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

Nancy Pelosi is losing her grip She’s put congressional Democrats in a terrible position — and midterms are coming. By Michael Dahlberg

Posted By on November 9th, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/nancy-pelosi-losing-her-grip-democrats/

Top Democrats took a media victory lap last weekend, crowing about the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that finally cleared the House on Friday night after months of false starts and intra-party squabbling. The vote came only after Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her latest Hail Mary, attempted to satisfy progressive lawmakers by also allowing a procedural vote on the massive social spending bill craved by liberals. Even then, Pelosi was forced to rely on a handful of Republicans to secure a majority.

Predictably, the White House was eager to spin the bill’s passage as major win for the Biden agenda, claiming it would energize voters and pave the way for trillions more in government spending just in time for the holidays. And yet, despite the high fives and happy talk with reporters, many congressional Democrats will surely spend this week’s recess reflecting on the months of chaotic leadership that preceded the vote. Some will no doubt conclude, if they haven’t already, that they are watching a speaker in decline and a leadership team losing its grip on its own party.

For House Democrats, who face voters in less than a year, that’s an uncomfortable place to be.

While there has been some handwringing on the right over Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s inability to keep 13 of his members from voting for the bill, such criticism overlooks a political reality. As others have noted, infrastructure was always destined to reach the president’s desk, with or without Republican support. Even if reconciliation talks broke down and the entire process became unsalvageable, Democrats were never heading into the midterms without at least one more legislative achievement. Faced with a binary choice of spending less money than they had hoped for or spending nothing at all, it was a safe bet that eventually progressives would opt for the former.

HISTORY Comments turned off

Kristallnacht: A nationwide pogrom Any suggestion that German Jews were passive in leaving after Kristallnacht are mistaken. Most of those who could escape did so. Many could not. Dr. Alex Grobman

Posted By on November 9th, 2021

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/316525

Between the late evening hours of November 9, and the early morning of the 10th, the German rioters destroyed and firebombed 1,000 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland, leaving many of them burning during the night in full view of the public and local firefighters, who had received orders to intervene only to prevent flames from spreading to nearby buildings. Explosives were used in some locations to wreck the buildings. [1]

The shop windows of an estimated 7,500 commercial establishments out of approximately 9,000 Jewish-owned stores were smashed and their merchandise looted or scattered on the sidewalk and streets.[2] It as estimated the amount of plate glass shattered equaled half the yearly production of the plate-glass industry of Belgium, from which the glass had been imported.[3]

Schoolboys were in the vanguard of many attacks against the Jews, and in breaking windows. Teachers provided them with clubs for them to demolish Jewish businesses.[4]

Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, the chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, initiated the nation-wide pogrom without any well-defined objective or any strategy as to the methods that would be employed. This led to a “hasty and improvised organization” causing “messiness and miscommunication.” Aside from being disorganized, impulsive and chaotic, “the lack of control” is what terrified the victims. [5]

The magnitude of murder, rape and sexual attacks (the extent to which will never be known), the systematic public humiliations, indiscriminate looting of private homes, loss of property and the level of terror that ensued, shocked the nation and unnerved the regime.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Eating Knesset candy and drinking the Kool-Aid Ruthie Blum

Posted By on November 9th, 2021

https://www.jns.org/opinion/eating-knesset-candy-and-drinking-the-kool-aid/

 Photos that emerged last week of Israeli lawmakers munching on candy for two white nights in a row served as a perfect metaphor for the kindergarten-like atmosphere of the Knesset as a whole and the current government in particular.

Though the assortment of sweets was there for a “serious” purpose—to provide an energy boost to the exhausted parliamentarians during the wee hours of Thursday and Friday, when they debated and voted on the 2021 and 2022 state budgets—there was something both comical and disconcerting about the display

The sight of Defense Minister Benny Gantz sucking on a pink lollipop, for example, was a bit cringe-inducing. The mullahs in Tehran must have gotten a kick out of it. Or at least wondered why the Israeli figure charged with targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities opted for a sucker over strong Middle Eastern coffee.

In fairness to Gantz, he wasn’t alone. Indeed, the whole lollipop-licking plenum looked as puerile as it’s been sounding these days, with childish verbiage and decibel levels not even fit for a playground.

