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A Broken Congress House Republicans have forgotten their mission. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on October 4th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-broken-congress/

When Democrats are in the majority, they get their way. And when Republicans are in the majority, the Democrats also get their way. Most recently, after the stopgap spending bill was passed, Rep Jamie Raskin took to MSNBC to boast that the Democrats “got the vast majority of what we wanted” from it. And for some Republicans that was the last straw.

Eight House Republicans allied with Democrats on a vote to remove Speaker Kevin McCarthy. And for the first time in over a century, a House Speaker was successfully booted from office.

A civil war among Republicans came down to threats from both sides of collaborating with Democrats in a House of Representatives with a narrow majority. And collaborating with Democrats seems to be the only thing that House Republicans know how to do anymore.

What are the legislative achievements of a House GOP majority, today, yesterday and the day before? They invariably involve collaborating with Democrats for personal political gain.

It’s been over a generation since a House Republican majority delivered for conservatives. Congressional Republicans are too terrified to fight Democrats and instead go after safe targets like each other. It’s not even worth counting how many times a Democrat White House made a House Republican majority cower in fear over the threat of being blamed for a government shutdown. Or how often that same majority compensated for surrendering to Democrats with meaningless virtue signaling votes that everyone knew were never going to pass the Senate.

Why are Democrats able to effectively wield their House majority while Republicans couldn’t? The Democrats are not afraid of what Republicans think of them. They develop a plan, implement it and dismiss Republican efforts to stop them. Republicans however care a great deal about what Democrats, in the House, in the media and the culture, think of them.

When Republicans threaten to blame Democrats for something, they laugh it off. Democrats backed the mobs that burned cities to the ground and opened the border to an unprecedented mass invasion without worrying what the Republicans would say. But Republicans live in fear of being blamed for a government shutdown. Rather than risk being blamed for shutting down the country, they shut down their own agenda, and then formed circular firing squads.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Glimmer of Hope in Higher Education The Open Discourse Coalition, a new organization that champions free speech, is thriving. By Susan J. Crawford and Kenneth G. Langone

Posted By on October 4th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-glimmer-of-hope-for-free-speech-in-higher-education-colleges-universities-civil-discourse-7330474?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

The president of Bucknell University, John Bravman, stood behind a placard bearing the words “Freedom of Expression” last month and kicked off a yearlong forum on the subject. Mr. Bravman introduced columnist George Will, who inveighed against censorship for 45 minutes, skewering both political parties in the process.

It was a dream come true, considering the cancel culture flourishing on many college campuses. In 2021 we wrote a letter in these pages with the headline “Alumni Are Fed Up and Ready to Fight Back.” We saw what was happening at our alma mater and colleges nationwide and decided to do something about it.

We began Open Discourse Coalition, an alumni and student-supported organization. The coalition is an independent, nonprofit organization with an office blocks from Bucknell University. Its goal is to advance the school’s mission to offer students diversity of thought with an unwavering commitment to free speech.

Prominent speakers, confident they will be heard, have been drawn to Bucknell to discuss and debate national issues, with students from the right and left turning out in large numbers. Experts on some of society’s thorniest topics have civilly discussed, disagreed and answered challenging questions from students.

It “was not nearly as polarized as what I expected,” one student wrote in response to a program. Another: “I was pleasantly surprised at how civil the conversation [was] and highly appreciated the respect both views gave each other.” One professor told us it was the first time he heard two differing perspectives on gun control at the same program in more than 20 years on campus.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

“He Will Help You With What You Need”: New Messages To Hunter Deepen Concerns Over Chinese Influence by Jonathan Turley

Posted By on October 4th, 2023

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/he-will-help-you-what-you-need-new-messages-hunter-deepen-concerns-over-chinese-influence

After the initiation of the Biden impeachment inquiry, new messages are deepening concerns over the influence of Chinese figures on the Biden family. Messages from longtime Biden associate Fran Person show the Chinese stepping in to support Hunter’s lavish lifestyle as funds dried up during his divorce. Person wrote Hunter that Chinese businessman Bo Zhang “will help you with what you need.”

Fran Person was not just a close aide to Joe Biden for years, but someone that the First Lady Jill Biden described as a member of the family: “Fran has been like a son to Joe and me. For eight years, we traveled the country, shared holidays together … Fran may be leaving the office, but he will always be a part of our family.”

Fran left the staff of Joe Biden and went to work with Chinese figures . . . and Hunter.

In a July 2017 WhatsApp message, Person told Hunter that Zhang was aware that he was in financial distress during his divorce and would cover his costs. Hunter sounds desperate for the Chinese support as he gushes money to fund his lavish lifestyle: “100K at least gets me until next month.”

Person assures him that Zhang has his back: “He will help you with what you need.”

