NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Democrats Have a ‘Go Big or Go Home’ Problem by David Davenport

Posted By on February 6th, 2020

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/democrats-have-a-go-big-or-go-home-problem

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/democrats-have-a-go-big-or-go-home-problem

The fact that Democrats could not even deliver timely results of their own Iowa caucuses underscores their larger problem. They have become the party of big, structural changes led by government in a time when people lack confidence and trust in big government.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren likes to talk about the need for “big, structural change” to our domestic policies. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is right with her, denouncing “half measures” and arguing, as he did in a recent commercial, “America is best when we strive to do big things.” 

Nearly all of the Democratic candidates have jumped on the “go big or go home” bandwagon, with calls for “Medicare for all,” free college, a revolutionary and expensive Green New Deal, and huge tax increases on the wealthy. Apparently, Democrats have concluded that if policy proposals are not blockbuster, then they are merely lackluster. Their pitch is not President John F. Kennedy’s “we can do better” call for improvement, but rather President Franklin Roosevelt’s plea for a revolutionary New Deal.

The problem is that the public increasingly distrusts big government. A Pew Research Center study published last year showed that only 17% of people trust the government to do what is right, while 75% believe that trust in the federal government is shrinking. Examining trust in various leadership groups, government officials came in dead last, behind scientists and educators, but even trailing journalists and business leaders.

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Meanwhile: Americans’ optimism about personal finances surges to all-time high in new Gallup poll

Posted By on February 6th, 2020

https://hotair.com/archives/allahpundit/2020/02/05/meanwhile-americans-optimism-personal-finances-surges-time-high-new-gallup-poll/

A friendly reminder amid all the impeachment hubbub today that Trump’s probably getting reelected and the political shiny object du jour will have little or nothing to do with his odds.

Neither the Reagan era nor the Clinton era, both famous boom times for America, produced quite as much financial optimism as the Trump era has. Remember that other poll that Gallup released yesterday showing Trump’s job approval at a personal best 49 percent? Now we know what’s driving that number. With economic enthusiasm like this, if Trump were a little less … Trump-y his job approval might be north of 55 percent. He’d be a near-lock for a second term.

But there’s more. Gallup also asked a question with lots of resonance for the 2020 election: Are you better off financially then you were a year ago?

Nearly six in 10 Americans (59%) now say they are better off financially than they were a year ago, up from 50% last year…

The current 59% of Americans who say they are better off financially than they were a year ago is essentially tied for the all-time high of 58% in January 1999. That was recorded during the dot-com boom, with conditions similar to the current state of the economy — a stock market rocketing to then-record highs and unemployment at multidecade lows — though GDP growth was higher at that time.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Week of Political Karma for the Democrats Julie Kelly

Posted By on February 6th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/05/a-week-of-political-karma-for-the-democrats/

President Trump now stands acquitted. The Democrats must confront the debacle that is their presidential primary field and run on a nonexistent record of achievement as the 2020 campaign season kicks off. Karma, indeed, is a bitch.

Donald Trump couldn’t have scripted it better himself: The Democratic Party’s karma knocked them right on the head this week as their countrymen watched in disgust—some, admittedly, in delight.

After three years of deception, gaslighting, and public temper tantrums, these power-hungry partisans finally got their comeuppance. An assembly of agents provocateurs, motivated by an insatiable amount of contempt not just for the president but for Americans in general, who gambled on a farcical impeachment crusade rather than build a persuasive policy case to win over voters this year, are ranting and pouting and tearing up stuff because . . . well, because they are losing. If Nancy Pelosi could have thrown a pacifier from her Capitol high chair Tuesday night, she would have.