Nor did the final passage of the budgets put a stop to the infantile behavior. On the contrary, the aftermath of the marathon that kept the government from falling has been just as embarrassing, if not more.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Friends of Igor Danchenko   The plot thickens as Special Counsel John Durham indicts a Russian Washington-based think-tanker for lying to the FBI about the rumors he passed on to Christopher Steele for his “dossier.” by George Parry

Posted By on November 9th, 2021

https://spectator.org/the-friends-of-igor-danchenko/

The Trump-Russia collusion hoax is the most successful and destructive partisan political scam in the history of our nation. Based on lies portraying Donald Trump as a covert Russian operative, it was cited by the Obama-era FBI and Justice Department as the putative justification for using the nation’s vast intelligence apparatus to investigate Trump and concomitantly benefit Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The underlying lies were compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele upon whose “dossier” the FBI based its FISA warrant applications to spy on Trump advisor Carter Page and, by extension, Trump and his presidential campaign. The Steele Dossier consists of 17 now-discredited reports which collectively allege that Trump was subject to blackmail by the Kremlin for bizarre sexual behavior in a Moscow hotel and that his campaign operatives were conspiring with the Russians to influence the outcome of the 2016 election.

When he wrote those reports, Steele was working under contract with Fusion GPS, a private investigations firm that had been retained by Marc Elias, legal counsel to the Clinton campaign, to do opposition research on Trump.

Well after the 2016 election, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (“OIG”) reviewed the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign.

According to the OIG’s report, Steele was hired by Fusion GPS to investigate, among other things, “whether there were any ties between the Russian government and Trump or his campaign. Steele’s work for Fusion GPS resulted in his producing numerous election-related reports.” With Fusion GPS’s authorization, he “directly provided more than a dozen of his reports to the FBI between July and October 2016, and several others to the FBI through [DOJ attorney Bruce] Ohr and other third parties.”

The OIG found that that the FBI used Steele’s information to obtain FISA warrants to conduct electronic surveillance of Page. In its warrant applications, the FBI advised the court that “Steele was believed to be a reliable source for three reasons: his professional background; his history of work as an FBI CHS [confidential human source] since 2013; and his prior non-election reporting, which the FBI described as ‘corroborated and used in criminal proceedings.’”

In other words, the FBI averred under oath that, based on Steele’s credibility, derogatory information about Trump and his campaign warranted investigation by means of electronic surveillance.

The OIG also found that, in October 2016, Steele provided briefings regarding his findings to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media outlets. In each, Steele’s credibility as an experienced former British agent who worked Russian intelligence was a material factor in establishing the credibility of the Trump-Russia collusion smear.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s not feeling the pressure to change by Lawrence Haas

Posted By on November 9th, 2021

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/580503-irans-not-feeling-the-pressure-to-change?rl=1

All the focus on whether the United States and Iran will resume talks over resurrecting the 2015 global nuclear deal obscures an issue of equal importance: escalating skirmishes between Washington and Jerusalem on the one hand and Tehran on the other that raise the risk of miscalculation and, in turn, war.

In recent days, the United States flew a B-1B bomber over such key regional waterways as the Strait of Hormuz — a vital waterway for global oil shipping — the Red Sea, and the Suez Canal in a show of force that, at points along the way, was joined by aircraft from Israel as well as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.

That came after Iran reportedly directed a drone attack on a U.S. military outpost in Syria, causing much damage (but no casualties) and marking what the Washington Post called “the first major attack on U.S. troops in Syria by Iran.” Iranian-backed militias have repeatedly used drones to attack U.S. forces in Iraq.

Washington now considers Iran’s expanding arsenal of drones a bigger short-term threat to regional peace and stability than its nuclear and ballistic missile program. Within days of the drone strike in Syria, U.S. officials imposed sanctions on companies and individuals that it said had ties to Iran’s drone program.

Israel, meanwhile, continues to conduct airstrikes in Syria to prevent Iran from establishing a permanent presence there and from sending sophisticated weapons to its terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. Now, Iran plans to send advanced anti-aircraft missile batteries to the region, which will complicate Israeli airstrikes.

While all of those developments raise the risk of miscalculation and war, so too does Iran’s continuing progress on its nuclear program.

Specifically, Iran is enriching uranium at near weapons-grade levels and maintaining stockpiles that far exceed what the 2015 deal allowed, restricting the access of international inspectors to its facilities, and seeking sanctions relief and other concessions before returning to the negotiating table.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told NBC News that its monitoring program in Iran is no longer “intact” because Iran has not repaired a camera at a key facility outside Tehran. Inspectors are relying on such cameras at key sites because, earlier this year, Iran stopped letting international inspectors conduct the snap inspections that the 2015 deal allowed for.

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden’s Border by Chris Farrell

Posted By on November 8th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17911/biden-border

Fiscal year-end figures provided this month by the Department of Homeland Security show that 2021 was the record year for all-time high apprehensions on the southern border. Federal agents apprehended 1,659,206 illegal immigrants at the southwest border in 2021, breaking the previous high of 1,643,679 in 2000.

