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Ruth King

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The Bells Toll for Theresa May . . . or Brexit? By Christopher Gage

By on November 17th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/17/the-bells

If I had one British pound for each time I was convinced of Prime Minister Theresa May’s end, I could purchase premium tickets to an Evening with Bill and Hillary Clinton. That abject cultural wreck dutifully has been cancelled. Though, the evening with Bill and Hillary stutters on.

Theresa May will go down as the most consequential prime minister in recent British history. For all the wrong reasons.

Yet, at the time of writing, May remains in office, not in power, as the once-ruthless Conservative party sharpens its pencils to the pitter-patter drip-feed of no-confidence letters. The slow death of Theresa May drips and drips and drips.

She is the Tinder date that just won’t leave. It was nice. Thanks for the Rioja. But I have work now. Please hail an Uber. I’ll pay.

But Theresa is in it for the wedding bells. After her Brexit secretary Dominic Raab resigned on Thursday morning, he was followed soon by another cabinet member, Esther McVey.

May didn’t take the brutal hint. Instead, just hours later, she told the nation she would resist any vote of confidence: “Am I going to see this through? Yes.”

This is despite arch-Euroskeptic Jacob Rees-Mogg, head of the influential European Research Group, handing in his own letter of no-confidence, and imploring his 80-plus lawmakers to do the same. So far, 20 Conservatives have publicly demanded she go.

Math doesn’t lie. May already relies on the minor Democratic Unionist Party to prop up her minority government. Without the ERG, her Brexit deal won’t get through parliament. May will be fortunate to get through the weekend.

Mogg’s letter to Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee—a political murder squad—could force a leadership challenge, if the required 15 percent of the Parliamentary party—48 letters from lawmakers—hits the mat. A political death panel could convene next week.

Not only is she now opposed by most of her own party, but twice as many British people oppose her deal than support it. The Uber is beeping outside. Theresa just wants to chat. Theresa isn’t leaving.

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Ocasio-Cortez turning into a nightmare for Congressional Dems By Thomas Lifson

By on November 17th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/ocasiocortez_turning_into_a_nightmare_for_congressional_dems.html

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is claiming that she is being discriminated against by House Democrats, implying racism. It turns out that she not only brings lots of media attention, she also carries a truckload of attitude.

James Barrett of the Daily Wire:

The nation’s youngest congresswoman has also been sounding the alarm over racism and sexism she suggests she’s already experienced on Capitol Hill.

Conservative Arthur Schwartz thinks she is lying:

This can easily be sorted out. But the victimology of her demand that “Next time try believing women + people of color when they talk about their experiences being a woman or person of color” is a shot across the bow of Nancy Pelosi and the entire House leadership.

She is signaling her willingness to Mau-Mau anyone who offends her even in the most trivial way. With all the attention the media loves to lavish on her, she is able to make endless trouble, and threaten the broad strategy of the Democratic Party: serve the interests of billionaires by garnering the votes of minorities and the poor with appeals to identity politics and free stuff/

The Daily Wire has a telling photograph of Ocasio-Cortez standing apart from a group of other Representatives. Click here to see it.

Boy, I bet that Nancy Pelosi sure misses Joe Crowley, the fourth-ranking member of the House Democratic Caucus that was defeated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the primary in a majority-minority Congressional district in New York City.

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U.S. House Republicans to Subpoena James Comey, Loretta Lynch By Debra Heine

By on November 17th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/u-s-house-republicans-to-subpoena-james-comey-loretta-lynch/

In the final weeks of their majority, House Republicans plan to interview two key witnesses as part of a joint committee investigation into the FBI’s investigations of the Trump campaign and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert Goodlatte (R-Va.) is preparing to subpoena former FBI Director James Comey and former Attorney General Loretta Lynch for closed-door depositions on Nov. 29 and Dec. 5 respectively, according to the AP.

