ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Monday Schadenfreude: Plame flames By Charles Sullivan

Posted By on March 9th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/monday_schadenfreude_plame_flames.html

Whoever wins the Democrat primary on June 2 for New Mexico’s third congressional district will be an overwhelming favorite to win the general election in November. It is very unlikely that Valerie Plame will be that person. She probably will not even make the Democrat ballot.

Valerie Plame and her then husband, Joe Wilson, loudly decamped from Washington, D.C. and moved to New Mexico’s version of Marin County, California: Santa Fe in 2007. They remained there quietly until 2019 when Ms. Plame announced that she was running for Congress as a Democrat in northern New Mexico. In September her campaign produced a catchy video that received national attention. The WaPo was less enthusiastic giving the ad three Pinocchios.

The only major controversy of her campaign has  involved a tweet that she made in 2017, long before she announced her run for Congress, linking to an article entitled America’s Jews are Driving America’s Wars. She apologized numerous times for the tweet and announced in January of this year that she was joining a temple in Santa Fe. Several days after the announcement a congregant of the temple said that Ms. Plame was not a member, as she had claimed.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

In America, ignorance and anti-Semitism drive the animus against Israel By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on March 9th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/in_america_ignorance_and_antisemitism_drive_the_animus_against_israel.html

Samantha Mandeles, the Senior Researcher and Outreach Director at the Legal Insurrection Foundation, has regularly attended AIPAC conferences over the past several years. This year, however, she opted not to attend the AIPAC conference itself but, instead, to report on the anti-Israel protests that invariably take place outside of the conference venue.

What Mandeles discovered after spending nearly four hours observing the protesters and interviewing them is that they are driven by historical ignorance and revisionism, baseless conspiracy theories and, underlying it all, anti-Semitism. This last point is noteworthy because one of the central claims the anti-Israel crowd makes to give itself legitimacy is that it’s not anti-Semitic; it’s merely “anti-Zionist.” Scratch an anti-Zionist, though, and you’ll almost invariably find an anti-Semite.

Because Mandeles carefully documents her conclusions about the misinformation, conspiracy theories, and anti-Semitism powering the protests outside of the AIPAC conference, her article is long and cannot easily be summarized. However, several important points deserve to be mentioned here.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Renew the Patriot Act or Risk Another 9/11 By Tim Sumner

Posted By on March 9th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/renew_the_patriot_act_or_risk_another_911.html

Before the Patriot Act, the FBI would have been stymied in conducting a counterterrorism investigation involving a now infamous American agent of a foreign power.

Anwar al-Awlaki was born in the United States. Yet, apparently, Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee believe the only thing worth remembering about him is that President Obama “illegally” had him killed in Yemen using a Hellfire missile. (No matter that al-Awlaki: had sent “panty bomber” Abdulmuttalab to blow up a passenger plane over Detroit; attempted to blow up a DHL cargo airplane in flight; had become the well-publicized spiritual leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula [AQAP]; and was heavily guarded in Yemen’s remote tribal areas — sending Americans into those wilds to arrest him would have been difficult and dangerous.)

Most of us vividly recall that twice before 9/11 al-Awlaki met with future hijackers.

I agree with former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy that the collection of metadata should be abolished. Further, I agree that judges are unqualified to conduct national security. Republicans and Democrats in Congress have repeatedly abdicated their oversight responsibilities of our intelligence community. Now, some Republicans are seeking to give the FISA court even more authority. Far too many Democrats — who seek to vest America’s foreign enemies with our constitutional rights — are cheering them on.

Yet Senators Paul and Lee seem to assume America could also safely let the business records and roving wiretap provisions of the Patriot Act expire after March 15, 2020.

HISTORY Comments turned off

How the U.S. Won World War II Without Invading Japan More people died in the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo than at either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Warren Kozak

Posted By on March 9th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-u-s-won-world-war-ii-without-invading-japan-11583698141?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The U.S. entered World War II in 1941. Yet American planes couldn’t dent a roof in Japan until 1945. The 1942 Doolittle raid, with its 16 bombers that took off from carriers, showed great ingenuity and bravery. But it had zero impact on Japan’s ability to make war.

The raid was designed to boost morale after Pearl Harbor. When the U.S. didn’t follow up with more attacks, the Japanese believed their homeland was invulnerable to enemy bombs because of the emperor’s divine presence. That hubris ended 75 years ago Monday with an event that set in motion the eventual U.S. victory.

