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Ruth King

Tulsi Gabbard Lambastes CNN, NY Times for Suggesting She’s a Russian Asset, Slams Dem Foreign Policy Consensus By Mairead McArdle

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-slams-cnn-ny-times-for-suggesting-shes-a-russian-asset-slams-dem-foreign-policy-consensus/

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D., Hawaii) slammed CNN and the New York Times during Tuesday evening’s debate, which the two outlets co-hosted, accusing both of smearing her by attributing her call for an end to the “regime-change war” in Syria to a nefarious allegiance to Russia.

“The New York Times and CNN have also smeared veterans like myself for calling to an end to this regime-change war,” Gabbard told the crowd in Ohio.

“Just two days ago, the New York Times put out an article saying I am a Russian asset and an Assad apologist and all these different smears,” the Hawaii Democrat continued. “This morning a CNN commentator said on national television that I’m an asset of Russia. Completely despicable.”

A Times article published October 12 accused Gabbard of “defending the brutal Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad.” Hours before the debate, a CNN analyst called the senator a “puppet for the Russian government.”

Gabbard also blamed President Trump for ordering the withdrawal of U.S. troops from northern Syria, a move that has garnered bipartisan criticism.

“The slaughter of the Kurds being done by Turkey is yet another negative consequence of the regime-change war that we’ve been waging in Syria,” Gabbard said. “Donald Trump has the blood of the Kurds on his hand — but so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have supported this ongoing regime-change war in Syria that started in 2011, along with many in the mainstream media, who have been championing and cheerleading this regime-change war.”

Gabbard added that she would end “regime-change” wars in the region by ceasing “draconian sanctions,” which she called a “modern-day siege.”

Kurdish, Syrian, and Turkish Ironies By Victor Davis Hanson *****

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/kurdish-syrian-turkish-ironies/

Critics now upset about abandoning our Kurdish friends demanded abject withdrawals — and the abandonment of friends — in Afghanistan and Iraq.

O utrage met Donald Trump’s supposedly rash decision to pull back U.S. troops from possible confrontational zones between our Kurdish friends in Syria and Recep Erdogan’s expeditionary forces.

Turkey claims that it will punish the Syrian Kurds for a variety of supposed provocations, including aiding and abetting Kurdish terrorist separatists inside Turkey. But what they say they can so easily do and what they really can do inside Syria are, of course, two different things.

A Noble People
Most Americans in general favor the Kurds and oppose the Turks. Aside from Israel, Kurds are about the only American allies in the Middle East who predictably fight alongside our troops against Islamists, theocrats, and Baathists. They admire Americans, and for the most part they do not indulge in the normal anti-American histrionics. They despise ISIS as much we do and are on the front lines combatting ISIS atrocities.

Skeptics might suggest that they do so mostly for self-interested reasons. But all people do that. And what is unusual about the Kurds of Iraq and Syria is the number of times they have risked their lives in battle alongside our own soldiers. For that alone, they deserve special American dispensations and should not be left to the vagaries of Turkish or Russian air power or any combined Turkish, Syrian, Islamist, or Iranian cynical alliance.

Like the Poles, the Armenians, the Greeks, and the Israelis, the Kurds are an honorable, ancient, and brave people who drew history’s unfortunate lot of living in a dangerous geography between much larger and aggressive nations. And, to be frank, all these endangered peoples at some point in their histories, ancient and modern or both, seem to have fought against Turkish forces, been targeted by them, or threatened by Ankara.

The Senate Voted to End Emergency on the Border But Hezbollah, ISIS, gangs and drug cartels didn’t get the memo. Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/senate-voted-end-emergency-border-michael-cutler/

On September 25, 2019 the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch posted a disturbing report, “Senate votes to end border emergency under which Trump redirected military funds to wall construction” that began with the following paragraph:

The Senate again approved a resolution to end President Trump’s national emergency at the southern border, with Republicans joining Democrats in a bid to prevent the president from redirecting military funds toward a border wall, though Trump was expected to veto it again.

The report went on to note that the Republicans control the Senate and ended with this sentence:

The vote was an unusual display of Republican rebellion against the president’s quest for his signature policy initiative, which led to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history that ended earlier this year.