The subpoenas are part of an investigation by two GOP-led committees into decisions made by the department during the 2016 election, when Democrat Hillary Clinton was cleared in a probe into her email use and Justice officials launched an investigation into Trump’s campaign and Russia. Both Comey and Lynch were in power during that time.

Republicans on the House Judiciary and Oversight and Government Reform panels have argued that Justice officials were conspiring against Trump’s election, and they have interviewed multiple current and former Justice officials behind closed doors in an effort to prove their case.

It’s unclear if Comey and Lynch will appear, but Comey has indicated in the past that he would be willing to testify at an open hearing.

He again conveyed his willingness to appear in a tweet Friday evening:

“House Republicans can ask me anything they want but I want the American people to watch, so let’s have a public hearing,” he said. “Truth is best served by transparency. Let me know when is convenient,” he said.

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New Hope for the Truth of 2016? Hints that congressional investigators may finally pull back the lid on James Comey’s actions. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

By on November 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-hope-for-the-truth

Two men will be key in the next Congress to getting to the bottom of the remaining mysteries of the 2016 election. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, likely chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has indicated he’s not going the let the biggest sleeping dog of the 2016 race lie.

“Totally,” he told CNN when asked whether he would probe FBI actions during the campaign. “The oversight function will be very much front and center.”

On the Democratic side, Rep. Adam Schiff told the Los Angeles Times that his first goal is to restore “comity” to his own fractious House Intelligence Committee. (Presumably the Times reporter didn’t mishear the word “comedy.”) Less felicitously, Mr. Schiff added, “We’re going to be defending the independence of the Justice Department,” by which he meant protecting special counsel Robert Mueller from being fired by President Trump.

Except the Mueller investigation is expected to wrap up soon, and it appears to have found nothing particularly exciting. Meanwhile, Mr. Schiff has finally shown some interest in the truly explosive unfinished business of 2016. He told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer that if former FBI chief James Comey’s account of his actions during the 2016 race is accurate, then his intervention likely represents the “most measurable” and “most significant way in which the Russians may have impacted the outcome of the election.”

Mr. Schiff’s acknowledgment is especially interesting because, unlike the rest of us, he would have seen a classified Justice Department report on this episode, which remains withheld from the public.

Mr. Comey, we now know, was acting on dubious, possibly planted Russian intelligence when he intervened in the Hillary Clinton email matter. He was acting from a counterintelligence motive (he was worried about a Russian effort to discredit Mrs. Clinton’s victory), not the criminal investigatory motive he pretended at the time. In adopting this spy vs. spy rationale, he surely would have consulted with his Obama administration colleagues, CIA Director John Brennan and National Intelligence Director James Clapper.

And when Mr. Comey intervened a second time, reopening the investigation days before the election, he did so to protect the credibility of the original operation. This step, even Mr. Comey now concedes, may have tipped the Electoral College to Mr. Trump. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Gerrymander Excuse Implodes Democrats’ total vote share roughly matches their House majority.

By on November 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-gerrymander-excuse-implodes-1542412885

Elections have a way of blowing up partisan conceits—see what happened to the Democratic Party’s Electoral College “lock” in 2016. This year Democrats busted one of their own cherished myths by proving that Republican gerrymanders weren’t preventing them from retaking the House of Representatives. There’s a lesson here for voters and judges.

State legislatures have been drawing congressional boundaries to favor one party or another since America’s founding. During the 40 years of sustained Democratic control of the House in the late 20th century, this worked in the Democrats’ favor. As political scientist Matt Grossmann has shown, Democrats sometimes enjoyed congressional majorities nearly 10 percentage points larger than their share of the House popular vote.

Then came the Republican romp of 2010, followed by the Census and the regular 10-year redistricting to reflect population ebb and flow across the U.S. The new GOP majorities in several states drew districts that increased their representation in the House, as Democrats also did where they had a partisan advantage.

