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Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Colluders, Obstructionists, Leakers, and Other Projectionists By Victor Davis Hanson

By on May 27th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/26/colluders-obstructionists-leakers-and-other-projectionists/

Before the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the idea that the Russians or anyone else could warp or tamper with our elections in any serious manner was laughed off by President Obama. “There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America’s elections,” Obama said in the weeks leading up to the 2016 election.

Obama was anxious that the sure-to-be-sore-loser Trump would not blame his defeat on voting impropriety in a fashion that might call into question Clinton’s victory. After Clinton’s stunning defeat, Russian “collusion”—thanks initially to efforts by Obama holdover Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates to go after Michael Flynn and the successful attempts of the CIA and FBI to seed the bogus Steele dossier among the government elite—became a club to destroy the incoming Trump Administration.

Colluders, Inc.
How ironic that Russian “collusion” was used as a preemptive charge from those who actually had colluded with Russians for all sorts for financial and careerist advantages.

The entire so-called Uranium One caper had hinged on ex-President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and their Clinton Foundation uniting with Russian or Russian-affiliated oligarchs to ease restrictions on the sale of North American uranium reserves to a Russian company with close ties to Vladimir Putin. Coincidentally what followed were massive donations from concerned Russian parties to the foundation, as well as a $500,000 honorarium to Bill Clinton for a brief Moscow speech. Note that no more money has been forthcoming from Russia to either of the Clintons or their foundation.

Had Donald Trump been caught, as President Obama was in Seoul in March 2012, on a hot mic assuring the Russians that he would be more flexible with Russia after the 2020 election (“On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved—but it’s important for him [Putin] to give me space”) he would likely now be facing real impeachment charges.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Erdoğan’s Istanbul Nightmare by Burak Bekdil

By on May 27th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14252/erdogan-istanbul-election

Turkey’s Supreme Electoral Board, consisting of judges apparently under government pressure, cancelled the result of the Istanbul mayoral election on the pretext that some officials serving at the polling stations were not civil servants, as required by the law. “The Board’s decision brings Turkish democracy one big step closer to death,” wrote Kemal Kirişçi, senior fellow at TÜSİAD, Turkey’s biggest business association.
“It appears that losing Istanbul entails too many risks for the AKP for the matter to be left to its own resources. Many are convinced that if the AKP were to lose Istanbul to the opposition, after having held it – with its precursor – for 25 years, a hornet’s nest of vested interests, corruption, and abuse of power would be revealed.” — Semih Idiz, a columnist for Sigma Turkey, an Ankara-based think tank.
Even if Erdoğan wins Istanbul in the re-run, he will have lost the last few remaining crumbs of his international credibility.

During most of his nearly 17-year-long term as Turkey’s leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s self-aggrandizing, assertive foreign policy and his Islamist and nationalist one-man-rule have earned him popularity and votes in a country where average schooling is a mere 6.5 years. Erdoğan believed — and made the average Turk believe — that Turkey is a major world power. He claimed that his rule made miracles in the economy. Therefore, since his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, he has not lost a single election. Everything was coming up roses all the time. Not anymore.

“Who wins Istanbul wins Turkey,” has been Erdoğan’s dictum since 1994, when he won mayoral elections in Turkey’s biggest city (home to nearly 15% of Turkey’s 57 million voters and accounting for 31% of its GDP). Twenty-five years later, his candidate for mayor of Istanbul, former prime minister Binali Yıldırım, lost in the local election — the first defeat in Istanbul for Islamists since 1994. Game not yet over, Erdoğan ruled.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Left’s Battle Against ‘Inequality’ The fallback race card. Larry Elder

By on May 27th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273861/lefts-battle-against-inequality-larry-elder

In his book “Discrimination and Disparities,” economist Thomas Sowell notes that a disproportionate percentage of first-born siblings become National Merit scholars compared to siblings born later, presumably because the first-born starts life with no sibling competition for parental attention. This, says Sowell, illustrates the absurdities of expecting equal results when equal results do not even occur within the same family among siblings raised under the same roof with the same parents.

