NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

While Democrats Trash Obamacare, Trump Is Fixing It — by John Merline

Posted By on October 24th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/10/23/while-demo

In the upside-down world of Washington politics, President Donald Trump appears to be fixing Obamacare, while Democrats are running around the country dismissing it as a horrible failure.

The latest evidence of the former is that Obamacare premiums are set to drop 4% next year, after declining 1.5% last year, according to a report released by the Health and Human Services Department this week. This comes after five straight years of huge increases, during which Obamacare premiums more than doubled.

The news is so remarkable that even the Washington Post had to admit that “Obamacare is getting more affordable under the Trump administration.”  Oh, and the Obamacare markets are becoming more competitive, too, with the number of plans climbing by 13%, giving nearly 70% of the country access to at least three plans.

The Post even acknowledges that these improvements come “despite dire predictions by Democrats that the Trump administration would destroy the insurance marketplaces.”

“Dire predictions” is right.

When Trump signed the tax cut law into effect, he zeroed out the much-hated individual mandate tax. Critics said it would destabilize Obamacare markets because the young and healthy, freed from the tax penalty, would drop coverage, leaving the Obamacare insurance pool sicker and more expensive.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Gov. Abbott: Two Gov. Offices Looking into Case of Little Boy Transitioning to Girl Against Dad’s Wishes Debra Heine

Posted By on October 24th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/23/gov-abbott-two-gov-offices-looking-into-case-of-little-boy-transitioning-to-girl-against-dads-wishes/

Texas governor Greg Abbott announced Wednesday evening that the Texas Attorney General’s Office and the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services is looking into the sad saga of James Younger, the seven year-old boy who may be forced to undergo chemical castration at the behest of his mother.

On Monday, a jury in Dallas ruled in favor of the boy’s mother, Dr. Anne Georgulas, allowing her to continue “transitioning” James to “Luna” using puberty blockers and eventually cross-sex hormones. The child has reportedly been “transitioning” into a girl since he was three.

Meanwhile, the boy’s father, Jeffrey Younger, will be required to “affirm” that his son as a girl, despite his religious and moral objections, and will be forced to take a class on transgenderism.

A few minutes after the governor’s tweet, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) also commented on the case, calling it “horrifying & tragic” and characterizing the procedure as “nothing less than child abuse.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

I’m from the Deep State and I’m here to help – by Arthur Chrenkoff *****

Posted By on October 24th, 2019

http://thedailychrenk.com/2019/10/23/im-deep-state-im-help/

It’s 2019, so it’s perhaps time to update Ronald Reagan’s famous dictum that “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

The media and the left (but I repeat myself) have spent the past three years ridiculing the concept of the “Deep State” and those who subscribe to its existence. We have been told it’s a crazy right-wing conspiracy theory to believe that some public servants, mostly in the fields of intelligence, law enforcement and diplomacy, might cooperate in informal cabals to pursue their preferred policies regardless of who is in power and to protect their fiefdoms from oversight, interference and the executive, legislative and judicial control. To wonder whether some influential people in the federal bureaucracy, connected through a revolving door with the progressive establishment, might have contemplated preventing the election of their bete noire and his removal from office once their initial efforts proved unsuccessful invited accusation of delusion and paranoia.

This narrative is now officially old and busted. The new and hot one: the Deep State exists and it’s good.

As Michelle Cottle, member of “The New York Times” editorial board, writes in her op-ed “They Are Not The Resistance. They Are Not a Cabal. They Are Public Servants: Let us now praise these not-silent heroes”:

President Trump is right: The deep state is alive and well. But it is not the sinister, antidemocratic cabal of his fever dreams. It is, rather, a collection of patriotic public servants — career diplomats, scientists, intelligence officers and others — who, from within the bowels of this corrupt and corrupting administration, have somehow remembered that their duty is to protect the interests, not of a particular leader, but of the American people.

Fiona Hill, Michael McKinley and the whistle-blower who effectively initiated the impeachment investigation — when these folks saw something suspicious, they said something. Their aim was not to bring down Mr. Trump out of personal or political animus but to rescue the Republic from his excesses. Those who refuse to silently indulge this president’s worst impulses qualify as heroes — and deserve our gratitude.