The Biden administration, despite an August 2021 court ruling by Texas-based US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, continues to find ways through policy rules and memoranda of instruction, to circumvent the law and permit unlawful entry.

[T]he Biden administration has also decided to skew the numbers more favorably toward their goals for an even more “open borders” unrestricted immigration with a new policy directive from Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas… fencing off a number of new “protected areas” where no immigration law enforcement activities are permitted.

Border communities and states will feel the impact of Biden’s policies first and the hardest, but what this administration has unleashed on the nation at-large will have enormous consequences for every facet of our society: housing, healthcare, education, services, public safety, quality of life, employment, economics, the justice system, and – of course – voting rolls. The voting issue is indisputably altered in California under Governor Gavin Newsom, where election officials mailed unsolicited ballots state-wide, reportedly enabling “Cheating in plain sight.”

One does not see reporting in the American news media nowadays about the “Biden Caravans,” thousands of immigrants making their way north to the border region of the United States. News media reports on the number of illegal immigrants apprehended at the border are also few and far between. The deficit in reporting and public attention does not, however, mean that the border crisis has abated. In fact, the crisis has deepened on all fronts: it is a humanitarian disaster compounded by rampant criminality and grave national security threats.

The “mother of all caravans” (also known as the “march for liberty, dignity and peace”) is on the way from the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, which borders Guatemala, to the United States. By the time you read this, they may already have arrived. More than 4,000 illegal immigrants are estimated to be in the caravan. Spanish-language reporting (that includes video) on the caravan claims that the group consists mainly of Haitians and Central Americans. Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, is quoted in a Mexican news story as saying that the government will act with prudence and caution in accordance with human rights laws, although he adds that migrants are being fooled because they will not be allowed to enter the United States.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Getting Risk Right: Understanding the Science of Elusive Health Risks by Geoffrey Kabat

Posted By on November 8th, 2021

https://www.amazon.com/Getting-Risk-Right-Understanding-Science-ebook/dp/B01MAXIL21/ref=sr_1_3?crid=

Do cell phones cause brain cancer? Does BPA threaten our health? How safe are certain dietary supplements, especially those containing exotic herbs or small amounts of toxic substances? Is the HPV vaccine safe? We depend on science and medicine as never before, yet there is widespread misinformation and confusion, amplified by the media, regarding what influences our health. In Getting Risk Right, Geoffrey C. Kabat shows how science works—and sometimes doesn’t—and what separates these two very different outcomes.

Kabat seeks to help us distinguish between claims that are supported by solid science and those that are the result of poorly designed or misinterpreted studies. By exploring different examples, he explains why certain risks are worth worrying about, while others are not. He emphasizes the variable quality of research in contested areas of health risks, as well as the professional, political, and methodological factors that can distort the research process. Drawing on recent systematic critiques of biomedical research and on insights from behavioral psychology, Getting Risk Right examines factors both internal and external to the science that can influence what results get attention and how questionable results can be used to support a particular narrative concerning an alleged public health threat. In this book, Kabat provides a much-needed antidote to what has been called “an epidemic of false claims.”

HISTORY Comments turned off

Face to Face with the Auschwitz Memorial Twitter Project Geoffrey C. Kabat

Posted By on November 8th, 2021

https://quillette.com/2021/11/05/face-to-face-with-the-auschwitz-memorial-twitter-project/

The Nazi concentration camp system still remains a unicum, both in its extent and its quality. At no other place or time has one seen a phenomenon so unexpected and so complex: never have so many human lives been extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a combination of technological ingenuity, fanaticism, and cruelty.

~Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

A girl of perhaps 11 years, with lush, braided hair and a beautiful face, sits alone in a classroom looking up from her book at the photographer. She is self-possessed and gives the most natural smile.

Another photo shows a girl of five or six intently studying something she holds in her hands, possibly a flower or a piece of white cloth. She has a white bow in her hair.

In a third photo, a handsome, well-dressed woman in her late teens is sitting in an armchair by an open window smiling, apparently engaged in conversation.

These are three of a succession of arresting photographs accompanying brief online biographies of people transported to Auschwitz and, with rare exceptions, killed there between 1941 and 1945.

The photographs are posted on the Auschwitz Memorial Twitter site, which is run by the Auschwitz‑Birkenau Memorial and State Museum in Poland.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trickle-Down Bidenism This Biden socialist cadre who engineered these self-induced calamities has no clue about the damage they have done to America. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 8th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/11/07/trickle-down-bidenism/

Can 10 months really make a real difference in America? Not normally.

