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Ruth King

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NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS PRESS DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES ON SHUTTING JERUSALEM EMBASSY Ira Stoll

By on January 19th, 2020

https://mailchi.mp/689009fcf330/krd-news-new-york-times-editors-press-democratic-presidential-candidates-on-shutting-jerusalem-embassy?e=9365a7c638

If anyone still needs proof that the NY Times is a bias, anti-Israel publication, please read today’s featured article (Ira Stoll, Algemeiner, Jan 17).

The editorial board members practically sound like paid lobbyists for the Palestine Liberation Organization, badgering the politicians to back the idea of evacuating American diplomats from the Jerusalem embassy in the next Democratic administration. krd

Democratic presidential candidates hoping to win the endorsement of The New York Times are being interrogated by Times editors about whether they’ll commit to shutting down the American embassy in Israel’s capital.

President Donald Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem in May 2018, fulfilling a campaign promise and finally bringing America into compliance with the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995. The widely predicted violent reaction by regional Arabs rapidly fizzled out. But the Times editorial board members appear to be nursing a grudge about the matter, at least to judge by their questions to the Democratic presidential candidates.

Undoing the embassy move has emerged as a standard topic in the Times endorsement interviews, as much a part of the routine as questions on more traditional Democratic platform planks such as reproductive rights or antitrust enforcement against technology companies.

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What Do Democrats Fear in Donald Trump? Greatness!! J.B. Shurk

By on January 19th, 2020

www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/what_do_democrats_fear_in_donald_trump_greatness.html

James Carville says Trump is the greatest threat to America since the fall of communism.  It is easy to laugh away such a declaration, but I think there is an invaluable truth expressed.  Trump is as important in stature as the United States’ most formidable military and political opponent of the twentieth century.  Trumpism as an ideological force has the mass and acceleration of a Soviet Empire that threatened to conquer the world.  Nobody speaks about the Bush Doctrine in such terms.  Nobody confuses the Obama Doctrine or the Carter Doctrine as projecting that kind of power.  Yet here we are, just three years after the election, and somehow the belittled and mocked hotel owner from Queens has stumbled into creating a movement that matches in strength and potency what took Marx, Lenin, and Stalin over a century to perfect.  Consider the fear that Carville and his ilk must harbor about what is to come.

What does he see that makes him tremble so?  In a word, greatness.

How could he not?  When you see a man being endlessly ridiculed and scorned brush off those insults with ease and smile back, you know something is different.  When you watch a 6’3″ sack of energy bustling across the stage four or more times a day in suit and tie before tens of thousands of spectators watching his every move, and he seems more rested and comfortable than the press gallery a third his age, you know you haven’t seen this before.  When his enemies spend years using the combined forces of corporate media, the legal system, and the intelligence agencies to dispose of him one way or another, and the man responds with an off-the-cuff one-liner that shows he could not care less, you know you are dealing with something rare.

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The Hole in the Impeachment Case By Andrew C. McCarthy Something is missing from the charges against Trump: An indictable offense.

By on January 19th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/trump-impeachment-trial-charges-lack-indictable-offense/

Thought experiment No. 1: Suppose Bob Mueller’s probe actually proves that Donald Trump is under Vladimir Putin’s thumb. Fill in the rest of the blanks with your favorite corruption fantasy: The Kremlin has video of the mogul-turned-president debauching himself in a Moscow hotel; the Kremlin has a bulging file of real-estate transfers through which Trump laundered racketeering proceeds for Putin’s favored mobsters and oligarchs; or Trump is recorded cutting a deal to drop Obama-era sanctions against Putin’s regime if Russian spies hack Democratic accounts.

Thought experiment No. 2: Adam Schiff is not a demagogue. (Remember, this is fantasy.) At the very first televised hearing, when he alleged that President Trump told Ukrainian president Zelensky, “I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent . . . lots of it,” Schiff was not defrauding the public. Instead, impeachment’s Inspector Clouseau can actually prove that Trump was asking a foreign government to manufacture out of whole cloth evidence that Vice President Biden and his son were cashing in on the former’s political influence (as opposed to asking that Ukraine look into an arrangement so objectively sleazy that the Obama administration itself agitated over what to do about it).

What do these two scenarios have in common, besides being fictional? Answer: If either of them were real, we’d already be talking about President Pence’s upcoming State of the Union address.

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Keep an eye out for Israel Derangement Syndrome Juliet Moses

By on January 19th, 2020

ttps://www.spectator.com.au/2020/01/keep-an-eye-out-for-israel-derangement-syndrome/

I am not a psychiatrist, but I’ve observed a kind of psychosis in far-left activists of the West who claim to be progressives championing the Palestinian cause: Israel Derangement Syndrome, or IDS.