Throughout the Trump presidency, there has been a trickle of fed-up individuals willing to step up and protest the administration’s war on science, expertise and facts.

Is that what it is! Just patriotic public servants trying to save the people from a democratically elected President of their own country.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Ozone hole shrinking, NASA announces By Howard J. Warner

Posted By on October 24th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/ozone_hole_shrinking_nasa_announces.html

NASA recently announced that evidence indicates that the planet’s ozone hole over Antarctica is closing and now the smallest it’s been since it was discovered three decades ago.  By 1990, the ozone hole had enlarged to 8 million square miles (twice the size of the USA).  The cause of this opening has been blamed on chlorofluorocarbons, which most countries outlawed.  The shrinking hole should be significantly reduced and stable by 2040–50 and eliminated by 2100.

Sounds as though the climate change (or global warming) enthusiasts have to adjust their strategy for arousing fear among the industrialized nations regarding potential planetary damage from human behavior.  It now appears that the polar bear population is stable.  Climate change advocates now must deal with this good news, which messes up some of the scare tactics they have employed for several decades.

However, this good news was delivered with a negative caveat.  For three decades, we have been told that the ozone hole was a threat to the planet and life, as it allows more solar radiation (UV) through to the Earth’s ground.  This will increase the risk of DNA mutations, they argue.  Ozone is a multiple oxygen molecule that also is a greenhouse gas.  Therefore, it can raise the heat retained in the atmosphere.  The hole allows some heat to escape and helps cool the planet.  Though these amounts are small, they work against global warming.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Dems Panic Over John James in Michigan Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on October 24th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2019/10/dems-panic-over-john-james-michigan-daniel-greenfield/

While the news is bad out of Colorado, a state that is starting to seem as unsalvageable as California, there’s good news out of Michigan.

Or bad news in this poll, if you’re a Democrat.

That “oh, oh” you hear from the Democratic camp of U.S. Senator Gary Peters is that, in one week, two polls are out showing his race against Republican challenger John James is a statistical dead heat and for an incumbent to be in that spot one year before the election is hardly good news.

In the Vanguard, Dennis, Pubic Sector Consultant poll  last May it was Mr. Peters 42% and Mr. James 37%.  It is now 39.5% for Mr. Peters and 39.3% for Mr. James.

James was one of the most promising candidates of the last cycle, he’s back in, and his numbers look very good. 

More party support last time around could have already seen Stabenow out and James in. Now, Democrats are scrambling to try and stop James in the lamest ways possible.

The Democrats are banging the drum to link Mr. James to the problems President Trump has.

They are showing a photo of Mr. James with Rudy Giuliani and a Ukrainian businessman charged by the Feds with campaign finance violations.

Do they really think anyone in Michigan is going to care? And deploying that, this early on, is a sloppy desperation tactic. Which doesn’t suggest that the Dems have a plan to stop James beyond appealing to Washington Post readers.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary Running? Will a failed politician offer salvation to the Democratic Party? Ari Lieberman

Posted By on October 24th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/will-hillary-run-ari-lieberman/

In 2016, we thought we had heard the last of Hillary Clinton. We thought wrong. Instead of engaging in humble introspection, the twice failed presidential candidate went on a whirlwind tour giving interviews and lectures, blaming everyone from former FBI director James Comey to the Macedonians for her 2016 rout. But Clinton hasn’t stopped with book tours. According to multiple reliable sources, she is considering a third run, lured by both the thirst for power and the prospect of defeating her arch nemeses, Donald Trump. 

Recently on Fox’s Tucker Carlson show, a close advisor to Hillary Clinton indicated that the architect of the Benghazi fiasco may yet have another go at proclaiming herself leader of the free world. Philippe Reines, who has been a close Clinton confidant since 2009 and prepped Hillary for debates with Trump in 2016, tellingly noted that Clinton has not foreclosed the possibility of joining the race.

Democrats are in serious trouble. Joe Biden, the supposed savior of the Democratic Party and the man who was expected to easily secure the nomination is lagging in both the polls and fundraising. According to the latest reports, Biden only has $8.9 million on hand. But anemic fundraising is only half the problem for Biden. He is now being eclipsed by Elizabeth Warren in the polls. That ominous development spells trouble not only for Biden but also for Democratic prospects for victory in 2020.

