NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Once ‘Golden State’ Is Badly Tarnished By Janet Levy

Posted By on September 12th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/the_once_golden_state_is_badly_tarnished.html

With crime soaring, rampant homelessness, sanctuary state status attracting the highest illegal immigrant population in the country and its “worst state in the U.S. to do business” ranking for more than a decade, California and its expansive, debt-ridden, progressive government is devolving into a third-world country. In cities such as San Francisco, public defecation is legal, drug use is flagrant, and tent cities are designated biohazards. In once pristine San Diego, contractors have been spraying down homeless encampments with household bleach to stave off a hepatitis A epidemic. The so-called “Golden State,” which now has the highest poverty rate in the nation, is tarnished beyond recognition with such serious problems that the sublime climate and striking coastline may no longer be enough to sustain its reputation and cachet. With laws that benefit criminals and illegals, big government that endeavors to control every aspect of residents’ lives from plastic bags to straws; sanctioned street, tent, and vehicle dwelling; and an unaffordable overhyped bullet train boondoggle that will cost taxpayers almost $100 billion, California is headed for economic disaster.

Rising Crime

In the past few years, California has instituted criminal justice reform legislation and initiatives, ostensibly to reduce budget expenditures and prison overcrowding, which has led invariably to the release of more criminals into the state’s population.

Proposition 47, a referendum passed in 2014, reclassified certain drug possession felonies to misdemeanors and required misdemeanor sentencing for theft when the amount involved is $950 or less. Drug possession for personal use is now considered a misdemeanor.
Proposition 57, a statewide ballot proposition passed in 2016, changed parole policies for those convicted of nonviolent felonies. But the proposition failed to define “nonviolent crimes”. The result was that those committing “nonviolent” crimes such as rape of an unconscious or intoxicated person, assault of a police office, domestic violence, hostage taking, drive-by shootings, and human trafficking of a child became eligible for early parole based on a paper review in lieu of a parole hearing.
Assembly Bill 1448 and Assembly Bill 1308 allow for the early release of prisoners who are 60 years or older who have served at least 25 years of their sentence and prisoners who committed crimes at least 25 years or younger who have served at least 15 years, respectively. Both were signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown in 2017.

BOOKS Comments turned off

This Politically Incorrect Feminist Was in the Room Making it Happen By Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Posted By on September 12th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/this-politically-incorrect-feminist-was-in-the-room-making-it-happen/

To paraphrase the Broadway hit Hamilton: Phyllis Chesler was not only in the room where it happened, she was often the one in the room making it happen. “it” in this case refers to second-wave feminism, and Chesler was at its epicenter. A Politically Feminist: Creating a Movement with B*tches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors, and Wonder Women (St. Martin’s Press) is the latest of her 18 books. It is a movement’s memoir as well as a personal history.

The first feminist wave, from the 19th to the early 20th century, focused on eliminating legal bars to women’s equality: the legal rights to vote, to own property, and to be admitted to the professions. Even after these victories, however, women were still not secure physically, financially, or intellectually. The balance of power in their relationships with men – in the workplace, in marriage, and in control over reproduction — was wildly unfair.

Chesler’s latest book recounts the war to change all that. It sketches the marches for equal rights, protests against objectification by men, “bra-burnings” (a misnomer), the unheard-of demand that women’s mental health be judged under a female standard, and the sometimes successful wresting of control from the “male patriarchy” over what happens with, to, and by women. Chesler was there, driving and directing many of these campaigns. She chronicles these feminist firsts with a “you are there” immediacy and searing insight into the characters on the stage. Chesler also shows us that, for this revolution as for so many others, the individual ambitions and fears of the movement’s leaders had a tremendous impact on its victories and failures. And a huge impact on Chesler herself.

As a guide to the feminist movement, Chesler was positioned perfectly: intellectually (degrees in literature, graduate work in brain science, and a doctorate in psychology), chronologically (came of age in the late 50s) and geographically (New York City, naturally, the center-of-the-universe) for that wild ride on the Second Wave of Feminism.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The immoral foreign policy of the “Resistance”Caroline Glick

Posted By on September 12th, 2018

http://carolineglick.com/the-immoral-foreign-policy-of-the-resistance/

One of the constant themes of the “Resistance” — most recently restated in the New York Times’ anonymous op-ed Wednesday — is that President Donald Trump is “amoral” because he is interested in cultivating good relations with dictators.

In the words of the anonymous op-ed author: “In public and in private, President Trump shows a preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.”

Notably, this is the same line used by the Israeli left and by Israel’s many critics in the West against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s foreign policy.

There are two aspects of this criticism that are worth pointing out.

First, the criticisms are utterly hypocritical.

The same “Resistance” howling about Trump’s desire to forge a détente with Russia based on a shared interest in fighting Islamic terrorists and preventing Iran from becoming the nuclear hegemon of the Middle East once bent over backwards to empower Iran. They gave the ayatollahs a clear path to a nuclear weapon, as well as $150 billion to finance their wars in Syria and Yemen, and their global terror attacks.

The same Never Trump Republicans attacking Trump for his efforts to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula without war happily supported then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Riceas she cut a deal that only empowered Pyonyang.

