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Ruth King

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Dem Pollster Issues Frantic Warning on Midterms By Kyle Smith

By on April 25th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dem-pollster-issues-frantic-warning-on-midterms/

Perfect storm incoming! Not only are the American people angry with how the Democrats are running things, they’re angry in a whole lot of different ways at the same time. Democratic pundits are already whining that the media are to blame for not telling citizens about all the good news — everyone has a job and the economy is growing — but the media are unable to mollify people who have half a dozen reasons to want to thrash the Dems.

Mark Penn, a Bill Clinton pollster, in today’s New York Times:

These economic blows are just one element in a cascading set of problems all hitting at the same time. It combines the nuclear anxieties of the 1950s and ’60s with the inflation threat of the ’70s, the crime wave of the ’80s and ’90s and the tensions over illegal immigration in the 2000s and beyond. This electorate is not experiencing a malaise, as President Jimmy Carter was once apocryphally said to have proclaimed, but has instead formed into a deep national fissure ready to blow like a geyser in the next election if leadership does not move to relieve the pressure.

Americans think the economy is weak, inflation is effectively giving them a major pay cut, the border is being overrun, criminals are roaming unchecked, Covid policy is a mess, Vladimir Putin is more dangerous than ever before, and political correctness amounts to a national gag order. Any one of these things could be enough to cost Democrats the House; in the fall of 2014, you may recall, America was in a state of anxiety about mass illegal immigration and a threat from Ebola that turned out to recede quickly, and harshly punished the party in power. Republicans gained an astonishing nine Senate seats, and 13 in the House.

America today is facing real, undeniable problems, and most of them are strongly associated with the Democratic Party. The rout is coming, and Democrats are doing almost nothing to avoid absorbing painful punishment in November.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Florida takes another brilliant step toward righting wrongs in education By Andrea Widburg

By on April 25th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/florida_takes_another_brilliant_step_towards_righting_wrongs_in_education.html

Florida has been on a roll, doing one thing after another to clean up its education system.  In the past year, it passed a bill blocking universities from censoring (conservative) political views; banned communist-controlled Confucius Institutes from campuses; mandated that high school students learn financial literacy; banned Critical Race Theory in public schools; and, of course, passed the Parental Rights in Education bill, preventing teachers from instructing their five- to eight-year-old students about sexuality.  What also happened last week was that Florida got a new law limiting tenure at Florida’s public universities.

Tenure — permanent job security for college and university professors who have managed to maintain their jobs for a certain period — is a relatively new concept.  It began in 1940, when the American Association of University Professors created a Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure holding that academic integrity requires that professors must be free from the fear of firing.

Perhaps tenure made sense when Nazis (who were socialists) were using political brute force to purge German campuses of anybody who stood against their socialist totalitarianism.  However, tenure makes less sense in America when college and university professors, who are almost entirely socialist, use academic brute force to indoctrinate students and stop people who are not hard left from getting hired.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden says Macron didn’t take his election-night call, talked to staff instead By Steven Nelson

By on April 25th, 2022

https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/biden-says-emmanuel-macron-didnt-take-his-election-night-call/

President Biden said Monday that French President Emmanuel Macron didn’t come to the phone when he called to congratulate him on his landslide reelection.

Biden said he spoke with Macron’s staff instead on Sunday night as the French president partied at the Eiffel Tower — requiring the US president to call back Monday.

“I feel good about the French election,” Biden said as he returned to DC from a weekend trip home to Delaware. “I tried to talk to him last night. I spoke to his staff and he was at the Eiffel Tower having a good time. And I’m going to be talking to him today.”

Presidential calls to foreign leaders typically are arranged by White House staff to avoid unscripted or embarrassing moments for the leader of the world’s sole superpower.

Biden reached Macron on Monday before hosting the Stanley Cup championship-winning Tampa Bay Lightning team on the White House lawn.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

A Mostly Wind- and Solar-Powered U.S. Economy Is a Dangerous Fantasy by Francis Menton

By on April 25th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18469/wind-solar-power-us-economy

When President Biden and other advocates of wind and solar generation speak, they appear to believe that the challenge posed is just a matter of currently having too much fossil fuel generation and not enough wind and solar; and therefore, accomplishing the transition to “net zero” will be a simple matter of building sufficient wind and solar facilities and having those facilities replace the current ones that use the fossil fuels.

