Displaying the most recent of 91910 posts written by

Ruth King

Erdoğan’s ‘Make-Turkey-More-Islamic’ Campaign Is a Failure by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15440/erdogan-islamic-campaign

Half the population of Turkey is under the age of 32 — a young population. Many of these young Turks are, it seems, pushing back against Erdoğan’s state-imposed Islamization.

The more Erdoğan uses the state’s police power to indoctrinate young Turks in favor of devout political Islam, the more they tend to put a distance between themselves and Erdoğan’s “devout generations” campaign.

Perhaps Erdoğan’s best service to his country is to show young Turks what it actually means to live under an Islamist regime.

Trust for Islamist politics in both the Middle East and North Africa has plummeted since the beginning of the Arab Spring. A survey for BBC Arabic found that since 2012-13, public trust in Islamist political parties in Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Sudan and Iraq has significantly declined, from nearly 40% to less than 20%. The survey also found a similar decline in trust for religious leaders in the same countries. In the Gaza Strip alone, public trust in Hamas fell from 45% to 24%. In Turkey, Islam does not appear to be appealing to masses as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan apparently hoped it would.

In 2012, Erdoğan described his political mission as “raising devout generations”, a remark for which Turkey’s main opposition called him “a merchant of religion”. In November 2019, Erdoğan repeated his quest for “devout generations” so that “we will not see alcoholics on the streets”. He boasts that since he came to power in 2002, the number of imam school students has risen from 60,000 to 1.3 million. No doubt, that is an impressive record for an Islamist strongman. But too premature to cheer about.

Environmentalists Caused Australia’s Fires, Not ‘Climate Change’ Edward Ring

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/14/environmentalists-caused-australias-fires-not-climate-change/

Is this kind of conflagration too convenient to ever try to prevent, insofar as such generates righteous ‘Thunbergian’ green thunder across the world, solving nothing, but further empowering the bureaucrats?

These greenies and the government don’t want to burn s— off. We’re going to lose all our houses and properties because of you useless pieces of garbage will not burn off when its supposed to, through the winter time like we used to do years ago out in the farms up in the mountains; burn all the undergrowth off so everything was safe. But you p—–, you want to have a really good look at this, look at the state you’ve caused here. You are the biggest bunch of useless loser pieces of garbage God ever had the misfortune to blow life into.”

– Australian resident of New South Wales, January 7, 2020

Environmentalist regulations are the reason for this year’s devastating wildfires in Australia. These misguided measures prevented landowners from burning off dry brush. For decades, every year during the Australian winter, across the continent, brushfires were deliberately set to safely burn the undergrowth. Even in pre-colonial times, the aborigines set brushfires to prevent tinder from accumulating.

If you want to watch an authentic, eyewitness account of what really happened—quoted above—you’ll find it 2:56 minutes into “The Truth About the Australian Bushfires,” a January 7 video by the inimitable Paul Joseph Watson. (But watch out. Most of the profanity is edited out of the above transcription.)

Nigel Farage gets his way, and last laugh: Brexit is coming

https://www.ap.org/en-us/

Nigel Farage, the self-declared “pantomime villain” of Brexit, is leaving his favorite theater — the European Union’s parliament in Strasbourg — this week with a sense of mission accomplished.

Ridiculed for years, and thriving on the abuse he got from, and dealt to, pro-EU legislators and politicians, he now feels he got the last laugh. On Jan. 31, the U.K. will be leaving the EU, in a historic loss for the bloc — and a historic gain for the likes of Farage.

“When I first came here, I started saying the U.K. would leave the European Union. Everyone thought it was hilarious,” Farage told The Associated Press in an interview, speaking about his early days in the EU legislature in the late 1990s.

The European Union was still thriving, expanding at the time, and could shrug off a loud and sometimes foul-mouthed British parliamentarian as just a nuisance about to be swatted aside by the force of history of closer integration.

Britain may have been a halfhearted member with rumbling about holding onto sovereignty and complaints about “unelected bureaucraats” from Brussels having too much say in their lives. But thoughts of actually leaving? No. Those were left to fringe politicians like Farage.

