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Ruth King

The Super Shady Coverup of the Paul Pelosi Story Is Worse Than You Thought By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/01/19/the-super-shady-coverup-of-the-paul-pelosi-story-is-worse-than-you-thought-n1663357

Remember when the Paul Pelosi story was big news for a while, then weird things started coming out, and then suddenly everyone stopped talking about it?

Yeah, I do.

Back in October, the story came, and Democrats pounced on it, pushing the narrative that some deranged Trumpster had broken into the Pelosi home and attacked the husband of the then-House Speaker in some politically motivated MAGA attack. Of course, it was soon revealed that the attack was most definitely not a Trump supporter — but actually a left-leaning supporter of Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ causes, as well as a nudist activist who reportedly struggled with drug abuse. Oops.

But it gets weirder. It was initially reported that when the police came, the attacker was wearing nothing but his underwear — which was later retracted. There was a report that there was a third unnamed individual who let the police in — which was later retracted. Then there was the report that detailed how Pelosi opened the door for the police before returning to the interior of his home to reengage his attacker — which was later retracted, and NBC News reporter Miguel Almaguer got suspended for reporting it — even though his report matched details recorded in court documents. As the story lingered, we were left with questions than answers, and yet three key pieces of evidence — Pelosi’s 911 call, the police body cam footage, and Capitol Police security footage — have not been released.

Turkey: Putin’s Open Door for Harming Western Interests by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19314/turkey-putin-western-interests

For Putin, Erdoğan’s friendship is growing ever more important — and vice versa.

Turkey has refused to join Western sanctions against Russia over Ukraine, thereby throwing a lifeline to Putin. Turkish skies remain open to Russian airlines and its doors open to hundreds of thousands of Russians and their money. Turkish exports to Russia are surging. In July alone, exports to Russia shot up by a dizzying 75% year-on-year.

Russian cash helped plug the growing hole in Turkey’s foreign currency reserves — at a time when Erdoğan needs foreign money for the country’s ailing economy before the presidential and parliamentary elections this June.

In March, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said that Russian oligarchs were welcome in Turkey. In October, the Financial Times reported that between January and August 2021, a record $28 billion from unclear origins had flowed into Turkey.

“Putin’s goal remains anchoring Erdoğan more and more to Russia through a vast mesh of mutually beneficial operations in the fields of defense, energy, trade, and finance… By doing this, Putin is comforting an embattled incumbent president and is openly bolstering Erdoğan’s position in the upcoming elections…. [T]he world is witnessing the Russian president using Turkey for his own benefits.” — Marc Pierini, senior fellow at Carnegie Europe and a former EU Ambassador to Ankara, August 30, 2022.

The Erdoğan-Putin bond has two main pillars. One is pragmatism: They both strategically, politically and economically benefit. The other is ideological: They both hate the West.

Turkish Islamists, especially neo-Ottomans, have historically hated Russia — both Czarist and Soviet. Similarly, Russians and Soviets have never been great fans of the Turks — both Ottoman and republican. Today, however, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with a big foot in NATO, is exhibiting a pro-Russian tilt never seen before, and at a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin is seen as an existential threat to Western interests. What is the secret behind this sudden marriage?

Insanity On Display?

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/20/insanity-on-display/

John Kerry, former senator, former secretary of state, and now chief climate alarmist for the Biden administration, said in so many words Tuesday during his World Economic Forum rant that it’s too late to save the planet from global warming. Yet he claimed climate programs still need more “money, money, money, money, money, money, money.” The only reason he’s not the worst person in the world is because he has so much competition at Davos.

What Kerry actually said was that he is “not convinced we’re going to get there in time to do what the scientists said, which is avoid the worst consequences of the crisis,” meaning that he doubts that the global temperature will stay under the cap of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial temperature set by scientists (though it is actually a random figure with no scientific support).

Yet he continues to crusade for a cause that hopes to strip Westerners of both their wealth – yes, according to the United Press International, he said “money” seven times – and freedom to move about.

With absolutely zero self-awareness, the man who flies in private jets, has multiple homes (which most of us would consider mansions) and more cars than most families, and up until a few years ago owned a yacht, preached about “the way we live,” and thundered against “the incredible sort of destructive process of growth the way we interpret it.” He called it “robber-baron growth.”

