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Ruth King

POLITICS Comments turned off

What Could Sink Trump’s Chances in 2020? By Victor Davis Hanson

By on August 22nd, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/what-could-sink-trumps-chances-in-2020/

What factors usually re-elect or throw out incumbent presidents?

The economy counts most.

Recessions, or at least chronic economic pessimism, sink incumbents. Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were tagged with sluggish growth, high unemployment and a sense of perceived stagnation — and were easily defeated.

The 2008 financial crisis likely ended any chance for John McCain to continue eight years of Republican rule. Barack Obama campaigned on the message that incumbent George W. Bush was to blame for the meltdown and that McCain, his potential Republican successor, would be even worse.

A once-unpopular incumbent Ronald Reagan fought recession for three years. Yet he soared to a landslide victory in 1984 only after the gross domestic product suddenly took off at an annualized clip of over 7 percent prior to the election.

President Donald Trump’s economy is still booming. But his opponents here and abroad are counting on a recession to derail him.

They hope that either the good times can’t last forever or that Trump’s trade war with China will scare investors and businesspeople into retrenchment. Or perhaps massive annual deficits and staggering debt will finally catch up to a financially reckless government.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

At The Risk Of Further Upsetting Ms. Tlaib Shoshana Bryen

By on August 22nd, 2019

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

The crocodile tears for Tlaib’s grandmother on on the West Bank were supposed to make Israel look bad. For anyone even marginally aware of the history of the Israel, the territories and relationship among them, it won’t work. But watch out – this, not facts and objective judgments – will continue to be the line of attack against Israel. We have to be prepared to see through the maudlin handkerchief twisting. S.B.

Rashida Tlaib was in tears over the conditions in which her grandmother lives in the West Bank, and furious that her mother, an American citizen, was forced to go through a “checkpoint” from Israel once in order to visit her. “As a young girl, visiting Palestine to see my grandparents, I watched as my mother had to go through dehumanizing checkpoints — even though she was a United States citizen and proud American.” She was so sad. Teary. Emotional. Distraught.

In light of that …

Is it insensitive to point out that international Arab wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, terror wars (so-called intifadas) in 1989 and 2001, and rocket wars in 2006, 2009, and 2014 have all been started by Arab states or Palestinian leaders against the state of Israel with the intention of destroying it?

It is, perhaps, rude to point out that in the 1949 war of annihilation he declared on Israel, the King of Jordan scooped up the territory that had been allocated for a Palestinian-Arab state. It’s probably uncharitable to mention that he annexed the Palestinian-allotted territory in a move recognized only by Great Britain and Pakistan, but no one did anything about it. And pitiless to mention that Tlaib’s grandmother was thus illegally occupied from 1949 – 1967. By Jordan. And thick-skinned, perhaps, to point out that Israel only entered the Palestinian picture when the Jordanian King — in a mind-bogglingly stupid moment — entered 1967’s Six-Day War on the fourth day and managed to lose all of his illegally held possessions.

And given what Ms. Tlaib considers to be her grandmother’s suffering, it seems hardhearted to point out that there were no checkpoints during the Jordanian occupation because no Israeli person — no Jewish person — ever passed from Israel into Jordanian-held Jerusalem at all between 1949 and 1967. No Jewish person could pray at the holiest of Jewish sites and 58 synagogues on the eastern side of the city were dynamited and destroyed. And no Jordanian or Palestinian person was permitted by Jordan to pass from Jordan into Israel during that period for work, medical care, or school.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Celebriphilia epidemic sweeps US: Forget knowledge & wisdom, get guidance from the stars: Michael McCaffrey *****

By on August 22nd, 2019

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/466795-celebrity-expert-americans-opinion/
FROM DPS

Americans are blessed to have a plethora of benevolent celebrities who are willing to share their infinite knowledge and wisdom with them.

After a thorough examination by a team of top-notch doctors, I was recently given some very disturbing news… I was diagnosed with an acute case of stage 4 platonic celebriphilia. In case you don’t know, celebriphilia is a disease where the afflicted have an abnormal and overwhelming adoration of celebrity.

My medical team, which includes Dr Phil, Dr Drew and Dr Oz, tells me that the symptoms of celebriphilia include feeling a false sense of familiarity and intimacy with celebrities which leads to the afflicted projecting an inordinate amount of inappropriate intelligence, wisdom and expertise upon celebrities.

Also on rt.com ‘Russians killed Epstein’: Go home everyone, Alec Baldwin is on the case

My celebriphilia first manifested itself a few years ago when Academy Award-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow created her “lifestyle brand” Goop. Through Goop, Gwyneth sold new-age, alternative therapies and devices at exorbitant prices, including “vaginal eggs” that were meant to be inserted into the vagina in order to aid “hormonal balance, and feminine energy.”