The Obama administration alumni who now insist that Putin is America’s number-one enemy did everything they could to appease him – in exchange for nothing — for years.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

God Said, ‘Be Fruitful and Multiply’ Israelis are taking Genesis 1:28 seriously. The Jewish state’s fertility rate is 3.1, far above replacement. Robert C. Hamilton

Posted By on September 12th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/god-said-be-fruitful-and-multiply-1536705344

I was heading for the final leg of my flight to Tel Aviv when something curious happened. As I crossed the Brussels airport, I was joined by other travelers. At each corridor, the crew swelled in size. Kippah-capped men carrying heavy briefcases, young couples wearing Star-of-David embroidered backpacks, older Hasidic rabbis who looked like Moses, families with infants in strollers and several toddlers trudging behind—we were all heading to the same place.

At the gate, I felt as if I’d crashed a family party. A couple of young boys zipped through the crowd on scooters like dive-bombers on a mission, with tzitzis (knotted fringes) and peyes (long side-curls) flying in the air.

Where I had started, the airport was hushed and gray, a space designed for efficiency. Its unadorned industrial motif was utilitarian, if not nihilistic. At my departure gate, I found a vibrant and chaotic scene, alive with color, noise and frolicking kids. I relaxed. As a pediatrician, I recognized the messiness; I work in that universe each day.

My experience vividly displayed how two countries, Belgium and Israel, view children. Israel treasures them. According to a 2018 report from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the fertility rate for Israeli women stands at a robust 3.1, nearly double the level of most European nations. The Belgian fertility rate is 1.7, well below the replacement rate of 2.1.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

DISPATCHES FROM TOM GROSS-MP OF PALESTINIAN DESCENT CONDEMNS CORBYNITE POSTERS AS “BLATANTLY ANTI-SEMITIC”

Posted By on September 12th, 2018

https://wp.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/
MP OF PALESTINIAN DESCENT CONDEMNS CORBYNITE POSTERS AS “BLATANTLY ANTI-SEMITIC”

Britain’s first MP of Palestinian descent told the BBC that the defacing of London bus-stops with “Israel is a racist endeavour” posters was “blatantly anti-Semitic”.

Layla Moran, the Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford West and Abingdon, said: “I’m a Palestinian. The fact that this has come from a group that purportedly is speaking for Palestinians, I take great offence at myself, because I think it is blatantly anti-Semitic.”

Moran was responding to comments by Labour Shadow Chancellor and key Corbyn ally John McDonnell who had told the BBC “It is not at all anti-Semitic to describe Israel as a state as racist.”

The posters were meant to mock the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of Jew-hate, which says that comparing Israel to Nazi Germany or singling out only one country, Israel, and calling it “a racist endeavor” are examples of modern anti-Semitism.
MUSLIM MAYOR OF MONDAY CONDEMNS ANTI-ISRAEL POSTERS

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, condemned the “Israel hate” posters on the city’s bus stops as “offensive” and said that any posters found would be rapidly removed.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Education Dept. Reopens Rutgers Case Charging Discrimination Against Jewish Students By Erica L. Green

Posted By on September 12th, 2018

The new head of civil rights at the Education Department has reopened a seven-year-old case brought by a Zionist group against Rutgers University, saying the Obama administration, in closing the case, ignored evidence that suggested the school allowed a hostile environment for Jewish students. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/11/us/politics/rutgers-jewish-education-civil-rights.html

The move by Kenneth L. Marcus, the assistant secretary of education for civil rights and a longtime opponent of Palestinian rights causes, signaled a significant policy shift on civil rights enforcement — and injected federal authority in the contentious fights over Israel that have divided campuses across the country. It also put the weight of the federal government behind a definition of anti-Semitism that targets opponents of Zionism, and it explicitly defines Judaism as not only a religion but also an ethnic origin.

And it comes after the Trump administration moved the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, moved to cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority and announced the closing of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Washington.

In a letter to the Zionist Organization of America, obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Marcus said he would vacate a 2014 decision by the Obama administration and re-examine the conservative Jewish group’s cause not as a case of religious freedom but as possible discrimination against an ethnic group.

In so doing, the Education Department embraced Judaism as an ethnicity and adopted a hotly contested definition of anti-Semitism that included “denying the Jewish people the right to self-determination” by, for example, “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards by requiring of” Israel “a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

In effect, Arab-American activists say, the government is declaring the Palestinian cause anti-Semitic.

POLITICS Comments turned off

PRIMARY IS TOMORROW- ROBERT ROSENTHAL (D)FOR CIVIL COURT JUDGE- NYC DISTRICT 2

Posted By on September 11th, 2018

Robert Rosenthal for Civil Court Judge in 2018-

For 27 years, I have fought for justice on behalf of people who are under appreciated and overlooked. My work has been difficult, but rewarding. I look forward to a new phase of my career as a judge, in which I can continue to pursue justice from the bench.”

