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Social Justice, Tikkun Olam and the Democrat Party Politics Diane Bederman

Posted By on October 3rd, 2020

https://dianebederman.com/social-justice-tikkun-olam-and-the-democrat-party/

Judaism teaches that social justice includes leaving grain and produce during the harvest for the poor to glean in order to provide all people the dignity of work. A hand up and not a perpetual hand out.

“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the corner of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest.  You shall not pick your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger.” (Leviticus 19:9-11)

Our Jewish ethic teaches us that we have moral agency; free will; that we are the subject of our destiny and not the object of our fate. We are not the victims of circumstance because we choose our path, no matter the road blocks put in our way.

Yet, I watch and listen as Jewish people support a party that places multiple road blocks in front of those in most need of uplifting by promoting a welfare state: free stuff; free education, free health care, subsidized housing. It all sounds lovely, but for those whose hand is always out, there is no dignity; there is no moral agency.  I agree there is no dignity in homelessness or hunger but socialism is not the answer. We know this from history watching what happened in Cuba, Russia, and Venezuela, rich beyond belief, from oil, whose people are now unable to buy toilet paper. Socialism is evil. It is debilitating. It undermines dignity turning citizens into generational victims.

Dear Jews, listen to those less fortunate. Listen to the Latinos and Hispanics whose families fled socialist countries to come to America for the freedom to rise up and to fall down, knowing you could rise up again. Listen to them as they warn against socialism as preached by Bernie Sanders and shared by AOC.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

EU Still Siding with the “World’s Worst Human Rights Abuser” by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on October 3rd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16539/eu-iran-human-rights-abuse

“One day, I heard screams, shouting, and pleas for help in the police department…. I witnessed two officers who were dressed in unofficial uniform cursing and hitting Navid with batons and metal pipes with no mercy. They would tell him: ‘the truth is whatever we say, will you write what we are saying or not?’ Navid was… begging: ‘please, stop, please don’t hit me, I didn’t do anything.’ He covered his head with his arms. And one of the officers, whose name I later learned was Abbasi, hit Navid with such strength that Navid let out a gut-wrenching scream and fell unconscious”. — Witness to the torture of Iran’s wrestling champion, Navid Afkari, who was reportedly tortured into a false confession, then hanged.

Iran’s leaders most likely wanted to make an example of the highly respected wrestler, to impose fear in society, and send a strong message to the people that anyone who dares to protest can face severe consequences.

Did they hear about the four teenagers who will have their fingers amputated as a punishment for stealing, also, according to them, after being tortured until they “confessed”?

The European Union, in empowering a regime that is torturing and executing protesters and political prisoners, is making itself complicit in these crimes against humanity. Instead, the EU needs immediately to join the US in putting pressure on the mullahs and holding them accountable.

The European Union is openly siding with the ruling mullahs of Iran and attempting to scuttle US efforts to pressure the rogue regime to stop. Britain, France and Germany, on September 18, told the UN Security Council that the EU is strongly committed to ensuring the continued lifting of sanctions against the Iranian government. The three European powers added that, as far as they were concerned, even if the United States reimposes all sanctions, their UN sanctions relief for Iran would continue beyond September 20.

The EU has also been helping Iranian leaders to evade US sanctions through a payment mechanism labeled as INSTEX (Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges), which is designed to permit European firms and corporations to continue doing business with the Iranian government in spite of US economic sanctions against Tehran.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Iran: Can the U.S. Make Peace with the Mullahs? by Peter Huessy

Posted By on October 3rd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16582/iran-can-the-us-make-peace-with-the-mullahs

With regard to the JCPOA itself, Iran’s serious and continuing violations of the nuclear enrichment terms of the existing agreement reflect the true intentions of the mullahs, and clearly indicate that a new nuclear deal could not be implemented with any confidence: it would also be violated by Iran. Secretary Pompeo, in a statement posted on the Department of State’s website, noted that Iran has shown no willingness to live in peace.

Like other criminal cartels, Iran has operational arms, including the IRGC, Hezbollah and Hamas, to do its dirty work. In 2014-15, Iran’s terror proxy, Hezbollah, financed its terrorism through smuggling contraband cigarettes in the United States, and working with Venezuelan drug cartels to smuggle drugs and traffic in women and children. Revealingly, a nearly-completed law enforcement effort to take down Hezbollah’s cigarette smuggling ring was shut down by the Obama administration just before the 2015 JCPOA was concluded.

