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President Biden Should Quash Abbas’ Newest Offensive by Moshe Phillips

https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/01/08/president-biden-should-quash-abbas-newest-offensive/

In December, both Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and Russian leader Vladimir Putin called for the “Quartet” to be the sponsor of future negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. But why?

The Quartet was established in Madrid in 2002 and is comprised of the United Nations, the European Union, the United States, and Russia. It has been irrelevant for many years — at least since May 2015, when Tony Blair officially resigned from his role as Special Envoy, and arguably long before that.

The Biden administration should abandon the Quartet as soon as possible before Abbas’ offensive sees success.

A review of the Quartet’s website is instructive on why Abbas has been so vocal lately about his support for the Quartet’s increased involvement.

The tagline included at the top of every page of the Quartet’s website is “supporting the Palestinian people to build the institutions and economy of a viable, peaceful state in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

It’s important to break down that sentence.

First, the tagline does not mention Israel at all. That, in and of itself, is decision that cannot be defended in any way. How can one claim to support peace between two sides and ignore the very existence of one side in your mission statement?

Second, Israel’s major cities and Ben Gurion International Airport would be within easy rocket range of terrorists sitting on the Palestinian side of the border of a “West Bank” state. Does anyone honestly believes that a new Palestinian government would stamp out the terrorists? Does anybody remember the Oslo Accords, which obligated the Palestinian Authority to outlaw and disarm all terrorists? Who enforced that, and who will enforce future Palestinian compliance?

As Democrat lies compound, the truth will out By Earick Ward

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/as_democrat_lies_compound_the_truth_will_out.html

Have you ever lied, or ever watched someone else lie?  What commonly occurs is a compounding of more lies, designed to cover the original lie and subsequently keep the truth from being discovered.

It is not enough that the left cheated (a lie).  What we are witnessing today is the left flailing about, working tirelessly to conceal its deceit.

If leftists rightfully won the 2020 presidential election, and now the subsequent Georgia Senate runoff, one would think we’d see a measured process for transitioning Joe Biden and Kamala Harris into the presidency and vice presidency.   

What we’re seeing instead is chaos.  A myriad of leftist entities, from pols to Media, Big Tech, Hollywood, and others, are whipped into a frenzy to silence dissent and cut short the president’s term.

There are the 25th Amendment, impeachment, punishment, and threats of punishment of anyone who dares question the legitimacy of the vote, and now mass censorship of the president and American citizens?  Are these necessary when a peaceful transition of power is scheduled to occur in a mere 10 days?  

If you have the truth, pound the truth. If you don’t have the truth, pound the table.

What we are witnessing is a tantrum of spoiled children, pounding the table.

We know they lied.  They know they lied.  We know they know they lied.  The more that they flail about, the more at peace you should feel that our cause is just.

Conceding Defeat to Fraud Is Not Patriotic By Dennis L. Weisman

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/conceding_defeat_to_fraud_is_not_patriotic.html

I. Introduction

In the aftermath of the protests that devolved into deadly riots in Washington, D.C. and resulted in the breach of the Capitol building, there is a temptation to stand down and not question any further whether Joe Biden is the duly elected president of the United States.  That question, which is key to preserving our democracy, must not go unanswered, violence or no violence.  We hear claims that what occurred in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday happens only in third-world countries.  Perhaps the more germane question is whether these types of elections are third-world phenomena and fall well short of the integrity we should demand of our election process and the officials who preside over it.

 I make no claim that the voting irregularities writ large are of a scope that would change the outcome of the presidential election because I honestly do not know.  But this uncertainty, which I believe that many share, and not just supporters of Donald Trump, is a cancer on the Republic because it strikes at the foundation of our democracy.  If we can’t trust the elections, we can’t trust the politicians who come to power as a result of those elections, and without trust there is no democracy and ultimately there is no country.

II. The “Patriotic Myths”

The first myth is that patriotism demands that we now stand down in questioning the results of the presidential election.  In fact, the opposite is true.  There are no circumstances in which outstanding, credible questions regarding the integrity of our elections should go unanswered because without ensuring the integrity of our elections, we can have no enduring fidelity to those politicians who emerge victorious from those elections.

