ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Mysterious, Outrageous Death of Jeffrey Epstein It’s next to impossible to kill oneself in jail—I know, because I’ve been there. Judith Miller ****

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/jeffrey-epstein

Here are a few things I know firsthand about being in jail. First and foremost, you have virtually no control over your life and surroundings. You can’t get so much as an aspirin without authorization. In most jails, you can’t wear a belt, or shoelaces, or keep a razor in your cell. You have no privacy, no sense of dignity, and no rights. And in a well-run jail, high-profile prisoners have virtually no chance of killing themselves.

So the alleged suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, the 66-year-old financier with powerful American and foreign friends who was about to stand trial for allegedly sexually abusing dozens of girls, many of them underage, is particularly unfathomable—and outrageous. In a letter to the Justice Department, Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska called it inexcusable that Epstein did not live to face his accusers. “Obviously, heads must roll,” he wrote. Attorney General William Barr clearly agrees. Saying that he was “appalled” to have learned that Epstein was found dead at 6:30 a.m. on Saturday morning at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in lower Manhattan, Barr instructed the department’s inspector general to investigate precisely how Epstein died at MCC, a long-troubled, pretrial detention facility.

Epstein was placed on suicide watch on July 23 after being found semi-conscious in his cell with marks on his neck, in what prison officials described at the time as a failed suicide attempt. He was removed from suicide watch six days later, on July 29, and returned to a segregated area of the prison with extra security known as the special housing unit. Why Epstein was removed from suicide watch is a focus of the DOJ investigation.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Truth Behind the Trump Storm Low-skilled immigration has changed dramatically since America’s Ellis Island days. Kay S. Hymowitz January 16, 2018

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

.https://www.city-journal.org/html/truth-behind-trump-storm-15676.html

…..”The truth is that an “hourglass,” low-mobility, big-government economy presents a new set of questions about immigration policy. Today’s immigrants face a different economic reality from their predecessors. 

During the mass migration that took place in the period between 1850 and 1930, more than 12 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Many were uneducated and unskilled people from countries that were largely shitholes. Immigrants from nineteenth-century Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia, Austro-Hungarian, Greece, even the now-flush Scandinavian countries, were escaping poor, stagnant places where the future promised more of the same.

Poverty and lack of skills didn’t stop newcomers from finding work because there was plenty of it—on the piers of New York and Philadelphia, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest, and in the factories that were spreading to cities all over the country. In 1914, over 70 percent of the factory workers at Ford Motor Company were foreign-born. Immigrants and their children were over half of all of American manufacturing workers in 1920. New technologies and a swelling population also meant more jobs for construction and transportation workers. The pre–World War II industrial economy, sociologists Roger Waldinger and Joel Perlman have written, offered a “range of blue collar opportunities” for immigrants and their children.

Today’s unskilled immigrants are not so lucky. Automation and offshoring to Third World countries have seriously eroded the number of blue-collar jobs. Manufacturing positions plummeted from 19.4 million in 1979 to 11.5 million in 2010, even as immigrants were adding millions to the population of job seekers. In 1970, blue-collar jobs were 31.2 percent of total nonfarm employment. By 2016, their share had fallen to 13.6 percent of total employment. Today’s immigrants are more likely to be hotel workers, agricultural hands, bussers, janitors, and hospital orderlies. They may be earning more than they could have in their home countries, but their wages—assuming they work full-time—are enough only to keep them a notch or two above the poverty line in the United States. Adding to their troubles is frequently a lack of benefits, unreliable hours, and little chance for moving up the income ladder.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Radical Politics on the Public Dime New York community organizations siphon off taxpayer money to promote their agendas. Seth Barron

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/radical-politics-ny-community-organizations

In September 2018, activist groups around New York rushed to denounce the Trump administration for considering making changes to the “public charge” rule for noncitizens. The changes would add food stamps, Medicaid, and federal housing vouchers to the programs that count against immigrants when the government determines their future status. The New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) staged a protest outside the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side, joined by the African Services Committee and the Chinese-American Planning Council. Executives of the three organizations were arrested after they sat down in the middle of Delancey Street and blocked rush-hour traffic.

