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Ruth King

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Saeed Shah and Bill Spindle:Pakistan’s New Leader Vows to Reset Relations With U.S. After sweeping to power in a disputed election, Imran Khan calls for a ‘mutually beneficial’ relationship, lays out an ambitious domestic agenda

By on July 27th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-cricket-star-imran-khan-claims-victory-in-pakistan-election-1532609185

Former cricket star Imran Khan swept to power in a disputed Pakistani election, upending the political landscape in a fragile democracy that now stands to be led by a sharp critic of the U.S.

The scale of victory far exceeded expert predictions, based on near-final vote counts in much-delayed results from Wednesday’s election, which will likely allow his party to form a government on its own and to appoint him prime minister.

But his win, which many of his rivals denounced as being marred by irregularities and help from the powerful military, also involved political compromises that critics say could undercut his ambitious agenda.

“I will prove that we can fix our governance system,” Mr. Khan said in his victory speech on Thursday. “All our policies will be aimed to help the weakest members of our society.”

Mr. Khan called for a new, “mutually beneficial,” relationship with the U.S. that breaks with the antiterrorism partnership seen since 2001.

“Unfortunately up to now, our relationship has been one-way. America pays Pakistan for fighting its war, which has really damaged Pakistan,” he said.

Mr. Khan has said U.S. soldiers must leave Afghanistan as there is no military solution there. Washington may also be moving toward direct peace talks with the Taliban, and it will find Mr. Khan’s government helpful for exiting Afghanistan, the party says.

However, if the Trump administration continues with the policy, announced last year, of an enhanced military presence in Afghanistan, it could find Mr. Khan to be a stubborn thorn.

Washington considers Islamabad’s help vital in stabilizing Afghanistan, and U.S. military supply lines also pass through Pakistan. In addition, he is an implacable opponent of U.S. drone strikes inside Pakistan.

A U.S. official said it welcomes an opportunity to work with Pakistan’s new government “to advance our goals of security, stability, and prosperity in South Asia.”

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POLITICS Comments turned off

McCaskill’s Intimidation Game The Missouri senator runs attack ads not on her opponent but one of his supporters. Kimberley Strassel

By on July 27th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mccaskills-intimidation-game-1532646222

If you’ve tuned in to this year’s midterms, chances are you know about that hot Senate race in Missouri: McCaskill vs. Humphreys. Oh, wait.

Democrat Claire McCaskill is indeed facing a tough re-election, trying for a third term. She’s had a particularly rough week, after the Kansas City Star reported that businesses tied to her husband had been awarded $131 million in federal contracts since she took office in 2007. Her putative opponent is the constitutional conservative Josh Hawley, the current attorney general and the strong favorite to win the GOP primary on Aug. 7.

Team McCaskill is already employing the Democratic Party’s go-to tactic this midterm: character assassination. There’s not much else. The economy is humming, the party’s centrist and liberal wings are fighting, and the drumbeat of impending Trump doom isn’t finding much accompaniment. So in Missouri as elsewhere, candidates are reverting to personal attacks. But the McCaskill forces are piling on a guy who isn’t even running.

Indeed, they are attacking a private citizen and donor, David Humphreys. Back in March, Chuck Schumer’s Senate Majority PAC began plowing millions into attacks on the businessman, who donated to Mr. Hawley’s campaign for attorney general. The pattern is the same: An ad makes a malicious accusation against Mr. Humphreys, then sidles over to tar Mr. Hawley with guilt by association. Just how invested are they in this strategy? Since airing their first spot, 70% of Democratic ads—amounting to $4.7 million—have been focused on Mr. Humphreys.

Ms. McCaskill’s pickle is that the GOP has upped its recruitment game. Her only prior re-election bid in 2012 had her face off against Todd Akin, who self-immolated after his blundering comments on abortion and rape. Mr. Hawley—a savvier, younger man and squeaky clean—hasn’t provided a similar opening. A native Missourian and onetime U.S. Supreme Court law clerk, he arrived on the political scene only in 2016, becoming the Show Me State’s first Republican attorney general in 24 years.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Endangered Species Scare A 1970s law gets a modest implementation review. Panic ensues.

