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POLITICS

Divisions Over Israel Shadow Calif. Democrats’ Convention . By Susan Crabtree

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/05/31/divisions_over_israel_shadow_calif_democrats_convention_140467.html

Democratic activists in California have sparked another divisive intra-party debate over inflammatory accusations leveled against the Israeli government at the state party gathering this weekend – an event where several Democratic presidential contenders plan to showcase their campaigns.

On Friday, the eve of the California Democratic Party convention in San Francisco, officials were set to consider at least five draft resolutions that would denounce the Israeli government’s influence on U.S. politics.

One particularly controversial resolution accuses Israel of willfully “aligning with the virulent Islamophobia” of white supremacist groups, including “Christian fundamentalist and ultra-right groups” in the U.S., and it indirectly links that alliance to the 2018 massacre of 11 congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue.

The party’s Resolutions Committee on Friday evening will consider the five draft resolutions, among roughly 200 in total authored by convention delegates. The panel could try to table the ones dealing with Israel to avoid a dramatic public floor debate over the weekend.

Drew Hammill, spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, declined to comment on the resolutions while they remain pending. State party spokesman Roger Salazar was equally reticent.

WHO IS VIRGINIA STATE DELEGATE IBRAHEEM SAMIRAH? ANOTHER BIGOT

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/30/calling-out-anti-semitism-isnt-islamophobic/

Calling Out Anti-Semitism Isn’t ‘Islamophobic’ By Kyle Shideler

Virginia State Delegate Ibraheem Samirah is the poster child for a new crop of Democratic politicians. He’s young, charismatic, and very progressive, with a history of activism that began in his student days on the campuses of Boston University and American University. Samirah has spent his brief time as a Virginia delegate hawking a “Green New Deal” for Virginia in the Washington Post.

But Samirah also has a history of shockingly antisemitic and virulently anti-Israel statements and troubling associations, and he doesn’t take kindly to those who point it out.

A story by Mikhael Smits in the Washington Free Beacon detailed Samirah’s long-running association with the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions group formed out of the Hamas-linked Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP). Samirah’s ties are both historic—including his father’s time as Chairman of the IAP and role as a Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood spokesman—and ongoing. He received funds from AMP donors in his delegate campaign this year, and spoke at AMP’s 2018 national convention.

Smits’ piece builds upon reporting during the February 2019 special election that highlighted Samirah’s anti-Semitic Facebook posts, which were condemned by both Republicans and Democrats but didn’t prevent him from winning the race by a comfortable margin.

Samirah responded to the new wave of criticism by tweeting an unsourced list of “statistics” claiming large numbers of Republicans, and a significant minority of Americans generally, hate or fear Muslims involved in politics.

Samirah also labeled his critics “Far-Right,” even though the “Far-Right” of Samirah’s imagination would seem to encapsulate the entire Virginia Republican Party, which responded to the Free Beacon report by labeling Samirah’s behavior “rabid anti-Semitism.”

Funny how no one wants to look into that report that Omar married her brother… By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/funny_how_no_one_wants_to_talk_about_that_report_that_omar_married_her_brother.html

You’d think they’d be all over this like tabloid papparazzi. Wild and prurient news always sells papers and draws viewer eyeballs, and the scattered reports about how America’s first Muslim congresswoman, Rep. Ilhan Omar, reportedly married her own brother in a bid to bring him into the country ahead of the others trying to get in, is quite a doozy. The press certainly got excited about the Stormy Daniels controversy for such a reason, but why the absence of interest in Omar’s kinky weird love life?

Now the fearless Michelle Malkin has taken up the case, wanting to know why this isn’t being looked into by either the press or more importantly, these law enforcers. She writes:

Investigations dating back to 2016 by blogger Scott Johnson of Power Line (which recently celebrated 15 years in the blogosphere), David North of the Center for Immigration Studies, Alpha News reporter Preya Samsundar and PJMedia.com reporter David Steinberg have determined that the outspoken Somalian Muslim refugee likely married her own brother named Ahmed Elmi in 2009 for some unknown ill-gotten gain while still informally married to the man she calls her husband and father of her three children, Ahmed Hirsi. After a Somalian website floated questions about the marriage arrangement with Elmi and Johnson’s initial reporting broke into the local news, Omar sought to divorce Elmi. Her use of $6,000 in state campaign funds, some of which went to pay a personal divorce lawyer, is currently under state investigation.

