MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Reporter Fighting for America’s Free Press Catherine Herridge could face a daily $800 fine for refusing to give up her sources. This week, she went to Congress to defend the First Amendment.

Posted By on April 13th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/catherine-herridge-free-speech-congress?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

As the old saying goes, a journalist is only as good as her sources. In 2024, it’s not just a cliché; it’s a warning. The right of reporters to protect the officials and whistleblowers who take great risks to get information to the public is now in jeopardy. 

At the center of this fight is Catherine Herridge, one of the most respected national security reporters in Washington. In February, she was abruptly fired from CBS News during a round of layoffs. This was strange considering that Herridge is a scoop-getter. She broke the first story on how al-Qaeda’s English-language recruiter, Anwar al-Awlaki, was in contact with the 9/11 hijackers, and that Hunter Biden’s laptop was authentic and in the custody of the FBI. 

What made it even more alarming was that her notes and files, which contained information on her sources, were seized by her former employer. CBS even locked her out of her own office. She eventually retrieved her personal property, but only after enlisting the help of her union.

But just as one problem was resolved, Herridge faced another threat. In a separate civil lawsuit, a federal judge found her in contempt of court for refusing to disclose her sources in her investigation into a taxpayer-funded school in Virginia run by a woman with alleged links to the Chinese military.

In both cases, Herridge’s promise to protect her sources was threatened. In both cases, she refused to break that promise. 

Yesterday, Herridge testified in favor of a new bill that would prohibit the federal government from compelling journalists to disclose information on their sources. Here is her testimony before the House, championing the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying—or PRESS—Act, in a hearing that was titled “Fighting for a Free Press.” 

Good morning, Chairman Jordan, Ranking Member Nadler, Chairman Roy, and Ranking Member Scanlon and members of the Subcommittee. I am here today with a deep sense of gratitude and humility. I appreciate the subcommittee taking the time to focus again on the importance of protecting reporters’ sources and the vital safeguards provided by the PRESS Act.

As you know, in February, I was held in contempt of court for refusing to disclose my confidential reporting sources on a national security story. I think my current situation can help put the importance of the PRESS Act into context.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Hippocrates and hypocrisy Ruthie Blum

Posted By on April 13th, 2024

https://www.jns.org/hippocrates-and-hypocrisy/

Israel ought to have its head examined. Its bleeding heart could use a check-up, too.

Both became painfully clear this week and by no means for the first time. Whatever the prognosis, one thing is certain: Only a serious disorder could explain the Jewish state’s provision of top-notch medical care for a member of Hamas’s Nukhba force, which led to the Oct. 7 massacre.

A healthy response to the perversion ensued, however. When word got out on Wednesday that the wounded terrorist was being treated at Hadassah Mount Scopus Medical Center in Jerusalem, Herzl Hajaj—whose 22-year-old daughter, Shir, was killed in a 2017 ISIS-inspired truck-ramming attack—went on the offensive.

“Shame on Hadassah Mount Scopus for treating terrorists who murdered, raped, butchered and humiliated our daughters, our loved ones and the entire people of Israel,” he posted on X. “The time has come for Health Minister Uriel Buso … to issue an order to hospitals not to treat terrorists.”

He then called on his social-media followers to protest the “depraved action” of Hadassah, which “has forgotten the terrible massacre and what these despicable terrorists did to our daughters and the people of Israel. We do not forget and will not be silent.”

Shortly thereafter, dozens of angry demonstrators stormed the halls of the hospital. Hajaj, a member of the Choose Life Forum and an activist against the cushy conditions of Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails, showed up to express his outrage.

“Is this where the terrorist son of a bitch is hospitalized?” he shouted at the Hadassah staffers and armed guards protecting the door of the intensive-care unit room where the Nukhba commando lay hooked up to an IV. “Is the terrorist hospitalized here? Take him out of here, not us.”

OPINION Comments turned off

‘Democracy’ Has a Peculiar Aftertaste by J.B. Shurk

Posted By on April 12th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20564/democracy

If you live in a “democracy” where everyone routinely votes to censor and imprison one another, you still live in a police state.

The word “democracy” appears to have become polite shorthand for insisting that an insular minority in control of the American government always knows what is best for the vast, unrepresented majority. Even worse, it sometimes seems nothing more than a convenient disguise for camouflaging abuses of power.