If anyone thinks that diplomacy can resolve such threats, one need not do any more than remember the diplomatic success Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had in preventing Nazi Germany from attacking Poland.

On Saturday, September 19, after months of futile diplomatic efforts to extend the UN ban on Iran’s purchase of advanced weapons, the Trump administration implemented “snap back” sanctions as set forth in the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). That action was taken, said U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, because “The Iranians are largely ignoring the most important components of the [nuclear deal] with respect to nuclear enrichment.”

BOOKS, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Anthony J. Sadar :Environmental perspective meets environmental apocalypse

Posted By on October 3rd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/10/environmental_perspective_meets_environmental_apocalypse_.html

On the first day of teaching college-level Environmental Science, I write on the board in large letters “PERSPECTIVE.”  This attention grabber focuses students on what they need to learn to get a more complete understanding of environmental issues.  They need to discover not just facts and figures but the sense of those facts and figures from environmental practitioners, both within and outside the ivory towers. 

Perspective is what Michael Shellenberger’s book. Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (Harper, June 2020), provides at a time when perspective is desperately needed.  In addition to being a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and “the winner of the 2008 Green Book Award from the Stevens Institute of Technology’s Center for Science Writings,” Mr. Shellenberger is “an invited expert reviewer of the next Assessment Report for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” 

Apoclypse Never went to #1 in three categories this past weekend on Amazon:  Climatology, Environmental Policy, and Human Geography (Books).  So, people are taking notice of this author’s real-world perspective, and well they should.  I provided each of my two college summer interns with copies of Apocalypse Never as a gift when they completed their internships.  I encouraged the students to consider the book’s concepts along with what they learned from their environmental science and engineering training. 

Individual chapters address popular notions of impending worldwide woes that have been instilled in students and the public alike since at least the 1960s.  Catastrophic climate change, overpopulation, energy crisis, whaling, and plastics are among the pertinent topics carefully reviewed and evaluated.  Mr. Shellenberger relies primarily on historic and academic sources, although he includes interviews with recognized subject-matter experts and those impacted by untoward ecological and economic decisions. 

Apocalypse Never doesn’t miss the unmistakable comparison of modern environmentalism with religious practice, noting that it “is the dominant secular religion of the educated, upper-middle-class elite in most developed and many developing nations.  It provides a new story about our collective and individual purpose.  It designates good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains.  And it does so in the language of science, which provides it with legitimacy.” 

ELECTIONS, ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Biden’s Energy Plan: Sacrificing Goats to the Sun Gods By Norman Rogers

Posted By on October 3rd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/bidens_energy_plan_sacrificing_goats_to_the_sun_gods.html

A number of documents  have been published by the Biden campaign and the Democratic Party: Biden’s energy plan, the Biden-Saunders unity manifesto and the party platform.  A lot of the goals in these documents are generalities, promising everything to everyone, especially to groups that vote Democratic.  One concrete goal is carbon-free electricity generation by 2035.  This is a pointless goal on several fronts.  Reducing U.S. CO2 emissions is a pointless exercise due to the fact that declining U.S. emissions are dwarfed by rapidly increasing emissions in China and India.  U.S. emissions are declining due to increased use of natural gas, a low-carbon source of energy.  The claim that CO2 will create an apocalyptic disaster is overwrought, without sound scientific basis.  The Biden campaign ignores the fantastic benefits for agriculture of adding more CO2 to the atmosphere.  The Biden campaign accepts as fact popular fake claims that not even the most extreme climate scientists would dare to advocate — that CO2 will create forest fires, floods, and sea level rise.

