ship that fake news announces is taking on water portside? For us landlubbers that’s left in boat talk.

You know what they say about Muridae –(rats and mice).

 In the rush to the lifeboats  Senators Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Mitt Romney (Utah),  Susan Collins (Maine), Ben Sasse (Neb.),Representatives Fred Upton (Mich.), Francis Rooney (Fla.), Will Hurd (Texas), Paul Mitchell (Mich.),  Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) and less vocal and more cautious but urging the President toward concession, Senators Marco Rubio ‘(Fla.),Pat Toomey (Pa.),Mike Rounds (S.D.), Representative Tom Reed (N.Y.). would grab life jackets scramble to the gangplank abandoning the captain whose efforts to reassure them were denied and decried.

Big Tech, social media, and the Wall Street “jewelry” (see German translation) would disembark to yachts and sailboats and helicopters equipped with emergency support caviar and champagne dispatched from posh harbors.

As soon as those dead-weight rodentia would leave, the ship would immediately right itself and like the famous Presidential yacht of yore the U.S.S. Sequoia, would navigate to the Wharf in the District of Columbia and then to the White House.

The next day media headlines would shriek that those Republicans were mercilessly thrown overboard…..Rsk

Joe Biden, Candidate of Lies The former vice president began his presidential candidacy with a grand lie. He’s finishing with one, too. Steve Cortes

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/11/joe-biden-candidate-of-lies/

Joe Biden launched his entire campaign on the back of the most pernicious lie in American public life—the “very fine people” hoax, the myth that President Trump praised violent bigots in Charlottesville three years ago. Even a cursory examination of the actual transcripts and unedited video clips of that infamous August 2017 Trump Tower press conference reveals that the president explicitly and clearly excluded hateful actors from his “both sides” designation. 

On that occasion, and on many others subsequently, Trump declared: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.” 

Even though “condemned totally” leaves zero room for interpretation, Joe Biden launched his presidential campaign on the baseless foundation of this corrosive calumny. Biden claimed that the Charlottesville controversy compelled his candidacy. Biden continued with this lie throughout the campaign, meeting no protest from the Democrats’ compliant media. 

In the final weeks of the campaign, after Vice-President Mike Pence admirably assailed the hoax in a powerful and concise prosecution at the vice-presidential debate against Kamala Harris, Biden finally seemed to drop that chestnut from his repertoire. Let’s hope the lie remains in the political grave, where it belongs. 

Certainly, we know that minority Americans increasingly wholly reject the conclusions of those peddling the lie. After all, Trump’s Election Day totals reveal the largest minority vote for any Republican president in 60 years. 

Trump’s surge among Hispanics was especially notable, with the president capturing 47 percent of the Hispanic vote in Florida, per CBS News, a key pillar of Trump’s massive 373,000-vote victory in the Sunshine State. So the very people the Left would have us believe Trump wishes to target, resoundingly rejected Buden’s slanders.

Unfortunately, Biden’s willingness to use race as a cudgel to achieve political power has a long history. 

This Is a Time for Fighting, Not for “Healing” A dire moment to protect our Constitution. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/time-fighting-not-healing-bruce-thornton/

As part of his pretense that the presidential race is over, Joe Biden indulged the banal “time for healing” and “we’re all Americans” rhetoric. But we shouldn’t be fooled. Even before Barack Obama’s dishonest “no red state, no blue state” campaign lies were followed by a hyper-partisan, divisive administration, we’ve known that the increasingly left-leaning Democrats will endorse  “any means necessary” tactics to work their political will.

And we also know that too many Republicans will fall for the Dems’ rhetorical bait-and-switch. We shouldn’t let them get away with it this time, for we’re facing a hard fight ahead to minimize the damage that the “woke” Democrats will try to inflict on our Constitution. It’s time to fight, not “heal.”

First, anyone paying attention for the last few decades knows that every time a Democrat starts talking about “reaching across the aisle” and “bipartisanship,” he’s getting ready to pick your pocket. Such bromides are really euphemisms for serving their policy preferences rather than conservative ones, after which they’ll pat you on the head as a “good Republican” or a “maverick” for betraying your conservative principles.

Meanwhile, few Democrats reciprocate. They never cringe preemptively before Republicans lest the Donks call them bad names. Outright racialist behavior such as consorting with a race-hack like Al Sharpton or an avowed anti-Semite like Louis Farrakhan is indulged, and any complaint contemptuously dismissed by Democrat Senators and House Representatives, even as they endlessly chant “racist” or “white supremacist” at Republicans.

When computers cheat, they inevitably leave evidence behind By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/when_computers_cheat_they_inevitably_leave_evidence_behind.html

Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, a multi-credentialed MIT grad, ran the numbers, and the computer data generated in Michigan scream out “fraud!”

You should learn three main things from this post: (1) The Supreme Court can consider statistical evidence of fraud and can order a new election. (2) Most of the computers used for voting in America have a built-in mechanism that allows votes to be weighted in favor of a candidate. (3) If someone does tell a computer to mess with the election outcome, the computer’s processes will inevitably create unnatural data trails that prove human intervention in vote counts – and that’s what happened in three Michigan counties.

The Supreme Court

Alexander Macris found Donohue v. Board of Elections of State of New York, 435 F.Supp. 957 (E.D.N.Y. 1976), a case with close parallels to 2020’s election. After President Ford lost in 1976, Republican voters sued New York, alleging that systematic fraud deprived them of their voting rights. The district court allowed the suit and stated the following legal test: (1) Plaintiffs had to prove specific acts of misconduct that (2) involved ‘willful or knowing’ ballot fraud (3) by state officials or private persons acting jointly with state officials that (4) changed the outcome of the election.

