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Ruth King

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez alters her campaign bio to fudge ‘girl from the Bronx’ misrepresentation By Thomas Lifson

By on July 8th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/alexandria_ocasiocortez_alters_her_campaign_bio_fudge_girl_from_the_bronx_misrepresentation.html

Now that she’s the “it girl” of the Democrats, who “represents the future of our party,” according to the party chair Tom Perez, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s biographical claims have come under scrutiny, and cannot withstand the sunshine. Most notoriously (for now!) her claim that she commuted 40 minutes from her home in the Bronx to school in Westchester doesn’t pass the smell test. Mark Lungariello, of her actual home town (not the Bronx) Rockland/Westchester Journal News, writes:

U.S. congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s online bio was tweaked days after she faced scrutiny over where she grew up. (snip)

Her bio was called into question by some conservatives after the victory because she lived and went to school in Westchester County, New York, which some critics charged contradicted her Bronx girl campaign narrative.

The bio previously stated, “She ended up attending public school 40 minutes north in Yorktown, and much of her life was defined by the 40-minute commute between school and her family in the Bronx.”

That sentence in the bio has since been changed, though it still doesn’t explicitly state that she moved out of the Bronx to Yorktown when she was 5 years old.

“She ended up attending public school in Yorktown, 40 minutes north of her birthplace,” it now states. “As a result, much of her early life was spent in transit between her tight-knit extended family in the Bronx & her daily student life.”

Face it: she lied. And she still is fudging the truth. “Tight-knit extended family” is a deceptive term meant to imply she lived in the Bronx when in fact she lived in upscale Westchester.

Would you buy a used biography from this woman?

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Victor Davis Hanson: Never Trumpers Told Us Trump Would Be Liberal, He Wasn’t; No Alternative Agenda

By on July 8th, 2018

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/07/06/victor_davis_hanson_never_trumpers_told_us_trump_would_be_liberal_he_wasnt_no_alternative_agenda.html

Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution is interviewed by FOX News’ Tucker Carlson on the lack of agenda from the left and how the anti-Trump faction was wrong about him.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Barack Obama got elected twice but he was an ungodly disaster for the Democratic party. They lost the supermajority, they lost the Senate, they lost the House, they lost 1,000 local state and local offices, they’re going to lose the Supreme Court. And they can’t come to grips with the fact that they control popular cultural — sports, universities, the media — but that turns into this type of street theater you referenced. It doesn’t transfer into actual political power and they’re very frustrated.

The Never Trumpers told us that Trump would be a moderate or a liberal. He wasn’t. The Heritage Foundation said he was more conservative in his first 2 years than Ronald Reagan. The left said he was going to implode or that the Mueller investigation, or impeachment, or the emoluments clause, or they were going to sue under the 25th Amendment. None of that happened. So Trump is almost 50% approval rating.

And the final thing is there’s no alternative agenda. We don’t know what your speaker, your guest, what do they feel about taxes? Do they want more government? More regulation? Less? Is the Iran deal good or bad? We don’t hear any of that. Instead, they fixate on somebody like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, kind of an obscure 28-year-old who won an election with 20% turnout and suddenly that’s a metaphor for a brave new world. So it’s a frustration that they don’t translate their cultural influence into raw political power.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Don’t You Dare Touch Roe!’ — Judicial Confirmation Silly Season Begins By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on July 8th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/supreme-court-unlikely-to-overturn-roe-v-wade/Roe probably won’t be overturned because it probably won’t come up; Casey is the center of abortion law nowadays.

It was my honor to befriend Judge Robert Bork in the last years of his life. Not surprisingly, I don’t find much amusement in the cesspool that judicial-confirmation politics has become since his name became a synonym for slander in 1987 — a debacle that changed history for the worse in more ways than the woodenly whimsical Anthony Kennedy’s assumption of what should have been the Bork seat.

Still, I admit to chuckling over the musings of Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a “moderate” Republican in the Kennedy mold. With the justice announcing his retirement after 30 years on the Court, a confirmation battle royale is shaping up over his successor, whom President Trump is expected to nominate on Monday. On cue, Senator Collins has let it be known that she would look askance at any nominee who has “demonstrated hostility [towards] and an eagerness to overturn Roe v. Wade.”

