Castro Fan Karen Bass Vetted for Biden VP Los Angeles Democrat seeks “new path of support and collaboration” with Communist Cuban regime. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/castro-fan-karen-bass-vetted-biden-vp-lloyd-billingsley/

“Congresswoman Karen Bass, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, is undergoing vetting as a candidate to be Joe Biden’s running mate,” Bo Erickson of CBS News reported on June 24.

In March, the five-term Los Angeles Democrat endorsed Biden for president, but even some Democrats were troubled by one of Bass’s previous endorsements.

“The passing of the Comandante en Jefe is a great loss to the people of Cuba,” said Bass in a statement after Fidel Castro passed away on November 25, 2016.  “I hope together, our two nations will continue on the new path of support and collaboration with one another, and continue in the new direction of diplomacy.” Democrats had often praised Castro, but Karen Bass used the official designation, Comandante en Jefe, for a Communist dictator one generation out of Europe.

Fidel Castro’s father Ángel Castro y Argiz immigrated from Spain in 1906 and ran a sugarcane farm. Fidel attended Catholic boarding schools and the University of Havana where the law student “organized violent gangs” for “political aims.” The revolution of the late 1950s included not a single Afro-Cuban, and the Communist Fidel was Commandante en Jefe for more than 50 years, with not a single free and fair election.

Fidel Castro drove a formerly prosperous nation to sub-Haiti levels of poverty. His repression was such that thousands of Cubans fled at the first opportunity, leaving everything behind, at great risk to their own lives. That is why the Straits of Florida have become a graveyard without crosses.

What Will a Trump Re-Election Mean For the Middle East? The region’s future hinges on what happens in November. Joseph Puder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/middle-east-conundrum-joseph-puder/

With the Middle East awaiting the U.S. elections, there is no significant military or political movement in the region. The Arab world, much like the rest of the world, is preoccupied with the coronavirus crisis, and its severe impact on the local economies in the region. The Arab world, divided into royalist, presidential, and parliamentary systems, none of them democratic, all having conflicting interests, are now in the same boat because of the coronavirus crisis. In Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria and the Arab Gulf states, the current focus is on internal issues, specifically health measures that would prevent the spread of coronavirus infections and the economic impact it has caused. As far as external issues are concerned, there is a conundrum. Who will be the next U.S. president? Many external decisions will await the results of the U.S. presidential elections, and the direction of the next American president.

Iran is not an Arab country, but it too is enmeshed in recovering from the economic damage caused by the coronavirus, and the impact of the U.S. sanctions on its failing economy. The regime is burdened by the lack of credibility and trustworthiness. The ayatollahs poor handling of the coronavirus crisis, coupled with the downing of the Ukrainian jetliner by the Iranian military in January, 2020, at the loss of 176 lives, exposed the regimes incompetence. Then they lied about it. The Islamic Republic of Iran is hoping for a Democrat party victory in the November, 2020 U.S. elections, and the defeat of Donald Trump in particular. They are expecting that Joe Biden as President will end the sanctions and rejoin the 5+1 nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Iraq is now more stable, following six months of failed attempts to form a government. The new Prime Minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, a former head of Intelligence, is not an Iranian puppet. He is committed to lead Iraq out of its economic crisis, due in part to the collapse of the price of oil, Iraq’s primary export. Iraq has also endured a health crisis brought about by the coronavirus, and a resurgent Islamic State terrorism (IS). The appointment of al-Kadhimi as prime minister, and the strengthened position of the Kurdish President of Iraq, Barham Salih, (this reporter interviewed Barham Salih in 1993), both of them reformers, has dealt a blow to the pro-Iranian groups in Iraq. The election of al-Kadhimi was welcomed by Washington.

Exposing the Lies of Black Lives Matter Where black racism and Marxism are dressed up as “social justice.” John Perazzo

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/exposing-lies-black-lives-matter-john-perazzo/

Black Lives Matter (BLM) was established in 2013 by a trio of self-identified Marxist revolutionaries. Striving to make white Americans “uncomfortable about institutional racism” and the “structural oppression” that allegedly “prevents so many [black people] from realizing their dreams,” BLM contends that blacks living under America’s “white supremacist system” are routinely targeted for “extrajudicial killings … by police and vigilantes.” That claim has become an article of faith for the millions of American leftists who dutifully parrot BLM’s talking points. The remainder of this article is dedicated to providing hard data which exposes BLM’s worldview as nothing more than a mountain of malicious lies.

