WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Praising a Nazi Why exactly did the Trudeau-NDP axis do it? by Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on September 29th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/praising-a-nazi/

On September 22, after Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Canadian Parliament, Speaker Anthony Rota praised Yaroslav Hunka, 98, “who fought [for] the Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today.” The Speaker, a member of the Liberal Party, was a big fan.

“I’m proud to say that he [Hunka] is from North Bay and from my riding of Nipissing-Timiskaming” and according to Rota, Hunka “is a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and New Democratic Party (NDP) boss Jagmeet Singh joined Rota and their respective parties in honoring Hunka with two standing ovations. As Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and other Jewish groups pointed, Yaroslav Hunka was a strange sort of hero.

Hunka served under Nazi command with the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, a voluntary unit also known as the SS 14th Waffen Division or the First Ukrainian Division. During World War II, Hunka’s unit committed atrocities against the Polish resistance and in the village of Huta Pieniacka massacred adults and children alike. The International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg declared Hunka’s unit a criminal organization.

Canadians had a right to wonder what this Nazi was doing in Canada and how his murderous past remained hidden for so long. As the people might recall, key historical issues are in play.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

GOP Debate II: Déjà Vu All Under Again Bob Maistros

Posted By on September 29th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/28/gop-debate-ii-deja-vu-all-under-again/

EXCERPT

Who, as it happens, was the second challenger regressing from a widely hailed performance. In these parleys, participants – particularly women – must take care not to cross the fine line between strong and strident, and assertive versus annoying. The not-so-gentlelady from the Palmetto State all but obliterated it, coming across as weirdly bellicose even in otherwise well-considered asseverations on key issues, and outright boorish in continuously interrupting and attempting to drown out fellow candidates. 

As for beleaguered erstwhile veep Mike Pence, two (admittedly borrowed) words suffice: “low energy.” 

Which brings us to the similar outcome referenced above: the night’s winner, and by a wider margin than in the initial wrangle, was again Florida’s Ron DeSantis. The Sunshine State’s chief executive succeeded in his campaign’s priority: turning every opportunity into paeans to his splendid record at home – even three questions, on health insurance, education curricula and abortion, intended by the mostly overmatched moderators to knock him on his heels. 

DeSantis made good use of a “veto pen” as a prop in promoting his fiscal record in Florida, and pointed out to applause that he would be the first president since 1988 to have served overseas. 

He played peacemaker in various fracases, and took the pressure off the field in turning back the initial question on who should be “voted off the island” as “disrespectful.” 

He boasted a pair of those dreamy “defining moments.” One was his triumphal – and all-too-true – pronouncement that his success in having “gotten into big fights and delivered big victories for the people of Florida” has left “the Democratic Party … in ruins” in his state. 

But the evening’s climax came in a flurry of world-class counterpunching in response to a planned knockout punch on abortion. Instead of cowering, the governor seized the opportunity to tout his blowout reelection victory due to leading “with purpose and conviction.” Rejected the premise that pro-lifers were responsible for mid-term losses. Offered a full-throated defense of the pro-life position that included a quote engraved on The Gipper’s grave. And suggested that Republicans should hold Democrats accountable for their “extremism” on late-term abortion.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Biden’s Attack on Electricity: By Mario Loyola

Posted By on September 29th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/10/16/bidens-attack-on-electricity/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=third

Lights out

Marxism had many trappings of a religion. But fortunately, its major claims were of this world and could be falsified. Karl Marx argued that under capitalism, the living conditions of workers deteriorate and that only by seizing the means of production can they improve their lot. After a few generations of communism, nobody in Europe believed that anymore.

The climate-change movement has a similar vulnerability. Its religious trappings are plain enough: the attribution of natural catastrophes to human wickedness, revelations of the apocalypse, persecution of heretics. But at the end of the day its claims are material — and falsifiable.

With climate change, we are told, living conditions will deteriorate, and only by decarbonizing the economy can we avoid those losses. It may take several more generations to convince people one way or the other, but in the meantime there is a quick way to discredit the claim, and that is for government to implement a policy that is so costly and catastrophic in the near term that people generally start wondering whether climate policies might not be considerably more dangerous than climate change.