Right-wing documentary filmmaker enters Dem presidential race By Tal Axelrod

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/442786-right-wing-documentary-filmmaker-ami-horowitz-enters-dem-race-solicits

Conservative documentary filmmaker Ami Horowitz announced Wednesday that he is running in the Democratic presidential primary to disrupt the party’s nominating process.

“The Democratic Party has become the party of socialism, open borders and late-term abortions. They’ve become so radicalized over the past several years that I feel compelled to try to bring some sanity into the discussion,” Horowitz said in an announcement video posted to Twitter. 

“So if you want to see me throw an intellectual hand grenade on the Democratic debate stage and hold them accountable, go to AmiForAmerica.com and donate some money. Send some cash. Anything!”

Horowitz wrote in a tweet announcing his candidacy that he is soliciting donations to reach the threshold of 65,000 individual donors set by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in order to appear on the primary debate stage next month.

He told The Hill that he is “pretty confident” he will garner the necessary funds, noting that he’s already raked in 2,756 donations in two hours before his website crashed.

Horowitz is unlikely to achieve the DNC’s polling threshold of hitting at least 1 percent on three different nationally recognized surveys.

A Democrat Who Terrifies Other Democrats Thomas McArdle

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/05/30/a-democrat-who-terrifies-other-democrats/

As impeachment noise reaches ever-louder crescendos among Democrats, with the real danger they will overplay their hand and end up investigating and subpoenaing themselves into defeat in 2020, there now emerges another threat: a little-noticed Democrat running for President who is reminding his party of the saner policies some of their most prominent leaders embraced not that long ago.

Democratic luminaries like Bobby Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, John F. Kennedy, and Henry “Scoop” Jackson – all of whom in their time represented dark blue states.

Ami Horowitz, a noted documentary filmmaker, announced his candidacy this month and expressed sentiments with which all four of those giants of the party’s history would agree. “The Democratic Party has become the party of socialism, open borders, and late-term abortions,” he said. “They’ve become so radicalized over the past several years that I feel compelled to try to bring some sanity into the discussion.”

Horowitz got thousands of donations within days of announcing, but needs many times that to get a place on the stage for the first two rounds of debates.

“The Democratic Party has been inexorably and decisively moving to the left,” he told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. He charged that the party now holds a position in favor of open borders that “90 percent of the country doesn’t believe in.” The same 90 percent opposition is the case on late-term abortion, he asserted.

“They’re running away from the word capitalism, which has brought more wealth to more people and lifted more people out of poverty than anything man has ever created – but they’re running away from it. So I want to go on the debate stage, I want to throw an intellectual hand grenade there, and make that debate stage a very unsafe space, intellectually speaking, for those people.”

Democrats 2020: The Grievance Party By Larry Elder

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/democrats-2020-the-grievance-party/

Describing the Democratic Party as one built on “identity politics” used to be a pejorative. But Georgia’s failed 2018 Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Stacey Abrams, recently defended this description of her party. “I would argue that identity politics is exactly who we are,” said Abrams, “and it’s exactly how we won. … When we refuse to engage in the conversation of identity politics, when we refuse to acknowledge that we see you and we understand you and we understand the barriers that you face, then what we are met with is a lack of trust.”

Fellow Democrat and presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg apparently failed to get the memo. A week before Abrams embraced and even expressed pride in Democrats’ identity politics, Buttigieg was blasting President Donald Trump for his “racist” use of it. Trump, said Buttigieg, engages in “peak white identity politics” that creates a “crisis of belonging” in America “designed to drive apart people with common interests.” Buttigieg added, “When you do not belong, it doesn’t just put you in a bad mood; it puts you in a different country.”

By “identity” politics, Democrats really mean grievances. The party leaders push the narrative that blacks, Hispanics, gays, etc. are victims, whether due “inequality” or “sexism” or “racism” or “otherism.”

Take 2020 Democratic presidential contender Sen. Kamala Harris, who announced plans to end the alleged grievance of “unequal pay.” Harris claims women working full time make 80 cents on the dollar (SET ITAL) for doing the same work (END ITAL) as men. She insists it’s worse for minorities: Black women are only paid 61 cents on the dollar, Hispanic women 53 cents. Never mind that the Labor Department long ago debunked this myth. CONTINUE AT SITE

Dem. Presidential Contenders Urge Impeachment after Mueller Press Conference By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dem-presidential-contenders-urge-impeachment-after-mueller-press-conference/

A host of Democratic presidential candidates have strengthened their calls for impeachment in response to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s reiteration of his investigative findings in a Wednesday press conference.

In his first public comments since his appointment, Mueller emphasized the role of Congress in addressing the actions outlined in his report, citing the long-standing Department of Justice guideline that precludes the indictment of a sitting president.