But his luxurious lifestyle and those of the other wealthy men and women fighting global warming must be OK, because he assured members of his fawning audience that they are all special, “a select group of human beings” who “are able to sit in a room and come together and, uh, actually talk about saving the planet.”

Ruthie Blum:Tom Friedman’s lies, damned lies and statistics – opinion No, Tom, Biden ought to be told that the Jewish state isn’t “changing its fundamental character.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-729063

In his latest disingenuous profession of concern for the welfare of the Jewish state, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman appealed to President Joe Biden to “stop Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist coalition from turning Israel into an illiberal bastion of zealotry.”

He began his mock memo by informing Biden that “Israel is on the verge of a historic transformation – from a full-fledged democracy to something less, and from a stabilizing force in the region to a destabilizing one.”

“Israel is on the verge of a historic transformation – from a full-fledged democracy to something less, and from a stabilizing force in the region to a destabilizing one.”

Tom Friedman

Both his plea to the president and depiction of the situation in Israel were amusing. In the first place, Biden is barely capable of stringing together a coherent sentence, let alone taking on a job that’s not in his purview and none of his business. 

Secondly, Friedman has always been critical of Israeli behavior that didn’t involve capitulation to a Palestinian entity bent on destroying the Jewish state. In other words, his breast-beating about the new government in Jerusalem was as old and false as the rest of his tirade. 

Tom Friedman’s breast-beating about the new Israeli government is old and false

One ploy was to dismiss the victory of the Netanyahu camp by claiming that it won by a “sliver” of the votes. He performed this trick by citing data on the ballots cast for parties that didn’t make it into the Knesset. Among these were Balad and Meretz, both on the far Left – the former an openly anti-Zionist Arab faction and the latter a post-Zionist Jewish one.  

Treating the fact that neither passed the electoral threshold as a mere mathematical mishap rather than a reflection of the Left’s failure, he pointed to the “5,000-person anti-government demonstration [that] grew to 80,000 over the weekend” prior to the publication of his January 17 piece. 

America’s Police Exodus The fallout of ‘defund the police’ is still unfolding. Just ask Brian Lande. Leighton Woodhouse

https://www.thefp.com/p/americas-police-exodus?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Last year, Brian Lande, an officer in the Richmond, Calif., police department, had to draw his gun to stop two drunk men from clobbering each other to death with metal rods.

In 2015, he threatened deadly force to stop a fight between two more drunk men. One was armed with a hatchet. Another, with a wrench. 

On another occasion, he drew his firearm to arrest a man hopping a backyard fence, fleeing the scene of a burglary.

None of these was remarkable in Richmond, a working-class city just east of San Francisco that’s notorious for its drive-by shootings, break-ins, carjackings, and countless petty crimes.

When I asked Lande if he often had to unholster his gun—a standard-issue Glock 17—he told me he’d done it so many times that “they all bleed into each other.” 

Luckily, he’s never had to pull the trigger.

But things could easily have gone south. If a suspect had made a suspicious move or pulled something out of his pocket that looked like a gun—it happens more than you’d think—he would have had less than a quarter of a second to make the most awful decision of his life: whether to kill another human being. 

“You’re in an incredibly inauspicious situation,” Lande told me. “The chance of making a good faith mistake is high.”

What that means is that if you’re a cop, you’ve got to be confident that if a tragedy occurs—if a life is taken that should not have been taken—your chief, your city council, the powers that be will at least treat you fairly, hear you out, and ensure that justice is served.

Watchdog: Pentagon Can’t Account for $220 Billion in Equipment By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/18/watchdog-pentagon-cant-account-for-220-billion-in-equipment/

On Tuesday, a watchdog report claimed that the Department of Defense (DOD) has still been unable to account for at least $220 billion worth of equipment that had been given to government contractors.

According to the Daily Caller, the report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) noted that auditors first noticed the Pentagon’s failure to keep track of such contractor-loaned equipment back in 2001. The report says that the DOD has not made any improvements to its accountability processes since then, which heightens the possibility of overlooking similar errors in the future.

“This long-standing issue affects the accounting and reporting of GFP and is one of the reasons DOD is unable to produce auditable financial statements,” the GAO report read in part.