By on July 27th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/endangered-species-scare-1532646111

By now you may have seen the photos of baby owls that will ostensibly be extinct once Donald Trump finishes demolishing protections for endangered species. Such dystopian predictions warrant a more rational look at the Trump Administration’s efforts to update a 1970s law that isn’t accomplishing what its supporters claim.

The Interior and Commerce departments are accepting feedback on proposals to clarify regulations related to the Endangered Species Act, which Congress hasn’t updated in more than 25 years. The law is a golden idol of the environmental left, though its goal is species recovery and less than 2% of listed species are delisted.

Wyoming Governor Matt Mead noted recently that it “took five lawsuits and fifteen years to delist a recovered gray wolf population in Wyoming,” while the Canada lynx listed some 18 years ago still has “no discernible path to recovery.” Private land owners have little incentive to help because spotting an endangered species is a death sentence for the productive use of their property.

Interior’s sensible principle seems to be that the law should be more predictable, including harmonizing the standards for listing and delisting. The current process makes it easy to list a species but hard to remove it even when the evidence of recovery is compelling. Also welcome is a proposal that wildlife classified as “threatened” won’t receive full treatment as “endangered,” which has defeated the purpose of a distinction that is supposed to allow for proactive rehabilitation.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Dignity for the Palestinians by Denis MacEoin

By on July 27th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12762/dignity-for-the-palestinians

Given that all Palestinian leaderships have called for a Palestinian state that will encompass and obliterate the state of Israel, it is not surprising that they cannot bear to accept any proposal that will give them only one small state (or two small states) in the territory allotted to them by the United Nations in 1947.

Re-imposition of Islamic waqf law will not restore Spain, Portugal, Sicily, India, Greece and all the other states of the abandoned caliphal empires to Muslim rule, and it is futile to think that is nothing more than a fantasy.

A recent US report revealed that there are, it seems, actually no more than 20,000 Palestinian refugees in the world.

In the end, it is so-called pro-Palestinian activists such as Robert Fisk or writers for papers such as The Independent, The Guardian, or the New York Times who do their utmost to persuade the world to favour Palestinian intransigence over offers of upgrading lives and international law.

Anyone who cares for Israel, who aspires to peace, who has a good understanding of the historical, ethical, political, and legal facts that underpin the right of the Jewish people to a state of which they are the indigenous people, will be familiar with the name of Robert Fisk. But not in a good way.

For decades, Fisk has been one of the most unrelenting of Israel’s many haters and one of the most uncritical supporters of the rights of the Palestinians and their unending calls and actions aimed at the total destruction of Israel and the expulsion or massacre of the Jewish people living there.[1]

Fisk is a clever man. He took his PhD in 1983 from Trinity College, Dublin, an ancient and respected university. Although his doctorate was in political science on a topic related to Ireland and Britain, he has worked as the Middle East correspondent for the Times (1976-1988) and, since 1989, for the left-wing daily, The Independent.

Over the years, he has reported on many wars in many countries and has written and co-authored many books about them, all of them about their conflicts.[2]

Given his Jack-of-all trades character, it is not surprising that Fisk does not always get his facts straight, and for this he has often been criticized by people with deeper knowledge, as here or here: He is opinionated, often in an extreme way, functioning more as an activist than a reporter. According to UKMediaWatch:

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Lies of the Soros-Backed Immigration Lobby Why Americans should worry about their dishonest agenda. Michael Cutler

By on July 27th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270859/lies-soros-backed-immigration-lobby-michael-cutler
The George Soros-backed American Immigration Council is the latest group hell-bent on “resisting” commonsense immigration enforcement in the U.S. Several in this group are, themselves, practicing immigration attorneys who should know the truth about the dangers of open borders policies in communities across the U.S. However, however, many lawyers at the American Immigration Council gloss over facts and, instead, promote dangerously false information about the legal aspects of the immigration issue.

One such example of the white-washing lawyers at the American Immigration Council is Joshua Breisblatt, the group’s Senior Policy Analyst and an immigration attorney with an extensive background in immigration law and the lobbying efforts mounted in the Halls of Congress to push the open borders agenda. His bio notes that he had worked for Former Congressman Harry Mitchell of Arizona. Breisblatt penned an outrageously deceitful article on the group’s website titled: “USCIS Is Slowly Being Morphed Into an Immigration Enforcement Agency.”

