ELECTIONS, POLITICS Comments turned off

Here Comes the New York Gerrymander The new Governor says she’ll help Democrats carve up the state.

Posted By on August 26th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/here-comes-the-new-york-gerrymander-kathy-hochul-democrats-11629928462?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s moderate reputation may not last long. In her first day in the office vacated by Andrew Cuomo, Ms. Hochul promised to help gerrymander the Empire State to the benefit of Democrats in Washington, D.C.

The New York Times asked Ms. Hochul in an interview, “Do you plan to use your influence to help Democrats expand the House majority through the redistricting process?” Nice leading question. She answered: “Yes. I am also the leader of the New York State Democratic Party. I embrace that. I have a responsibility to lead this party, as well as the government.”

She added, in response to the next question, that “I have to help make sure there are more Democrats there to help Joe Biden get his agenda through the Senate.”

By a 15-point margin, New Yorkers in 2014 passed a constitutional amendment creating a bipartisan commission to take the lead on redistricting. The commission is slated to publish an outline of its first proposal by Sept. 15.

Yet after Democrats took control of both chambers of the New York Legislature in 2018, they began to look for ways to undermine the new commission. Another redistricting amendment on the ballot this November would do precisely that. It would implement complicated rule changes in the redistricting process ahead of the 2022 elections, but the main objective is to reduce GOP leverage.

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

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON – – BIDEN’S BROWN THUMB

Posted By on August 26th, 2021

https://www.tothepointnews.com/register/?wlfrom=%2F2021%2F08%2Fbidens-brown-thumb%2F

To say of someone they “have a green thumb” is to note everything in their garden grows and blossoms.  Joe Biden’s thumb is not green – it is brown.  Everything he has touched since entering office has turned to feces.

None of his blame-gaming, none of his distortions, none of his fantasies and unreality can mask that truth.

THE AFGHAN CATASTROPHE

Seven months ago, Afghanistan was relatively quiet—with about 10,000 vestigial NATO troops, including 2,500 Americans, anchored by the Bagram Airfield. They were able to provide air superiority for the coalition and Afghan national army.

With air power, NATO forces, if and when they so wished, could have very slowly and gradually withdrawn all its remnant troops—but only after a prior departure of all American and European civilians, coalition contractors, and allied Afghans.

The transient calm abruptly imploded as soon as Joe Biden recklessly yanked all U.S. troops out in a matter of days. Many left in the dead of night, leaving no one to protect contractors, dependents, diplomats, and Afghan allies. In Biden’s world, civilians protect the last Western enclave while soldiers flee.

Three weeks ago, Joe Biden and a woke politicized Pentagon were assuring us that Afghanistan was “stable.” Now the country is reverting to its accustomed premodern, theocratic, and medieval chaos. It will likely soon reopen as the world’s pre-9/11-style terrorist haven—an arms mart of over $50 billion in abandoned U.S. military equipment.

Thanks to the president of the United States, terrorists and nation-state enemies can now shop for arms and train there without hindrance.

The “NATO coalition-builder” Biden also dry-gulched his European allies, whose soldiers outnumbered our own. The humanitarian “good ole Joe from Scranton” deprecated the thousands of Afghan military dead who had helped the Americans.

The families of the American fallen and wounded of two decades were all but told by Biden that the catastrophe in Kabul was inevitable—no other way out but chaos and dishonor. Why did he not tell us that earlier, when he was vice president, so many dead and wounded ago?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden Sank the Ship and Now He’s Bragging About the Number of Lifeboats Jim Treacher

Posted By on August 26th, 2021

https://jimtreacher.substack.com/p/biden-sank-afghanistan-and-now-hes

As a wise man once said, you should never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. But when it comes to current events in Afghanistan, the Biden administration is spewing out plenty of both.

Biden gave yet another “press conference” Tuesday, although none of them have been actual press conferences. He just reads off a teleprompter for a few minutes, and then turns around and walks right out as the press yells at him.

