FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

John Kerry’s anti-Israel stance speaks for itself By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/john-kerrys-anti-israel-stance-speaks-for-itself-opinion-666783

An audiotape of an “off-the-record” interview in March with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, conducted by regime-aligned journalist and economist Saeed Leylaz, has been causing a global stir.

The three-hour recording, which was leaked to London-based Persian TV channel Iran International and subsequently reported on by The New York Times, has been examined from different angles. These include questioning whether the conversation was digitally doctored, and pondering the veracity of, or motive behind, Zarif’s claims.

One ostensibly jarring revelation that Iran’s top diplomat is heard making concerns his subordinate role to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The only surprising aspect of this self-evident morsel is Zarif’s verbal acknowledgment of it. In every other respect, it’s old news. Khamenei is Tehran’s figurative puppet-master, and the IRGC calls the literal shots.

Nevertheless, Iranian theologian and former Islamic Republic vice president Mohammad Ali Abtahi compared the leak of the tape to Israel’s 2018 seizure of a trove of nuclear documents from a warehouse in Tehran. While perhaps a bit overly dramatic, the analogy is apt when viewed in the context of another of Zarif’s allegations; one involving former US secretary of state John Kerry, currently the White House’s climate czar.

According to Zarif, “Kerry informed me that Israel attacked [Iranian positions] 200 times in Syria.”

Leylaz then asked, “You didn’t know?”

Zarif replied, “No, no.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Naftali Bennett – leader of the Left? David Isaac

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

http://worldisraelnews.com

Bennett appears poised to lead a National Unity government made up of some surprising bedfellows.

“The Likud will do after the election what it always does, turn immediately to the Left.”

Those words sound dissonant today, given that they were spoken by Naftali Bennett, leader of the Yemina party, a week before the elections.

On Sunday the headline of a major Hebrew paper cried out, “Yemina Breaks Leftward.” Yemina, ironically, means “rightward.” So an equally accurate translation of the headline could be: “Rightward Breaks Leftward.”

Such a nonsensical headline fits the events that are unfolding as Bennett seems poised to form a government with parties that oppose him on every principle he professes to hold dear.

That’s if he is serious. Until the deal is closed, it’s possible this adventure is all for show, an attempt by Bennett to appear statesmanlike as he proves to the Israeli public that he has exhausted every possibility before supporting a fifth round of elections.

If he is serious, it’s hard to believe his base would approve.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Scott Outshines Biden, Enrages Libs With Inspiring Tale of Overcoming Adversity Slams race-obsessed hucksters ‘making money and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made any progress’Andrew Stiles

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://freebeacon.com/politics/tim-scott-biden-response/

Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.) delivered a powerful and inspiringly diverse response to President Joe Biden’s congressional address on Wednesday, causing professional journalists and other liberal ideologues to lose their minds.

Scott argued that Biden—a “good man” whose speech was “full of good words”—had failed to deliver on his promise to unite the country and “lower the temperature” after his victory in the 2020 election. “The Biden administration has pushed us apart,” he said, praising the bipartisan COVID-19 relief legislation passed under former president Donald Trump and the success of Operation Warp Speed. The radical policies Democrats have proposed, he argued, were not intended to find “common ground.”

Invoking his personal story of being raised in poverty by a single “prayin’ momma,” Scott challenged the lockdown policies backed by Democratic politicians that have closed down the institutions that aided his improbable rise, including schools and churches. He spoke of his experience as a black man in America and his struggle to be taken seriously by Democrats and their supporters.

“I get called ‘Uncle Tom’ and the N-word by progressives, by liberals,” said Scott, who also called out the Washington Post for publishing a widely condemned fact check suggesting “my family’s poverty was actually privilege.” He challenged the prevailing corporate and cultural norms regarding issues of race, denouncing those who are “making money and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made any progress at all.”