Fox News Digital reported on Person’s messages. They include this assurance:

“I talked to Bo previously about the 37K – he didn’t flinch. I will talk to him about 56K and possibly 100K. It really depends on his liquid assets in the US…I will ask. His only problem is getting large sums out of China (especially right now).”

Hunter appears in distress and presses Person if he knew whether anything was wired or if they were in a “holding pattern.”

Person responds “No holding pattern…he was on his way to the bank this morning. He will be in touch when it’s confirmed.”

“He will help you with what you need. He also mentioned that you should take a trip to China some time this month to just get away for a week or so…just decompress.”

Hunter later schedules the trip.

The concern is that Hunter was receiving money from figures closely associated with foreign government and foreign intelligence, including the CCP.  These operatives often look for people who are in desperate situations to exercise influence over them. Hunter Biden’s massive spending and addictions would have been a draw for intelligence services.  He offered an obvious entry into potential influence or access with regard to Joe Biden.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Putin’s Man in Ankara: Erdoğan by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on October 4th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20020/putin-erdogan

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is trying to get the most from Turkey’s theoretical Western allies while in reality allying with Russian President Vladimir Putin – like sort of a Muslim Fidel Castro.

“[A]ny sense of a significant change in Mr. Erdoğan’s balancing act between Russia and the West appeared to evaporate on Monday, when he and Mr. Putin stood side by side after a meeting in the Russian resort town of Sochi and spoke of expanding cooperation.” — Editorial, The New York Times, September 4, 2023.

Erdoğan returned home [from Sochi] with an agenda to convince Western parties to the [grain corridor] deal on whatever terms Moscow insists should be in any new agreement.

Erdoğan needs Western money to prevent Turkey’s economic suicide. He needs U.S.-made fighter jets to maintain a delicate power balance over the Aegean skies. He needs Western pats on the shoulder to win legitimacy for his undemocratic one-man rule. But he wants all of these cookies without having to give up Russia. Over the past years, Erdoğan has made Turkey addicted to Russia, like a junkie to a dealer.

[I]t was appalling to hear an EU ambassador in Ankara tell me that he was appalled that Erdoğan said that a) he trusts Russia as much as he trusts the West, and that b) Ankara could “part ways” with the European Union if necessary. Erdogan’s ultranationalist ally, Devlet Bahçeli, immediately endorsed the cheap bluff: “We’re done with the EU.”

That is the way Erdoğan does horse trading. Sadly, each time, the gullible West gets cheated.

Erdoğan’s Turkey is one of the countries breaking Western sanctions on Russia. Earlier in September, the US State Department imposed sanctions on five Turkish shipping and trade companies for repairing Russian Defense Ministry vessels, transporting Russian military goods, and helping Russia to evade sanctions.

Perhaps Erdoğan is right. Turkey should part ways with the EU – and NATO too.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ukraine’s Victory Over Russia Will Benefit Western Security by Con Coughlin

Posted By on October 3rd, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20017/ukraine-western-security

The slow rate of [Ukrainian] progress has also prompted politicians on both sides of the Atlantic to question whether it is worth continuing to support Ukraine’s military effort or instead concentrate their efforts on negotiating a peace settlement between the warring countries.

Vivek Ramaswamy, a candidate for the Republican Party nomination in the 2024 US presidential election… calling for Ukraine to cede territory to Russia as part of a peace package that would also commit Moscow to end its military alliance with Beijing.

Ramaswamy’s fundamental argument, which is attracting support in some Republican circles, is that by supporting Ukraine’s war effort, the US and its allies risk forcing Moscow to align itself more closely with Beijing, thereby creating a powerful bloc to confront the West.

[T]he notion that Western support for Ukraine will force Moscow to forge closer ties with China is also overstated. Chinese President Xi Jinping may have given his tacit backing for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last year, but Beijing regards Moscow as being very much the poor relation in their alliance, and sees Russia as being little more than a gas station to be used to fuel the Chinese economy. If Russia seriously thinks its interests would be better served by developing close ties with China, it should think again.

If Putin were to succeed in capturing large swathes of Ukrainian territory through force of arms, China would conclude that it could use similar tactics to achieve its own aims, such as launching an invasion of Taiwan. If Putin is defeated, though, China’s Communist rulers will have to think twice before launching an unprovoked military assault.

Had it not been for the surrender of the US to Afghanistan in August of 2021, Russia would never have invaded Ukraine. Putin only started slowly sending troops to its border a few weeks later in September. Recently, China has begun sending ships and fighter jets toward Taiwan in the same slowly escalating way, to “normalize” troop movements and avoid raising alarm. The US simply cannot afford another defeat, this time in Ukraine. The surrender of any Ukrainian territory in some “deal” to end the war will be seen by the international community as a victory for Putin and another feckless American cut-and-run.

