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Turkey: From Europe With Love by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on December 26th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16861/turkey-europe-tensions-sanctions

Erdoğan also said that he sees Turkey’s future in Europe — the same Europe he just had accused of being “Nazi remnants and fascists.”

The heart of the matter was how tough the EU would go in sanctions at a time when Turkey’s national economy was in free-fall. What Brussels decided, it turned out, was: Not so tough

Legally speaking, the man Erdoğan referred to as a “terrorist” is only a suspect without a court verdict. This, however, is Erdoğan’s sick understanding of constitutional rights: He is the elected leader, so he believes he can take the liberty to declare suspects guilty or not guilty while their court cases are in progress.

If Turkey’s Islamist strongman, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, spent more sleepless nights the first week of December than he had over his concerns for U.S. sanctions, it was because of the more imminent and potentially punishing European Union sanctions that would take shape at a summit on December 10-11. He must have had a relatively peaceful sleep when the summit was over. He might have thought that he had managed to get away from a huge European sanctions bomb, at least until March. It may, however, be a bit premature for him to sigh with relief.

After the EU leaders gave Turkey an unambiguous warning in October, Erdoğan chose to escalate tensions, bringing what otherwise would have been mere diplomatic issues to the level of a mini-clash of civilizations. Erdoğan calculated that he could play the tough Ottoman sultan until the last moment and that the EU would never dare burn their bridges with Turkey. He was right and wrong. He bought time, the EU did not burn their bridges, the sanctions at the December summit were not powerful enough to change Turkey’s course. Nevertheless, Erdoğan now has another deadline by which he must choose between a further clash of civilizations and sustainable de-escalation.

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Rudy Giuliani is again promising good news is on the way By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on December 26th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/rudy_giuliani_is_again_promising_good_news_is_on_the_way.html

When it comes to the election, the facts are clear: Joe Biden, an incompetent, corrupt, possibly senile politician who campaigned from his basement, allegedly received more votes than any president in American history. The engines for that victory were media and tech propaganda and censorship, and paper and computer ballot fraud. Nevertheless, a craven judicial class that refuses to look at the evidence, corrupt political officials, and more media and tech propaganda and censorship seem to have fixed the dial on a Biden presidency. On Christmas Day, though, President Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, promised that things are “going to blow up” going forward.

Let me say that I’m a little bit worried that Giuliani is over-promising. I know how lawyers think. They get incredibly excited about a specific fact, legal argument, or procedural point, and optimistically assume that whatever excites them is going to break the whole case wide open. Sadly, lawyers are almost always wrong about that. What ends cases isn’t some Hollywood, Perry Mason moment, with a witness suddenly admitting to a lie or a fingerprint magically appearing. Instead, it’s a long slog of aggregating facts and legal arguments.

The problem with the 2020 election is that we don’t have a long slog. Instead, we have a judicial class (reaching all the way up to the Supreme Court) that has settled for a very peculiar and deeply immoral position: In an election rife with manifest fraud, America’s judiciary would prefer to see Trump’s real votes voided through fraud, than see Biden’s fake votes properly invalidated through having that fraud exposed. Put another way, they’re voting for a dishonest Biden win than an honest Trump victory.

Given this situation, we Trump supporters keep hoping that a black swan explodes onto the scene, or even better, a fiery phoenix that blasts to ashes the arguments propping up the dissolute, demented, doddering Democrat darling, Joe Biden. (I love alliteration.)

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Why Sidney Powell gets the Galileo treatment By Eric Georgatos

Posted By on December 26th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/why_sidney_powell_gets_the_galileo_treatment.html

“Common sense says election integrity is fundamental to the survival of democracy in any form, so if there are reasonable grounds for suspicion, why wouldn’t serious adults want to turn over every rock to determine the truth?  If the ruling class is so eager to pronounce Sidney Powell a lunatic fringe conspiracy theorist, why wouldn’t they want the Dominion voting machines fully audited so they can prove once and for all that Powell is crazy and deserves to be mocked and ignored?”

Observers of human history might have to go back all the way to Galileo to find a ruling class as determined to cancel someone as much as today’s is to cancel Sidney Powell in response to her single-minded devotion to bringing the truth of the full scale of the 2020 election fraud to light. 

Galileo broke the news/discovery that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe, and in fact revolved around the sun, and that just didn’t comport with what the ruling class, including church authorities, were prepared or willing to accept.  Galileo rocked their world — probably deeply threatening their hold of authority over the masses if they were exposed as so fundamentally wrong — so their solution wasn’t to deal with the truth but to put Galileo under house arrest and demand that he renounce his discovery.