Go ahead and Roe, Roe, Roe your boat, Senator. Thanks to Justice Kennedy, we’ve actually been living in a Casey world — as in Planned Parenthood v. Casey — for the past quarter century. For good and for ill. “Don’t you dare touch Roe” is the political hyperbole of Democrats and their fellow travelers. It is not a serious legal position — as if serious legal positions had anything to do with confirmation politics.

Here is reality: Casey’s refinement of the right judicially manufactured in Roe granted expansive and expanding room to regulate abortion. The validity of those regulations, not the core holding of Roe, is what dominates abortion litigation nowadays. It is unlikely that cases will present a need to grapple with Roe, it is even less likely that Roe will be overturned, and even if this highly unlikely event were to come to pass, it would not render abortion illegal. Instead, abortion would once again be a question for the states, the vast majority of which would guarantee some degree of access to abortion. We are not going to move into a post-Roe era, but even if we did, no woman who could obtain an abortion today would be unable to get one post-Roe.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Abuse of Egypt’s Coptic Christians by Salim Mansur

By on July 7th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12661/egypt-christians-abuse

The violence, and incitement to violence, directed by Egyptian Muslims against the Copts — especially those organized sectarian campaigns by the Muslim Brotherhood and related groups — are crimes against humanity and should be treated as such by the international community.

We know that a few drops of lemon will curdle an entire bowl of milk. Egypt’s Muslims, as many Muslims elsewhere, have poured the entire Nile River — made toxic by their bigotry and violence — into their faith-tradition. We, Muslims, have degraded our culture by authoritarianism and the obstinate tendency to blame others for our own failings. We have thus perverted the very Islam that we believe is the final revelation.

Muslims in Egypt and elsewhere know from experience the extent to which Western powers have betrayed in practice what they pronounce in theory when it comes to support for people subjected to authoritarian regimes.

What is long overdue from the West is a robust policy to defend and secure human rights for everyone, especially minorities, in Muslim-majority countries… [as in] the Helsinki Agreement of 1975.

We have seen and recoiled from the horrific footage of Coptic Christians beheaded by ISIS in 2015 in Libya and the repeated bombings over the past two decades of Coptic churches in Egypt. We read about the Maspero massacre in 2011, when Egyptian military tanks, deployed to protect peaceful Christian demonstrators, instead rolled over them, crushing many to death. And we continue to receive reports of Coptic girls abducted, compelled to convert to Islam and forced into marriages with Muslims.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why are we so willing to believe in doomsday scenarios that virtually never materialise? Things Are Getting Better, So Why Are We All So Gloomy? By Marian L. Tupy (January 2018)

By on July 7th, 2018

https://humanprogress.org/article.php?p=1084

At the end of last year on CapX, I documented the constant stream of technological, scientific and medical breakthroughs that are improving the lives of billions of ordinary people. Given all this good news, the real question is why people are so unbelievably pessimistic.

Judging by a 2016 poll of close to 20,000 people in some of the world’s richest countries, you could barely overstate the extent of the gloominess. In response to the question “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?”, just 10 per cent in Sweden, 6 per cent in the US, 4 per cent in Germany and 3 per cent in France thought things were getting better. Why? Because, it turns out, we are pessimists by nature.

Over the last 200 years or so, the world has experienced previously unimaginable improvements in standards of living. The process of rapid economic growth started in Europe and America, but today some of the world’s fastest growing countries can be found in Asia and Africa – lifting billions of people from absolute poverty. Historical evidence, therefore, makes a potent case for optimism. Yet, pessimism is everywhere. As the British author Matt Ridley noted in The Rational Optimist:

The bookshops are groaning under ziggurats of pessimism. The airwaves are crammed with doom. In my own adult lifetime, I have listened to the implacable predictions of growing poverty, coming famines, expanding deserts, imminent plagues, impending water wars, inevitable oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, mad-cow epidemics, Y2K computer bugs, killer bees, sex-change fish, global warming, ocean acidification and even asteroid impacts that would presently bring this happy interlude to a terrible end. I cannot recall a time when one or other of these scares was not solemnly espoused by sober, distinguished and serious elites and hysterically echoed by the media. I cannot recall a time when I was not being urged by somebody that the world could only survive if it abandoned the foolish goal of economic growth. The fashionable reason for pessimism changed, but the pessimism was constant. In the 1960s the population explosion and global famine were top of the charts, in the 1970s the exhaustion of resources, in the 1980s acid rain, in the 1990s pandemics, in the 2000s global warming. One by one these scares came and (all but the last) went.

