NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Americans Differ on Ukraine and Gaza What are we to conclude about these contradictory wars and American attitudes toward them? The more democratic and defensive the power, the more Americans support it—but only up to a point. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 4th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/04/americans-differ-on-ukraine-and-gaza/

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Americans overwhelmingly supported Ukraine—as they did with Israel after October 7.

No wonder: Ukraine was surprise attacked by Russia, and Israel was by Hamas.

It seemed an easy binary of good versus evil: both the attacked Ukraine and Israel are pro-Western. Both their attackers, anti-Western Russia and Hamas, are not.

Now everything is bifurcating. And the politics of the wars in America reflect incoherence.

Both Ukraine and Israel are portrayed in the media as supposedly bogging down in their counteroffensives.

More pro-Israel Republicans are troubled by Ukraine’s strategy, or lack thereof, in an increasing Somme-like stalemate.

Yet more pro-Ukrainian Democrats are turning away from Israel as it dismantles Gaza in the messy, bloody slog against Hamas. The left claims either Israel cannot or should not defeat Hamas, or at least at the present cost.

So the left pushes Israel to a ceasefire with Hamas.

It blasts Israeli “disproportionate” responses.

It demands that Israel avoid collateral damage.

It pressures it to form a wartime bipartisan government.

It lobbies to cut it off from American resupply.

It is terrified that Israel will expand the war by responding to aggression from Hezbollah and Iran.

Yet on Ukraine, the left oddly pivots to the very opposite agenda.

It believes Ukraine should not be forced to make peace with Russian “fascists.” It must become disproportionate to “win” the war.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

More Wokeness in Medicine Jack Butler

Posted By on April 4th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/more-wokeness-in-medicine/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=third

Last year, I wrote for the magazine about the “rampant politicization of health care.” Thanks to greater government involvement in medicine, the ties between academia and the practice of medicine, and other pressures (with George Floyd’s death serving as a special catalyst), medical-school curricula, professional medical associations, and other aspects of the field increasingly reflect and transmit left-wing ideology. Take a look at some med-school curricula:

The Harvard Medical School course “Caring for Patients with Diverse Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities, and Sex Development” promises that “clinical exposure and education will focus on serving gender and sexual minority people across the lifespan, from infants to older adults.” An Indiana University Medical School “Sex and Gender Primer” for first-year students stresses that sex and gender “fall along a continuum, rather than being binary constructs,” and provides instruction on the use of “inclusive terminology.” A June 2020 letter from medical-school faculty at the University of California, San Diego, referred to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery and committed to creating “a curriculum which addresses the part we play in righting these systemic injustices” and using “these tragic events to strengthen our resolve.” One survey found that 39 of America’s 50 most prestigious medical schools contained some element of mandatory critical-race-theory training in their curricula.

Unfortunately, more examples of this general trend abound. In City Journal, Ian Kingsbury, director of research at Do No Harm (which specializes in documenting and fighting the politicization in medicine), describes one: The New England Journal of Medicine is denying that there could be any biological basis for the greater risk black women have for preeclampsia, a dangerous pregnancy complication involving high blood pressure.

The higher risk must, instead, be the fault of “the stress imposed by structural and individual racism.” It correctly observes that black females born in the U.S. are likelier to have preeclampsia than black women born elsewhere, and that those in the latter group who have lived here ten years or more are likelier to have it than those who have lived here for fewer years. But these differences have plausible explanations. They’re just not one that the newly politicized medical field wants to hear: genetics and behavior.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

DeSantis Responds after Learning Biden Has Flown 300,000 Migrants to Florida: ‘They Don’t Give Us Information’ James Lynch

Posted By on April 4th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/desantis-responds-after-learning-biden-has-flown-300000-migrants-to-florida-they-dont-give-us-information/

Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R) spoke out against the Biden administration’s migrant-flight program on Wednesday in response to the release of new data showing 300,000 migrants have been flown into the sunshine state on the taxpayer’s dime.

DeSantis addressed the migrant flights in a speech after new data from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) found nearly 326,000 migrants have been flown from abroad to Florida through a parole program expanded by the Biden administration.

“They don’t tell us anytime somebody comes in,” DeSantis said. “We can’t verify that, they don’t give us information on it, we have not seen though large numbers in our communities all of the sudden.”

“It may be the case [Biden] is bringing people in under this illegal parole program, and then they’re migrating to sanctuary jurisdictions,” he added. “We’re not a sanctuary state. We don’t have sanctuary cities. We took action to where you’re not getting a driver’s license. You’re not getting ID cards.”

ELECTIONS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

This Election Year’s Tournament of Narratives What matters when making our choice in November. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on April 4th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/this-election-years-tournament-of-narratives/

Every presidential election season, the media publicize explanatory tales that profile each candidate’s character, virtues, and vices, and identify and promote the critical issues, polices, and goals at stake in our choice. In the postwar period, new technologies of communication––especially the internet with its hordes of commentators and podcasters, cataracts of information, non-stop serial polling, and instant photos and videos available 24/7––have multiplied and intensified the narratives that shape the political parties’ platforms, and the voters’ opinions.

This November will be Donald Trump’s third presidential election, and it comes laden with narratives that Democrats and establishment Republicans, both stunned by Trump’s 2016 upset of consummate insider Hillary Clinton, have employed to demonize the president and salve the wounds to their arrogant self-regard and insider hauteur.

We all know the “narremes,” the basic, repeated verbal units, that comprise the story: Russian election interference, the Steele dossier, and threats to “our democracy” from the January 6 “insurrectionist,” to name a few. Trump himself is the villain of the tale: a semi-fascist admirer of autocrats, a warmonger, and plotter of coups; a rapist, racist, sexist, Islamophobic Hispanophobic heartless Scroogian capitalist, and an uneducated boor, crass  philistine, and crude jingoist.

These are just a sample of the favorite slurs endlessly recycled by the corporate media PR firm and their clients–– the progressive, leftist “woke” Democrats and their NeverTrump Republican fellow travelers.

Joe Biden’s narremes, of course, have been starkly different. For one obvious thing, the postwar partisan politicization of the media today has reached a critical level not just of partisanship, but blatant lies and denials of patent facts, a carry-over of the media’s “slobbering love affair,” as Bernie Goldberg put it, that they had carried on with Barack Obama.

Abetted by social media and C-suite colluders, in 2020, the media marketed Biden as the anti-Trump: a stabilizing unifier, a steady, experienced “centrist” hand familiar with both our domestic  “democratic norms,” and the globalist, technocratic  political order.

ELECTIONS, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Aliens Voting We’ve seen the invasion of our border. Are we going to stop the invasion of our voter rolls? by J. Christian Adams

Posted By on April 4th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/aliens-are-voting/

The southern border crisis has reached new heights under President Biden. Now, viral footage shows migrants rushing the National Guard and cutting down border fencing. The data backs up the images Americans are seeing on TV. Arrests for illegal border crossings from Mexico have reached an all-time high.

I could just as easily be describing our border in 2015 or even a decade before. Some of these foreigners will get drivers licenses and, therefore mistakenly get added to American voter rolls. We have researched this issue for years, and there is hard data to back it up.

We already have government records from states across the country that reveal aliens have been registering and voting in American elections. Yes, you read that right: foreigners are casting ballots in American elections. It is not a myth or Bigfoot. It is happening.

The number one source for alien registration is the DMV registration system. The overwhelming majority of foreigners who end up registered to vote come through the DMV. The second most prevalent is student visas. Illegal border crossers comprise a smaller percentage of aliens to get registered. Data support these conclusions.

For over a decade, the Public Interest Legal Foundation has been harvesting records from election offices in Texas, California, North Carolina, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and many more states that reveal the extent of the problem of aliens getting registered to vote and why it is happening.

The National Voter Registration Act, more commonly known as Motor Voter, is the federal law that requires states to offer voter registration at local drivers license agencies.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Trump’s First Job In 2025: Reverse Biden’s EV Mandate

Posted By on April 4th, 2024

Should Donald Trump be elected this fall, he should waste no time in reversing Joe Biden’s electric vehicle mandate. He not only overstepped his authority, he set the country directly on a course that will bring nothing but trouble.

Acting like the authoritarian that the Democrats and media claim that Donald Trump is, Biden, with a pen and maybe a phone, has ordered through his Environmental Protection Agency to issue a rule that will require Americans to replace their internal-combustion engine automobiles with battery-powered cars. The rule doesn’t require Americans to buy electric vehicles, nor does it directly outlaw the sale of automobiles that run on gasoline.

But in effect, it is a mandate and a ban.

Forcing the country into EVs is an egregious abuse of power by executive edict. Biden’s rule has been referred to, for good reason, as “a “crackdown on cars,” a “bloodbath” for consumers and an example of chutzpah. American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers wisely suggests that “the American people need to rise up against this rule and reject it.”

Yes, he has a financial interest in making that statement. But he knows, as do many, that the booted regulatory regime we’re living under “has become the government’s primary mode of controlling Americans,” as Philip Hamburger, a Columbia University law professor, wrote in his 2014 book “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden, in Full Hypocrisy Mode, Slams Israel Over Mishap Under this kind of pressure, can Israel still defeat Hamas? P.David Hornik

Posted By on April 4th, 2024

https://pdavidhornik.substack.com/p/biden-in-full-hypocrisy-mode-slams?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1319513&post_

On Monday night, in a tragic and painful incident, seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen charity organization were killed in an errant Israeli drone strike on their three-car convoy in Gaza.

The words “tragic and painful” are not de rigueur. WCK’s work, which involved providing food both to Israelis and to Palestinians displaced by the war, was much appreciated by Israelis—not least because WCK was filling the shoes of UNRWA, the UN’s “pro-Palestinian” organization whose work in Gaza has been suspended because of their systemic collusion with Hamas.

When Israelis say that painful things happen in the fog of war, we know what we’re talking about and we mean it. On December 15, three Israeli hostages, young men who had escaped Hamas captivity in Gaza, were errantly shot dead by Israeli forces who feared they were Hamas terrorists pretending to be escaped Israeli hostages. Considering that Hamas regularly uses such tactics, and, in general, manipulates human beings to protect itself at a level unprecedented in history, the fear was understandable even if it had a terrible result.

Meanwhile Israeli leaders have sincerely apologized for the aid-workers incident and the IDF is investigating it thoroughly. We know so far that it happened at night, and that whoever gave the order for the drone strike was convinced there were armed terrorists in the convoy. Of course, that doesn’t rule out poor judgment or malfeasance.

But nothing, in any case, will put a dent in the uproar of harsh criticism of Israel over the mishap—and not least from that place of special geopolitical significance for Israel, Washington.

OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The unbearable sanctimony of the ‘pro-Palestine’ set Palestine activism has become a way for the graduate elites to lord their moral supremacy over the rest of us. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on April 3rd, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/04/01/the-unbearable-sanctimony-of-the-pro-palestine-set/

Britain’s ‘queer’ activists aren’t happy. In fact the poor dears are fuming. They haven’t been this pissed off since the last time some middle-aged woman politely requested the right to shower at the gym without seeing a tumescent knob in the neighbouring cubicle. For one of their cultural icons has done something unconscionable. He’s broken the cardinal moral code of right-on society. He’s deviated from the holy law of the upper-middle class. Brace yourselves: he has agreed to share a space with – my God – someone from Israel.

This is the story of Olly Alexander – a singer, I hear – who has caused much weeping and gnashing of teeth among people with purple hair. All because he has refused to pull out of the Eurovision Song Contest in protest at Israel’s inclusion. Even following receipt of a hectoring missive from Queers for Palestine – the movement that single-handedly killed satire – Mr Alexander said he will perform his track ‘Dizzy’ at the famously camp competition in Sweden in May. For a ‘queer’ to defy Queers for Palestine is tantamount to a Muslim flouting the hadiths. It’s the social wilderness for Olly now.

‘There can be no party with a state committing apartheid and genocide’, said the humourless goons of Queers for Palestine. Perhaps these luvvies would rather party in Gaza. I’m sure homophobic Hamas would enjoy a good dance on their graves. Israel’s inclusion in Eurovision will help to whitewash its ‘crimes against humanity’, they insisted, and thus everyone of good, woke conscience should refuse to take part. Mr Alexander demurred, saying he’d rather use the Eurovision ‘platform’ to bring folk ‘together’ and issue a ‘call for peace’. Oh God, he’s going to writhe around with a Palestine flag, isn’t he?

The moral hubris of these people is mind-blowing. Imagine how drunk on your own righteousness you would have to be, how in love with your own virtuous reflection, to imagine that your decision to boogie or not to boogie could reshape events in the Middle East. The idea that Olly Alexander withdrawing from Eurovision might help save Gaza is only outdone in dumbness by the idea that his remaining in Eurovision to yelp ‘Peace now!’ might help save Gaza. I hate to break it to you, fellas, but no one in Gaza, Israel, Iran, Qatar, America or anywhere else outside of the hip eateries of Dalston gives a solitary shit whether ‘Dizzy’ happens or not.

