NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Lipstick on a Political Pig The Dems offer “remedies” for the 2024 disaster to never happen again. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on December 12th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/lipstick-on-a-political-pig/

The barnyard metaphor “lipstick on a pig” expresses the old wisdom that cosmetic changes can’t alter the essential nature of anything. Ever since the election, the Democrats, with a few exceptions, have been flailing about trying to explain how the unthinkable happened. Usually, the analysis––scapegoating is more accurate–– is accompanied by remedies that claim to make sure such a disaster never happens again. Most, however, are just variations of putting lipstick on their ideological pig.

Last week the Democrats elected a new chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, the point of the leftist spear carried by the leftist Dems that have dominated their party in the House for more than a decade. According to NBC’s Sahil Kapur, the prog’s new honcho, Greg Casar of Texas, is advising that the Democrats should finesse culture-war issues as actually economic ones, and thus create opportunities to plump for more dirigiste and redistributionist economic policies:

“The progressive movement needs to change. We need to re-emphasize core economic issues every time some of these cultural war issues are brought up,” Casar said. “So when we hear Republicans attacking queer Americans again, I think the progressive response needs to be that a trans person didn’t deny your health insurance claim, a big corporation did — with Republican help. We need to connect the dots for people that the Republican Party obsession with these culture war issues is driven by Republicans’ desire to distract voters and have them look away while Republicans pick their pocket.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bye Bye Wray Having completed the destruction of the FBI, the Bureau Director leaves the stage. Robert Spencer

Posted By on December 12th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bye-bye-wray/

Christopher Wray might not be the worst director in the history of the FBI. After all, there was James Comey, and before him Robert Mueller. Wray, however, who finally resigned on Wednesday, completed the work that Mueller and Comey began: he oversaw the total politicization of the FBI, and its transformation from a respected law enforcement agency into an American Gestapo, a tool of partisan politics that the Biden-Harris regime wielded like a club against its political enemies, real and imagined. Christopher Wray will not be missed. The question that he leaves in his wake is whether the damage he has done can be undone, and the FBI restored, or if the whole agency should simply be shut down.

While Christopher Wray was director of the FBI, agents of his crooked agency stormed Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and scrutinized Melania Trump’s clothes closet for classified information. This was the first time in American history that a sitting president had weaponized the FBI against a political opponent, and Wray uttered not a public word about how the Federal Bureau of Investigation was becoming the Democrat Bureau of Lawfare and Harassment.

Trump wasn’t the only victim, either. The Biden-Harris regime  sicced Wray’s feds on angry parents protesting at school board meetings, worked with Twitter and other social media giants to silence and deplatform people with opposing views, and even sent spies into Catholic churches.

This is the legacy of Christopher Wray. And while all that was happening, Wray repeatedly insisted that “insurrectionists” and the “white supremacists” constituted the greatest terror threat the nation faces today. Not Islamic jihadists. Certainly not criminals crossing the open border and roaming free inside the United States. Wray’s ridiculous claims about “white supremacist terrorists,” as well as the agency’s focus on Jan. 6 “insurrectionists,” were a thinly veiled attempt to criminalize and destroy all political opposition to the Biden regime in the U.S.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Whatever The Atlantic Is Paying Jonathan Chait, It’s Too Much

Posted By on December 12th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/12/whatever-the-atlantic-is-paying-jonathan-chait-its-too-much/

We are not in the habit of reading Jonathan Chait’s bloated regurgitations, but the headline on his latest column in The Atlantic — “The Bizarre Normalcy of Trump 2.0” — intrigued us because only a leftist could describe the orderly and upbeat transition that is happening right now as “bizarre.”

To Chait, what’s bizarre is that people on the left aren’t freaking out more because “what is actually happening in the capital is, by any rational standard, disturbing.”

A prime example, Chait says, is Trump’s appointment of Michael Anton as director of policy planning at the State Department, which, he says, highlights “the banal ubiquity of authoritarian thinking in the Trumpified Republican Party.”

What he says next is one of the purest, most unadulterated forms of projection we’ve ever come across.

Here’s what he writes about Anton:

Anton is best known for an essay published eight years ago called ‘The Flight 93 Election.’ In it, he argued that conservatives should support Trump, despite their serious reservations about his character, because another Democratic term in office would amount to the death of the republic. (Hillary Clinton, like the 9/11 hijackers, would steer the country toward the equivalent of a fiery demise.) At the time, Anton’s argument stood out for its existential tone and hysterical life-and-death metaphor. Now his logic — that permitting Democrats to win a single national election is tantamount to national suicide, the prevention of which justifies any measures, legal or otherwise — is a required belief for service in the power ministries. Once an oddball, Anton is just another Trump bureaucrat who subscribes to the party’s rule-or-perish ideology. (emphasis added)

Say what?

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Has Trump Already Solved Global Warming?

Posted By on December 12th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/12/11/has-trump-already-solved-global-warming/

Editor’s note: Google’s AdSense ad network immediately demonetized this article, calling it “unreliable and harmful.”

Do advertisers know that Google routinely blocks their ads from appearing on webpages that aren’t sufficiently woke? Meanwhile, you can donate directly to I&I here.

A report from a group of international researchers shows that temperatures in Greenland aren’t cooperating with the alarmists’ doomsday predictions. In fact, “most areas are cooling.” This is inconvenient for the climate harpies who have designated Greenland as an indicator of what man-made carbon dioxide emissions are doing to the planet.

Not three months ago, the World Economic Forum eagerly mentioned a study that predicted that a “total collapse” of Greenland’s ice sheet “could happen by 2025.” Last year, a Washington Post scare-’em-all headline declared “Greenland glacier’s rapid melting may signal faster sea level rise.” In another of the many examples we could cite, AZoCleantech.com has claimed that Greenland’s changing landscape signals a global threat.

Now back to the researchers: Using satellite readings, they determined that “the ice-free sub-regions of Greenland are warmer than the ice-covered sub-regions,” which they attribute “to population density.” Overall, though, there was no significant change in Greenland’s temperature for the period studied, 2000 to 2019. They further noted that “in coastal southern Greenland, the temperature during 1958-2001 showed a significant cooling.”

And those ice-covered sub-regions they studied? They found “no evidence of warming over” ice-covered areas. Yes, this thrusts another deep gash into the politically spun global warming yarn.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Still Stupid in America America’s government-run school system is failing. By Larry Sand

Posted By on December 11th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/11/still-stupid-in-america/

In a memorable April 1995 video, Apple founder Steve Jobs declared, “The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it’s not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can’t teach, and administrators run the place, and nobody can be fired. It’s terrible….”

Then in January 2006, John Stossel’s eye-opening documentary, Stupid in America, was aired. The investigative ABC show was billed as “a nasty title for a program about public education, but some nasty things are going on in America’s public schools, and it’s about time we face up to it…The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from poorer countries that spend much less money on education, ranking behind not only Belgium but also Poland, the Czech Republic, and South Korea…This should come as no surprise if you remember that public education in the United States is a government monopoly. Don’t like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it’s good or bad. That’s why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.”

Sadly, since Jobs’ comments and Stossel’s documentary, public school performance has not improved. The latest example of our descent is shown by the scores on the most recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), an assessment administered to 650,000 4th and 8th graders in 64 countries.

The 2023 test, the results of which were released on December 4, revealed that average U.S. math scores declined sharply between 2019 and 2023, falling 18 points for 4th graders and 27 points for 8th graders. Internationally, this puts the U.S., a purported world leader, at 22nd of 63 education systems for 4th-grade math and 20th of 45 education systems for 8th-grade math.

Additionally, average U.S. math scores for both 4th and 8th graders reverted to performance levels of 1995, the first year the TIMSS assessment was administered, meaning any progress made since Steve Jobs’ damning comments has been erased.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

HTS is no ‘liberation movement’ The Islamist rebels that toppled Bashar al-Assad should be viewed with extreme caution. Rakib Ehsan

Posted By on December 11th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/10/hts-is-no-liberation-movement/

The overthrow of Bashar Al-Assad’s despotic regime in Syria this weekend has been cheered on by the UK government as well as much of the mainstream media.

Speaking on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg on BBC One, deputy PM Angela Rayner said that she ‘welcomed’ the news of Assad’s fall. Yesterday, foreign secretary David Lammy celebrated the Syrian president’s toppling, telling MPs that Assad is a ‘monster’, a ‘drug dealer’ and a ‘rat’.

In a sense, the government’s response is understandable. No one should mourn the end of the Assad dynasty’s brutal decades-long rule. Furthermore, Assad’s fall deals another significant blow to his despotic backers, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia, depriving both of a key strategic ally. Lammy’s geopolitical analysis leaves a lot to be desired at times, but he is right to say that Assad’s defeat is a humiliation for both Moscow and Tehran.

Yet too often, this understandable happiness over the fall of the Syrian dictator has morphed into an endorsement of the Islamist forces that toppled him. Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6, even went so far as to describe Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that led the offensive against Assad, as ‘a liberation movement’.

It’s enough to make you wonder if parts of the British state have mislaid their critical faculties. The HTS-led forces now vying to replace Assad should be viewed much more cautiously.

After all, HTS, which had previously been confined to the Idlib province in Syria’s north-west, is a Sunni Islamist paramilitary group. Its leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, was once aligned with the Islamic State (ISIS), and headed up HTS’s predecessor movement, al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. In 2017, the US State Department put up a $10million reward for information that could lead to his capture. This came after its decision in 2013 to classify him as a ‘specially designated global terrorist’. Likewise, the British state lists HTS as a proscribed terrorist organisation, although the government has now mooted removing it from the list.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

In the UK, Fantasy Can’t Quite Replace Reality A dying nation pretends it’s still strong enough to victimize others. by Robert Spencer

Posted By on December 11th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/in-the-uk-fantasy-cant-quite-replace-reality/

Britain, once the seat of a global empire and a proud civilization, is undergoing a world-historical societal transformation before our very eyes, and yet few have taken notice. In fact, even as this formerly great nation and erstwhile leader of the Western world suffers through its death agonies and last days as a free society, some are even celebrating its imminent demise. And still others are going even farther: amid the death throes of British civilization, they’re still up to their old game of posturing and playing the victim, as if they, not Britain, were in mortal peril. They even claim to have been victimized at the hands of dying Britain itself, as the nation of Shakespeare, Henry V and Churchill still had the will or the strength to get the better of anyone.

The Spectator on Saturday reviewed a new play called “Expendable,” which is playing until Dec. 21 at London’s renowned West End theatre The Royal Court. The play, according to The Spectator, is “an urgent bulletin from the front line of the grooming gang scandal in the north of England.” The Royal Court website is no less effusive, saying: “Playwright Emteaz Hussain‘s Expendable spotlights the often-overlooked voices of Pakistani women, delving into the shortcomings of law enforcement, politicians, and the media.”

Spotlighting the criminally overlooked voices of Pakistani women sounds like a capital idea. They could tell us about how the Qur’an directs men to beat women from whom they “fear disobedience” (4:34). They could tell us about how it devalues a woman’s testimony (2:282) and inheritance rights (4:11), and allows for the marriage, and even the divorce, of prepubescent girls (65:4). They could tell us about honor killings, the jailing of rape victims, and more.

All that, however, is not what “Expendable” is about. “The setting,” The Spectator tells is, “is a kitchen in Yorkshire where Zara is trying to keep her family together after her son, Raheel, was outed as a rape suspect by a national newspaper.” It’s not just the shame of the charge, it’s the attendant harassment: “White thugs dump parcels of excrement on their porch and Zara cowers under the kitchen table, too scared to answer the door. The racists have mounted a mass demonstration, supported by the cops, which causes local bus services to be cancelled.”

NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENSE Comments turned off

Clown Commandant General Eric Smith’s claim that America’s Middle East combat experience gives it an edge over China is historically inaccurate and reflective of broader issues in military leadership and readiness. By Josiah Lippincott

Posted By on December 11th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/11/clown-commandant/

“President Trump can change this. He could start by relieving Smith of command and promoting an officer with a functioning brain to stand in his stead.We need serious reform in the Department of Defense. That change should start at the top. I, for one, would like to see my former branch become a serious warfighting organization. The Marine Corps is not a circus, and the Commandant should not be a clown.”

In recent comments at the Ronald Reagan Foundation and Institute’s National Defense Forum, General Eric Smith, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, stated that America could defeat China in a war because of our combat experience in the Middle East.

“The advantage lies with us because our last combat was captured on somebody’s iPhone 14… The Chinese’ last combat was captured on oil and canvas, and they should not forget that… I would not undersell the value that our combat experience brings to this fight.”

Smith went on to praise America’s “warrior culture”:

“It is easy to bluster. But it’s another thing when you actually have to go toe-to-toe and go in harm’s way. And we have a lengthy history of going in harm’s way—in Iraq, Afghanistan. We’ve built a culture of warrior excellence, warfighting, and interoperability in the joint force. The PRC has not yet had to deal with that. They haven’t had to deal with that in decades.”