The past several days have been filled with delightful metaphors: The president gave a lengthy interview before kickoff on Super Bowl Sunday, touting his achievements and mocking his political foes. A team from a pro-Trump red state faced a team from a Trump-hating blue state, which was favored to win. The San Francisco 49ers, based in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hometown, had a 10-point lead going into the fourth quarter.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Trump aide: Rising anti-Semitism will lead to settlement growth

Posted By on February 6th, 2020

https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/02/06/trump-aide-rising-anti-semitism-will-lead-to-settlement-growth/
“The Israeli birth rate is strong and is growing because sadly anti-Semitism in Europe and other places around the world is encouraging more Jews to return to Israel. The settlements are going to continue to expand,” says Robert O’Brien, US President Donald Trump’s national security adviser.

US President Donald Trump’s national security adviser warned Palestinians on Wednesday that Israeli settlements will continue to expand because rising anti-Semitism around the world means more Jews will immigrate to Israel.

Addressing many hot-button global issues in a speech and discussion with foreign diplomats to the United States, Robert O’Brien defended Trump’s Mideast peace plan, which was embraced by Israel but rejected by the Palestinians.

O’Brien said the plan is not “perfect,” but urged the Palestinians to negotiate terms of the proposed deal. The deal offers economic benefits that would allow “Palestine” to become the “Singapore of the Middle East,” he said.

The Palestinians have roundly denounced the proposal, which offers them limited self-rule in chunks of territory with a capital in parts of east Jerusalem while allowing Israel to annex portions of Judea and Samaria.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Save Us From Secular Redeemers Anthony Daniels

Posted By on February 6th, 2020

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/01/save-us-from-secular-redeemers/

One of the most troubling aspects of what, as I write this, is the latest Islamist terrorist attack in London, is the reaction to it of Mr David Merritt, father of one of the murdered victims, a young man who believed that he was helping to “rehabilitate” his own murderer, and that he, or others like him, had succeeded in doing so. Mr Merritt said he hoped that his son’s death would not be used to promote more “draconian” sentences.

But what constitutes a draconian sentence for a man who plots seriously to blow up the stock exchange, assassinate a prominent politician, bomb synagogues and kill rabbis, and set up a training camp for terrorists to do more of the same? Such a man is a mass, and probably serial mass, killer in the making. By his remarks, therefore, Mr Merritt implied that freeing such a man after eight years in prison had been the right thing to do, even if it entailed the death of his own son.

Let us try for a moment to imagine what effect his remarks would have on an aspiring Muslim terrorist. This is difficult, of course, but it is one of the things that having an imagination is for: to see ourselves as others see us.

The aspiring Muslim terrorist, having usually participated in what he comes to regard as the Sodom and Gomorrah of Western life, suddenly comes to think that Islam at its most puritanical and uncompromising is the indubitable answer to life’s problems. This is a stupid thing to think, no doubt, but there is no doctrine so stupid that it is incapable of inspiring fanaticism. Our aspiring terrorist believes that it is his duty, as well as his pleasure, to impose his vision of virtue on the world, even to the point of martyrdom rewarded by the kind of genteel or cleaned-up Sodom and Gomorrah in the sky that is his conception of paradise.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

UK: Why Are Dangerous Jihadists Being Released Early from Prison? by Soeren Kern

Posted By on February 6th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15536/uk-jihadists-released-early

“We cannot have the situation…where an offender — a known risk to innocent members of the public — is released early by automatic process of law without any oversight by the Parole Board. — UK Secretary of State for Justice.

“When I was a constable, I could arrest and process a suspect in an hour, maximum. Today, it takes a day or more…. The police are mired in bureaucracy, while the judicial system has become an institutional cloud-cuckoo land.” — Philip Flower, former chief superintendent with the Metropolitan Police, Daily Mail.

“Bluntly, how would you feel if you were told to keep track of known terrorists who have been released from prison to satisfy the politically correct assumptions of our justice system?” — Philip Flower, former chief superintendent with the Metropolitan Police, Daily Mail.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has vowed to toughen sentencing guidelines for convicted terrorists after a newly-released prisoner carried out a jihadist attack in London.