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Angry Genius of Miles Davis By Kyle Smith

By on August 21st, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/miles-davis-documentary-birth-of-the-cool/As the new documentary Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool makes clear, Davis was not a nice man. But his talent for the trumpet was magical.

How delightful it is to learn that Miles Davis, as a boy, used to take his trumpet out into the woods, listen to the animals, and imitate them on his horn. Later, in New York, he was already working as a professional musician when he decided to go to Juilliard to learn classical technique — a risk in his world, where the best musicians feared “sounding white.”

Many were the influences that went into Davis’s music, as we learn in Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, a beguiling new documentary full of strange details, some unnerving, some wonderful. Backed by Davis’s resplendent music, it’s frequently hypnotic, even heartbreaking. The usual talking-head interviews — experts, fellow musicians, and family members appear on camera — intermingle with the reflections of Davis himself, read by the actor Carl Lumbly in Davis’s signature gravelly tone.

Davis was an angry man, often a loner, and one source of his hot temper was racism. Born into affluence in 1926 — his father, a dentist, is described as the “second-richest” black man in Illinois — he went off to Paris in 1949 and found himself not only welcome but the toast of its swells. Via his girlfriend, the actress Juliette Gréco (neither spoke the other’s language), he joined a circle of creative people that included Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre. Returning home, he said, “It was hard for me to come back to the bullsh** white people put black people through in this country. . . . Before I knew it I had a heroin habit, which meant getting and shooting heroin all day and all night.”

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The New York Times Reframes History By Peter Kirsanow

By on August 21st, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-new-york-times-reframes-history/

The New York Times’s 1619 Project purports to “reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”

The Times, ostensibly a newspaper, wasn’t around in 1619 to publish the “first rough draft of history” for this period. So now it’s decided to rewrite it to its liking.

The New York Times was, however, around to publish the first rough draft of numerous other significant events in history. One that comes immediately to mind is the Stalin-era 1932 famine in which millions of Ukrainians died. The precise number of deaths (ranging from 3 million to 10 million) is lost to history, in part because the New York Times — per its Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty — reported that “[a]ny report of famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.” The Times confidently informed the world that there was “no famine . . .nor is there likely to be.”

The Times got a Pulitzer for that titanic debacle and other articles that ignored  Stalin’s manifold atrocities. Maybe it should devote a tiny portion of its 1619 Project resources to reframing its    history of the Ukrainian famine.

 

More recently, Times leadership admits to dedicating the last two years of its vast reporting resources to the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. An American president elected with Russian assistance. The Times got another Pulitzer for this travesty. Then the Mueller report issued. Yet another major story the Times could reframe, perhaps by training as much attention on the involvement of the upper levels of the Obama administration in the hoax.

The list of “reframing” possibilities is endless. But the New York Times would do well to correct its own profound mistakes and biases before rewriting history to suit its ideological imperatives.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Melissa Langsam Braunstein: Europe Considers The Nazi Idea Of Requiring Jewish Businesses To Identify Themselves On Labels

By on August 21st, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/europe-considers-nazi-idea-requiring-jewish-businesses-identify-labels/

The EU may begin targeting businesses in Israel in the name of neutrality, but the ramifications will be anything but neutral.

Europeans are considering stigmatizing Jewish businesses — an idea last popularized by the Nazis — all in the name of neutrality. This time, the focus is on Jewish-owned businesses located in the world’s only Jewish nation state and the European Union’s not-so-subtle suggestion that Israel exists only within its pre-1967 borders.

In June, Gerard Hogan, an advocate general at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, issued a nonbinding opinion, which many expect the court’s judges will adopt, suggesting that EU member states marginalize foodstuffs from Israel through detailed labeling. So products produced by Jewish citizens of Israel on land Israel won in the Six Day War is supposed to be labeled as hailing from “Israeli settlements” rather than being labeled “made in Israel.”

The advocate general writes that it’s not acceptable to simply mark a product as being from the West Bank or the Golan: “Although these terms do refer to the wider area or territory from which the product originates, the omission of the additional geographical information that the product originates from Israeli settlements is likely to mislead the consumer as to the true origin of the product. In such cases, it is necessary to add, in brackets, the term ‘Israeli settlement’ or equivalent terms.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Joy Pullmann:Scholastic’s New School Catalog Hawks Books To Saturate Kids With Identity Politics

By on August 21st, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/scholastics-new-school-catalog-hawks-books-to-indoctrinate-kids-with-identity-politics/

The world’s largest publisher and distributor of books to kids, which hosts the No. 1-visited site for U.S. elementary school teachers, has gone full-on woke. You won’t believe the garbage they’re selling to public schools.