“The opinion [in the report] says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal-justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing,” he said.

In response, a number of Democratic presidential contenders renewed their calls for an impeachment inquiry and cast Mueller’s comments as a de facto endorsement of that course of action.

Senator Kamala Harris (D., Calif.) on Wednesday said Mueller’s press conference was “essentially” a public impeachment referral intended to motivate lawmakers who have not yet made up their minds on the issue.

Socialists Don’t Know History Young people don’t remember the Soviet nightmare. But what’s Sanders’s excuse? By Joseph Epstein

https://www.wsj.com/articles/socialists-dont-know-history-11559171072

‘History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.” I can’t help but mumble this famous sentence from Karl Marx’s “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” whenever I hear about the socialist wing of the new—and distinctly not your father’s—Democratic Party. Socialism caused the deaths of more than 100 million people under Lenin, Stalin and Mao, but young progressives want to give it another go.

Not all the socialist Democrats are young. Sen. Bernie Sanders, 77, proudly calls himself a democratic socialist, but one wonders if “democratic socialist,” like “military justice” or “good kosher meal,” is an oxymoron. Under socialism the state always takes priority over the people. “Unfortunately,” as Win McCormack writes in the New Republic, “no self-identified socialist regime in the world—all of which have been installed by professional revolutionists in the Marxist-Leninist tradition—has ever been the least bit democratic.”

In his earnest self-righteousness and inflexibly held positions, Mr. Sanders reminds one of the Stalinists of old. Whenever I hear him hammering home his points in his staccato speech, using his hands for italics, I recall that old phrase of Jewish mothers of an earlier generation being nagged by their children: “Hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik!” Loosely translated: “Stop rattling that tea kettle in my face.” Mr. Sanders isn’t a Stalinist, but, judging by his temperament and rigidity, in Stalin’s day he might have been.

Trump Dominates the Opposition By Taking Them Seriously By Karin McQuillan

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/28/trump-dominates-the-opposition-by-taking-them-seriously/

When our nephew was 9 years old, he posed an unending series of questions: who would win in a fight, a lion or a crocodile? A gorilla or a shark? Those questions come to mind as we watch President Trump face off against his political opponents. On one side, President Trump, on the other, the entire Democratic Party-media complex, and their enablers among the GOP establishment. It is President Trump who comes out on top in each major battle.

Do not underestimate the president’s opponents, however. They are not giving up and returning to civic norms of civil bipartisanship. Democrats have had tremendous success in getting out their twisted message that Trump is a menace to the nation. It is everywhere in the mainstream media, on Google and Yahoo, on Facebook and Twitter. They have suppressed President Trump’s popularity despite the fantastic job he is doing on jobs, the economy, trade and geopolitics.

After the collapse of the attempted Russia-collusion coup, and the arrival of Attorney General William Barr, that three-year dynamic has shifted to President Trump’s favor.

Yet the Democrats have hardly missed a beat. They have pivoted to a multitude of personal investigations, to weird accusations that Barr and Trump are suppressing evidence, while also protesting the declassification of documents. Democrats are still screaming “constitutional crisis” and talking of impeachment—all meant to taint Trump’s image with no-information voters.

Do not mistake the Democrats for a joke, no matter how ludicrous their actions look from this side of the reality divide.

The Left’s Battle Against ‘Inequality’ The fallback race card. Larry Elder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273861/lefts-battle-against-inequality-larry-elder

In his book “Discrimination and Disparities,” economist Thomas Sowell notes that a disproportionate percentage of first-born siblings become National Merit scholars compared to siblings born later, presumably because the first-born starts life with no sibling competition for parental attention. This, says Sowell, illustrates the absurdities of expecting equal results when equal results do not even occur within the same family among siblings raised under the same roof with the same parents.

When I was growing up in South Central Los Angeles, one of my closest friends was “Paul.” We met in the second grade and attended the same elementary school, middle school and high school. Not only did we take many of the same courses with the same teachers, our houses were identical.

When I first invited Paul to my home, about a half-mile from his, he was astonished. “Whoever built your house,” he said, “built mine, too.” He was right. When I visited his house, I found that the only difference was that my house had one tiny additional window that his did not. Same schools. Same teacher. Same neighborhood. Same house design.

Paul was a gifted athlete. Name the sport, he excelled. He was a starting pitcher for the baseball team, the starting shooting guard for the basketball team and the starting quarterback for the football team. He picked up a tennis racquet, hit balls against a backboard for a few weeks and then made the tennis team.