The second myth is that there is ample time to study the election results and procedures after Mr. Biden’s inauguration.  But what if the wrong man occupies the Oval Office, one not duly elected by a fair and impartial vote of the American people?  What are the American people supposed to do after the fact?  What is the constitutional procedure for removing a sitting president from office should it be discovered ex post facto that he was the product of a fraudulent election?  

The third myth is that a true patriot knows when to stand down even if there are voting irregularities.  The necessary implication is that Mr. Trump is not a patriot because he refuses to go away quietly and simply accept defeat, deserved or otherwise.  I do not doubt that Mr. Trump’s ego plays a prominent role in his challenging the election results.  He does not like to lose.  But there is a much larger issue at play.

The ‘Virtue’ of the New Totalitarians Later ages are always surprised by the casual brutality of totalitarian regimes. What they neglect is the unshakeable (though misguided) conviction of virtue that animates the totalitarians. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/09/the-virtue-of-the-new-totalitarians/

What was the most disturbing thing to happen in the last few days? 

Some say it was the horrifying spectacle of the mob besieging and breaking into the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. 

That was indeed disturbing, especially the pageant of wanton assaults on property in the seat of our government and, most of all, the images of Ashli Babbitt, the young woman who was shot and killed, apparently by law enforcement. 

There is much we do not know about what happened that afternoon. But I think Tucker Carlson was right about two essential things. 

One, that President Trump bears some responsibility for what happened. He “recklessly encouraged,” as Carlson put it, his distraught supporters. I should note, by the way, that I believe that the president’s supporters are right to be distraught—and not just because their guy lost. That’s the nature of elections. One candidate wins, the other loses. So long as the election is fair, and is seen to be fair, all is well. The loser, and the loser’s supporters, may mutter, but they accept the result and go home. 

But in the 2020 election there were huge and, in my view, determinative irregularities. Had the votes been fairly counted, I believe, Trump would have won. But they weren’t. 

Hence the anger among his supporters. The president should have appreciated their anger and acted accordingly. He ought also to have appreciated that by January 6, the game was over. There was nothing Vice President Mike Pence could have done that would have changed the outcome of the election. When Trump concluded his remarks to the crowd by encouraging them to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” and go “to the Capitol,” he was playing with fire. He ought to have discerned as much.

But I believe Carlson is also correct that the president did not intend or foresee the mayhem that followed. As the transcript of his remarks shows, he encouraged the crowd “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” He ought to have known that more could transpire. A huge, fired-up crowd is a mob just waiting to happen. But Carlson was right: this was a “political protest” that “got out of hand,” not an “insurrection” or an act of “domestic terrorism,” as Joe Biden and others we quick to claim. 

Why Trump Will Weather This Nonsense He’ll be back. Dov Fischer

https://spectator.org/trump-will-return/

We have been through this drill before — as with Charlottesville and as when President Trump held a press conference alongside Vladimir Putin overseas and stated that he believed Putin’s questionable asseveration that Russia had not messed with the 2016 American elections. Everyone is smart except Trump.

I view the video, and more than 95 percent of the people who made their ways inside clearly were just drifting and roaming around, walking mostly in single or double file, as in a tour of the Capitol.

In each case, the Mainstream Media whipped up a froth and frenzy. In all of human history, we essentially were told, there never had been such perfidy. We kept hearing, night after day after night after day, the carefully selected clip: “There were fine people on both sides.” So that meant, we were told, that President Trump, grandfather of Orthodox Jewish children, benefactor of Jared Kushner, doting father of Orthodox Jewish Ivanka, a man who commuted the unfair sentence of Shlomo Rubashkin, endorses Nazis. As recently as this very week, the Mainstream Media still are at it, still lying shamelessly that he endorsed Nazis at Charlottesville. While I was watching the nightly Hebrew news out of Israel on Israel’s equivalent of PBS, the Left-oriented public broadcasting station that the Government funds and that the taxpayers hate because all their Mainstream Media likewise are Left-oriented, their Thursday news report included that same precisely edited clip: “There were fine people on both sides.” Not a word about how the President in truth had condemned Nazism and White Nationalists two separate times in the same four-minute conference. That is why the general Israeli population hate their Mainstream Media and love Trump.

