Displaying posts categorized under

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

As the Big Lie About Sicknick Persists, Alleged Attackers Languish in Jail No one killed Brian Sicknick. But that isn’t stopping the Biden Justice Department, the media, every Democratic politician, and now Sicknick’s loved ones from perpetuating the lie. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/05/28/as-the-big-lie-about-sicknick-persists-alleged-attackers-languish-in-jail/

On August 26, 2020, Kevin Phomma was arrested in Portland for assaulting several police officers with bear spray during that city’s nonstop siege by Antifa and Black Lives Matters protesters. Phomma and others surrounded the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, blocked traffic, and fought with law enforcement.

In a press release announcing his arrest, the Justice Department said, “Phomma doused several officers with pepper spray while they attempted to arrest him. Once in custody, officers discovered the pepper spray was in fact a powerful bear deterrent pepper spray.”

Phomma, 26, also had a three-inch dagger in a sheath strapped to his left hip. He was charged with a dozen counts ranging from civil disorder—a felony—to unlawful use of mace. He appears to contribute little to society except for his skills as a professional protester.

A few days after his arrest, Phomma was released on bail. His trial is still pending; his lawyers claim the civil disorder charge is “a vestige of opposition to civil rights for Black Americans.” (He does not appear to be black.)

While Phomma roams free, acting as the aggrieved party rather than the aggressor, the two men who allegedly sprayed officer Brian Sicknick with a chemical irritant on January 6 are not so lucky.

George Tanios and Julian Khater were arrested in March and accused of “attacking” Sicknick with a chemical spray; the indictment, not coincidentally, was filed just a few weeks after the initial account of Sicknick’s death—the murder-by-fire-extinguisher story—was exposed as a lie.

Desperate to sustain the lie that a police officer was killed by bloodthirsty Trump cultists on January 6, the media and Democrats quickly pivoted to the idea Sicknick died from an allergic reaction to the bear spray. Tanios and Khater, who traveled together to hear Donald Trump’s speech that day, face four charges of using and carrying the “dangerous and deadly weapon” on January 6.

Unlike Kevin Phomma, one charge filed against Tanios and Khater is “assault on a federal officer with a dangerous weapon.” Unlike Phomma and his accomplices, Tanios and Khater also are charged with conspiracy for allegedly pre-planning the assault on a federal officer.

Also unlike Phomma, neither man has been able to post bail; a federal judge last month agreed with Joe Biden’s Justice Department to keep the pair behind bars awaiting trial. D.C. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan, a Reagan appointee, even rejected a $15 million bond package backed by 16 relatives of Julian Khater—an amount three times higher than the court-ordered bail for Harvey Weinstein, as one reporter noted.

A Terrifying Omen For America Under Biden Becomes Even Worse By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/05/28/a-terrifying-omen-for-america-under-biden-becomes-even-worse-n1450432

A new portent of doom for the U.S. economy and the Democrats led by President Joe Biden hit the presses on Friday — a key measure of inflation in the month of April proved worse than expected. This, combined with persistently high unemployment numbers coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, bodes ill for the recovery and should jolt Americans out of their complacency with the Biden administration’s profligate spending.

The core personal consumption expenditures index, which officials at the Federal Reserve consider to be the best indicator of inflation, rose 3.1 percent in April, above the 2.9 percent that economists predicted, the Commerce Department reported on Friday, CNBC reported. In March, the index only rose 1.9 percent.

The index captures more price movements across a variety of goods and services and is generally considered a wider-ranging measure for inflation than the Labor Department’s consumer price index, which accelerated 4.2 percent last month.

The Fed considers 2 percent to be healthy, although it will allow the price index to grow in the interest of promoting full employment. Unfortunately, unemployment remained above 6 percent in April despite economists predicting that it would dip below 6 percent.

This persistent unemployment should not surprise Americans who are familiar with the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion blue pork bill masquerading as a “COVID-19 relief” stimulus. Only 8.6 percent of the funding went directly to combatting the pandemic, while hundreds of billions went to blue-state bailouts. The bill also sent $1,400 checks to individuals, and extended the $400/week “enhanced” unemployment benefits.

Jews Can’t Let the U.S. Turn into Europe By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/jews-cant-let-the-u-s-turn-into-europe/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

A few days ago, New York governor Andrew Cuomo sent extra state patrols to Jewish neighborhoods after a rash of attacks, including the beating of a man by a mob in midtown, a brick flying through the windows of a kosher pizza store, and “protesters” spitting at and threatening restaurant patrons. I had initially missed the story. Since anti-Jewish attacks in Brooklyn aren’t primarily the work of white supremacists, the incidents don’t garner widespread attention.