When I was growing up in South Central Los Angeles, one of my closest friends was “Paul.” We met in the second grade and attended the same elementary school, middle school and high school. Not only did we take many of the same courses with the same teachers, our houses were identical.

When I first invited Paul to my home, about a half-mile from his, he was astonished. “Whoever built your house,” he said, “built mine, too.” He was right. When I visited his house, I found that the only difference was that my house had one tiny additional window that his did not. Same schools. Same teacher. Same neighborhood. Same house design.

Paul was a gifted athlete. Name the sport, he excelled. He was a starting pitcher for the baseball team, the starting shooting guard for the basketball team and the starting quarterback for the football team. He picked up a tennis racquet, hit balls against a backboard for a few weeks and then made the tennis team.

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Arab-Israelis Today And why they prefer to live in a Jewish democratic state. Joseph Puder

By on May 27th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273825/arab-israelis-today-joseph-puder

British Labor party shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry, speaking at the British House of Commons (May 13, 2019), accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of taking steps that pushed Israel “away from democracy, and away from the rule of law while also attacking the freedoms of Israeli Arabs…” It is apparent that Ms. Thornberry’s accusations against Prime Minister Netanyahu have to do with the Jeremy Corbyn led Labor party policies rather than with reality on the ground. This reporter has just traveled throughout Israel and experienced a different reality insofar as Arab-Israeli citizens are concerned. Ms. Thornberry should do likewise and travel throughout Israel before making a judgement about Arab freedoms in Israel.

In the last Israeli parliamentary elections on April 9, 2019, the combined Arab parties, Hadash-Ta’al and Ra’am-Balad lost 3 seats (mandates) in the Knesset. Ahmed Tibi and Ayman Odeh decided to run on an independent list and garnered 6 seats while the more radical and Islamist Ra’am-Balad party, led by Mansour Abbas received 4 (it barely passed the threshold of 3.25% of the vote), down from 13 in the previous 2015 elections when the two parties ran on a combined list. These results reflect the disenchantment of younger Arab-Israelis with their Knesset representatives. The Arab Knesset members, in the words of many young Arab voters, care more about the welfare of Palestinian Arabs than about their own constituents, who seek to integrate into Israeli society and partake in Israel’s prosperous economy.

The New York Times, with its anti-Netanyahu bias, reported (by David Halbfinger) on March 20, 2019 that according to a new poll from the University of Maryland suggested that Mr. Netanyahu’s racial provocations may spur turnout among Arab voters motivated to usher him out of office.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The New York Times: Enabler of Genocidal Anti-Semitism How America’s “paper of record” whitewashes Jew hatred by its silence. Kenneth Levin

By on May 27th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273830/new-york-times-enabler-genocidal-anti-semitism-kenneth-levin

In response to the uproar over its April publication of a blatantly anti-Semitic cartoon, the Times first tweeted an acknowledgment that the cartoon was “offensive,” then posted an apology and finally – as the blowback continued – published a statement by the Editorial Board conceding the cartoon was “appalling” and its appearance in the paper’s international edition, at a time of resurgent targeting of Jews, was evidence “of numbness to [anti-Semitism’s] creep…”

One can agree with that assessment of the cartoon, but there are other elements of the Editorial Board statement that are grossly misleading and reflect a refusal to come to terms with the Times’ sordid track record regarding anti-Semitism.

On the Holocaust and its prelude in Germany, the statement declares: “In the 1930s and 1940s The Times was largely silent as anti-Semitism rose up and bathed the world in blood. That failure still haunts this newspaper.”  But it has obviously not haunted the paper enough to move it from its consistent refusal over many decades – despite its intense coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – to report on the incitement to mass murder of Jews that has long been a staple of Palestinian and broader Arab media, mosques and schools. It has failed to do so even as such incitement has in recent years become ever more widely established within the Muslim world.  On the contrary, to the degree that the Times, in relatively rare moments, has noted the problem at all, it has typically done so to downplay it or even to ridicule concern with it. 

