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Ruth King

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

There Goes Latin America: Iran’s Regime in America’s Backyard by Majid Rafizadeh

By on March 16th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20487/iran-latin-america

The Iranian regime, which… has been calling for “Death to America,” now has ballistic missiles which it says can reach the US, and claims to have a hypersonic missile that, according to one report, “Can Destroy US In 40 sec.”

Venezuela appears to have willingly embraced Iran’s overtures.

The Iranian regime, in addition to Venezuela, has evidently also been exploring avenues for military cooperation with Nicaragua and Cuba.

It is critical to recognize now the gravity of this exponentiating national security threat.

Venezuela, near the US, emerges as a key player in Iran’s Latin American ambitions. As a potential launching pad for attacks on the U.S., Venezuela appears to have willingly embraced Iran’s overtures. Iran’s growing military capabilities, with ballistic missiles and armed drones capable of reaching Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas from Latin American soil, already pose a direct threat to the United States.

A threatening development has been brewing largely under the radar of the Biden administration and the mainstream media attention: Iran’s calculated expansion into Latin America, from Argentina to Mexico.

With alarming nonchalance, the Biden administration appears to have turned a blind eye to the Iranian regime’s concerted efforts to establish a military foothold right in America’s backyard. The ramifications of this complacency are profound. The Iranian regime, which, since it began in 1979, has been calling for “Death to America,” now has ballistic missiles which it says can reach the US, and claims to have a hypersonic missile that, according to one report, “Can Destroy US In 40 sec.”

Historically, Iran’s playbook in the Middle East involved the arming and sponsoring of proxies and terror groups such as Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas, with the ultimate aim of annihilating Israel and has carried out more than 180 attacks just since October 7 on U.S. interests in the region.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden Should be Threatening Qatar and the Terrorists, Not Israel by Bassam Tawil

By on March 15th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20486/biden-should-threaten-qatar

Biden’s reported threat to halt or suspend US military supplies to Israel if the IDF enters Rafah is what encourages Hamas to continue fighting and reject every proposal to release the hostages. When Hamas leaders hear that Biden is threatening Israel to prevent the IDF from entering Rafah, they must say to themselves: “Why should we make any concessions to Israel? America doesn’t want the Israelis to destroy the four remaining battalions. The US administration is opposed to Israel’s plan to eliminate Hamas, so let’s wait!”

A total defeat means the elimination of all of Hamas’s battalions. An Israeli victory will never be complete as long as one, or even half, a Hamas battalion remains intact.

Biden is actually sending a message to Hamas and Iran’s other terror proxies, including Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Houthis, that America is about to throw Israel under the bus. Cutting off US weapons supplies to Israel is the ultimate fantasy of the terrorists.

The administration could show impressive leadership and in fact “bring this to an end as quickly as we can” — not just for Israel but for all in the region who are seeking peace — by encouraging Israel to take out the terrorists in Rafah without delay.

Instead of pressuring Israel, Biden should be pressuring his friends in Qatar to force their Hamas puppets to hand over the Israeli hostages and surrender. Instead of threatening to cut off weapons supplies to Israel, he should be threatening the leaders of Qatar with the withdrawal of US forces from the country’s Al Udeid Air Base and to officially designate Qatar as a State Sponsor of Terrorism (for its funding of Hamas, Hizballah, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Taliban, Al Shabab, Al Nusra Front, among others).

This is the way – the only way – to end the war quickly, as well as to send a signal to America’s adversaries looking on, that the US is prepared to uphold the values of civilization, not the values of terror.

US President Joe Biden will consider conditioning military supplies to Israel if the Israeli army moves forward with a large-scale invasion of the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, according to four US officials.

