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Ruth King

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Ruthie Blum : Amy Coney Barrett, Jewish liberals and the US Constitution

By on September 29th, 2020

https://www.jns.org/opinion/amy-coney-barrett-jewish-liberals-and-the-us-constituti

For Jews who worship at the altar of abortion and gun control, RBG was practically a religious figure, and filling her seat with a Catholic who rejects judicial activism is blasphemous.

The apoplexy on the part of Democrats in general and Jewish liberals in particular to the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court was to be expected. Anything that President Donald Trump does drives them crazy.

But the fact that he decided to fill the seat vacated by the Sept. 18 death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg before the fast-approaching election has been more than they can tolerate. How dare the president exercise his right to do so, they have been moaning, when his days in office are numbered?

Or so they have been praying. Literally.

Indeed, when news of Ginsburg’s death on the eve of Rosh Hashanah reached many Reform and Conservative congregants (the Orthodox don’t tune into electronic devices on Friday night, and certainly not during the Jewish New Year), their rabbis devoted the following morning’s services to her legacy.

RBG, as she came to be called, had been their heroine. She was not only the first Jewish woman to sit on the Supreme Court and the second woman after Sandra Day O’Connor. She was a warrior for all left-wing causes, whose opinions on and off the bench gained her the adoration of liberals far and wide, including in Israel, which has one of the Western world’s most politically interventionist Supreme Court.

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The Democrats’ Frivolous Three-Pronged Attack on Judge Barrett By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on September 29th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/the-democrats-frivolous-three-pronged-att

Progressives’ main arguments against President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee don’t withstand scrutiny.Doing some commentary over the weekend about President Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, I was struck by not just the emptiness but the outright deceptiveness of the three main Democratic lines of attack against her. These are early days, so perhaps Barrett’s opposition will find something of substance that gains some traction. For now, the main salvos against her are frivolous:

(1) President Trump has a litmus test for nominees, who must take predetermined positions that support his policy agenda; (2) Relatedly, Judge Barrett will “destroy” the Affordable Care Act, consideration of which comes up on the Supreme Court’s oral-argument docket the week after Election Day; and (3) Barrett, a devout Catholic, is on a crusade to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973).

I will take these in order.. Litmus Test

There is no evidence that President Trump has imposed a litmus test on judges whom he would nominate to the Supreme Court. That Democrats say there is a litmus test, tirelessly, on every media platform available to them, is not proof of anything other than a campaign to drive a fact-free political narrative into the public’s consciousness. Specifically, there is no evidence that Judge Barrett, in order to be nominated, had to agree to take the Trump administration’s position of staunch opposition to Obamacare and abortion. As I noted on the Corner earlier today, it is not unusual for Trump-appointed judges to rule against the administration.

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The Weak Leading the Woke What We Ask About When We Ask About Joe by William Voegeli

By on September 29th, 2020

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-weak-leading-the-woke/

Let’s start with an easy one.

How old is Joe Biden?

As this issue goes to press, 77. America’s median age is 38, which means that more than half the country is less than half Biden’s age. If inaugurated on January 20, 2021, exactly two months after he turns 78, Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., will be older on his first day in office than Ronald Reagan was on his last day as president. Reagan was the oldest president prior to Donald Trump, who is three and a half years younger than Biden and became president almost four years ago. As a result, Trump will reach the age of 78 years and seven months in January 2025, at the conclusion of what would be his second term. Biden will be that old in June 2021.

Last year, when Biden was a candidate for the Democratic nomination, he (or at least his advisors) suggested he would serve only one term if elected. Having become the nominee, he said more recently that he would “absolutely” consider seeking a second term in 2024. If that quest overcomes all obstacles, political and medical, Biden would leave office in January 2029 at 86, an age surpassed by only seven ex-presidents.

To think of Biden’s age another way, he is older than his party’s nominee in each of the seven most recent presidential elections: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton. One must go back to 86-year-old Michael Dukakis, who lost the 1988 election to George H.W. Bush, to find a Democratic presidential nominee born before Biden was.

How long has Joe Biden been in government?

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Meet a Secret Trump Voter ‘Being a lesbian who’s voting for Trump is like coming out of the closet again.’ By Bret Stephens

By on September 29th, 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/opinion/trump-voters.html

Chris is a registered Democrat in her 50s who lives in Manhattan. She’s well-educated, well-traveled and well-informed. She has voted for candidates of both parties over the years and was enthusiastic for Bernie Sanders in 2016.