First, a little more history: The U.S. could reach Japan only after the Marines took the Mariana Islands at great cost in 1944. The largest airports in the world were built within months and filled with new, modern B-29 bombers. The B-29 was a marvel and the greatest expense of the war at $3 billion, compared with $2.4 billion for the Manhattan Project. Each plane was three times the size of the next-largest bomber, the B-17. The B-29 could fly 3,700 miles and cruise at an altitude high enough to elude antiaircraft fire.

BOOKS, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Woody Allen’s Life Story: Canceled A publisher yields to the mob and drops a ‘challenging’ book. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on March 9th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/woody-allens-life-story-canceled-11583645773?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The Hachette Book Group announced last Monday that it would bring out “Apropos of Nothing,” a memoir by Woody Allen, in early April. CEO Michael Pietsch told an interviewer that the publisher “believes strongly that there’s a large audience that wants to hear the story of Woody Allen’s life as told by Woody Allen himself.”

There was also a noisy audience that didn’t—and that didn’t want anyone else to hear it either. Last Thursday Hachette employees staged a walkout to protest the book, and on Friday Hachette dropped it.

“The decision to cancel Mr. Allen’s book was a difficult one,” said a spokesman for the publisher. “At HBG we take our relationships with authors very seriously, and do not cancel books lightly. We have published and will continue to publish many challenging books.”

My own interest in Woody Allen is approximately zero. I used to find him funny, but the prospect of wading through “a comprehensive account of his life,” as Hachette put it, fills me with gloom. Hachette had nonetheless determined that many readers would be interested in Mr. Allen’s life story. They simply forgot to check with the feminist commissars to see if he passes muster in the age of #MeToo.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Growth will be a thing of the past if businesses choose ‘net zero’ By Rupert Darwall

Posted By on March 9th, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/486409-growth-will-be-a-thing-of-the-past-if-businesses-choose-net-zero

Pledging “net zero” by 2050 to achieve compliance with the Paris Agreement on climate change is all the rage in the corporate world. BP has announced that it will be a net-zero company – that is, maintaining a balance between emissions produced and emissions taken out of the atmosphere – by the designated date. During its “Beyond Petroleum” days in the 2000s, BP made massive bets on renewable energy, ending in large write-downs in 2011. The lesson: An oil company doesn’t become a renewable-energy company. 

BP apparently hasn’t learned. In effect, its new CEO, Brian Looney, is sun-setting the world’s sixth-largest quoted oil company and Britain’s fifth-largest company by market capitalization. Nonetheless, BP’s move was welcomed by some of its most militant shareholders, led by the Church of England’s head investor, Edward Mason, who promptly urged investors to up the pressure on Exxon Mobil to disclose its emissions.

In fact, the Paris Agreement speaks only of “pursuing efforts” to limit the rise in average global temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and achieving net-zero emissions sometime “in the second half of this century.” The more aggressive timetable came three years later, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produced its 1.5°C special report. In that document, the IPCC asserted that emissions must reach net zero by around 2050 and, by 2030, cut emissions by about 45 percent from 2010 levels.

HISTORY Comments turned off

Nothing New in the Sick World of Jew Hate Joan Swirsky

Posted By on March 9th, 2020

https://www.thepostemail.com/2020/03/08/nothing-new-in-the-sick-world-of-jew-hate/

“Though marked by levity, Purim is deadly serious: We are reminded that Haman exists in every generation and that we Jews dare not ignore our own identity.” Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik 

This year, the Jewish holiday of Purim begins on Monday, March 9th and ends on March 10th. It is a significant holiday that has everything to do with Jewish survival, which today is as relevant as it was throughout Jewish history, not only 75 years ago in Nazi Germany when six-million Jews were savagely incinerated in burning ovens while the entire world looked on, but also 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 years ago!

The story of Purim takes place in ancient Persia (now Iran). The Holy Temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed more than 50 years earlier and the Jews had become servile subjects in Persia.

The King of Persia, Ahasuerus, who was drunk at the time, became furious with his exquisite wife Vashti when she refused to undress before his court, so he ordered her execution. But after her death, he became lonely and had his servants orchestrate a beauty contest so he could pick another wife. When Esther appeared, he was enchanted with her great beauty and married her, making her the Queen of Persia.