For many commentators the post-2010 redistricting created a crisis of democracy by supposedly locking Democrats out of power. Days before the 2018 election the New York Times’ David Leonhardt cited Republican gerrymandering as evidence that the U.S. could “slide toward Hungarian autocracy.”

Well, so much for that. Democrats last week made their largest gain in House seats since 1974 and appear to be closing in on a 233-seat House majority with several races still not called. This means Democrats will hold about 53.6% of seats—a 7.1% edge. And, what do you know, Democratic House candidates nationwide have 52.8% of votes—7.3% more than Republicans, according to the latest Cook Political Report tally.

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A Tale of Two New Yorks Billions for Amazon but rats, lead paint and mold for public housing.

By on November 17th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-tale-of-two-new-yorks-1542413122

New York’s Democratic kingpins Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio are getting hit from right, left and center for showering Amazon with some $3 billion in subsidies. The corporate welfare is even more outrageous when juxtaposed with New York City’s dilapidated public housing that the Governor and mayor have long neglected.

This summer the Justice Department sued Nycha for sweeping its disrepair under a shabby rug. Nycha agreed to a court-appointed monitor to oversee $1.2 billion in repairs over the next five years. On Wednesday in a 52-page ruling, federal Judge William Pauley III, a Bill Clinton appointee, rejected the settlement as inadequate and perhaps unconstitutional.

According to the New York State Department of Public Health, 83% of Nycha’s inspected units contained a hazardous condition. “Somewhat reminiscent of the biblical plagues of Egypt, these conditions include toxic lead paint, asthma-inducing mold, lack of heat, frequent elevator outages, and vermin infestations,” the judge noted, adding that the authority “whitewashed these deficiencies for years.”

While Mayor de Blasio agreed to spend an additional $1.2 billion to fix Nycha’s 326 complexes that house 400,000 people, conditions are so awful that the authority estimates it needs $32 billion for repairs. “NYCHA’s current capital needs would not be met until the year 2166,” the judge wrote.

Judge Pauley added that a special monitor “would bring about an unwarranted—and as far as this Court is aware, unprecedented—judicial usurpation of responsibilities that Congress has expressly entrusted to” the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and “raises serious concerns implicating the separation of powers and the delegation of equitable judicial power.”

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WILL PRESIDENT TRUMP CALL IT “WEST BANK” OR JUDEA AND SAMARIA? DAVID SINGER

By on November 16th, 2018

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

President Trump – having rejected a barrage of criticism since describing himself as a “nationalist” – faces a further torrent of invective should he choose to say “Judea and Samaria” rather than “West Bank” in his soon to-be-released peace proposals.

Arab propaganda has used “West Bank” since 1949 to obliterate any Jewish connection to one of the two remaining pieces of land under the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine where sovereignty still remains undetermined between Jews and Arabs. Even worse, the United Nations and the US State Department have continued using this deceptive and misleading terminology since 1967.

The media and countless political commentators have sought to relegate the historical-geographical term “Judea and Samaria” to some ancient biblical anachronism that fell into disuse centuries ago – yet that term appears in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica and the UN 1947 Partition Plan resolution.

Incontrovertible Jewish claims to this hotly-disputed territory – about the size of Delaware – were eloquently summarised in the Forward on 12 July 1991:

‘As for “Judea” and “Samaria”, they are indeed ancient names, but the notion that they had become “archaic” prior to 1967 is totally false for both English and Hebrew. Indeed, unlike their Moslem counterparts, not only Jewish, but Christian geographers too, from Roman times onward, always considered the mountainous regions north and south of Jerusalem to be discrete entities, since this is how the Old and New Testaments speak of them because of the separate Judean and Israelite kingdoms that existed there. As late as many 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century atlases, it is possible to find accurate maps of Palestine with the major Arab towns and villages appearing beside the words “Judea” and “Samaria” in large print.

