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Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Biden Presidency Is Unsustainable The Harris Dilemma By Victor Davis Hanson

By on July 31st, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/31/the-biden-presidency-is-unsustainable/

Imagine if Gavin Newsom was currently Vice President amid the final meltdown of the Biden family consortium.

Does anyone doubt that Biden would then either be forced to resign by Democratic politicos (for reasons in addition to his escalating dementia), or would be impeached and perhaps abdicate Nixon-style?

The presence of the now predictable mediocrity of Kamala Harris and the impossibility, given her race and gender, of removing her, for now is about all that keeps a cognitively declining Biden still in office. The Left fears what she could do as president to the Democratic Party; conservatives are terrified of what she could do to the country.

Joe Biden’s bewilderment exempts his embarrassments from accountability in the way that Hunter Biden’s addictions excuse his past serial criminality. But the passes granted to both father and son would be now unsustainable with a viable Vice President in waiting.

Indeed, the Harris problem explains some of current Democratic strategy.

Backroom leaks and growing insider rumors of Biden dementia confirm the portrait of an often befuddled president whom the public by now knows all too well.

The aimless House Democrats’ “how-dare-you-even-consider-an-impeachment inquiry” furor, coupled with their half-hearted efforts, along with the media, to refute the actual charges of corruption of the Biden family, suggest that he will not run for reelection—but also not be impeached much less convicted or removed under the 25th Amendment.

So the Harris dilemma explains a lot: finding a way to keep her out of current power until Biden somehow finishes his first term, and thus letting the Democratic 2024 primary candidates organically abort her presidential aspirations.

There are a few problems, however, with this strategy.

One, can Joe Biden finish his first term?

That would require his staff to shorten his already truncated workday for the next 18 months to about 2-3 hours of work per day.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Kay S. Hymowitz: Barbie’s Checkmate Greta Gerwig’s film is outfitted with so many layers of irony as to disarm the doll’s—and the film’s—most ardent critics.

By on July 31st, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/barbies-checkmate

I know. You’ve had it up to here with Barbie. You don’t care about the stunning $162 million global record-breaking opening weekend. You roll your eyes at the Barbie luggage, the candles, the ice cream, the Airbnb listing, the NFTs. You’re sick of the whole “women are so oppressed yet so wow.” You’ve heard it a million times already; the future is female.

Well, you may not be interested in Barbie, but Barbie—or more precisely, Mattel, Barbie’s corporate puppet master—is interested in you. Young children are Mattel’s core customers, but the company has set its sights on a much wider market. It sees the movie as a way for everyone—“teens, young adults, moms, glammas [a portmanteau for glamorous grandmas]” to “engage in the franchise,” in the words of Richard Dickson, Mattel’s former president and COO (now CEO of clothing retailer Gap).

Judging from the pink tsunami of the past few weeks, Mattel’s efforts are paying off. We shouldn’t be surprised. The movie is only the latest in a long series of brilliant chess moves confirming Mattel’s place as the World Champion Grand Master of marketing to progressive, relatively affluent, sophisticated consumers. I don’t know whether the company or the movie are actually as woke as some are grumbling, but I do know Mattel saw the sales potential of the woke phenomenon when Nikole Hannah-Jones was still in elementary school.

Consider Barbie’s origins. For much of commercial toy history, baby dolls were your basic girl toy. Girls would pretend to bottle-feed, dress, and comfort their dolls in imitation of their housewife mothers, who, in turn, tended to their real-life average of five (!) children. The end of the baby-doll era came in the late 1950s, after Ruth Handler, along with her husband Elliot, a founder of the young Mattel company, had a eureka moment. During a visit to Germany, she spotted an unusual doll known as Bild Lilli in a shop window. Based on a risqué comic book character, Lilli was mostly sold in tobacco shops. The character was something of a floozy, with many R-rated adventures. At the time, Lilli was coveted not by little girls but by grown men, though exactly what they did with the dolls no one was saying. To create Barbie, Mattel desexualized and Americanized Lilli, giving her a California glow, evening out her dramatically arched eyebrows and toning down her red, puckered lips. One other seemingly trivial but significant change: Lilli’s shoes were molded to her invisible feet; Barbie’s shoes are removable.

