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Ruth King

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Over a Dozen Current and Former Fox News Employees Shoot Down NBC’s Hit Piece Against Pete Hegseth–on the Record By Debra Heine

By on December 4th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/04/over-a-dozen-current-and-former-fox-news-employees-shoot-down-nbcs-hit-piece-against-pete-hegseth-on-the-record/

An NBC News hit piece accusing Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, of habitually coming to work at “Fox and Friends Weekend” hung over and smelling of alcohol has been refuted by over a dozen Fox News personalities and guests who have worked with him, including his two cohosts.

The NBC story, which is based on ten anonymous sources, claims that Hegseth’s drinking “concerned” his colleagues at Fox News.

“Two of those people said that on more than a dozen occasions during Hegseth’s time as a co-host of ‘Fox & Friends Weekend,’ which began in 2017, they smelled alcohol on him before he went on air,” the NBC story alleges. “Those same two people, plus another, said that during his time there he appeared on television after they’d heard him talk about being hungover as he was getting ready or on set.”

According to the story, “one of the sources said they smelled alcohol on him as recently as last month and heard him complain about being hungover this fall.”

NBC News reporters Chloe Melas, Courtney Kube and Sarah Fitzpatrick claim they spoke with ten current and former employees at Fox News. However, 12 of Hegseth’s colleagues at Fox have gone on the record to strongly dispute the story on social media.  And these employees say they weren’t even contacted by NBC News for comment.

Hegseth’s Fox and Friends Weekend cohost Will Cain fumed on X that NBC’s story is “Bullshit. 100 percent bullshit. Actually…horseshit.”

“Put my name on it. On the record. It’ll be your only on the record source,” Cain wrote. “Signed, The guy who sat next to him for 8 hours every week for five years starting at 6am.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Winning Has Already Begun

By on December 4th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/04/the-winning-has-already-begun/

Under normal circumstances, it takes a year or two before a president can have an impact on the economy or world affairs. But Donald Trump won’t be president for almost two months, and already we are feeling the effects of his election.

Consumers are more confident, manufacturers more optimistic, investors more bullish. Canada is promising to toughen up its border controls. Ukraine is talking about how to end its nearly three-year-long war. There’s a ceasefire in the Middle East.

Heck, even Trump’s favorability rating broke through 50%, a rarity since he first announced his candidacy in 2015.

Let’s look at the evidence:

The RealClearMarkets/TIPP Economic Optimism Index jumped 13.4% in November to 53.2, the highest in more than three years. Anything over 50 indicates a positive for optimism, and this is the first time the index has been positive since September 2021

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Charles Lipson: Kamala Harris was a shocking candidate — but Democrats are ignoring the bigger reason for their defeat

By on December 4th, 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/12/03/kamala-harris-shocking-candidate-but-democrats-ignore/

The reckoning they face is urgent. By 2028, they won’t have their biggest asset: Donald Trump

Losing parties always search for explanations. When they lose big – when they lose the White House and both houses of Congress – that search becomes a full-scale reckoning. What went wrong for Democrats? How can they correct it?

Those questions aren’t lacking for answers. The problem is sorting out the ones that really matter.

The easiest answer – and surely part of the explanation – is “we need a better candidate”. Kamala Harris was truly dreadful. But that only raises another question: how did the Democrats end up with such a clunker?

The mainstream media did their best to cover for her, less because they liked Harris and more because they hated Donald Trump. That’s why they ignored her obvious defects for some six weeks after party leaders ditched Joe Biden and anointed Harris as his replacement. She was hoisted aloft by fawning journalists and broadcasters. When their hot air was finally exhausted, Kamala crashed. Even spending $1.5 billion and saturating the airways with slick commercials wasn’t enough to persuade centrist, independent voters.

Harris was sunk by several problems. The first, and most fundamental, is that she was the second-ranking official in an unpopular administration. She was inextricably bound to its failures. When almost 80 per cent of voters say that the country is “on the wrong track”, the burden is almost insurmountable. 

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel forces Iranian plane to reverse course over Syria The Mahan Air aircraft was suspected to be transporting weapons to Hezbollah in violation of the Lebanon ceasefire agreement • IDF eliminates Hezbollah cell near a church in Southern Lebanon. Joshua Marks

By on December 3rd, 2024

https://www.jns.org/israel-forces-iranian-plane-to-reverse-course-over-syria/?utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%20Emails&utm_

Israeli fighter jets on Sunday night intercepted an Iranian plane over Syria suspected to be transporting weapons to Hezbollah, forcing it to return to Tehran.

The operation was part of efforts to maintain the Nov. 27 ceasefire agreement that ended over a year of hostilities between Israel and the Iranian-backed terror group.

The “Letter of Guarantees,” an annex to the agreement, underscores the United States’ commitment to collaborating with Israel to counter Iran’s destabilizing activities in Lebanon, including halting the transfer of weapons, proxies and materials into Lebanon from Iranian territory.

Additional provisions in the two-and-a-half-page U.S.-Israel side deal reportedly include guarantees of Israeli operational freedom against Hezbollah violations of the ceasefire.