We’re getting used to this image by now:

Literally turning his back on Americans in trouble is becoming a daily ritual for Biden. If he knew we’d be seeing so much of him from this angle, he would’ve gotten some more of those plugs on top.

Biden was five hours late to his own scheduled “press conference,” and there was no point in having any reporters there in the first place. The only time he’s answered any questions about this Afghanistan debacle was when he humiliated himself in front of George Stephanopoulos, of all people.

Jen Psaki did take questions from the press, for all the good it did anyone. Remember when she got all theatrically outraged at the very idea that Americans are stranded in Afghanistan? That was Monday. The very next day, she admitted that yes, there are Americans stranded in Afghanistan:

Is it just me, or does she seem very nervous and twitchy?1 If she keeps yanking at her hair like that, she’ll have a big bald spot like her boss. The way this Afghanistan debacle is going, it’ll take a lot more than Democrat operatives making #PsakiBomb trend on Twitter to fool people into thinking she’s popular.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Biden-Soros: Paradox Ira Stoll

Posted By on August 26th, 2021

https://www.nysun.com/national/the-biden-soros-paradox/91629/

Americans elected President Trump in 2016 and President Obama and Vice President Biden before that on, in part, promises to end “endless wars” and bring our troops home. Now that Mr. Biden is following through on that in Afghanistan, polls show his job-approval sinking.

How to explain the apparent paradox? Americans seem to want to end wars and bring the troops home, but when they see the actual consequences of doing that, they blame the politicians.

Part of the apparent contradiction is in the incompleteness of the rhetorical framing, whether from the politician or a pollster. No presidential candidate who wants to get elected runs around Iowa and New Hampshire saying, “I’m going to end the wars and bring the troops home, even if that means the countries the troops were in revert to their previous status as terrorist bases and even if that means women’s rights in those countries are set back to the dark ages.”

No pollster asks, “How many two-year-old children trampled to death on the chaotic outskirts of the Kabul airport are an acceptable tradeoff for bringing the troops home?”

The most conflicted is the billionaire George Soros. The Washington Free Beacon illustrated its editorial on the Afghanistan humiliation with a photo of Mr. Soros, noting that he had funded, in the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a group that aimed to “bring the forces against endless war on the Left and the Right together.”

Yet Mr. Soros himself tweeted August 17 that his Open Society Foundations had created “a $10 million Afghanistan emergency fund to support Afghans in grave danger — including champions of human rights, women’s rights, and journalists.”

The press release quoted the president of the Open Society Foundations, Mark Malloch-Brown, as insisting, “We remain deeply committed to Afghans and their efforts to help the country advance toward a more open society. We call on funders to join us in our response to this urgent humanitarian crisis. There is truly not a moment to waste.”

The “urgent humanitarian crisis” erupted after Mr. Biden followed the policy course that the Soros-funded Quincy Institute advocated. I’m not sure whether the right word for it is hypocrisy or tragedy.

The Open Society press release said the money would “support sponsorship for humanitarian parole programs in the United States that provide a pathway to temporary refuge for those in harm’s way… bolster international relief organizations in their efforts to support Afghan citizens fleeing the Taliban advance.” The money would also “aid other efforts to deliver humanitarian relief to internally displaced Afghans and those fleeing to other countries taking them in.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

UNRWA’s Jihad against Israel (Part Three) Andrew Harrod

Posted By on August 26th, 2021

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/08/unrwas-jihad-against-israel-part-three

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) has turned “their plight into a political tool” for Israel’s destruction, Center for Near East Policy Research (CNEPR) Director David Bedein noted in 2014. His book, Roadblock to Peace: How the UN Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict—UNRWA Policies Reconsidered, is essential for understanding UNRWA’s cruel exploitation of humanitarianism in order to wage war on Israel.