They are completely wrong about that.

The proposed transition to “net zero” via wind and solar power is not only not easy, but is a total fantasy. It likely cannot occur at all without dramatically undermining our economy, lifestyle and security, and it certainly cannot occur at anything remotely approaching reasonable cost. At some point, the ongoing forced transition… will crash and burn.

[I]t doesn’t matter whether you build a million wind turbines and solar panels, or a billion, or a trillion. On a calm night, they will still produce nothing, and will require full back-up from some other source.

If you propose a predominantly wind/solar electricity system, where fossil fuel back-up is banned, you must, repeat must, address the question of energy storage. Without fossil fuel back-up, and with nuclear and hydro constrained, storage is the only remaining option. How much will be needed? How much will it cost? How long will the energy need to remain in storage before it is used?

There should be highly-detailed engineering studies of how the transition can be accomplished…. But the opposite is the case. At the current time, the government is paying little to no significant attention to the energy storage problem. There is no detailed engineering plan of how to accomplish the transition. There are no detailed government-supported studies of how much storage will be needed, or of what technology can accomplish the job, or of cost.

It gets worse:…. Ken Gregory calculated the cost of such a system as well over $100 trillion, before even getting to the question of whether battery technology exists that can store such amounts of energy for months on end and then discharge the energy over additional months. And even at that enormous cost, that calculation only applied to current levels of electricity consumption…. For purposes of comparison, the entire U.S. GDP is currently around $22 trillion per year.

In other words: we have a hundred-trillion-or-so dollar effort that under presidential directive must be fully up and running by 2035, with everybody’s light and heat and everything else dependent on success, and not only don’t we have any feasibility study or demonstration project, but we haven’t started the basic research yet, and the building where the basic research is to be conducted won’t be ready until 2025.

Meanwhile the country heads down a government-directed and coerced path of massively building wind turbines and solar panels, while forcing the closure of fully-functioning power plants burning coal, oil and natural gas. It is only a question of time before somewhere the system ceases to work…. [I]t is easy to see how the consequences could be dire. Will millions be left without heat in the dead of winter, in which case many will likely die? Will a fully-electrified transportation system get knocked out, stranding millions without ability to get to work? Will our military capabilities get disabled and enable some sort of attack?

No sane, let alone competent, government would ever be headed down this path.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Our Spanish Civil War? Deep and brutal strife in 1930s Spain was a prelude to the barbarity of World War II. Now with the war in Ukraine, we’re reminded that the veneer of civilization is very thin. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 25th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/24/our-spanish-civil-war/

From 1936 to 1939, the civil war in Spain became a European laboratory of new tactics, strategies, logistics, wartime morality, and weapons. Right-wing nationalists under General Francisco Franco finally defeated loyal supporters of an evolutionary socialist republic—but only after much of the Western world had variously weighed in.

The cost to the Spanish people of such brutal and vicious strife was horrific. Over 500,000 Spaniards would die in a little over two-and-a-half years. The country was left in shambles. 

Dictatorships in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and autocratic Portugal poured millions of dollars in military aid and money for Franco’s efforts to seize power. In turn, the Soviet Union often matched that aid with shipments to various communists, socialists, and anarchists of the Popular Front forces. 

Whether by design or by accident, Spain became a proving ground for many of the strategies, weapons, and tactics that would follow later in World War II. And it would be a preview of just how impotent democracies and international bodies were to stop aggressive powers.

The relatively new regime of Nazi Germany sent to Spain hundreds of tanks and “volunteer” troops, pilots, dive bombers, and transport planes of the Condor Legion. 

But Germany’s intervention was not always quite what it seemed. Behind the scenes, Adolf Hitler provided enough aid to ensure Franco’s likely eventual victory. But he did not send quite enough immediate help either to antagonize his European democratic rivals, or to ensure a quick victory for the Nationalists that might have created a powerful and independent Iberian fascist rival bloc to his own. 