In contrast to Biden’s rambling tirade, Scott envisioned a “joyful springtime for our nation,” where his illiterate grandfather “saw his family go from cotton to Congress in one lifetime.” This was precisely the claim that Post chief fact checker Glenn Kessler, whose grandfather was a Dutch steel magnate, dinged for lacking “nuance.”

Nuance was certainly lacking from the liberal response to Scott’s speech. MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace said the speech was “delivered from a planet where facts don’t matter.” Democratic analyst Jason Nichols, in a since-deleted tweet, called Scott a “clown” whose “ancestors are ashamed of him.” At least one left-wing media personality had to apologize for “an ironic joke” using racially charged language. The term “Uncle Tim” was trending on Twitter.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

CDC Punishes ‘Superstar’ Scientist For COVID Vaccine Recommendation The CDC Followed 4 Days Later By Joy Pullmann

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/28/cdc-punishes-superstar-scientist-for-covid-vaccine-recommendation-the-cdc-followed-4-days-later/

Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Martin Kulldorff invented key parts of the U.S. vaccine safety system. But the CDC doesn’t want his expertise on COVID vaccines. Why? Looks like politics.

The Centers for Disease Control pulled a world-renowned expert off a vaccine safety advisory committee after he publicly disagreed with the agency’s pause of the Johnson and Johnson COVID vaccine.

In an email, the CDC’s Dr. Amanda Cohn said Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School was being removed for communicating to the public his expert opinion, which differed from what the CDC was saying publicly at the time. Four days later, however, the CDC reinstated the use of the vaccine, effectively adopting Kulldorff’s recommendation after punishing him for publicly communicating it.

“It has been brought to CDC and ACIPs attention recent public statements you’ve made regarding policy opinions that appear to be pre-determined prior to complete review of data,” Cohn wrote Kulldorff in an April 19 email. “We understand and appreciate that VaST members have personal opinions and we do not object to the expression of those opinions. However, we expect members to be objective and devoid of any appearance of bias… Therefore, CDC is respectfully ending your membership on VaST effective today.”

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden’s Border by Chris Farrell

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17319/biden-border

The surge of unaccompanied children and families to the southern border – as well as the surge of non-marijuana drug trafficking across the border – is a humanitarian crisis, a health crisis and a national security crisis.

The Biden administration has ordered the termination of all work. Construction sites and crews are, essentially, idle – at the reported cost of more than $1 million dollars per day in Cochise County, AZ alone. It is costing $1 million taxpayer dollars per day — meaning more than $100 million so far for just one site — to figure out how, exactly, to unwind the half-completed construction project …..

While you are considering the human and dollar costs of Biden’s “children in cages,” consider the construction sites and equipment staged in remote areas, or the drug loads packed into Chevy Suburbans, stripped of everything in the interior but the driver’s seat, and painted matte black for their 2AM runs north through the dry arroyo beds into the United States.

Some of that equipment was looking for people other than illegal aliens – other people (terrorists) bearing ill-will towards the United States – so the radiological detection devices? Gone. The license plate readers and recorders? Gone.

Mexico is an utterly corrupt, failed, narco-state. The “best” thing Mexico has going for it is the “efficiency” of the Cartels…. Perhaps Biden’s border legacy will be another type of 9/11 attack, launched across his now virtually non-existent border with Mexico?

The surge of unaccompanied children and families to the southern border — as well as the surge of non-marijuana drug trafficking across the border — is a humanitarian crisis, a health crisis and a national security crisis. It all belongs — 100% — to President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

The illegal alien surge has been promoted and advertised for since June 28, 2019, when every single one of the Democratic presidential primary candidates raised their hands and said they would support free health care to all illegal immigrants in the United States. That was the first step in a cynical political ploy to permanently replace a segment of the American electorate with “more obedient voters from the Third World” — while masquerading as compassion and care.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey: How Erdogan’s Pledge for Reform Collapsed in Five Months by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17301/erdogan-reform-collapse

“We don’t see ourselves elsewhere but in Europe,” Erdoğan said on November 21. “We envisage building our future together with Europe.”

