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Ruth King

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ELECTIONS ARE COMING: JOHN JAMES (R) FOR MICHIGAN SENATE*****

By on August 8th, 2018

Michigan’s Underdog Senate Primary Winner John James Offers A Bright Future For Voters And Republicans
Ignoring the Michigan race as an easy win for an incumbent Democrat is a mistake, with several factors making this a contest to watch.By Margot Clevelandhttp://thefederalist.com/2018/08/08/michigans-underdog-senate-primary-winner-john-james-offers-bright-future-voters-republicans/

Political newcomer John James won Michigan’s Tuesday Republican senatorial primary. The previous underdog finished with a solid 9 percent victory over opponent Sandy Pensler, thanks in part to a late-July endorsement from Donald Trump. Trump also recorded a telephone pitch for James that went out to Republican voters the day before they headed to the polls.

James, who suffers from sparse name recognition, will face Democrat Debbie Stabenow when voters head to the polls in November. Prior to the primary, Stabenow held a nearly 20-point lead in a hypothetical head-to-head contest between the Democrat senator and the political novice, leading national pundits to write off the contest.

RealClearPolitics, for instance, sees the seat staying in Democratic hands because of Republicans’ failure to “come up with a solid challenger.” Even with the increasing focus on the 2018 midterm elections—which will determine control of the Senate for the remainder of President Trump’s first term—Michigan’s Senate battle remains but a blip in the national coverage.

Ignoring the Michigan race, however, is a mistake, with several factors making this a contest to watch. First, beltway observers ignore James’ appeal. Salena Zito, whose on-the-ground, back-roads reporting of election 2018 proved prescient, captured this reality in her profile of the senatorial candidate, “John James Could Be the Future Republicans Have Been Waiting for.”

James is a young, accomplished, determined, devout black man, the kind of new conservative that the Grand Old Party needs to shake up next year’s midterm election cycle. He is at once full of energy, grace, command, and passion.

When this young man tells you he is running on conviction, everything about him tells you he is not a poser. He says: “I am called to a life of service. I want to serve my country and my community and my state. When I would come back from Iraq on leave during the great recession, the economic and societal devastation I saw here in my own state floored me.’”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Millennials, Socialism, and Equality By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on August 8th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/millennials_socialism_and_equality.html

Zach Carter of the Huffington Post is telling Baby-Boomers that they are getting their knickers all in a twist and really should tone down their worries since, after all, “socialism is good now.”

Carter, senior political economy reporter at the HuffPo, evinces dazzling ignorance and misdirection as he leads Millennials down a path that will prove disastrous to them.

Carter asserts that we are re-entering the “Golden Age of American Paranoia” and any genuine concerns about the spread of communism are delusional. Has Carter ever perused The Black Book of Communism (1999), edited by Mark Kramer? He would learn “the actual, practical accomplishments of Communism around the world: terror, torture, famine, mass deportations, and massacres.”

Astonishing in the sheer detail it amasses, the book is the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue and analyze the crimes of communism over seventy years.

‘Revolutions, like trees, must be judged by their fruit,’ Ignazio Silone wrote, and this is the standard the authors apply to the Communist experience – in the China of ‘the Great Helmsman,’ Kim Il Sung’s Korea, Vietnam under ‘Uncle Ho’ and Cuba under Castro, Ethiopia under Mengistu, Angola under Neto, and Afghanistan under Najibullah. The authors, all distinguished scholars based in Europe, document Communist crimes against humanity, but also crimes against national and universal culture, from Stalin’s destruction of hundreds of churches in Moscow to Ceausescu’s leveling of the historic heart of Bucharest to the wide scale devastation visited on Chinese culture by Mao’s Red Guards.

As the death toll mounts – as many as 25 million in the former Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1.7 million in Cambodia … the authors systematically show how and why, wherever the … ideology of Communism was established, it quickly led to crime, terror, and repression.

But, you retort, Carter never mentions the word “communism” in his article. It is exquisitely important to remember that according to Vladimir Lenin, “the goal of socialism is communism.”