There was a similar froth and frenzy during and after that overseas press conference with Putin: James Clapper and John Brennan were all over CNN asserting that the President had perpetrated treason and such. It was worse than Benedict Arnold giving secrets to the British in the days when the Brits were our mortal enemies. (Interesting how time changes realities.) How could the President publicly say, alongside Putin, that he believes Vladimir Putin and not his own director of intelligence? Why didn’t Trump look Putin in the face, in front of world news media, and call him a liar and a crook and a tyrant — and then privately try to negotiate other issues that were on the table? As if any world leader ever would stare another in the face, in front of the world media, and would speak that way, that directly, rather than scold behind closed doors.

Joe Biden’s Boosters Wrote His Prodigal Son’s Entire Resume By Paul Sperry10/16/20

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/10/16/joe_bidens_boosters_wr

Hunter Biden profited from his father’s political connections long before he struck questionable deals in countries where Joe Biden was undertaking diplomatic missions as vice president. In fact, virtually all the jobs listed on his resume going back to his first position out of college, which paid a six-figure salary, came courtesy of the former six-term senator’s donors, lobbyists and allies, a RealClearInvestigations examination has found.

Hunter Biden: Through a lawyer, he maintained he and his father dutifully avoided “conflicts of interest.”

One document reviewed by RCI reveals that a Biden associate admitted “finding employment” for Hunter Biden specifically as a special favor to his father, then a Senate leader running for president. He secured a $1.2 million gig on Wall Street for his young son, even though it was understood he had no experience in high finance. Many of his generous patrons, in turn, ended up with legislation and policies favorable to their businesses or investments, an RCI review of lobbying records and legislative actions taken by the elder Biden confirms.

That the 50-year-old Hunter has been trading on his Democratic father’s political influence his entire adult life raises legal questions about possible influence-peddling, government watchdogs and former federal investigators say. In addition, the more than two-decades-long pattern of nepotism casts fresh doubt on Joe Biden’s recent statements that he “never discussed” business with his son, and that his activities posed “no conflicts of interest.” 

No fewer than three committees in the Republican-controlled Senate have opened probes into potential Biden family conflicts. Investigators are also poring over Treasury Department records that have flagged suspicious activities involving Hunter’s banking transactions and business deals that may be connected to his father’s political influence. 

U.S. ethics rules require all government officials to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest in taking official actions. The Bidens have denied any wrongdoing.

ENOUGH WITH THE OUTRAGE John Hinderaker

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/01/enough-with-the-outrage.php

Like pretty much all conservatives, I have consistently criticized riots and other forms of political violence for many years. That includes yesterday’s Washington, D.C. riot. You can’t say the same about liberals, however. Until yesterday, one might have thought that liberals consider rioting and other forms of political violence to be as American as apple pie.

You could write a book in support of that proposition, but for now let’s cite just a few examples. Do you remember when President Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2017? Leftist Democrats rioted in Washington that day. That riot was arguably worse, more violent and more destructive, than what happened in D.C. yesterday. The liberal rioters destroyed stores, set vehicles on fire and battled with the police. Six police officers were wounded. Here is a video reminder:

I don’t recall a single Democratic office-holder denouncing the Democrats’ Inauguration Day riot, and the Associated Press came perilously close to praising the rioters.

Over the ensuing four years, Antifa and Black Lives Matter rioted countless times, bringing devastation to cities like Portland, Seattle, Kenosha and Minneapolis. Did any Democrats denounce these riots? Not that I remember. Many Democrats endorsed them, or seemed to do so. Kamala Harris, for example, said about the riots in June:

They’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not gonna stop. And everyone beware because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And everyone should take note of that. They’re not gonna let up and they should not.

Pearl-Clutchers on Parade By Joan Swirsky

https://canadafreepress.com/article/pearl-clutchers-on-parade

In all those eight months––220 days, over 5,000 hours––what was the reaction of Democrats, both elected and civilian?

Time to get out the ledger.

