NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

House Republicans seek Jan. 6 treatment for Bowman over fire alarm

Posted By on October 2nd, 2023

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/oct/1/house-republicans-want-jamaal-bowman-be-given-jan-/

House Republicans want Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who admitted he pulled a Capitol building’s fire alarm hours before a possible government shutdown, to get the same justice as the Jan. 6 protesters got for their 2021 breach of the Capitol to obstruct official business.

Mr. Bowman, New York Democrat, said in a statement Saturday night that he pulled a Cannon House Office Building fire alarm because he was “rushing to make a vote” and thought that activating the alarm would open a nearby door.

“I came to a door that is usually open for votes but today would not open,” he said. “I am embarrassed to admit that I activated the fire alarm, mistakenly thinking it would open the door,” he said.

The alarm’s going off led to an evacuation of the building while police checked for a threat.

It was not clear Sunday whether Mr. Bowman’s setting off the alarm specifically delayed Saturday evening’s House vote on a Republican spending bill to keep the government from shutting down. But it theoretically could have and it unquestionably came while other Democrats were using numerous parliamentary tactics to delay a vote.

“I regret this and sincerely apologize for any confusion this caused. But I want to be very clear, this was not me, in any way, trying to delay any vote,” Mr. Bowman said. “It was the exact opposite — I was trying urgently to get to a vote, which I ultimately did.”

Mr. Bowman said he also met with the Sergeant at Arms and the Capitol Police, at their request, and explained what had happened.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

86% Of Americans Want Gov’t Spending Cuts, Including Most Democrats: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on October 2nd, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/10/02/86-of-americans-want-govt-spending-cuts-including-most-democrats-ii-tipp-poll/

The government narrowly avoided closing after Congress came to a last-minute, short-term political deal to keep it open for another 45 days. With soaring spending and exploding federal debt, the latest partisan dispute was inevitable. But Americans have a clear retort, according to the latest I&I/TIPP Poll: Regardless of party, they want cuts in federal spending, and blame our dangerously soaring debt on Congress’s failure to do so.

The national online poll of 1,378 Americans, taken from Sept. 27-29, asked respondents two questions related to the current budget impasse. The first: “The national debt has exceeded $33 trillion. What do you believe bears the primary responsibility for this situation?”

The message from the poll, which has a margin of error of +/-2.7 percentage points, was clear: Overall, 66% blamed surging debt on “excessive government spending,” followed by “insufficient taxation” (13%), “slow economic growth” (11%) and “unsure” (9%).

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Concerning the Fate of Our Nation by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20002/concerning-the-fate-of-our-nation

It appears the Federal Reserve is playing Russian roulette with our nation’s interest rates.

JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon has looked at the potential future of Fed actions and is deeply concerned that it could raise rates as high as 7%. A Bloomberg News report observed:

“If the key rate climbed to 7%, it would have serious implications for American businesses and consumers. Already, economists put the probability of a US recession over the next 12 months at 60%.”

Suggested Plan of Action by U.S. Congress:

A comprehensive “Made in America Policy” to advance and encourage construction projects and job creation, science and medical research; with incentives such as tax credits, bonus depreciation and low-interest mortgages for first-time home buyers and low-cost housing developments.
Restore energy independence, with America as an energy-exporting nation.
Eliminate pork-barrel spending to reduce our $33 trillion national debt and related interest expenses.
Bribery payoffs, dark money and other criminality should be prosecuted.
Ballot bandits and ballot-harvesting are unlawful enterprises, and offenders should be held accountable.
Engage the U.S. military to reverse open borders policies. Mexico and drug cartels should be held accountable for fentanyl deaths and the invasion of illegal immigrants.

Lawrence Kadish serves on the Board of Governors of Gatestone Institute.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Whenever They Want to Kill, They Kill’: The Persecution of Christians, August 2023 by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20004/whenever-they-want-to-kill-they-kill

Muslims surrounded and murdered a Christian man. — newsintervention.com, August 22, 2023, Pakistan

Around 2 a.m., Muslim Fulani herdsmen launched a raid—the third of its kind on the same Christian majority village where people were sleeping after a long day’s work. They slaughtered 21 villagers. – Report, persecution.org, August 10, Nigeria

“Nigeria’s Middle Belt region that has been rocked by violence with tens of thousands of Christians killed over the past 20 years.” – Report, persecution.org, August 10, Nigeria

Muslims began yelling “Away with him!” Others grabbed the microphone from the pastor and “started tearing off pages of the Bible and Christian literature.” Now, gathered together, the Muslims began stoning him. – morningstarnews,org., August 1, 2023, Uganda

“Others were saying that Allah has granted to them authority to kill all infidels. Another Muslim sprayed what looked like acid [on Pastor Robert], while another hit him with a thorny object and stepped on the evangelist’s back and the stomach.” – Eyewitness, morningstarnews,org., August 23, 2023, Uganda

“[I]nfidels” cannot “preach in this town or come and mislead our people here… We are going to fight in the cause of Allah to kill all of you.” – Sheikh Hiisa Mubaraka, morningstarnews,org., August 23, 2023, Uganda

“There is an ongoing Genocide against 120,000 Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Artsakh.