No matter. I’d suggest Jews go out and arm themselves to deter these kinds of assaults, but, of course, New York makes that extraordinarily difficult. And we shouldn’t exaggerate the circumstances — hate crimes are still rare and the United States is perhaps the safest place for Jews.

That said, it would be a tragedy if we were on a European trajectory. There, the kinds of lies and smears now being normalized and spread by likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and other progressives on the floor of Congress have manifested in harassment and violence against Jews. Nearly a quarter of the French, for instance, believe in some Jewish conspiracy theories. Nearly half of the French say that Zionism is a plot for world domination. Much like American progressives, the European Union helps fuel this animosity by singling out the Jewish state for endless and nearly exclusive reprimand, while at the same time ignoring the atrocities around the world.

In Europe, few Jewish organizations are left to push back against these currents. Indeed, in the United States, Jewish organizations — the cowardly ADL and others — also largely exist to mollify leftist partisans and crusade for progressive causes. These places are populated by people who exhibit bravery by putting triple parentheses around their Twitter handles; the kind of people who work harder to cancel Tucker Carlson than expose the spread of blood libels by elected officials. These are the kind of people who propose American Jews take off your yarmulkes, as they must in Paris suburbs. “It pains me to say this,” Aaron Keyak, Joe Biden’s head of Jewish engagement during the campaign and transition, recently tweeted, “but if you fear for your life or physical safety take off your kippah and hide your magen david. (Obviously, if you can, ask your rabbi first.)” In 2020, Keyak blamed Trump for anti-Semitic attacks, saying, “We see how Trump has been remarkably weak on anti-Semitism and has endangered Jews by making us all less safe.” Today, he has no idea why it’s happening.

Lionel Trilling’s Warning As the great literary critic cautioned more than a half century ago, liberals increasingly reduce a complex world to black and white. Lee Siegel

https://www.city-journal.org/lionel-trillings-warning

In 1950, literary critic Lionel Trilling published a collection of essays called The Liberal Imagination. It contained a presciently devastating critique of modern American liberalism’s grasp of reality. Liberalism, he wrote, “drifts toward a denial of the emotions and the imagination”:

The world is a complex and unexpected and terrible place. . . . It is one of the tendencies of liberalism to simplify, and this tendency is natural in view of the effort which liberalism makes to organize the elements of life in a rational way. . . . We must understand that organization means delegation, and agencies, and bureaus, and technicians, and that the ideas that can survive delegation, that can be passed on to agencies and bureaus and technicians, incline to be ideas of a certain kind and of a certain simplicity: they give up something of their largeness and modulation and complexity in order to survive.

By “imagination,” Trilling didn’t mean the ability to invent. He meant the ability to resist simplistic, reductive, and morally gratifying explanations of reality and to see the painfully immense complexity of truth and perspective that is at the heart of life.

Consider a few test cases of the efficacy of the liberal imagination. Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene recently wrote in a Tweet that a grocery store chain allowing its vaccinated employees not to use masks so long as they wore a logo on their shirts was “just like the Nazi’s [sic] forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.” Denunciations of Greene for making such an unhinged analogy swiftly followed. Yet with a little complexity, a little modulation, and a little context, you might arrive at the conclusion that Greene is crazy like the proverbial fox. Perhaps she intuits that in American politics, celebrity almost guarantees success as a political candidate, and that notoriety is the quickest route to celebrity. But why ruin all the fun? Greene and her adversaries are linked arm in arm in a thrilling race to the bottom.

There are Holocaust analogies, and then there are Holocaust analogies. Recently, CNN fired Rick Santorum, the network’s token conservative pundit, for saying elsewhere that the U.S. was founded on “Judeo-Christian values” and that its colonists and settlers “birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here. I mean, yes we have Native Americans, but candidly there isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.” Callous? Sure, but Santorum was not denying American Indians’ death and destruction at the hands of white settlers. He was carelessly stating facts that were nevertheless historically accurate—America was founded on Judeo-Christian values; and American culture doesn’t owe much to Native American culture, if by “culture” he meant the organized expression of thought and feeling.

Byron York Second thoughts about voting for Joe Biden by Byron York,

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-second-thoughts-about-voting-for-joe-biden

It was well known during the presidential campaign that many Biden voters were happier about voting against Donald Trump than voting for Joe Biden. A Monmouth University poll taken a couple of weeks after the election found that 57 percent of Biden voters reported being happy with his victory, while 73 percent said they were happy that Trump lost. So a significant number of them voted more against Trump than for Biden.