According to Turkish news site Gazete Duvar, a total of 128,872 people have been indicted in the past six years for insulting Erdoğan. Of those, 27,824 had to stand trial and 9,556 were convicted.

Apparently, Erdoğan wants a democratic system without opposition.

But who cares about the Constitution in a country where the governing bloc is proposing to close down even the Constitutional Court, in addition to banning opposition parties? All these autocratic measures occurred in the less than half-year since Erdoğan pledged democratic reforms.

A few years ago, then Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu had vehemently refuted claims that Turkey was a second-class democracy. He was right. Turkey has since remained a third-class democracy.

His critics often joke that when President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pledges democratic reforms, one should run away immediately. His latest charm offensive in November, aimed at repairing Turkey’s badly-strained ties with the West and Western institutions, has proven that the joke still holds value.

“We don’t see ourselves elsewhere but in Europe,” Erdoğan said on November 21. “We envisage building our future together with Europe.” Two days later, Defense Minister Hulusi Akar described NATO as the “cornerstone of our defense and security policy” and said that Turkey was looking forward to cooperating with the incoming administration under Joe Biden in the United States. Erdoğan also promised a bold package of democratic reforms.

Less than five months later, Italy’s Prime Minister Mario Draghi had to call Erdoğan a “dictator.” That was not because an experienced European politician wanted to insult a Muslim head of state.

According to Turkish news site Gazete Duvar, a total of 128,872 people have been indicted in the past six years for insulting Erdoğan. Of those, 27,824 had to stand trial and 9,556 were convicted. By comparison, only 11 Turks had been convicted for insulting Ahmet Necdet Sezer, president between 2000 and 2007.

After Erdoğan’s latest reform pledge, on March 21, Turkish authorities arrested a pro-Kurdish opposition MP who had refused to leave parliament for several days after his seat was revoked. Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu “was brought out by force while he was in pyjamas and slippers” by “nearly 100 police officers,” the leftist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) said in a statement.

EDUCATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Peculiar Institution of Higher Education Just as a sermonizing Hollywood grates when it no longer can make good movies, so does a once hallowed but now self-righteous university seem hollow when it charges so much for increasingly so little.

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/28/the-peculiar-institution-of-higher-education/

Nothing is now stranger than the contemporary college campus. 

Not too long ago, Americans used to idolize their universities. Indeed, in science, math, engineering, medicine and business, these meritocratic departments and schools often still remain the world’s top-ranked. 

Certainly, top-notch higher education explains much of the current scientific, technological, and commercial excellence of the United States. 

After World War II—won in part due to superior American scientific research, production, and logistics—the college degree became the prerequisite for a successful career. The GI Bill enabled 8 million returning vets to go to college. Most graduated to good jobs. 

The university from the late 1940s to 1960 was a rich resource of continuing education. It introduced the world’s great literature, from Homer to Tolstoy, to the American middle classes. 

But today’s universities and colleges bear little if any resemblance to postwar education. Even during the tumultuous 1960s, when campuses were plagued by radical protests and periodic violence, there was still institutionalized free speech. An empirical college curriculum mostly survived the chaos of the 1960s.

But it is gone now.

Instead, imagine a place where the certification of educational excellence, the B.A. degree, is no guarantee that a graduate can speak, write, or communicate coherently or think inductively.

Imagine a place that requires applicants to submit high-school diplomas, grade-point averages, and standardized tests, but rejects any requirement that its own graduates upon completion of college do the same by passing a basic uniform competency test. 

Imagine a place where after an initial trial period, a minority of elite employees alone receive lifetime job guarantees. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

First thoughts about Biden’s address to Congress By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/first_thoughts_about_bidens_address_to_congress.html

Biden spoke for over an hour to roughly 200 masked, vaccinated Congresspeople in a mostly empty House chamber. Showing the manic energy of a grasshopper on amphetamines, he did much better than I expected. Barring a few verbal slips, Biden managed to stay on point the whole time. Really, the only problem with the speech was that it was a lie from beginning to end.