The blockade of the Lachin Corridor by the Azerbaijani security forces impeding access to any food, medical supplies, and other essentials should be considered a Genocide under Article II, (c) of the Genocide Convention: ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.'” — Luis Moreno Ocampo, the former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, concerning Artsakh, an ancient Christian region under Azerbaijani control, luismorenoocampo.com, August 4, 2023, Azerbaijan

“Starvation is the invisible Genocide weapon. Without immediate dramatic change, this group of Armenians will be destroyed in a few weeks.” — Luis Moreno Ocampo, the former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, concerning Artsakh, an ancient Christian region under Azerbaijani control, luismorenoocampo.com, August 4, 2023, Azerbaijan

“[T]he neighbors told her that they should let her [teenage] daughter marry their son so that she could convert to Islam and be led from the ‘delusion of their faith to the true religion,’ but if she refuses to convert, they have the right to do whatever they wish to her daughter.” – Report, pesecution.org, August 11, 2023, Egypt

The following are among the murders and abuses inflicted on Christians by Muslims throughout the month of August 2023.

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties Christopher Caldwell January 21, 2020

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

“In this landmark cultural and political history of the last half-century, Christopher Caldwell brilliantly dissects the new progressive establishment, and shows how the reforms of the sixties gradually devolved into intolerance, self-righteousness, and the antithesis of what had started out as naive idealism. A singular analysis by a masterful chronicler of the sixties dreams that have gone so terribly, but predictably, wrong.”
— Victor Davis Hanson, author of The Case for Trump

A major American intellectual makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, instead left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled—and ready to put an adventurer in the White House.

Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences. Even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high—in wealth, freedom, and social stability—and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations.

Caldwell reveals the real political turning points of the past half century, taking readers on a roller-coaster ride through Playboy magazine, affirmative action, CB radio, leveraged buyouts, iPhones, Oxycontin, Black Lives Matter, and internet cookies. In doing so, he shows that attempts to redress the injustices of the past have left Americans living under two different ideas of what it means to play by the rules.

Essential, timely, hard to put down, The Age of Entitlement is a brilliant and ambitious argument about how the reforms of the past fifty years gave the country two incompatible political systems—and drove it toward conflict.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

From Oligarchs to Plutocrats by Amir Taheri

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20003/oligarchs-plutocrats

The disastrous consequences of oligarchs meddling in politics are too well known to need more attention here. But what about the plutocrats’ record? The question merits attention, because right now two American plutocrats are engaged in erratic attempts at solving two of the hottest international problems. Elon Musk, the owner of X (Twitter), Tesla and SpaceX, and reputed to be the richest on the man planet, says he has a plan to end the Russian war in Ukraine. For his part, George Soros, now operating through his son Alexander, is busy campaigning for a deal between Tehran and Washington to give President Joe Biden’s forthcoming election campaign the boost it badly needs.

George Soros has been engaged in his grand plan for bringing the Islamic Republic of Iran into the fold for almost three decades.

The scheme reached the peak of its success when the so-called “New York Boys” seized control of the executive branch of government in Tehran under President Hassan Rouhani, a British-educated junior cleric dreaming of leading the Islamic Republic into the “modern world”.

However, as might have been expected, the Soros scenario ultimately failed because “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has bigger dreams for the Islamic Republic. Khamenei believes that the West is heading south to decline while China, Russia and Iran have emerged as leaders for a “New World Order”. Now, however, we know that Khamenei’s leadership troika exists only in his fantasies. China and Russia treat Iran as an untouchable to be kept at arm’s length.

Will the plutocrat’s peace scenario work? I doubt it. Being anti-American and anti-Israel form the Iranian regime’s core identity.

In the 1920s, the American plutocrat Armand Hammer orchestrated a similar scenario with the newly-born Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin. He persuaded Washington to give the Bolsheviks a chance to learn the beauty of getting rich through capitalism and trade. Hammer won the argument and Lenin won the civil war that without the “Great Satan ” pumping money into his war machine, he would have lost.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Berenson: ‘No question’ gov’t policy was to encourage vax ‘by every means short of force’ By AG Staff

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/30/berenson-no-question-govt-policy-was-to-encourage-vax-by-every-means-short-of-force/

Alex Berenson criticized recent attempts by the Left to make us forget about the vaccine mandates enacted just two years ago.

“We were all around for it,” Berenson told host Dan Proft on the “Counterculture” podcast. “It was not fifty years ago, it was two falls ago.”

“There was tremendous pressure to get vaccinated at tremendous societal cost or lose your job or potentially be excluded from shopping, as happened in some places, or being at university,” Berenson said. “There was no question that the government policy was by every means short of force, to encourage vaccination.”

Berenson is a former NY Times journalist and author of “Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives.”

He and Proft discussed “Covid 1.5” and the recent return of mask mandates and “vaccine” pressure.

This full interview is available on Rumble, YouTube, and Spotify.