That sense of ambivalence about Biden has lasted into his presidency. A new Fox News poll asked the question, “Are you satisfied with how you voted in the 2020 presidential election, or do you wish you had voted differently?” Ninety-one percent of Biden voters said they were satisfied. Among Democrats, 89 percent said they were satisfied. Of people who call themselves liberals, 85 percent were satisfied. While those numbers are high, they are still lower than the last two winning candidates in the early months of their presidencies. In April 2017, 97 percent of Trump voters said they were satisfied with their vote, while in April 2009, 93 percent of Obama voters said they were satisfied.

There appears to be a growing concern among some voters that Biden is not governing the way he campaigned. During his run for the White House, Biden presented himself as a “centrist,” and much media coverage happily went along. But once in office, Biden has pushed massive spending proposals to remake America. He has not uttered a word of protest when admiring media commentators compared him to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, Democrats who succeeded in passing massive proposals to remake America.

In short, Biden is pushing more change than some of his voters want. The change they wanted was to get rid of Trump, not elect a new FDR.

A Sinking Ship of State Drowns Everyone by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17415/sinking-ship-of-state

To be clear, the spending bill is actually the creation of a national debt so massive that it has the means to destabilize a democracy dependent on a functioning economy.

For the Chinese Communist Party, seeking to master the 21st Century as the one global superpower, it represents a strategic victory without so much as firing a single bullet. They know that an economically weakened America cannot possibly sustain its military leadership when it is burdened with paying down a massive debt. Our allies and unaligned nations recognize this threat as well, and will reinvent their relationship with China if they believe America’s best days are in the past.

What makes the Administration believe that Corporate America would not respond with massive restructuring to avoid a confiscatory tax bill — or passing the added cost on to the consumer, or moving the company’s headquarters offshore to a country with a lower corporate rate — to avoid the threat of losing its international competitive edge? Corporations have good accountants, too.

Few debate the idea that our nation’s infrastructure is in need of serious attention but the level of political dishonesty in characterizing the Biden plan as “infrastructure” has even made many in his own party queasy. Significant portions of the bill are earmarked for “environmental” agendas and seeming favors to campaign donors, such as billions in subsidies for electric vehicles. The proposed bill cries out for more sunlight and vast quantities of disinfectant.

This recipe for an economic apocalypse comes at a time when new job creation has stagnated and the specter of a serious inflation has begun to emerge…. As historians will tell you if we have the wisdom to listen, no one escapes the devastation of a debtor nation. No one.

The Oldest Hatred Now Fulminates and Flourishes at 1600 By Joan Swirsky,

https://www.thepostemail.com/2021/05/28/the-oldest-hatred-now-fulminates-and-flourishes-at-1600/

In February, not two weeks into the, ahem, presidency of Joe Biden, I described in my article, “Joe’s Jews,” the appointments he made of 11 longtime Jew haters and Israel loathers to key positions in his cabinet/regime.

A month later, in my article “More about Joe and the Jews,” I described 12 more Jew haters and Israel loathers that Joe appointed to key positions in his cabinet/regime.

There have been many other alarmingly similar appointments since then, making it clear to even the most casual observer that the Biden White House has a particularly hostile––even hateful––attitude toward Jews and their ancient homeland Israel, combined with a perverse infatuation with and allegiance to any group or individual intent on destroying the Jewish state.

There is no doubt that Biden’s presence in the Oval Office has been interpreted by these career haters and organized thugs as an unmistakable nod of approval to continue and even expand on the tsunami of anti-Semitism now sweeping the entire globe––from the contamination of most American colleges and universities to brutal physical assaults of Jews  in the streets of New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and around the world––a phenomenon writer Victor Rosenthal elaborates upon in chilling detail––to condemnation of Israel by the Irish parliament and other governments to the racist obscenities vomited out routinely by Democrat members of the U.S. Congress. 

AND THE BEAT GOES ON

In fact, Joe Biden and his entire coterie/staff/cabinet/appointees of left-wing, blatantly anti-Semitic radicals, demonstrate their noxious racism on a daily basis, notwithstanding his boilerplate pronouncements about support for Israel…at the exact same time he embraces, applauds and funds Israel’s mortal enemies. Want proof? Here is the very very short list:

Just Who Made Obama’s Birth Certificate an Issue? By Jack Cashill

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/05/just_who_made_obamas_birth_certificate_an_issue.html

In his controversial new book on the 2020 election, Battle For The Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Donald Trump. Edward-Isaac Dovere repeats a canard that has become something of a staple of Democratic mythology.