Debunking BLM’s Claims About Police Use of Force

A major Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report in 2001 examined incidents where police in the United States used deadly force to kill criminal suspects between 1976 and 1998. During that 23-year span, 42% of all suspects killed by police were black – a figure that comported precisely with the percentage of violent crimes committed by African Americans during that same period. This is enormously significant because we would expect that in police forces not plagued by systemic racism, officers would shoot suspects of various racial or ethnic backgrounds at rates closely resembling their respective involvement in the types of serious crimes most likely to elicit the use of force by police. And indeed, that is exactly what the evidence shows.

The same BJS report found that in nearly two-thirds of all justifiable homicides by police during 1976-98, the officer’s race and the suspect’s race were the same. When a white or Hispanic officer killed a suspect, that suspect was usually (63% of the time) white or Hispanic as well. And when a black officer killed a suspect, that suspect was usually black (81% of the time).

The BJS report also examined the rate at which officers killed suspects of other racial or ethnic backgrounds. In 1998, the “black-officer-kills-black-felon” rate was 32 per 100,000 black officers, more than double the rate at which white and Hispanic officers killed black felons (14 per 100,000). That same year, the rate at which white and Hispanic officers killed white or Hispanic felons (28 per 100,000) was much higher than the “black-officer-kills-white-or-Hispanic-felon” rate of 11 per 100,000.

Caution: Anything You Say Will Be Racist Somehow By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/caution_anything_you_say_will_be_racist_somehow.html

I first learned of John Leo in 1999 when he penned the clever and prescient piece titled “A Waspish, Niggardly Slur,” wherein he exposed the dangerous trend in language manipulation that is now so wildly prevalent.  It was an equal-opportunity poke at the absurd lengths to which people will go to accuse someone of racism.

Leo explained that a Washington, D.C. white mayoral aide, David Howard, had used the term “niggardly.”  A black official took offense because he felt that it was a racist term.  In fact, niggardly means miserly or cheap and has nothing whatsoever to do with race.  Nonetheless, Howard offered his resignation, and then Mayor Anthony Williams accepted the resignation, explaining that “although Howard didn’t say anything that was in itself racist” (emphasis mine), “using a word that could be misunderstood was like ‘getting caught smoking in a refinery with a resulting explosion.'”

Thus began the onslaught of alleged coded insults that has now metastasized so that everyone is afraid of calling a spade a spade.  The “expression ‘to call a spade a spade’ entered the English language when Nicholas Udall translated Erasmus in 1542.  To be clear, ‘the ‘spade’ in the Erasmus translation has nothing to do with a deck of cards, but rather the gardening tool.  The early usages of the word ‘spade’ did not refer to either race or skin color.  The Oxford English Dictionary says the first appearance of the word spade as a reference to blackness was in Claude McKay’s 1928 novel Home to Harlem, which was notable for its depictions of street life in Harlem in the 1920s.  ‘Jake is such a fool spade,’ wrote McKay.  ‘Don’t know how to handle the womens [sic].’  Fellow Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman then used the word in his novel The Blacker The Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, a widely read and notable work that explored prejudice within the African-American community.”

The Huge Law Enforcement Scandal that Cries Out for Justice By Rael Jean Isaac

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/the_huge_law_enforcement_scandal_that_cries_out_for_justice.html

In the American Thinker (June 30), Jack Cashill offers an eloquent plea for an Atticus Finch to take up the cause of George Zimmerman in suing those responsible for perpetrating the Trayvon Hoax.  There is another case, also in Florida, awaiting its Atticus Finch, the product of an earlier moral panic, the now largely forgotten “mass sex abuse in daycare” hysteria.  These cases, replete with lurid charges the media mindlessly and breathlessly disseminated in the 1980s and ’90s, are today widely recognized as a modern version of the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, down to allegations of Satanic rituals by caregivers.  Despite this, one victim remains incarcerated.  Frank Fuster has now served thirty-five years in prison for a crime not only that he did not commit, but that never happened.  His first parole hearing is scheduled an unbelievable 114 years from now — in March 2134.