The GAO went on to say that when it comes to attempting to identify the causes of such financial deficiencies, the DOD should create an entirely separate plan to address this issue, since “department-wide efforts have not been comprehensive and sufficiently detailed.”

“Without such a strategy, DOD is at an increased risk that its efforts to remediate the [government furnished property] material weakness will continue to be insufficient and that it will continue to miss or push back target remediation dates,” the report continued.

Even more alarming is the likelihood that the given total of $220 billion in unaccounted property may be lower than the actual amount. The GAO noted in its report that there had been past instances of the military admitting that it could not provide an estimate; in 2016, the Army told the GAO that it had an “unknown” number of assets, and that “quantities may be greatly different than the Army’s documented property records reflect.”

Since the DOD had its first audit in 2018, it failed its fifth consecutive audit in November of last year. Of the Pentagon’s roughly $3.5 trillion in assets, contractors were unable to provide expenditures for about 61 percent of the money spent.

“I would not say that we flunked,” said Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord in response to the abysmal report. “The process is important for us to do, and it is making us get better. It is not making us get better as fast as we want.”

The poisoning of America By Richard C. LaMagna

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/01/the_poisoning_of_america.html

It’s time for a new drug strategy. The Biden Administration’s harm reduction strategy isn’t working. America is in its worst drug abuse crisis in over a century. According to the CDC,  over 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021, and almost 950,000 have died since 1999; figures for 2022 show a slight decline in overdose deaths over the previous year. The leading killer is illicit fentanyl — a synthetic opioid so powerful that two milligrams can kill you. Fentanyl and methamphetamine come from Mexico; their chemicals come from China. Drug cartels make fentanyl and add it to heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and counterfeit prescription drugs. The fake drugs look like Xanax, Adderall, and other prescription drugs but are laced with fentanyl. It’s easy to buy drugs on the Internet and social media. Young people buy “Xanax” and die from fentanyl poisoning. Yet, there is no outrage from our leaders.             

New York had the heroin and crack epidemics of the 70s and 80s. The response was more enforcement and treatment, and it worked for a while. But since then, the drug problem has progressively worsened; drug enforcement and treatment are not priorities for our politicians and government leaders. All aspects of the drug problem have been given a low priority since the mid-90s. Our society tolerates illicit drug use and has legalized marijuana use. Drug traffickers exploit modern technology to their advantage, but the U.S. government lags behind. We suffer the consequences of three decades or more of failed and inconsistent strategies coupled with permissive attitudes toward drug use.           

The Biden administration’s drug strategy isn’t working, and there is no urgency to address the problem. In 1989 President George H.W. Bush addressed the nation on TV to tell Americans what their government was doing about the drug problem. He announced the first National Drug Control Strategy, which contained substantial resource increases and a solid commitment to enforcement and treatment. He said, “[drugs are] the greatest threat facing our nation today.” The current administration rarely mentions the drug crisis. One can barely walk the streets of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities without stepping over addicts, discarded syringes, and crack pipes. Violence in our major cities is often driven by drug-gang conflict. Such human misery is unacceptable in the wealthiest country on earth.

What is our current drug strategy for China and Mexico? These countries are not cooperative and cite America’s drug appetite as the problem — they are not wrong. U.S. border enforcement officials are overwhelmed by the flood of undocumented migrants and cannot focus on drugs smuggled over the border.

Here are recommendations to save American lives.

U.S. Enabling North Korea, So South Korea Wants Nuclear Weapons by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19323/korea-nuclear-weapons

We do not have to wonder if Beijing in fact supports North Korea’s weapons programs. China for decades has allowed the North to use Chinese banks to handle proceeds from criminal activities and activities in violation of U.N. sanctions.

Such designations [enforcing U.S. money-laundering laws] would put these state banks out of business everywhere outside China.

If these banks were to fail, so would China’s state-dominated banking system. The failure of the banking system would undoubtedly mean the end of the Chinese economy and financial system. The end of the Communist Party’s political system could not be far behind.

Whatever the effects of designations, the United States needs to enforce its laws. America did not allow Pablo Escobar to run criminal cash through New York, so why does America allow China to do that for North Korea?