The court held that the plaintiffs could introduce expert opinions and statistical analyses showing that voting patterns markedly deviated from the predictable uniformity to be found in random samples from elections counts that were honest. If the plaintiffs, won, said the court, they could get an order requiring a new presidential election. Any other outcome would fail to protect election integrity (especially in presidential elections) that is “essential to a free and democratic society.”

Trump’s Pennsylvania complaint is brilliant By James V. DeLong

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/trumps_pennsylvania_complaint_is_brilliant.html

The complaint filed in Pennsylvania by the Trump campaign is a superb piece of legal craftsmanship.

It was filed in federal court, not state.  The gist is that some of the state’s actions, and particularly the exclusion of Republican poll-watchers during the counting of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots, violated federal constitutional requirements.

The point is obvious enough once one thinks of it, but it’s brilliant all the same.  It shifts the focus from state law, where a politicized Pennsylvania court has the last word, to federal law, where the U.S. Supreme Court rules.

As for the obviousness of the point, consider as a thought experiment a state law requiring that all votes be counted in secret by an unelected board named by the party in power.  Could it survive a constitutional challenge?

As my old Harvard constitutional law professors would have said, “to ask the question is to answer it.”  It is hard to count all the constitutional guarantees violated here: Equal Protection, Due Process, Privileges and Immunities.  Indeed, the complaint stacks up the Supreme Court precedents supporting its arguments, including the long line of ringing statements in the chain of one-person-one-vote decisions.

Will Trump Ride Off Into the Sunset? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/2020/11/12/will-trump-ride-off-into-the-sunset-n1139227

I once wrote that whenever Donald Trump exits office, he will likely leave as a “tragic hero.” Over two millennia ago, the Athenian tragedian Sophocles first described the archetype in his portraits of an angry and old but still fearsome Ajax, and heroic but stubborn and self-fixated Antigone.

In the iconic John Ford Western “The Searchers” and in a host of other films from “Shane” to “High Noon,” we have seen stories of these sorts.

The legalistic but impotent town council, the idealistic but outgunned sodbusters or the incompetent posse in desperation turns to unconventional deliverance. They suddenly need a John Wayne as a scary Ethan Edwards or a mysterious gunslinger like Shane.

But to call in such Manichean outsiders is to admit that the status quo of a sober establishment has failed.

The outsider deliverers are suspiciously seen as self-absorbed. Their methods bother an endangered, polite society, even as they begin to bring it results.

We know such checkered iconoclasts from our own war stories of Gens. William Tecumseh Sherman, George S. Patton and Curtis LeMay. All three shredded pretensions. They reminded Americans that war is hell, and that the only thing worse than fighting so brutally against dangerous enemies is losing. And all three — only after the conflicts ended — were eventually deemed eccentric enough to be expendable.

As we learn from the second half of Sophocles’ tragedies and the last 30 minutes of classic Westerns, the nearer the tragic hero comes to ensuring results, the more his benefactors can begin to second-guess his bothersome methods.

Project Veritas Leaks Clip Purportedly Showing Federal Agents Pressuring USPS Whistleblower

https://www.theepochtimes.com/project-veritas-leaks-clip-purportedly-showing-feds-intimidating-usps-whistleblower-hopkins_3575907.html

Investigative journalism nonprofit Project Veritas on Wednesday released a recording it claims shows federal agents pressuring a U.S. Postal Service (USPS) whistleblower in Erie, Pennsylvania, to go back on his allegations last week that he overheard superiors discussing a scheme to backdate mail-in ballots.

Mail carrier Richard Hopkins last week claimed that he heard a local postmaster at Erie Post Office, Rob Weisenbach, instruct USPS workers to collect mail ballots they receive after Nov. 3 and hand them over to him to be backdated.

Hopkins, 32, who has since been placed on non-pay status by the post office, signed a sworn affidavit, under the penalty of perjury, containing the allegations. It was received by Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Nov. 7.

He said that he is willing to testify under oath that he heard Weisenbach tell a supervisor that he was backdating ballots “to make it appear as though the ballots had been collected on November 3, 2020, despite them in fact being collected on November 4 and possibly later.”

Under state election rules, ballots can be counted up to three days after Election Day as long as they are postmarked as having been sent on Nov. 3.

A USPS spokesman told The Epoch Times it was aware of Hopkins’s claim and had referred the matter to the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Office of Inspector General. A USPS Office of Inspector General spokesperson told The Epoch Times via email, “The U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General does not comment on ongoing matters.”

Memo To Joe: COVID Is Skyrocketing In States That Already Have Mask Mandates

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/11/12/memo-to-joe-covid-is-skyrocketing-in-states-that-already-have-mask-mandates/

Ever since the mainstream media declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 election, he’s been prattling on about how a nationwide mask mandate is vital to slowing the spread of the coronavirus. But has anyone noticed that the disease is spreading like wildfire in states that already have mask mandates?  

The day after he made up his “President Elect” signs, Biden declared that he would call on governors around the country to impose mask mandates. One Biden official told NBC News that “If a governor declines, he’ll go to the mayors in the state and ask them to lead. In many states, there is the capacity of mayors to institute mandates.”

“It’s time to end the politicization of basic, responsible public health steps like mask-wearing and social distancing,” Biden said on Monday. “The single most effective thing we can do to stop the spread of COVID: Wear a mask.”

Really? Let’s look at the data.

As it stands, 33 states already have statewide mask mandates. These states account for three-quarters of the nation’s population.