Why is Fuster alone still in prison when the dozens of other victims of the daycare hysteria were all released, most of them long ago?  That includes— just to cite a sample — the Edenton 7 in North Carolina, whose plight was brilliantly set forth by Ofra Bikel on PBS; the Amiraults in Massachusetts, for whose defense, in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz won a Pulitzer; Kelly Michaels, the young aspiring actress sentenced to 47 years for supposedly sexually molesting virtually all the three- to five-year-old children at Wee Care Day Nursery in New Jersey; and the 43 adults charged with close to 30,000 crimes against young children in Wenatchee, Washington.  Sometimes justice was wickedly slow, as in the case of Fran and Dan Keller, who served 21 years in prison before they were finally released in 2013 and their conviction set aside.  The couple, who ran a daycare center out of their Texas home, had each been sentenced to 48 years on absurd testimony that included accusations that they had drowned and dismembered babies in front of other children, transported the children to Mexico to be sexually abused by soldiers in the Mexican army, dressed as pumpkins and shot children in the arms and legs, and so on.

The Coronavirus Credibility Gap Politicians and experts sow distrust with double standards on protests and dissembling about masks.By Joseph A. Ladapo

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-coronavirus-credibility-gap-11593645643?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The American public is fractured over policy responses to Covid-19. That rift is most visible in debates about masks and new rounds of shutdowns. Such disputes are common in a country as diverse and opinionated as America. But political leaders and health officials have sown distrust by politicizing the pandemic response.

Political leaders and health officials have often invoked “science” to justify decisions manifestly guided by their personal preferences. That costs them credibility. Restoring public confidence will require acknowledging their role in politicizing the pandemic, yielding to accommodations and sensible alternatives in the areas of greatest controversy, and focusing on the widely supported goal of not overwhelming hospitals, rather than less meaningful metrics such as increases in Covid-19 cases.

One of the earliest signs of politicization was the broad animus directed at protesters who objected to the lockdowns. In a country where liberty and free expression are as fundamental as air and water, it is remarkable how casually political leaders and health officials disparaged and banned their activities—and even targeted protesters for prosecution. Politics was also at play when New York Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered police in Brooklyn to break up a crowd of mourners who gathered for a Hasidic Jewish funeral, warning that their actions were “unacceptable” and threatening to arrest them.

Contrast this with the approach that many of the same political leaders and public-health experts took toward the protests catalyzed by George Floyd’s killing. These protesters were neither maligned nor targeted with fines and arrests based on social distancing or mask mandates. They were often joined in the streets by politicians such as Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.

The Meaning of Hong Kong China snuffs out a beacon of freedom, a warning to the world.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-meaning-of-hong-kong-11593645526?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

China’s decision to impose its national-security law on Hong Kong is a seismic event that goes well beyond the sad fate of its 7.5 million people. The illegal takeover shows that Beijing’s Communist rulers are willing to violate their international commitments with impunity as they spread their authoritarian model.

We say this with regret because we were among those who hoped, amid China’s reform era that began in the 1980s, that the Middle Kingdom could be drawn into a world of peaceful global norms. Hong Kong, a showcase of the prosperity that economic freedom and the rule of law can produce, was a lesson for Beijing to learn from.

Now those hopes are crushed, as China’s Communist legislature imposed the national-security law that ends Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” governance and subverts the rights promised under the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984. Beijing promised to preserve Hong Kong’s legal autonomy and freedom of speech, assembly, the press and other liberties. The 7.5 million now subject to this sweeping legislation weren’t even permitted to read the text until it passed.

In a statement Tuesday, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam claimed that the national-security law “only targets an extremely small minority of offenders while the life and property as well as various legitimate basic rights and freedoms enjoyed by the overwhelming majority of citizens will be protected.”

