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Ruth King

Taiwan’s Presidential Election Highlights the Failure of China’s Aggressive Foreign Meddling By Helen Raleigh See note please

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/china-taiwan-relations-tsai-ing-wen-reelection-highlights-failure-china-foreign-meddling/

Finally! After the betrayal of Nixon/Kissinger/ Carter by recognizing Communist China’s “One China” policy Taiwan is breaking free and gaining the approval of America…..rsk

President Tsai Ing-wen’s landslide reelection victory is a huge blow to Beijing’s ambitions.

On Saturday, Taiwan’s first female president, Tsai Ing-wen of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive party (DPP), won re-election in a landslide victory that dealt a decisive blow to Beijing’s aggressive efforts to dictate Taiwanese politics.

The first thing to note about Tsai’s victory is that it had a lot to do with the ongoing unrest in Hong Kong. At the beginning of 2019, Tsai had an approval rating in the low 20s. The pro-reunification Nationalist Party (KMT) had won 2018’s local elections, handing the DPP a huge defeat on the strength of voters’ economic concerns. Many Taiwanese weren’t pleased with an economy slowed by Beijing’s coercive measures. China’s autocratic head of state, Xi Jinping, sees Tsai’s pro-independence political stand as the ultimate threat to his aim of reunification with Taiwan and had decided to use China’s economic power to teach her a lesson. Beijing had issued a travel ban in 2018 forbidding mainland tourists from traveling to the island. Since tourism is one of the biggest industries in Taiwan, the ban was projected to result in 700,000 fewer mainland tourists in just six months, costing Taiwan a staggering $900.5 million. Voters backed the KMT later the same year, and Tsai was forced to resign from her position as DPP chair. With a dangerously low approval rating and no political momentum to speak of, Tsai looked to be as good as dead politically this time last year.

How Communist Ideology Infiltrated America’s Security Agencies & Fueled Spygate—Diana West VIDEO

How Communist Ideology Infiltrated America’s Security Agencies & Fueled Spygate—Diana West

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=41&v=xZhDlf7sOaE&feature=emb_logo

Third Republican Senator Endorses War Powers Resolution, Leaving Dems Just Shy of Majority By Zachary Evans

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/third-republican-senator-endorses-war-powers-resolution-leaving-dems-just-shy-of-majority/

Senator Todd Young (R., Ind.) announced on Tuesday that he would support a resolution to curb President Trump’s power to make war on Iran without Congressional authorization.

Young is the third Republican Senator to support the resolution, which was authored by Senator Tim Kaine (D., Va.). Democrats will need four Republicans to vote for the resolution in order to gain the majority required to pass it.

Kaine tweaked the original resolution to make it more palatable for Republicans, eliminating a section that Republicans and some Democrats deemed too critical of President Trump.

“I will be supporting, shall we call it, Kaine 2.0., the newer Kaine language, should I have an opportunity to vote on it,” Young said in comments reported by The Hill.

Senators Rand Paul (R., Ky.) and Mike Lee (R., Utah) have both previously expressed support for the War Powers resolution. Paul and Lee confirmed their support after a classified briefing on the U.S. airstrike that killed senior Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.

The New Post-Trump Constitution By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/new-post-trump-consti
The new normal: Impeachment as a routine partisan tool, endless investigations, lying under oath with impunity, surveillance of political enemies, zero accountability …

T he Left sees Donald Trump’s comportment, rallies, and tweets as a new low in presidential behavior that justifies extraordinary countermeasures. But Trump’s personal characteristics are idiosyncratic and may or may not become institutionalized by subsequent presidents. And it is not as if liberal icons such as FDR, LBJ, JFK, and Bill Clinton suddenly became saintly in office.

What is far scarier is the reaction to Trump, in both the constitutional and political sense. What follows are likely the new norms for the next generation of presidents, and they will probably be equally applied to Democrats who implemented them in the Trump era.

1) Private presidential phone calls with foreign leaders will be leaked and printed in the major media. The point will be not so much to air breaking news as to embarrass the president or to use such disclosures to stymie his foreign policy. Those who leak such information will be canonized as part of a “resistance.” Prominent officials in government will publish anonymous op-eds in the New York Times bragging about how they are daily undermining a new president’s administration.

2) Impeachment is now a casual affair. It requires no report of illegal or unethical behavior by a special counsel or special prosecutor. It will not be bipartisan but solely the action of the opposition party in the House when it is in the majority.

Public support will not matter. Much less will it be needed. Impeachment will be applied equally to a first- or second-term presidency. And it will become useful in a reelection year to help drive down an incumbent’s popularity.