According to Dovere, in November 2020, then-president Barack Obama had a hard time making sense out of Hillary Clinton’s loss “to a man he thought of as a moronic carnival barker.”  Dovere traced Obama’s grudge against Donald Trump to the birth certificate issue.

Obama, writes Dovere, “would never forgive [Trump] for turning a fringe obsession with his birth certificate into an issue he’d had to address from the White House briefing room in 2011.”

Dovere errs on several counts.  Trump was not the one who turned the birth certificate into an issue.  Obama was.  Nor did Obama have to address the issue from the White House.  He could have easily settled it in his attorney’s office three years earlier.  More importantly, perhaps, it was not the birth certificate that provoked Obama’s wrath.  It was Trump’s ability to see Obama the same way Obama saw himself — as a fraud.

In the way of background, a week prior to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, attorney Philip Berg filed a federal suit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania challenging Obama’s constitutional eligibility to be president.  A Democrat and former deputy attorney general for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Berg expected to be taken seriously.  He wasn’t.  The media expressed zero interest in his suit.

You Knew DOJ’s Kristen Clarke Was a Radical, But It’s Much, Much Worse Than They’re Letting On By J. Christian Adams

https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2021/05/27/justice-departments-kristen-clarke-all-about-skin-color-n1450172

Newly confirmed Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Kristen Clarke is a thoroughly modern woman. She could never have been confirmed even during the Clinton administration because of her racially-soaked radical worldview.

But these are revolutionary times, where skin color has gained newfound importance in a way we haven’t seen since June 1964 when segregationists chased civil rights marchers down the streets of St. Augustine, Florida.

If you think the comparison doesn’t work, then you haven’t been paying attention, or you are watching too much MSNBC.

I suppose everything old is new again. Content of character is out. Color of skin is in.

And thus Clarke squeaked by this week on a 51-48 vote to manage the most powerful division of the Justice Department.

The Civil Rights Division has its tentacles in every single aspect of American life – schools, jails, elections, hotels, mortgages, movie theaters, church sermons, bathrooms, computer software, rent rates, service animals on planes, pool chair lifts, mental hospitals and forcing police departments to adopt radical policing policies. I left 100 other topics off the list.

And now, another racialist radical is in charge in the division where I was once an attorney.

Clarke is no ordinary racialist radical, though. She brings a reputation for being racially greedy. I have some personal experience with her on this point.

In 2007, I was working on what would become the Voting Rights Act case of United States v. Georgetown School Board.  I was one of the lawyers who spent many days in South Carolina investigating violations of the Voting Rights Act. Georgetown had a voting-age black population of 34 percent but the at-large elections for school board resulted in no blacks ever being elected to the nine at-large seats.  While there is no right to proportional representation, in theory, blacks could conceivably have won three of nine seats.

‘Defund the Police’ Mayoral Candidate Dragged by Young Car Thieves By Kevin Downey Jr.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2021/05/27/defund-the-police-mayoral-candidate-dragged-by-young-car-thieves-n1450337

Atlanta city councilman and mega-liberal mayoral candidate Antonio Brown, who voted last year to defund the Atlanta Police Department by a whopping $73 million, was dragged alongside his car by kiddie-thieves stealing his 2016 Mercedes on Wednesday. The suspects were described as being between the ages of 7 and 11 years old.

Brown, who is running on a platform of “reimagining” the police, arrived at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at a new Dunkin Donuts-Baskin Robbins combo store around 12:30 p.m. Moments after he stepped out of his car, 4 kids swarmed into his keyless, push-button-start Mercedes and took off. Brown attempted to stop the kids, one of whom “acted like he had a gun.” Brown claimed he was dragged, “about a block” before he let go.

“As he started to speed up, and I knew that if I had not let go, I knew I probably could have killed myself because he was going so fast, I would have started to tumble. And I would have hurt him,” the councilman said, Fox News reported.

I have no idea how the child car thief would have gotten hurt in this scenario. I also have no idea how getting dragged “about a block” didn’t result in numerous injuries for Brown.

Brown’s Instagram, with a whopping (sarcasm) 3,454 followers, posted 10 pictures of the ribbon-cutting ceremony where he and his car were separated by children. The pictures have thus far garnered a staggering (more sarcasm) 114 likes.