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Ruth King

POLITICS Comments turned off

Democrats’ Competing Midterm Messages on the Economy by Adele Malpass

By on June 28th, 2018

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/
As the midterm election season heats up, a mixed economic message is coming from Democratic congressional candidates as the progressive wing finds itself at odds with party moderates. Partly, this is a reflection of the difficulty the out-of-power party has getting traction during robust economic times. The 2018 midterms are taking place at a time when the unemployment rate is at its lowest point in 18 years. But this dichotomy is also indicative of the Democratic Party’s leftward movement. The moderate wing is in shock after 10-term New York Congressman Joe Crowley lost a primary battle Tuesday to Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old underfunded outsider candidate to the left of “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders.

Progressives have absorbed the Sanders playbook and are campaigning on platforms advocating free college tuition, free single-payer health care, and a jobs guarantee program for all. This is on top of calls for a $15 minimum wage and a new affordable housing mandate to address income and wealth inequality. They insist that this all can be done by taxing Wall Street, millionaires and rolling back the recent Republican tax cuts.

They will get a chance to test their liberal economic message in one of the most watched midterm races, a congressional election in Orange County, California, where Mimi Walters is the two-term Republican incumbent. This is an upscale swing voter district that Hillary Clinton won by five percentage points. Democrats have identified it as a key district to flip in their quest to retake the House. Facing Walters in the November general election is Katie Porter, a Democrat who finished a distant second to Walters in California’s “top-two” primary system.

Porter, a university professor and a protégé of Elizabeth Warren’s from her Harvard days, has been dubbed the “Elizabeth Warren of the West.” She has endorsed Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” proposal, touts Nancy Pelosi’s plan to roll back the recently passed tax cuts, and insists that wealthy corporations “pay their fair share.”

However, her close association with Warren, which includes a fundraiser headlined by the Massachusetts liberal and numerous photos with her, are viewed as a vulnerability by some Republicans. “Katie Porter is out of touch with this district as a far-left progressive,” said Courtney Alexander, communications director of the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with the Republican House leadership. “Going into the fall, she will be a sharp contrast to the Republican message of less taxes.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: PUTTING CHILDREN FIRST….IN THE LINE OF MEDIA FIRE

By on June 27th, 2018

There is an iconic picture of a child, a young boy, terrified, holding his hands up as armed Nazis surround and round up the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Pictures of children who are injured or at risk evoke a special horror among decent people.

Indecent journalists exploit and stage such photographs to further bias and political agenda. A recent Time magazine cover is an example. In Gaza, Hamas paid the grieving family of a dead baby, Layla al-Ghandour to use her photo to blame Israeli troops who fired on violent “demonstrators” along the Gaza border with Israel.

Nothing is new here.

In August of 1982 during the first Lebanon/Israel War, front pages and television footage were flooded with pictures of a Lebanese baby with bandages covering her body. The headlines and networks screamed: “ A baby who lost both arms was severely burned as a result of a bomb dropped by and Israeli plane.”

Then U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz, by every measure a decent and fair man, declared after being shown the photograph and headline: “The symbol of this war is a baby whose arms have been amputated.”

Harsh words indeed, but totally wrong. The baby, it was soon disclosed, had not lost any limbs nor suffered severe burns. In fact, the light injuries were sustained from a shell misfired by the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Many years later, following the terrorist spree that segued the Oslo Agreement, the mainstream media failed to notice or record photos of mangled baby strollers or the blood soaked sheets of a crib in Israel.

Telling truth to biased journalists is akin to casting pearls before swine. rsk

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

European Terrorism: The ‘Batman Syndrome’ by Giulio Meotti

By on June 27th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12567/european-terrorism-batman-syndrome

“It is the ‘Batman syndrome’: the hero refuses to kill, he systematically saves his enemy who escapes and kills new victims until the hero catches up with him, and so on”. — Causeur magazine.

“These crimes will continue so long as the Republic leaves the enemy in peace”. — Ivan Riofoul, Le Figaro.

In the end, there might be still a region called “Europe”, but it may no longer enfold European culture.