Sufferers of this insidious illness don’t rationally advocate for Palestinians and criticise Israeli policies, in the same way they’d criticise other states. They are doctrinaire cultists possessed of an unadulterated, unhinged hatred for Israel, which they see as a uniquely evil state that must be eradicated. Until then, it will be their all-consuming, defining cause; never mind the Uyghurs, Kurds or Iranian women. In indulging in the delusion that the end (of Israel) goal will eventually occur, they are complicit in perpetuating the conflict and emboldening the despotic regimes that act against the interests of the very people they purport to champion, the Palestinians.

Corbynism is the most recent prominent example of IDS. While we will no longer be bombarded with its leader’s sneering visage, the animosity towards Israel that its dogmatism exemplifies, replete with conspiracism and terrorist sympathising, is unlikely to fade. And it is rising across the Atlantic

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America Is Deeply Divided Because The Left Has Become So Shallow Frank Bullit

By on January 18th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/01/18/america-is-deeply-divided-because-the-left-has-become-so-shallow/

Virtue signaling and luxury beliefs have driven us apart.

‘The country is hopelessly split,” says the November 2018 Intelligencer headline. According to The Hill, “Analyst says U.S. is most divided since Civil War.” Not quite a year ago, the History Channel reported that “some historians are also raising the alarm over division in the country.”

Naturally, President Donald Trump and everyone who voted for him are being blamed for the bitter breakup. But this is nothing more than the political left projecting on others the exact sort of behavior it’s engaged in.

An angry mixture of Democrats, “progressives,” socialists, and democratic socialists that makes up the political left is driven not by ideas but by its members’ desperate need to establish their social status. They want to be identified with those they consider “cool.” Think of Barack Obama, most high-profile Democratic politicians, celebrities, and media stars.

Yes, it’s a lot like high school.

The pursuit of social status is done through virtue-signaling (which “does not require actually doing anything virtuous … It takes no effort or sacrifice at all,” says the author of the term), and the holding of luxury beliefs. The former, artfully defined in Wikipedia as “the contrivance of a false appearance of virtue or goodness,” is used to confirm the latter, which has been described as ”ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class,” as well as “good public relations” that protect “you from being branded a bigot and being expelled from public society.”

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WHO IS MANU RAJU? HE IS JUST WHAT McSALLY CALLED HIM….A LIBERAL HACK….

By on January 18th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/16/az-sen-martha-mcsally-calls-cnn-reporter-a-liberal-hack-triggering-liberal-hacks-on-twitter/

AZ Sen. Martha McSally Calls CNN Reporter a ‘Liberal Hack,’ Triggering Liberal Hacks on Twitter Debra Heine

Commentary editor Noah Rothman simply called McSally’s words “pretty uncalled for.”

But they were called for, as Raju is one of the Hill’s most shameless and reliable mouth pieces for Democrats.

Until the Russia Collusion hoax fizzled, Raju was one of its biggest peddlers.

In December of 2017, for instance, Raju was involved in”one of the most humiliating spectacles in the history of the U.S. media,” as the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald put it.

With a tone so grave and bombastic that it is impossible to overstate, CNN went on the air and announced a major exclusive: Donald Trump, Jr. was offered by email advanced access to the trove of DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks – meaning before those emails were made public.
***

There was, alas, just one small problem with this massive, blockbuster story: it was totally and completely false. The email which Trump, Jr. received that directed him to the WikiLeaks archive was sent afterWikiLeaks published it online for the whole world to see, not before. Rather than some super secretive operative giving Trump, Jr. advanced access, as both CNN and MSNBC told the public for hours they had confirmed, it was instead just some totally pedestrian message from a random member of the public suggesting Trump, Jr. review documents the whole world was already talking about. All of the anonymous sources CNN and MSNBC cited somehow all got the date of the email wrong.

Federalist co-founder Sean Davis challenged Tapper to explain how the CNN reporter could have gotten that story so wrong without being either a liberal hack or “too stupid to read the date on the email.”

The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway called Raju “a favorite and reliable leak recipient for Democrats.”

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Martha McSally’s Blasphemy By David Harsanyi

By on January 18th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/martha-mcsally-hack-comment-journalists-see-some-great-sacrilege/

As I note in my New York Post piece today, I don’t believe that Martha McSally, who is serving her first term in the Senate after being appointed to take John McCain’s seat, is going to be helped much by accusing CNN’s Manu Raju of being a “hack.” Attacking the press might be an effective way to excite national conservatives, but it probably does little to entice independents and moderates in Arizona.

One group, however, was greatly affected by the interaction: journalists, who seem to believe that McSally has engaged in some great sacrilege. A distressed National Press Club statement calls her comment “ethically wrong.” The New York Times’ Michael Barbaro says it is “never” ok to attack a journalist. One wishes there would have been this level of outcry when Elizabeth Warren, also a senator, called Fox News a “hate-for-profit racket.” But so it goes.

The Washington Post’s media critic labeled the interaction “chilling.” Now, “chilling,” it seems to me, would more appropriately describe the government spying on reporters or throwing someone into prison in effort to appease foreign theocrats. I’m pretty sure, at this point, the largely inconsequential McSally-Raju kerfuffle has generated more outrage from mainstream journalists than either of those cases.

