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Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Unlike His Critics, Former New York Yankees Closer Mariano Rivera Is A Mensch The Hall of Fame pitcher supports a pluralistic nation with democratic institutions and free association. By David Harsanyi

By on July 22nd, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/07/22/unlike-critics-former-new-york-yankees-closer-mariano-rivera-mensch/

In a transcendently ridiculous column at The Daily Beast, readers are warned that MLB Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera has “served at the pleasure of a racist president, taken part in thinly veiled propaganda on behalf of a far-right government in Israel, and gotten chummy with outright bigots and apocalyptic loons.”

Mo Rivera? The greatest closer—perhaps the greatest pitcher—in Major League baseball history? Mo Rivera, the first player unanimously selected as a first-ballot Hall of Famer? As a longtime Yankees fan, and someone fortunate enough to see Rivera up close for a number of years, I can think of few greater pleasures in sports than watching him work. So I never thought I’d be able to admire him more. But here we are.

It’s not surprising that The Daily Beast, whose editor-in-chief blames Israeli Jews for white nationalism, would find Rivera’s support of Israel problematic (the original illustration for the piece, incidentally, had Rivera standing on a pitcher’s mound shaped like a yarmulke atop a Jewish star).

Nor is it surprising that the piece offers no evidence that Mariano has “served at the pleasure” of the Trump administration—even if you accept the debatable contention that the administration is racist. Rivera didn’t join the pinstriped Sturmtruppen, he merely accepted a nomination to the Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. He signed onto the Opioid Drug Abuse Commission. He went to the White House as a delegate for the Special Olympics. He took “friendly photo op” as part of an interfaith conference in Israel with the U.S. ambassador to Israel. These days, I guess all of this qualifies as extremism.

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Weiner Bounces Back Into Huma’s Life By Jim Treacher

By on July 22nd, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/weiner-bounces-back-into-humas-life/

Once upon a time, a Democratic congressman named Anthony Weiner sent lots of pictures of his junk to women he met online. He claimed he was hacked or pranked or whatever, and he blamed his political opponents for his misdeeds. He even blamed Andrew Breitbart. And Weiner would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling bloggers.

Weiner resigned from Congress in disgrace, and all the people who defended him pretended they never did. He ran for mayor of NYC (would he have been any worse than de Blasio?), and his filth-ridden laptop even played a crucial role in making sure Hillary Clinton will never be elected president.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran Claims It Has Arrested 17 Iranian CIA Spies, Sentenced Some to Death By Mairead McArdle

By on July 22nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/iran-claims-it-has-arrested-17-iranian-cia-spies-sentenced-some-to-death/

Iran said Monday it has arrested 17 Iranians accused of spying on the country’s nuclear and military sites for the CIA.

The alleged spies had “sophisticated training” and worked on “sensitive sites” in “economic, nuclear, infrastructural, military and cyber fields or their counterpart private sector,” the Iranian Intelligence Ministry’s director of counterespionage reportedly said at a rare press conference in Tehran.

All the alleged spies are reportedly Iranian nationals arrested in the past few months. Some of the 17 who resisted cooperating with Iranian intelligence will be locked up for a lengthy period, and some have already been sentenced to death, the counterintelligence director said.

President Trump denied Iran’s claims Monday morning, calling them “propaganda.”

“The Report of Iran capturing CIA spies is totally false. Zero truth,” the president wrote on Twitter. “Just more lies and propaganda (like their shot down drone) put out by a Religious Regime that is Badly Failing and has no idea what to do. Their Economy is dead, and will get much worse. Iran is a total mess!”

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Trump Approval Rating Hits Record High in New Poll By Jack Crowe

By on July 22nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-approval-rating-hits-record-high-in-new-poll/

Well into his third year in office, President Trump’s approval rating has reached a record high, according to a poll released Monday.

Trump’s approval rating hit 44 percent in the new NPR/NewsHour/Marist poll, the highest level at which it’s been recorded in any mainstream opinion poll with the exception of a a July 7 Washington Post poll that recorded 47 percent approval.

Respondents were surveyed from July 15 to July 17, in the days following the president’s tweet instructing four freshman congresswoman of color to “go back” to their home countries.

Since taking office Trump’s approval rating has hovered between 35 and 43 percent in the Marist poll.

The poll, which included responses from 1,336 adults, also found that Trump has won over a small but significant group of independents in the last month. His approval rating among independents increased from 35 percent last month to 42 percent in the latest poll. Meanwhile, the percentage of respondents who said they will definitely vote against Trump remained unchanged from last month at 53 percent.

While Trump gained ground among independents, Democrats remain unpopular with the group: 43 percent of respondents in the poll said they believed Democrats would take the country in a positive direction if given the opportunity, compared with 46 percent who said the party would lead the country in a negative direction.