Biden has also told MSNBC that a Rafah operation would cross a “red line,” although he balanced that statement with a commitment to support Israel’s right to self-defense.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Tyranny in drag It is high time we dismantled the phony progressive rhetoric of the woke agenda. Brendan O’Neill

By on March 15th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/03/13/tyranny-in-drag/

Would you vote for a party that promised to let men parade around bollock-naked in women’s changing rooms? Or a party that was alarmingly blasé about gay kids being ‘corrected’ with drugs and surgery? Or a party that threatened to clamp down on thoughtcriminals who refer to people with penises and testicles – you know, men – as men? If not, then don’t vote Labour in the upcoming General Election. Because it’s possible it will pursue all of these petty tyrannical policies.

Of course, it isn’t using these actual words. It isn’t saying, ‘We will fight for the right of men to show their knobs to women at the gym’. Even Labour knows that would be a vote-loser. Instead, its authoritarianism will arrive wrapped in euphemism. Its regressive agenda will be smuggled in under progressive-sounding slogans. Rather than saying, ‘Men should be allowed to piss in any bathroom they bloody well choose’, Labour says: ‘We will modernise gender-recognition processes.’ It amounts to the same thing, though: if we get into government we will make it easier for men to masquerade as women.

It really is time we dismantled the scaffolding of deceptive rhetoric that surrounds the tyranny of woke. Angela Eagle, a Labour MP who served in the governments of both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, recently gave voice to the illiberal aspirations of the government-in-waiting. Her choice of words was impeccably politically correct. Labour, she said last week, will ‘legislate for a trans-inclusive conversion therapy ban, make anti-LGBT+ hate crime an aggravated offence [and] modernise gender-recognition processes’. What a lovely collection of buzzwords. Who could object? Well, me.

Let’s take her platitudinous promises one at a time. What does it mean to ‘legislate for a trans-inclusive conversion therapy ban’? To some, this will sound nice. Conversion therapy, if we take it to mean some religious hothead exorcising the demon of homosexuality from a 15-year-old gay lad, is a bad thing, so surely banning it is right? Not so fast.

In the trans context, ‘conversion therapy’ doesn’t only refer to the caricature vision of a Bible-thumping redneck making his kid ‘pray away the gay’. It refers to pretty much any attempt to dissuade a young person from undergoing dramatic and oftentimes irreversible procedures to ‘change their sex’.

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FOREIGN POLICY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Kamala Harris explains it all out for you on Gaza Monica Showalter

By on March 15th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/03/kamala_harris_explains_it_all_out_for_you_on_gaza.html

Foreign policy ace Kamala Harris is back in the saddle, explaining to all us rube voters what Gaza is all about.

Kamala Harris on the war in Gaza: “This subject is one that, sadly I say, has — there’s an appetite a lot of people have for it to be binary, as though it’s one thing or the other, when in fact many things are true at the same time.”

Which is one heck of a word salad.

Obviously, she’s feeling the heat from the Hamas-cheering leftists of academia who are seen as vital to Democrats in their re-election bid, and the other heat from the pro-Israel wing of the Democrat party, which is an increasingly smaller segment but just as important to winning independents. So, if I am deciphering the garble correctly, she would like us to know that many things can be true at the same time.

That ought to get them all onboard the Democrat train.

It’s wretched, though.

This is supposed to be America’s foreign policy leader speaking and she obviously doesn’t know a thing about what she’s talking about. She doesn’t know which side she’s on and she lacks the capacity to form even an opinion on it, not being “a good study” as critics on the inside have alleged in the past.

So, here she is, presenting us with another word salad — on a deadly serious issue — and sending a message to our enemies and Israel’s enemies, that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

You thought Joe’s senility was a problem creating a lot of foreign policy failures? Try the stupid person’s take on it, driven by electoral politics alone, and it only gets worse.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

A Forgotten Voice Speaks of the Horrors of Auschwitz By Janet Levy

By on March 15th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/a_forgotten_voice_speaks_of_the_horrors_of_auschwitz.html

Holocaust denial is gaining traction among young Americans. 

A December 2023 poll by Economist/YouGov found 20% of respondents aged 18-29 years believing that the Nazi massacre of six million Jews is a myth. 