The European Union lost €180 billion (USD $210 billion) in GDP due to terrorism between 2004 and 2016. The United Kingdom (€43.7 billion) and France (€43 billion) suffered the highest losses, followed by Spain (€40.8 billion) and Germany (€19.2 billion), according to a Rand Corporation study.

“Beyond those who have been directly physically affected by terrorist attacks, the extensive coverage of terrorist attacks through multiple media and social media channels has substantially increased the amount of people and companies that could be psychologically affected. This subsequently affects their economic behaviour”.

New statistics have also come from the Britain’s anti-terrorism office. 441 people have been arrested in the UK for terrorism in the last year alone, and 4,182 since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The threat of terrorism is exhausting Europe.

According to the Spanish “black book” of terrorism, 658 Europeans have been murdered in terror attacks on European soil, while 1,029 Europeans have been killed by them abroad. Half of the French army has been deployed within the French Republic to protect the civilian targets, such as schools, monuments, and religious sites. Europe’s armies are exhausted from patrolling the streets, to the point that NATO planners now fear that, over time, European armies “may get better at guarding railway stations and airports than fighting wars”. An officer who recently returned from Afghanistan for guard duty in Belgium said: “We are standing around like flowers pots, just waiting to be smashed”. Germany also sent troops into the streets for the first time since the Second World War.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Years after Genocide, Yazidis Urgently Need Help by Uzay Bulut

By on June 27th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12590/yazidis-need-help

There are two types of aid urgently needed by Yazidis at Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps in northern Iraq, according to Saad Babir, media director of Yazda: psychological support for the victims of genocide, and basic services such as healthcare, food, water, electricity, heat, new tents — and even firetrucks and ambulances. Many Yazidis have died in IDP camps due to a lack of the latter two.

“When I was in the camps, I noticed that when UN officials came in to do an assessment, the Yazidi people were not able to tell them the truth about what was happening for fear of retaliation from the country’s leaders.” — Dawood Saleh, Yazidi author and activist.

“We wrote many reports to the UN, for it to consider Yazidis in the camps refugees, due to their dangerous situation, but our pleas were rejected. The UN has not reported on the situation accurately and sufficiently to enable Western countries to help Yazidis more.” — Dawood Saleh.

On June 13, Mark Green, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), finally offered some good news for the persecuted Christians and Yazidis in Iraq. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled: “Help Is on the Way for Middle Eastern Christians,” he wrote:

“Every day of delay brings persecuted communities that much closer to extinction. In Iraq alone, nearly 90% of Christians have fled in the past 15 years, emptying entire villages that had stood for more than a thousand years. The Yazidi population has been similarly decimated. Without immediate additional support, these groups may be forced to continue their unprecedented exodus, perhaps never to return to their ancient homes.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

It’s Getting Dangerous to Disagree in America By Karin McQuillan

By on June 27th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/27/it-is-dangerous-to-be-

This weekend, Sarah Sanders Huckabee and her family were thrown out of a Virginia restaurant after a vote by the staff.

Do not trivialize this as a failure of civility, or a small incident in the soap opera of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Victor Davis Hanson says it will pass. It is not passing. It is growing. This is more than an assault on the Trump Administration; it is an assault on all of us.

Everywhere, in city, town, and country, Republicans keep their mouths shut among their neighbors, at dinner parties, at community gatherings, at their workplaces. To be openly Republican is to lose old friends, to alienate neighbors, to risk losing your job or career. Everyone on the Right has experienced this.

President Trump is adept at protecting himself. His policy successes speak louder than the hysteria. What about the rest of us? Ordinary people are vulnerable.

If a highly qualified job candidate votes Republican, his or her chance of employment shrinks to 7 percent in journalism, 3 percent in Ivy League colleges, 7 percent in Hollywood, and 10 percent in Silicon Valley.