In fact, Adrian Krieg writes that “the worst despotic governments of this century were: Nazis in Germany, Fascists in Italy, Communists in the USSR, [Romania, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia, (and) Vietnam[.]” Each was supposed to be a “paragon of socialist endeavor.” The end result was that the leaders of “these countries murdered more of their own civilian citizens than they lost in military conflict.” It is why socialism always results in tyrannical rule.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Does Trump Have What It Takes to Win on Immigration? By Karin McQuillan

By on August 8th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/08/does_trump_have_what_it_takes_to_win_on_immigration.html

President Trump has faced down the Chinese, the Russians, ISIS, and North Korea, but does he have what it takes to force Congress to fix immigration? I am beginning to think the answer is no. Congressional leadership has secured the votes, and worked the rules, to pass the president’s agenda only when the members agree with his policies, such as choosing conservative justices or lowering taxes. On issues such as Obamacare and immigration, where the GOP establishment disagrees with Trump, he has failed.

On Obamacare, Trump gave up in disgust after killing the individual mandate. He can’t do that on immigration. Fixing immigration was a big promise. He has got to deliver.

The art of negotiation requires both carrots and sticks. Trump has shown little to offer or threaten that the impervious incumbents of the GOP want or fear. He has endorsed their candidates and campaigned for them and been rewarded with no loyalty. The rewards of their lobbyists and payoffs of crony corruption have made our politicians, especially leadership, independent of voters and of the president.

President Trump has Republican voters behind him on every detail of his immigration policy. Voters want a wall. They want more border patrol. They want an end to catch and release and an end to visa overstays. Voters also agree with Trump that we need to cut down legal migration. They want Muslim immigration heavily vetted and curtailed. They want an end to chain migration.

But as every conservative knows to our sorrow, Republican career politicians don’t care about the wishes of ordinary voters.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Amazon Sells ‘Make Israel Palestine Again’ T-Shirt, Despite Removing Some ‘Hate’ Products By Tyler O’Neil

By on August 8th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/amazon-sells-make-israel-palestine-again-t-shirt-despite-removing-hate-products/

Late last month, Amazon stopped selling Neo-Nazi and KKK products after Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) sent a letter urging the site to remove all products from Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)-designated “hate groups.” On Wednesday, the company stopped endorsing products from Infowars’ Alex Jones. Even so, the site is still selling “Make Israel Palestine Again” t-shirts, without revealing where the t-shirts come from — suggesting they come direct from Amazon.

Is Amazon endorsing the destruction of the State of Israel? If a user chooses a specific size, the site will reveal that this product is “In Stock” and that it “Ships from and [is] sold by Amazon.com.” This contrasts with a great deal of merchandise Amazon sells that comes from third-party sources.

Amazon does not reveal who produces these shirts, as it does with most products on “Amazon Fashion.” It seems reasonable for a user to believe that the company itself is designing and selling this product.

The slogan “Make Israel Palestine Again” appears across social media, and as separate accounts on Twitter and on Instagram. The Twitter account shows a picture of President Donald Trump wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat, with the text altered to read “Make Israel Palestine Again.”

Anti-Israel activists with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement have adopted the slogan.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Amazon reviews are highly publicized and polarized. Three users rated the “Make Israel Palestine Again” t-shirt with five stars. “Get tons of compliments everywhere I wear this shirt!” RK reported. “One day the Palestinians will have their home again,” YoYo chimed in. A user named “ethan allen” added, “I love this shirt.”

Others gave the shirt one-star reviews. “Joanofark06” denounced the shirt as “ISRAEL HATE,” declaring, “This is a HORRIBLE, EVIL shirt, and I will not stand for this. I will refuse to buy from Amazon, ever again, until this shirt gets taken down, as Israel is God’s land, an our bible mentions Israel over 100 times.” The user went on to paint with a broad brush, declaring that “Muslims hate the Jews, just like satan does.” While not all Muslims “hate the Jews,” anti-Semitism is rampant in the Muslim Middle East, and opposition to the state of Israel’s very existence seems the last acceptable form of anti-Semitism. CONTINUE AT SITE

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Facebook’s Problem With Veterans Its algorithm treats our nonpolitical site as ‘political content.’ 63 Comments By David Gale

By on August 8th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-problem-with-veterans-1533682511

After 18 years as an executive at MTV, I decided to start a media brand for an underserved audience: American military veterans and their families.