New York City has long been fertile ground for political protest, of course, so these events were not unusual—though the city’s protest culture has gone into overdrive since Trump’s election, with rallies, marches, and demonstrations becoming a frequent backdrop around Manhattan. Civil-society groups, along with elected officials, activists, and unions, typically organize these protests, which run the gamut from standard political rallies to civil disobedience. What most New Yorkers don’t realize, though, is that many of the protests, including NYIC’s action last year, aren’t simply the work of civic-minded private citizens. On the contrary: they are funded, sometimes lavishly, by local and state government—that is, by taxpayers. New York is home to a host of such groups, which, in the Trump era, have expanded their charitable missions to include near-constant political activism. Whether they agree or disagree with these efforts, New Yorkers should understand that they’re paying the bill for them.

New York City spends about $95 billion annually. Not counting Medicaid spending, the city allocates about 13 percent of its outlays to human services—including homeless shelters, senior centers, youth recreation, adult literacy, foster care, and many other programs tailored to the needs of New York’s 8.5 million people, 43 percent of whom live below the city-measured poverty line. The city contracts with nonprofit organizations to provide many of these services. Most homeless shelters, for instance, are run by nongovernmental organizations. Similarly, nonprofits provide public defenders to indigent defendants. Individual contracts with these large groups—such as the Lutheran Social Services of Metropolitan New York, Inc., which deals with vulnerable children—can run to hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Acting DHS Secretary: Border Crossings Down 43 Percent Since May By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/acting-dhs-secretary-border-crossings-down-43-percent-since-may/

Acting DHS secretary Kevin McAleenan said Wednesday that border crossings have declined 43 percent since May, when arrests between ports of entry at the southern border increased for the fourth straight month to 132,887, up from 99,304 arrests in April.

“So those efforts are making progress, 43 percent reduction in crossings since May,” McAleenan said. “We’re hoping to continue the progress in August.”

McAleenan said DHS is working with Central American countries to protect migrants who need asylum as well as conduct an “aggressive effort against human smugglers,” a project he said “could really change the game.”

“I’ll be going back to Central America next week to try to build on that with El Salvador and Panama and really address this problem as a regional effort,” he said.

The number of immigrants being held at border stations is also down significantly from its June high of 20,000, McAleenan said. “This morning we have less than 4,000, and they’re not staying with us very long. We’re able to repatriate the single adults quickly. The unaccompanied children are going to a better situation with Health and Human Services.”

The acting DHS chief went on to take a shot at what he sees as a toxic political environment “where we’re demonizing law enforcement for doing their jobs,” calling it “concerning.”

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Andrew Bostom:Rev. Justin Perkins, American linguist & missionary, 1836 eyewitness to a murderous Persian Muslim blood libel against, & seething Islamic hatred, of Jews.

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

Rev. Justin Perkins. A Residence of Eight Years in Persia among the Nestorian Christians with Notices of the Muhammedans, New York, 1843; p. 276.

May 20, 1836] Yesterday an unoffending Jew was publicly beheaded and burned in this city. The enraged Mohammedans had, for two or three days, thronged the governor’s palace by thousands, demanding that the whole Jewish population of the city should be put to death to a man. And to appease the mob, the governor delivered up this individual. He was arraigned under the accusation of having murdered a Mohammedan child. The Mohammedans…cherish the belief, (or profess to cherish it,) that the Jews possess an instinctive thirst for human blood, as well as seek human victims for an annual sacrifice.

In this instance, a Mohammedan infant was found dead, before the door of a Jew.

The probability is that the child died a natural death and was thus exposed by interested persons, to rouse public indignation against the poor Jews; and so strong is the hatred of the Mohammedans towards the descendants of Israel, that the stratagem proved entirely successful, as is often the case in Mohammedan countries…The hostility cherished by Mohammedans towards the Jews is inconceivably more bitter than their hatred to Christians. The determined aversion which the Jews early manifested to the religion of the impostor [Muhammad] is still remembered and strongly resented by his followers.

BOOKS Comments turned off

A Brief History of Election Meddling By Andrew C. McCarthy *****

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/ball-of-collusion-book-excerpt-democrats-true-election-meddlers/

They have tried to influence elections in Russia and Israel, and have sought the Russians’ help to get elected here.

Editor’s note: Andrew C. McCarthy’s new book is Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency. This is the second in a series of excerpts.

NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE

‘T he 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.”

Thus spoke President Barack Obama just a couple of weeks before Election Day 2012. With the race still thought to be tight, he had come to the candidates’ final debate loaded for bear. Earlier in the campaign, his Republican rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, had had the temerity to pronounce that Russia was, “without question, our number-one geopolitical foe.” The incumbent president regarded this as an absurd anachronism. So that night, he brought the snark. Hadn’t anyone informed Romney that “the Cold War’s been over for 20 years”?

Obama tut-tutted that this Republican nostalgia for the foreign policy of the 1980s was of a piece with the GOP’s desire to revive the “social policy of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.” Yes, that was your Democratic-party standard-bearer, what seems like only yesterday. No longer was this the party of Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy. To Obama-era Democrats, arguing that Russia was a real threat, that it longed for a return to Soviet hegemony, was akin to calling for the return of Jim Crow and the adoption of protectionist practices that helped ignite the Great Depression.

But then Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election, and Democrats decided they’d best return that call from the 1980s after all. It turns out Russia — the Russia against whose serial aggressions Obama took little meaningful action throughout his eight years in office — really is our Numero Uno geopolitical foe. Turns out the Cold War isn’t “so last century.” Since November 8, 2016, in ever-evolving Democratic dogma, Russia has gone from a quaint obsession of neocon warmongers to an existential threat on the order of Climate Change!

As is generally the case, neither extreme of political posturing has been accurate. Romney was right that Putin’s Russia is a significant rival on the world stage. Whether it is “number one” on the tally sheet is debatable. To figure that out, we’d have to make judgment calls about all the threats we face — immediate versus long-term, forcible versus other forms of aggression, ideological versus transactional, and so on. No need to dawdle over that. It suffices to say that the Russian regime is a serious adversary. It has a formidable nuclear arsenal, as well as highly capable military and intelligence forces. Its default posture is anti-American (though it is biddable). It cooperates effectively with other anti-American regimes and factions. Its veto power in the United Nations Security Council complicates our government’s capacity to act in American interests. It has a Soviet iciness about the use of terrorism and forges alliances with terrorists in the pursuit of its interests. The regime is ruthless in its determination to remain in power, it has revanchist ambitions, and it is shrewd in testing the West’s resolve — or lack of same — to respond to incremental aggressions that implicate NATO and other commitments.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Column: What role does ‘toxic masculinity’ play in mass shootings? By Clarence Page

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/clarence-page/ct-column-mass-shooters-dayton-el-paso-toxic-masculinity-page-20190813-cin4sh2iszb7xl5a7hcbvq3i6a-story.html

As the toll from mass shootings this year already approaches the total for all of last year, more people are openly asking a question that has lurked mostly in the shadows: Why are the shooters so often white men?

“Mental illness and hatred pull the trigger, not the gun,” declared President Donald Trump when he condemned shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, which left at least 31 people dead and dozens wounded.

I wish it were that simple. The president was right about hatred, but as psychiatrists and social scientists look for factors that might help us to predict mass violence, they find it’s not mental illness as often as it’s just men, overwhelmingly white men.

Sure, there have been infamous exceptions, such as the 30-year-old woman who shot and killed one boy and wounded five other children in a Winnetka elementary school in 1988 before shooting a man and then killing herself.

Or there was the D.C. sniper case, in which two African American men, ages 41 and 17, terrorized the Washington metropolitan area in 2002, killing 17 people and wounding 10 others in a nationwide killing spree.

Well minds, in my nonmedical opinion, do not commit such horrible acts.