Fields that create our educational, cultural, and technological world are deprived of the talent pool of roughly half the country. It also means the country is subjected to political thought control in precisely the fields that determine people’s cultural norms and values and shape their politics.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

My Attendance at a “Rally for Palestine” Something was missing. Hugh Fitzgerald

By on June 27th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270563/my-attendance-rally-palestine-hugh-fitzgerald

I recently attended a Rally for Palestine in the main square of a medium-sized French city close to Marseille. There were flags aflutter of the State of Palestine, two booths full of anti-Zionist propaganda, French middle-aged leftists, committed to the cause, concolorous in their political views with their American cousins of circa 1970, all granola and granny glasses. There were pamphlets of testimonies by “Palestinians” describing the unbelievable behavior of the Zionists, when they started the 1948 war, and then the 1956 Sinai war, and then the 1967 war, and the 1973 war, and several wars made on the peaceful citizens of Gaza — all entirely unprovoked attacks by the monstrous Israelis. There were flags of Palestine for sale. There were photographs of Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. There was something — I couldn’t make out the title — by Noam Chomsky. But what attracted my attention the most were the four outline maps of “Palestine” that were spread out on the ground, depicting an ever-expanding seizure of Arab land by the Zionist “settlers.”

The first map of “Palestine” showed it in 1946 as almost entirely Arab, with a handful of diminutive Jewish islands in an Arab sea.

The other three maps told a tale of inexorable Zionist expansion. The second map showed Palestine according to the U.N. Partition Plan of 1947. Palestine is still overwhelmingly Arab, but with a little more land area — still discontinuous bits — than in the 1946 map, assigned to the Jews. Then a map showing Israel just before, and then just after, the Six-Day War. No discussion of what caused the Six-Day War. No display of the Sinai as part of the territory Israel won in that war, or mention of how it was given back to Egypt by the Israelis.

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BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Honor Killing and Islam A new book documents the spread of a vicious practice into the West. Ibn Warraq

By on June 27th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270515/honor-killing-and-islam-ibn-warraq

Phyllis Chesler pioneered the study of violence against women in the late 1960s, concentrating on women living in North America and Europe. By 2003, she was writing about honor killings, based on newspaper accounts, Internet sources, interviews, and memoirs. She then embarked on a series of equally pioneering, meticulously researched, academic studies of honor killings in the West, but also in the Middle East and South Asia. These studies and over 90 articles on the same subject are collected for the first time in A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killing.

Chesler carefully distinguishes honor killings from “plain and psychopathic homicides, serial killings, crimes of passion, revenge killings, and domestic violence.” An honor killing is the murder of girls and women by their families because of supposedly disgraceful acts perceived to have brought public shame. Honor killings are a family collaboration and even considered by their perpetrators to be legally justifiable acts of self-defense, because the murdered girls’ dishonor is regarded as an aggressive act against their families. It demands a response.

In her second of four in-depth studies first published in The Middle East Quarterly, Chesler looked at 172 incidents and 230 honor-killing victims. She gathered most of her information from English-language media around the world. “There were 100 victims murdered for honor in the West, including 33 in North America and 67 in Europe,” Chesler found. “There were 130 additional victims in the Muslim world. Most of the perpetrators were Muslims, as were their victims, and most of the victims were women.” Indeed, while Sikhs and Hindus do commit such murders, the honor killings in her study, both those in the West and in the rest of the world, are mainly Muslim-on-Muslim crimes.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Iranian Spy Who Helped Create Two Terror States Inside Israel The price of peace is treason. Daniel Greenfield

By on June 27th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270545/iranian-spy-who-helped-create-two-terror-states-daniel-greenfield

When the Oslo deal that would create two Islamic terror states inside Israel came up for a vote in the Knesset, the legislator whose vote helped it pass is the same man now accused of spying for Iran.

The strange story of Gonen Segev, doctor, Minister of Energy, drug smuggler, Nigerian exile and now accused Iranian spy, is also that of the dirty politics behind the peace process. It wasn’t idealism that made the deal with the PLO. It was dirty backroom deals with dangerously unprincipled politicians.

Segev’s cousin had testified in court that he was “a pathological liar who makes excuses and evades responsibilities for his actions.” But the same is true of the Israeli left which brought Segev on board.