The Israel Defense Forces is authorized to counter immediate threats in Southern Lebanon, such as observed preparations for a Hezbollah rocket launch, and also to address emerging threats, for example the digging of tunnels or arms transfers, if Lebanon’s government is unwilling or unable to act.

According to a 2022 report by the Alma Research and Education Center, Mahan Air serves as the Islamic Republic’s main cover for transporting weapons.

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OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump Redux: Defeating Identity Despots By Daryl McCann

By on December 3rd, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/the-u-s-a/trump-redux-defeating-identity-despots/

Donald Trump’s victory on November 5 was more than just a defeat for his hapless opponent. It was a defeat for the Democrat powerbrokers who foisted Kamala Harris on the American public without the former senator from California attaining a single party delegate during this year’s primary season (or, for that matter, in 2019-20). It was, similarly, a defeat for the mass media, which reconfigured her as “the voice of a new generation” once she became the Democrats’ presidential nominee, despite deriding her performance as vice-president over the previous three and a half years. Finally, and most importantly, November 5 marks the day Americans rejected the despotism of Obama-style identity politics.

Leading Democrats are now arguing over whether to blame Joe Biden or Harris for the Democrats’ worst result in a presidential election since 1988, including the loss of all seven battleground states. The Biden camp points out that Biden won six of those states in 2020 and could have hardly done worse than Harris this time. But that argument does not hold up in the light of Biden’s abysmal performance in his televised debate with Trump. Old Joe was on target to do as badly as Harris did, or worse. More than 75 per cent of American voters believed their country was on the wrong track—inflation, a doubling of the price of petrol, soaring mortgage rates, 10 to 20 million unvetted immigrants pouring across the southern border, foreign wars, boys in girls’ sports, and so on were affecting the national mood. Biden was not the man to turn things around. Not only was his administration responsible for many or all of these problems, but in the June 27 debate, Trump exposed Biden’s serious cognitive decline for all the world to see; not even the Democrat powerbrokers and their allies in the mainstream media could hide it any longer.

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OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Fight for Free Speech Rebecca Weisser

By on December 3rd, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/editors-column/the-fight-for-free-speech/

“The taboo against telling the truth is what protects the woke establishment. Trump has been derided as everything from a boor and a buffoon to a fascist. Yet it was he, not his preening critics, who observed, “If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple just like dominos one by one.” Amen to that. And merry Christmas, happy Hanukah, and happy holidays to all.”

The attack on free speech is one of the most disturbing manifestations of the “woke mind virus” which has captured ruling elites in the West. Donald Trump’s re-election is its most encouraging rebuttal. The historic size of Trump’s victory is evidence that we have, at last, passed “peak woke”. The lamentations and gnashing of teeth of America’s left liberals is, one hopes, its wake.

At the top of the president-elect’s to-do list he says is ending the “censorship cartel … that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called ‘mis-’ and ‘dis-information’” driven by a “sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media … conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people” by suppressing “vital information on everything from elections to public health”.

The good news is that Trump’s proposed legislation to protect free speech in America will hamper Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s attempts to censor social media in Australia.It follows a pushback on the Starmer Labour government’s attack on freedom of speech in the UK. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s attempt to quietly throttle the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act has been condemned by more than 600 academics, writers, and public intellectuals including Stephen Fry, Ian McEwan, historian Tom Holland, Lady Antonia Fraser, and former Poet Laureate Sir ­Andrew Motion. While they might have their political differences, they were united in condemning the government for not protecting ­“humane and liberal values” or opposing “cancel culture” in British universities.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Syrian tragedy continues Whoever wins this bloody battle between Assad and the jihadists, the Syrian people have already lost. Tim Black

By on December 3rd, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/03/the-syrian-tragedy-continues/

The terrible 13-years-long conflict in Syria has been mainly framed as a civil war between the government of Bashar al-Assad and domestic opponents. The sight of jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) capturing villages and towns in north-west Syria, before advancing on and taking the city of Aleppo on Friday, has largely been interpreted through this civil-war lens – as the reignition of a conflict between ‘rebel’ groups and ‘regime’ or ‘government’ forces.

This, though, is to tell only part of the story. Not just of the latest direct challenge to Assad’s hollow rule, but also of Syria’s long-standing descent into violent instability. (For one thing, ‘rebels’ seems like an oddly anodyne way to describe the vicious Islamists of HTS.)

Throughout this long conflict, there have certainly been domestic factors involved, chief among which is the illegitimacy and chronic lack of authority of Assad’s de facto, tin-pot dictatorship. This weakness gave rise to the initial popular uprisings against him in 2011. But since that initial eruption of anti-Assad protest during the Arab Spring, this has ceased to be a conflict determined by social, political forces internal to Syria itself.