But weld together a hard-left socialist agenda with the control of the White House and Congress onto the combined forces of progressive woke media, Silicon Valley, the corporate boardrooms, the entertainment industry, academia, and the Wall Street borg—all in the age of instant and intrusive communications—and it’s no wonder a country, even a nation as resilient as the United States, can descend quite quickly in ways that make America almost unrecognizable.

In other words, 40 weeks of relentless Bidenism finally permeates most of the nation.

Fuel Prices, Inflation, and Border Chaos

Out in the California foothills and Central Valley, relatively “cheap” propane now has more than doubled to a rate of $3.91 a gallon.

At about the same time that I got the propane bill, I filled up the truck with diesel fuel. It was $4.87 a gallon with a credit card, up in price almost $2 a gallon from over a year ago. I thought myself lucky since the week prior in Palo Alto it was about $5.29 a gallon.

I spoke not long ago in Bakersfield to an oil man. He described impending California new rules on the horizon concerning almost every aspect of horizontal drilling and fracking—as part of his own larger fears that the entire industry is shrinking even as demands and profits soar, and consumers need more natural gas and gasoline than ever.

Has anyone ever heard of liberal Americans deliberately not pumping oil and gas, but still needing so much more output that they beg the illiberal Saudis and Russians to bail us out? At other times in our history, we have suffered plenty of fossil fuel scarcities due to war, embargoes, and declining reserves. But never has America deliberately created shortages amid a sea of our own gas and oil.

What has been the reaction from those who slashed natural gas and oil production by cancelling new federal leases and pipelines, and oil fields in Alaska, or warned frackers that new regulations and taxes were just the prerequisites to a rapid phase out of their existence altogether—on the pathway to a wind and solar nirvana?

When asked if the United States would at least increase (e.g., restore previous levels of) oil production, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm laughed, “That is hilarious.”

To whom is that comical? The guy with an older model pickup doing daily landscape work for his wealthy clients? The waitress who drives 20 miles to work? The broke student who commutes to campus?

I drove today along a rural avenue next to my farm. Both sides of the street were littered—far more than usually so—with trash. They were not just the usual garbage bags and tires, but washers, dryers, refrigerators, car seats, furniture—and mattresses of all shapes and sizes. It was an intensification of the now old story of rural California as an open dumping ground of refuse.

I stopped to inspect the flotsam and jetsam. The dumpers are careful to glean out their personal addresses. They rarely leave traceable material. But all the magazines, newspapers, and printed material were in Spanish. Note there are no green regulators out here who patrol rural avenues to stop the pollution and desecration of the natural landscape; in the hierarchy of wokeness, illegal immigration trumps the environment.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Federal Court Blocks Biden Vaccine Mandate A win for the people in the ongoing war against white coat supremacy Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on November 8th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/federal-court-blocks-biden-vaccine-mandate-lloyd-billingsley/

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Saturday blocked a Biden vaccine mandate that would have forced private companies with more than 100 employees to get workers vaccinated, submit to weekly tests, or face steep fines. 

Due to start on January 4 and affecting more than 80 million workers, the mandate was to be enforced through the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The appeal court cited “grave statutory and constitutional issues” with the Biden plan, which drew lawsuits from, among others, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton.

“WE WON,” Paxton tweeted after Saturday’s ruling. “The fight is not over and I will never stop resisting this Admin’s unconstitutional overreach!” Paxton told reporters the ruling “gives people hope that they aren’t going to lose their jobs and the president isn’t going to be able to ruin people’s careers and make their lives more difficult.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted. “Emergency hearings will take place soon. We will have our day in court to strike down Biden’s unconstitutional abuse of authority.”

A full 26 states had filed suit against the Biden mandate. Louisiana attorney general Jeff Landry called it “unlawful overreach,” adding that the administration “will not impose medical procedures on the American people without the checks and balances afforded by our Constitution.” For West Virginia attorney general Patrick Morrisey the ruling was “good news” and “Biden’s vaccine mandates are unlawful, unconstitutional and just wrong!”

Companies opposing the Biden mandate included the Daily Wire news website. As co-founder and  CEO Jeremy Boreing explained, “forcing Americans to choose between their livelihoods and their freedom is a grotesque abuse of power and we won’t be a party to it. We will not incur the cost of implementing this testing regime. We will not incur the liability of inserting ourselves into the private health decisions and information of our employees. Our company was founded to stand against tyranny, and we will.”

Biden charged that “the virus will not go away by itself, or because we wish it away. We have to act.” It had apparently escaped the Delaware Democrat’s notice that the vaccines currently being imposed have not exactly been trouble-free. For example, Finland, Sweden and Norway have paused the use of the Moderna vaccine, citing a risk of myocarditis.