The Hebrew terms, yehuda and shomron have had a slightly more complex history – rather, shomron has had, since yehuda, “Judah” which was originally the name of the tribe that occupied the southern hill country of the Land of Israel, has been in uninterrupted use as a geographical term since the Book of Deuteronomy. We find it and it alone in the Mishnah and the Talmud; in the account of the famous 12th-century Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela; in Kaftor u-Ferach, a 16th-century halakhic geography of Palestine composed by the Italian Rabbi Ishtori Haparhi; in all the 19t- and 20th-century literature of Zionist settlement in Palestine; and in thousands of other Hebrew sources from every period of Jewish history as well.

The case of “shomron”, “Samaria”, is somewhat different. The oldest Hebrew name for the mountains north of Jerusalem is not shomron but efrayim, after the tribe whose territory it was. Shomron was originally a site in Efrayim that, in the reign of King Omri, became the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel, which eventually began to bear its name. Thus, in the Hebrew Bible we find shomron, efrayim, and yisra’el used interchangeably, while in rabbinic literature they are joined by a fourth term: eretz ha-kutim, “the Land of the Cuthites” – a reference to the Samaritans, a population originally transferred from the Babylonian region of Kutu to take the place of the “ten lost” tribes of Israel deported by the Assyrians in 721 B.C.E.

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The Free Speech Crisis on Campus Is Worse than People Think by Bradley Campbell

By on November 16th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/11/14/the-free-speech-

Last month Samuel Abrams, a politics professor at Sarah Lawrence College, published an op-ed in the New York Times titled, “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators.” Abrams, who describes himself as conservative leaning, pointed to the titles of some recent events put on by his campus’s Office of Student Affairs: “Stay Healthy, Stay Woke,” “Understanding White Privilege,” and “Microaggressions.” He described these events as politically lopsided and noted that this kind of highly politicized socialization of college students is occurring throughout the country. A lot of campus critics have pointed to the left-wing political skew of faculty, he said, and have worried about indoctrination in the classroom. But indoctrination is much more likely at campus events outside the classroom, and the political skew of administrators in charge of student life is even greater than that of faculty. (He surveyed a representative sample of 900 “student-facing administrators” and found a ratio of 12 liberals for every conservative, compared to 6 to 1 for academic faculty.)

Remember, Abrams is a tenured professor commenting about a widely discussed issue and writing about his research in the New York Times—America’s pre-eminent newspaper, hardly some right-wing rag. And what was the reaction at Sarah Lawrence College? Campus activists, after apparently trying to break into Abrams’s office, vandalized the office door, taking away the items he had put up, including a picture of his newborn son, and putting up signs with statements such as “Quit” and “Our Right to Exist Is Not ‘Ideological’ Asshole.” The student senate held an emergency meeting to discuss the offending op-ed, and the college president, Cristle Collins Judd, suggested to Abrams that he had created a hostile work environment and asked him whether he thought it was acceptable to write op-eds without her approval. She also asked him if he was on the job market, perhaps as a suggestion that he should be.

A new moral culture

If you were a time traveler from 10 years ago—maybe even five years ago—you’d probably have trouble following some of that. What’s a microaggression? What’s woke? And how could a New York Times op-ed lead to that kind of uproar on campus? But if you’ve been around, and if you’ve been following the happenings on American college campuses, you’re familiar by now with conflicts like this and the new moral terminology guiding the campus activists. In the last few years we’ve seen professors such as Nicholas Christakis at Yale and Brett Weinstein at Evergreen State College surrounded by angry, cursing students, with Christakis and his wife, Erika Christakis, soon leaving their positions as the masters of one of Yale’s residential colleges and Weinstein and his wife, Heather Heying, leaving Evergreen entirely. We’ve heard about microaggressions, said to be small slights that over time do great harm to disadvantaged groups; trigger warnings, which some students demand before they are exposed to course material that might be disturbing; and safe spaces, where people can go to be free of ideas that challenge leftist identity politics. We’ve heard claims that speech that offends campus activists is actually violence, and we’ve seen activists use actual violence to stop it —and to defend this as self-defense—when administrators fail to do so.