As previously discussed, over five million Palestinian “refugee” descendants of Arabs who lost their homes in what became Israel during its 1948-1949 War of Independence are the wards of UNRWA. This outsized agency uniquely exists outside of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which cares for all other refugees worldwide. UNRWA has also uniquely emphasized a “right of return” to modern Israel as a permanent solution for Palestinian “refugees.”

They “are the only ones in the world who have sustained their status as refugees across four generations; and their misery has been utilized as a weapon against Israel,” Bedein wrote. Any “right of return” influx would demographically inundate Israel. Thus, “Israel understands that ‘return’ is a code word for destruction, something the Jewish state will never permit,” he added.

Indeed, Bedein quoted Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs Muhammad Saleh Ed-Din to this effect. He wrote in 1949 that “in demanding the restoration of the refugees to Palestine, the Arabs intend that they shall return as the masters of the homeland” and “annihilate the state of Israel.” As Bedein reviewed, the

‘Right of Return’ issue was often mentioned in Arab forums within the wider context of the discussion of Israel’s liquidation. In Israeli eyes, therefore, the continued persistence on the ‘Right of Return’ by any Arab party betrays that party’s desire to wipe Israel off the map.

“Tragically, UNRWA emphasis on ‘right of return’ provides Palestinians with a rationale for their war against Israel,” Bedein observed, and correspondingly UNRWA “camps, quite simply, function in a pro-terrorist environment.” “Terrorist activity in the UNRWA refugee camps has been extensively documented” by monitors such as the Israeli Shin Bet intelligence service, he wrote. Shin Bet has “documented how UNRWA schools are used for storing ammunition, as well as for hiding suspected terrorists,” while UNRWA vehicles and ambulances also transport terrorists and ammunition.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

CRT is the dialectic of suicide Why are white people so reluctant to tell the truth about critical race theory? Pedro L. Gonzalez

Posted By on August 26th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/critical-race-theory-suicide-whites-crt/

Some things in this world go so beyond the pale that it becomes absurd to weigh and measure them upon the cool, dispassionate scales of reason. Critical race theory (CRT) is one.

There are different definitions of CRT, most of which contain cute elisions. Sharif El-Mekki, CEO at the Center for Black Educator Development, offers a typical one. ‘Critical race theory is a legal framework,’ he says. ‘It’s a lens for people to be able to apply to law and see how racial injustice and how racism has been baked in many laws in the history of America’. That is partly true about some of CRT’s applications. But the political activist Susan Sontag, not known for mincing words, provided a fuller picture.

‘The white race is the cancer of human history,’ Sontag wrote in Partisan Review; ‘it is the white race and it alone — its ideologies and inventions — which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself’.

The purpose of CRT is to ‘prove’ why this is and how it affects nonwhites, not only as applied to law but every aspect of life. Healthcare, classical music, climate change, dating markets, the great outdoors, botanical nomenclature and math class — all are touched by the stain of racial bigotry. In a world where everything is racist, CRT is the cipher disk that reveals the how, why, and who.

The real reason CRT is intolerable, then, is also the one many people have trouble saying aloud: it is explicitly anti-white. For people like me, this is not merely a game of semantics.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

President Ice Cream’s Afghan meltdown There is quite a lot of that Yes-No, Did-Didn’t, whip-lashing these days Roger Kimball

Posted By on August 26th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/joe-biden-ice-cream-afghan-meltdown/

You have to hand it to the Taliban (or, if you are Joe Biden, the ‘Tally-bahn’): they are both a persistent and an infernally clever lot.

As to their persistence, recall that George W. Bush assured us that, ‘thanks to our military, our allies, and the brave fighters of Afghanistan…the Taliban regime is coming to an end.’ That was in December 2001.

As of August 2021, they control the country and are as I write issuing ultimatums to the President of the United States: everybody out by September 11, no, make that August 31 — otherwise, there will be ‘consequences’.