Wind and solar cannot be the instrument to achieve the (unnecessary) goal of 100% zero carbon electricity by 2035.  Wind and solar are erratic and unpredictable sources of electricity.  As long as wind and solar supply less than about 25% of the electricity in a grid, the grid can handle the erratic energy supply by throttling backup plants, usually natural gas plants, up and down to compensate for the ups and downs of wind or solar.  When wind and solar go past the approximate 25% threshold, spells of excess wind and solar power appear.  The problem is that wind and solar power are peaky, with peaks 3 to 5 times the average power.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Winding Constitutional Path From Trump to Pence to Pompeo The president is sick, so here’s a review of the laws governing succession. By John Yoo

Posted By on October 3rd, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-winding-constitutional-path-from-trump-to-pence-to-pompeo-11601677891?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

What if President Trump becomes seriously ill and unable to do his job? Under the 25th Amendment, the president can report to Congress that “he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Vice President Mike Pence would become acting president until Mr. Trump sends a second written declaration that he can perform his duties again.

But suppose he’s unable or unwilling to issue the declaration. The 25th Amendment provides for that too. If the vice president and a majority of “the principal officers of the executive branch”—defined by statute to include the heads of the 15 major executive departments—declare in writing that the president “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” Mr. Pence becomes acting president “immediately.”

Mr. Trump’s opponents have often mused about invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office for behavior they regard as erratic. The idea reflects a misunderstanding of how the amendment works. Even in the unlikely event that Mr. Pence and the cabinet backed such a move, the president could challenge it. The disagreement would be resolved in the president’s favor unless two-thirds of both houses of Congress overrode him—and even then, his removal would be temporary. The 25th Amendment deals with cases of genuine debility, such as might arise if the president became seriously ill.

Mr. Pence has tested negative for the coronavirus. But suppose that changes and both he and Mr. Trump are too sick to perform the presidency’s duties. Article II of the Constitution states that in “the case of removal, death, resignation or inability” of both the president and vice president, Congress has the authority to declare “what officer shall then act as president” until the disability ends or a new president is elected. The term “officer” poses a problem for the current law.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Staying positive The left is in a paroxysm of delight over the President’s diagnosis Roger Kimball

Posted By on October 3rd, 2020

https://spectator.us/testing-positive-coronavirus-donald-trump/

Almost everyone, no matter his political coloration, has been predicting that the presidential election would be close. I was thinking of writing a column in the next few days arguing against this conventional position. I am no Nate Silver, psephologist to the stars, but the more I looked around, the more it seemed to me that President Trump was going to win handsomely. I was thinking he would take all the states he took last time, with the possible exception of Wisconsin (10 electoral votes). Further, it seemed to me that he had a good chance to pick up Nevada (6 votes), Minnesota (10) and New Hampshire (4). I even thought that Colorado (9 votes) and Virginia (13) might be in play.

The President’s announcement earlier today that he and Melania had tested positive for the Chinese flu has made me pause to reconsider that prognostication.

One of the reasons I was so upbeat in my psephological prophecy was the vigor of the President’s campaign. Notwithstanding the restrictions imposed on public gatherings by our latest Chinese import, his team has devised and robust strategy for him to campaign safely and effectively. His rallies are outdoors, usually involve Air Force One as an elegant prop, and the draw large and enthusiastic crowds.

But wait, how can I say that these rallies are safe when the President has just tested positive for COVID? I won’t give you a lecture about the difference between post hoc and propter hoc but will merely observe that we have no idea from where the President was exposed to the virus.

Naturally, the left is having none of. The Los Angeles Times, for example, wheeled into print with an editorial gleefully lambasting the President for his ‘recklessness’ (in fact ‘deadly, foolish recklessness’).

Moreover, we do not know whether he will sicken from the exposure. The vast majority of people who test positive are asymptomatic, many more experience on mild symptoms.

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Accidental Defender of the Constitution Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on October 3rd, 2020

https://fedsoc.org/commentary/publications/the-accidental-defender-of-the-constitutio

It is fair to say that Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power is a book Yoo never thought he’d write. Fair because he says so himself, right up front: “If friends had told me on January 21, 2017, that I would write a book on Donald Trump as a defender of the Constitution, I would have questioned their sanity.”
A Review of Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power, by John Yoo, https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250269577.