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Blacks complain about Biden’s open borders, and Democrats’ foundations silence them By Monica Showalter

By on April 25th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/blacks_complain_about_bidens_open_borders_and_democrats_foundations_silence_them.html

“Mass unfettered immigration is a much stronger issue in poor minority communities than the leftist foundations that silence them let on.”

Mickey Kaus has spotted an interesting article that ran in Tablet magazine by Michael Lind, about the smothering effect monied leftist foundations are having … on the left.

Lind’s argument is this:

The centralized and authoritarian control of American progressivism by major foundations and the nonprofits that they fund, and the large media institutions, universities, corporations, and banks that disseminate the progressive party line, has made it impossible for there to be public intellectuals on the American center left. This is not to say that progressives are not intelligent and/or well-educated. It is merely to say that being a progressive public intellectual is no longer an option, in an era in which progressivism is anti-intellectual.

If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star. That’s because, in the third decade of the 21st century, intellectual life on the American center left is dead. Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police. The space to the left-of-center that was once filled with magazines and organizations devoted to what Diana Trilling called the “life of significant contention” is now filled by the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded, single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds. Having crowded out dissent and debate, the nonprofit industrial complex—Progressivism Inc.—taints the Democratic Party by association with its bizarre obsessions and contributes to Democratic electoral defeats, like the one that appears to be imminent this fall.

We all know that these monster leftist billionaire-bankrolled outfits conspire to create chaos, as well as ostracize anyone who thinks differently on the right.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Macron Stays in Power And once again the French forgo an opportunity to change course. Bruce Bawer

By on April 25th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/macron-stays-power-bruce-bawer/

On Sunday evening, as the minutes ticked by until 8 P.M., when the French polls would close and the results of the presidential election would be announced, a correspondent for the English-language service of France 24 stood outside Emmanuel Macron’s campaign headquarters and said that the 1300-odd international journalists who were gathered there exuded an “optimism” that the incumbent “has this in the bag.” Well, at least they were honest about the fact that Macron was very much the candidate of the establishment to which they belong. Back in the France 24 studio, to be sure, one of the panelists present expressed concern that the reportedly high turnout was “maybe not good for French democracy,” meaning not good for Macron – for in France, as in the Anglosphere, when journalists use the word “democracy” nowadays, they mean keeping the left in power and erecting a cordon sanitaire around the “populists.” In the end, they need not have worried: although there were hopes that Marine Le Pen might pull an upset, Macron won, as expected, this time by a vote of 58.2% to 41.8%. Yes, the margin between the two was half as wide as when they faced each other in 2017. But a win is a win.    

For those whose chief concern is the advance of Islam in the West, the significance of that victory is manifest. During the latter part of Macron’s term, they heard, on the one hand, the cringing statements by Emmanuel Macron’s appointees: the ambassador to Sweden who in 2020 called France “a Muslim country” and the Foreign Minister who, shortly therafter, on a visit to Egypt, assured Muslims of his “deep respect” for Islam. On the other side, there were the defiant members of the French military – more than a thousand of them, including no fewer than twenty generals – who, last year, sending a message that was consistent with Le Pen’s own, declared in an open letter that France is endangered by Muslim enemies within who “despise our country, its traditions, its culture, and who want to see it dissolved by removing its past and its history.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Airbrushing Jews Out of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount The Orwellian ideological – and theological – war against history. Richard L. Cravatts

By on April 25th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/airbrushing-jews-out-jerusalem-and-temple-mount-richard-l-cravatts/

Last week in Jerusalem, as Jews celebrated Passover and Muslims observed Ramadan, violent images were broadcast of Palestinian thugs vandalizing the Al-Aqsa Mosque and hurling Molotov cocktails, stones, and fireworks on the Temple Mount itself and at Jews praying at the Western Wall.

