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Bolsonaro’s Election Indicates Brazil Can Be An Anti-Socialist Ally Plagued by populist, left-wing regimes for too long, Brazilians have elected Jair Bolsonaro. Here’s why that’s great news for the rest of Latin America.By Sumantra Maitra

Posted By on January 11th, 2019

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/11/bolsonaros-election-indicates-brazil-can-anti-socialist-ally/

Brazil might not be perfect, but their recent elections provide a chance at political recalibration in Latin America. Washington shouldn’t miss such an opportunity.

Peter Beinart recently wrote a bizarre article in The Atlantic, which blamed the rise of right-wing populists across the world as a reaction to feminism and women’s rights. The central thesis of the essay is so patently absurd, it barely needs any refutation. It is the type of social science garbage you can find in any sociology or gender studies paper.

For example, Beinart cites Valerie Hudson of Texas A&M University with an insane claim bereft of any evidence stating that the history of humanity is men agreeing to be ruled by other men in return for all men ruling over women. This is, of course, politically, biologically, and historically absurd, as no such global understanding existed at any point of history. Humanity rarely evolved in a similar fashion all over the globe — otherwise there wouldn’t be Valerie Hudson teaching at a university, and Texas would have looked like Islamic State-controlled Raqqa, in Syria.

Beinart takes his argument to its logical extreme, cherry-picking quotes and tying it up with populist movements across the world, hinting that all populism is inherently misogynist. Beinart never seeks to explain why Germany’s right-wing AFD is currently ruled by Alice Weidel––a lesbian former Goldman Sachs banker––who has a Sinhalese partner and has rallied her country against mass Islamic immigration, or that the significant majority of supporters of Swedish, Danish, and Finnish right-wing parties are female, increasingly afraid of rising sexual assaults and street crimes. I could carry on, but for a terrific takedown, please read my colleague here.

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The House of Memes By Daniel Foster

Posted By on January 11th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/01/28/the-house-of-memes/
Nobody knows what AOC will be or what she will do with a House seat that could very well stay hermetically sealed from competition for the next 50 years.

She’s a maniac, maniac, on the floor!
And she’s dancing like she’s never danced before!

I’m breaking my own rule in writing this column. Because as soon as everyone started referring to freshman New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by her initials “AOC,” I swore to myself I wouldn’t write about her.

Initials have become a thing with progressive lady icons. There’s the “Notorious R.B.G.,” a play on ’90s gangster-rap martyr Notorious B.I.G., whose persona (and person) stand at some mathematical maximum distance from Justice Ginsburg’s; and, more recently, House Democratic-caucus chairman Hakeem Jeffries’s announcement as he rose to nominate “Nancy D’Alesandro Pelosi” for speaker that “House Democrats are down with NDP.”

Itself a hip-hop homage to the Naughty by Nature song “Down with OPP,” this too is a headscratcher of an association. Be­cause the song isn’t, as you are surely thinking, a call to overthrow the Ontario Provincial Police, but a carnal appreciation of “Other People’s P***ies” (think the pink hats or the Access Hollywood tape).

But I digress. The point is, once the chattering class crowned Ocasio-Cortez as “AOC” before she was even sworn in — hell, before she even won — I knew that the mainstream coverage would only get more fawning, and the backlash from the Right even more virulent. And I knew the world didn’t need one more shmuck with a laptop weighing in.

So here’s 600 more words!

There’s a kind of uniquely digital-age vicious cycle at work. Ocasio-Cortez is young and attractive and charismatic, and of course “intersectional,” and her election flatters the self-conception of all the right people. So it’s natural that she’d get outsized attention, including for her dorm-room ideas on sundry policy topics. I joined many in finding this attention annoying, which in turn led, with some justice, to meta-coverage about how she drives the Right crazy! Which in turn I found more annoying still. Run this dynamic through umpteen iterations and you get way less justice and way more meta.

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Fellow Dems Chastise Ocasio-Cortez: ‘She Doesn’t Understand How the Place Works’ By Jack Crowe

Posted By on January 11th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-chastized-not-understanding-how-congress-works/

Veterans of the Democratic establishment, unsettled by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s lack of deference to seniority and party unity, have cautioned the freshman lawmaker to direct her potent social-media attacks toward Republicans rather than centrist Democrats.

“I’m sure Ms. Cortez means well, but there’s almost an outstanding rule: Don’t attack your own people,” Representative Emmanuel Cleaver (D., Mo.) told Politico. “We just don’t need sniping in our Democratic Caucus.”

Since upsetting six-term incumbent Joe Crowley in a primary last summer and winning election to Crowley’s old seat in November, Ocasio-Cortez has used her immense social-media following to chastise fellow Democrats she believes are insufficiently progressive and too beholden to the antiquated establishment. The 29-year-old’s zealous confrontations with more senior lawmakers, which she appears to have dialed back in recent weeks, have drawn the consternation of those concerned about the potential for her to splinter the party.