The Democrats refused to accept that there was a crisis on the southern border in the first place, and now the Republican-controlled Senate has voted, yet again, to “end the crisis”!

What has not been determined, or reported upon, is how our politicians from either political party have come to the insane conclusion that the emergency on the treacherous southern border has ended.

Certainly the “all clear” has not sounded.

While President Trump has been successful in reducing the number of illegal aliens who are being apprehended by the Border Patrol along the southern border–though a number of tactics including getting Mexico to deploy their forces along the border and with other diplomatic initiatives–tens of thousands of illegal aliens continue to be apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol each month and narcotics continue to be seized along that troubled border.

Christopher Columbus: A Progressive Tool for Discrediting America The Left’s vicious assault on American history ensues. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/legacy-christopher-columbus-bruce-thornton/

The recent attacks on historical monuments by the “woke” progressive Philistines, and the New York Times’s “1619 Project” aimed at rewriting America’s history as a racist plot, are just the latest in the left’s long assault on American history. Long before this current iconoclasm, Christopher Columbus has been the arch-villain in the left’s Orwellian revision of American history as peculiarly and irredeemably evil from its birth.

Attacking and demonizing American history predates the current frenzy of revisionism and virtue-signaling, for it is one of the progressive left’s favorite tools for undermining the patriotic solidarity that binds us together and undergirds our political order.

This long assault on America’s founding and exceptionalism has been a weapon of the left for weakening the US’s most successful and powerful enemy. The left can never forgive the US for achieving “prosperity, power, the tendency towards uniformity of economic conditions,” as Raymond Aron pointed out in 1957, “by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention” and the “revolutionary code.” The left has to discredit America’s foundations in order to show that its success has come at too great a price––the institutionalization of racist oppression and inequality that has created “white privilege” and “white supremacism.” What better place to start than with Christopher Columbus, who began the evil colonization of and genocide against the innocent American peoples? And Columbus’s most malign heir has been the United States.

CNN Presidential Debate Show Dem candidates pine for socialism, trash Trump and tout impeachment. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/cnn-presidential-debate-show-lloyd-billingsley/

The undercard of the Democrat debate kicked off Tuesday morning when previously missing-in-action Hunter Biden gave an interview with ABC News. Joe Biden’s son conceded it was “poor judgment” to be involved in ventures in Ukraine and China that have complicated his father’s situation. On the other hand, Hunter insisted he “did nothing wrong at all.”

Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders had just emerged from Heart Attack Hotel and Elizabeth Warren had not, as she claimed, been fired because she was visible pregnant. Like her false claim to be a Cherokee, that was no obstacle to a continued run for president, at least for Democrats.

The real back story came on Monday, with the revelation from the O’Keefe video that CNN was determined to, as Jeff Zucker said, “stay very focused on impeachment.” When the show started at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, it was a joint production with CNN’s impeachment surge. Anderson Cooper asked the twelve Democrats if it was better to let the voters decide.

“The president obstructed justice and done it repeatedly,” said Sen Elizabeth Warren. “Donald Trump broke the law. Impeachment must go forward.”

Socialist Bernie Sanders called Trump “the most corrupt president in the history of this country.” So Sanders called for a “speedy impeachment process,” and “McConnell must allow a free and fair trial.”

The Hong Kong Crackdown Has Begun Beijing hasn’t sent tanks into the streets. It’s trying to do the job with criminal gangs and technology. By Jillian Kay Melchior

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hong-kong-crackdown-has-begun-11571180182

Hong Kong

The Chinese crackdown here is under way. Tanks haven’t rolled into Hong Kong à la Tiananmen Square in 1989. But Beijing is carrying out a subtler, though often still violent, effort to suppress dissent, hoping the world won’t notice. Ask Stanley Ho Wai-hong of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions.

The 35-year-old pro-democracy labor activist planned a community event Sept. 29 in Sai Kung, a fishing village in Hong Kong’s New Territories. But that afternoon, tens of thousands were rallying in the city against China’s human-rights abuses, so Mr. Ho canceled his event at the last minute. He was driving away when a stranger called him and asked him to come back so villagers could give him a gift. “It was a trap for murder,” he told me at the hospital earlier this month.