The antidote could be reading Jozsef Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium.  This haunting memoir of a year as an Auschwitz inmate, first published in Hungarian in 1950, was only last year translated to English and 12 other languages, thus reaching the wider world.

Like Primo Levi, a more famous Auschwitz memoirist, Debreczeni was captured in 1944, as the Nazis, in retreat, inched toward defeat.  Otherwise, he may not have survived.  As with Levi, Debreczeni’s training – Levi was a chemist, Debreczeni a reporter, editor, and poet – enabled him to write with detachment about the Nazi atrocities, the horrific conditions in the camps, his suffering and that of others, and the dehumanization of guards and inmates alike. 

Thus, the dark ironies stand out starker.  A kapo, chosen from the prisoners and accorded privileges in exchange for disciplining and brutalizing the rest, is shocked to realize he has been denounced to the commandant by other kapos.  He is calling out in a booming voice the ID numbers of prisoners selected to stand separately.  Everyone is afraid, not knowing their fate.  The hapless fellow comes upon his own number, but must continue reading the list to the end.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

RNC Sues Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson Over ‘Bloated’ Voter Rolls By Debra Heine

By on March 15th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/14/rnc-sues-michigan-secretary-of-state-jocelyn-benson-over-bloated-voter-rolls/

The Republican National Committee has filed a lawsuit against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) over the state’s inaccurate voter rolls, arguing her office has failed to follow the National Voter Registration Act.

Newly appointed RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said Wednesday that Benson’s noncompliance with the NVRA has left the battleground state “with inflated and inaccurate voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election.”

The NVRA, passed in 1993, “requires states to keep voter registration lists accurate and current, such as identifying persons who have become ineligible due to having died or moved outside the jurisdiction.”

According to RNC, 76 of Michigan’s 83 counties have inflated voter rolls, demonstrating Benson’s lack of compliance with the act.

The RNC filed the suit along with two Michigan voters, Jordan Jorritsma, and Emerson Silvernail, over Benson’s failure to “keep their rolls accurate and up-to-date,”  Whatley said in a statement to the Washington Times.

The Complaint states that at least 53 Michigan counties have more active registered voters than adult citizens over the age of 18.

“That number of voters is impossibly high,” the RNC contends in the lawsuit.

An additional 23 counties have active-voter registration rates that exceed 90 percent of adult citizens over the age of 18. That figure far eclipses the national and statewide voter registration rate in recent elections.

“Retaining voter rolls bloated with ineligible voters harms the electoral process, heightens the risk of electoral fraud, and undermines public confidence in
elections,” the plaintiffs said.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

AP ‘Fact Focus’ Elastically Redefines Terms to Defend Biden The latest “fact-checkers” ploy. by Tim Graham

By on March 15th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/ap-fact-focus-elastically-redefines-terms-to-defend-biden/

Reading the “fact-checkers” in the press sometimes triggers memories of the comic book hero Plastic Man, who could contort into all sorts of shapes. Take the Associated Press, and immigration reporter Elliot Spagat in San Diego.

The headline was “Fact Focus: Claims Biden administration is secretly flying migrants into the country are unfounded.” Spagat had to redefine all sorts of words like “secretly” to defend President Joe Biden’s fly-over-the-border policies.

The Spagat dispatch began: “In his Super Tuesday victory speech, former President Donald Trump elevated false information that had gone viral on social media, claiming the Biden administration secretly flew hundreds of thousands of migrants into the United States.”

AP noted that on Jan. 26, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (if you can call them that) reported “327,000 immigrants were vetted and authorized for travel.” The government flew in more than 67,000 Cubans, 126,000 Haitians, 53,000 Nicaraguans and 81,000 Venezuelans.

Trump said, “Today it was announced that 325,000 people were flown in from parts unknown — migrants were flown in airplanes, not going through borders … It was unbelievable.”

How was this false? Spagat elastically argued, “But migrants are not being flown into the U.S. randomly.” Trump never said “randomly,” or “secretly.” He said “parts unknown.”