Director Greta Gerwig’s movie opens with a hilarious take on Barbie’s arrival in the U.S. market. A gargantuan doll dressed in a zebra-striped bathing suit and sunglasses suddenly appears, monolith-like, astride a group of sad-looking young girls. Dressed in dowdy, Amish-inspired smock dresses, they are awestruck at this vision of adult sexiness and glamour and immediately smash their baby dolls in angry disgust, a scene that Gerwig gleefully sets to the majestic orchestral opening of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, made famous by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

In the Name of Climate Change: Travel Restrictions and the Great Reset By Janet Levy

By on July 31st, 2023

If you experienced unprecedented delays during air travel this summer, the airlines likely blamed it on the weather.  You might have been surprised, for bad weather wasn’t reported in the news.  But here is what should surprise and shock you even more.  The real reason – a shortage of pilots and air traffic controllers (ATCs) – is linked to the Great Reset, the agenda to control people and restrict freedom conceived by the global elite and being implemented through leftist groups and their sympathizers.

It is now well known that Klaus Schwab, chief of the elitist World Economic Forum (WEF), set the Great Reset in motion during the pandemic, calling it an opportunity to “reflect, reimagine, and reset the world.” The COVID lockdown also connects to the story of the recent flight delays, because it was during the pandemic that travel restrictions were imposed worldwide and pilots and ATCs were laid off.  At London’s Heathrow, alone, for example, traffic plunged more than 75% – from 80 million passengers daily to about one million.  The ostensible reason for limiting travel was to curb contagion and virus mutation.  But a sinister agenda was afoot.

The travel restrictions, quarantines, vaccine passports, social distancing, the lockdown itself, and other measures were not so much for disease control as for imposing the dystopian New World Order.  COVID was a smokescreen.  In the name of a recovery plan, radical steps were initiated to restructure the world economy and usher in an extreme environmentalist and statist framework of governance as the new norm

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Education Establishment’s Radical New Ploys Will increased spending, common good bargaining, community schools, and transitional kindergarten really improve student learning?Larry Sand

By on July 31st, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-education-establishments-radical-new-ploys/

The results of a Gallup poll released earlier this month show that just 28% of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in K-12 public schools. The number for Republicans is particularly damning: Just 14% of GOPers view education in a positive light.

Confidence in higher education has also taken a hit, with just 36% of those polled saying they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, down from 48% in 2018 and 57% in 2015.

Additionally, there is little hope on the horizon that things will change for the better. This month, NWEA, a student assessment organization, released a new report which reveals that students progressed more slowly in reading and math during the 2022–23 school year than in pre-pandemic years. In other words, during the past school year, most students fell further behind.

Mushrooming Spending

The money-grubbing educrats and unionistas can’t blame lack of funding as an excuse. The feds have poured $190 billion into education to make amends for the Covid-related school shutdowns. But a 10-month examination by The 74 reveals that, while some school districts have used the monies properly, some haven’t used the money yet, while others have “pumped millions of dollars into classroom additions, upgrading athletic fields and other expenditures unrelated to the pandemic.”

Some districts invested funds in silly things like “fidget cubes” and aromatherapy supplies. Worse, many districts involved themselves in shady business deals. In San Joaquin County, CA, a state district attorney launched a criminal probe into the Stockton Unified School District for spending “roughly $7 million on ultraviolet air purifiers from a company linked to a former mayor with a history of legal trouble. A state audit pointed to the board’s decision to approve the contract even though district staff gave the proposal a low rating. Less than half of the 2,200 filters purchased were installed, and the rest are stored in a warehouse.”

And the situation is about to get worse. As Linda Jacobson reports in The 74, the funds are going to run out in about a year when the drunken sailor-type spending ends. Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, explains, “Deficits will creep up quickly and really destabilize a district. In the end, the students will suffer if districts wait too long to rein in their spending.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran: With Friends Like That by Amir Taheri

By on July 31st, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19838/iran-friends

The Islamic Republic has been asking to be admitted into the BRICS group [Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa] club since 2010 when the “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced his intention to create a “New World Order” through a triple alliance of Iran, China and Russia.

Tehran sources say the Iranian demand, though supported by South Africa and India, has been quietly vetoed by Russia and cold-shouldered by China.

Khamenei’s dream of a “New World Order” led by Iran, China and Russia, has proven to be a pipe-dream shaped in the mind of a leader that operates in a fantasy universe.

The pipe-dream was partly punctured last week when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made his first foreign visit after his election victory to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, ignoring Iran altogether.

[F]or years, the former head of the Islamic Majlis’s National Security Commission Heshmatallah Falahat-Pisheh has warned that both China and Russia have treated the Islamic Republic as nothing but a source of profit for themselves.

