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The RNC’s aspirational message couldn’t be more different from Dems’ radicalism By Steve Cortes

Posted By on August 26th, 2020

https://nypost.com/2020/08/25/the-rncs-aspirational-message-couldnt-be-more-different-from-dems-radicalism/

The Republican National Convention is underway, and it ­offers a hopeful, pro-American agenda that stands in stark contrast to the radicalism that radiated out of the Democratic National Convention last week.

The Democrats’ convention ­revealed a disturbing truth about the party’s November ticket. While Joe Biden’s name is inscribed there as a sort of nod to a moderate past, it is the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who are really on the ballot this November.

Time and again, Biden, the supposed moderate, has proved willing to embrace the radical leftists who now control his party. His electoral platform is really a Biden-Sanders Unity platform. It reflects the hard left’s top policy priorities, including government-controlled health care, the Green New Deal and a climate agenda that would kill millions of American jobs and dull America’s economic and energy edge.

While the platform doesn’t explicitly endorse Medicare for All, it calls for the creation of a “public-option plan” overseen by the government. It was no accident that Sanders — one of the ­architects of Medicare for All — was prominently featured on the opening night of the Democrats’ convention.

Meanwhile, as nihilistic rioters sow disorder in cities across the United States, Biden and the Democrats said not a word in condemnation. As violent crime spikes in blue states and cities, victimizing mostly poor people of color, Biden and the Democrats offered no solution

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Revenge of the Normies Matthew Continetti

Posted By on August 26th, 2020

https://freebeacon.com/2020-election/revenge-of-the-normies/

The 2020 Republican National Convention is the Trump presidency in microcosm: precedent is overturned, norms disregarded, and authorities ignored or dismissed in favor of the men and women who comprise the Trump coalition. It’s polarizing and riveting. And the whole thing makes for great television.

The second night of the convention featured high-profile speeches from First Lady Melania Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and Eric Trump. But, once again, the real stars were President Trump and the cast of Americans who had been selected to illustrate aspects of his multi-front war on the political and media elite. We heard from a Maine lobsterman, a Wisconsin dairy farmer, a truck driver from Ohio, and a police officer from New Mexico who adopted the child of a woman addicted to opiates. Nick Sandmann explained how mainstream media outlets defamed him based on a photo that went viral on Twitter. Sandmann brought a bit of meme culture to the proceedings when he “trolled” his media antagonists by putting on a MAGA cap at the end of his speech.

Trump sent many reporters and commentators into a fury when he pardoned a former convict and presided over a naturalization ceremony in the middle of the convention. But the whole thing worked, both as political theater and as campaign strategy. Trump’s interactions with normal Americans humanize him and allow him to display rarely seen compassion and to utilize his self-deprecating sense of humor. And the men and women highlighted in these two segments are living rebukes to the critical narratives surrounding Trump on race and immigration. Trump’s exchanges with each of the new Americans were charming and amusing. After he finished reading aloud the resume of a new U.S. citizen from Lebanon who is a multilingual psychologist, Trump quipped, “In other words, she can figure me out.” Everyone in the room laughed.

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RNC Hails Land of Opportunity With a back story on Democrats and the Iran Deal. Wed Aug 26, 2020 Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on August 26th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/rnc-hails-land-opportunity-lloyd-billingsley/

“When Iran threatened, the president approved a strike against Qasem Soleimani,” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the Republican National Convention on Tuesday. The president also ended the “disastrous nuclear deal with Iran,” but before Pompeo spoke a word, prominent Democrats were targeting the venue.

According to Wendy Sherman, undersecretary of state for political affairs in the Obama administration, it was “wholly inappropriate to use Jerusalem as a prop in the Republican convention.” As Sherman told Laura Kelly of The Hill, “This is really a grievous and potentially very harmful act by Secretary Pompeo. Secretaries of State and Defense have traditionally stayed above partisan politics because they represent America to the world. It is truly breaking a norm to have the Secretary of State do this.” 

Before Secretary Pompeo came on in the closing stages, speakers took up the theme of opportunity. Jon Ponder had abandoned crime and built a new life in a “nation of second chances.” President Trump said Jon’s life was a “testament to the power of redemption” and the audience saw President Trump grant Ponder a full pardon.

One-time presidential rival Rand Paul told the convention Trump had helped him on a medical mission to Guatemala and Haiti to perform eye surgeries. Trump “gets things done,” such as a “true tax cut.” The president cut red tape, signed the First Step Act and “undid the harm Joe Biden did.” And Biden, Paul said, “bragged about a bill that still wreaks havoc on people of color.” 