Still another factor that risks undermining Western support for Ukraine is the unreliability of the Biden administration’s approach to the conflict. On one level, the White House remains committed to supporting the Ukrainian cause. On another, it appears confused about defining its ultimate objectives in the conflict. As retired US General Jack Keane recently commented in an interview with Fox News, the Biden administration’s current track record suggests that it still does not have a strategic goal in the conflict.

If that is the case, then in the interests of Western security, the administration needs to agree on an endgame for the Ukraine conflict, one where Russia’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Western backed Ukrainian forces becomes the central objective.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Report: An Iranian Spy Currently Serves as Chief of Staff for Assistant Secretary of Defense For Special Operations By Debra Heine

Posted By on October 3rd, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/02/report-an-iranian-spy-currently-serves-as-chief-of-staff-for-assistant-secretary-of-defense-for-special-operations/

Former Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley oversaw “an Iranian intelligence operation designed to influence the United States and allied governments” while he served as the Biden regime’s chief negotiator for the Iran nuclear deal, according to several explosive new reports.

A trove of “purloined Iranian government emails” were published last week in Semafor and in the London-based opposition paper Iran International after an extensive, months-long vetting process by the two outlets, investigative journalist and author Lee Smith reported in Tablet on Sunday.

According to the reports, Malley planted an alleged Iranian spy named Ariane Tabatabai into sensitive positions in the Biden administration, first at the State Department and then at the Pentagon, where she continues to serve as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier.

Malley, a controversial figure since the Obama years, has since been suspended and has had his security clearance revoked for allegedly mishandling classified documents.

As Lee reported in Tablet, email exchanges between Iranian regime diplomats and analysts over several years indicate that “Tabatabai was part of a regime propaganda unit set up in 2014 by the Iranian Foreign Ministry.”

The Iran Experts Initiative (IEI) tasked operatives drawn from Iranian diaspora communities to promote Iranian interests during the clerical regime’s negotiations with the United States over its nuclear weapons program. Though several of the IEI operatives and others named in the emails have sought to portray themselves on social media as having engaged with the regime in their capacity as academic experts, or in order to promote better understanding between the United States and Iran, none has questioned the veracity of the emails.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Kendi’s Troubles Threaten the Whole ‘Antiracist’ Biz By Jack Cashill

Posted By on October 3rd, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/10/kendis_troubles_threaten_the_whole_antiracist_biz.html

As blue-collar philosopher Eric Hoffer reportedly observed some years back, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Ibram X. Kendi’s brand of antiracism skipped the first two phases. It was conceived as a racket.

Like most rackets, Kendi’s depended for its success on finding suckers to support it. Kendi found his at Boston University. In a perverse effort to atone for imagined sins, the BU administration funded a Kendi brainchild, the Center for Antiracist Research. Hysteria over the death of George Floyd inspired the center, but hysteria alone cannot sustain it.

 “After suddenly laying off over half his employees last week and with his center producing almost nothing since its founding,” writes David Decosimo in the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Kendi is now facing an investigation and harsh criticism from numerous colleagues complaining of financial mismanagement, dysfunctional leadership, and failure to honor obligations attached to its millions in grant money.”

No surprises here. Kendi is just one racial bunco artist out of many. Doing research for my new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, I reviewed the work of four of the leading lights in this movement, specifically on the subject of white flight.

Two, Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates, are Black; two, Robin DiAngelo and Tim Wise, are White. What they have in common is that none of them gives any evidence of ever having spoken to a White person who fled. Evidence only spoils the con.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Marc Lamont Hill’s Atrocious Libels Against Israel The Professor of Hip-Hop Lit tries to pass himself off as a Middle East expert. by Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on October 3rd, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/marc-lamont-hills-atrocious-libels-against-israel/

Marc Lamont Hill has a long history of posing as an expert on the Middle East with the sole aim of excoriating Israel. In 2019 article in the Jerusalem Post, Seth J. Frantzman observes:

Hill’s latest excoriation of Israel, posted to his 90,000 followers [on Facebook], followed Mazzig’s [Hen Mazzig, an Israeli writer, and Mizrahi] argument that Israel is not a country of “privileged and powerful white Europeans.” Mazzig sought to emphasize the role of Mizrahi Jews in Israeli history and condemned the tendency of critics to define Israelis as Ashkenazi Jews alone. Hill responded that Mazzig ignores “the racial and political project that transformed Palestinian Jews (who lived peacefully with other Palestinians) into the 20th century identity category of ‘Mizrahi’ as a means of detaching them from Palestinian identity.”