“Independents are on the fence overall,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion at Marist College. “They’re not willing to grant President Trump reelection, and yet they’re not persuaded by Democrats at this point.”

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Breaking: Baseball Great Accused of Visiting Israel By Rich Lowry

By on July 22nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/breaking-baseball-great-accused-of-visiting-israel/

Mariano Rivera is the greatest closer of all time, and an exemplary human being, in other words, not a natural target for a hit piece upon his induction into the Hall of Fame. But the Daily Beast is here to serve, and offered up a truly pathetic attempted take-down of Rivera for allegedly being a right-wing extremist, by which is meant a pro-Israel Christian and Republican. Perhaps my favorite line in the piece is this one, which is supposed to be latent with sinister meaning: “He has traveled to Israel on multiple occasions, possibly beginning in 2013.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-baseball-hall-of-famer-mariano-riveras-secret-far-right-politics

Inside Baseball Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera’s Far-Right Politics

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Deutschland über alles The Fourth Reich picks a new Führer. Bruce Bawer

By on July 22nd, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274333/deutschland-%C3%BCber-alles-bruce-bawer

No sane person could have witnessed the coronation this week of the new grand poobah of the European Union without recognizing just how utterly undemocratic – and dangerous – this institution is.

Her name is Ursula von der Leyen, a name that instantly communicates two important facts: (1) she is German; (2) she is a member of a hereditary elite.

To be sure, the “von” is courtesy of her husband, who belongs to an aristocratic family. But her own blood also runs blue. In addition to having a tony Teutonic lineage – she was born into the patrician Albrecht clan – she’s descended from a couple of the biggest slave traders in the American South. Her grandfather, Carl Albrecht, was a psychologist famous for his studies of “mystical consciousness.” Her father, Ernst Albrecht, was one of the very first bureaucrats to tread the corridors of power in what would later become the European Union 

Raised in Belgium, von der Leyen studied in Germany and Britain, and lived for a while in the U.S., along the way picking up degrees in economics and public health and also becoming a gynecologist. But she eventually settled on politics, hitching her wagon to Angela Merkel and climbing the ladder of power in Germany, getting herself elected to the Bundestag and serving in turn as Minister of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women, and Youth; Minister of Labor and Social Affairs; and Minister of Defense. In the last-named position, she didn’t exactly cover herself in glory: as President Trump has pointed out, Germany has consistently failed to pull its weight in NATO; British journalist Andrew Neil recently referred to her as a “failed” Defense Minister and as “the second most unpopular politician in Germany.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Your Tax Dollars At Work: Colleges Hire Army of High-Paid, Ineffective Diversity Officers

By on July 22nd, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/07/22/your-tax-dollars-at-work-colleges-hire-army-of-high-paid-ineffective-diversity-officers/

A new study finds that diversity among college faculty didn’t budge from 2013 to 2017. But what the study really exposes is a much deeper problem: rampant waste at massively taxpayer-subsidized colleges and universities.

“Colleges and universities have not realized much progress toward ethnoracial and gender faculty diversity in recent years — the exception being a modest increase (between 1-2%) in tenured Asians across institutional types,” the study, published by the Hispanic Journal of Law and Policy, found.

Why does this matter? Because these institutions of higher learning have been dumping truckloads of money to build increasingly bloated diversity offices.     

Economist Mark Perry recently discovered that the University of Michigan has nearly 100 administrative positions devoted to diversity. More than two dozen of them make six-figure salaries. The Chief Diversity Officer makes almost $400,000. The total cost to the school: more than $11 million. That’s enough money, Perry calculates, to give more than 750 in-state students free rides.

The University of Texas at Austin has eight vice presidents in its Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, at an annual cost of $9.5 million. UC Berkeley has 175 diversity bureaucrats.

This year, Georgetown University created a new vice president position to oversee diversity at a school that already has: has an Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Affirmative Action, an Office of Affirmative Action and University Human Resources, a Diversity Advisory Board, a Center for Multicultural Equity and Access, a Working Group on Reporting Incidents of Intolerance, an Initiative on Diversity and Inclusiveness, a School of Medicine Office of Diversity and Inclusion, a School of Medicine Subcommittee on Faculty Diversity and Inclusion, a Law Center Office of Equity and Inclusion, a Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching and Service, and others.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How a Trivial Dispute Between Two anti-Trump Democrats in a Publix Express Lane Became the Latest Racial Hate Hoax Debra Heine

By on July 22nd, 2019

amgreatness.com/2019/07/21/how-a-trivial-dispute-between-two-democrats-in-a-publix-express-lane-became-the-latest-racial-hate-hoax/

The latest “hate crime” supposedly inspired by President Trump’s allegedly “racist” rhetoric appears to be nothing more than an example of two anti-Trump Democrats behaving badly in public.