The American system of government is a federation of sovereign states that retain inherent powers not specifically delegated to the national government. It is a republic that separates discrete powers among coequal and competing branches of government — namely the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial. It is a representative democracy that empowers the people to vote into office those who presumably will best serve their interests. Most importantly, it is a constitutional system that severely limits government’s authority and proscribes government agents from infringing upon freedoms retained by the people.

Just to be indisputably clear that the government is forbidden from rewriting its own delegated powers in such a way that they violate an American’s God-given liberties, the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution — the Bill of Rights — act as a redundancy measure and explicit warning to state actors not to infringe upon or water down the rights delineated there.

A pure “democracy,” on the other hand, can be dangerous to anyone who does not think like, or readily follow, the crowd. Villagers willing to hang a suspected horse-thief before any trial might be acting democratically, but they are still a vigilante mob. If you live in a “democracy” where everyone routinely votes to censor and imprison one another, you still live in a police state.

If too many Americans fail to fully understand why their system of government is far superior to the fickle whims that naturally poison “democracy,” their representatives in government fare no better. For nearly two and half centuries, Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, and presidents have twisted and stretched the original intent and plain meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Their sometimes-questionable fealty to the very document that they have sworn to defend has done us no favors.

Given that the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us copious written records documenting their purpose in limiting the powers of the federal government as much as was practicable and safeguarding Americans’ inherent liberties as clearly as possible, the sheer size of the federal government today and the breadth of its authority might shock their sensibilities. They might be horrified that a fourth branch of government — namely, the vast administrative bureaucracy — has sprung up out of whole cloth and amalgamated enormous powers once strictly separated and delegated to specific branches.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Queen of the Gender Crits J.K. Rowling’s scathingly effective takedown of Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act has been a wonder to behold. Joan Smith

Posted By on April 12th, 2024

https://quillette.com/2024/04/11/queen-of-the-gender-crits/

EXCERPT

Indeed identity politics has become as central to the SNP’s creed, if not more so, than taking Scotland out of the UK. In a reversal of Whisky Galore-type stereotypes, in fact, the Scots have now taken on the role of witch-finders, sniffing out heretical thoughts under the cover of a supposedly liberal ideology. A vast amount of parliamentary time has been wasted on bad and unnecessary legislation advocated by trans activists, including a bill to remove all safeguards from the process that allows people to change their legal gender. The UK government salvaged the day by blocking the reckless Gender Recognition Reform Act last year, but the SNP had another trick up its sleeve.

The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act came into effect on April 1—April Fools’ day, as critics were quick to point out. It’s been on the statute books since 2021, but implementation was delayed because no one could say with any certainty what it actually criminalised.

Officially described as an act “to make provision about the aggravation of offences by prejudice; to make provision about an offence of racially aggravated harassment; to make provision about offences relating to stirring up hatred against a group of persons” and various other “connected purposes,” the law extends existing protections against racial hatred to cover age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics. Women are not explicitly protected. And so the female half of the population will have to wait for a separate piece of legislation that addresses misogyny at an unspecified time in the future.

At a moment when trans activists physically disrupt feminist events, and scour social media for posts they can present as transphobic, the scope for trivial and malicious complaints is endless. Opponents of the legislation warned that the Act would have a chilling effect on freedom of speech, not least because a new offence of “stirring up hatred” has no clear definition, yet attracts a sentence of up to seven years in prison. The Act has been denounced as a “clype’s charter” (clype being a Scots word meaning a sneak); and that is exactly what it has proved to be, prompting around 8,000 complaints to the police in the first week following the Act’s implementation. 

A new offence of ‘stirring up hatred’ has no clear definition, yet attracts a sentence of up to seven years in prison.

In a development that surprised no one, the Scottish First Minister, Humza Yousaf, who steered the bill through Parliament when he was Justice Secretary, has been accused of watering down protections for “gender-critical” women (which is to say, those who believe in a biologically-based definition of womanhood) to avoid upsetting trans activists. Susan Smith, director of the feminist organisation For Women Scotland, claimed on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour that Yousaf and his fellow SNP politicians broke a promise that she and a colleague would be involved in drawing up training materials because he thought “it would upset the trans lobby if those examples were given in the guidance to the police.” And, as everyone predicted, one of the first targets when the legislation came into operation was another English novelist who has made Scotland her home.

J.K. Rowling has lived in Edinburgh since 1993, before she published her first Harry Potter novel. Her increasingly stellar fame was initially seen as an ornament to the city and she became one of Scotland’s foremost philanthropists, setting up a charity in 2006 that supports children in orphanages in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. More recently, after Edinburgh’s rape crisis centre appointed a trans-identified male as its CEO, Rowling set up and funded Beira’s Place, a women-only service for victims of sexual violence. In any sane world, such generous acts would have won plaudits from government ministers. Not in Scotland, however, where the SNP is convinced that even the mildest resistance to the intemperate demands of gender warriors is tantamount to heresy.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Farewell, Mr Haffman 

Posted By on April 12th, 2024

From Janet Levy Ross

In 1941 Occupied Paris, Jews are instructed to identify themselves to the authorities.  Jeweler Joseph Haffmann makes arrangement for his wife and children to flee from Vichy France and offers an employee the opportunity to take over his business and upstairs living quarters until it is safe for him to return.  As his attempts to escape and join his family are thwarted by the omnipresence of Nazis in the city, Haffman is forced to reside in the basement of his home with his employee and his wife.  Their relationship is transformed in intriguing ways but poetic justice prevails in the end.  Excellent acting by the nonpareil Daniel Auteuil and others.  

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Inflation runs hot for third straight month, driven by gas prices and rent

Posted By on April 12th, 2024

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/inflation-cpi-consumer-price-index-march-2024/

Inflation remains the stickiest of problems for the U.S. economy, with the March consumer price index coming in hotter than expected — the third straight month that prices have accelerated. Gasoline prices and rent contributed over half the monthly increase, the government said on Wednesday.

Prices in March rose 3.5% on an annual basis, higher than the 3.4% expected by economists polled by financial data services company FactSet. It also represents a jump from February’s increase of 3.2% and January’s bump of 3.1% on a year-over-year basis. 

The latest acceleration in prices complicates the picture for the Federal Reserve, which has been monitoring economic data to determine whether inflation is cool enough to allow it to cut interest rates. But inflation, which measures the rate of price changes in goods and services bought by consumers, has remained stubborn in 2024, stalling the progress made last year to bring down the annual growth rate to the Fed’s goal of 2%.

“This marks the third consecutive strong reading and means that the stalled disinflationary narrative can no longer be called a blip,” said Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management, in an email.  

Shah added, “In fact, even if inflation were to cool next month to a more comfortable reading, there is likely sufficient caution within the Fed now to mean that a July cut may also be a stretch, by which point the U.S. election will begin to intrude with Fed decision making.”

Stocks fell on the report, with S&P 500 down 45 points, or 0.9%, to 5,164.96. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slumped 1% while the tech-heavy Nasdaq slipped 0.9%.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Absolutely Inane Case in Manhattan And one of the weakest in recent memory. by Mike Davis

Posted By on April 12th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-absolutely-inane-case-in-manhattan/

On Monday, April 15, President Donald Trump will become the first former president and the first major presidential candidate in American history to face a criminal trial. Not only is this unprecedented, it’s happening with one of the weakest criminal cases in recent memory.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s office searched for any way to charge the former president since 2017. The investigation poured over President Trump’s personal and business life, and they settled on charging the former president with 34 felonies for the non-felony of his attorney Michael Cohen settling a nuisance claim.

The case is so weak that The New York Times and The Washington Post both acknowledged that it’s a stretch. The New York Times reported: “The case against the former president hinges on an untested and therefore risky legal theory involving a complex interplay of laws.”

Meanwhile, The Washington Post wrote that the prosecution left some “legal experts . . . scratching their heads” as “they describe it as an unusual case.”

Indeed, it is unusual.

Soros-funded Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg says that President Trump “repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal crimes that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.”

Bragg’s indictment, however, shows that this is a false accusation from the DA.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Birx Busted How the white coat supremacist teamed with Fauci to take down Trump. by Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on April 12th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/birx-busted/

It Wasn’t Fauci: How the Deep State Really Played Trump, a short documentary now making the rounds, aims to prove that, in 2020, President Trump was not in command of the nation. The “fourth branch” of government, the administrative or “deep state,” took control and basically shut down the country, leaving disaster on every hand. One of the major players, Dr. Deborah Birx, has managed to escape notice.

Birx graduated from Houghton College and earned her medical degree at the Penn State. From 1980 to 1994 she served the U.S. Army, attaining the rank of colonel, and served a stint at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Birx’s bio showed no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry but she worked with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Fauci contended that AIDS was caused by HIV, a claim disputed by Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, Peter Duesberg of UC Berkeley,  Charles A. Thomas, and other leading medical scientists in “The Group for the Scientific Reappraisal of the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis.” Instead of debating these scientists, all more qualified than himself, Fauci branded them “AIDS denialists,” sought to block their media appearances, and in some cases deprived them of funding. See professor Duesberg’s Inventing the AIDS Virus, a virtual post-grad course in virology and exposure of Fauci. Deborah Birx was his faithful disciple.

