IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

William Barr says he sees legal way to add citizenship question to 2020 census

Posted By on July 9th, 2019

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/barr-census-citizenship-question-sees-legal-way-to-add-it/

Edgefield, S.C. — Attorney General William Barr said Monday he sees a way to legally require 2020 census respondents to declare whether or not they are citizens, despite a Supreme Court ruling that forbade asking the question.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Barr said the Trump administration will take action in the coming days that he believes will allow the government to add the controversial census query. Barr would not detail the plans, though a senior official said President Trump is expected to issue a memorandum to the Commerce Department instructing it to include the question on census forms.

The Supreme Court recently blocked the question, at least temporarily, saying the administration’s justification “seems to have been contrived.” That was a blow to Mr. Trump, who has been pressing for the government to demand information about citizenship.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s experts have said requiring such information would discourage immigrants from participating in the survey and result in a less accurate count. That in turn would redistribute money and political power away from Democratic-led cities where immigrants tend to cluster to whiter, rural areas where Republicans do well.

Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday that Mr. Trump wants to add the demand for citizenship information because he wants to “make America white again.”

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is replacing the legal team that has been pursuing Mr. Trump’s efforts, putting in place a new team consisting of both career and politically appointed attorneys.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

In Praise of Crowdfunding By Douglas Murray

Posted By on July 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/noah-carl-andy-ngo-in-praise-of-crowdfunding/

The deranging effects of tech are visible every day. But there are also positive aspects — among them a tool that strikes me as having many of the capabilities needed to restore some sanity to our times. I refer to the process of crowdfunding. In recent weeks I have been struck by the response to two crowdfunding efforts in particular, which are vital in different ways.

The first relates to the case of Andy Ngo, the young Portland-based journalist whom I wrote about here last week. Ngo, readers will remember, was recently assaulted by so-called “Antifa” in broad daylight as the police stood aside. In the hospital afterwards it became clear that he had suffered a brain hemorrhage, among other injuries. Another journalist immediately set up a crowdfunding site to try to help pay Ngo’s substantial medical bills and to replace the equipment that the Portland Antifa thugs had broken or stolen from him. The goal of that crowdfunding appeal was reached (and indeed exceeded) in a matter of days by American citizens and others horrified at what had been allowed to happen on their streets.

Now another crowdfunder has been set up, this time to launch legal proceedings against those responsible for assaulting the journalist. Among those who may be in the firing line of legal proceedings are not just the thugs who the authorities have allowed to run rampant through an American city, but also the authorities themselves. A link to the legal appeal can be found here.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Kentucky Democrat Amy McGrath Announces 2020 Challenge to McConnell By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on July 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kentucky-democrat-amy-mcgrath-announces-2020-challenge-to-mcconnell/

Kentucky Democrat Amy McGrath on Tuesday announced that she will run to unseat Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell in 2020.

The former Marine fighter pilot and mother of three, who lost her 2018 bid to defeat Republican representative Andy Barr, made her announcement in a video message posted to Twitter.

McGrath says in the video that she wrote a letter when she was 13 to McConnell, her senator, telling him she wanted to fly fighter jets in combat.

“He never wrote back,” McGrath says in the video. “I’ve often wondered, how many other people did Mitch McConnell never take the time to write back or even think about.”

“Everything that’s wrong with Washington had to start somewhere — it started with him,” she wrote in an accompanying tweet.

McGrath argued that “the things that Kentuckians voted for Trump for are not being done” thanks to McConnell, who she explained has blocked legislation his constituents supported, such as measures that would have lowered drug pricing.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

A Modest Immigration Proposal By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 9th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/progressive-colleges-can-house-illegal-immigrants-dorms/

College campuses have lots of empty housing during the summer. Proudly progressive institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Stanford should welcome illegal immigrants.

R epresentative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) believes that American detention centers that house illegal aliens — over 1 million illegal arrivals during the last six months alone — are similar to “concentration camps.” A storm of criticism met her historically fallacious comparisons. Ocasio-Cortez doubled down on her Hitlerian reference by pedantically claiming that she was referencing “concentration” rather than “death” camps, and thus despite sloganeering “Never Again,” with a wink and nod, she was supposedly not suggesting that Auschwitz was quite comparable to America’s border facilities.

She then doubled down again by visiting the border. On the basis of no evidence, she was soon claiming that detained illegal aliens were drinking out of toilets, as well as alleging that immigration officers met her social-welfare activism with rudeness and sexual innuendo.

Where to start with her abject historical ignorance?

One, America’s detention centers bear no resemblance to concentration camps of the past. Illegal aliens know that there is some chance that, after they enter the U.S. illegally, they may be apprehended and detained. If they really believed the conditions of their detention resembled “concentration camps,” which historically are scenes of mass death, they would never have come.