The American ruling class of 2020 is bizarrely opposed to allocating any oxygen to what Sidney Powell has discovered and is alleging about Dominion Voting Systems (and others), about vote-shifting algorithms and partial decimal vote counts, and about vote manipulation showing up throughout the country.  Even Rudy Giuliani, the President’s attorney, and Mark Meadows, the President’s Chief of Staff, seem hellbent on publicly keeping their distance from Powell — and on keeping President Trump from getting too close to or aligned with Powell.

Other elements of the ruling class — such as SCOTUS and much of the rest of the federal judiciary — won’t even look at the evidence Powell has assembled.  They just ‘don’t want to go there’, and so they make up legal excuses — e.g., lack of standing — and wave off the substance of the allegations.

What gives?  Why are they behaving this way?

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Nashville: A bomb blast unlike any other on American soil By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on December 26th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/nashville_a_bomb_blast_unlike_any_other_on_american_soil.html

The facts about the Christmas morning bomb in Nashville are not complicated. What is complicated is understanding who set off the bomb and why. That’s because this bombing does not match any other bombs that have exploded in the Western world.

As I said, the facts about the bomb are not complicated:

Early Christmas morning, someone parked an RV in front of the AT&T building near Second Avenue and Commerce Street in downtown Nashville.

Shortly before it exploded, the RV began playing a recording telling people to leave the area:

Note the precision of that announcement: If you can hear this recording, you are in the blast range. The person who prepared that bomb knew precisely how far the blast would carry – and how far the announcement would carry.

Nashville police, upon hearing that announcement, went door to door telling people to evacuate:

Doing so was extremely brave because there was no reason to believe that the announcement was honest. That bomb could have gone off at any minute.

At least three people ended up in the hospital. The police also announced that they’d found human remains, although they have not stated whether they were from a victim or the bomber.

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The Woke See No Evil—and Nothing but Evil Behind the paradox lies a superstition about history that may explain their viciousness and violence. By Chilton Williamson Jr.

Posted By on December 26th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-woke-see-no-eviland-nothing-but-evil-11608925768?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

It is impossible to read Mark Twain in the 21st century without being aware, each time one encounters it, of the single most unspeakable word in the English language today; a word that in Twain’s time was as common as mud and therefore completely unremarkable on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. The issue concerning the appropriateness of designating “Huckleberry Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” in their original and unexpurgated state as assigned reading in English classes in the public schools has troubled teachers and administrators since at least the 1990s.

I am not concerned here with the question of whether the bowdlerization of these texts is defensible, a moral imperative, or an offense against literature—New South published a sanitized edition of the two books in 2011—but rather with the paradoxical character of postmodern political correctness. That character was exposed, also in 2011, when the Virginia Department of Education adopted a textbook, “Our Virginia: Past and Present” by Joy Masoff, which contained the claim that “thousands of Southern blacks fought in the Confederate ranks, including two under the command of Stonewall Jackson.” That prompted anger and indignation on the left and an advisory to teachers from the department to ignore the passage.

Yet it is a historically confirmed fact that many Southern blacks, freemen as well as slaves, fought on the side of the Confederacy, as attested to by the historian William Freehling and documented by Harvard’s Prof. John Stauffer in an essay for TheRoot.com. Even so, many Civil War historians continue to deny it for ideological reasons.

The dispute over the existence of black Confederate soldiers is a clear instance of how radical progressives, in their war on America, have been pursuing two contradictory aims at once. First, they have worked tirelessly to expose what they view as the fundamentally and indelibly racist character of America from its inception. Thus the central purpose of the “1619 Project,” conceived by Nikole Hannah-Jones and subsequently developed by the New York Times magazine: to rewrite, edit and otherwise “correct” the history of the American Republic. Second, they have sought to sanitize America’s cultural achievements and thereby satisfy the moral demands of the present time, all for the good of future generations.

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A Lone Star Speech Victory The University of Texas at Austin will dissolve its bias-response team.

Posted By on December 26th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-lone-star-speech-victory-11608852943?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Political speech is under attack these days from Beijing to Berkeley, so we’ll take victories where we can get them. One arrived Tuesday when the University of Texas at Austin agreed to disband its PC police and end policies that suppress speech on campus.

Credit the nonprofit Speech First, which sued on behalf of student members in 2018. The group claimed UT and its officials had “created an elaborate investigatory and disciplinary apparatus to suppress, punish, and deter speech that other students deem ‘offensive,’ ‘biased,’ ‘uncivil,’ or ‘rude.’”

