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Ruth King

Obama’s Simmering Resentment of Benjamin Netanyahu By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/obamas-simmering-resentment-of-benjamin-netanyahu/?itm_campaign=headline-

In his new memoir, the 44th president continues to blame Netanyahu for his own failure to make peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

T he final chapter of Barack Obama’s third memoir, A Promised Land, begins with an extensive review of the former president’s often-testy relationship with his Israeli counterpart, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Claims that Obama was explicitly anti-Israel or anti-Semitic were always hyperbolic, but his assessment of his dealings with Netanyahu reveals the bristling disdain that fueled perceptions he was not a stalwart or reliable ally of the Jewish state.

Obama is a careful writer, and he would never risk something as incendiary as an argument that AIPAC controlled or exercised undue influence over U.S. politics, or that its members had “dual loyalty” toward both Israel and the United States. But in his description of the group and its sway, he doesn’t really keep a safe distance from those arguments, either:

Members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful bipartisan lobbying organization dedicated to ensuring unwavering U.S. support for Israel. AIPAC’s clout could be brought to bear on virtually every congressional district in the country, and just about every politician in Washington — including me — counted AIPAC members among their key supporters and donors. In the past, the organization had accommodated a spectrum of views on Middle East peace, insisting mainly that those seeking its endorsement support a continuation of U.S. aid to Israel and oppose efforts to isolate or condemn Israel via the U.N. and other international bodies. But as Israeli politics had moved to the right, so had AIPAC’s policy positions. Its staff and leaders increasingly argued that there should be ‘no daylight’ between the U.S. and Israeli governments, even when Israel took actions that were contrary to U.S. policy. Those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election.

Sidney Powell: Will Prove Case ‘Within Next Two Weeks’ in Court By Sandy Fitzgerald

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/sidney-powell-maria-bartiromo-election-trump/2020/11/20/id/998020/

Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell Friday claimed her team will be able to prove, in court, all of their claims concerning the election “within the next two weeks,” as “we have more than enough evidence now.”

“We have more evidence now than the present population is imprisoned on,” Powell told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo, while laughing off a statement from Dominion Voting Systems denying the attorneys’ claim that the company’s software was used to pull votes away from President Donald Trump and give them to Democrat challenger Joe Biden, and that the company had ties to Venezuela. 

“All I can tell you is that well, the company might have somehow severed or tried to sever the relationships recently, I don’t know how they are parsing their words, but I can tell you that the company was started with Venezuelan money in Venezuela for the express purpose of rigging elections for Hugo Chavez,” Powell said. 

She also claimed that there were people who were “in the control room” and how they “watched how the votes” were flipped in real time. 

“We have evidence now of information from the systems going to three or four different foreign countries during the time of the election, those countries themselves could have watched the live votes come in and changed at the numbers,” said Powell. “There’s significant evidence of foreign interference from the worst communist countries on the Earth with our election.”

COVID-19 Lockdowns Lead to a Failure to Thrive By Julie Kelly *****

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/19/covid-19-lockdowns-lead-to-a-failure-to-thrive/

What in the hell are we doing?

There once was a time, like any other time before the year 2020, when people would have been ashamed to openly boast about abandoning their aging parents during the holidays.

But broadcasting plans to ditch ailing mothers and fathers for Thanksgiving is the latest in COVID-19 fashion. Thanks to more heartless, cruel guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and outlandish orders issued by tyrannical governors of both political parties, families are planning to forego holiday traditions to avoid infecting each other with the virus.

“I already canceled Thanksgiving and Christmas with my 91-year-old mother because I DON’T WANT TO KILL HER,” left-wing pundit John Aravosis declared on Twitter. Dozens of his followers chimed in to announce similar plans. 

Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s education secretary, after disclosing he and his family had contracted coronavirus despite following all the rules since the start, said he had not seen his 85-year-old mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, since last spring. “I’ve been able to do almost nothing with her for six months,” Duncan admitted on CNN. “But there’s nothing worse than having the people you care about contract this virus.”

That is, of course, a preposterous statement. It would be easy to name dozens if not hundreds of “worse” things that could happen to a loved one; for example, slowly withering away in a long-term care facility, isolated from family, desperate for human touch and interaction. But that is exactly what’s happening across the country as most states continue to impose harsh restrictions for nursing home visits. The most prosperous country in the world is allowing its most vulnerable citizens—men and women who defended and built America—to die of Third World causes including “failure to thrive,” a common ailment among children in impoverished nations.

“I’d Rather Die From COVID Than Loneliness”

According to an Associated Press story this week, an estimated 40,000 nursing home residents have died prematurely since March, resulting in a 15 percent increase in “excess deaths” at those facilities. 

Giuliani Scorches Media For Censoring Mounting Evidence of Election Fraud And Condoning Threats Against Lawyers and Witnesses By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/19/giuliani-scorches-media-for-censoring-mounting-evidence-of-election-fraud-and-condoning-threats-against-lawyers-and-witnesses/

During a press conference Thursday, President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani scorched the corporate media for refusing to cover what he called “a massive attack on the integrity of the voting system” in the United States.

The Trump Campaign hosted the presser at RNC headquarters in Washington, D.C. with Giuliani, Trump Campaign Legal Advisor Jenna Ellis, and Trump lawyer Sidney Powell.

Throughout the news conference, Giuliani blasted the MSM for going along with the ruse that Democrat Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square amid mounting evidence of massive election fraud. He also chastised them for refusing to cover or condemn threats and harassment against witnesses of the fraud and lawyers on Trump’s legal team.  “It’s tolerated because YOU condone it in the press and you don’t cover it and you don’t condemn it,” he charged.

Giuliani said that that the only reason Democrat Joe Biden got more votes than President Trump is because thousands of illegal ballots were produced and allowed to be used after the election was over. “Give us an opportunity to prove it in court, and we will,” Giuliani promised.

The former New York Mayor informed reporters that his team has gathered a vast amount of evidence that points to a conspiracy involving multiple states that was executed from a centralized location.

“This was not a singular [case] of voter fraud in just one state,” Giuliani said. “This pattern repeats itself in a number of states. Almost exactly the same pattern which any experienced investigator, prosecutor would suggest that there was a plan from a centralized place to execute these various acts of voter fraud specifically focused on big cities and specifically focused on, as you can imagine, big cities controlled by Democrats, and particularly focused on big cities that have a long history of corruption.” He noted that the number of voter fraud cases in Philadelphia alone “could fill a library.”

The Cancel Culture Moves Against Trump Lawyers by Chris Farrell

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16773/trump-lawyers-cancel-culture

Now, the Never-Trumper “Republicans” of the Lincoln Project… have dreamed up a way to self-righteously interfere with legal due process.

Reminder: our system of justice guarantees citizens the presumption of innocence and the ability to access the courts to address torts and grievances.

The larger point to consider is that should a Biden presidency come about, these sorts of tactics — and the general, national shift to centralized government control — will increasingly be compulsory. It is a philosophical thing. Big Government, Big Media, Big Tech, Big Medicine, Big Solutions — all at the expense of the individual: Individual rights, individual property, personal wealth, personal privacy, individual responsibility, personal conscience. Those will all have to be compromised supposedly for the greater good — especially if you supported Trump.

Thanks to The Lincoln Project, attorneys at Jones Day and Porter, Wright, Morris & Arthur LLP are on “the List.” What list? The List of people to be identified, catalogued, written about and punished for cooperating with Republican election campaigns. Bloomberg News reported it a week ago and we have The Lincoln Project’s own Twitter feed explaining their thinking.

In their tweet announcing their project against the law firms, The Lincoln Project stated: “Whatever you think of the Administration’s legal arguments, targeting the sanctity of our elections is immoral & ineffective.” One wonders if they apply the same election integrity standards to themselves.

Attorneys with these two law firms (among others) are representing the election interests of President Trump and Vice President Pence. Legal representation, according to The Lincoln Project, must be suppressed and intimidated. People who help Trump-Pence must be put on The List. This was precisely the sort of list maintained by the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit in the not-so-distant past.

Just when you had deciphered and comprehended the consequences of today’s practical application of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory — how “deconstructing” people is the Cancel Culture — many (and here I include The Lincoln Project crew) take things to whole new low.

