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Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Thank You for Tax Reform Fourth quarter GDP shows the economy needed a growth boost.

By on January 27th, 2018

The “secular stagnation” thesis is having a bad year. Readers will recall that this idea, popularized by former Obama White House economist Larry Summers, held that America is fated to endure slow economic growth. This conveniently justified the Obama era’s historic slow growth as an inevitable deus ex machina, and Mr. Summers’s policy advice was for government to borrow more money to spend on public works.

A year after the Obama economists left town, stagnation may be following them back to Harvard. The Commerce Department announced Friday that the U.S. economy grew 2.6% in the fourth quarter of 2017, below what most economists expected but the third straight quarter of solid growth.

The details of the GDP report were stronger than the top line that was reduced by the volatile categories of trade and inventories. A fall in inventories accounted for most of the decline in growth from the third quarter, but inventories ebb and flow and the measure will rebound in future quarters. Exports rose more slowly (6.9%) than imports (13.9%), which reduced the trade contribution to GDP.

Consumer spending rose a healthy 3.8% in the quarter, while business nonresidential investment climbed 6.8%. The latter continues the trend during 2017 of rising capital spending, which underperformed across the Obama years. It’s not too much to say that capital was on strike as CEOs and small-business owners tried to avoid becoming a target of new taxes or Obama regulators.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Why the Academic Left Fears and Loathes Dr. Jordan Peterson By John Dale Dunn

By on January 27th, 2018

Who is this man, this Jordan Peterson, academic clinical psychologist, tenured at the University of Toronto with hundreds of thousands of YouTube followers, who has made a splash recently as a voice of reason, battling the political correctness elites and upsetting the academic grandees?

Less than a week ago, we got a stormy weather alert in an article that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “What’s So Dangerous about Jordan Peterson?” by Tom Bartlett, with the tease “Not long ago, he was an obscure psychology professor. Now he leads a flock of die-hard disciples.” One might suppose, considering Mr. Bartlett’s choice of words, that Peterson is a Jim Jones-style cult-leader, but instinctively, I knew I would like to find out about anybody described as dangerous by the trade paper of American higher education.

Mr. Bartlett considers Dr. Peterson a threat because Peterson deviates from the leftist academic canon – a conservative, traditionalist, moralist anti-political correctness psychologist academic. He objects to the speech police and the tyranny of the left. He that a totalitarian-speech police state is developing in Canada, and, by instinct and conviction, he objects strongly to the “good speech” laws demanding the use of concocted or inapposite pronouns and labels preferred by the little darlin’s of the newly concocted gender-identity claxon, cowbell, and tin drum army.

Peterson objects to speech police tactics, and he does it eloquently. That’s a threat to and dangerous for the academic poobahs who live and breathe censorship and intellectual tyranny. Bartlett’s essay is an alert: watch out for this conservative who has a bad attitude on lots of things and opposes our new pronoun gender identity group project and our promotion of the grievance status of the newly formed sex-gender-dysmorphist deviant group.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

MELANIE PHILLIPS:DEFENDERS OF FREE SPEECH HAVE A NEW PROPHET – PROFESSOR JORDAN PETERSON

By on January 27th, 2018

If you want to know what the culture war is about, look no farther than the spectacular eruption in Britain during the past few days over Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto.

For Peterson, who reportedly holds many liberal views, the concern is not over transgender issues or pay gaps or any of today’s causes. It is rather that truth and freedom are now under assault from neo-Marxism, which defines everything in terms of relativism and power and which has taken over the universities.

The threat Peterson perceives is not just to political but cognitive freedom. His own use of words is so precise because, as he believes, words are integral to our ability to think and thus our freedom to make sense of the world. That’s the way we arrive at the truth as we see it, and for him truth trumps everything else.