Proft launched “Counterculture” — American Greatness’ newest podcast — earlier this month. He also is the co-host of “Chicago’s Morning Answer” weekday mornings from 5-9 a.m. on AM 560 Chicago. A former Republican candidate for Illinois Governor, Proft attended Northwestern University and received his J.D. from Loyola University-Chicago.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The American status quo as we edge from summer to fall By Molly Slag

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/09/the_american_status_quo_as_we_edge_from_summer_to_fall.html

As we segue from the Month of the Autumn Leaf into the Month of the Pumpkin, let us contemplate a brief sketch of the status quo we face, in national defense, internationally, and domestically. And if some of these strike you as far-fetched, remember that, a mere decade ago, all of them would have struck you as far-fetched.

(1) National defense:

(a) We are at war with Russia, using Ukraine as our proxy.

(b) We are at war with China, although it has not yet become kinetic.

(c) China is preparing to invade Taiwan.

(d) China and Russia both have hypersonic missiles. We do not:

These weapons can attack with extreme speed, be launched from great distances, and evade most air defenses. They can carry conventional explosives or nuclear warheads. These weapons combine speed with the ability to fly at low altitudes and maneuver in flight, making them more difficult to spot by radar or satellite. That makes them almost impossible to intercept with current anti-missile systems. In a battle in the South China Sea, Beijing could use hypersonic missiles to more than double its reach, leaving U.S. ships in the region nearly defenseless, and could even strike Guam, home to thousands of U.S. troops and key military installations.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Joel Zinberg Equity vs. Evidence Are new draft recommendations on breast-cancer screening the result of DEI-based political pressure?

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

https://media5.manhattan-institute.org/iiif/2/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F5%2Fbreast-cancer-screening-DEI-based-political-pressure.jpg/full/!99999,960/0/default.jpg

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force—a volunteer panel of national experts in prevention and evidence-based medicine that makes recommendations for clinical preventive services such as screenings, counseling services, or medications—has generally been considered an honest broker, willing to buck political and popular pressures to give advice consistent with the available evidence. New USPSTF draft recommendations on breast-cancer screening suggest that this may have changed.

When the USPSTF last updated its breast-cancer screening recommendations about eight years ago, it found that, for women under 50 with an average risk of cancer, the harms of screening outweighed the benefits. It recommended routine screening for women 50 or older and advised younger women to consult with their physicians to discuss whether their history and individual risk factors warrant screening.

This recommendation echoed guidelines used around the world. The U.K, France, Denmark, and Germany, for example, screen women 50 and older, but there is no organized screening of women in their forties. Switzerland has no screening program for women of any age.

The USPSTF recently issued a draft recommendation lowering the starting age for mammography screening from 50 to 40 years. This will affect approximately 20 million additional women. It is not clear what prompted the change.

The USPSTF acknowledged that no new randomized trials of screening mammography for women in their forties have been conducted since the previous recommendation was made. Nor have new, follow-up findings emerged from the eight previous randomized trials in this age group, all of which found no significant benefit.

Instead, the task force relied on modeling studies to provide information about the benefits and harms of breast-cancer screening in different age groups. As with any model, the results depend on the assumptions made. The model assumed that screening mammography reduces breast-cancer mortality by 25 percent and concluded that lowering the starting age from 50 to 40 would result in 1.3 fewer deaths over a lifetime for every 1,000 women screened.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s ‘democracy’ protesters destroy their own platform The Tel Aviv mob attack on Yom Kippur has far wider resonance Melanie Phillips

Posted By on October 1st, 2023

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/israels-democracy-protesters-destroy?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The shocking scenes in Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur not only destroyed the principal claim of Israel’s nine months-old protest movement against the government. They also illuminated a fundamental and disturbing fault-line in the wider Jewish world and the west.

Those who came to pray together in Tel Aviv’s public spaces on the holiest day of the year were shouted at, abused, reduced to tears and forced to disband their prayer services.

This repellent spectacle, on Yom Kippur of all days, was redolent of the forcible attempts to suppress Jewish prayer that have characterised Jew-hatred throughout the ages. Yet sickeningly, the perpetrators were themselves Jews spitting baseless hatred against other Jews.

The immediate cause was that the worshippers had erected a mechitzah, or divider, between men and women. Tel Aviv’s Mayor Ron Huldai had made a ruling forbidding segregated prayers in the city’s public spaces, a ruling that was upheld by the Supreme Court.

The objectors said the Rosh Yehudi movement, which tries to spread Orthodox Judaism in Tel Aviv, deliberately provoked disorder by disobeying Huldai’s ruling.

However, as everyone could see, the mob wasn’t only targeting Rosh Yehudi but also ordinary, religiously observant people who came to pray in those open spaces.

During the Covid emergency, segregated public prayers were regularly held in Tel Aviv and provoked no problem. The flashpoint occurred this week because, for the past nine months, secular people have whipped up hysterical loathing of the haredim and religious-nationalist Jews, whom they accuse of plotting to destroy Israeli democracy and human rights through the government’s judicial reforms.