These claims are remarkably stupid. For one, the Chinese’ last combat was not captured on “oil and canvas.”

The United States fought—and lost—a war with China in living memory! That combat was captured not in paintings but in photos and videos. Communist China intervened in the Korean War after UN troops pushed to the Yalu River on the border of North Korea and China in 1950.

Communist troops from the People’s Liberation Army pushed American and United Nations forces south in a series of bloody engagements that fall. The Battle of the Chosin Reservoir in November 1950 is well-known to Marines (save for General Smith) for the brutality of the cold conditions. Chinese forces pushed the Marines back to the 38th parallel, but we inflicted heavy losses in the process.

American troops displayed great bravery, but it should be noted that the conflict was a disaster for the Americans.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Rescuing California Requires Challenging Crony Environmentalism California’s high cost of living is driven by Democratic policies that prioritize environmentalism and government expansion, harming businesses and households while failing to address affordability. By Edward Ring

Posted By on December 11th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/12/11/rescuing-california-requires-challenging-crony-environmentalism/

The Speaker of the Assembly in the California state legislature, Robert Rivas, recently said, “California must not fixate on Trump and forget about affordability.”

Fat chance. California has been under the absolute control of Democrats for a generation. It’s their policies that have made the state unaffordable.

By now, the only people who deny that California’s state government policies are hostile toward working families and businesses, small and large, are the people running the state government. California is run by activist state bureaucrats, the unions that are funded by their membership dues, and the politicians that are elected and controlled by these unions. This is a racket. An entirely legal, yet entirely corrupt and self-serving system that is designed to grow government, harass businesses, kill good jobs, assess punitively high taxes, and elevate the cost of living to the point where people either become dependent on government assistance, flee to friendlier states, or are so rich they don’t care.

Democrats did this. Democrats own it.

The reason this system isn’t successfully challenged and broken is because surrounding this core coalition are commercial and nonprofit special interests that benefit from the status quo. A prime example of this is the homeless industrial complex, a network of state and local bureaucracies, subsidized developers of “supportive housing,” and “nonprofit” providers of services to the homeless. They have collected tens of billions of dollars from taxpayers to implement demonstrably failed policies, and as California’s homeless population continues to grow, they collect additional billions.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is ‘America’s Doctor’ a Good Choice to Head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid? By Janet Levy

Posted By on December 11th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/12/is_america_s_doctor_a_good_choice_to_head_the_centers_for_medicare_and_medicaid.html

Mountebanks peddling miracle cures in the Old West would often pretend to be qualified doctors. 

It is rare to come across mountebanks now, rarer still for qualified doctors to peddle miracle cures.  But Dr. Mehmet Oz – a former cardiothoracic surgeon, famed purveyor of ‘medutainment’ on his T.V. show, and the man President-elect Donald Trump has nominated to administer Medicaid and Medicare – has been doing so unchecked.

On his show (that ran from 2009 to 2022) and on numerous other occasions, Dr. Oz has hyped dubious medical “miracles” and recommended cures that range from the anodyne, to the bizarre and dangerous. 

Here’s a partial list: a bar of lavender soap in bed to relieve restless leg syndrome; green coffee bean extract and raspberry ketones for weight loss; red onions, endives, and sea bass to reduce the risk of ovarian cancer; a poop primer for self-assessing overall health; 200 orgasms annually to extend life expectancy by six years; selenium supplements to prevent cancer; colloidal silver for the common cold; and a supplement containing human chorionic gonadotropin (a placental hormone) for weight loss.

In fact, the AMA Journal of Ethics has called Dr. Oz “a dangerous rogue unfit for the office of America’s doctor,” earned by virtue of his show.  In 2014, a Senate hearing on weight-loss scams chided him and told him to use his immense influence responsibly.

Yet, his dubious recommendations are not the only reason Dr. Oz is a questionable choice to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency that spends $2.6 trillion annually. 

The following are of greater concern:

·    Potential conflicts of interest will likely bias Dr. Oz’s decisions, for he has significant investments in healthcare and pharma companies, including the UnitedHealth Group, a critical CMS partner; in Amazon, which runs a Medicare-linked online pharmacy; and in Domino’s Pizzas, Pepsi, and U.S. Foods, makers of products linked to lifestyle diseases.