That’s why he said he would go on hunger strike in prison rather than submit to being told what personal pronouns he must use.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

CNN: America’s 21st Century Tokyo Rose by Linda Goudsmit

By on January 27th, 2018

Tokyo Rose was the infamous American-born Japanese woman Iva Ikuko Toguri D’Aquino whose voice was heard by Allied troops in the South Pacific during WWII. Iva Ikuko Toguri was born in Los Angeles on July 4, 1916. She visited Japan after college and was stranded there after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Toguri renounced her U.S. citizenship and worked in radio. Radio disinformation was the fake news media propaganda tool of its time. Tokyo Rose broadcast from Radio Tokyo on the Zero Hour radio show to demoralize Allied soldiers by telling them that their girlfriends back home were seeing other men. She returned to the U.S. after the war and was convicted of treason. She was released from prison after six years and pardoned 20 years later by Gerald Ford. Tokyo Rose died in Chicago in 2006.

The Democrat Party subversively refuses to accept the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the election of President Donald Trump. They continue to deny the legitimacy of Constitutionally elected President Donald Trump with seditious attacks against him. In flagrant violation of our American Constitution ex-president Barack Obama is leading the lawless anti-American Resistance movement attempting to overthrow the sitting government of President Trump. It is truly shocking.

America is a country of freedom because it abides by its laws. Political opponents are bound by election outcomes to insure the peaceful transition of power – it is what separates America from the bloodshed of third world coups. So, what is the purpose of Obama’s seditious Resistance movement? What is being resisted?

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POLITICS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: DAN LIPINSKI FOR CONGRESS (D,ILLINOIS DISTRICT 3)

By on January 27th, 2018

A primary election is coming up in Illinois,and pro-Israel supporters should back Democratic Congressman Daniel Lipinski. It is shameful that pro-choice Democrats who claim to be pro-Israel are backing a challenger to Lipinski, one of the most independent minded members of either house of Congress,and a strong supporter of Israel. . Again it shows that on the left, the pro-Israel cause will always be trumped by passion for abortion.
To Protect Our Heritage Political Action Committee found out this week that one of the staunchest supporters of Israel in Congress, Representative Dan Lipinski (D, IL-3) is facing a primary challenge from a candidate who does not share our values about a strong U.S.-Israel relationship. With the Illinois primary little more than a month away, Representative Lipinski needs our support now to fight off this challenge.
A man of integrity and character, Lipinski is a moderate Democrat with a stellar voting record on Israel, despite his southwest Chicago/suburban district being home to two of Illinois’ largest mosques. He was one of the few Democrats who bravely withstood presidential pressure by voting against the disastrous Iranian Nuclear Deal.
To help him win and keep his seat you can donate to his campaign

https://www.lipinskiforcongress.com/secure/donate.html

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hump Day by Mark Steyn

By on January 26th, 2018

Snapshots of a changing world:

~There she is, Miss Saudi Arabia:

Beauty season is in full swing and 30,000 camels have gathered for the second annual King Abdulaziz Camel Festival, the largest pageant in the Gulf.

Yes, indeed. One of the benefits of keeping all your womenfolk in head-to-toe body bags is that it frees up all the botox for your camel:

Twelve camels have been disqualified from Saudi Arabia’s annual camel beauty contest after receiving botulinum toxin injections to make their pouts look more alluring.

When it comes to camels, I don’t mind the Meg Ryan lips, but I draw the line at silicone humps. No word yet on whether this trend has spread to Saudi Arabia’s Most Beautiful Goat pageant.

~The Oscar nominations are out. Jorge Ramos complains there are no Latinos, and Constance Wu that there are no Asians. If it adds to the gaiety, as a Canadian, I’m outraged by the lack of Canadians, considering that all these “American” movies are filmed north of the border. Maybe the media can find a Saudi to complain that there are no camels.

Meanwhile, Scaramouche identifies a more basic problem with the Oscar itself: He’s a naked man, albeit glittering enough to see your reflection in – like Harvey Weinstein slathered in massage oil opening his hotel room door to Ashley Judd and demanding a rubdown.