Bernie Beats Hillary Activists celebrate the end of moderation in the Democratic field. James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-beats-hillary-11579044694?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton. But even if he loses again in 2020, his long-term project to pull Democratic candidates in the direction of socialism is already a success.

Today the left-leaning Americans for Tax Fairness is celebrating the end of moderation among Democrats seeking the White House. The organization gleefully announces:

All four leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have proposed tax and spending plans many times the size of Hillary Clinton’s fiscal plan in 2016, showing how far the debate has shifted in the progressive direction in four years. Like Clinton, they would all raise taxes almost exclusively on the wealthy and corporations to improve public services working families rely on like healthcare, education, and infrastructure.

Don’t believe that part about taxes only hitting the rich and corporations. But it’s hard to argue the point that radicalism is the new normal for office-seeking Democrats. According to the lefty outfit:

Clinton proposed upping tax revenue on the wealthy and corporations by $1.4 trillion over 10 years to pay for $1.7 trillion in public investments. Biden and Buttigieg have both offered up plans raising taxes on the rich and corporations by around $3.4 trillion, although both have made statements suggesting their totals could go quite a bit higher. Sanders and Warren are proposing around $10 trillion in high-income and corporate tax hikes, exclusive of the revenue they propose raising for their Medicare for All plans.
Notably, Michael Bennet, another moderate Democrat running for president, has proposed raising $5.2 billion from the wealthy and corporations to fund $6 trillion in new investments. CONTINUE AT SITE

Dem Debate Flop Same old socialist, faux impeachment, climate change, and Trump Derangement Syndrome boilerplate. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/dem-six-pack-serves-flop-lloyd-billingsley/

Most viewers were watching President Trump hold forth in Milwaukee but the run-up to Tuesday’s CNN Democrat debate in Des Moines features some stories of interest. Cory Booker had recently dropped up, so some Democrats were lamenting that all the candidates were white, a condition beyond their control. And as word had it, things were going to get tough on stage.

Tucker Carlson showed video of Sanders’ staffers warning of violence if Bernie did not get the nomination. And if he was elected, we would need re-education campaigns so people would not be “Nazis.”

The prevailing story was Elizabeth Warren’s charge that Bernie Sanders claimed a woman could not be president. Sanders claimed he never said it, and the debate kicked off on who would be the best commander in chief.

Bernie Sanders claimed he had opposed military and foreign policy blunders such as Iraq, Vietnam and Afghanistan. The Vermont socialist seemed unconcerned about actual enemies the nation was now facing.

Joe Biden said he would compare his record compare to anyone on this stage, but came up short on specifics. It was a mistake, he said, to give the president authority to go to war.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar wanted good health care and education for the troops. And she would get the nation back into the Iran deal from which President Trump had withdrawn.

South Dakota State Rep Proposes Bill to Criminalize Gender-Transition Surgeries on Children By Tobias Hoonhout

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/south-dakota-state-rep-proposes-bill-to-criminalize-gender-transition-surgeries-on-children/

South Dakota State Representative Fred Deutsch introduced a bill Tuesday to prosecute medical professionals who attempt to transition children struggling with gender dysphoria, the latest state-level effort to prevent physicians from performing irreversible sex-change surgeries on minors.

The “Vulnerable Child Protection Act” is not Deutsch’s first attempt to limit transgender influence on children. He sponsored a 2016 bill that sought to limit the bathrooms and locker rooms that South Dakota’s transgender students can use, which passed the state legislature, but was vetoed by then-Governor Dennis Daugaard.

In recent months, and with the high-profile custody battle in Texas over James Younger’s potential transition, several states have introduced similar bills, which are intended to punish doctors and healthcare providers who attempt to transition children. Alaska, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, and South Carolina have all seen similar efforts at the state level.

“Every child in South Dakota should be protected from dangerous drugs and procedures,” Deutsch said in a statement emailed to National Review. “The solution for children’s identification with the opposite sex isn’t to poison their bodies with mega-doses of the wrong hormones, to chemically or surgically castrate and sterilize them, or to remove healthy breasts and reproductive organs. The solution is compassionate care, and that doesn’t include catastrophically and irreversibly altering their bodies.”