It should also be noted, rude or not, that McSally’s underlying grievance is legitimate. CNN, as Charles Cooke has written, is no longer a news network, and Republicans have no ethical responsibility to treat it as such, whether one of its reporters happens to be asking a legitimate questions or not. And no matter how many times his colleagues put the word “respected” in front of Raju’s name, it doesn’t change the fact that he has a long history of partisan bias, not only with his still-unexplained Don Jr. “collusion” piece, but on the issue of Brett Kavanaugh and many others. The fact that Raju does some good reporting, doesn’t mean he isn’t also a partisan. You can be both.

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The Never-Ending Impeachment By Matthew Continetti

By on January 18th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/trump-impeachment-never-ending-effort/

Efforts to remove Trump didn’t start with Ukraine. And won’t end there.

Maybe Nancy Pelosi waited to send impeachment to the Senate because she was waiting for her pens to arrive. The fancy commemorative ballpoints, featuring the speaker’s name engraved in gold, that Pelosi gave to colleagues at Wednesday’s engrossment ceremony quickly became the subject of mockery. Republicans saw them as emblematic of Democratic partisanship and triviality. “Nothing says seriousness and sobriety like handing out souvenirs,” said Mitch McConnell. “As though this were a happy bill-signing instead of the gravest process in our Constitution.”

In Pelosi’s eyes, impeachment is something to celebrate. It’s more than an accomplishment. It’s the most significant product of the 116th Congress. What McConnell calls “the gravest process” has been the preferred means of Democrats to inflict maximum damage on President Trump and possibly remove him from office before the end of his term. The trial that begins on Tuesday has been years in the making. And the drive to impeach Trump won’t end when the verdict is rendered. He may well end up the first president to be impeached multiple times.

Maxine Waters has been chanting “impeach 45” since the spring of 2017. Representative Al Green introduced the first impeachment resolution that summer. Tom Steyer founded “Need to Impeach” that October. In November 2017 a group of House Democrats introduced additional articles of impeachment. The same thing happened in December 2017, January 2018, March 2019, May 2019, and July 2019. House Democrats accuse Trump of violating the emoluments clause, obstructing justice, associating with white nationalism, separating families of illegal immigrants, and more.

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The Democrat candidates have consistently ignored Israel in their debates By Andrea Widburg

By on January 18th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/the_democrat_candidates_have_consistently_ignored_israel_in_their_debates.html

A Jerusalem Post article points out something interesting about the Democrat Party debates to date: They are loudly silent about Israel. While each of the six candidates who made it to the January 2020 debate had a great to say about Iran, and especially how wonderful Obama’s Iran Deal was and how all would handle Iran so much better than President Trump ever could, none even whispered the word Israel.

Things would have been different, says Herb Keinon, at a Republican debate:

Were the tables reversed, were this a debate among Republican contenders, Israel would most likely have been a major part of the conversation, even if the thrust of the discussion was Iran and not the Palestinian issue. Republican candidates – in talking about Iran or the nuclear deal – would surely have inserted lines about “the need to keep Israel safe” or “working strongly with our close ally Israel.”

As former Mideast negotiator Aaron David Miller told the Jewish Insider after the debate, “Had it been a Republican debate, with Iran as focus, they would have been stumbling over one another with pro-Israeli references.”

What the debate reflects, says Keinon, is a profound change in the Democrat Party as a whole. The candidates have determined that supporting Israel is no longer an advantage to a candidate:

The current candidates – those on the debate stage and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was not there – apparently feel they have little to gain politically right now by speaking on Israel.

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For Democrats worried about Bernie, Bloomberg’s looking good By Andrea Widburg

By on January 18th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/for_democrats_worried_about_bernie_bloombergs_looking_good.html

Democrats are running out of options. So far, no candidate of the week has promised to be capable of beating President Trump and his supercharged economy or even of staying in the race. Worse, Bernie, the candidate who almost certainly cannot win, is peaking at the perfect time, right before the primaries. You can see the fear in a John Ellis opinion piece at the Washington Post:

At the moment, two realities drive the Democratic presidential campaign.

Reality No. 1: Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is leading in most polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire. He’s also the best organized in both states. And he’s got a hot hand; what used to be called “momentum.”

Reality No. 2: Democratic primary voters are, as Gallup put it, “thinking strategically about [their] 2020 nominee.” Here’s Gallup’s write-up from two months ago: “Six in 10 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents would prefer to see the party nominate the candidate with the best chance of beating President Donald Trump, even if that person does not share their views on key issues. By contrast, 36% say they would rather have the reverse: a candidate aligned with them on almost all the issues they care about, even if that person is not the most electable.”

So, who is electable? John Ellis thinks he has the answer:

Which helps explain why Democrats across the country will soon find themselves with a newfound appreciation for the virtues of one Mike Bloomberg, former Republican mayor of New York and billionaire founder of a financial data services empire.

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