~I heard this report on the BBC yesterday, and was profoundly depressed – not merely by the news story itself, but by the antiseptic way it was presented:

British mum Sally Evans had been worried about her teenage son, Thomas, as he was getting involved in petty crime. So when he converted to Islam and cleaned up his act she was relieved. However as she and her other son Micheal recount, they didn’t realise he was getting radicalised until it was way too late. We hear how Sally and Micheal coped when they found out Thomas had joined Islamist militant group al-Shabab.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

PENCE AND PEW, PRESENT AND FUTURE The VP’s moving speech to Israel stands in stark contrast to rising Democratic Israel hatred. Caroline Glick

By on January 26th, 2018

Vice President Mike Pence gave an epic speech at the Knesset this week. His was the most powerful embrace of Zionism and the Jewish people any foreign leader has ever presented. Pence’s fluency in Jewish history, and his comprehension of the centrality of the both the Bible and the Land of Israel in the vast flow of that history in far-flung-exile communities across time and space was spellbinding. He touched the hearts of his audience, causing knots in the throats of most of the people sitting in the Knesset on Monday afternoon.

Pence’s speech was rendered poignant and the friendship he bore became tinged with urgency with the publication, the very next day, of the latest Pew Center survey on American views of Israel.

Speaking in the name of the American people he represents, Pence said on Monday: “The friendship between our people has never been deeper.”

And when it comes to the Republican voters who elected President Donald Trump and Vice President Pence a year and two months ago, Pence is certainly correct. But the Pew data showed that on Israel, as on so many other issues, the cleavage between Republicans and Democrats is vast and unbridgeable.

Most of the coverage of the Pew survey focused reasonably on its main finding. The good news is that overall American support for Israel over the Palestinians remains more or less constant, and overwhelming. Forty-six percent of Americans support Israel over the Palestinians while a mere 16% of Americans support the Palestinians against Israel. The numbers haven’t changed much since polling began in 1978.

But then the news becomes more fraught. The disparity between Republican support for Israel and Democratic support for Israel has never been greater. Whereas 79% of Republicans support Israel over the Palestinians, only 27% of Democrats do. Moreover, the further one goes to the Left among Democratic voters, the more anti-Israel the respondents become. Liberal Democrats are now nearly twice as likely to support the Palestinians over Israel as they are to support Israel over the Palestinians. Thirty-five percent of liberal Democrats support the Palestinians against Israel. A mere 19% support Israel more than the Palestinians.

Conservative and moderate Democrats still support Israel far more than they support the Palestinians with 35% of moderate and conservative Democrats supporting Israel over the Palestinians, and 17% supporting the Palestinians more than Israel. But the level of support for Israel among this demographic has dropped precipitously in the last year and a half. In the previous survey, which took place in April 2016, support for Israel was 53%, or 19 points higher.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: Silencing and Intimidating Journalists by Bassam Tawil

By on January 26th, 2018

The five journalists were arrested shortly after Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas signed the controversial cyber-crime law in June 2017. Critics say the new law is aimed at silencing and intimidating journalists and political opponents of the PA and its president.

Ammar Dweik, head of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights, said the new law is “one of the worst” since the PA was established in 1994.

The Palestinian Authority claims it does not tolerate “incitement.” The “incitement” it is referring to, however, is criticism of Abbas and his cronies. In fact, the PA tolerates incitement quite well, and has spent decades driving such incitement — when it is directed against Israel and the US. Indeed, Palestinians are free to incite against Israel and the US day and night.

Palestinian journalists have decided to renew their campaign against the Palestinian Authority’s assault on freedom of expression.

The decision came after the Palestinian Authority (PA) filed charges against journalist Tareq Abu Zeid, for “incitement” and “jeopardizing the security of the State of Palestine.”

Abu Zeid is the latest victim of a new Palestinian law targeting journalists and social media activists.