The article begins with these three paragraphs:

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) issued new guidance to initiate deportation proceedings for thousands of applicants denied for any immigration benefit. This policy change will have far-reaching implications for many of those interacting with the agency, but also signals a major shift in how USCIS operates.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Ridicule, Not Reasoned Debate, Is the Best Medicine for Political Cults Time to take off the gloves. Bruce Thornton

By on July 27th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270858/ridicule-not-reasoned-debate-best-medicine-bruce-thornton

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley recently told a high school audience that conservatives shouldn’t delight in “owning the libs” –– i.e. triggering a progressive into a hysterical response that you proceed to make fun of. Instead, we should be “persuading” progs with reasoned argument and “bringing people around to your point of view,” as Haley said.

In that way, we make a convert rather than energize partisans into clinging more tightly to their beliefs and voting to empower them.

Having spent more than 40 years in the incubators of today’s leftist nonsense, universities, I am skeptical about the power of reasoned argument among today’s ill-educated students. Most of their teachers, like most progressives, are pretty much immune to reason, evidence, and coherent argument, little of which makes it into their courses. As the old gag goes, arguing with a leftist is like playing chess with a pigeon: It knocks over the pieces, craps on the board, then struts around like it won the game. Reasoned argument cuts no ice when confronted with the irrational caprices and gratifying passions of human beings.

In fact, the assumption behind Haley’s plea is the old Socratic one that virtue is knowledge, that if one knows the good, one will do the good––one of the foundational bad ideas of modernity. When people believe wrong or dangerous ideas, the paradigm goes, that’s because they’re deficient in knowledge. They just need to be better informed of the facts, and better trained to spot incoherent and fallacious arguments.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who Leaked the Trump Tape? by Alan M. Dershowitz

By on July 27th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12767/who-leaked-the-trump-tape

The reason this is important to all Americans, beyond the immediate parties to this taped conversation, is that it may well discourage clients, patients, penitents and others from confiding in their lawyers, doctors, priests and the professionals who promise them confidentiality.

Cohen promised confidentiality and yet the world heard what his client confided in him.

Obviously, people who are willing improperly to leak confidential material may also be willing to lie about it under oath, but the consequences of lying under oath are greater than leaking, since leaking is not a crime but perjury is.

Someone leaked the lawyer/client confidential tape containing a conversation between President Donald J. Trump and his lawyer Michael Cohen. A former judge, assigned by the presiding judge to evaluate the seized tapes, reportedly concluded that this conversation was privileged. Yet someone leaked their contents. The President Trump’s current lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, then waived the privilege as to that tape. He said he never would have waived it had its existence and content not been improperly leaked.

So, the question remains: Who leaked this privileged material? If it was anyone in the Trump camp, there would be no violation of confidentiality, as the privilege belongs to the client, namely Trump, who can waive it. But no one else, most especially his lawyer, may properly waive the privilege. And Giuliani has categorically denied that it was leaked by Trump or anyone on his behalf. Indeed, he has expressed outrage at the leak.

Whom does that leave? Cohen is an obvious suspect, although I am confident that his excellent and experienced lawyer, Lanny Davis, would not have done so. Perhaps Cohen himself, who ran into Michael Avenatti at a restaurant, told him about the tape. We simply do not know.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

JAMIE GLAZOV’S NEW BOOK: “JIHADIST PSYCHOPATH”

By on July 26th, 2018

http://jamieglazov.com/2018/07/26/jamie-glazovs-new-book-jihadist-psychopath/

Jihadist Psychopath: How He Is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us.

Jihadist Psychopath offers an original and ground-breaking perspective on the terror war. Like no other work, it unveils the world of psychopathy and reveals, step by step, how Islamic Supremacists are duplicating the sinister methodology of psychopaths who routinely charm, seduce, capture, and devour their prey.

Jihadist Psychopath unveils how every element of the formula by which the psychopath subjugates his victim is used by the Islamic Supremacist to ensnare and subjugate non-Muslims. And in the same way that the victim of the psychopath is complicit in his own destruction, so too Western civilization is now embracing and enabling its own conquest and consumption.

President Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton says about Jihadist Psychopath:

Hard as it is to believe, many in the West simply will not take the time and trouble to understand the threat posed by radical Islamicist terrorism. James Burnham once wrote of a similar problem with international Communism in his masterful Suicide of the West. Now, Jamie Glazov has written this century’s counterpart to Burnham’s classic work and will doubtless upset those determined not to analyze for themselves the nature of the underlying phenomenon.

With a Foreword written by Michael Ledeen, glowing advance praise also comes from Dennis Prager, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer, Steve Emerson and many other titans and scholars in the international arena. (See Amazon page for many of the blurbs).

Dennis Prager affirms that Jihadist Psychopath is “…one of the most important books of the present time.”

And that’s why you have to pre-order a copy now. Order Jihadist Psychopath Today!

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Kathy Gyngell Revolutionary Transgenderism

By on July 26th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/06/revolutionary-transgenderism-march/
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/06/revolutionary-transgenderism-march/
Kathy Gyngell is co-editor of the Conservative Woman website (www.conservativewoman.co.uk ).

Gender has nothing to with biology, don’t you know — and should you beg to differ, if you cling to the view of there being only two sexes, brace for the sanctions various legislatures around the world are keen to impose on those who persist in thinking unacceptable thoughts.

Revolutionary transgenderism is on the march in Britain, with the blessing of a Conservative Prime Minister. The delayed consultations on proposed changes to the government’s new Gender Recognition Act that Theresa May promises are to go ahead. It is likely that, though opposed by traditional feminists as well as social conservatives, the Gender Recognition Act, backed by Labour, will pass through the Commons and into law.

Last October, in a speech to Pink News, an LGBT website, Mrs May reiterated her previous commitment to improving “trans” rights and to changing the current gender recognition law to make “self-identification” easier, something that had never featured in a Conservative election manifesto. (By contrast Labour’s manifesto had included specific commitments to tackling bullying of LGBT young people and to ensuring that the new guidance for relationships and sex education is LGBT inclusive. It also promised to bring the law on LGBT hate crimes into line with hate crimes based on race and faith, and most importantly to reform the Gender Recognition Act and the Equality Act 2010 to ensure they protect transgender people by changing the protected characteristic of “gender assignment” to “gender identity” and remove other supposedly outdated language such as “transsexual”.)

Mrs May explained to her hosts: “We’ve set out plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act, streamlining and de-medicalising the process for changing gender, because being trans is not an illness and it shouldn’t be treated as such.” Sex change would, she promised, become a matter of choice, rather than of diagnosis.

Earlier in the summer, Justine Greening (the Minister for Women and Equalities and Secretary of State for Education) had announced that gender could be legally changed without any medical diagnosis, and promised publication of a consultation on a new Gender Recognition Act. Medics have described her zeal in applying this thinking to policy as unscientific, dangerous and part of a wider social strategy. The implications of establishing such a “right” of self-identification in the law are profound. Yet there has been next to no debate on them in the Party.

In a stroke “gender” and “sex” would be treated as being the same, though in reality “sex” is what we are biologically born with as dictated by either XX or XY chromosomes, yet gender as a social construct simply reflects the roles we take on as a result of the sex we are born into (which themselves are increasingly subject to debate).

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Uncomfortable: MSNBC host uses anti-Semitic slur to rhyme the name of Jewish lawyer Michael Cohen By Thomas Lifson

By on July 26th, 2018

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

It’s the sort verbal gaffe that could end a career if another ethnic group had been involved – even if, as I am fairly certain in this case, no ethnic animus was involved. Recall, for instance, the Washington, D.C. official who was forced to resign following his use of the word “niggardly” at a public meeting. (He was later offered his job back when linguistic experts pointed out the word has origins in Middle English and has nothing to do with race.)

Even so, it was an appalling lapse.

NewsBusters explains:

MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson crashed and burned Wednesday while attempting to plug an NBC News report during the final moments of her morning show. In a spectacular display of poor judgment, the MSNBC Live host attempted to rhyme former Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s name with a made-up word, and wound up using what sounded like an anti-Semitic slur in the process: “Kikle.” Mr. Cohen is Jewish.

Here is video of the incident:

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