Former Oil Minister Bijan Zangeneh has warned that Russia, having pushed Iran out of the European oil market is now trying to do the same in the Indian and Chinese markets by offering mouth-watering discounts. Since last March, China’s oil imports from Iran have fallen by almost 40 percent, according to unofficial estimates, with Russia claiming the part that Iran has lost.

Meanwhile, regarding what some Iranians see as an attack by Lavrov on the nation’s integrity, many are unhappy about Raisi’s refusal or inability to read the riot act to the Russians. The concern is that Tehran’s lack of reaction to the Russian and Chinese moves could encourage other nations to adopt a similar stance against Iran.

Khamenei, aged 84, seems unlikely to abandon what he had hoped would be his “historic legacy” or, in his own words “driving the Great Satan and its allies out of the region.” This is perhaps why, as long as Khamenei is in charge, neither Beijing nor Moscow is worried about angering Iran, whatever they do.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinian ‘Unity’ To Destroy Israel by Bassam Tawil

By on July 31st, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19840/palestinian-unity-destroy-israel

Recently, the [Hamas] movement claimed responsibility for a number of terror attacks targeting Jewish soldiers and civilians in the West Bank. Hamas, in addition, continues to call on Palestinians to step up terror attacks with the declared intention of liberating all of “Palestine,” from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and replacing Israel with an Iranian-backed terror state.

The Biden administration and the European Union did not condemn Abbas for meeting with the leader of a movement designated by the Americans, Europeans and other countries as a terrorist organization.

The Biden Administration and the Europeans are also likely to continue providing financial aid to the Palestinians without asking Abbas about his repeated attempts to forge an alliance with the same Hamas terrorists who murder Jews and openly call for the elimination of Israel. The Biden Administration and the Europeans apparently have no problem with Abbas preferring to meet with the leader of a terrorist group, Hamas, than with the prime minister of Israel.

Needless to say, the term “comprehensive resistance” is a euphemism for terrorism. As it has proven over the past three decades, Hamas outright rejects non-violent “resistance.” The only “resistance” Hamas endorses is one that includes suicide bombings and the indiscriminate firing of rockets at Israeli towns and cities, as well as drive-by shootings and stabbings. The only “resistance” Hamas endorses is one that results in the murder of as many Jews as possible.

One of Abbas’s close associates, Azzam al-Ahmed, recently said that Abbas is hoping to form a unity government with Hamas. Such a move would mean that the US and European Union, the largest funders of the Palestinians, would also end up funding an Islamist movement which they have already classified as a terrorist organization. Once Hamas joins a Palestinian Authority-led government, it too would benefit from American and European taxpayer funds.

At the very least, the Biden Administration and the European Union ought to call out Abbas for seeking to forge an alliance with one of the most deadly Palestinian terrorist movements, Hamas.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Wild 2024 Race It may prove to be the most volatile race in recent memory. by Victor Davis Hanson

By on July 31st, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-wild-2024-race/

Current polls, pundits, and politicos insist that the 2024 race is a sure rematch between former President Donald Trump and incumbent President Joe Biden.

It may well turn out that way.

But in past election cycles, summer polls 15 months before the general election usually did not mean much.

In December 2003, the CBS poll headline blared, “Dean pulls away in Dem race.” Howard Dean would eventually be clobbered by nominee John Kerry.

In the Gallup Poll of late June 2007, Hillary Clinton still continued to enjoy her wide lead in the Democratic primary over eventual nominee and elected president Barack Obama.

On the Republican side, Gallup noted of its summer 2007 polls that, “There has been little serious threat to the frontrunner, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani” — who bombed out early in the race.

About this time in 2015, Jeb Bush was leading Trump in the Republican primary. Or as CNN characterized their summer poll, “He (Bush) holds a significant lead over the second-place candidate Trump.”

By January 2016, the favorite, can-do Wisconsin governor Scott Walker was leading all candidates by a substantial margin as they headed for the Iowa caucuses.

There are lots of reasons to believe that 2024 may prove to be the most volatile race in recent memory.

Not since 1912 — when third-party ex-president Theodore Roosevelt challenged incumbent President William Howard Taft in a three-way race with Woodrow Wilson — have two presidents run against each other.

Both, remember, lost that year to the far less experienced Wilson.