Erica Thomas, a Georgia Democrat claimed on Friday that a “white man” in a supermarket check-out line called her a “lazy son-of-a-b*tch” and told her to “go back where you came from.”

Thomas, who is nine months pregnant, tearfully made the claim outside of an Atlanta-area Publix store after the man cursed at her for taking too many items into a supermarket express lane.

“And this white man comes up to me and says: ‘You lazy son of a b*tch,”’ Thomas said, sobbing as she described the confrontation in a video. “He says: ‘You lazy son of a bitch; you need to go back where you came from.”’

As Thomas’s video went viral and the hashtag #IStandwithErica trended on Twitter, Democrat pols like Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Beto O’Rourk jumped in the fray to politically exploit the incident.

Thomas later walked back her comments, saying, “I don’t want to say he said go back to you’re country or go back to where you came from, but he was making those kinds of references.”

As the racial narrative fell apart, the Guardian weighed in with a report incorrectly characterizing Thomas as a Republican:

The “white man” in question is Cuban-American Eric Sparkes, a fellow Democrat who admitted that that he cursed at Thomas for taking too many items into the express line, but denied telling her to “go back where you came from.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Can’t We All Just Get Along? By Victor Davis Hanson

By on July 22nd, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/22/cant-we-all-just-get-along/

Get along? Apparently no—at least until after 2020. Two examples summarize why.

“We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice,” said U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), one-quarter of “the squad” sowing havoc among Democrats in the House. “ We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice.”

Of the Republican Party, MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes said the other day: “It must be peacefully, nonviolently, politically destroyed with love, compassion and determination, but utterly confronted and destroyed. That is the only way to break the coalition apart… Not by prying off this or that interest. They are in too deep. They have shamed themselves too much. The heart of the thing must be ripped out. The darkness must be banished.”

In other words, the new progressive message is that we all must vote monolithically and predicated on our superficial appearance, religion, or sexual orientation. And the Trump base must be destroyed, though annihilated with “love” and “compassion.”

Love It—Or What Actually?
All are presently shocked that Donald Trump would dare suggest that if anyone did not like the United States, then perhaps he or she might, of their own volition, consider leaving the country.

Trump apparently was directing his ire exclusively at particular first-generation congresswomen and suggesting that their anti-American furor logically might lead such unhappy U.S. citizens to consider voluntary deportation.

Perhaps no politician should ever advise American citizens with whom he disagrees to leave the country. But Trump did not suggest mandatory departures—in the manner that Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) had wanted Trump supporter and immigrant Sebastian Gorka deported.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

No One Really Wants to ‘Send Her Back’ By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on July 22nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/no-one-really-wants-to-send-her-back/

Don’t exaggerate the significance of raucous chants.

The president can be very entertaining, but I don’t pay much attention to political rallies, including his famously raucous ones.

For the faithful, the rallies are fun spectacles, like rock concerts or ball games. I don’t think they can be taken too seriously, except perhaps as a gauge of the president’s support. Not in lieu of polls, but in conjunction. And with healthy skepticism: The polls have a history of undercounting Trump supporters, but the ardor of the Trump base on display at the rallies should not be confounded with national enthusiasm for the Trump presidency — though it may signal more openness to it, especially in light of the increasingly radical alternative.

Which brings us to Wednesday night’s Trump rally in Greenville, N.C., and the ginned-up crowd of Trump fans chanting “Send her back!” That was in reference to Ilhan Omar, who is a naturalized American from Somalia, a radical at the crowded junction between Islamists and leftists, and a member of Congress from Minnesota’s fifth district — the deep-blue Twin Cities area that teems with Millennials and Somali immigrants.

All good populist demagoguery needs a villain. President Trump hardly has the market cornered on this. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton studied Alinskyite community organizing. The organizer, a self-styled renegade against The Establishment, is instructed to avoid abstractions when picking an opposition target. You’ve got to make it personal, to polarize the adversary in stark terms. Trump’s persona is to hit back harder than he is hit. No surprise, then, that he is a practitioner of this demagogic art, since he is also the Left’s No. 1 target.

Most Republican villains the Left selects (the Bushes, Mitt Romney . . .) respond by trying to prove they’re not really villains. This is a futile strategy. The demagogues making the accusation already know it’s not true. They do it because it always works. Or at least it used to. It’s different with the president, who is from the Leo Durocher School: “I come to play. I come to beat you. I come to kill you!” Trump vexes the Left because he revels in the mud wrestle. Sure, he craves admiration, but he wants to win more, and he doesn’t in the slightest mind winning ugly. In that the Left must see a lot of itself, but that doesn’t mean it has figured out an effective response.

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