https://www.frontpagemag.com/greenfield-video-media-bias-against-israel/
Freedom Center Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield recently went on the Never Again is Now Podcast to discuss Media Bias Against Israel, dealing with the question: If there is bias in the U.S. media against the Jewish State, how does this manifest itself?
Don’t miss it!
https://www.frontpagemag.com/has-the-nato-turning-point-stopped-turning/
Remember last year when the NATO nations had a road-to-Damascus moment? It seemed that Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine had awakened the West from its “new world order” dogmatic slumbers, with scenes of death and devastation from a past we thought we had exorcised with the end of the Cold War.
In response to Russia’s attack, last year the air was filled with pledges of military support for Ukraine and blustering denunciations of Putin. Skimpy defense budgets and “postmodern” foreign policy idealism were over. Columnist Michael Barone announced “a vast and historic transformation in Europe . . . that will continue reverberating, no matter what happens in Ukraine.” And according to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, “February 24 marks a turning point in the history of our continent.”
Lately the “turning point” seems to have stopped turning, as the conflict in Ukraine heads for a long, bloody slog, with no resolution in sight. What many thought would be a triumphal confirmation of the “rules-based international order” has instead seen the return of the repressed foreign policy realism dominated by national self-interest.
French president Emmanuel Macron, for example, besieged by riots and protests over a proposal to raise the retirement age, recently visited China’s autocrat Xi Jinping, in a failed attempt to distance Xi from Putin, though he successfully secured a contract worth billions of Euros. He also called for Europe to have “strategic autonomy” from the U.S. regarding China’s threats to Taiwan, and to avoid the “great risk” that Europe “gets caught up in crises that are not ours” and ends up “taking our cue from the U.S. agenda.”
The diplomatic confusion and bluster about Europe’s need for “strategic autonomy” raised questions about NATO “unity.” It seems calm with China is more important than upholding the “rules-based international order.” In that case, as Senator Marco Rubio said, if Europe doesn’t “‘pick sides’ between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, then maybe we shouldn’t be picking sides either [on Ukraine].”
A more significant blow to the renewed martial vigor of NATO was the Pentagon documents allegedly leaked by a recently arrested intelligence operative serving with the Massachusetts Air National Guard. If the intelligence is accurate, our public confidence that Ukraine can stop Russia and recover some of its occupied territory is shaky. That “explains the urgency with which Kyiv has been lobbying the U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to speed up deliveries of Western-made air-defense systems and to provide Ukraine with Western-made jet fighters, such as F-16s,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2023/04/18/immigrants-polio-vaxx-n2622053
Half of illegal immigrants pouring into New York City are not vaccinated against poliovirus, the city’s health commissioner, Ashwin Vasan, said.
This month, Vasan sent an eight-page letter to doctors outlining the health risk migrants living in the city pose to residents. In the letter, Vasan pointed out that the migrants come from countries with high rates of infectious tuberculosis, chickenpox and other illnesses (via the New York Post):
“More than 50,000 people have come to New York City (NYC) in the past year shortly after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. As more people arrive and many make NYC their home, the scale and scope of need continues to grow,” Vasan said in an eight-page letter, dated April 11, sent to physicians and other health care providers. A copy was obtained by The Post.
“I am writing now to underscore how critical it is that health care providers take a wide range of considerations into account when working with people who are seeking asylum … The scope of this letter represents the scale of the need. It is incumbent upon us as a welcoming city to comprehensively evaluate and meet these needs.”
[…]
“Vaccination rates for certain diseases are low in some of the most common countries of origin, with rates hovering around 50% for polio as an example,” the commissioner said.
https://townhall.com/columnists/betsymccaughey/2023/04/19/bidens-open-borders-bringing-diseases-to-your-neighborhood-n2622113
Ready for another pandemic? New York City’s health commissioner announced last week that the influx of migrants from the southern border — more than 50,000 to New York City alone in the past year — is delivering contagious diseases, including tuberculosis and polio, to our neighborhoods.
The same disease threats are also endangering other migrant destinations, including California, Texas and Florida.
In a letter to physicians and health care administrators citywide, Commissioner Ashwan Vasan explained that “many people who recently arrived in NYC have lived in or traveled through countries with high rates of TB.”
TB, short for tuberculosis, is a bacterial infection. It is treatable with antibiotics, but it generally takes six to nine months of medication to recover. Not a walk in the park.
TB spreads through the air, like flu or a cold. Stand next to someone with TB for a long subway ride or sit next to them every day at school and you can catch it.
New York City’s TB rate, at 6.1 cases per 100,000, is more than double the national rate. Close to 9 out of 10 (88%) of these TB cases are people born outside the United States. Every neighborhood in the city has had at least one case.
Vasan’s letter called on New York to pull out all the stops providing health care, food and legal services to migrants. Not a word about protecting the people who already live here.