Second, Trump is currently the target of at least four state and federal prosecutors.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why Is Saudi Arabia Spending Billions on Western Sports? LIV Golf. Formula 1. And now a $332 million bid for Kylian Mbappé. What we call ‘sportswashing,’ the Saudis call savvy. Josh Glancy

By on July 31st, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/saudi-arabia-sportswashing-football-liv-golf?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

I’ll never forget the moment Saudi Arabia arrived in global soccer. It happened at the World Cup last November, when the team faced Argentina—the overwhelming favorite to win. 

At halftime they were losing 1–0 and nobody was paying attention. I was finishing my halftime snack in the Pearl Lounge at Doha’s Lusail Stadium: a bowl of caviar in one hand and a glass of Taittinger champagne in the other. Then, suddenly, the Saudis scored a goal in the second half—and plutocrats clad in keffiyehs and thobes tipped over their plates of wagyu steak as they stampeded back to their seats. Saudi Arabia went on to beat the soccer legends 2–1, causing the biggest upset in World Cup history.

That game was just the beginning. In recent weeks, Saudi Arabia has embarked on an extraordinary and record-breaking shopping spree, spending billions to acquire marquee-name players. The most recent foray is an attempt by Saudi soccer club Al-Hilal to sign French striker Kylian Mbappé, by most measures the best player in the world, for a quite staggering world record $332 million, plus a one-year contract worth $776 million. Money like this has never been seen in soccer before. Unsurprisingly, the bid was accepted by Mbappé’s club, Paris Saint-Germain, but the soccer star, so far, has refused the deal. 

Either Saudi Arabia really wants to be the global epicenter of soccer, or they really want to distract the world with their attempts to do so. 

Most Westerners believe it’s the latter, accusing the kingdom of “sportswashing.” Saudi Arabia is well aware of their reputation: they’re a country that oppresses women, executes dissidents, and disembowels Washington Post columnists. But—and this is a big but—if they buy enough soccer stars and sponsor enough sports tournaments, then maybe “human rights atrocities” won’t be the first thing mentioned when people discuss Saudi Arabia.

At least that’s the theory. But is it working? Can you buy enough star athletes to make the world forget (or at least ignore) all of your tyrannical excesses? And is that even what they’re doing at all? 

What’s crystal clear is that the Saudis have been building up to this investment spree for some time, dipping into their Public Investment Fund (PIF) of more than $700 billion to pay for it. In 2019, the country hosted British heavyweight boxing champion Anthony Joshua’s fight against the Mexican American fighter Andy Ruiz Jr. Then in 2021, it hosted its first Formula 1 race, at the newly minted track in Jeddah. That same year, it made its biggest move so far by buying Newcastle United, a storied Premier League soccer team from the northeast of England. 

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY —STAFFED UP, LAWYERED UP & ARMED UP!

By on July 31st, 2023

Following the launch of our U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report earlier in the week, last night I was featured on Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street show.

When Biden claims climate change is the #1 national security threat, politicians and unelected bureaucrats think they have license to run amok — fleecing the American people and curtailing of freedom and liberty…

WATCH THE INTERVIEW: THE EPA IS STAFFING UP, LAWYERING UP, AND ARMING UP WITH AN EXTRA $100 BILLION FROM CONGRESS
 

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DOJ can’t sink any lower after attempted jailing of Hunter Biden’s ex-partner Devon Archer before his testimony Miranda Devine –

By on July 31st, 2023

https://nypost.com/2023/07/30/doj-cant-sink-any-lower-after-attempted-arrest-of-hunter-bidens-ex-partner-devon-archer/

The Department of Justice attempted to have Devon Archer report to prison ahead of his expected testimony about his former business partner Hunter Biden before the House Oversight Committee. Alec TabakWhat a coincidence!

On the eve of Devon Archer’s bombshell testimony to the House Oversight Committee, the Department of Justice tried to put him in jail. 

If you don’t suspect that’s an attempt to intimidate Hunter Biden’s former best friend before he reveals damaging secrets about the president, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

It’s another example of a DOJ gone astray.

Coming hot on the heels of the first son’s dubious plea deal in Delaware collapsing last week, and amid allegations from senior IRS whistleblowers of political favoritism by prosecutors to protect Joe Biden, you have to wonder how far a weaponized, all-powerful, unaccountable justice system can go.

Two more examples from the past week tell you the sky’s the limit — and they’re not even bothering to hide it anymore.

On Wednesday, federal prosecutors dropped campaign-finance violation charges against cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who just so happens to have been Biden’s second-biggest donor.

On Thursday, new charges against Biden’s chief political rival, Donald Trump, were filed by special counsel Jack Smith over the former president’s handling of classified files.

‘Obstruction of justice’

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