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Democrats Wish Upon a Star Welcome to the Happy Land of pathetic progressive make-believe.Don Feder

Posted By on August 26th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/democrats-wish-upon-star-don-feder/

Last week, the Democrat Party had its national convention at the summit of the Big Rock Candy Mountain in the Happy Land of Make Believe – a place of magic and wonder where reality is shaped by whim and whatever you wish is true, just because you wish it. Joe Biden is now the Mayor. Kamala Harris provides hair-sniffing morale.

Democrats have been accused of lying. But to be guilty of that, you have to be able to distinguish between lies and the truth.

For the Democrat Party, reality is like the lyrics from “Pinocchio” — ”anything your heart desires will come to you.” As Slow Joe once said, his party chooses truth (that which confirms its ideology) over facts (that which contradicts it).

Here are a few of the truths Democrats cling to:

There is no rioting in Portland, Seattle, Chicago, New York, Denver, etc. just “peaceful protests” the President is trying to suppress with his “stormtroopers,” as Nancy Pelosi would have it.

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How Do We Save People from the Tyranny of Lockdown? The specific things we can all do. Katie Hopkins

Posted By on August 26th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/how-do-we-save-people-tyranny-lockdown-katie-hopkins/

Prager U is looking at the impact of lockdown on our mental health and asking, “Was it worth it?”

In the last 30 days, around 40% of people have reported mental or behavioral health issues, 30% anxiety or depression, 26% trauma and stress and 10.7% have considered suicide.

You need to say it twice to stop yourself reading it like a shopping list. During lockdowns, one in ten people have considered suicide in the last 30 days. Look around you. One in ten.

We also know that statistically these figures will be an under-representation. People do not willingly share this kind of information about their darkest thoughts in hopeless moments. Suicide is a private thing, perhaps the most solitary act of all. Right up until what remains of you is found.

4 in 5 U.S. workers live paycheck-to-paycheck. What do you say to a father who no longer has an income to pay the rent? Or a mother made redundant in March with no money to buy food? For many of us work is about much more than satisfying bills, or a providing a home. There is dignity in work, and indignity in the losing of it. This is not unique to lower income homes.

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Trump Admin May Label China’s Treatment of Uighurs a ‘Genocide’: Report By Zachary Evans

Posted By on August 26th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-admin-may-label-chinas-treatment-of-uighurs-a-genocide-report/

The Trump administration is considering whether to formally label China’s treatment of Uighurs a “genocide,” Politico reported on Tuesday.

A genocide designation by the U.S. government could have political and legal consequences for the country. If the genocide label is approved, it could pressure the U.S. to intervene in some form to counteract the genocide, though not necessarily through military means. The designation would also be sure to further inflame tensions between the U.S. and China that have soared during the coronavirus pandemic.

The National Security Council, State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security are still weighing whether to use the term, Trump administration officials told Politico. The administration could designate China’s treatment of Uighurs as “crimes against humanity” or “ethnic cleansing” if there is not enough support for a formal designation of “genocide.”

A spokesman for the Joe Biden presidential campaign said Biden supports the “genocide” designation, which could influence President Trump’s final decision on the matter.

China has imprisoned over one million Uighurs and other Muslims from the province of Xinjiang in reeducation camps aimed to stamp out detainees’ Islamic faith and indoctrinate them in communist party ideology. White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien has referred to the facilities as “concentration camps,” and reports of torture, rape, and other abuses have emerged from the camps.

 

China is also implementing a campaign of forced sterilizations and abortions on Uighur women.

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California Apocalypto By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 26th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/california-apocalypto/#slide-1

Power outages, fires, water shortages, rising taxes, crumbling and congested highways, dismal schools, lawlessness … I t is now August in California.

So we can expect the following from our postmodern state government. There are the now-normal raging wildfires in the coastal and Sierra foothills. And they will be greeted as if they are not characteristic threats of 500 years of settled history, but leveraged as proof of global warming as well as the state’s abject inability to put them out.

When the inept state can’t extinguish them as it has in the past, it suggests that it’s more “natural” to let them burn. Jerry Brown’s team told us that the drought’s toll — millions of dead trees and tens of millions of acres of parched grass and calcified shrubs on hillsides — provided a natural source of food and shelter for bugs and birds and thus need not be grazed or thinned or harvested. And so the wages of drought could be in a sense good for an “ecosystem” that otherwise proved to be green napalm for the people of foothill communities.