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Our Cold and Bloody War with China Peter Schweizer reveals why the powerful turn a blind eye while China kills Americans.

By on March 15th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-cold-and-bloody-war-with-china/

In November, Biden and Chinese Communist President Xi met once again, this time at the mansion used for the exteriors of the TV show, ‘Dynasty’, to talk about the relationship between the two countries. And yet all these months after the three hour meeting, nothing changed.

Biden had met with Xi everywhere from the Bay Area to Bali with no result. Why?

In ‘Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans’, Peter Schweizer, the journalist and investigator behind ‘Clinton Cash’, follows up on his work in ‘Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win’ to expose an entire network of corruption that is not only stealing America’s future, but has also claimed countless lives.

Blood Money is a war story illustrated with the Sun Tzu maxims that drive the larger strategic thinking of the Chinese military apparatus about how to “subdue the enemy without fighting”.

“According to a textbook given to Chinese military officers,” ‘Blood Money’ reveals, Xi is quoted as saying, “Our struggle and contest of power with the West cannot be moderated. It will inevitably be long, complex, and at times extremely sharp.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Joel Zinberg A Solution in Search of a Problem President Biden’s promise to expand drug-price controls will imperil supply and innovation.

By on March 15th, 2024

https://media5.manhattan-institute.org/iiif/2/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F5%2Fdrug-price-controls.jpg/full/!99999,960/0/default.jpg

In his State of the Union address, President Biden touted the drug-price controls in his Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Though the price controls have yet to take effect, Biden proposed expanding these measures, which threaten to destroy pharmaceutical innovation and harm the nation’s health.

The IRA’s drug-price controls are a solution in search of a problem. Two years ago, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that per capita prescription-drug spending in real terms had fallen as a percentage of total spending on health care since the mid-2000s. Retail prescription drug prices have gone up at a slower rate than have hospital prices and health-care prices generally. According to researchers at the health-care data group IQVIA, U.S. drug spending is lower as a percentage of national health expenditures than the average drug-spending share across 11 developed countries.

While price-control proponents focus on drugs’ high list prices, the average net price of a prescription—the amount that users actually paid after subtracting manufacturers’ discounts and rebates—has been falling, according to CBO. This reflects the increased use of generic drugs, which cost far less than name-brand pharmaceuticals and now account for nine out of ten prescriptions. In fact, U.S. patients use more generics and pay less for them (16 percent less, on average) than do patients in other developed countries.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

When and How Did We Get Here?—Gradually, then Suddenly. Part One Victor Davis Hanson

By on March 15th, 2024

https://victorhanson.com/when-and-how-did-we-get-here-gradually-then-suddenly-part-one/

Presidents—Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden—have either been doubling the national debt in their four- or eight-year tenures or added several trillion to it. We all know that adding a trillion dollars in debt to what we collectively owe every 100 days is unsustainable. But then again, we all know that to stop the borrowing, much less to concede the need to run surpluses, would earn a president the smears of “racist,” “uncaring,” and “cruel,” if not run the risk of a recession or worse.

So our presidents, in the manner individual Americans handle credit card debt, embrace Louis XV’s much-quoted observation “Après moi, le déluge”—“after me, the flood.” Put in modern Americanese, it means enjoying the unsustainable while you can because the next generations will pay heavily for what we incurred. Presidents prime the economy by printing trillions of dollars in funny money, hoping, as in the game of musical chairs, that the money music won’t abruptly stop on their watch, leaving them without a seat.

It is astonishing how our major downtowns so quickly, so easily transmogrified into near wastelands. Drive into downtown Los Angeles in 2019 and it was a crowded bustling city, with a rebooted downtown. Ditto San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland. Drive into them just five years later and they are dangerous and toxic moonscapes. Had we shown a photo of a 2024 San Francisco Walgreens to someone in 2019, he would have thought it a caged prison infirmary.

So what or who tore off the thin Thucydidean veneer of civilization so quickly?

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