She’s asked me not to publish her last name. It would not go down well for her at the store where she works as a manager if her colleagues knew that she plans to vote for Donald Trump.

Chris is also gay. “Being a lesbian who’s voting for Trump is like coming out of the closet again,” she tells me.

Readers of this newspaper who conjure an image of a Trump voter probably think of people like Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who pointed guns at protesters outside their St. Louis home in late June. But if Trump defies current polling and wins again, it’ll be thanks to a discreet base of support from voters like Chris, who fit into none of the cultural or demographic stereotypes of the Trump base.

It’s worth understanding where she’s coming from.

Start with the economy. “I haven’t seen double digit [gains] in my 401(k) since the internet boom of the late ’90s,” she says. “It went up 19.6 percent” in the year before the pandemic. “Look at the stock market,” she says. (Up about 35 percent from four years ago.) “Look at gas prices.” (About the same as what they were when Trump took office, but well below the $3.31 per gallon at the midpoint of the Obama administration.)

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The Progressive Medusa Victor Davis Hanson

By on September 29th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/

There was once a tradition of Democratic liberalism. But that wing of the Democratic Party no longer exists and died sometime in the 1990s. Old-style liberalism has been absorbed by Progressivism at best and unapologetic socialism at worst—in a journey on the supposedly predetermined arc of history that bends toward 1984.

The new-old leftist aim is not to operate within either the existing parameters of the Constitution as written or the customs and traditions of America—a 150-year-long nine-justice Supreme Court, the Electoral College, a 50-state nation, a Senate filibuster, two senators per state, and a secure border. All are obstructions to the drive for power. 

Given its redistributionist creed, socialism cannot afford to be patent and honest. If socialism were transparent, it never would gain majority support. Joe Biden cannot talk about the Electoral College or court packing, unequivocally condemn the violence in our urban centers, discuss the Green New Deal, name his likely Supreme Court appointments, be honest about his plans for fracking, or explain his views on the borders, because he is now owned lock, stock and barrel by the hard Left whose agendas were rejected even in his own Democratic primaries.

The Left seeks to transform America into something never envisioned by the founders, a huge all-encompassing, panopticon state, one run by anointed Platonic guardians. Our elite watchmen will use their unlimited power to force upon us an equality of result society—with themselves properly exempted.

The hard Left’s defense is that its mission is so critical, so morally superior, that all means can be justified to achieve its noble ends. And so almost every institution that the Left has in its line of vision is now petrifying.

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Another Pathetic Times ‘Bombshell’ Donald Trump failed to pay taxes on business losses—like every other taxpayer in the world. By Adam Mill

By on September 29th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/28/another-pathetic-times-bombshell/

The New York Times earned a whopping $428.5 million in revenue in just the third quarter of 2019. While its revenue increased when compared to the same quarter in 2018, it’s tax bill declined to just $6.1 million (down from $10.1 million in the same quarter the year prior).

How on earth did this rich corporation manage such a significant reduction in its tax burden after such a flush year? It employed the same tax gimmick that Times reporters would later pillory President Trump for using on his taxes; it only paid taxes on its profit realized after deducting operating costs. 

To ordinary wage earners, it might seem like cheating: Only paying income taxes on income. But that’s just the same dirty game the Times has now claimed to have caught the Bad Orange Man playing. 

The Times clucked righteously that the president failed to pay taxes on his losses. The Times failed to identify any other business in the history of income tax that has ever paid income taxes on losses. But since the Times hates him, it wants him to follow a different tax rule than every other company in the world.

Over the weekend, the Times finally opened the Schrodinger’s box of Trump tax returns. While the box remained closed, it allowed all sorts of idle speculation (masquerading as journalism). 

“Might it shed light on the president’s connections to Russian money, interests, indebtedness?” Forbes speculated in April 2019. “Democrats say they are concerned the White House could pressure IRS agents to go easy on Trump’s returns, and that they need his tax documents to understand how seriously the agency is vetting them,” Politico reported in July 2019. 

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Liberals Confident That Current Utopian State of Democrat-Led Cities Reveals the Paradise to Come Once Biden Elected

By on September 29th, 2020

https://www.thegoodgopher.com/home/the-good-gopher-satire-liberals-confident-that-current-utopian-state-of-democrat-led-cities-reveals-the-paradise-to-come-once-biden-elected

“The Garden of Eden isn’t a fairy tale after all! It’s been reimagined all over the nation in cities like Portland, Seattle, and Chicago!”

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Flu Vaccination Is More Important Than Ever This Year Henry I. Miller

By on September 29th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/09/29/flu-vaccination-is-more-important-than-ever-this-year/

This year’s influenza (“flu”) season, which should kick off sometime in October, rev up in November, and last until spring, will be made more treacherous than ever by the concurrent COVID-19 pandemic (cases of which are currently surging in many parts of the nation). The coincidence of infections by the two viruses in the population has the potential to be a perfect storm.

There have been more than 7 million confirmed cases and about 210,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. this year, and public health experts are expecting an uptick in cases as winter approaches and people tend more often to be in crowded, poorly ventilated, indoor spaces. 

The morbidity of flu varies significantly from year to year.  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that it has caused millions of deaths, hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, and tens of thousands of deaths every year since 2010.  As shown in the figure below, the morbidity and mortality vary significantly from year to year. If this flu season is at the high end of the range, hospitals contending with large numbers of admissions for flu, in addition to COVID-19 patients, could well be overwhelmed.

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The Message Of Iran’s Execution Of A Wrestling Champion Ali Safavi

By on September 29th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/09/26/the-message-of-irans-execution-of-a-wrestling-champion/

Last Saturday, despite a global outcry, the Iranian regime brutally executed a 27-year-old wrestling champion. Navid Afkari was arrested during peaceful anti-regime protests back in 2018. Amnesty International called the execution a “travesty of justice.” And the International Olympic Committee (IOC) sad it was “shocked” by the announcement.

A high-profile campaign around the world had been sparked to force the regime to stop the execution. That included the World Players Association representing 85,000 athletes worldwide, along with other major sports groups and athletes in Iran and around the world. But in the end, Afkari, who proclaimed his innocence until the end, was executed so hastily that the regime even robbed him of a final family visit.

In tape recordings and letters from prison, Akfari had explained some of the torture he had endured: “They put a plastic bag over my head and almost suffocated me. Using batons and other hard objects, they beat hard on my hands, abdomen, and legs. … They tied me forcefully and poured alcohol down my nostrils.”

Both of his brothers have also been sentenced to decades in prison after being tortured. Their grieving mother, Bahieh Namjoo, said in a video posted on social media: “They tortured my sons to confess against Navid. This was a sham trial. My children could not defend themselves.”

The Iranian people are facing devastating circumstances and are on the verge of rising up. Decades of endemic state corruption and economic mismanagement by state officials have left millions of Iranians struggling to make ends meet. In 2018 and 2019, millions in close to 200 cities called for democratic regime change.

That is precisely why the regime sentenced Afkari to not one, but TWO, death sentences. The regime wanted to send a message of intimidation to the rest of the population in order to prevent further protests in a very tense environment. But the execution actually sent the complete opposite message. It revealed the regime’s incredible fragility.

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Revolution by Shenanigan By Kevin D. Williamson

By on September 29th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/revolution-by-shenanigan/

EXCERPTS

Democrats propose to do away with the Constitution and impose a new one that none of us has agreed to live under.

Today’s shenanigan is tomorrow’s precedent.

The American constitutional order is a blend of democratic and undemocratic institutions, a result of the compromises that were necessary to create one nation out of 13 very different colonies, with different economic and political interests, different cultures, different religious habits — the genuine diversity of 18th-century American life. We have a federal system in which the states and U.S. government exercise a kind of dual sovereignty, with the states remaining powers in their own right rather than mere administrative subdivisions of the national state. The status of the states is reflected in the Senate, where each state enjoys equal representation regardless of population, and in institutions such as the Electoral College. Other antidemocratic measures in our constitutional order include judicial review and, most important, the Bill of Rights, which are constraints on the powers of temporary democratic majorities.

The Democrats currently are at war with the American Constitution. They believe that it is unjust that on two recent occasions their party has lost presidential elections, which happen in the Electoral College, in spite of winning a greater number of total votes across all the states. They dislike that the Senate gives power to less populated, rural, and largely Western states that are more conservative than are the big, densely populated urban areas in which Democrats thrive. And they are irritated that the First Amendment prevents them from imposing a federal censorship regime on political speech.

The Democrats’ approach to the Senate has been politically incompetent. When they were in power, they resented the effective maneuvering of the minority party, and so eliminated the filibuster in the matter of most federal judicial appointments, an innovation that they are regretting in the worst way right about now. Republicans extended the filibuster-free process to nominations for the highest court.

Now, some Democrats propose to simply create new Senate seats for their party by declaring the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to be states, which would be illegal in the former case and unwise in the latter. But in the matter of Puerto Rico, they have the Texas-annexation shenanigans of the 19th century as precedent.

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