Open borders import disease. Immigrants who lawfully apply for a visa must undergo health screenings and show they are vaccinated, and refugees are screened for TB before entering the U.S. Not so for those wading across the Rio Grande.
https://pjmedia.com/columns/john-stossel/2023/04/19/save-the-planet-invest-in-fossil-fuels-n1688410
Earth Day is Saturday! Hooray?
“Saving humanity from the climate crisis,” says EarthDay.org, requires us to “push away from the dirty fossil fuel economy.”
Sounds logical.
But my latest video explains why doing that is cruel to poor people.
“Three billion people in the world still use less electricity than a typical refrigerator,” explains Alex Epstein, author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.” If they’re going to have “their first well-paying jobs … their first consistent supply of clean water … a modern life … that’s going to depend on fossil fuels.”
But the greens say we have a better replacement: wind and solar power.
So I push back at Epstein: “Solar is getting cheaper all the time. It’s already cheaper than fossil fuels.”
“When we look at solar and wind around the world,” he answers, “it always correlates to rising prices and declining reliability. Why? Because solar and wind are intermittent. At any time, they can go near zero.”
That means wind turbines and solar farms don’t replace fossil fuel plants. You have to build them in addition to fossil fuel plants.
“We spent trillions of dollars in subsidies and mandates putting solar panels and wind turbines everywhere,” Epstein points out, “Yet we’re still having shortages of fossil fuels.”
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/04/18/fetterman-returns-to-the-senatedressed-like-a-slob-n1688175
After undergoing inpatient treatment for clinical depression at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for several weeks, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), has finally returned to the Senate. He began his treatment in February and was discharged by the end of March. Since being sworn in as a U.S. Senator in January, he’s spent more time indisposed than serving. His absence has contributed to some significant headaches for Senate Democrats, as his and other senators’ absences have made the Democrats’ already slim majority in the upper chamber even smaller.
“I want everyone to know that depression is treatable, and treatment works,” Fetterman said in a statement after his release from Walter Reed last month. “This isn’t about politics — right now there are people who are suffering with depression in red counties and blue counties. If you need help, please get help.”
Now that he’s back, we’re not only supposed to celebrate his bravery but we’re also supposed to forget all about the fact that he lied during the campaign about his physical and mental well-being, and his fitness to serve in the U.S. Senate.
“It’s great to be back,” he told reporters upon his arrival at the Capitol Monday afternoon. It should surprise no one that he did not answer any questions.
It should also surprise no one that Fetterman’s triumphant return to the U.S. Senate apparently wasn’t enough of a reason for him to dress the part of a U.S. Senator. Rather than donning a suit and tie, Fetterman showed up to the Capitol wearing his signature hoodie and shorts, because apparently, dressing like a slob is his thing.
https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/19/the-fda-needs-bold-reforms-instead-of-kicking-the-can-down-the-road/
When Dr. Robert Califf was selected by President Joe Biden for a second stint as Food and Drug Administration commissioner, we called it a safe but uninspired choice. Unfortunately, we have been proven right.
Califf is a distinguished academic cardiologist who specializes in clinical trial design, but the day-to-day regulatory decision-making happens at organizational levels below the commissioner, and he seems unwilling to engage with them. He has also made it clear that he’s not interested in criticism from the public, even though the FDA is required by law to consider public comments as part of the rulemaking process.
Dr. Califf did give some reason for hope last summer when he commissioned a review of the agency’s food and tobacco regulatory programs. We suspected that the report, prepared by the Reagan-Udall Foundation, would be a whitewash. But we are pleased to say we were partly wrong.
On the food front, the report echoed criticism from members of Congress, industry and public interest groups that there isn’t a single chain of command among various human food oversight offices, including the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition and the Office of Food Policy and Response.
Now, a diverse group of stakeholders is unhappy with the reorganization plan the FDA announced in January and fleshed out further in late February, because it doesn’t fully integrate the all-important food inspection work into the new Human Foods program.
At a House Oversight Subcommittee hearing in March, Frank Yiannas, who resigned earlier this year as the FDA’s deputy commissioner for food policy, testified that the agency’s ability to protect food safety is hindered by staff turnover, a siloed culture, and a lack of decision-making power. Roberta Wagner, the Consumer Brands Association’s vice president of regulatory and technical affairs, noted that an external study of the FDA has found the agency’s food regulation suffers from “constant turmoil” and “little motivation.”
https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/19/signs-of-the-great-divorce-2-6-million-fled-counties-that-voted-for-biden-since-2020/
Is the country separating itself into two distinct camps? One increasingly leftist and the other trying desperately to cling to traditional American values? Census data seem to show that it very well could be underway.
Last week, we commented on recent population data showing that people have been fleeing urban areas, noting that these are mostly Democratically controlled, and we’ve pointed out that people have also been moving from red states to blue.