On February 2, Sudesh Amman, a 20-year-old jihadist from Harrow in north-west London, stabbed two people in a knife rampage on Streatham High Road before he was shot dead by police. He had been released from prison just days earlier after serving less than half of his sentence for terrorism offenses.

Amman, who was carrying a 10-inch kitchen knife, wearing a fake suicide bomber vest, and shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the Greatest”), had been under active police surveillance at the time of the attack, which London police described as an “Islamist-related terrorist incident.”

In December 2018, Amman was sentenced to three years and four months in prison after pleading guilty to 13 counts of expressing support for Islamist terrorism and possessing and sharing Islamic State and al-Qaeda propaganda. He was 18 years old at the time.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Democrats Panic After Iowa James Carville says he’s “scared to death” that Dems have gone too far left. Thomas Gallatin

Posted By on February 6th, 2020

https://patriotpost.us/articles/68373-democrats-panic-after-iowa-2020-02-05

With the Democrats’ Iowa caucuses fiasco dragging on into its third day — no official winner has yet been announced — there are clear indications that party leaders are panicking. Longtime Democrat strategist and former Bill Clinton campaign manager James Carville wondered why Tom Perez was still leading the Democratic National Committee. “The polling averages have not been very good the last 10 days and I’ve some pretty good polls that show enthusiasm among Democrats is not as high as we might like it,” Carville observed. “This is not going particularly well so far. And why is Tom Perez still the chairman of the Democratic National Committee? I have no idea. This party needs to wake up.” He later added, “I know these donors and they’re not going to give a popsicle to the DNC right now. I can promise you that.”

Carville isn’t the only high-profile Democrat sounding the alarm. David Axelrod, former senior advisor to Barack Obama, bemoaned, “However bad the handling the count has been, the Iowa’s Democratic Party’s handling of the messaging around it has been an abject disaster. It should be taught in classrooms as an example of what not to do in a crisis.”

Then there’s the growing specter of election malfeasance, which will only further complicate the DNC’s future efforts of getting its base to coalesce around the party’s eventual nominee, let alone gin up voter enthusiasm.

Speaking of coalescing, the divide within the party between hard-left socialists and non-socialists has Carville even more concerned. “I mean, I’m 75 years old. Why am I here doing this? Because I am scared to death, that’s why,” he complained. It’s more than an image problem, Carville argues. “All the Sanders people were taking pictures wishing Jeremy Corbyn the best. … The press corps went AOC crazy. … We got to decide what we want to be. Do we want to be an ideological cult or do we want to have a majoritarian instinct to be a majority party? … The urban core is not going to get it done. What we need is power. You understand? That’s what this is about. Without power, you have nothing. You just have talking points.”

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

President Trump Joins the ‘Peace Processors’ Can “the Deal of the Century” work if Palestinian Arabs hate Israel more than they love peace? Bruce Thornton

Posted By on February 6th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/president-trump-joins-peace-processors-bruce-thornton/

For decades the “peace process,” the attempt to resolve the Israeli-Arab conflict, has tempted American presidents into trying to achieve international diplomacy’s biggest prize. Apart from the cold “peace” Jimmy Carter brokered between Israel and Egypt ––a success predicated on the U.S. giving Egypt $1.5 billion a year in foreign aid––all the other attempts have foundered on Arab Palestinian intransigence, corruption, and fanatical devotion to the destruction of Israel.

Some commentators, however, now believe that given changing geopolitical circumstance and Trump’s rejection of the old anti-Israel paradigm, this string of failure has a good chance of ending with Trump’s “deal of the century.” But odds are it will add just one more exercise in futility, since the Palestinian Arabs simply do not want to make a deal, and are more committed to the dysfunctional (and, for its leaders, lucrative) status quo than they are to creating a viable economy and a normal nation living “side-by-side in peace” with Israel.