“I think she needs to give herself an opportunity to know her colleagues and to give herself a sense of the chemistry of the body before passing judgment on anyone or anything,” said Representative Yvette Clarke (D., N.Y.).

“She’s new here, feeling her way around,” said Representative Kurt Schrader (D., Ore.). “She doesn’t understand how the place works yet.”

In responding to the Politico article Friday morning, Ocasio-Cortez quoted a character from the comic book Watchmen to signal her intention to resist the influence of more experienced lawmakers.Ocasio-Cortez was denied a seat on the influential Ways and Means committee this week despite a public pressure campaign launched by progressive advocacy groups. The former bartender, who joined a climate-change protest in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office during her freshman congressional orientation, also demanded the creation of a specific committee to further the implementation of a so-called “green new deal,” but was refused that as well.

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Trump and U.S. Civil–Military Relations — the Generals Aren’t Always Right By Mackubin Thomas Owens

Posted By on January 11th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/trump-civil-military-relations-tensions/Tensions between the two sectors are woven into the fabric of the American republic.

As Tom Nichols, my friend and former colleague at the Naval War College, noted recently in The Atlantic, Americans don’t often think about civil-military relations, and that’s a good thing. It means that paratroopers are not normally seizing communications centers, and tanks aren’t rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol.

But since U.S. civil–military relations are generally healthy, when Americans do talk about them, they often do so in apocalyptic terms. Each example of civil–military tensions, it seems, portends a crisis. Nichols’s essay is a case in point: President Trump, he writes,

has taken a dangerous path, excoriating retired military leaders who criticize him and lavishing praise and make-believe pay raises on the active-duty military voters who he believes support him. A precious heritage built on the dual pillars of military obedience to civilians and civilian respect for military professionals is now at severe risk.

Someone reading that essay would have to conclude that, under Trump, U.S. civil–military relations have entered a unique period of crisis.

But that is not the case. To understand why, it is useful to understand that U.S. civil–military relations can best be described as a bargain among three parties: the uniformed military, civilian policymakers, and the American people. Periodically, in response to social, political, technological, and geopolitical changes, this bargain must be renegotiated. In this case, as in many previous ones, what seems to be a crisis is more likely a transition as the civil–military bargain is in the process of being renegotiated.

There is no question that many of Trump’s actions, including his excoriation of some retired generals and flag officers critical of him, as well as his dismissive remarks about Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis after effusively praising him when the latter resigned, have inflamed civil–military tensions. But the 2016 presidential campaign should have made it clear that Trump’s approach to the military would be unconventional.

During that campaign, Donald Trump slammed the leadership of the U.S. military, claiming that “the generals under Barack Obama have not been successful. Under the leadership of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the generals have been reduced to rubble, reduced to a point where it is embarrassing for our country.” He implied that, as president, he would replace Obama’s military leadership with generals and admirals who would not subordinate military effectiveness to “political correctness.”

HISTORY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Golan Heights mean more than security for Israel Not just for Israeli security, but for Biblical and Ancestral Jewish Sovereignty, the Golan Heights must be recognized as Israeli territory by the US. Victor Sharpe

Posted By on January 11th, 2019

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/23280

On Sunday, January 5th, 2019, Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, requested visiting U.S. National Security Advisor, John Bolton, to seek Washington’s long delayed recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights. In doing so Netanyahu stressed the vital security importance of the Heights. He told Bolton that, “When you are there, you’ll be able to understand perfectly why we will never leave the Golan Heights and why it is important that all countries recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.”

Indeed, those of us who have stood on the Golan’s 1,700 foot steep escarpment, are struck by its immense strategic value overlooking Israel’s fertile Hula Valley and the beautiful harp shaped lake below, called in Hebrew, Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee) because of its unique shape.

Syria had occupied it for 44 years during which time no agriculture of any significance or restoration of its terrain ever took place. Instead, the Golan was a Syrian army artillery encampment whose sole purpose was to deliberately rain down an endless barrage of shells upon Israeli farmers, fishermen and villagers .

Israel’s liberation of the Golan in 1967 has lasted 52 years. Ask yourself then, who has possessed the Golan the longest and who has millennial historic, religious, Biblical and post-Biblical attachment to it? And it is that last reference to the ancestral and Biblical attachment to the Golan that must be included as an imperative and crucial component of Israel’s and the Jewish people’s claim.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Trump Must Build Missile Defenses to Defeat Existential EMP Threats By Henry F. Cooper

Posted By on January 11th, 2019

https://www.newsmax.com/henryfcooper/electromagnetic-pulse-emp-iran-north-korea/2019/01/08/id/897356/

We urgently need effective ballistic missile defense (BMD) systems to protect Americans from an existential electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threat posed by a nuclear explosion high in or above the atmosphere.