We Are the Mighty, which launched in 2014, has intentionally stayed away from hard news, politics or anything that tries to polarize veterans. Because our entire purpose is to engage this audience, we rely heavily on social media, especially our Facebook page. At first we found, as many publishers have, that there was no better partner than Facebook , the company whose mission statement is “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together . . . and express what matters to them.”
Photo: iStock/Getty Images

Despite Facebook’s frequent and inscrutable changes, our business continued to thrive. We were rewarded—with likes, shares and comments—for our authentic posts, positive message and high engagement. Thanks to Facebook’s enormous scale, we could reach a monthly audience of millions. If we stayed true to our values and remained assiduously nonpolitical, positive and honest, we assumed we could withstand the inevitable tweaks to the algorithm.

Then in June, Facebook said it had changed its policies “in response to criticism over how its ad network was able to be manipulated during elections.” These policies require publishers to label anything considered “political” or “issue-based advertising.” Evidently, if anything in our posts uses the word “military,” we are classified as a “political” advertiser—as seen on Facebook’s Advertiser Help Center in its list of “National Issues of Public Importance”—and must be labeled as such. Publishers like We Are the Mighty must register as creators of “political advertising” to target audiences with such content.
. CONTINUE AT SITE

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EDUCATION, MEDIA Comments turned off

Is Liberal Racism a Horse of a Different Color? Bigotry is bigotry, whether systemic, as at Harvard, or idiosyncratic, like Sarah Jeong’s Twitter feed. By Jason L. Riley

By on August 8th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-liberal-racism-a-horse-of-a-different-color-1533682618

Be honest. Are you really surprised that the New York Times has stood by its decision to hire Sarah Jeong as an editorial board member even after it was revealed she spent years on social media making openly racist and sexist remarks about white men? You may be outraged, sure. But surprised?

To paraphrase a well-known political figure, Ms. Jeong could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot a white person without losing the support of liberals. It’s a safe bet she was tapped by the Times because of these racial prejudices, not despite them. Editorial board members are hired to help formulate and express the official position of a newspaper. Ms. Jeong is being hired to speak for the Times, and they like where she’s coming from.

The Grey Lady attacks President Trump as a racist and sexist on a near-daily basis, and columnists like Charles Blow write about little else. So is it hypocritical for the paper to hire and defend a new editorial board member who has made no secret of her own biases? Of course it is, but that’s considered beside the point by people who share Ms. Jeong’s worldview.

The liberals who control most major media outlets specialize in applying different standards to different groups. Like the Times, Twitter had no problem with Ms. Jeong’s repugnant observations. Scores of tweets that included offensive phrases—“#cancelwhitepeople”; “are White people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun?”; “White people have stopped breeding. you’ll all go extinct soon. that was my plan all along”—didn’t faze Jack Dorsey’s content monitors. But when conservative activist Candace Owens decided last weekend to reproduce Ms. Jeong’s posts and replace “white” with “black” or “Jewish,” Twitter temporarily suspended her account. Following a backlash, Twitter restored the account and claimed that “we made an error.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Sarah Jeong Is a Boring, Typical Product of the American Academy By Heather Mac Donald

By on August 8th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/sarah-jeong-boring-typical-product-higher-education/

To decry her anti-white ‘racism’ gives her too much credit for originality.

The most significant feature of Sarah Jeong, the New York Times’ embattled new editorial board member, is not that she is a “racist,” as her critics put it. It is that she is an entirely typical product of the contemporary academy.

After the New York Times announced Jeong’s hire in early August, web sleuths dug out a mother lode of tweets demonstrating an obsession with whites. Samples include “white men are [bullsh**],” “#cancelwhitepeople,” “National/ Pretty goddam white/ Radio,” “I’m tired of being mad about white dudes. I’m going to pretend they don’t exist for a week,” and “I figured it out. Powerful white women automatically receive officer status in Club Feminism. Unless they disavow.” Both the Times and Jeong blamed her posts on . . . you guessed, it, whites. Her status as a “young Asian woman,” in the Times’ words, made her a subject of frequent online harassment, to which she responded “for a period of time” by “imitating the rhetoric of her harassers.”

This argument was, to borrow a phrase, bullsh**. Jeong’s five-year tweet trail is much longer than a mere “period of time” during which she allegedly experimented with counter-trolling. But most important, her tweets are not imitative of anything other than the ideology that now rules the higher-education establishment, including UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School, both of which Jeong attended. And that ideology is taking over non-academic institutions, whether in journalism, publishing, the tech sector, or the rest of corporate America. Sarah Jeong’s tweets and blog posts are just a marker of the world we already live in.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Yazidi Slavery, Child Trafficking, Death Threats to Journalist: Should Turkey Remain in NATO? by Uzay Bulut

By on August 8th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12816/turkey-child-trafficking-slavery

Yazidis are still being enslaved and sold by ISIS, with Turkish involvement, while the life of the journalist who exposed the crime is threatened.