Israel’s education minister gets taught a lesson Rafi Peretz should spend more time on Israel’s academic record and school curricula, and less time poking around in the business of family choices.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/israels-education-minister-gets-taught-a-lesson/

Israeli Education Minister Rafi Peretz, an Orthodox rabbi and head of the right-wing Habayit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) Party, indicated this week—for the second time since being appointed last June to the interim post—how poorly suited he is for his job.

Peretz caused an uproar in July, a mere few weeks into his temporary tenure, when he said in a televised interview that he had experience in conducting successful gay conversion therapy.

In a move illustrating his inability to learn a lesson, Peretz put his foot in his mouth again over the past weekend, telling the Hebrew daily Yediot Achronot that marriage between a man and a woman is the definition of a “normative family.”

When asked what he would do if one of his own kids came out of the closet, he basically replied that he’s lucky not to have to worry about such a scenario. “Thank God,” he said, “my children were raised in a natural and healthy way … and are building their homes on Jewish values.”

Oy.

Trump administration starts returning migrants DEEP INTO MEXICO to combat border crisis Adam Shaw, 

www.foxnews.com/politics/us-mexican-migrants-mexico-border-crisis

Trump administration starts returning migrants DEEP INTO MEXICO to combat border crisis
Adam Shaw, FoxNews.com

The Trump administration has started returning Mexican migrants deep into the country’s interior as part of an expanding effort to deter illegal immigration and combat the ongoing crisis at the border.

The Department of Homeland Security started running flights from Tucson, Ariz., to Guadalajara in December. Officials say the migrants being returned are all Mexican nationals from non-border Mexican states who typically have either recently illegally entered the U.S., or who had gone through the court system but were ruled to be deportable by an immigration judge.

The plan marks a departure from past practice of releasing migrants at the border. The idea would be to make it harder for repeat offenders to try and cross the border again if they are returned hundreds of miles away. Officials say returning people closer to their hometowns is better for them as well, and allows them to receive services from the Mexican government.

DHS says it plans to run two flights a week starting at the end of January and expects to return about 250 migrants a week. Officials say the move has been requested by the Mexican government, with which the U.S. has been working for months to stem the border crisis — which peaked in May but still concerns officials.

Hillary Clinton Vindicated On Corruption Charges?

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/01/14/hillary-clinton-vindicated-on-corruption-charges-hardly/

 Hardly
I&I Editorial Board

Last week, the Washington Post reported that the Justice Department had wound down a Hillary Clinton-related inquiry after finding “nothing of consequence.” That set off a series of Hosannas from the allegedly non-partisan press, which seems to notice quid pro quos only when they involve a Republican.

A quick review of the flagrantly corrupt dealings of the Clinton Foundation is in order.

When Hillary took the job of secretary of state under President Barack Obama, she promised that the foundation wouldn’t accept foreign donations. It took in money from at least seven foreign governments.

Documents showed that 85 of the 154 private interests who met with Clinton at the State Department had donated money to the foundation.

Emails unearthed by Judicial Watch showed that Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin – who worked for both the State Department and the foundation –  gave “special expedited access to the secretary of state” for those who gave $25,000 to $10 million.

Peter Schweizer’s book “Clinton Cash” exposed other unsavory entanglements between the foundation, government policy, and the Clintons’ pocketbooks.

As the late great columnist Charles Krauthammer put it, the foundation was “a massive family enterprise disguised as a charity” that was intended to help restore the Clintons to power.

“A Look Back to the Past Decade” Sydney Willams

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

In his 1961 work, A Study of History (a study of the rise and fall of twenty-three civilizations), Arnold Toynbee concluded that civilizations die from suicide, not by murder, brought on by a decline in the moral fiber of society. When a New York Times reporter compared the killing of Qassim Soleimani to the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Left never blinked, despite the implied insult to the Reverend King, his family and followers. When the West fails to defend the genocide of Christians in Africa, but are supplicant to Muslims who murder them, does that reflect a moral stance or a fear of retaliation? “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage,” spoke Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the Harvard commencement in 1978. The decline in moral courage has worsened over the past forty-two years. We in the West are more prosperous than ever before, yet we are filled with discontent: If we are black, we are victims; if we are white, we are supremacists; if we are Jews, we are subject to anti-Semitism; if we are Asian, we suffer from reverse discrimination. Unemployment, including minority unemployment, is the lowest in fifty years, and 2019 year-over-year wage growth was the highest for low-wage earners. Yet few of us seem happy with who we are. Perhaps because family has been subordinated to the village and the state?