Trump’s deal endorses a Palestinian state on 70% of Judea and Samaria, an area twice the size of the land the Palestinian Authority currently controls, with a transportation corridor between the so-called “occupied West Bank” and Gaza; designates East Jerusalem as its capital; and promises $50 billion in multinational development aid. But it puts the burden of concessions on the PA rather than Israel: Disarming terrorist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, ending “pay to slay” money to the families of terrorists who die during an attack, and recognizing Israel as a Jewish state. The Palestinian Arabs will also have to abandon its demand of a “right to return” for an ever-metastasizing number of  “refugees” from the 1948 war, accept Israeli control over an undivided Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley, and stop its school curricula and state propaganda that incite hatred of Israel and legitimizes terrorist violence against it.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

An Al Qaeda Leader Came to America as a Refugee, And Applied for Disability for Bullet Wounds How Biden helped an Al-Qaeda leader come to the USA. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on February 6th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/al-qaeda-leader-came-america-refugee-and-applied-daniel-greenfield/

After engaging in terrorism in Iraq, an Al Qaeda leader came to America as a refugee and applied for Social Security disability benefits because his “injuries” in Iraq had made it too hard for him to work.

In 2006, Ali Yousif Ahmed Al-Nouri was the Emir of an Al Qaeda terrorist group in Fallujah. The Iraqi city was the scene of brutal battles between Al Qaeda and America. It was where American soldiers had suffered the most casualties in any battle since the Vietnam War. Despite multiple defeats, Al Qaeda remained deeply entrenched in the city and was even able to seize a number of neighborhoods in 2014.

By then, Al-Nouri was living in Arizona.

Only 2 years after being the Emir of an Al Qaeda group, Al-Nouri had traded the deserts of Al-Anbar for the deserts of the Southwest. How was an Al Qaeda leader able to move to the United States?

Easy. He claimed to be a refugee from Al Qaeda.

In 2008, the United States raised the refugee admission celling to 80,000 to accommodate the surge of Iraqis applying to come to the United States. The Iraqis claimed to be fleeing terrorism, but some, like Al-Nouri were terrorists, and our refugee resettlement program was not interested in telling them apart.

A quarter of refugees that year were Iraqis. The Al Qaeda leader was one of 13,823 Iraqi refugees. The huge increase from 1,608 in 2007, made any real screening of the Iraqis all but impossible. And, worse still, Iraqis, like Al-Nouri, were in the top 3 refugee groups and their claims were processed ‘in-country’.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Wins Again By Kyle Smith

Posted By on February 6th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/trump-wins-again/

Trump broke Pelosi. Or maybe she just broke herself.

Trying to dislodge a president whose approval ratings have been stuck well below 50 percent for virtually his entire presidency, in an atmosphere of economic effervescence, Democrats would be smart to signal voters that they won’t bring about major policy shifts but will restore decorous behavior.

Instead, they’re doing the opposite.

George W. Bush inspired Charles Krauthammer to coin the term “Bush Derangement Syndrome.” President Obama likened his opposition to a “fever.” But no president has ever done what President Trump is doing to his ideological adversaries, which is to cause them to lunge uncontrollably around the political stage like so many kittens chasing the dot made by a laser pointer.

Behold: Nancy Pelosi, she of the tight self-control and the 32-year run in Congress, threw a hissy fit on live television and ripped up the State of the Union speech. The silky slalom schusser tumbled over her skis and planted her face in the side of the mountain. What she probably thought would look like a gesture of aggression and defiance instead looked more like petulance and frustration. Trump not only gave a great speech, he gave great television, which is far more important. “A master showman at his best,” declared Norah O’Donnell, the CBS Evening News anchor. The effectiveness of the SOTU made Pelosi mad. Trump’s discipline made Pelosi mad. His obliteration of the impeachment drama by not even dignifying it with a mention made Pelosi mad. #PelosiTantrum and #NancytheRipper were top trending topics on Twitter. Democrats think they’re going to rage their way into the White House. Maybe you can try that when the country’s on fire. It isn’t.