 

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Asma Uddin Abets Hateful Sharia Supremacism in America Andrew Bostom

Posted By on March 9th, 2020

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2020/03/asma-uddin-abets-hateful-sharia-supremacism-in-america/

Granting her contention she is “not affiliated (directly) with CAIR or the Muslim Brotherhood”—CAIR having been founded as the political wing of Hamas, which, per the Hamas Covenant is a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot—Uddin nonetheless just accepted CAIR’s sponsorship of her speaking event Tuesday, January 28, 2020, in Maryland. Moreover, Uddin’s calumny about “Gaffneyism” fuses so-called paranoid ideations regarding an “Islamic coup,” with bowdlerization of the Sharia’s living doctrinal and historical reality, past as prologue. For example, here is Uddin’s 2012 apologetic summary negation of theSharia (curiously relegated to a footnote) that completely ignores its doubly totalitarian essence—promulgation of jihad war to submit mankind to its jurisdiction, with the resultant crushing of all basic liberties, including freedom of conscience, and speech, sanctioned discrimination against all non-Muslims, and Muslim women, and barbaric, dehumanizing punishments such as stoning for adultery, and mutilation for theft:  

Sharia is the ideal law of God according to Islam. Muslims believe that the Islamic legal system is one that aims toward ideals of justice, fairness, and the good life. Sharia has tremendous diversity, as jurists and learned scholars figure out and articulate what that law is. Historically, Sharia served as a means for political dissent against arbitrary rule. It is not a monolithic doctrine of violence, as has been characterized in the recently introduced Tennessee bill that would criminalize practices of Sharia.

Uddin’s updated commentary on the Sharia from her 2019 book is equally disingenuous in its omissions, merely reiterating such bowdlerized apologetics: Sharia’s “divine message” blandly analogized to the miracle of rain water in the desert; “my (her) experience does not square with your (the non-Muslim reader’s?) idea of sharia”; “even in states where Muslims want a sharia-based legal code,…what they are asking for is justice and fairness.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Saying No to the Invasion of Europe By Janet Levy

Posted By on March 8th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/03/saying_no_to_the_invasion_of_europe.html

The inundation of Europe with Muslim migrants intent on permanent settlement is unprecedented in world history.  Europe, which has accepted vast numbers of the migrants, has become an epicenter of Islamic terrorism replete with alarming levels of migrant crime, including Muslim sex slave gangs and sharia-controlled “no-go” zones.  Faced with this reality, four Central European countries — Hungary, Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia — have adamantly refused to accept Muslim refugees, earning criticism from the European community and prosecution by the European Court of Justice.

But now, with Turkey threatening to open its border and inundate Greece with thousands more Muslim refugees, the European community appears to have paused in its ongoing acceptance of migrants and pledged to protect Greece’s border.  It illustrates the threat that has existed from the beginning from the mass movement of Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa.

Some view the migration as a “humanitarian crisis” and call critics “xenophobes” or “racists” who lack compassion.  Others question the motivation for the sudden refugee onslaught and ask why Europe must shoulder responsibility and absorb the mass exodus when proximate, affluent Muslim countries have not offered assistance.  They see, instead, a planned invasion or hijra, a 1,400-year-old Islamic doctrine modeled after Mohammed’s migration from Mecca to Medina.  It is designed to subvert and subdue non-Muslim societies and pave the way for total Islamization, in this case, of all Europe.  

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How the media ignores pattern of Democratic attacks on the courts By Jonathan Turley

Posted By on March 8th, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/486424-how-the-media-ignores-pattern-of-democratic-attacks-on-the-courts

“I am from Brooklyn.” That statement made by Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer was meant to excuse threats he has made against two conservative justices the day before on the steps of the Supreme Court. His “apology” seemed to be a mix of claiming a license for all New Yorkers to use “strong language” and claiming justification because some justices are “working hand in glove” with Republicans. This was like a bizarre road rage defense from a Brooklyn driver who apologizes for the situation but explains that it was all due to the lousy driving of the other guy.

The problem is that this the latest in a pattern of Democratic leaders attacking and threatening jurists if they rule the “wrong” way in certain cases. Although Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin advised the public “not to dwell” on the comments by Schumer, there is much more to dwell on than just this incident. Indeed, Democratic senators, including Durbin, have made threats against the Supreme Court and the judiciary.

It is certainly true that the media has not dwelled on these attacks, at least not from Democrats. Another New Yorker has used “strong language” to attack jurists, and many of us have criticized President Trump for those comments. Not surprisingly, Schumer has not cited a New York license for Trump to do as he did, perhaps since Trump was born in Queens. Indeed, Schumer recently denounced Trump for criticizing the judge in the trial of Roger Stone. Schumer called on Chief Justice John Roberts to “defend the independence” of the judiciary from such unwarranted attacks.