‘You Know You’re on the Right Side of History When…’ Mark Alexander

https://patriotpost.us/alexander/71847-you-know-youre-on-the-right-side-of-history-when-dot-dot-dot-2020-07-01?

“A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable.” —Thomas Jefferson (1817)

You know you’re on the right side of history when the other side burns our flag and topples our monuments and obstructs the march toward American Liberty that these symbols represent.

Joe Biden remains largely hunkered down in his basement bunker so as not to risk further exposure of his non compos mentis cognitive slide. Until yesterday, when he made an unpublicized appearance and fumbled his remarks, it had been 89 days since he last answered an unscripted media question. Apparently, his campaign’s strategy is “less is more” — and who can blame his handlers?

On Monday, from his sequestered safe house, Biden posted a social-media comment, asserting, “White supremacy should be rooted out and relegated to the pages of history — not promoted by the President of the United States.”

That immediately prompted a question he should be (but won’t be) asked in response: Given the violent racist history of the Democrat Party, shouldn’t any and all references to it be “canceled” and stricken from history, and anyone who refuses to disassociate themselves from the party thrown out of office?

After all, Democrats were the party of slavery before Republicans emancipated black people in the 19th century. Then Democrats became the party of racist oppression in the century that followed. And in the 55 years since the Civil Rights movement was met by the policy failures of Lyndon Johnson’s so-called “Great Society,” the Democrat Party is still enslaving poor people on what amount to socialist urban poverty plantations.

Arguably, the Democrat Party is, at the same time, the author and beneficiary of “systemic racism.” As the old saw goes, “If not for double standards, Democrats would have no standards.”

If only woke protesters knew how close they were to meaningful police reform By Kelsey Bolar

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/505295-if-only-woke-protesters-knew-how-close-they-were-to-meaningful-police

Shamelessly denying Republicans the 60 votes needed to openly debate a GOP-proposed bill, Senate Democrats stripped Americans of the opportunity to pass meaningful reforms for an issue that’s turned the nation upside down.

The vote, which occurred last week, provides further evidence that the ongoing riots and protests aren’t about George Floyd or police reform. They’re about control. 

The media, for its part, hardly cared. They enabled obstruction while hardly pressing Democrats to explain their objections. 

“Tim Scott’s bill is a half-assed bill that doesn’t do what we should be doing, which is doing honest police reform,” Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono (D) offered.                            

The “watered-down policing bill is meant to derail meaningful reform,” said California Sen. Kamala Harris (D).

“The Republican bill is really just disastrously weak,” said Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D).

These statements were only to be outdone by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who unapologetically accused Senate Republicans of “trying to get away with murder, actually — the murder of George Floyd.”

Truly, a remarkable statement about her colleagues in Congress.

The Rayshard Brooks case is tragic but, legally, straightforward Andrew C. McCarthy

https://spectator.us/rule-law-collapsing-rayshard-brooks/

It is the law that makes us ‘the best of animals.’ So saying, Aristotle had a very specific conception of justice in mind: ‘The law is reason free from passion.’ Committed to live under it, mankind is ‘perfected.’ There is, however, a flip side. ‘When separated from law and justice,’ as happens when passion overwhelms reason, mankind ‘is the worst of all.’

Which would make this the worst of times.

The streets of America’s greatest cities are aflame. Some of it is anarchic. Most of it is methodical mayhem. Cultural Marxists are not merely desecrating statuary, they are erasing history. Naturally, this is done under the guise of ideals such as ‘anti-racism’, ‘anti-fascism’, and ‘equality’. Up close, the anti-racists are race-obsessives, the anti-fascists are totalitarian ideologues, and the radical egalitarianism on offer is a perversion that would supplant equality of opportunity with coerced results and an inevitable caste system. As woke white campus reactionaries, clad in their ‘BLM’ t-shirts, confront beleaguered African American police officers, a vignette repeatedly seen but studiously unnoticed in media coverage, you can’t help but wonder as to whether black lives matter to Black Lives Matter.

But the campaign is working, not because it is effacing iconic images of our society, culture, and history, but because it is destroying the rule of law that makes possible a civilization worth having. Its replacement is the rule of the mob.