Such is the thin silver lining on President Biden’s latest round of climate policies, by far the most ambitious yet. In April, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed two rules that, if implemented simultaneously, would wreck America’s electricity grid. The first was vehicle-emissions standards that would require two-thirds of all vehicles made in America to be fully electric by 2032. That’s barely eight years from now. The second would require the large natural-gas and coal plants upon which the nation’s electricity depends for “baseload” power to adopt carbon-capture-and-storage technology (CSS) (in which carbon dioxide is removed from the power-plant exhaust by a chemical process, then transported by pipeline to be injected deep underground) or switch to “green” hydrogen (i.e., hydrogen produced by renewable sources) by 2038 at the latest.

Both rules rest on thin legal ice. For the vehicles rule, the EPA is defining each “class” of vehicle as including fully electric cars of the same size as the relevant combustion-engine vehicle; then it sets the emission standard so low that no combustion-powered car can possibly meet it. As a result, there is no way for carmakers to comply with the “fleet average” standards by improving emissions in their existing vehicles, as the Clean Air Act contemplates. Rather, carmakers will have to switch to producing fully electric vehicles (EVs), regardless of whether the charging infrastructure is in place and the grid can handle the ballooning demand. The Supreme Court insisted last year in West Virginia v. EPA that the Clean Air Act does not give the EPA power to require utilities to switch to different kinds of power plants; the same principle should apply to the engines in our automobiles.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Second Republican debate: Here’s the biggest winner and the biggest loser

Posted By on September 29th, 2023

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/second-republican-debate-biggest-winner-biggest-loser

Expectations are everything in life, and they certainly were key to the outcome of the second Republican debate held at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.

The winner of the evening was Gov. Ron DeSantis, for whom expectations were low. The audience was reminded of his achievements and why the Florida governor is running second in the GOP primary polls. 

Nikki Haley, from whom much was expected, failed to live up to her performance in the first debate, but held her own. 

Vivek Ramaswamy was not as annoying as in the first debate, but he has yet to show he is ready to be president. 

South Carolina Senator Tim Scott was more combative, as expected, but probably did not move the needle on his chances.

As for everybody else – with respect, it is time for Mike Pence, Chris Christie (seriously), and Doug Burgum to drop out of the race. Fewer contestants would mean less fighting for air time and less bickering; that would be a relief.

DeSantis had a great deal at stake coming into the second GOP debate. His polls have been slipping, he has made some mistakes in his campaign and he is widely viewed as unable to connect with voters.  

Helped by low expectations, DeSantis had a good night. He may not bounce in the polls, but he should have stopped the bleeding.  He trained his fire on Joe Biden, blaming the president (rightly) for too much government spending and for inflation; he also criticized former President Donald Trump, who again declined to participate in the GOP forum. 

Throughout the evening DeSantis pointed to his accomplishments in Florida – in education, the state is ranked number one, and Florida is also enjoying a 50-year low in crime, for instance. 

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

“Migration” by Sydney Williams

Posted By on September 29th, 2023

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“No nation in history has survived once its borders were destroyed, once its citizenship was rendered

no different from mere residence, and once its neighbors with impunity undermined its sovereignty.”

                    Victor Davis Hanson (1953-)                                                                                                                                             

Over two and a half million illegal migrants have crossed our southern border this fiscal year. Last week, 10,000 crossed into Eagle Pass, Texas, a city of fewer than 30,000. The United States is not alone in being inundated by swarms of migrants. On Italy’s island of Lampedusa, where 6,000 locals reside, 11,000 migrants arrived in five days last week. In the UK’s The Spectator, on the same date, Douglas Murray wrote: “Keep allowing people with no discernible asylum claims to land by the thousands, from a continent with hundreds of millions more to come, and you will be fêted. Stop the law-breaking and you will find yourself prosecuted.” Today, the problem of illegal immigration appears insoluble. It seems to be, as Churchill once said about Russia: “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” It is neither a mystery nor insoluble. But it is a problem political leaders in Washington and Brussels refuse to address honestly.

On one side, there are those who despair a humanitarian crisis – people living in utter poverty and under dictatorial regimes. These people are willing to accommodate victims (perceived or real) without reserve. On the other side are those willing to exercise any measure to keep out all illegal immigrants – a wall, armed guards, barbed wire, refusals to let over-crowded boats dock. It is a problem in need of the common sense of a Jeeves, when too much of the West is led by well-intentioned, feeble-minded Bertie Woosters.