But a deeper dive into statistics finds serious mental illness to be conclusively present in only a small minority of mass shootings, according to various studies using different standards for what constitutes a mental health problem. A 2014 FBI study, for example, found that most mass shooters have a history of showing some symptoms of mental illness, though only about a fourth actually have been diagnosed.

POLITICS Comments turned off

U.S. presidential candidate Cory Booker proposes office to fight white supremacy Joseph Ax

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-booker/u-s-presidential-candidate-cory-booker-proposes-office-to-fight-white-supremacy-idUSKCN1V50YA

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. Senator Cory Booker on Thursday said he would create a White House office to combat white supremacy and hate crimes if elected, becoming the latest Democratic presidential candidate to call for action after a racially motivated massacre in Texas.

Booker said he would also require the FBI and the Justice Department to allocate the same level of resources and attention to white supremacist-inspired violence as they devote to international terrorism.

The New Jersey senator announced his plan less than two weeks after a gunman in El Paso, Texas, killed 22 people inside a Walmart after posting an anti-immigrant screed online that echoed some of President Donald Trump’s heated rhetoric. The attack was among three mass shootings in the span of a week that killed 34 people in all.

The incidents have roiled the presidential race, with Democrats accusing Trump, a Republican, of fomenting hatred while failing to embrace common-sense gun restrictions. Several candidates, including Senator Kamala Harris on Wednesday, have released plans to fight gun violence and white supremacy in the days since the El Paso massacre.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel Has Every Right To Block Rashida Tlaib And Ilhan Omar Not even we believe people are entitled to visit simply because they demand it. David Harsanyi

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/15/israel-has-a-moral-right-to-block-rashida-tlaib-and-ilhan-omar/

Israeli officials have decided to block U.S. Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar from entering their country, a reversal of policy that President Donald Trump seems to have prompted.

Should Israel have taken the high road and given two enemies of Israel visas for this propaganda visit? Probably. It usually does. Allowing foes to enter the country reflects the strong liberal values that make Israel a special place in Middle East.

However, the idea that impeding two anti-Semites and Hamas apologists from entering Israel is an attack on democracy, or the United States, or that such a move is accelerating the corrosion of the Democratic Party’s support for Israel, is absurd.

Sen. Bernie Sanders contends that Israel is showing “enormous disrespect to these elected leaders, to the United States Congress, and to the principles of democracy.”

What principle of democracy states that you have to issue visas for illiberal bigots who actively engage in efforts to harm your citizens? If Republican Steve King were denied an entry visa into Mexico, not a single congressperson would stand up for him, not a single presidential candidate would claim that Mexico had insulted the honor of the United States, not a single Democrat would argue that it reflected poorly on Mexican democracy, and not a single liberal pundit would contend that the Mexican-U.S. relationship was being hurt.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Noa Rothman’s pathetic embrace of Abbas Rothman, whose famous eulogy at her grandfather’s funeral in 1995 became a worldwide tear-jerker, recently joined the Democratic Union. By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on August 15th, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Noa-Rothmans-pathetic-embrace-of-

Noa Rothman, the granddaughter of slain Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, was very proud of herself this week for making a pilgrimage to Ramallah to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Rothman, whose famous eulogy at her grandfather’s funeral in 1995 became a worldwide tear-jerker, recently joined former prime minister Ehud Barak’s new party, which merged with Meretz to become the Democratic Union. Though polls suggest that she has little-to-no-chance of becoming a member of Knesset after the September 17 election, since her placement at No. 9 puts her well below the five seats predicted for the left-wing faction, her particular claim to fame gives her party a PR advantage. Or does it?

During the 25 years since Rabin and his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, won a joint Nobel Prize with PLO chief Yasser Arafat for “their efforts to create peace in the Middle East,” Israel has been plagued by an ongoing Palestinian war of attrition against the Jewish state.

Opponents of the very Oslo Accords that created the PA knew all along that Arafat had not changed his terrorist stripes. Indeed, anyone who wasn’t living in la-la land realized that the so-called “peace agreements” were simply a sophisticated stage in the PLO leader’s “plan of phases” to annihilate Israel.