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POLITICS Comments turned off

BERNIE SANDERS WOULD MOVE EMBASSY OUT OF JERUSALEM IF IT LEADS TO PEACE

By on May 27th, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/American-Politics/Bernie-Sanders-willing-to-move-embassy-out-of-Jerusalem-if-it-leads-to-peace-590330

Sanders has called the Netanyahu government “racist” in the past, most recently at a CNN Town Hall on last month.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders expressed his willingness to move the US Embassy from Jerusalem back to Tel Aviv if it would help bring peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, during an NBC interview this week.The comments were made in response to a question of how he would maintain the strong relations between the United States and Israel, despite his criticism. The senator claimed that he is not anti-Israel, and noted that some members of his family live there and that he volunteered on a kibbutz decades ago.

“As a young man I spent a number of months in Israel, [and] worked on a kibbutz for while. I have family in Israel. I am not anti-Israel. But the fact of the matter is that Netanyahu is a right-wing politician who I think is treating the Palestinian people extremely unfairly,” he said.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Pitfalls along the road to socialism By Richard Jack Rail

By on May 27th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/pitfalls_along_the_road_to_socialism.html

All over Europe, elections are teaching Brussels that Greeks like being Greek, Brits, Brit, and French, French. Nobody much cottons to being “European,” where some Belgian bureaucrat says what you will and won’t do in your small town where another language is spoken and people don’t like paying huge salaries to self-important nobodies in gray flannel suits.

The population of Europe is discovering it really doesn’t like the creeping socialism of the European Union, though many probably don’t even realize that that’s what they’re mad about. It isn’t even full-blown socialism yet, but everybody knows that’s the destination, and the shine has worn off. Happens every time on the long and winding road to socialism.

Some insightful sage noted that you can vote your way into socialism but you have to shoot your way out. That’s what waits at the end of the road Europe is on. Strife. Once it breaks into the open, citizens will suddenly understand why they haven’t been allowed to own private firearms. It’s a lesson Venezuelans have learned the hard way and that many Americans still don’t get.

But Europe will probably have to get hungry first. Literally hungry, and not “literally” in the Joe Biden sense. Perhaps before that, Europe will get literally cold as Moscow starts playing with the natural gas spigot, just to show who’s really boss. Certainly, before that Europe will run low on gasoline and will have to wait in line for a few expensive liters to get home from the job that just laid them off.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Robert Mueller — dishonest, deceptive and diabolical By Patricia McCarthy

By on May 27th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/robert_mueller__dishonest_deceptive_and_diabolical.html

Democratic expectations of victory over Trump were dashed when Mueller absolved the President of any untoward arrangement with Russian tools of Putin.  Within an hour, Mueller went from being heralded as the “most trusted man in America” to a traitor.  His words had been twisted by AG Barr, they said.  Mueller would come to Congress and tell them the real truth.  But Mueller does not want to be grilled by crazed Democrats; one can imagine their vicious anger that would be directed his way.  By noon that day, these former Mueller devotees turned their wrath upon Barr.  Suddenly he was “the President’s lawyer,” not the AG.  In short, since the day the report was released, the left’s meltdown that began on election night 2016 got infinitely worse.  For nearly three years they had studiously ignored the  mountains of evidence that the entire fiasco was a seditious attempt at a coup, a scheme to frame and overthrow a duly-elected President.  Those involved believed their plan would work.  Those who were duped by the rumors and innuendo because they so hated the fact that this drain-the-swamp outsider had come to power in their backyard were left stunned.