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The Lessons of the Asia Bibi Case By Nina Shea

By on November 16th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/asia-bibi-blasphemy-laws-western-asylum/

Pakistan has released the purported blasphemer against Islam. Now what nation will have the courage to grant her asylum?

Asia Bibi, the Catholic mother imprisoned in Pakistan for nine years and condemned to hang for violating that country’s strict blasphemy law, has drawn broad sympathy throughout the West. Lacking credible evidence, and despite her denials, lower courts plainly yielded to Islamist pressure in making the illiterate field hand the first Pakistani woman to be given a death sentence for insulting Islam’s prophet, Mohammed. Then on October 31, Bibi finally received justice in an acquittal by Pakistan’s supreme court. But when she was released a week later, she found that mobs were baying for her blood throughout Pakistan — and, most surprisingly, that the West held out no firm offer of a safe haven.

Islamabad has given assurances that Bibi has been taken to a secret, secure location inside Pakistan, pending a permanent place of refuge. But her escape seems stalled. The West’s response so far of passive hand-wringing while Bibi faces mortal danger indicates more than poor planning; it shows a failure to fully comprehend the deeply radicalizing effects of the blasphemy taboo within the world’s second-largest Muslim nation — and the inroads it has made in the West.

Western leaders have consistently expressed concern for Bibi during her nearly decade-long ordeal. Human-rights advocates, such as the indefatigable Lord David Alton, who just last month met personally in Pakistan with the chief justice, have vigorously championed Bibi in the British parliament. Yet when the moment of truth arrived, London quickly decided it would not give her asylum owing to security concerns. The U.K. has its own radical Islamist leaders within its million-strong Pakistani community to worry about, including Anjem Choudary, paroled last month following a terror-law conviction. Lord Alton called the British decision “craven.”

In Paris, the city hall had an enlarged photo of Bibi by its front entrance when I last visited several years ago, and France has long been discussed as a place of asylum for her. But deadly Islamist attacks against Charlie Hebdo’s editors for blasphemy, and most recently against French Jews, make asylum there unthinkable. Last week Italy and Canada revealed their engagement in “sensitive” multilateral talks on Bibi’s case, but so far neither has offered an actual legal grant of asylum. Also last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized for Canada’s turning away the MS St. Louis and its 907 desperate Jewish passengers seeking refuge from German Nazis 79 years ago. Hopefully, he will apply the St. Louis lesson to throw a lifeline to Bibi.

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Haley Announces Flip from Longstanding U.S. Abstention on Golan Heights Resolution to ‘No’ By Bridget Johnson

By on November 16th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/haley-announces-flip-from-longstanding-u-s-abstention-on-golan-heights-resolution-to-no/

For the first time, the United States plans to vote “no” today instead of abstaining on an annual United Nations resolution slamming “continued Israeli military occupation” of the Golan Heights.

In past years, the resolution has called upon Israel “to desist from changing the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure and legal status of the occupied Syrian Golan and in particular to desist from the establishment of settlements.”

It also calls upon Israel “to desist from imposing Israeli citizenship and Israeli identity cards on the Syrian citizens in the occupied Syrian Golan, and from its repressive measures against the population of the occupied Syrian Golan.”

The U.S. Mission to the United Nations cited as the reasons for the change from abstention to “no” the “resolution’s anti-Israel bias, as well as the militarization of the Syrian Golan border, and a worsening humanitarian crisis.”

UN Ambassador Nikki Haley declared in a statement previewing the vote that “the United States will no longer abstain when the United Nations engages in its useless annual vote on the Golan Heights.”

“If this resolution ever made sense, it surely does not today. The resolution is plainly biased against Israel,” she said. “Further, the atrocities the Syrian regime continues to commit prove its lack of fitness to govern anyone. The destructive influence of the Iranian regime inside Syria presents major threats to international security. ISIS and other terrorist groups remain in Syria.”

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