You are familiar with the tactics of the Cancel Culture: Target a person who says things (usually very effectively) they do not like; then manufacture some outrage over a supposed offense (real or imagined); whip things up exponentially, to a hysterical pitch via social media; maximize the controversy with additional murky claims and/or threats to anyone who may support the person or be within their “blast radius” (also known as “isolation”); issue non-negotiable demands for the person’s silencing, firing, removal, banning, etc. Viola! Cancelled.

Team Trump: Evidence Shows ‘More Than Double’ the Vote Margin in Swing States Is From Illegal Ballots By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/election/tyler-o-neil/2020/11/19/team-trump-evidence-shows-more-than-double-the-vote-margin-in-swing-states-is-from-illegal-ballots-n1160908

Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis gave a blockbuster press conference on Thursday in which they ran down the legal case for the president’s repeated claim that he won the 2020 presidential election. Giuliani insisted that the evidence the campaign has collected suggests that “more than double” the margin of votes required to flip the election in six swing states are provably illegal, meaning Trump will have won them when only legal votes are counted. Ellis insisted that the legal challenges are not aimed at reversing the preliminary election results, however, but at restoring election integrity.

“In the states that we have indicated in red, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona, we more than double the number of votes needed to overturn the election in terms of provable, illegal ballots,” Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, said.

Giuliani insisted that the amount of evidence Team Trump has compiled suggests that Democrats cooked up a voter fraud scheme across the country.

“I think the logical conclusion is this is a common plan, a common scheme, that comes right directly from the Democrat Party and it comes from the candidate. Clearly, that’s the reason why Hillary Clinton said, ‘Don’t concede even if you’re losing.’ That’s the reason, we had a Freudian slip by the candidate and he said he had the best ‘voter fraud’ team in the country. That’s the reason why he probably didn’t have to go out and campaign. He had to have known what they were going to do. This had to be planned in advance,” the former mayor said.

Correct Diagnostics Needed What really explains the problems in the black community? Walter Williams

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/correct-diagnostics-needed-walter-williams/

“……

The former superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, Meria Carstarphen, last year said, “White students are nearly 4.5 grade levels ahead of their black peers within Atlanta Public Schools.” In San Francisco, 70% of white students are proficient in math; for black students, it is 12% — a gap of 58%. In Washington, D.C., 83% of white students scored proficient in reading, as did only 23% of black students — a gap of 60%. In Philadelphia, 47% of black students scored below basic in math and 42% scored below basic in reading. In Baltimore, 59% of black students scored below basic in math and 49% in reading. In Detroit, 73% of black students scored below basic in math and 56% in reading.

“Below basic” is the score a student receives when he is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and grade level skills. How much can racism explain this? To do well in school, someone must make a kid do his homework, get a good night’s rest, have breakfast and mind the teacher. If these basic family functions are not performed, it makes little difference how much money is put into education the result will be disappointing.

In 2019, the racial breakdown of high school seniors who took the ACT college entrance exam and met its readiness benchmarks was 62% of Asians, 47% of whites, 23% of Hispanics and 11% of blacks. That helps explain a 2016 study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce “African Americans: College Majors and Earnings.” It found that black college students were highly concentrated in lower-paying and less academically demanding majors like administrative services and social work. They are much less likely than other students to major in science, technology, engineering and math, even though blacks in these fields earned as much as 50% more than blacks who earned a bachelor’s degree in art or psychology and social work.

James D. Agresti, the president and co-founder of Just Facts has just published an article titled “Social Ills That Plague African Americans Coincide with Leftism, Not Racism.”

Our Dysfunctional ‘Race Relations’ How virtue signaling and weaponizing racial discourse sabotaged the goals of the civil rights movement. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/our-dysfunctional-race-relations-bruce-thornton/

Commentator and radio host Larry Elder recently posted an insightful tweet: “It is a sign of progress that today in America ‘race relations’ pretty much comes down to just one thing: how black people feel about white people––and how white people feel about how black people feel about white people.”

Unpacking this comment will reveal how dysfunctional “race relations” and racial discourse have been for half a century since legal segregation was ended.