Hill is claiming that the category of “Mizrahi Jews” — “Oriental Jews,” that is, “Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry” — was made up by Ashkenazi Jews to “detach” them from their “Palestinian identity.” In fact, Mizrahi Jews have their own history, never considered themselves as “Palestinians,” and did not “live peacefully” with Arabs, but only as dhimmis, subject to a host of social, economic, and political disabilities, including, most importantly, the duty to pay the jizyah, a capitation tax that allowed them to continue to worship as Jews free from Muslim attack. Frantzman also states:

Mazzig posted a screenshot of another exchange with Hill in which Hill wrote that “I literally study Yemeni and Moroccan Jews for a living.”

What “living” is that? He doesn’t teach about Yemeni and Moroccan Jews; he hasn’t written a word about them. So why does Marc Lamont Hill claim that he “literally” studies them “for a living”? I thought he studied race, racism, anti-racism, and of course hip-hop lit, for his living. Has he quietly changed the subject of his study? Can we be expecting a paper soon on “Yemeni and Moroccan Jews” by “one of the leading intellectual voices in the country”?

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden’s Intentional Crisis The great invasion of the USA. by Byron York

Posted By on October 3rd, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bidens-intentional-crisis/

The continuing incursion of illegal border crossers into the United States is the most astonishing story in American politics. There have been days recently in which 10,000 people crossed illegally into the country — and remember, in a long-ago era, when Barack Obama was president, a tenth of that was considered a crisis.

The current emergency can be attributed entirely to President Joe Biden. In word and deed, from the 2020 campaign on, Biden sent a message to would-be illegal border crossers around the world: If you come to the United States, you will be allowed to stay. And millions have.

Lately, though, Biden’s welcome-to-illegal-crossers policy has become a burden on some important Democrats. New York City Mayor Eric Adams is screaming about the arrival of an estimated 110,000 new asylum seekers in his city. The cost of caring for the new residents will “destroy New York City,” Adams said. And even though Adams tried to blame Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott for sending illegal border crossers to New York, the fact is that Abbott has sent just 13,000. In any event, the presence of all 110,000 in New York is the result of Biden policies.

Now that some Democrats are complaining, news reports say Biden is beginning to feel some pressure. Can he do something to lower the heat? In response, Biden has come up with a way to address the problem: Rush more inadmissible migrants into the United States.

It seems crazy, and it is. But it is more than that. It is also perhaps the best indicator we have of Biden’s intentions in the border crisis. Look at the 10,000-a-day flow of illegal crossers over the border. The president of the United States has the authority and means to protect the U.S. border. The only way a president would allow this to go on for years is if the president wanted this to happen. And it appears that Biden does, in fact, want this to happen.

Early in the border crisis, I wrote, “The president is not trying to stop the flow of illegal crossers. Instead, he is trying to accommodate the flow, scrambling to find housing and living arrangements for those coming in. The message has gotten out to the world, and the world is coming.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Decline and Fall of Home: Part One By David Solway

Posted By on October 3rd, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/culture/david-solway-2/2023/09/25/the-decline-and-fall-of-home-part-one-n1729442

The similarities between the current American decline as a world power and the collapse of the Roman Empire have often been remarked. (After the western part of the Roman Empire fell, the eastern half continued to exist as the Byzantine Empire for hundreds of years. Therefore, the “fall of Rome” really refers only to the fall of the western half of the Empire.) The analogy has become a staple cliché of popular opinion and historical scholarship. The correspondences between Rome and America are compelling and, when the issue is regarded with fresh eyes and attention to taxonomic detail, will strike us with a sense of genuine foreboding.

The factors leading to the fall of the Roman Empire, conventionally dated 476 AD, following the attack of the barbarian chieftain Odoacer, are eerily reminiscent of the nodal “single point failures” observable in 2023 America. Briefly:

The Welfare State

Starting in 123 BC, the powerful reformist Tribune Gaius Gracchus installed a monthly free dole of grain and provided for the entertainment of a decadent citizenry —  in poet Juvenal’s phrase from “The Satires” (Satire 10), circa 127 AD: “They shed their sense of responsibility/…and reveal their desire for two things only/bread and circuses.” The practice continued well into the later years of the Empire. The analogy with the American panoply of food stamps, “Great Society” amenities, payment to single mothers, provision of flat-screen TVs and other luxury items, and the contribution of welfare expansion to family breakdown, is stunning.

Debt

Under the Emperor Diocletian, personal debt led to the abandonment of mortgaged property — in our terms, the collapse of the subprime mortgage market. Enormous public debt crippled Rome’s economy. America’s debt, both funded and unfunded, hovers in the unimaginable trillions. As Will and Ariel Durant wrote of Rome in “The Lessons of History,” “Huge bureaucratic machinery was unable to govern the empire effectively with the enormous, out-of-control debt.”

We are seeing the same disaster unfolding before our very eyes. Michael E. Newton warns in “The Path to Tyranny,” “By 2035, the debt is projected to be between 79 and 181 percent of GDP…The United States is clearly on the road to bankruptcy.”