Reuniting the kidnapped Yazidis with their families and bringing the perpetrators to justice should be a priority of civilized governments worldwide, not only to help stop the persecution and enslavement of Yazidis, but also to defeat jihad.

The question is: Should Turkey, with the path it is on, even remain a member of NATO?

August 3 marked the fourth anniversary of the ISIS invasion of Sinjar, Iraq and the start of the Yazidi genocide. Since that date in 2014, approximately 3,100 Yazidis either have been executed or died of dehydration and starvation, according to the organization Yazda. At least 6,800 women and children were kidnapped by ISIS terrorists and subjected to sexual and physical abuse, captives were forced to convert to Islam, and young boys were separated from their families and forced to become child soldiers, according to a report entitled “Working Against the Clock: Documenting Mass Graves of Yazidis Killed by the Islamic State.” Moreover, 3,000 Yazidi women and girls are believed to remain in ISIS captivity, but their whereabouts are unknown.

One Yazidi child recently sold in Ankara, Turkey, and then freed through the mediation efforts of Yazidi and humanitarian-aid organizations, according to a report by Hale Gönültaş, a journalist with the Turkish news website Gazete Duvar. On July 30, three days after Gönültaş’s article appeared, she received a death threat on her mobile phone from a Turkish-speaking man, who told her that he knew her home address, and then shouted, “Jihad will come to this land. Watch your step!”

This is not the first time that Gönültaş has been threatened for writing about ISIS atrocities. In May 2017, she received similar telephone threats after posting two articles: “200,000 children in ISIS camps,” and “ISIS holds 600 children from Turkey.”

In addition, a video of Turkish-speaking children receiving military training from ISIS was sent to her email address. In the video, in which one of them is seen cutting off someone’s head with a knife, the children are saying, “We are here for jihad.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

EU Unable to Neutralize US Sanctions against Iran by Soeren Kern

By on August 8th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12815/iran-sanctions-european-union

“Anyone doing business with Iran will NOT be doing business with the United States.” — US President Donald J. Trump.

“The EU is demanding that its largest corporations risk the entire cake for a few more crumbs.” — Samuel Jackisch, Brussels correspondent for German public broadcaster ARD.

“The fines are in the multibillions these days so it’s just not worth the risk for a small piece of business and maybe pleasing a European government.” — Investment banker quoted by Reuters.

The European Union has announced a new regulation aimed at shielding European companies from the impact of US sanctions on Iran. The measure, which has been greeted with skepticism by the European business media, is unlikely to succeed: it expects European companies to risk their business interests in the US market for interests in the much smaller Iranian market.

The so-called “Blocking Statute” entered into effect on August 7, the same day that the first round of US sanctions on Iran officially snapped back into place. Those sanctions target Iran’s purchases of US dollars — the main currency for international financial transactions and oil purchases — as well as the auto, civil aviation, coal, industrial software and metals sectors. A second, much stronger round of sanctions targeting Iran’s oil exports, takes effect on November 5.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

New Anne Frank Play Casts ICE As The Nazis Holocaust victim’s legacy is misappropriated by deranged leftists. Matthew Vadum

By on August 8th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270964/new-anne-frank-play-casts-ice-nazis-matthew-vadum

A new leftist politics-tainted theatrical production of The Diary of Anne Frank in Los Angeles outrageously compares the Trump administration to the German Nazi regime by replacing Nazis hunting for Jews with ICE agents tracking down Latino illegal aliens.

Although the play is set to open Sept. 6 in Los Angeles, the comparison between Anne Frank and illegal aliens in the United States is beyond farfetched.

Illegal aliens enter the U.S. without permission. They are, legally speaking, the authors of their own misfortune. Nonetheless, efforts to apprehend them are not persecutory, and when they are caught, they are not persecuted. They are treated humanely at all times. They are given a hearing and due process. If they are found to be present unlawfully in the country, they are removed from it, not sent to forced labor camps of death camps.

Apart from trivializing the deaths of six million Jews and many others under Adolph Hitler’s Nazi regime, the play treats those who enforce our nation’s immigration laws as monstrous genocidal brutes and absurdly equates the idea of maintaining national borders with violent governmental persecution. It is a theatrical manifestation of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

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