Despite being pulled to the left by his challengers, Biden is viewed by many as a centrist Democrat capable of securing Independents as well as causing defections among moderate Republicans. Crucially, his carefully crafted blue collar image and Pennsylvania origins gave him an advantage in the nation’s Rust Belt, an area secured by Trump in 2016. And his past association with Barack Obama gave him an advantage with African American voters.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

I’m from the Deep State and I’m here to help by Arthur Chrenkoff

Posted By on October 23rd, 2019

http://thedailychrenk.com/2019/10/23/im-deep-state-im-help/

It’s 2019, so it’s perhaps time to update Ronald Reagan’s famous dictum that “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

The media and the left (but I repeat myself) have spent the past three years ridiculing the concept of the “Deep State” and those who subscribe to its existence. We have been told it’s a crazy right-wing conspiracy theory to believe that some public servants, mostly in the fields of intelligence, law enforcement and diplomacy, might cooperate in informal cabals to pursue their preferred policies regardless of who is in power and to protect their fiefdoms from oversight, interference and the executive, legislative and judicial control. To wonder whether some influential people in the federal bureaucracy, connected through a revolving door with the progressive establishment, might have contemplated preventing the election of their bete noire and his removal from office once their initial efforts proved unsuccessful invited accusation of delusion and paranoia.

This narrative is now officially old and busted. The new and hot one: the Deep State exists and it’s good.

As Michelle Cottle, member of “The New York Times” editorial board, writes in her op-ed “They Are Not The Resistance. They Are Not a Cabal. They Are Public Servants: Let us now praise these not-silent heroes”:

President Trump is right: The deep state is alive and well. But it is not the sinister, antidemocratic cabal of his fever dreams. It is, rather, a collection of patriotic public servants — career diplomats, scientists, intelligence officers and others — who, from within the bowels of this corrupt and corrupting administration, have somehow remembered that their duty is to protect the interests, not of a particular leader, but of the American people.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism What’s wrong with anti-Zionism is anti-Zionism itself. Michael Walzer ▪ Fall 2019

Posted By on October 23rd, 2019

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/anti-zionism-and-anti-semi

Anti-Zionism is a flourishing politics today on many university campuses and on parts of the left, and the standard response from many Jewish organizations and from most of the Jews I know is to call it the newest version of anti-Semitism. But anti-Zionism is a subject in itself; it comes in many varieties, and which ones are anti-Semitic—that’s the question I want to address here. I take “Zionism” to mean a belief in the rightful existence of a Jewish state, nothing more. Anti-Zionism denies the rightfulness. My concern here is with left-wing anti-Zionism in the United States and Europe.

Most versions of anti-Zionism first appeared among the Jews. The first, and probably the oldest, takes Zionism to be a Jewish heresy. According to Orthodox doctrine, the return of the Jews to Zion and the establishment of a state will be the work of the Messiah in the days to come. Until then, Jews are required to accept their exile, defer to gentile rulers, and wait for divine deliverance. Political action is a usurpation of God’s prerogative. Zionist writers hated the passivity that this doctrine produced with such passion that they were called anti-Semites by orthodox Jews, who would never have given that name to their own rejection of the Zionist project.

“Waiting for the Messiah” has a left version, which might be called “waiting for the revolution.” Jews (and other minorities) were often told that all their problems would be solved, and could only be solved, by the triumph of the proletariat. Many Jews took this to be an expression of hostility, a refusal to recognize the urgencies of their situation. But I don’t see anti-Semitism here, only ideological rigidity and moral insensitivity.

The second Jewish version of anti-Zionism was first proclaimed by the founders of Reform Judaism in nineteenth-century Germany. There is no Jewish people, they insisted, only a community of faith—men and women of the Mosaic persuasion. Jews could be good Germans (or good citizens of any state) since they were not a nation like the other nations and did not aspire to a state of their own. Zionism was perceived as a threat to these good Germans, since it suggested that they had an allegiance elsewhere.