We know from authoritative sources that such an attack would shut down our unhardened electric power grid for an indefinite period. Without electricity, most Americans would die within months from starvation, disease, and societal collapse that would inevitably follow without just-in-time delivery of food and other vital goods.

This threat can be delivered by Russia, China, North Korea and probably Iran — and possibly terrorists who gain nuclear weapons (by hook or crook) and use Scuds costing a few million dollars to launch such an attack from off-shore vessels.

That Russia and China pose this threat is well known; less so is the threat from the other three potential sources.

Nevertheless, the Congressional EMP Commission learned from Russian generals fifteen years ago that how to build low-yield “Super EMP” nuclear weapons was passed to North Korea — and Iranian scientists have reportedly attended and/or observed North Korea’s low yield nuclear tests.

Thus, North Korea and Iran both pose an EMP threat to the American people — and they (or Russia or China) could hire terrorists to launch such an attack from vessels off our coasts. Our defense is poor at best against this threat, which may well now exist.

Iran conducted a possible “dry run” test from a vessel in the Caspian Sea in the late 1990s, has many proven ballistic missiles, and could be armed with nuclear weapons derived from their long standing cooperation with their ally North Korea that has several tens of nuclear weapons.

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Ruthie Blum; The Anyone but Bibi Bluster

Posted By on January 11th, 2019

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-anybody-but-bibi-camps-bluster/

When Tzipi Livni and her ilk try to promote the idea that Netanyahu is a greater danger to Israel than Islamist missiles and butcher knives covered in Jewish blood, most of us just sigh and yawn.

In a typical tirade against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu on Tuesday, Hatnua Party chair Tzipi Livni said, “No leader in Israel has the right to destroy everything we have built here for his own personal needs.”

Referring to Netanyahu’s televised address to the nation on Monday evening, Livni—still stinging from her sudden ouster by Labor Party leader Avi Gabbay as head of the Zionist Union opposition bloc—added, “That’s what he does on prime time.”

Livni was not alone in lambasting Netanyahu for causing the country to spend three hours speculating about the “dramatic announcement” he was going to deliver, and then treating viewers to a complaint that he is not being given a fair shake by the legal system.

It was a disappointing display. Rumors had been rampant of imminent war, the possible release of Israelis in Hamas captivity or potential U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The letdown, then, was enormous.

More importantly, it provided “anybody but Bibi” politicians and members of the media with the perfect opportunity to accuse Netanyahu of hijacking the airways to make a case for his innocence in a number of corruption cases for which he is being investigated. Channel 10 went as far as to cut off the prime minister’s remarks in the middle and resume its regular news broadcast.

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CNN’s Acosta Confirms Walled Part of the Border Is Crisis-Free

Posted By on January 11th, 2019

https://freebeacon.com/uncategorized/cnns-acosta-confirms-walled-part-of-the-border-is-crisis-free/

CNN reporter Jim Acosta confirmed no crisis existed along a walled portion of the U.S.-Mexico border during a visit Thursday.

In a video shared to Twitter, Acosta pointed to “some of the steel slats that the president’s been talking about.” Walking along the border in McAllen, Texas, Acosta noted that the president has warned of a national emergency at the unwalled portion of the southern border. Acosta observed that this emergency did not exist along the portion of the border that had already been secured with steel slats.

“As we’re walking along here we’re not saying any kind of imminent danger,” he remarked, patting the border barrier with his hand as he filmed himself. “There are no migrants trying to rush towards this fence.”

President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to “build the wall” and secure the border. Though the rate has decreased in recent years, hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals cross the southern border into the United States every year.

Democrats have refused to provide funding for the president’s border wall, though many have voted for it as part of larger immigration bills in the past. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) jokingly offered the president one dollar for the wall and called it immoral. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), have refused to accommodate Trump’s wish to build a border wall.

“He is not going to get the wall in any form,” Schumer said last month. Some Democrats, like Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.), have agreed that “enhanced fencing” would in fact help secure the border. The estimated cost is between $2-5.7 billion dollars.

In an address to the nation from the oval office Tuesday, Trump stopped short of declaring a federal emergency to secure unilateral authority to fund the wall. Now in its twentieth day, the government shutdown is approaching the longest of its kind in American history.

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Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Trump?Edward Cranswick

Posted By on January 11th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/01-02/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-trump/

While some folks talk a big game about principles, what they really prefer is someone socking it to their enemies. Donald Trump won in 2016 because he could be relied on to punch every conceited political moraliser and mediocre pseudo-intellectual who attempted to stand in his way.