Ridley raises a more specific point that general pessimism: Why are we as a species so willing to believe in doomsday scenarios that virtually never materialise?

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

‘Abolish ICE’ and the Democrats’ Regression to Extremism By Kyle Smith

By on July 7th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/abolish-ice-rhetoric-democrat-self-defeating-strategy/The race to be most radical is a self-defeating strategy.

The Democrats have an all-but-unbeatable potential presidential candidate lined up for 2020. She’s a woman who enjoys an A rating from the National Rifle Association and brags about going out to shoot the family turkey for Thanksgiving. She has spoken out in favor of federal fines for sanctuary cities, supported making English the national language, called for more border enforcement, and opposed driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. She is a fiscal moderate and a proud face of rural America. Ohio? Pennsylvania? Wisconsin? She’d romp in all of them.

Unfortunately for her party, this woman no longer exists. She is Kirsten Gillibrand circa 2008, the days when she was a congresswoman representing New York’s largely rural 20th district. The 2018 Gillibrand has renounced all of these stances, moving left and left and left again. She supports the New New Deal that is today’s progressive economics (Medicare for all, a federal jobs guarantee, a $15 minimum wage) and says she “couldn’t have been more wrong” about her previous support for gun rights. By 2010, her first full year in the Senate, the NRA had altered its rating of her record — to an F. A decade ago Gillibrand was a strong supporter of Israel; these days she is writing hymns of praise in Time magazine for the far-left anti-Semitic activist Linda Sarsour. She was the only senator to vote against confirming James Mattis as secretary of defense.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Harper’s Bazaar Editor Calls for ‘Sex Strike’ to Support Abortion Rights By Faith Moore

By on July 7th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/harpers-bazaar-editor-calls-for-sex-strike-to-support-abortion-rights/

Great news, everybody! Feminists are going on a “sex strike”! That’s right, it’s #Lysistrata2018 and it’s absolutely glorious. Jennifer Wright, political editor-at-large for Harper’s Bazaar, tweeted out the idea on Monday and it’s gaining traction among feminists who don’t understand logic (but I repeat myself).

“We’re very likely to lose Roe Vs. Wade,” Wright tweeted, following the announcement of Justice Kennedy’s retirement. “Some men may think that doesn’t concern them. Make it.” That’s right, feminists are protesting a potential abortion ban by — you gotta love ‘em — suggesting women stop doing the thing that could cause them to feel they need an abortion in the first place. Hold the phone, I think feminists just banned abortion!

Sadly, it’s not that simple. Wright suggests women add a female judge emoji to their “dating profiles” to “show people you won’t date/sleep with anyone who doesn’t support a woman’s right to choose.” She then coins the hashtag #Lysistrata2018.

Lysistrata, for those who don’t know, is a comedy by Aristophanes in which women withhold sex from their men in an attempt to end the Peloponnesian War. Wright’s hashtag — and her entire premise — on the other hand, doesn’t actually do anything.

Wright and her supporters — if I’m following the logic correctly, which is to say, not at all — aren’t withholding sex, per se. They’re only signaling their unwillingness to sleep with or date (which, to modern feminists, is pretty much the same thing) anyone who wouldn’t okay an abortion if he accidentally got her pregnant.

It’s possible that Wright thinks that she and all pro-choice women are so mind-blowingly desirable that anyone who sees their “dating profile” is going to suddenly rethink his moral and political stance for a chance to get her into bed. (How’s that going for ya, Jennifer?) But I think what Wright is really saying is that she believes that all women are pro-choice. Otherwise, why target only men? CONTINUE AT SITE

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Will the FBI Come Clean? Lawmakers demand the truth about the origin of the 2016 Trump investigation. Kimberley Strassel

By on July 7th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-the-fbi-come-clean-1530833315

In the trench war between congressional Republicans and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, we have arrived at a crucial battle. A House resolution sets Friday as the deadline for the Justice Department to come clean on the beginning of its investigation into the Trump campaign. We’ll find out if the FBI has been lying to the public.