Migration has been a factor in human evolution for at least 200,000 years – since homo sapiens began leaving Africa. For the first 180,000-190,000 years our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, migrating from one area to another, depending on weather and food availability. They first populated the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Around 15,000 years ago they sailed to Australia, and crossed the Bering Sea to the Americas, Sometime about 12,000 to 13,000 years ago our ancestors began to transition from nomads to farmers, raising crops and animals for food, and around 3,000 BCE city states were created, to satisfy a need for laws to govern society and commerce.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Scale of Alleged Biden Foreign Influence Peddling Unprecedented in History of D.C. Corruption, Impeachment Witness Testifies Ryan Mills

Posted By on September 29th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/scale-of-alleged-biden-foreign-influence-peddling-unprecedented-in-history-of-d-c-corruption-impeachment-witness-testifies/

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, testifying during the first House impeachment inquiry hearing into President Joe Biden, said Thursday that while Washington, D.C., is “awash” with influence peddling, the “size and complexity” of the allegations against Biden and his family are unprecedented.

House leaders, he said, have a “duty” to determine if the president was involved in a pay-to-play scheme.

Turley was one of four witnesses — three Republicans and one Democrat — who testified during the hearing. None of the people who testified were direct fact witnesses to any crimes or to an alleged Biden-family scheme.

Republicans claim that there is a mountain of evidence that Biden’s family members, including his son Hunter and brother James, enriched themselves by selling the “Biden brand,” access to Joe Biden when he was vice president and a candidate for president, to foreigners.

Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio called it a “tale as old as time” and the “oldest story in the world.”

Turley, who previously testified in the impeachments of presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, said that comments by Hunter Biden and the “labyrinth of accounts and companies” used by the president’s family members to transfer money make the inquiry credible.

“The question is, did the president know? Did he encourage this type of corruption?” Turley said during questioning by Representative Glenn Grothman (R., Wis.). “You have to begin with the recognition that what Hunter Biden and his associates were doing was corrupt.”

Grothman asked Turley whether there was any precedent for the scale of foreign influence peddling Biden is alleged to have participated in.

“Influence peddling is the favorite form of corruption in Washington, D.C., and this city is awash in it,” Turley responded. “But have I seen anything of this size and complexity? No.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Ukrainian Gordian Knot: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 29th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/28/the-ukrainian-gordian-knot/

Most Americans understandably favor the Ukrainian resistance against Vladimir Putin’s Russian naked 2022 aggression.

Yet for Ukraine to break the current deadlock—our generation’s Verdun with perhaps 600,000 combined casualties so far— and “win” the war, it apparently must have the military wherewithal to hit targets inside Russia.

Such strategically logical attacks might nevertheless provoke a wounded and unpredictable Russia finally to carry out its boilerplate and ignored existential threats.

From the last 75 years of big-power rivalries, the operational “rules” of proxy wars are well known.

In Vietnam, Korea, and Afghanistan, Russia supplied America’s enemies—sometimes even sending Russian pilots into combat zones.

Thousands of Americans likely died due to our adversaries’ use of Russian munitions and personnel.

Likewise, Russia lost 15,000 fatalities in its decade-long misadventure in Afghanistan. In part, Moscow’s defeat may have been due to deadly American weapons, including sophisticated Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

In the bloody decades of these big-power proxy wars, many were fought on or near the borders of Russia or China.

Yet none of these surrogate conflicts of the nuclear age ever led to hot wars between the U.S. and Russia or China.

But Ukraine risks now becoming a new—and different—proxy war altogether.

Never has the U.S. squared off against Russia or China in a conventional proxy war over either’s respective historical borders (whether illegitimate or not).

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joe Biden’s so-called “Successful and Effective Presidency” Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 29th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/joe-bidens-so-called-successful-and-effective-presidency/

So, we are assured by David Ignatius that Biden has had such “a successful and effective” presidency that he must now step down, deprive us of his genius, and rest upon his laurels?

All of Biden’s initiatives now poll below 50 percent. Biden himself struggles to poll above 40 percent. That is no surprise given his record of governance.