Fear: Trump in the White House
by Bob Woodward
Simon & Schuster, 2018, 448 pages, $45
______________________________

Bob Woodward’s account of the Trump White House, provocatively titled Fear, is not a very interesting book. For one thing, the title is grandiose, and is predicated on the fallacious assumption that the best way to understand Donald Trump is to take him at his word. The back of the dust-jacket provides the quotation from which the title is drawn, a remark Trump made (one of a whirlwind of contradictory and context-pandering remarks) during the 2016 campaign: “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear.”

Naturally, the book’s marketers were probably trying to play up the image of Trump the authoritarian strongman, possibly even a fascist, a recurrent fantasy that those with little political acumen relish in peddling. As others have pointed out, such tough-guy talk from Trump actually springs from an adolescent desire to play the tough guy (his favourite film is reputedly The Godfather), and so he places a premium on words like respect and fear and—my favourite of his rare terms of adulation—tough cookie.

This review appears in the current edition of Quadrant.
Click here to subscribe and avoid the paywall

Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury had the first-in-best-dressed quality of confirming our worst fears about Trump—his inherent ridiculousness, his abnormal inattentiveness, and his propensity to take as most valuable the advice he received most recently. So Woodward has nothing new to offer here.

Woodward’s prose is clear but leaden. He’s less a writer than a conduit for information (which isn’t the worst thing in the world: boring and clear writing is often necessary, but it hardly makes for engrossing reading).

Fundamentally, there’s nothing I read in Fear that I felt I didn’t already know—with the exception of the information regarding Trump’s inability to grasp the linkage between trade policy and foreign policy. The book opens with a terrifying account of Trump’s near foreign-policy debacle in demanding to withdraw from the KORUS free-trade agreement between the United States and South Korea. As is so often the case in foreign affairs, economic relationships are part of the quid pro quo that goes into securing a profitable strategic military position in a country. Abandon KORUS and you risk compromising a key strategic foothold in the Korean peninsula—a foothold essential to the United States’ early detection of nuclear operations by the North.

But even here, my assumption before and throughout the Trump presidency is that his worst behaviour will be circumscribed by the often eminently sensible team of advisers he has around him, chiefly Jim Mattis (thankfully, Trump is more than usually deferential when it comes to men in uniform) but many others, too.

Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, is an amusing character in the book, stealing documents off Trump’s desk when he thought it better that The Donald didn’t see them, as in the KORUS case, where Trump had a draft letter on his desk signalling withdrawal from the agreement:

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Tlaib, the Democratic Party, and Jew-Hate The Democrats’ silence in the face of vile comments by one of their own. Ari Lieberman

Posted By on January 11th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272496/tlaib-democratic-party-and-jew-hate-ari-lieberman

It’s fair to say that ex-congressman John Conyers (D, Mi.), who represented Michigan’s 13th district, was not a good guy. The octogenarian congressman willingly attended Farrakhan gatherings, signed on to anti-Israel legislation and was eventually forced to resign amid a string sexual harassment allegations. It’s also fair to say that his replacement, Rashida Tlaib, who identifies as “Palestinian,” is a walking train wreck by comparison.

In the hours following her inauguration, Tlaib demanded Trump’s impeachment, called him a “mother f*cker,” admitted that she used this language in front of her child, displayed a map in which the State of Israel was replaced with “Palestine,” insinuated that U.S. Jews maintain dual loyalties (this coming from a woman who draped herself in a “Palestinian” flag and garb during her inauguration) and implied that U.S. politicians are controlled by Israel.

This behavior is to be expected from someone like Tlaib, whose unhinged anti-Israel and anti-Semitic vitriol is well known. In fact, Tlaib is so anti-Israel that even the anti-Israel J Street withdrew support for her. What is surprising is the Democratic Party’s near-complete silence on the matter. The calumny of dual loyalty is nearly as old as antisemitism itself and is regurgitated with banal regularity by conspiracy theorists on the hard-right and left. Former KKK leader David Duke and Tlaib find common ground on this matter. Tlaib’s ally, the Farrakhan-supporting Linda Sarsour recently invoked the same anti-Semitic trope.

So why have Democrats remained silent? Why have they not issued a full-throated condemnation of Tlaib’s vile comments? There are three likely explanations, which are not mutually exclusive and often overlap.

First, many Democrats suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, which prevents them from assessing serious matters, such as antisemitism, in rational terms. Tlaib is anti-Semitic to her core but because she is a Trump hater, she’s given a free pass. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) falls into this category. She showered Linda Sarsour with praise despite Sarsour’s odious past and ties to Farrakhan. Gillibrand’s hatred of Trump is so deep-seated that she will choose to pair up and find common cause with sordid characters who share her pedantic views on Trump.