He would be a real asset to the bench in New York….rsk

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

“Political Islam” and “Extremist” Terrorism By Rachel Ehrenfeld

Posted By on September 11th, 2018

http://acdemocracy.org/political-islam-and-extremist-terrorism/
Seventeen years since al Qaeda terrorists used passenger airplanes to attack New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Western-style liberal democracies are failing to recognize the radical Islamist threat. While, as former President Obama reminds us, “we took out [Osama] bin Laden,” neither he, nor most Western leaders have taken measures to identify the ideological underpinning that fuel radical Islamists the world over, which to make things more difficult disguises itself as just another political movement, i.e., Political Islam. But President Trump did not hesitate to call a spade a spade. He condemned “radical Islamic Terrorism” when addressing the 9/11 memorial service in Shanksville, PA, commemorating the brave passengers of Flight 93, who crashed the plane, to prevent the al Qaeda terrorists from hitting Capitol Hill.

The failure to name the jihadist is caused by an unwillingness to identify the seditious nature of Political Islam has prevented Western-style democracies to defend and counter the harmful rise of radical Islam. This failure has been hastened by the imposition of “political correctness” by leaders of the global Progressive Left movement, branding every attempt to identify the Islamist threat and stop it, as hateful, racist, and incredibly even Anti-Semitic.

The latest sad evidence of the failure to identify the jihadist ideology as the basis for Islamist terrorism is the first report of the Congressional mandated Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States, titled: “Beyond the Homeland: Protecting America from Extremism in Fragile States.” The bi-partisan committee was headed by the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission, Rep. Lee Hamilton, and Gov. Thomas Kean, who once again, failed to identify the jihadist ideology that fuels “extremism.” Instead, the report concluded that “A comprehensive preventive strategy should target both the conditions and the actors that fuel violent extremism, focusing on alleviating real and perceived injustice; fostering political inclusion; curbing the spread and appeal of extremist ideology; and containing the spread of extremist groups.” Nothing about jihad or political Islam.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Opposition to the president is not treason By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on September 11th, 2018

http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/405948-opposition-to-the-president-is-not-treason

POTUS ≠ US. It is a simple formula. If President Trump and his core supporters would internalize it, they’d be well served.

The presidency of the United States is the most significant, most powerful single office in our constitutional government. But, all the same, the president is a public servant. He is not the sovereign; we are. He represents the nation; he does not embody it.

Consequently, a betrayal of the president’s trust is not a betrayal of the country. It is dangerous to confound these two things.
The president is extremely agitated about an anonymous New York Times op-ed, penned by what the Gray Lady describes as “a senior official in the Trump administration.” I don’t blame him. The piece, in which the author brags about being part of a faction resisting the president from within, is dishonorable.

For an executive officer with integrity, there is a simple choice. If you object to the policies of an administration, or if you find the character of the president so objectionable that you have difficulty carrying out his directives, you can either (a) remain in the administration, do your best to veer the president toward policies you believe are in the nation’s interest, and then faithfully execute his lawful directives regardless of whether you agree with them; or (b) resign your position and engage in the public debate — in your own name, not in craven anonymity.

The official who authored the op-ed took the coward’s way out. He or she did not just betray the president. To the extent this self-serving preen has prompted a predictable presidential tirade and internal investigation, the author also has betrayed the selfless, patriotic administration officials who, every day, work diligently to govern and to pursue America’s best interests.

Moreover, the author has confirmed the indictment long lodged by Trump supporters: There is an entrenched “deep state” working against the president. Euphemizing it as the “steady state,” as Anonymous does, fails to camouflage the nature of the “Resistance.” And posturing about how the “steady state” beats back the president’s worst impulses does not conceal its imperious claim to be a permanent, unaccountable regime.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Top Five Ways Obama Attacked the Free Press By Matt Margolis

Posted By on September 11th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-top-five-ways-obama-attacked-the-free-press/

It’s been over a year and a half since Obama left office, but it still bothers me hearing him speak. Between his trying to take credit for the Trump economy or his claim that he, unlike Trump, didn’t “threaten the freedom of the press,” it’s hard not to get angry when he speaks because virtually everything he says is a lie. His trying to take credit for Trump’s economy was pathetic, but his claim that he was not an enemy of the free press deserves to be called out.

“It shouldn’t be Democratic or Republican to say that we don’t threaten the freedom of the press because — they say things or publish stories we don’t like,” Obama said during his speech at the University of Illinois. “I complained plenty about Fox News, but you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them ‘enemies of the people.’” Obama certainly had his issues with Fox News. Newsweek actually described the conflict between them as “a war.” But, Obama’s war with the media wasn’t limited to Fox News. Obama’s treatment of the media as a whole was so bad that New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan criticized the Obama administration in 2013 for its “unprecedented secrecy and unprecedented attacks on a free press.” David E. Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, said of the Obama administration in 2013, “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.” According to a report on press freedoms by the highly respected Committee to Protect Journalists, “In the Obama administration’s Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press.”

It’s hard to imagine, given how positive the media was toward Obama, that his administration could be so antagonistic toward them. But the evidence that Obama was an enemy of the free press is astounding. The left-leaning media today may be calling Trump’s attacks on the media unprecedented, but they pale in comparison to what happened during the Obama years. Here are five examples of Obama’s attacks on the free press.