On the left––literally––we have had nearly eight months of rampaging criminality and violence in the many Democrat-controlled cities in our country, all conducted by thugs belonging to groups called Black Lives Matter and Antifa. This is the short list of what they have done:

Committed widespread arson, including burning down hundreds of minority-owned businesses in the Latino, Asian and black communities (the black owners clearly didn’t matter);
Incinerated cars and burned down buildings, court houses, police stations, et al;
Shot laser beams in the eyes of policemen;
Assaulted civilians, resulting in 30 deaths and thousands of hospitalizations;

Smashed plate-glass windows of numerous businesses, both large and small and then engaged in looting, stealing and grand theft;
Terrorized and then dragged people out of restaurants;
Tore down historic statues, including those of black icons (duh);
Defaced streets and avenues with BLM’s block-long, block-lettered, yellow-painted name. 
Terrorized the citizenry of entire neighborhoods and towns for months on end;
Attacked people in locked cars;

In all those eight months––220 days, over 5,000 hours––what was the reaction of Democrats, both elected and civilian?

Corruption Has Consequences Ray DiLorenzo

ttps://canadafreepress.com/article/corruption-has-consequences

When Obama wanted to get his way, legal or not, he liked to say elections have consequences. Well, corruption has consequences. Much of what we are seeing today is the result of decades of political, civil, social and academic corruption and upheaval, much of it instigated by a political party with a nefarious agenda.

Politicians have long turned their backs on a now frustrated citizenry. Their refusal to listen to anything average Americans have to say and the inability of citizens to get the attention of a political establishment has given Donald Trump, will all his faults, a voice bigger than they ever could have imagined. And they hate him for it. They despise him for meeting the people where they are, huddling with them at their level, even having a Big Mac, and knowing he enjoyed it. The voters finally had a President that was going to take care of them. And he did.

The opposition went out of their way to destroy him, even kicking him when he was down. How anyone could withstand years of that kind of abuse and still achieve such monumental successes tells me God was with him.

In a moment of rare candor during the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters a ‘basket of deplorables.” For that brief moment, her Party revealed a level of contempt for more than half of the country, the hard-working Americans, supported by an equally sanctimonious and complicit press.

When mobs of Antifa and BLM terrorists in cities all across the country and politicians under the guise of health destroy people’s livelihoods and the neighborhoods they live in, the politicians go silent, displaying apathy. But when their turf is invaded, their fury comes alive, their indignation aroused, their ‘righteousness’ on full display. The ruling class reminds us that we are a nation of laws, but I ask, for whom? People see this for what it is…selfish disregard and hypocrisy. A party that condones the killing of unborn children right up to birth should not preach morality to anyone.

Leader of Far-Left ‘Insurgence USA’ Group Encouraged Rioters to Enter the Capitol By Bryan Preston,

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/01/08/leader-of-far-left-insurgence-usa-group-encouraged-rioters-to-enter-the-capitol-n1325304

Thursday we posted some details about some of the people who entered the Capitol during the riot on Wednesday. One of those individuals is John Sullivan.

According to the video Sullivan captured of the events, he encouraged protesters to enter the Capitol.

Deseret News reports:

Sullivan said he also intended to “support the Black community” with his attendance, but also feels it was “important to understand” those who were protesting in support of President Donald Trump.

But some of the 40-minute video he posted to his social media sites contradicts his assertion that he and another woman were “only filming” the actions and not participating as he can be heard in the video encouraging people to join them as they push their way through police barricades.

Just after people broke into the building, Sullivan — wearing a gas mask and wielding an iPhone on a stabilizing stick — and a woman who said Wednesday that she was making a documentary on Sullivan, are on the first porch area outside the entrance looking back over the throngs of people around the Capitol. They can be heard encouraging people to climb the wall, saying, “Come on. Let’s go!”

Sullivan claims he was just “blending in.”

Many, probably most, of the people who entered and damaged the Capitol are Trump supporters. Several have lost jobs as a result, and many will face charges. One, Ashli Babbitt, was shot and killed by Capitol Police, right next to Sullivan.

There has been some question of who instigated the crowd to enter. Sullivan, by the evidence of his own video, did. He is anti-Trump and aligns with BLM.