First, I suspect the word “progress” carries a double edge. Of course, the condescending and patronizing sensibility that underlies “white” America’s obsession with black people’s opinions of them is a tremendous improvement over the indifference and neglect at best, and at worst the daily demeaning humiliations and physical violence of the past.

But the goal of the Civil Rights Movement that brought down legal segregation wasn’t for blacks to become “mascots,” to use Thomas Sowell’s metaphor, of enlightened white people’s moral preening, or superficial compassion, or need for racial redemption and absolution. Rather, it was for black people to be in full possession of the unalienable rights upon which the country and the Constitution were founded, and hence to be politically and legally equal to other Americans. The color of their skin, then, would be irrelevant to their political and national identities and the “content of their character.”

Trump Lawyers Unveil Massive Voter Fraud Backdated ballots, overcounting, blocked inspections, dishonest vote counting systems, and more. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/trump-campaign-lawyers-outline-their-case-massive-joseph-klein/

President Trump’s campaign lawyers, led by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, held a contentious press conference Thursday at the Republican National Committee in Washington, DC. They outlined their evidence to date of what Giuliani described as a pattern of massive election fraud, which they plan to submit to courts in key battleground states where lawsuits have been or will be filed. Sidney Powell, who is a member of Trump’s legal team, and the Trump campaign’s senior legal advisor Jenna Ellis also spoke. Their central message was that, but for the rampant fraud and use of highly suspicious vote counting software systems, Trump would have won the election by a wide margin and that they had the evidence to prove it. They also accused the media of covering up the truth because of their hatred for President Trump.

Giuliani said that, based on his experience prosecuting some of the most dangerous criminals in the world, “I know crimes. I can smell them.” And criminal activity is what he is convinced occurred on a wide scale in this year’s presidential election.

Giuliani denounced what he called a centralized plan orchestrated by the Democratic Party to execute acts of voter fraud in big cities controlled by Democrats that have a long history of voter fraud. He cited Philadelphia as a prime example. Giuliani reminded the media attendees of Joe Biden’s own Freudian slip during the campaign when he boasted about having the most “extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in history.”

The common pattern of voter fraud detected by Trump’s legal team includes the counting of votes of out of state residents, “over voting” in which 150, 200 or even 300 percent of the registered voters in a precinct had supposedly “voted,” intimidation of voters, and preventing inspectors from closely observing the counting of mail-in ballots.

In addition, Sidney Powell described how a vote counting software system used in various states to count votes in this year’s election had its roots in communist Venezuela. The late Venezuela dictator Hugo Chavez allegedly obtained and used the software to make sure that he would always win his fake elections. Venezuela’s current dictator Nicholas Maduro has continued to use it. “One of its most characteristic features is its ability to flip votes.

Biden’s COVID Mask Slips When It Comes To Illegal Immigration

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/11/20/bidens-covid-mask-slips-when-it-comes-to-illegal-immigration/

As coronavirus cases spike, Joe Biden is getting increasingly aggressive about containment. He’s pushing all governors to impose statewide mask mandates and other restrictions. His advisers are openly talking about a national lockdown to slow the spread.

“It’s about patriotism,” Biden said on Wednesday. “If you really care about your country, what you want to do is keep your neighbors and your family safe.”

Yet somehow Biden’s patriotic concern for your neighbors and your family dissipates if it means stopping the flow of illegal immigrants across the southern border.

Let’s leave aside the fact that lockdowns have been repeatedly shown to be failures. And as we noted in this space earlier, mask mandates haven’t prevented surges in COVID-19 cases in the 35 states that had implemented them.

Biden’s mantra has been that Trump hasn’t done enough to fight the disease and that he will do more.

Well, the Trump administration has used the health and welfare provisions of Title 42 of the U.S. Code to immediately expel these border crossers, rather than let them hang around in detention centers and then be released into the U.S. This, the administration says, is “in the interest of public health.” Data from the Customs and Border Protection agency show that it sent back nearly 58,000 border jumpers in September alone. Given the surge in coronavirus cases in Mexico and other Latin American countries, this policy is no doubt helping control the spread.