The alleged Iranian spy began his political career on the right. But 3 years after he became one of the youngest members of Israel’s legislature, he aligned with the left and helped pass an agreement with the PLO that is the second biggest threat to Israel’s existence after Iran’s nuclear weapons.

It’s only fitting that Gonen Segev, whose political life hit its terrible peak with the PLO deal, should climax his post-political criminal career by standing accused of spying for Israel’s worst enemy.

And the former politician and defrocked doctor has the same excuse for the latter crime as for the former one. He wanted to be a hero. But Gonen Segev doesn’t have a history of being a hero.

What he does have is a history of being willing to do anything for money.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

An update on surface-based temperature data By Dale Leuck

By on June 27th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/an_update_on_surfacebased_temperature_data.html

It is helpful to update and evaluate temperature data occasionally. Accordingly, I have done so in the chart below, using data maintained by the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (part of NASA). The data is actually collected by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It extends from 1880 and is typically cited as providing the most reliable surface temperature anomalies available, and is available here, While it has serious flaws, it is the best available, and has been cited by NASA and quoted in the Washington Post as demonstrating 2016 to be the warmest year on record, with each of the first six months setting new records (see red below). But, notice the heating had begun in late 2015, a period that also coincided with one of the strongest El Ninos on record, and arguably explains the spike in temperatures in early 2016. By 2017, temperature anomalies had dropped significantly, with the first five months being about average over the last six years. In total, temperature anomalies where below year-previous levels for a total of 20 consecutive months, from October 2016 through May of 2018.

Those who failed to emphasize the importance of El Nino in heat spikes were guilty of serious malfeasance. But, that has been the story of climate “science” at least since Michael Mann and others spliced several sets of data together, much of it “proxy” data tree rings, ice samples, etc. in order to get a long time series that would show a “hockey stick” effect in recent years. Climategate demonstrated the full depth of corruption, with emails revealing collusion among many involved.

A 123-page paper by Christopher Booker, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), explains how a few strong personalities formulated and perpetuated what amounts to a hoax. The first of these was a Swedish meteorologist, Professor Bert Bolin (1925-2007). Bolin presented his views in 1979 at a first-ever meeting of the “World Climate Conference,” sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a 191-member country agency of the UN headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. Six years later, Bolin presented a longer paper for a 1985 conference in Villach, Austria, in which he concluded that “human-induced climate change” called for urgent action at the “highest level.”

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BOOKS, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Librarians without Chests: A Response to the ALSC’s Denigration of Laura Ingalls Wilder By Dedra McDonald Birzer

By on June 27th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/laura-ingalls-wilder-alsc-award-removal/

In favor of safe spaces and trigger-free zones, a network of professional librarians seeks to destroy a beloved literary heroine and malign her creator.

The Association for Library Services to Children (ALSC) decided on June 23 to strip Laura Ingalls Wilder’s name from an award established in 1954 to honor “the lasting contribution which [her] books have made to literature for children.” The telegram Wilder received on her 87th birthday informing her of the award continued, “In future years the award will be made in your name and be called the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award.” Overturning 65 years of honoring the most significant legacies in children’s literature with an award named for Wilder, the current ALSC noted “anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in her work” when it called for a review of the award in February 2018. The decision this week followed that review process. “This decision was made in consideration of the fact that Wilder’s legacy, as represented by her body of work, includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values of inclusiveness, integrity and respect, and responsiveness,” according to the statement on the organization’s website.

The ALSC’s renaming of the Wilder medal to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award erases the fundamental role Wilder played in creating the genre of juvenile fiction. Wilder’s work and its lasting impact on every generation of children since the publication of Little House in the Big Woods (1932) served as the impetus for the establishment of the award. It would be more honest for the ALSC to just scrap the award altogether and start afresh. The stated “core values” are vague enough to allow the group to take this award in any direction the wind happens to be blowing. What is “responsiveness” in children’s literature, anyway? Responsiveness to what? And just who is included when “inclusivity” is touted as a core value? Whatever happened to children’s literature that told good stories that sparked children’s curiosity about history? Wilder’s books have certainly done this and more, inspiring a multitude of related works, both fiction and non-fiction.

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