Many leftists have adopted this denial of Jewish peoplehood, and then they go on to claim that a Jewish state must be a religious state, something like a Catholic or Lutheran or Muslim state—political formations that no leftist could support. But Reform Jews adopted this position knowing that most of their fellow Jews didn’t share it. If the nation is a daily referendum, as Ernest Renan said, the Jews of Eastern Europe, the great majority, were voting every day for peoplehood. They weren’t all looking for a homeland in the land of Israel, but even the Bundists, who hoped for autonomy in the Tsarist empire, were Jewish nationalists.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Omar Affair The socialism of fools takes Washington By Michael Walzer (March 2019)

Posted By on October 23rd, 2019

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts

“Long ago, August Bebel gave a name to left-wing anti-Semitism: “the socialism of fools.” Now the fools are in Congress.”

There are two parts to the Omar affair, and despite the furor and all the statements and counterstatements, and the tweets and countertweets, not enough has been said about either. I will deal with them in this order: first, Rep. Omar’s lies and, second, the fearfulness of her critics

1) I don’t think that Rep. Omar is a liar; she is just repeating other people’s lies. It’s possible that she believes them or, maybe, she thinks they are half-true and politically useful (and she has proven that they are politically useful). In any case, her claims are false. AIPAC, aka the Zionist lobby—actually the right-wing Zionist lobby; there are others on the left—does not control American policy in the Middle East. The organization can make a lot of noise; it has influence in Congress—though less than its leaders tell its donors—and the influence comes from the money it spends. I am sure that there are politicians in the House and Senate who never fail to answer AIPAC’s phone calls and who speak passionately about Israel when they are asked to do so. But that’s about all they do, for Congress has very little impact on what America does in the Middle East or anywhere else. Putting Omar on the House Foreign Affairs Committee is probably a good idea; she will learn how little the committee has to do with foreign affairs.

American foreign policy is made in the White House. That may be constitutionally wrong, but it’s been true for a long time. When the people elect a president who agrees with AIPAC, the organization looks very powerful. And when the people elect a president who disagrees with AIPAC, the organization is powerless. I don’t remember how AIPAC responded to Carter’s Middle East policy or to Clinton’s. In neither case was AIPAC influential, not when Israel withdrew from the Sinai and not when Rabin and Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn; its leaders were probably not consulted. But its lack of influence was most clear in the Obama years, when it disapproved of almost everything Obama did in the Middle East, from the Cairo speech to the treaty with Iran, and could do nothing to change his policies

There are indeed Zionist lobbies at work in Washington. They advocate different policies, and sometimes one or another of them gets its way, but not because of its power or its money. It finds people in office who share its ideological commitments, or it doesn’t.

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Kurds, Trump, & Forgotten Zionist History By Moshe Phillips

Posted By on October 23rd, 2019

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/the-kurds-trump-forgotten-zionist-history/2019/10/20/

Various media outlets criticized President Trump last week for one of his defenses of his decision to remove 50 American troops who were assisting Kurdish fighters in Syria. “They didn’t help us in the Second World War,” Trump said regarding the Kurds. “They didn’t help us with Normandy, as an example.”

To rebut Trump’s argument, CNN quoted Michael Rubin from the American Enterprise Institute: “World War II was a war among states and the Kurds weren’t a state,” he said. It also quoted Henri Barkey, a Middle East expert from the Council on Foreign Relations, who said, “Just like many other people who did not have a state, [the Kurds] could not have helped the United States.”

In fact, though, both in World War I and World War II, stateless Zionist Jews lobbied and organized in the U.S., UK, Canada, Palestine, and elsewhere to form independent fighting units to fight against Germany and the Ottomans in WWI and against the Axis powers in WWII.

In WWI, first the Zion Mule Corps (650 Jewish soldiers, served at Gallipoli) and then later the Jewish Legion (5,000 Jewish solders) fought under British army command; in WWII, the Jewish Brigade (30,000 Jewish soldiers) was part of the British army.

The men agitating for and leading the Jewish soldiers in WWI and WWII were some of the most colorful and amazing individuals of the Zionist movement. That Barkey and Rubin could be expert sources for CNN and not be highly familiar with their stories is rather surprising.

The WWI Jewish fighters were led by British officer John Henry Patterson. Patterson was the most famous African lion hunter in British history. His story is told in the 1996 Val Kilmer/Michael Douglas film “The Ghost and the Darkness.” Patterson was played by Kilmer, and the movie is based on a book by Patterson. Two other books written by Patterson detail his work with Jewish soldiers and were titled With the Zionists in Gallipoli and With the Judaeans in the Palestine Campaign.