“The money Kim Jong Un obtains by fraud, computer hacking, and ransomware and which he uses to build bombs to threaten us is being laundered through our banks. We’re giving Xi Jinping and Kim de facto immunity to keep right on doing it.” — Joshua Stanton, expert on North Korean sanctions, to Gatestone.

No wonder South Korea’s Yoon is not particularly impressed with America.

South Korea is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. If Seoul were to develop nuclear weapons, it would have to withdraw.

Perhaps South Korea should withdraw. China, also a signatory, has been freely proliferating nuclear weapons technology to dangerous states, such as Pakistan and Iran, in addition to North Korea, and the United States has done little, sometimes nothing. At the same time, Washington repeatedly stopped South Korea and Taiwan from building nukes.

Yoon did the world a favor by exposing the folly of America’s nonproliferation policy. Washington needs to stop being afraid of Beijing and start defending allies such as South Korea — and itself.

South Korea’s president has just told the world that he no longer has confidence in the United States.

“It’s possible that the problem gets worse and our country will introduce tactical nuclear weapons or build them on our own,” said President Yoon Suk Yeol on January 11, at a joint briefing by his country’s defense and foreign ministries. “If that’s the case, we can have our own nuclear weapons pretty quickly, given our scientific and technological capabilities.”

Sheila Jackson Lee Introduces Bill to Criminalize ‘Hate Speech’ When leftists don’t even pretend anymore. by Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/sheila-jackson-lee-introduces-bill-to-criminalize-hate-speech/

Leftists don’t even make much of a pretense anymore; they don’t believe in the freedom of speech, and they mean to deny it to their political opponents. This is by far the most disturbing aspect of their agenda, for without the freedom to dissent, a tyrant can operate without any restraint whatsoever. Without the freedom of speech, there simply is no free society.

The latest example of the Left’s war on dissent comes from Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Reparations), who has just introduced a bill in the House, the “Leading Against White Supremacy Act of 2023.” Only vicious racists could possibly object to combating white supremacy, right? Actually, the bill is cleverly framed, but like so many other Congressional initiatives, it’s far more insidious than its name would suggest.

The bill is designed to “prevent and prosecute white supremacy inspired hate crime and conspiracy to commit white supremacy inspired hate crime and to amend title 18, United States Code, to expand the scope of hate crimes.” The framers of the bill were thoughtful enough to provide a helpful explanation: “A person engages in a white supremacy inspired hate crime when white supremacy ideology has motivated the planning, development, preparation, or perpetration of actions that constituted a crime or were undertaken in furtherance of activity that, if effectuated, would have constituted a crime.”

How Facebook Stifles Ex-Muslims in Norway It’s not just in America that social media clamps down on speech. by Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-facebook-stifles-ex-muslims-in-norway/

Thanks to Elon Musk, we’re now beginning to see solid evidence of the remarkable degree to which the social-media giants – in collaboration with Democratic politicians, intelligence agencies, and the corporate media –have striven to stifle their ideological opponents. But even the Twitter Files, at least the ones that have been made public so far, don’t satisfactorily convey the worldwide extent of Silicon Valley’s mischief. One of the most egregious cases that have come to my own attention recently is that of Ex-Muslims of Norway (EX-MN), which describes itself on its website as standing “for universal rights and secularism” and for the right of Muslims to criticize their religion and, if they wish, to leave it. The members of EX-MN emphasize their identity as ex-Muslims “because we will not be done with Islam until the Islamic mentality is modernized or Islam is cast onto the rubbish heap of history.”

Founded in 2016 by three writer/journalists – the Turkish-born Cemal Knudsen Yucel, the Iranian-born Lily Bandehy, and the late Iraqi–born Walid al-Kubaisi – EX-MN opposes forced marriage; polygamy; genital mutilation; child hijab; burkas; sexual segregation; taxpayer financing for religious institutions; religious intimidation and threats; and blasphemy laws. And it supports untrammeled freedom of speech. By way of promoting these worthy stances, EX-MN holds seminars, takes part in international conferences and demonstrations, sends its members to speak in schools and at public events, and posts videos on YouTube (most of them in English) about such topics as Koran burning, the concept of “Islamophobia,” pro-hijab Western feminists, and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.