Candidate Biden by design had told illegal aliens to come into the U.S. during the 2020 campaign. And they immediately took him up on it. Nearly eight million have now swarmed in, without background checks, medical exams, COVID vaccinations and testing, or any examination at all. We will deal with that disaster for decades to come.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was appointed to lie that the border was secure, on the expectation that his erasure of it altogether would not be impeachable, given political realities. So egregious were the arriving numbers and annihilation of U.S. immigration law, that even Democrats and leftists in Chicago and New York now want illegal aliens to go back to Texas (but not to Mexico), as they de facto redraw the U.S. border on Texas’s northern state boundaries.

We don’t dare call the Biden invitation to eight million, “The Great Replacement Theory” of altering the demography to ensure future leftwing voters. “They,” however, boast of just that agenda with slogans and book titles like “The New Democratic Majority” and “Demography is Destiny.”

Look at the interest rate, the inflation rate, and the price of gas and diesel since Biden took office and the squeeze explains why he does not poll 40 percent confidence on the economy. Ditto crime. The administration smiles as Soros-elected prosecutors downgrade felonies to misdemeanors, and misdemeanors to nothingness. The embarrassing lunacy of defunding the police is now rarely mentioned because police forces nationwide have been virtually defunded and even the Biden people are not happy with the scary results.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: THE GOP DEBATE

Posted By on September 28th, 2023

I watched the messy and shrill GOP debate last night with the misgiving that none of it really mattered. Elections in America are the hallmark of democracy and equality. Every single citizen in America- rich, poor, black, white, radical, conservative, orthodox, secular, atheist, etc. has that day to express a national choice. But, and this is a huge but, that precious freedom to choose is endangered by the lack of real election integrity.

The media libels and disinforms with alacrity. Many pollsters routinely ask yes or no questions designed to elicit shaky results to favor chosen candidates, and shady revised election rules threaten the integrity of results in a preponderance of states and districts.

Not a single candidate last night even brought it up. rsk

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald But Johnny Can’t Spell G-A-Y With large majorities of their students incompetent in English and math, Los Angeles schools are ramping up efforts—for more gay pride and gender indoctrination.

Posted By on September 28th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/but-johnny-cant-spell-g-a-y

It has been almost 90 days since Gay Pride month. According to the Los Angeles Unified School District, that is too long a hiatus from the imperative of immersing young children in the arcana of gay and trans identity. So throughout the week of October 9, many elementary school classrooms in Los Angeles will celebrate “National Coming Out Day,” which falls on October 11.  

October is itself LGBTQ+ History Month, the Los Angeles Unified School District bureaucracy has reminded what it calls the district’s “fabulous educators.” Other LGBTQ+ programming will take place throughout October, picking up where Gay Pride month left off.  The goals for the so-called Week of Action are ambitious: to turn six-year-olds into budding gender and critical race theorists.

An LAUSD teacher forwarded me the district’s “toolkit” for teachers laying out that agenda. Use of the toolkit, decorated with a Black Power Fist superimposed on neon rainbow stripes, is nominally optional, but elementary school teachers who forego LGBTQ programming during the Week of Action will surely risk stigmatization. (The district did not respond to queries regarding expected classroom participation rates.)

At the Week of Action’s start, teachers should engage kindergarten and first-grade students in discussions about identity, aided by an activity called an “Identity Map.” Pupils chart their experiences of discrimination or privilege along 12 axes, including race, gender identity, sexuality, mental health, and body size. This mapping allows seven-year-olds to see themselves through the “lens of intersectionality.” Teachers then post the identity maps on the wall for a class discussion about students’ multiple “identities.”

Each elementary school day during the Week of Action can be devoted to a different LGBTQ+ celebrity, whose identity will be announced in morning assemblies, suggests the toolkit.

Monday is Jazz Jennings Day. Jennings’s fame rests on being one of the youngest children to date to claim a trans identity. “Assigned male at birth,” as Jazz’s publicity materials inevitably put it, Jazz allegedly asserted female identity at age two, and was diagnosed with gender dysphoria at age four. Subsequent surgery tried to cut Jazz’s body into a simulacrum of a female one and resulted in undisclosed “complications.” On Jazz Jennings day, the LAUSD recommends that kindergartners engage in the fabulous activities of “Which Outfit” and “Which Hairdo.” (One day is not enough to acknowledge the fabulousness that is Jazz. January in the LAUSD is devoted to holding Jazz and Friends Reading Events, supplemented by reading inclusive books in every grade.)