But we wanted to go deeper and get more precise numbers. So, we matched Census net migration data from mid-2020 through mid-2022 for all the nation’s 3,000-plus counties (or their equivalents) and compared that with how these counties voted in 2020. Our working assumption is that the results of the incredibly divisive 2020 election would be a good barometer of the devoutly held political views in those counties.
What we found was striking: There has been a vast migration out of counties that voted for Joe Biden into those counties that voted to reelect Donald Trump.
Census data show a net internal migration of almost 2.6 million (2,584,459 to be exact) from blue counties to red since Biden was elected. (These figures don’t count immigrants or births or deaths, just those Americans moving from one location to another.)
More than 61% of the counties that voted for Biden in 2020 lost population, while 65% of Trump-supporting counties gained population.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/collateral-damage-of-a-smear-campaign-harlan-crow-clarence-thomas-texas-real-estate-americana-discourse-interview-75c89213?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
American politics lately feels like an endless game of—pardon the infelicitous word—delegitimation. The aim isn’t to convince voters that a political adversary is wrong or misguided, or even that he’s stupid or lying. It’s to assure the like-minded that he has no legitimate place in the public square and to drive him out if possible.
The habits of delegitimation have become so familiar that it’s easy to forget how antidemocratic they are: political correctness and, more recently, cancel culture; the invention of “phobias”—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia—to characterize dissent as mental illness; the wanton attribution of racism, misogyny, fascism and white supremacy; and of course the easy insinuation that any political figure of whom one disapproves is guilty of crimes.
The politics of delegitimation arose on the political left, an inheritance of 20th-century collectivist ideologies that saw no legitimacy in the liberal capitalist regimes they aimed to overthrow. But sizable segments of the American right now indulge in it, too. Donald Trump rose to power by treating his adversaries exactly as they treated him, and indeed as they had treated George W. Bush: as de facto illegitimate. Mr. Trump’s claims that Mexican-American judges have no right to rule against him, or that President Biden’s election was fraudulent, may be false. But they aren’t unique.
The impulse to delegitimate is at its ugliest any time a Republican president nominates a judge to the Supreme Court. During their confirmation hearings all of the current court’s conservative justices, with the partial exception of John Roberts, were accused of engaging in disreputable behavior or of holding opinions so bizarre and regressive as to disqualify them from service. In the stated views of their critics, these judges weren’t just wrong; they were bad.
Now that the court’s conservatives have a tenuous 6-3 majority despite the efforts of their defamers, the work of delegitimation has broadened to sitting justices and the court itself. Some recent headlines: “Supreme Court Term Begins Amid Questions about Its Legitimacy” (Washington Post), “Is the Supreme Court Facing a Legitimacy Crisis?” (New York Times), “The Supreme Court Is Fighting Over Its Own Legitimacy” (CNN). These and similar stories are manifestly intended to precipitate the “legitimacy crisis” they pretend to report.
https://swtotd.blogspot.com/
There is a sentence in P.G. Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves, in which Bertie Wooster speaks to Jeeves, that reminds me of today’s listening-challenged politicians and pundits: “On the occasion when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across the primaeval swamp…the clan has a tendency to ignore me.” Like Wodehouse’s Aunt Agatha, today’s politicians bellow and do not listen; so, concerns, if they are not of the woke variety, are ignored.
What have we become? Today’s transgender movement, with a biological male winning ‘woman of the year’ and with trans women athletes competing against biological females, is like watching a 1950s Hasty Pudding show. John Kerry and his crowd, in preaching of an impending climate apocalypse, remind us of a mythological Zeus hurling lightning bolts from atop Mount Olympus. Diversity, equity, and inclusion pronouncements could have been taken from Mad Magazine. Separate and segregated college graduation ceremonies are reminiscent of Jim Crow days: Dean Karayanis of The New York Sun recently wrote “that three dozen institutions from Yale to Ohio State are returning us to the days when ‘mixing the races’ was a secular sin, implementing policies that would make the most avowed Confederate grin.” Race and gender outrank merit in college selection and corporate advancement. Minorities, women, and the LBGTQ communities are told they are victims, and that they cannot rise above that appellation.
Political arrests and prosecutions remind us of Stalin’s Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man, and I will show you the crime.” Mass shootings elicit the expected response from the usual suspects: a Second Amendment defense from the right and more regulated sales of guns from the left. Ignored are the estimated 450 million guns already out there, many of them illegally acquired; gun safety rules, which in my youth came with the ownership of a firearm, are never mentioned by elected officials, and neither is the disturbing emotional behavior of most shooters as a possible cause. Declining birthrates will bring future demographic challenges, as the work force shrinks and the ranks of retirees expand. But progressives are focused on the right to abortion, at any time and any place. School choice is “fine for me but not for thee.” Families have disappeared into the maws of politicized governmental ‘communities,’ which encourage a lack of individual responsibility and accountability and that discourage the dignity of work and the benefits of personal independence. Future generations will wonder at today’s absurdities when preferred progressives’ ends were used to justify regressive means. In this overly sensitive world, there is no laughter.
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