This year’s back to school catalog for grades three to six from Scholastic, a children’s publishing giant, features books selected through a partnership with the identity politics pressure group We Need Diverse Books. The results are about what you might imagine.

The catalog’s front page features books about a Pakistani-American girl whose Milwaukee mosque is vandalized in a “hate crime,” a girl who finds out “her dad is secretly dating her best friend’s mom,” and a book about “Native American Heroes” who of course include political activists. Delightful. Third through sixth graders — who are approximately ages eight to twelve — definitely need this kind of broadening of their childish perspectives.

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Howard Zinn’s Anti-American Propaganda Takes Over The Smithsonian By Mary Grabar

By on August 21st, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/howard-zinns-anti-american-propaganda-takes-smithsonian/

Teach-ins’ at the taxpayer-funded Smithsonian and in New York City promise anti-historical indoctrination from socialist Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States.’

Long ago, during my childhood, school began right after Labor Day, and Columbus Day, commemorating the date Christopher Columbus discovered the New World on Oct. 12, 1492, was the first holiday of the school year.

Not anymore. Columbus Day of late has been marked by defacement of statues and hordes of angry adolescents demanding an end to the holiday. Leading young people in the hate-fest are teachers who have been educated with Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.”

This semester, the Smithsonian Institution is helping. Teachers will learn new teaching strategies and receiving continuing education credits at two “teach-ins” — on Sept. 7 in Washington, D.C., at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and on Sept. 28 in New York City.

Both “teach-ins” are efforts of our national museum, the Smithsonian, and D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice, “a project of Teaching for Change.” The invitation promises to feature “classroom resources for K-12 from Native Knowledge 360 [Degrees]” and from “the Zinn Education Project, including the campaign to abolish Columbus Day.”

The Zinn Education Project’s Infiltration

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Facebook Audit Results Rile Liberals And Conservatives By Tristan Justice

By on August 21st, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/21/facebook-audit-results-rile-liberals-and-conservatives/

Results of a Facebook audit released Tuesday, finding that the social media company has “significant work” to do to satisfy concerns from conservatives, are drawing criticism from both liberals and conservatives alike.

The eight-page report, authored by former Sen. Jon Kyl with Covington law firm in consultation with 133 conservative organizations, was inconclusive on whether the platform was biased in suppressing conservative views. The report, however, was written in a manner aiming to ease criticism of the company from Republicans and President Donald Trump, who often charge that the tech giant is part of a greater movement among large tech companies in Silicon Valley stifling conservative ideas on the internet.

Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has been the leading Republican senator pushing for greater federal regulation of big tech, slammed the report as a “smokescreen disguised as a solution.”

Hawley proposed legislation in June stripping social media companies such as Facebook of liability protections granted under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act unless they consented to an external audit to prove political neutrality.

The Missouri senator argued the Kyl and Covington audit was whitewash and far from thorough, as the report was essentially a compilation of interviews. “Merely asking somebody to listen to conservatives’ concerns isn’t an audit,” Hawley said.

“Facebook should conduct an actual audit by giving a trusted third party access to its algorithm, its key documents, and its content moderation protocols,” Hawley said in a statement Tuesday. “Then Facebook should release its results to the public.”

Other conservatives have been critical of Kyl’s report.

Brent Bozell, the president of Media Research Center, a conservative nonprofit dedicated to exposing bias in the media, claimed the Facebook report released this week was “empty and insulting.”

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CNN’s Wajahat Ali: White Supremacists Are “Coming For All Of Us,” Trump “Will Not Win” Posted By Ian Schwartz VIDEO

By on August 21st, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/08/20/cnns_wajahat_ali_white_supremacists_are_coming_for_all_of_us_trump_will_not_win.html

CNN contributor Wajahat Ali is asked what if “the squad” — the four Congresswomen led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — used the same “anti-Semitic trope” that President Trump did Tuesday when he said Jewish Americans who vote for Democrats are disloyal. Ali, a Muslim, said Muslims are with Jews and they will not be divided by race or religion.

“So, what I’m telling everyone today is a very radical idea that Donald Trump is a racist president. He’s also an anti-Semitic president. He promotes white supremacist talking points,” Ali said Tuesday on ‘CNN Tonight’ with host Don Lemon.”We’re going unite, we’re going to have our disagreements about Israel,” Ali said of his newfound Jewish-Muslim brotherhood. “That’s fine. But we’re going to unite against the common threat that is coming against all of us which is white supremacy and Donald Trump, you will not win.”

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