Decades from now, when historians assess Donald Trump’s presidency with sobriety and dispassion, the ironies are apt to stand out most. Donald Trump is the populist who lost the popular vote, owing his ascendancy to the Electoral College, an institution designed to temper popular excesses and which Trump himself, while pondering a presidential bid in 2012, rebuked as “a disaster for democracy.” Trump has been condemned as the Constitution’s scourge by progressives for whom the Constitution is mostly a nuisance to evolve beyond, framed by white racists in a time before Wokeness. Trump is the president who upheld the rule of law by firing the FBI director. He submitted to investigation by a special counsel whom he reviled but who nevertheless cleared him. Trump was impeached anyway by Democrats who were pushed into the exercise by partisans. But Democratic partisanship proved so devoid of appeal outside the activist Left that impeachment, though it happened just a few months earlier, rated nary a mention in the Democratic National Convention.

Is it any wonder that these four years have aged most of us tenfold?

We’re not through with the ironies, though. For present purposes, here is the most striking one: Through all of this, President Trump’s most compelling defender may be John Yoo, a brilliant conservative thinker who appeared to have both feet firmly planted in Camp Never Trump when the president took office in 2017.

John Yoo is the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California’s Berkeley Law School, where it is not easy to be a conservative academic, but anti-Trumpers are welcome. Professor Yoo is a nonpareil scholar of the presidency—in particular, of executive power as conceived in the Constitution and practiced through more than two centuries. He is a prolific author, his grasp of his core concentration immeasurably enhanced by service as a high-ranking Justice Department official. He played a pivotal role in national security policy development in the post-9/11 era, when President George W. Bush grappled with the vexing challenges of international jihadism, often with ferocious partisan opposition in Congress.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Majority of voters think Biden has used his political career to enrich his family and friends

Posted By on October 3rd, 2020

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/polling/majority-voters-believe-biden-has-used-his-political-career-enrich-his

A majority of U.S. voters say former Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has used his decades-long political career to enrich his family and close friends, according to a new Just the News Daily Poll with Scott Rasmussen.

When asked, 57% of voters said it was either “somewhat” or “very” likely that Biden’s inner circle has profited from his nearly 50-years-long career in public office, which includes the elected positions of U.S senator and vice president. Just 28% said they doubted such profiting. 

Noting parallels between Biden and 2016 Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, Rasmussen said: “In 2016, the Clinton campaign acted as if all they had to do to win was point out the ethical failings of Donald Trump. They failed to see the reality that many voters also saw Clinton as fundamentally corrupt. In fact, the baseline view for many voters is that ALL politicians are corrupt.”

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, MEDIA Comments turned off

America’s Chris Wallace Problem – Is anything more dangerous to our country than media bias? Robert Stacey McCain

Posted By on October 3rd, 2020

https://spectator.org/chris-wallace-debate-bias/

When will Chris Wallace apologize to Katie Pavlich? More than once, Wallace has
insulted his Fox News colleague on the network, as in a January segment about the impeachment of President Trump, when Wallace barked at Pavlich, “Get your facts straight!” As it turned out in that case, Pavlich was right and Wallace was wrong — and not accidentally so. The question at issue was Democrats’ demand that the Senate trial over what was called “Ukrainegate” include testimony from additional witnesses. Pavlich said this was unprecedented, and contended it was not the Senate’s fault that “the House did not come with a complete case.” Wallace began barking about “facts” in an attempt to rescue Democrats from the consequences of their failure.

Wallace’s dismal performance as moderator in Tuesday’s presidential debate reminded many viewers of such previous instances in which the Fox News Sunday host has shown his prejudice against Trump. And this matters, not only because of how that ugly televised carnival might affect the election, but because of what it tells us about the sad state of journalism in America. If Wallace is, Dov Fischer says, “the fairest moderator we can hope for in today’s Left-dominated media,” there is no hope for fairness. But what about those “facts” that Wallace presumed to lecture Katie Pavlich about? Even if we must resign ourselves to partisan prejudice from the media, must we tolerate journalists trafficking in outright lies?

That’s what Wallace did in Tuesday’s debate. Consider this question he aimed at President Trump: “You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out Antifa and other left-wing extremist groups, but are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities, as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland?”

Where is the evidence that “white supremacists and militia groups” were to blame for violence in Kenosha or Portland, Oregon? Wallace’s question was not only tendentious, but counterfactual. As regards Portland, Wallace seemed to be echoing Oregon’s woefully misguided Democratic governor. After a man who described himself as “100% Antifa” murdered a Trump supporter on the streets of Portland Aug.29, Gov. Kate Brown issued this rather bizarre statement: