Nigel Farage gets his way, and last laugh: Brexit is coming

https://www.ap.org/en-us/

Nigel Farage, the self-declared “pantomime villain” of Brexit, is leaving his favorite theater — the European Union’s parliament in Strasbourg — this week with a sense of mission accomplished.

Ridiculed for years, and thriving on the abuse he got from, and dealt to, pro-EU legislators and politicians, he now feels he got the last laugh. On Jan. 31, the U.K. will be leaving the EU, in a historic loss for the bloc — and a historic gain for the likes of Farage.

“When I first came here, I started saying the U.K. would leave the European Union. Everyone thought it was hilarious,” Farage told The Associated Press in an interview, speaking about his early days in the EU legislature in the late 1990s.

The European Union was still thriving, expanding at the time, and could shrug off a loud and sometimes foul-mouthed British parliamentarian as just a nuisance about to be swatted aside by the force of history of closer integration.

Britain may have been a halfhearted member with rumbling about holding onto sovereignty and complaints about “unelected bureaucraats” from Brussels having too much say in their lives. But thoughts of actually leaving? No. Those were left to fringe politicians like Farage.

Bernie Beats Hillary Activists celebrate the end of moderation in the Democratic field. James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-beats-hillary-11579044694?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Bernie Sanders lost the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton. But even if he loses again in 2020, his long-term project to pull Democratic candidates in the direction of socialism is already a success.

Today the left-leaning Americans for Tax Fairness is celebrating the end of moderation among Democrats seeking the White House. The organization gleefully announces:

All four leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have proposed tax and spending plans many times the size of Hillary Clinton’s fiscal plan in 2016, showing how far the debate has shifted in the progressive direction in four years. Like Clinton, they would all raise taxes almost exclusively on the wealthy and corporations to improve public services working families rely on like healthcare, education, and infrastructure.

Don’t believe that part about taxes only hitting the rich and corporations. But it’s hard to argue the point that radicalism is the new normal for office-seeking Democrats. According to the lefty outfit:

Clinton proposed upping tax revenue on the wealthy and corporations by $1.4 trillion over 10 years to pay for $1.7 trillion in public investments. Biden and Buttigieg have both offered up plans raising taxes on the rich and corporations by around $3.4 trillion, although both have made statements suggesting their totals could go quite a bit higher. Sanders and Warren are proposing around $10 trillion in high-income and corporate tax hikes, exclusive of the revenue they propose raising for their Medicare for All plans.
Notably, Michael Bennet, another moderate Democrat running for president, has proposed raising $5.2 billion from the wealthy and corporations to fund $6 trillion in new investments. CONTINUE AT SITE

Dem Debate Flop Same old socialist, faux impeachment, climate change, and Trump Derangement Syndrome boilerplate. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/dem-six-pack-serves-flop-lloyd-billingsley/

Most viewers were watching President Trump hold forth in Milwaukee but the run-up to Tuesday’s CNN Democrat debate in Des Moines features some stories of interest. Cory Booker had recently dropped up, so some Democrats were lamenting that all the candidates were white, a condition beyond their control. And as word had it, things were going to get tough on stage.

Tucker Carlson showed video of Sanders’ staffers warning of violence if Bernie did not get the nomination. And if he was elected, we would need re-education campaigns so people would not be “Nazis.”

The prevailing story was Elizabeth Warren’s charge that Bernie Sanders claimed a woman could not be president. Sanders claimed he never said it, and the debate kicked off on who would be the best commander in chief.

Bernie Sanders claimed he had opposed military and foreign policy blunders such as Iraq, Vietnam and Afghanistan. The Vermont socialist seemed unconcerned about actual enemies the nation was now facing.

Joe Biden said he would compare his record compare to anyone on this stage, but came up short on specifics. It was a mistake, he said, to give the president authority to go to war.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar wanted good health care and education for the troops. And she would get the nation back into the Iran deal from which President Trump had withdrawn.

South Dakota State Rep Proposes Bill to Criminalize Gender-Transition Surgeries on Children By Tobias Hoonhout

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/south-dakota-state-rep-proposes-bill-to-criminalize-gender-transition-surgeries-on-children/

South Dakota State Representative Fred Deutsch introduced a bill Tuesday to prosecute medical professionals who attempt to transition children struggling with gender dysphoria, the latest state-level effort to prevent physicians from performing irreversible sex-change surgeries on minors.

The “Vulnerable Child Protection Act” is not Deutsch’s first attempt to limit transgender influence on children. He sponsored a 2016 bill that sought to limit the bathrooms and locker rooms that South Dakota’s transgender students can use, which passed the state legislature, but was vetoed by then-Governor Dennis Daugaard.

In recent months, and with the high-profile custody battle in Texas over James Younger’s potential transition, several states have introduced similar bills, which are intended to punish doctors and healthcare providers who attempt to transition children. Alaska, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, and South Carolina have all seen similar efforts at the state level.

“Every child in South Dakota should be protected from dangerous drugs and procedures,” Deutsch said in a statement emailed to National Review. “The solution for children’s identification with the opposite sex isn’t to poison their bodies with mega-doses of the wrong hormones, to chemically or surgically castrate and sterilize them, or to remove healthy breasts and reproductive organs. The solution is compassionate care, and that doesn’t include catastrophically and irreversibly altering their bodies.”

James O’Keefe is back, with a truly chilling look at a Bernie-supporter By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/james_okeefe_is_back_with_a_truly_chilling_look_at_a_bernie_supporter.html

Investigative journalist James O’Keefe sent his undercover agents to check out what’s going on with the Bernie Sanders campaign. On Tuesday, he dropped the first of what promises to be a series of videos focusing on the people working for Bernie.

The video, which is embedded below, is pretty shocking. Kyle Jurek, a Field Organizer for Bernie in Iowa, is a foul-mouthed man with a limited vocabulary. He revels in thoughts of riots, explosions, burnings, beatings, and gulags.

Jurek’s imagination doesn’t limit itself to what will happen in America if Bernie wins. Instead, he predicts the ultimate dystopia should Trump win re-election. For him, the 1968 Chicago Riots at the Democratic National Convention will serve as a small introduction to what Bernie supporters will unleash should their man lose.

It’s not just conservatives who earn Jurek’s wrath. In true Leftist fashion, he imagines a world in which Bernie’s political rivals on the same side of the Leftist aisle get their comeuppance. He’s no fan of the Clintons, for example, and makes the usual joke about the Clintons and suicides. He then adds, “We don’t gotta kill the Clintons. We’ll make them kill themselves. . . . Reign of Terror.” How very Soviet.

Will Trump’s Pentagon stand tall when atheists attack? By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/will_trumps_pentagon_stand_tall_when_atheists_attack.html

A formal blessing for the Space Force “official” Bible resulted in a squeal of outrage from a man who has dedicated his life to making sure that America’s troops, who are mostly Christian, have no easy access to God.

When the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution, 85% of the American population did not belong to the Church of England. Were they in England, they would have had to pay to support the Anglican church and would have been barred from universities or government employment. Things were easier in the colonies, with the hold the Church of England had over the population varying from one colony to the next. 

It was in this context that the Founders included in the First Amendment the language stating that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion….” The Founders were not banning religion from America or even from government. They were saying only that Congress could not set up a state church and demand that people belong to it or suffer the consequences.

This mandate did not affect the Founders’ belief that God and morality were inextricably intertwined with a free, functioning country. After all, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, to the extent that all people have inherent rights, they are inherent because a divine Creator endowed us with those rights. John Adams believed that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

And then there’s Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He is a fanatically anti-Christian atheist who has been on a crusade for years now to purge religion entirely from the United States Military. To Mikey, Christians in the military are a “well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces.”

Democrats are getting nervous as they realize their base is tuning them out By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/democrats_are_getting_nervous_as_they_realize_their_base_is_tuning_them_out.html

It’s fascinating to watch some of the smarter Democrats drag themselves out of their own Trump hatred long enough to realize that their party is in trouble at a very fundamental level. Such is the case with Peter Hamby, who wrote an article for Vanity Fair entitled, “‘Like, I’ll tune in when there’s two weeks left’: Why Trump has a huge advantage over dems with low-information voters.”

What Hamby is concerned about is the fact that the media are so excessively self-involved that they no longer know how to communicate information and ideas to the voters media types want to reach most: people who are not politically engaged on a day-to-day basis but must turn out to vote on November 3 if the Democrat candidate is to win.

Hamby notes that traveling reporters have nothing but disdain for those who spend their days sitting at their desks reading and reporting on Twitter:

[T]he stories and micro-scandals that obsess political and media insiders—often played out in episodic fashion on Twitter—matter little to voters who are too busy and too well-adjusted to follow every nanosecond of the political news cycle. It’s hard to overstate how salient this discontinuity will be in the current election year.

With medieval conditions in California, Gov. Newsom looks back to the old Poor Laws By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/with_medieval_conditions_in_california_gov_newsom_looks_back_to_the_old_poor_laws.html

California was once called “the Golden State.” It has a mellow climate, its agricultural industry was “the fruit basket of America,” San Francisco was “the City that knew how,” Los Angeles was the “City of Dreams,” and the Sierra mountain range, one of the most beautiful in the world, was a summer and winter pleasure paradise. That’s the California in which I grew up.

The current California isn’t quite so nice. The climate is still lovely, but the agricultural industry has been struggling because of environmental concerns over the Delta Smelt, a small fish.

Regularly occurring droughts, which are part of California’s natural cycle, are proving devastating, mostly because California has refused to upgrade its water system in the last 60 years, even as the population almost doubled. The new plan is to limit people to 55 gallons a day, which gives them a choice on many days between cleaning their clothes or cleaning themselves.

Punishing taxes and regulations routinely drive businesses (aka employers) out of the state.

A Selective Opponent of ‘Settlers’ Human Rights Watch’s Sara Leah Whitson has one standard for Israel, another for Armenia. By Eugene Kontorovich

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-selective-opponent-of-settlers-11579046287?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director for Human Rights Watch, speaks in Doha, Qatar, June 12, 2012. Photo: Stringer/REUTERS

Hypocritical attacks on Israel are common, but Sarah Leah Whitson takes them to a new level. As Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch, she is one of the sharpest critics of the Jewish state’s presence in the West Bank, promoting boycotts and international prosecution for the supposed crimes of occupation and settlement. Yet elsewhere Ms. Whitson strongly supports settlements in occupied territories—suggesting that she and her colleagues don’t take their own legal claims against Israel seriously.

The settlements Ms. Whitson supports are in Nagorno-Karabakh, an area that was within the borders of post-Soviet Azerbaijan until 1994, when Armenia occupied the region after a protracted war. Since then, the Armenian leadership in Yerevan has actively encouraged the movement of settlers into the area. Many Armenians regard Karabakh as their historic homeland. But the United Nations, international courts and the U.S. all consider it occupied Azeri territory.

Little Women Goes to War “Woke” critics express outrage that men stay away from a movie with little to offer them. Kay S. Hymowitz

https://www.city-journal.org/little-women

You might think that when a film you love is nominated for an Oscar for best picture, best adapted screenplay, best actress, and best supporting actress it would be a time for champagne, but in the case of Little Women, it’s been sour grapes all around.  The film received six nominations in total, but its many avid admirers were still furious: Greta Gerwig, the film’s director, was not nominated for best director, proof that misogyny reigns in Hollywood.

Even before it opened, the film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel had taken on heavy sociological and political significance.  Amy Pascal, the movie’s producer, had tweeted that men were not attending screenings of the Greta Gerwig–directed movie due to “unconscious bias” against women. Another Hollywood feminist VIP, Melissa Silverstein, jumped in: “I think it’s total, fully conscious sexism and shameful. The female story is just as universal as the male story.” The media were off and running: “Little Women has a Little Man problem,” Vanity Fair announced. “Men Are Dismissing Little Women: What a Surprise,” was the snarky title of a New York Times column.

Actually, the reasons that men (and a fair number of women like myself) don’t share in the widespread euphoria over the film couldn’t be more mundane. For one thing, the movie is based on a children’s book—to be precise, a book for girls. Thomas Niles, Alcott’s editor at Roberts Brothers, asked her to write a “girls’ book.” And that’s exactly what she set out to do. She wasn’t keen on the idea, but she needed the money. “I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this kind of thing,” she complained in her diary in the spring of 1868. “Never liked girls; never knew many besides my sisters.” When Niles reported to Alcott that his niece had found the early pages enthralling, Alcott, who remained unenthusiastic about the project, conceded: “As it is for them, they are the best critics.” No surprise, then, that grown men aren’t crowding theaters to see the latest movie version of a nineteenth-century girls’ book.