That is, if the department complies. It has flouted so many subpoenas, and played so many games with redactions and deadlines, that the entire House GOP united last week to vote for the resolution demanding submission to Congress’s requests for documents. The vote was an order but also a warning—that this is the last chance to comply, and the next step will be to hold officials in contempt. It is a measure of the stakes that even that threat doesn’t guarantee cooperation.

At issue is the FBI’s “origin story,” in which it claims its full-fledged investigation into a presidential campaign was conducted, as it were, by the book. According to this narrative, the FBI did not launch its probe until July 31, 2016, only after Australia tipped it to a conversation junior Trump aide George Papadopoulos had with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in the spring of 2016 in London. Only after this formal commencement of a counterintelligence probe—Crossfire Hurricane—did the FBI begin to target U.S. citizens with spying, wiretapping and other tools usually reserved for foreign infiltrators. Or so the story goes.

This account, relayed by the New York Times in December 2017, has proved highly convenient for the FBI. The Australian “government” connection allowed the bureau to infuse the meaningless Papadopoulos conversation with significance, justifying the probe. The origin story suggested the FBI had followed procedure. Mostly, it countered the growing suspicion that the bureau had been snooping on a presidential campaign on the basis of truly disreputable info—a dossier of salacious information compiled by an opposition research firm working for the rival campaign. CONTINUE AT SITE

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Social-Justice Mob Takes Montreal A theater yields to the philistines and shuts down a critically acclaimed musical about slavery. By Elliot Kaufman

By on July 7th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-social-justice-mob-takes-montreal-1530914174?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=3&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Betty Bonifassi has spent 18 years researching, reworking and performing slave songs. In “SLĀV,” the hit new play on the same topic, she is the lead singer—or was. The Montreal International Jazz Festival canceled “SLĀV” on Wednesday: “We would like to apologize to those who were hurt.” Why the pain? Because Ms. Bonifassi and director Robert Lepage are white. Two of the seven cast members were black, but they won’t be performing either.

“SLĀV” sold out its first five shows and was booked for 11 more at Montreal’s Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. It also received glowing reviews in the Quebecois press. One critic wrote that the show reminds him of the “need to overcome” and makes him feel “ashamed” of his own “insane non-activism.” A writer at Le Journal de Montréal credits it with “demonstrating the absurdity of racism.”

Ms. Bonifassi, whose mother is Serbian and who sings the play’s first slave songs in Bulgarian, has said that because of her own heritage, she feels “touched by slavery.” “SLĀV” makes its way from the Balkans through Ireland and Quebec before reaching the U.S., where it not only confronts slavery but depicts a present-day black American jogger arrested for no reason.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Marquette’s Black Eye A professor’s victory for contracts and academic freedom.

By on July 7th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/marquettes-black-eye-1530916646

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has given Marquette University a bracing refresher on contracts and academic freedom. In a decision overturning a lower court’s dismissal of the case, the court on Friday ruled that Marquette breached its contract with political science professor John McAdams when it disciplined him “for exercising his contractually protected right of academic freedom.”

The case stems from a blog post by Mr. McAdams about a graduate instructor who had told a Marquette student that opinions against same-sex marriage would not be tolerated in her ethics class. The university says Mr. McAdams proved himself unfit by naming the graduate instructor, Cheryl Abbate, and linking to her publicly available website in his post on the encounter, so it suspended him. Even after losing the case Friday, the university continues to accuse Mr. McAdams of having used his blog to intentionally expose “her name and contact information to a hostile audience that sent her vile and threatening messages.”

The court is categorical in rejecting this argument. “Our review of the blog post,” reads the majority opinion, “reveals that it makes no ad hominem attack on Instructor Abbate, nor does it invite readers to be uncivil to her, either explicitly or implicitly.”

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