The motivation behind the Arab rage? Initially, false rumors were promoted that settlers were planning to make animal sacrifices, a claim that Ofir Gendelman, spokesperson to the Arab media in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, stressed was false and, in fact, had been promoted by Hamas for the express purpose of inciting terror,

But that spurious charge against Israelis was merely a new variant of the long-standing accusation made against Jews by Arabs that dastardly Jews were plotting to destroy the sacred Al-Aqsa Mosque, a baseless but recurring charge that Israeli journalist Nadav Shragai referred to as the “Al-Aksa [sic] Is in Danger” libel. In fact, as early as the 1920s, when Amin al-Husseini, the Nazi-loving Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, rallied Muslims with accusations that Jews intended to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and rebuild the Jewish Temple, Arabs have attempted to ignore and obscure any Jewish connection to the site and have sought to “liberate” purported Muslim holy places from the grip of the occupying Zionists.

While the current round of violence was predictably blamed on Israel, in fact, as with previous clashes on the Temple Mount, the violence and rioting were neither random nor pointless and had both a strategic and tactical purpose—to degrade the Jewish claim to Jerusalem and all of Palestine by erasing the Jewish identity, history, and religious significance of the Temple Mount and Islamicizing the entire site through physical and spiritual control.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Top Ten Jew-Hating Colleges and Universities De-Fund the pro-terrorist movement on campus. Sara Dogan

By on April 25th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/top-ten-jew-hating-colleges-and-universities-sara-dogan/

On college campuses across America, hatred and bigotry directed against Jews is at an all-time high. It is now almost commonplace for swastikas to appear in university halls and restrooms or scrawled on Jewish fraternity houses. Hundreds of chapters of the Hamas-funded terrorist support group, Students for Justice in Palestine, hold events promoting anti-Semitic speakers who spread terrorist propaganda, describing Israel – created the same way Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq were created—as a “settler-colonial state” that engages in “ethnic cleansing.” Under the influence of these terrorist-supporting hate groups, university departments have lined up to endorse statements incorporating the same genocidal lies.

Under pressure from Students for Justice in Palestine and other campus groups including the Muslim Brotherhood-created Muslim Students Association, student governments across the nation are promoting the Hamas-created Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel and its sister movement, the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, efforts reminiscent of the Nazi boycotts of the past. The goal of these boycotts is to isolate and economically strangle the world’s only Jewish state and the Middle East’s only democracy.

In the rare instances when pro-Israel speakers are invited to campus, they are met by mobs shouting slogans such as “Intifada!”—a call for a new violent uprising against Israel—or “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free”—a call to destroy the entirety of the Jewish homeland. America’s universities have become a new fount of Jew hatred which then leeches into the broader culture.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Here Comes the ‘DeSantis is Worse Than Trump’ Narrative “DeSantis presents an even clearer present and future danger than Trump does” by Mike LaChance

By on April 25th, 2022

https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/04/here-comes-the-desantis-is-worse-than-trump-narrative/

It’s finally here. We all knew this moment would arrive, it was just a matter of time. The same people who compared Trump to Hitler and called him a threat to democracy, will now tell us that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is even worse than Trump.

It won’t matter if DeSantis runs for president in 2024 or 2028, this will be something you’ll hear repeatedly.

Gabriel Hays of FOX News made the catch:

NBC News column: DeSantis is a ‘clearer danger than Trump,’ pushing ‘thought control’ like ‘Nazi Germany’

An NBC News opinion column asserted Wednesday that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ efforts to ban CRT and protect young children from being taught about gender and sexuality in inappropriate ways in public schools, represents “thought control that has happened” in “Nazi Germany” or “today’s China.”

Written by former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut, the opinion piece, titled “Ron DeSantis has taken Trump’s playbook — and made it much more dangerous,” discussed how the Florida Republican has turned Trump’s “divisive talk into real (and really harmful) action” that mirrors action done in “totalitarian societies.”

Aftergut’s reasoning included a variety of DeSantis’ recent policy decisions including the enactment of the Parental Rights in Education Bill, but he was really focused on the governor’s latest initiative, which Aftergut described as, “censoring math books.”

Of course, what liberal analysis of a Republican politician would be complete without a comparison to Hitler and the Nazis?

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