There were, during the past decade, trends that might be a cause of this despair. While none began in the Twenty-teens, they accelerated over the past ten years. All stem from a desire for power, a sense of political correctness and identity politics coated in hypocrisy, and a belief we should apologize for the success we have had, individually and collectively. We were told we didn’t build the business we built. We tear down statues that represent our history. Hashtags rule and victimization reigns. In colleges and universities, the humanities have been attacked as representing only dead white males who promoted exclusivity. We are told to be inclusive, but not when it comes to political opinions. Where, for example, is the diversity of ideas promoted by a racially and sexually diverse slate of Democrat candidates for President?

Four trends come to mind: The increasing estrangement between bureaucratic global institutions like the United Nations and the European Union and the nation states that compose them; the aging of populations, especially in Western nations and Japan; the decline of participation in organized religion, and the curtailment of free speech. The consequence has been disillusionment and partisanship, fueled by supercilious entertainers and journalists whose readership and viewership are in decline.

WILLARD “MEDEA” ROMNEY

‘Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate.” ”
“How I wish I might see him and his bride in utter ruin” MEDEA- By William Shakespeare

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/01/13/trump-impeachment-trial-senate-independence-romney-collins-column/4443789002/

hell hath no fury like a candidate scorned by William Congreve
First written as “Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d, Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.” in the 1697 play The Mourning Bride (Act III Scene 2) by Congreve, falesly attribute to William Shakespear

►Mitt Romney of Utah. The former Republican presidential nominee called Trump’s pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “wrong and appalling.” This reaction was predictable from Romney, who spoke out against Trump in 2016 and has continued to be critical. In an October interview with USA TODAY, Romney, 72, described himself as free to do “entirely what I believe is absolutely right. … And I hope that my kids down the road will say, ‘Yeah, you know our dad, our grandfather, our great-grandfather was a person of integrity and honored his oath of office.’ ” That sounds like a man who is ready to draw a sharp contrast with Trump.

Black Conservatives in America Edward Ring

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/13/black-conservatives-in-america/
Here are links to more black conservatives, showing how to find them:
Justin Wilson, Antonia Okafor, Candace Owens, Dr. Carol Swain, Chandler Crump, CJ Pearson, Anthony Brian Logan, David J Harris Jr., Lynnett Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson (Diamond and Silk), Jesse Lee Peterson, KingFace, Larry Elder, Mike Nificent, Allen West, Pastor Mark Burns, Patricia Dickson, Horace Cooper (Project 21), Shekinah Geist, Stacy Dash, Star Parker, Terrence K Williams, Taleed Brown, Keith Hodge and Kevin Hodge, Brandon Tatum, Will Johnson, Wayne Dupree, Jon Miller, Jamarcus Dove-Simmons, Derrick Blackman, Joy Villa, Mind of Jamal, Jermain Botsio, Jay McCaney.

Ideology is color blind. Patriotism is color blind. Faith is color blind. As Benjamin Franklin once said, we must hang together, or surely we shall hang separately.

Mainstream liberal Democrats and their allies in the media have made clear that “demographics is destiny,” and that destiny favors Democrats. It’s easy enough to see why they believe this: nonwhites constituted 15 percent of the population in 1960, by 2050 that will have risen to 53 percent, and nonwhites vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.

The answer most mainstream conservatives have to this challenge is to try harder. Convince nonwhites to vote for conservative candidates, even if that means giving up all the entitlements that Democrats have used for decades to purchase votes and create dependency. It’s a tough sell.

Not-so-mainstream conservatives are as likely to give up as to try harder. Consider this comment made in rebuttal to a recent article “Race and Realignment in the Anglosphere,” which had made the case for trying harder:

More pandering, compromise and continual hope that the invaders, who are relentlessly beating us politically, will suddenly draw back and change orientations is foolish. It is just more of the same old “conservative” born-to-lose mentality, no matter how nicely presented. We already know the result of the experiment you suggest, we lose everything, America becomes Brazil, and the multi-generational white majority, “Americans” as we think of ourselves, we will become a minority, in our only nation. And a targeted and hated one, at that . . . Let’s start seriously talking about the separation.

The problem with this comment, however well argued, is that it argues for something even more impossible. There will be no CalExit, there will be no sovereign American Redoubt, there will be no independent Atzlan. Because other than via a cataclysmic collapse that nobody should wish for, the United States is not going to split up. And even if separation is Plan B, shouldn’t Plan A—a massive nationalist political realignment—first be given a fighting chance?