The biggest lie was Biden’s relentless calls for togetherness. “And my fellow Americans, we must come together to heal the soul of this nation.” “My fellow Americans, we have to come together.” “We need to work together to find a consensus.” “We came together.” “There is nothing – nothing – beyond our capacity – nothing we can’t do – if we do it together.”

That’s a lovely sentiment – and Biden uttered it with a straight face on the same day that his Department of Justice sent the FBI with an open-ended search warrant to conduct a pre-dawn raid on Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer. This is a terrifying descent into practices common in dictatorships:

The next biggest lie was how Biden framed the events of January 6, when a few hundred unarmed people, egged on by leftist provocateurs, pushed their way into Congress, just as leftists have done since George W. Bush became president. They did so, not to overturn the government, but to ask for an honest certification vote.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War!’ Can Biden really be this dumb? By Patricia McCarthy

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/worst_attack_on_our_democracy_since_the_civil_war_can_biden_really_be_this_dumb.html

Whoa!  Joe Biden thinks that that relatively mild, wholly unarmed breach of the Capitol was the “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War!”  How historically ignorant are his speechwriters?  They seem to have forgotten about the assassination of Lincoln, WWI, Pearl Harbor and WWII, the Kennedy assassination, 9/11!  Did they really think that line would resonate with anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge?  

While the entire speech was banal, this was the most egregious spoken line.  That an American president would utter such an unspeakable lie is the measure of this man.  He is a fool.  Surely, he knows better but he and his handlers believe that most Americans are so dumb, so uninformed, they will accept such a lie as true.

That one line tells us everything we need to know about who Biden and the cabal running him are; they absolutely believe the American people are not only simpleminded but virtual toddlers who will believe anything they say.  

The rest of his not-SOTU speech only confirmed that Joe is the puppet of some thoroughly ridiculous people.  No wonder Jen Psaki, when asked about vaccine hesitancy among “white, Republican men,” replied that they are placing ads on country music stations and NASCAR sites!  Yeah, that’s right Jen.  The only people not submitting to the jab are rubes too dumb to know what’s good for them.  In fact, no vaccine for covid was necessary since there are effective treatments and a 99% recovery rate.  It’s perhaps just a greedy grab for big bucks by big pharma.  Biden is in their pocket too. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Top Ten Most Racist Colleges and Universities: #3 University of Southern California Kowtowing to the woke mob.

Posted By on April 29th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/top-ten-most-racist-colleges-and-universities-3-toptenracistuniversitiesorg/

#3: University of Southern California

The website of the University of Southern California proudly lists a multitude of “Student Equity and Inclusion Programs” which are designed to create “a sense of belonging” for the diverse array of students at USC.  But when a Communications Professor at the university attempted to educate his students about Chinese linguistic patterns, explaining the meaning of a Chinese word that—to the uneducated ear of American students sounded similar to the N-word—he was reported as a racist and suspended from teaching the class.

Greg Patton is a professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business and an “expert in communication, interpersonal and leadership effectiveness.” During the fall 2020 semester, Patton taught an online class during which he spoke about the use of “filler words” in the speech of various languages.

“If you have a lot of ‘ums and errs,’ this is culturally specific, so based on your native language,” the professor explained. “Like in China, the common word is ‘that, that, that.’ So in China it might be ‘nèi ge, nèi ge, nèi ge.’”

To a native Chinese speaker, the word sounds nothing like the American racial slur. Patton himself has worked in China although is not a fluent speaker of Chinese. Despite the crystal-clear context of Patton’s example, and his status as an expert in communications, a number of African-American students were so offended by his example that they sent a letter to the Marshall School of Business Dean Geoffrey Garrett accusing Patton of racial insensitivity and stating that he was unfit to teach the class.