When he arrived back in Sai Kung, he says, three men ambushed him and bludgeoned him with metal rods. Mr. Ho fell to the ground and tried to cover his skull with his hands. It took only half a minute for bystanders to rescue him, but “30 seconds is a long time.” The attack left Mr. Ho with seven gashes in his head and five bruises on his back. His right thumb and three other fingers were broken, the left index finger so severely that he needed surgery.

Other pro-democracy figures have been the targets of criminal violence, including lawmakers Lam Cheuk-ting and Kwong Chun-yu; an unnamed reporter for the Apple Daily news paper; Davin Wong, a student activist who was acting president of the Hong Kong University Students’ Union; and Jimmy Sham, convenor of the Civil Human Rights Front, which organized several protests with a million or more participants in Hong Kong this summer. The home of Apple Daily publisher Jimmy Lai was firebombed in September, and posters hung up in the metro system recently advertised his personal phone number as well as those of his children. Plainclothes thugs have also beaten up protesters, most famously in Yuen Long district in July, where some 45 were injured. CONTINUE AT SITE

Paul Craig Roberts: Oligarchs Will Crash US Financial System To Boot Trump Out Of Office

https://usawatchdog.com/

There is only one restraint that’s keeping the oligarchs from crashing the US economy right now. Paul Craig Roberts explains…

Economic expert and award winning journalist Dr. Paul Craig Roberts predicts that the oligarchs of the New World Order (NWO) will do anything to boot President Trump out of office. Dr. Roberts, who has a PhD in Economics and is a former Assistant Treasury Secretary in the Reagan Administration, predicts the NWO will take down the financial system as a last resort if all else fails. Dr. Roberts explains, “Now, if they can’t get Trump out, they will crash it. There will be a big crash before the election, and people will blame Trump. That’s about how smart Americans are. Now, there is one constraint for the Fed doing that because the Fed is a tool of the New York banks. If they crash the economy, they are going to crash those New York banks. That’s the only restraint on the elites. That’s their ultimate nuke. If they can’t get him out, they will say, okay, we are going to bring down the economy and too bad for the New York Banks, or they will find some special way to bail them out while everything else goes: the pension funds, the hedge funds, the mutual funds. They will wipe us out in order to get rid of Trump.”

Dr. Roberts says forget about the Left/Right Democrat and Republican paradigm. Dr. Roberts explains, “This isn’t a Democrat vs. Republican thing. This is the elite, the establishment, the oligarchs and the people who rule the country. They are defending their power. Trump was elected by the people. Remember, Hillary called people who voted for Trump ‘deplorables.’ So, the people who go against the elite candidate are ‘deplorable.’ The voters are ‘deplorable.’ That’s what this is about. They have to get him out for that reason. They also know if they get him out for that reason, every other person that would step forward and actually try to lead the country rather than serve the ruling class, that person will know that he hasn’t a chance. Even if he gets into office, he’s going to be excoriated, framed up, lied about and driven out. Nobody will want that grief.”

Elite M.B.A. Programs Report Steep Drop in Applications Harvard, Stanford, MIT see declines; international students find more options in Europe, Canada and Asia By Chip Cutter

https://www.wsj.com/articles/elite-m-b-a-programs-report-steep-drop-in-applications-11571130001?mod=trending_now_1

Applications to some of America’s most elite business schools fell at a steeper rate this year, as universities struggled to attract international students amid changes to immigration policies and political tensions between the U.S. and China.

The declines affected some of the nation’s top-rated programs, with Harvard University, Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others, all reporting larger year-over-year drops in business-school applications. Some, such as Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, posted double-digit percentage declines.

International Shift:U.S. business schools saw a steeper decline in applications from international students than any other country in the world this year.Change in applications from international students from previous year Source: Graduate Management Admission Council

Overall, applications to American M.B.A. programs fell for the fifth straight year, according to new data from the nonprofit Graduate Management Admission Council, an association of business schools that administers the GMAT admissions test. In the latest academic cycle ended this spring, U.S. business schools received 135,096 applications for programs including the traditional master of business administration degree, down 9.1% from the prior year, according to an annual survey. Last year applications for U.S. business programs were down 7%.