Oh, and by ‘everybody out’, we don’t mean Afghans who may have worked for the US: they have to stay.

There does seem to be a communications breakdown about radical elements in Afghanistan.

A few days ago, President Ice Cream said that al-Qaeda was ‘gone’ from Afghanistan, ergo (he did not say ‘ergo’) we had no reasons to be there, getting al-Qaeda after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 having been the original rationale for going into that godforsaken country in the first place.

Alas, just a few hours later that day, the Pentagon spokesman John ‘no imminent threat’ Kirby acknowledged that ‘al-Qaeda is a presence as well as Isis’ throughout Afghanistan.

There is quite a lot of that Yes-No, Did-Didn’t, whiplashing these days. Jen Psaki, the President’s press secretary, told us that no Americans were ‘stranded’ in Afghanistan, adding for good moralistic measure that it was ‘irresponsible’ to suggest such a thing.

Many observers close to the situation have a different assessment of what will happen; said one, ‘it is unavoidable that Americans, Green Card holders and those who worked with us will be left behind’. Hard cheese on those folks, but, as always, the Babylon Bee distributes solace, explaining that ‘Americans Trapped By Taliban With No Rescue Plan Happy To Hear They Are Not Stranded’.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Enough is Enough: Antifa Attacks Reporter in Portland Matt Taibbi

Posted By on August 26th, 2021

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/enough-is-enough-antifa-attacks-reporter

Antifa’s influence may be exaggerated, but it’s not a mythical Snuffleupagus, either, as they showed in attacking reporter Maranie Staab from our partner News2Share this past weekend.

This past Sunday, while covering a protest in Portland, Oregon for our video partner News2Share, a reporter named Maranie Staab was attacked by members of an Antifa-affiliated group. After complaining about a report she’d done in Colombia in conjunction with TK News, they maced her, shot paint at her, and threw her to the ground.

The backdrop for this scene was explained to TK readers this past weekend in our latest episode of “Activism, Uncensored” called “The Great American Fistfight.” After a series of violent street clashes between left and right activists in Los Angeles, right-wing protesters planned a “United We Win” rally in Portland, Oregon for this past weekend. Antifa and left-wing groups pledged to “defend Portland from racist fascists.” News2Share’s Ford Fischer predicted violence, and he unfortunately turned out to be right.

The exact sequence of events will be detailed in a longer report Ford has coming — the whole day turned out to be a mess, replete with violent confrontations and ending with an exchange of gunfire, in which a right-wing protester fired first (a Black Bloc protester returned fire but was not apprehended). Staab, it should be noted, was also first sprayed with WD-40 by a right-wing protester. But the more serious incident took place later.

In the relevant sequence, an Antifa-affiliated protester called Staab a kutta (a Hindi word meaning, “dog,” apparently) and “slut.” Then the masked protester demanded that press “get the fuck out” and stop filming, pointing in Staab’s face and making the following bizarre comment about a story we ran in July called “Colombia in Chaos”:

You fucking endanger people by flying to fucking Colombia and endangering everyone by opening them up to Covid!

Beyond the total incoherence of that comment generally, calling a woman a name like “slut” obviously flies in the face of what antifascist protesters generally claim to be their beliefs about things like misogyny. In any case, Staab then approached the protesters without her cameras out to try to talk things through, at which point they tossed paint at her, maced her, and threw her to the ground. Eventually, they also smashed both her iPhone and the lens for her digital camera. “Out!” they screamed. “How many fucking times do we have to tell you?”

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Cyberwar – Part One by Peter Schweizer

Posted By on August 25th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17654/cyberwar-part-one

Directly, these attacks [on the U.S.] strike at parts of our electrical grid, our food supply, our energy providers, banks, business computer networks and government systems. Indirectly, they threaten our livelihoods and our sense of security and stability.

[Cyberwar is] an undisguised assault against military and civilian infrastructure meant to cripple the targeted country, destroy or damage its communications and command systems, and create immediate and total chaos among its people.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime has denied its involvement, as it always does. No one believes them.