Students could anonymously report their professors and peers for “bias incidents” to the Campus Climate Response Team, which would investigate and threaten disciplinary referrals and “restorative justice” meetings with administrators. The university gave several examples of what constitutes an act of bias, including “faculty commentary in the classroom perceived as derogatory and insensitive,” and other behavior open to highly subjective judgments about what is offensive.

A federal judge dismissed the case in 2019. Citing that decision, university spokesman J.B. Bird said Wednesday that there was “no evidence students were disciplined, sanctioned or investigated for their speech” and that, “to the contrary,” there was “strong evidence of the university protecting the speech rights of conservative students and guests on campus.”

But Speech First appealed, and in October the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the ruling and remanded the case back to the district court. Circuit Court Judge Edith Jones blasted the bias-response team as “the clenched fist in the velvet glove of student speech regulation.”

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Obamas spending Christmas in Hawaii and generate the best picture ever of the former first couple By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on December 26th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/obamas_spending_christmas_in_hawaii_and_generate_the_embest_picture_everem_of_the_former_first_couple.html

It’s no surprise anymore when our ruling class travels for Christmas or any other reason that strikes their fancy, while the rest of us are told to give up family reunions, and even church services. So seeing Barack and Michelle Obama in Hawaii, able to jet around wherever their fancy takes them, enjoying their scores of millions of dollars earned from Netflix, books and other post-presidential activities is no surprise. Obviously, Barack has not reached the point he mentioned in 2010, when he said, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

I am actually grateful they took the opportunity to go kayaking and generate the picture in the tweet below, which is to my eyes the best, most revealing view of the couple ever taken.

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Joe Biden’s continued ‘Russian misinformation’ defense of Hunter is conspiracy-level laughable By Joe Concha,

Posted By on December 26th, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/531543-joe-bidens-continued-russian-misinformation-defense-of-hunter-is

President-elect Joe Biden continued his campaign strategy of running from anything resembling a tough question from a reporter when attempting to leave the stage after another “press conference” on Tuesday, calling said reporter a “one-horse pony” while continuing to assert that his son, Hunter Biden, is the target of a smear campaign fueled by Russian misinformation. 

The exchange occurred between Biden and Peter Doocy, a Fox News correspondent, after the president-elect took hard-hitting questions that included: 

“Do you believe that you will have a honeymoon to get things right?”

“Are you concerned about [Trump] lingering around? I see you smiling, but I still have to ask it. And kind of a corollary to that, would you consider filing for reelection early next year to show that you’re not going to be a lame duck?”

“Has the issue of the investigation of your son come up in discussions with your team and with potential candidates about the attorney general?”  

You get the idea, in terms of tone and temperature. What was a hostile four years between the press and President Trump is now a hospitable period between the press and Biden. And, in a related story, the freewheeling press conferences of Trump randomly calling on anyone and everyone are gone, with Biden’s staff deciding who gets to ask questions and who gets boxed out indefinitely. 

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

MY SAY: MERRY CHRISTMAS PRESIDENT TRUMP

Posted By on December 25th, 2020

Apposite and inspiring words from Rudyard Kipling’s Poem “If..”

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

Hold on and Godspeed !   rsk

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Trump ‘Resolved, Determined’ About Election, Says Pennsylvania Senator By Charlotte Cuthbertson

Posted By on December 25th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-resolved-determined-about-election-says-pennsylvania-senator_3632138.html

WASHINGTON—Several Pennsylvania state senators, all Republicans, met with the president in the Oval Office on Dec. 23 to discuss election fraud issues in their state.

Among them was Sen. Doug Mastriano, who said afterwards that he’s “never seen anyone more resolved or determined” as Trump, “because truth is on his side.”

“The mood was determined. We need to find out what the heck happened here,” Mastriano told The Epoch Times.

He said the group took Trump through the various concerns they had, including a dump of 570,000 votes in the middle of the night for Democratic nominee Joe Biden, during which time only about 3,200 votes appeared for Trump. “Even in the bluest of blue areas of Pennsylvania that’s statistically impossible,” Mastriano said.

“And we talked about how if this is not only fixed in the future, but if it’s not fixed for what just happened here, at what point does the republic collapse?”

Mastriano held a public hearing in Gettysburg on Nov. 25, where witness testimony outlined allegations of fraud ranging from chain-of-custody issues, lost USB cards, statistical anomalies, and poll watcher access issues.

The state legislature has been out of session since Nov. 30 and Republicans have been unable to convince Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, to call a special session to address election issues.