Earlier this week, a Palestinian magistrate’s court in Nablus, the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank, decided to refer the case of Abu Zeid to the PA’s Grand Criminal Court. Abu Zeid, who was arrested in August 2017 for 15 days, is facing charges over Facebook posts criticizing the Palestinian Authority. If convicted, he faces a minimum sentence of one year in prison and a fine.

Four other Palestinian journalists who were arrested by the Palestinian Authority around the same time are facing similar charges. However, it is still not clear when they will be brought to trial. The four are: Mamdouh Hamamreh, Kutaiba Qassem, Amer Abu Arafeh and Ahmed Halaikah. Many other journalists and Facebook users have also been summoned for interrogation over the past few months on suspicion of “incitement.”

The five journalists were arrested shortly after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas signed the controversial Palestinian cyber-crime law in June 2017. Critics say the new law is aimed at silencing and intimidating journalists and political opponents of the PA and its president.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Will the Voters Choose Sizzle or Steak? How the government shutdown reveals who has the advantage going into the midterm elections. Bruce Thornton

By on January 26th, 2018

The three-day government shutdown last Saturday has sharpened the debate about which party has the advantage going into the midterm elections in November, and which will profit from another possible shut-down if the February 8 deadline for coming up with a solution for the expiring DACA program isn’t met. More interesting than these analyses and prognostications is what they say about the pundits’ estimation of the American people’s ability to sort out the style “sizzle” from the policy-success “steak” come November.

The Democrat instigators of the current shutdown are for now paying a political price for bluffing and then caving to the Republicans, even though Republicans usually are blamed by the media and voters who have tarred them as the mean and greedy party of small government that always wants to starve the big-government Leviathan. Before the shutdown this received wisdom got support from A Washington Post poll that reported 48% of those polled would blame Republicans, 20 points more than those who’d blame the Dems. In fact, a later poll put 58% of voters blaming the Democrats.

Despite this seeming victory for Republicans, however, many still see the outlook for November as dim. Trump’s approval ratings, which are around 40%, 15 points behind his disapproval numbers, are at a historical low. The generic ballot poll asking people which party they prefer in November has the Dems ahead by 8 points. Democrats have been winning special elections lately, including a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama that had been Republican for 30 years, and most recently a the 10th State Senate district in Wisconsin, one held by Republicans for 17 years. The general consensus of Trumpophobes (e.g. here) from both parties is that the president’s abrasive and vulgar Tweets and comments, and his callous, if not racist, dismissal of immigrants during negotiations with Democrats in Congress, are undermining the party and threatening its success in November.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

REMARKS BY PRESIDENT TRUMP AND PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU OF ISRAEL IN DAVOS

By on January 26th, 2018

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Thank you very much. It’s great to be with Prime Minister Netanyahu. We’ve developed a great relationship, both as countries where I think it’s never been stronger — and I can honestly say that — and also, as personal friends.

We have discussions going with Israel on many things, including trade. But the big move and something that was very historic and very important was the fact that we will be moving our embassy, as you know, to Jerusalem. And as we also know, that is way ahead of schedule, by years, and we anticipate having a small version of it opened sometime next year. So that’s a long time ahead of schedule.

It’s an honor, and it’s great honor to be with you. Thank you very much.

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU: Thank you. Mr. President, Donald — thank you.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Thank you very much.

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU: Mr. President, I want to say something, because this is the first meeting we’ve had since your historic decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and to move the embassy, and now to expedite the movement of the embassy, to Jerusalem.

I want to say that this is a historic decision that will be forever etched in the hearts of our people for generations to come. People say that this pushes peace backward. I say it pushes peace forward because it recognizes history, it recognizes the present reality, and peace can only be built on the basis of truth. And by recognizing this history, you’ve made history. And we will always remember that.

We also support you completely in your stalwart position on the Iran nuclear deal. You’ve said it’s a disastrous deal. You’ve said that if its fatal flaws are not fixed, that you should walk away from it. And I want you to know that if you decide to do that, then we will back you all the way.

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