Mueller never deserved the “most trusted man” sobriquet.  He has a long record of abusing the power of his office over the years, no matter which office he occupied at the time.  He let four men rot in prison knowing they were innocent, a crime that cost taxpayers nearly $100m in recompense to the victims.  He did the bidding of Hillary Clinton when he delivered uranium to Russia.  Then, working with James Comey, he seriously misprosecuted the anthrax case, relentlessly pursuing an innocent  man, Steven Hatfill, and again costing the taxpayers millions, this time $5.82m.  As with Comey, Mueller’s positions of power over the years have gone to his head and made him both arrogant and careless.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Professor Who Argues Against Multicultural Ideology and for Western Exceptionalism Now Fears for His Job By David Solway

By on May 27th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/a-professor-who-argues-against-multicultural-ideology-and-for-western-exceptionalism-now-fears-for-his-job/

I have met University of New Brunswick sociologist and co-founder of the blog Council of European Canadians Ricardo Duchesne only once and found him reserved, thoughtful and modest. A brilliant writer and genuine scholar, he has authored two impeccably-researched volumes on the history of Western civilization and the settler domestication of pre-industrial lands.

In an earlier article for PJ Media, I had occasion to mention Duchesne, who writes in Canada in Decay — one of the most important books in our national literature explaining the emergence of the ideology of immigrant multiculturalism — that Canada is an extreme, though not unique, example of impending ethnocide, “promoting its own replacement by foreigners from other races, religions and cultures.” As Duchesne points out in The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, the same form of national self-deprecation we note in Canada is at work in most Western nations today.

Before multiculturalism took root, Duchesne argues, Canada was not an immigrant nation, as the cliché has it, but a European nation built by settlers and pioneers. The same formulation applies to the U.S. and Australia. He notes a critical difference between categories of newcomers: pioneers create, immigrants contribute (at their best). Multiculturalism, however, which radically changes the identity of a country, is neither a creation nor a contribution; it is “an experiment imposed from above.” Tensions inevitably arise between the rapidly shrinking European majority and the multi-ethnic, culturally alien brew that is displacing it.

Duschesne lays out his agenda in The Uniqueness of Western Civilization. His central contention, he writes, “will be that the West has always existed in a state of variance from the rest of the world’s cultures,” divergences that include, among a plethora of others, “the ‘Greek miracle’, the Roman invention of the legal persona, the Papal revolution, the invention of mechanical clocks, the Portuguese voyages of discovery, the Gutenberg revolution, the Cartographic revolution, the Protestant Reformation, the ‘rational’ mercantilist state and the ‘industrial enlightenment.’” He has no doubt that the “ideals of freedom and the reasoned pursuit of truth were cultivated and realized in the course of Western time.”

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HISTORY Comments turned off

Myron Magnet: How John Marshall Made the Supreme Court Supreme His brains and bonhomie forged a band of Federalist brethren.

By on May 26th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/john-marshall-supreme-court

Most serious American readers know National Review columnist and National Humanities Medal laureate Richard Brookhiser as the author of a shelf of elegantly crafted biographies of our nation’s Founding Fathers, from George Washington and Alexander Hamilton up to our re-founder, Abraham Lincoln. Those crisp, pleasurable volumes rest on the assumption that these were very great men who created (or re-created) something rare in human history: a self-governing republic whose growing freedom and prosperity validated the vision they strove so hard and sacrificed so much to make real. It’s fitting that the most recent of Brookhiser’s exemplary works is John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court, for it was Marshall—a junior member of the Founding Fathers, so to speak—who made the Court a formidable bastion of the nation’s founding governmental principles, shielding them from attacks by demagogically inclined presidents from Jefferson to Jackson, until his death in 1835.

It takes all a biographer’s skills to write Marshall’s life, for he left no diaries and few letters or speeches. One must intuit the man’s character from bits and pieces of his own writings, his weighty but wooden biography of George Washington, his judicial opinions, and his contemporaries’ descriptions of him. From these gleanings, however, like Napoleon’s chef after the Battle of Marengo, Brookhiser concocts a rich and nourishing dish.

Born in backwoods Virginia in 1755, Marshall all his life kept a rural simplicity of manner and dress that once misled a Richmond citizen to think him a porter and ask him to carry a turkey home from the market, which the chief justice cheerfully did, refusing a tip for his efforts. Gregarious, athletic, and full of jokes, Marshall in his thirties was the life of the Quoits Club, a select Richmond group dedicated to weekly bibulous good fellowship and a horseshoe-like game played with metal rings, activities at which Marshall excelled.

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