[Former U.S. National Security Adviser John] Bolton warns that to protect the American people, the defense establishment needs to focus much more attention on early threat-recognition.

Moreover, it is clear the U.S. government must be more assertive in pointing the finger at Vladimir Putin when a Russian attack is unmasked.

Cybercrime often merges with cyberwarfare. The techniques of both are similar, even if their intentions are not. Yet, unlike their “real-world” counterparts, we cannot afford to treat the former as merely a law enforcement problem and the latter as a military problem. Today’s gnat is tomorrow’s nuclear-tipped missile.

In a recent article, former U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton highlighted the cyberwarfare being waged on the West every day by Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. The assault is an accelerating proxy war, a coordinated terrorism campaign conducted by both hired criminals and military intelligence agencies, capable of great economic and societal damage. At the same time, even at lower intensity, it is a subtler attack on Western morale.

Directly, these attacks strike at parts of our electrical grid, our food supply, our energy providers, banks, business computer networks and government systems. Indirectly, they threaten our livelihoods and our sense of security and stability. That is, at least for the present, the most important thing about them.

The SolarWinds hack of 2020 compromised a top-tier provider of IT management services by injecting malware into the company’s routine software update to its 33,000 customers. Those victimized customers included hundreds of large companies, as well as the federal departments of Treasury, Commerce, and even Homeland Security. The hack was extremely sophisticated and operated for months before it was discovered. Cybersecurity analysts in and out of the government say conclusively it was the work of a hacking group they call “Nobelium,” operating with the support, if not the direct control, of the Russian government. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime has denied its involvement, as it always does. No one believes them.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hey, Biden Voters! You didn’t have a clue about how power works in the real world. You should have. You were a grown-up. You had no excuse.  By Bruce Bawer

Posted By on August 25th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/24/hey-biden-voters/

Damn you all.

You’re American citizens, with the right to vote in presidential elections.

For four years, we had a president who, over the course of a single term, managed to undo a great deal of the mischief wrought, and a great many of the mistakes made, by his recent predecessors. Trump revived America’s economy, shored up Americans’ individual liberties, forged several remarkable peace agreements, and greatly strengthened our international position—thus firmly checking the ambitions of our powerful adversaries. 

But, Biden voters, he had a personality that rubbed you the wrong way. He wrote nasty tweets. In the language of TV production, he was too “hot.” You wanted “cool.” 

The Democrats put up a candidate who was plainly in mental decline. It was obvious every time he spoke. But you didn’t pay terribly close attention to his speeches. The sources from which you get your “news” carefully clipped out all of the bits of his appearances in which his befuddlement was manifest. If you heard someone speak out about his senility, you dismissed the charges out of hand.  

Biden also had a less-than-stellar professional history. He’d spent decades in the Senate as little more than a fixture, an empty suit, a vapid, smiling shill for the credit-card companies and other corporations based in his shabby little state. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, mountains of evidence were made public indicating that Biden was even more deeply corrupt than we already knew, taking massive bribes from nefarious foreign powers. 

Yes, that story was banned from social media. Still, you could have known about it if you’d had the slightest bit of curiosity—and the slightest sense of civic responsibility. 

For years, your trusted news sources fed you lies about Trump and Russia. Those lies, which anyone with any sense recognized from the outset as preposterous, were finally disproved. But your sources never showed remorse or shame. Most of them never even corrected their stories—not really, not with any class or conviction. They just moved on—smoothly, slickly, smarmily—to other slanders, such as the ludicrous case of the Trump’s phone call to the president of Ukraine. 

If you’d really been paying attention, you’d have noticed at least some of this. But you were as caught up in the shell game as they were. It didn’t matter to you that Trump was exonerated. In fact, you really didn’t care what was true and what was false. You just wanted more reasons to hate him.