This bourgeois catfight over whose virtue-signal will be most effective reveals so much about the fashion for boycotting Israel. It’s increasingly clear that the fad for forswearing Israeli music and culture and food is less about liberating Palestine than about liberating one’s own ego. It’s about making a spectacle of one’s own moral rectitude. Being Israel-free has become a shortcut to the righteous highground, a means for movers and shakers to say: ‘See how pure I am?’ The clash between Queers for Palestine and Olly Alexander isn’t over the most effective way to assist Gaza – it’s a virtue-off, a tussle between tossers over who’s the most morally worthy.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Alvin Bragg’s ‘hush money’ case: No due process and a judge whose objectivity is highly suspect By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on April 3rd, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/04/alvin_bragg_s_hush_money_case_no_due_process_and_a_judge_whose_objectivity_is_highly_suspect.html

From the second it was filed, it was clear that Alvin Bragg’s indictment against Donald Trump for the payments he made to Stormy Daniels was a due process disaster. The complaint alleges legal conduct and then concludes that this legal conduct constituted illegal action of an undisclosed nature. The case should have been tossed instantly. But now that we know that the judge trying the case has deep Democrat ties and is trying to prevent Trump from exposing those ties, it’s becoming clear why it’s proceeding to trial.

Last year, John Hinderaker, who is no Trump fan, eviscerated Bragg’s indictment:

You can read Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Donald Trump and a supporting statement of facts here. The indictment is what we expected. It all has to do with paying $130,000 to Stormy Daniels for a non-disclosure agreement, which was legal. The payment was made by “Lawyer A,” Michael Cohen. Trump reimbursed Cohen using Trump’s own money, which was legal. The “34 counts” arise out of the fact that by agreement, Cohen got reimbursed by sending monthly invoices to Trump or his revocable trust. So for each monthly bill from Cohen, we get three counts of falsifying documents: one for the invoice, one for the ledger entry, and one for the check stub. Pathetic.

The indictment alleges that all of this was done “with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof,” but it never says what that other crime was. The second crime is mandatory because without it, falsifying a business record under New York law is a misdemeanor on which the statute of limitation has run. Presumably the second crime is alleged to be a campaign finance violation. But the payment to Daniels did not violate the campaign finance laws.

What this all boils down to is that, despite 34 counts against him, Trump has no idea what crime he is alleged to have committed.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Biden Must End Qatar’s Malign Role in Gaza Ceasefire Talks and Pier by Con Coughlin

Posted By on April 3rd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20529/qatar-role-gaza-hamas

In one of the more high profile cases involving Qatar’s financing of terrorism, the family of murdered American journalist Steven Sotloff claimed in a federal lawsuit in 2022 that prominent Qatari institutions wired $800,000 to an Islamic State “judge” who ordered the murder of Sotloff and another American journalist, James Foley. The two were beheaded in Syria in 2014, their killings filmed and published in grisly propaganda videos.

The US moved its forces to Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base from Saudi Arabia in 2003, after the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001. There seems no reason why it could not be moved once again to a country in the region that does not support terror groups.

Of even greater concern [than Qatar contributing $5.1 billion to US campuses since 1986], though, is the Biden administration’s willingness to allow Qatar to play a prominent role in negotiations for a ceasefire in Gaza and manage humanitarian aid delivered to a new pier being built in Gaza, even though Doha’s negotiating status and that of a potential caretaker have been thoroughly compromised through its involvement in creating Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure.

Given Qatar’s well-documented support for Hamas, it is clear that no meaningful resolution of the Gaza conflict is possible so long as Doha is continuing with its efforts to negotiate a settlement that is favourable to Hamas, one that would enable the terrorist movement to remain in control of Gaza, or that Qatar should operate, or indeed have anything to do with, the delivery of “humanitarian aid” to what seems planned as Hamas’s new beachhead.

Rather than allowing Qatar to continue playing its double game, where Doha pretends to be a close ally of the West while at the same time sponsoring terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Taliban, the Biden administration needs to wake up to the real threat Qatar poses to the security of the Middle East, and concentrate its efforts on negotiating a ceasefire deal and finding a custodian for Gaza and its new pier that do not require Qatar’s malign involvement.

After the success the Gulf state of Qatar achieved in helping restore the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, Doha is now investing all its energy in seeking to keep Hamas in power in Gaza.

For more than a decade, the tiny Gulf emirate has been using the massive profits it derives from its vast energy resources to sponsor radical Islamist ideology that underpins terrorist organisations such as Hamas.