In truth, the conflict in Syria has long since been shaped and fuelled by its internationalisation. Shortly after the moment in 2011 when the Arab Spring called the very viability of Assad’s government into question, global and regional hegemons crowded into the ensuing struggle, vying for influence and power. By 2012, NATO allies Turkey and America, with then secretary of state Hillary Clinton leading the charge, were simultaneously demanding Assad step down while backing various anti-government militias – some of which would turn out to be violent jihadists. On the other side, Russia and Iran attempted to shore up Assad’s crumbling regime, providing various forms of military support.

By the mid-2010s, Syria had been torn apart. To all intents and purposes, it had ceased to be a nation. It had become a patchwork of territories, each partially controlled by competing factions, which in turn were backed by competing international forces. There were the US-backed Kurdish fighters in the east, who were defending themselves against the insurgent jihadists while pursuing their own national ambitions. There were the Turkey-sponsored militias in the north. And there was the Russia-bolstered, Iran-aided government of Assad himself in the west. In the lawless chaos, Islamist militias, with backing from all around the region, flourished.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Dirty Green Money The UN’s latest global warming conference may be one of its last. by Daniel Greenfield

By on December 3rd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dirty-green-money/

“I’m also listening to ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’ by Rihanna nonstop,” Juan Carlos Monterrey Gomez, the vice chair for the implementation of the UN Climate Convention, told reporters.

The 2024 United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Baku was all about money.

It wasn’t the planet, but the scent of money that had drawn everyone from Gomez, the negotiator for Panama, one of the most corrupt countries in the world, to the Taliban, to the UN climate conference in Azerbaijan, a post-Soviet Muslim oil and gas country.

Officially everyone was in a country whose only real export was oil and gas to save the planet, but as the favorite song of the UN Climate Convention vice chair says, “Hold up, My money, Yo, my money.” Everyone in Baku wanted to save the planet. But only for the right price.

Even the Taliban who came asking for money to fix Afghanistan’s ‘climate change’ problems.

President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan kicked off the UN conference to end oil and gas by praising them as a “gift from Allah” and blamed America for polluting the world with ‘carbon emissions’.

Aliyev’s speech was representative of third world countries which had only shown up to trade votes for cash. UN climate conferences require a consensus. And that means bribing every third world dictatorship to get on board with whatever fictional climate target is being discussed now.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Ilya Shapiro, Noam Josse What Now on Campus? Donald Trump’s victory throws down a challenge to the unsustainable extremism at America’s colleges and universities.

By on December 3rd, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/what-now-on-campus

With Donald Trump’s election victory, U.S. college campuses have been humbled. The day after, the atmosphere at Columbia University was mournful, as Student Services handed out free pizza for students who needed support processing the results.

Students’ dismay at Trump’s victory contrasts with their jubilant, headline-grabbing anti-Israel activism over the past year. Ironically, student activists probably helped the Trump campaign by alienating moderates and creating an “uncommitted” movement, whose followers may have declined to vote for Kamala Harris.

Regardless of how many young people left the presidential line blank or voted for Jill Stein, college-educated voters generally were one of Democrats’ strongest cohorts in 2024. They were one of the few groups among whom Harris did not lose ground relative to Joe Biden in 2020, roughly matching Biden’s 12-point advantage in 2020. She outperformed Biden among white college-educated voters, which offset her relative underperformance among college-educated racial minorities.

College-educated voters’ preference for Democratic candidates is no surprise. Campuses incubate opposition to many of the ideas associated with the Trump campaign: patriotic pride in America and its history; a desire for the government to treat all Americans equally; and a preference for the interests of U.S. citizens to those of foreigners. DEI grandees and their acolytes consider such views retrograde and even racist; they believe, evidence notwithstanding, that Trump won by riling up a hateful white base. The broader electorate doesn’t see it that way. Their choice of Trump delivered a strong message to students, particularly at so-called elite schools: ravings about decolonization and gender theory are nonstarters for ordinary Americans.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

US follows France in warning Israel over ceasefire violations Restraint “from all sides” is necessary for the truce to hold, U.S. sources told Israeli media.

By on December 3rd, 2024

https://www.jns.org/us-follows-france-in-warning-israel-over-ceasefire-violations/?utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%20Emails&utm

Washington has backed up Paris’s assertions that Israel is violating the terms of last week’s ceasefire agreement with Lebanon, that formally ended 14 months of hostilities with the Hezbollah terrorist group.

U.S. presidential envoy Amos Hochstein, who played a pivotal role in brokering the deal, conveyed a message to officials in Jerusalem that they are not abiding by the truce terms, Ynet reported on Monday.

Sources told the Hebrew news outlet that the Americans believe that there have been violations on the Israeli side, primarily its use of surveillance drones over the skies of Beirut.

The sources stressed that for the ceasefire to hold, “restraint is required from all sides.”

Paris, a member of the Washington-led monitoring mechanism overseeing the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire agreement, had accused Jerusalem of committing 52 ceasefire violations, according to Hebrew media reports on Sunday that cited French diplomatic sources.

The sources alleged that Israel had bypassed the established channels for reporting violations before taking action.

The reports also claim that three Lebanese civilians were killed and highlight an increase in Israeli drone activity, claiming that low-altitude flights over Beirut had resumed.

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