James O’Keefe is back, with a truly chilling look at a Bernie-supporter By Andrea Widburg

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

Investigative journalist James O’Keefe sent his undercover agents to check out what’s going on with the Bernie Sanders campaign. On Tuesday, he dropped the first of what promises to be a series of videos focusing on the people working for Bernie.

The video, which is embedded below, is pretty shocking. Kyle Jurek, a Field Organizer for Bernie in Iowa, is a foul-mouthed man with a limited vocabulary. He revels in thoughts of riots, explosions, burnings, beatings, and gulags.

Jurek’s imagination doesn’t limit itself to what will happen in America if Bernie wins. Instead, he predicts the ultimate dystopia should Trump win re-election. For him, the 1968 Chicago Riots at the Democratic National Convention will serve as a small introduction to what Bernie supporters will unleash should their man lose.

It’s not just conservatives who earn Jurek’s wrath. In true Leftist fashion, he imagines a world in which Bernie’s political rivals on the same side of the Leftist aisle get their comeuppance. He’s no fan of the Clintons, for example, and makes the usual joke about the Clintons and suicides. He then adds, “We don’t gotta kill the Clintons. We’ll make them kill themselves. . . . Reign of Terror.” How very Soviet.

Will Trump’s Pentagon stand tall when atheists attack? By Andrea Widburg

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

A formal blessing for the Space Force “official” Bible resulted in a squeal of outrage from a man who has dedicated his life to making sure that America’s troops, who are mostly Christian, have no easy access to God.

When the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution, 85% of the American population did not belong to the Church of England. Were they in England, they would have had to pay to support the Anglican church and would have been barred from universities or government employment. Things were easier in the colonies, with the hold the Church of England had over the population varying from one colony to the next. 

It was in this context that the Founders included in the First Amendment the language stating that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion….” The Founders were not banning religion from America or even from government. They were saying only that Congress could not set up a state church and demand that people belong to it or suffer the consequences.

This mandate did not affect the Founders’ belief that God and morality were inextricably intertwined with a free, functioning country. After all, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, to the extent that all people have inherent rights, they are inherent because a divine Creator endowed us with those rights. John Adams believed that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

And then there’s Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He is a fanatically anti-Christian atheist who has been on a crusade for years now to purge religion entirely from the United States Military. To Mikey, Christians in the military are a “well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces.”

Democrats are getting nervous as they realize their base is tuning them out By Andrea Widburg

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

It’s fascinating to watch some of the smarter Democrats drag themselves out of their own Trump hatred long enough to realize that their party is in trouble at a very fundamental level. Such is the case with Peter Hamby, who wrote an article for Vanity Fair entitled, “‘Like, I’ll tune in when there’s two weeks left’: Why Trump has a huge advantage over dems with low-information voters.”

What Hamby is concerned about is the fact that the media are so excessively self-involved that they no longer know how to communicate information and ideas to the voters media types want to reach most: people who are not politically engaged on a day-to-day basis but must turn out to vote on November 3 if the Democrat candidate is to win.

Hamby notes that traveling reporters have nothing but disdain for those who spend their days sitting at their desks reading and reporting on Twitter:

[T]he stories and micro-scandals that obsess political and media insiders—often played out in episodic fashion on Twitter—matter little to voters who are too busy and too well-adjusted to follow every nanosecond of the political news cycle. It’s hard to overstate how salient this discontinuity will be in the current election year.

With medieval conditions in California, Gov. Newsom looks back to the old Poor Laws By Andrea Widburg

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

California was once called “the Golden State.” It has a mellow climate, its agricultural industry was “the fruit basket of America,” San Francisco was “the City that knew how,” Los Angeles was the “City of Dreams,” and the Sierra mountain range, one of the most beautiful in the world, was a summer and winter pleasure paradise. That’s the California in which I grew up.

The current California isn’t quite so nice. The climate is still lovely, but the agricultural industry has been struggling because of environmental concerns over the Delta Smelt, a small fish.

Regularly occurring droughts, which are part of California’s natural cycle, are proving devastating, mostly because California has refused to upgrade its water system in the last 60 years, even as the population almost doubled. The new plan is to limit people to 55 gallons a day, which gives them a choice on many days between cleaning their clothes or cleaning themselves.

Punishing taxes and regulations routinely drive businesses (aka employers) out of the state.