We can expect power outages, because we don’t believe in releasing clean heat to make energy. Note that we do not mind people heating up in their 108-degree apartments without power. The planet is always more important than the non-privileged people who inhabit it.

For some reason, solar panels don’t create much power when the state is engulfed in dust, haze, and smoke.

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RNC presented uplift; Dems delivered only addiction to victimhood By Patricia McCarthy

Posted By on August 26th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/rnc_presented_uplift_dems_delivered_only_addiction_to_victimhood.html

As the Democrats continue to ignore or defend the violence being so cleverly orchestrated and funded by Marxist groups intent upon destroying the United States as founded, the speakers at the RNC convention presented something more edifying.

They told their personal stories of what they had suffered under the Obama/Biden administration and how President Trump has done the work that has helped them directly.  

On the second night, the lobster fisherman, the steel-stamping company owner, the dairy farmer, the young Nick Sandmann whom the left attempted to “cancel” were among them. 

The second night of the convention did not disappoint; it was as uplifting and inspiring as the first night.  

It was also a night of blunt truth-telling.  Pam Bondi laid out the facts of the Biden family’s corruption.  

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Five COVID-19 Charts Democrats Can’t Let You Know About

Posted By on August 26th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/08/26/four-covid-19-charts-democrats-cant-let-you-know-about/

If the Democratic National Convention made anything clear, it is that Democrats are entirely invested in making the coronavirus pandemic look worse than it is in the United States.

Almost every speaker decried the response and blamed President Donald Trump for the scale of the disease in the country.

In his acceptance speech, Joe Biden said “Just judge this president on the facts. Five million Americans infected by COVID-19. More than 170,000 Americans have died. By far the worst performance of any nation on Earth.” Later he said, “We lead the world in confirmed cases. We lead the world in deaths.”

Fact checkers somehow missed Biden’s flagrant abuse of statistics. NPR’s “fact check” of Biden’s speech said only that, if anything, Biden undercounted the number of COVID-19 deaths.

But the number of infections and deaths is meaningless out of context. What matters is how many have died per capita, how many who’ve been infected have succumbed to the disease and where the trends are right now.

When you do that, the picture looks far less bleak.

The U.S. is far from the worst in the world in terms of the death rate per million population. The U.S. ranks 10th for per capita deaths worldwide, and notably better than the United Kingdom with its socialist health care scheme, and Sweden, which adopted a much more laissez-faire approach to the pandemic than the U.S.

On confirmed cases per million, the U.S. ranks 9th, but this is in part due to the extensive testing we’ve done. In fact, despite what Biden and Co. will have you believe, we are in the top of the pack when it comes to COVID-19 tests per capita. (Note also that only four of the other 36 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations do better than the U.S. on tests per capita.)

When it comes to the case fatality rate – the share of confirmed cases who have died – there is no comparison. Not only does the U.S. outperform most countries – as well as the world overall – the case fatality rate in the U.S. has been steadily declining.

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Lebanon Must End its Poisonous Political Relationship with Hezbollah by Con Coughlin

Posted By on August 26th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16411/lebanon-relationship-hezbollah

Speaking shortly after the verdict was announced, Bahaa Hariri, the eldest son of the murdered prime minister, told me that the conclusion of the trial should result in Hezbollah’s complete exclusion from Lebanese politics.

Mr Hariri’s campaign for Lebanon to end the interference of Iran and Hezbollah in the country’s political system will certainly be helped by the damning material that emerged from the trial about the organisation’s links with Syria and Iran.

The man convicted of Mr Hariri’s murder, therefore, is no ordinary Hezbollah commander, but someone who operates at the organisation’s highest levels, a fact that should help enormously in Lebanon’s coming battle to rid itself of the malign influence that Hezbollah and its Iranian paymasters have exercised over the country’s fortunes.

The conviction of a senior Hezbollah terrorist for assassinating Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has provided the hard-pressed Lebanese people with incontrovertible proof of the malign influence Iran exerts over their political system.

Following an investigation that has lasted for more than a decade and cost a staggering $1 billion, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the UN-sponsored body responsible for trying four Hezbollah suspects accused of murdering Mr Hariri in a car bomb attack in Beirut in 2005, has finally passed its judgement.