Millions of Russians by summer 1942 were not voluntarily flooding across German lines on the expectation that they’d survive, much less thrive, in Nazi “concentration camps.” The German public did not pressure the Nazi hierarchy to allow lawyers and counselors into Soviet POW camps. Boer children did not migrate to British territory on the rationale that their detention would be without hazard.

Certainly, undocumented immigrants — receiving, for example, “free” transgendered counseling and hormonal treatment while in American custody — do not resemble the inmates of “concentration camps.” American immigration authorities are trying to facilitate brief detentions and expedite both deportations and refugee hearings to curb the number of detainees. In exact opposite fashion, the wardens of concentration camps historically have wanted to lock up as many people as possible — not release them.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

THE TRUMP EFFECT: AMB. (RET.) YORAM ETTINGER

Posted By on July 9th, 2019

https://bit.ly/2S1WeHb

The initial two and a half years of President Trump’s national security policy have departed sharply from those of President Obama, his predecessor at the White House.

The nature of Trump’s national security policy may be assessed through the worldview of Vice President Mike Pence and the two most crucial appointments:Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was a “Tea Party” leader in the US House of Representatives, and National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has been a consistent advocate of a bolstered US posture of deterrence – in the face of rogue regimes and organizations – by flexing political, economic and military muscle. In 1991, it was Bolton who led the successful US campaign to revoke “Zionism is Racism” from UN records. Both Pompeo and Bolton have been consistent critics of Obama’s national security policy. 

The worldview of President Obama (and his Secretary of State, John Kerry) was shaped by the following principles:

1. No US moral, political, economic exceptionalism;

2. Preference of multinational – over unilateral – initiatives;

3. Considering the UN as a key factor in shaping the global arena;

4. Viewing non-assertive Western Europe as a role model;

5. Embracing the worldview of the State Department establishment, which has been persistently divorced from Middle East complexity (e.g., the “Arab Spring” illusion);

6. Adopting negotiation, reconciliation and containment as key tactics when dealing with rogue regimes (e.g., the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement);

7. Approaching rogue Islamic entities as potential allies rather than lethal opponents and enemies (e.g., “Islam has always been a part of the American Story,” Cairo, June 4, 2009);

8.  Playing down Islamic terrorism by designating the murder of 13 Fort Hood, TX, US soldiers by radical Muslim Major Nidal Hasan, as “workplace violence” (and later on, as “combat related casualties”), prohibiting the use of the term “Islamic terrorism;”

9. Defining the Palestinian issue as the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a core cause of Middle East turbulence and a crown-jewel of Arab policy-makers;

10. Assuming that a resolution – not management – of conflicts is a realistic option in the unpredictable, violent, intolerant, volcanic Middle East, which has never experienced long-term intra-Muslim peaceful coexistence.

 

MEDIA Comments turned off

Twice as Many Americans Have Confidence in Police than the Media Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on July 9th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/274246/twice-many-americans-have-confidence-police-media-daniel-greenfield

You might think that doesn’t mean much.

I have more confidence in your average schizophrenic homeless man screaming at ghosts than I do in the media. And you probably think I’m being too generous.

But the pattern here is that conservative institutions still tend to inspire more confidence than lefty ones.

Just three institutions — the military (73%), small business (68%) and the police (53%) — have garnered majority levels of confidence in all polls Gallup has conducted on each measure over the past two decades. The military has been the top-ranked institution or tied for the top-ranked institution each year since 1986.

Though 38% of Americans say they have confidence in the U.S. presidency, it is exceeded by the percentage of people who have very little or no confidence in this branch of government (44%), giving this institution a net-negative score.

Slightly more than a third of Americans also express confidence in the Supreme Court (38%), organized religion (36%) and the medical system (36%), while slightly less than a third have confidence in banks (30%), public schools (29%) and organized labor (29%).

Fewer than one in four Americans have confidence in the criminal justice system (24%), newspapers (23%) and big business (23%).

Americans have the least confidence in television news (18%) and Congress (11%). 

I wonder why.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The White Supremacist Bogeyman By Julie Kelly

Posted By on July 9th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/08/the-white-supremacist-bogeyman/

They are everywhere.

I am talking, of course, about white supremacists. The news media, Democrats, and NeverTrump Republicans would have us believe the country is under siege by a sinister cabal of Americans who want to return to the days of Jim Crow, or better yet, the era of slavery. Since the election of Donald Trump, white supremacists, we are warned, occupy the White House and control the Republican Party.

The signs are everywhere.

A MAGA hat is the new white hood. A common hand signal for “OK” actually is a way to send a message of solidarity to other white supremacists. So is drinking a glass of milk. Or owning a dog. Or selling an athletic shoe embossed with an American flag designed by Betsy Ross.

Public schools can now access a “toolkit” with lots of advice about how to combat the “rise” in white nationalism. (It is important to note that the terms “alt-right,” “white nationalist,” and “Nazi” are interchangeable with white supremacist.) Last March, Facebook announced “a ban on praise, support and representation of white nationalism and white separatism” and will offer its own kind of virtual intervention by “connecting people who search for terms associated with white supremacy to resources focused on helping people leave behind hate groups.”