The M.B.A. was once considered de rigueur for anyone wanting to join the management ranks of U.S. companies, especially for international students, offering a pathway to leadership and a bigger payday. But education experts say shifts in U.S. immigration policy, trade and political tensions with China, as well as the growing attractiveness of technology-industry jobs that don’t require M.B.A. degrees, have recently dampened foreign students’ enthusiasm for business school.

Meanwhile, a hot domestic job market has cooled the interest of many Americans in the traditional two-year M.B.A. path. Millennials, many of whom are saddled with debt loads from their undergraduate degrees, have proved more reluctant than previous generations to pursue the pricey degree.

Kim Jong Un, Astride a Pale Horse, Urges Self Reliance in Face of U.S. Sanctions North Korean leader blames his country’s hardships on ‘ceaseless sanctions’ and pressure from U.S.-led forces By Timothy W. Martin and Dasl Yoon

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kim-jong-un-astride-a-pale-horse-urges-self-reliance-in-face-of-u-s-sanctions-11571209808?cx_testId=30&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

SEOUL—North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, riding a white horse, galloped to the top of the country’s tallest mountain and delivered a blunt message aimed at the U.S.: his people’s pain has “turned into their anger.”

Mr. Kim blamed his country’s hardships on “ceaseless sanctions” and pressure from U.S.-led forces hostile against the North, according to a Wednesday report in state media. The North Korean leader has been calling for the country to be more self reliant while sanctions batter the cash-strapped regime’s economy.

“We should neither want help from anyone nor lend an ear to any temptation,” Mr. Kim was quoted as saying. “We should choose the prosperity based on our own efforts.”

Mr. Kim’s comments suggest Pyongyang’s hardened stance on nuclear talks with Washington isn’t softening. Working-level negotiations broke off earlier this month in Sweden. The Kim regime has since threatened to end diplomacy unless Washington takes a substantial step toward Pyongyang’s position before the end of the year.

The State Department offered a different account of the Oct. 5 meeting held by Stephen Biegun, the U.S. special representative on North Korea, and the chief North Korean negotiator, Kim Myong Gil. The U.S. said it had brought “creative ideas” and hoped talks would pick back up within two weeks.

Warren and Sanders, Policy Mates Their differences are mainly about rhetorical labeling.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/warren-and-sanders-policy-mates-11571181041

Bernie Sanders wants voters to know that he—not Elizabeth Warren —is the bona fide socialist running for President in 2020. “There are differences between Elizabeth and myself,” Mr. Sanders said Sunday on ABC. “Elizabeth I think, as you know, has said that she is a capitalist through her bones. I’m not.”

As he falls in the polls, Mr. Sanders has to do something to reignite that 2016 fire. But the Vermont Senator’s problem is that Ms. Warren has co-opted more or less all of his important policy proposals. True-blue socialists might thus conclude that in Ms. Warren they can get nearly all of Bernie’s agenda from a younger (barely, at age 70) candidate without the socialist label.

Consider the policy list. She and Mr. Sanders both want Medicare for All, including the end of private health insurance. The main difference is that Mr. Sanders admits he’d raise taxes on the middle class, while Ms. Warren ducks the question. They both vilify “the top 0.1%” and promise to make wealthy Americans “pay their fair share.” Her wealth tax would hit the net worth of “ultra-millionaires” at rates up to 3% a year. His would drain “extreme wealth” with a top rate of 8% a year.

It’s almost a vaudeville joke for policy wonks. What’s the difference between a socialist and a capitalist? Five percentage points, apparently. This punch line also holds regarding their respective proposals on “accountable capitalism” (Ms. Warren) and “corporate accountability” (Mr. Sanders). She wants to make big companies give 40% of their board seats to workers. He wants 45%.

They both would force these companies to get a new federal charter requiring them to consider “stakeholders” rather than shareholders in their business decisions. They both want to reimpose the old Glass-Steagall fence between commercial banking and investment banking. “The business model of Wall Street is fraud,” Mr. Sanders likes to say. Ms. Warren also thinks bankers are crooks: “Wall Street is looting the economy.” They agree the U.S. Postal Service should become a bank that offers government checking accounts and would compete with private banks.