From 2005-2014, Dr. Birx served as director of the CDC’s Division of Global HIV/AIDS (DGHA) In that role, Birx led the implementation of CDC’s PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) programs around the world. As the documentary points out, that was Birx’s ticket to the Covid task force, where her mantra was “silent asymptomatic spread,” endless repeated, with several variations.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Tucker Carlson’s Apologia for Christian Antisemitism By Haley Strack

Posted By on April 12th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/tucker-carlsons-apologia-for-christian-antisemitism/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=fourth

“In Isaac, Carlson has found a political activist who might support his anti-Israel views, Jewish Insider reported. The president of the Congress of Christian Leaders, Reverend Johnnie Moore, told the outlet that “those of us who track these things know that Munther Isaac has long been the high priest of antisemitic Christianity; sadly, he spreads his hate from the city of Jesus’ birth.” Moore added that, post–October 7, “Isaac seems to have graduated from being an anti-Zionist Lutheran preacher to a terror sympathizer.” “There’s really just no other way to describe him.”

“How does the government of Israel treat Christians?” Tucker Carlson asked Munther Isaac, the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, last week. For months since the October 7 attacks, Carlson has been at the forefront of a loose campaign of social-media influencers trying to convince Christians to abandon their support for Israel. He took things to a new level this week by turning to Isaac for answers, and claiming, “If you wake up in the morning and decide that your Christian faith requires you to support a foreign government blowing up churches and killing Christians, I think you’ve lost the thread.”

Isaac, though a Christian, has a long history of anti-Israel rhetoric that excuses terrorism. In 2021, he published an “Open Letter to U.S. Christians from a Palestinian Pastor,” in which he wrote, “We Palestinians are experiencing an occupation: one nation controlling another; the laws, policies, practices, and military of one state oppressing the people of another, controlling nearly every aspect of our lives.” Palestinians in Jerusalem, he continued, experienced ethnic cleansing at Israel’s hands and are subject to Israeli apartheid. In that article, Isaac told Christians to team up with groups such as IfNotNow and Jewish Voices for Peace — two of the groups organizing mass anti-Israel, and in many cases pro-Hamas, protests across the United States. Christians should embrace movements such as these, Isaac said, to “challenge the occupation.”

The pastor also said that Hamas’s October 7 attack was “an embodiment of the injustice that has befallen us as Palestinians since the Nakba until now. . . . Frankly, anyone following the events was not surprised by what happened yesterday. . . . One of the scenes that left an impression on my mind yesterday, and there are many scenes, is the scene of the Israeli youth who were celebrating a concert in the open air [the Nova music festival] just outside the borders of Gaza, and how they escaped. What a great contradiction, between the besieged poor on the one hand, and the wealthy people celebrating as if there was nothing behind the wall. Gaza exposes the hypocrisy of the world.” 

Isaac is on the board of Kairos Palestine, whose founding document says that “Christian love invites us to resist,” Jewish Insider reported. Kairos and Isaac describe Israel’s campaign in Gaza as “genocide.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

RENT CONTROL IS A DESTRUCTIVE POLICY

Posted By on April 12th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/12/biden-bombs-his-own-country/

Do we have to bring up late Swedish socialist economist Assar Lindbeck, who said “in many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing”? Yes, we do. Joe Biden made us.

The White House is not proposing a federal rent control law. Even that would likely be too much for this runaway administration that has twice defied the U.S. Supreme Court and forgiven student loans. What it has done is place a 10% cap on rent increases on government-subsidized properties with low-income tenants

It’s a change in how the cap is calculated, so it’s not entirely new ground. But it’s nevertheless a form of rent control, meaning the bombs are still dropping.

Yes, we’re back to the air raid comparison. And Lindbeck was not alone in making the point with an analogy that is easily understood. After the war, as the communist country struggled economically, Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach pointed out that policies that “artificially encouraged demand and discouraged supply” had in effect blown up the capital city, leaving “all the houses” in a state of “disrepair.”

​​“The Americans couldn’t destroy Hanoi, but we have destroyed our city by very low rents. We realized it was stupid and that we must change policy,” he said.