White supremacists have an entire cable channel—Fox News—populated by white supremacists such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham who use coded language and dog whistles and whatnot to provoke their fellow klansmen. Don’t believe me? Well, certainly you will believe Representative Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), brother of Democratic presidential candidate Julian Castro, who flatly called Ingraham a “white supremacist” on Twitter last week after she compared the conditions at a migrant detention center to U.S. military facilities.

You can’t escape them. 

These fanatics have been spotted at the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and within the friendly confines of Wrigley Field. Restaurant owners are urged to banish them from their eateries while other Americans bravely confront these wannabe George Wallaces at barbecue joints in the nation’s capital. Trump-supporting knitters are censored on a popular website because, according to Ravelry, any “support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.”

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Questions the Candidates Must Answer And the one question that will expose those who actually hate you. Michael Cutler

Posted By on July 9th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274223/questions-candidates-must-answer-michael-cutler

The questioning of an individual in a formal setting comes in two forms, the initial question and the follow-up question(s). I compare this to boxing. The initial question is not unlike the jab while the follow-up question is like the punch to the jaw and may actually score the knockout.

During the first two Democratic Primary debates many issues were raised that actually have relevance to the immigration crisis, yet this connection was never made.

Inasmuch as the “war on terror” continues and the “all clear” has not sounded and is not likely to sound for quite some time, I would want to start out by asking each and every candidate for any significant political office, but particularly for the Presidency, if he/she had read the 9/11 Commission Report and the companion report, 9/11 and  Terrorist Travel in their entirety.

The 9/11 Commission was convened specifically to learn from our mistakes to protect America and Americans from future terror attacks.

The President of the United States is also the Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces and is also of all federal law enforcement agencies.

Any serious candidate for the Presidency must consider those reports to be “required reading.”

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Prager U Video: What is the Muslim Brotherhood? Exposing the organization’s plans within America.

Posted By on July 9th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274248/prager-u-video-what-muslim-brotherhood-prager-university

The Muslim Brotherhood is a dangerous organization, seeking to destroy Western civilization from within and to establish a global Islamic state. In this new Prager U video, Ami Horowitz exposes the organization’s plans within America. Don’t miss it!

ISRAEL Comments turned off

A Moral Philosopher’s Letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Leading the most beleaguered state on earth against the greatest threat to civilization. Jason Hill *****

Posted By on July 9th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274217/moral-philosophers-letter-prime-minister-benjamin-jason-d-hill

Jason D. Hill is a professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. He is the author of several books, including “We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People.”

Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu,

I write to you as an admirer; as a moral philosopher, and as an immigrant to America from Jamaica where part of my ancestral bloodline can be traced to a maternal great-grandfather who was a Sephardic Jew, and whose people came to Jamaica from Jerusalem via Portugal.

Your name as you know, means, “Given by God.” And so you have been offered up to  your people in historic Supreme leadership in your unprecedented role in serving as fifth-term Prime Minister of Israel. You hail from the line of the first three great Patriarchs of Israel and, like the first, Abraham, you have been singled out by God to lead your great state and exceptional civilization. Unlike Abraham, you do not have to flee your homeland. You only have to defend it ruthlessly and intransigently and, with moral implacability, protect it by any means necessary against those who have sworn your people as their eternal enemies, and who have codified in their charters a Jihadist roadmap to the destruction of your country and your people.  Like Abraham’s people, many of God’s chosen people have yet to accommodate themselves to you and your prophetic role as an historic figure. You, the patriarch of Israel, are a mouthpiece of the dead and a living producer of victories yet to come.

Jews have had a 3,300 year presence in the land of Israel. In your heroic years ahead, and in your historic fifth term as Prime of Israel, the task of preserving that homeland lies in the unyielding grip of your hands.  As much of Europe grows more anti-Semitic with each passing year and, as that most racist of institutions, The United Nations, along with Europe seem to stamp their moral approval upon the terrorist organizations of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, you face a lonely and daunting task in decisions you will  make in the self-defense of your country. You will, undoubtedly, act unilaterally and defiantly at times, and toss international approval where it belongs: into the dustbin where stale, musky racist detritus resides, and where the moral grammar of rights are not really up for grabs—they have been allocated to your sworn enemies while your state is deemed worthy of none. Indeed, when the United Nations tries to shame your country for defending itself against war crimes committed by Hamas by declaring that you ought to share your Iron Dome defense technology with the very terror group trying to kill your citizens, then there is now lower and egregiously shameful space of moral degradation that the United Nations can occupy. Let the world remember that Hamas has repeatedly shot more than 9,000 missiles and mortar rockets into Israel from Gaza since your state withdrew military forces from there in 2005.