The Uninvited Backbone of Israel’s Anti-Reform Movement by Steve Apfel

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19853/ackbone-israel-anti-reform-movement

In the war of words over Israel’s judicial reform, irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the disputants, the word “democracy” appears to have suffered a bit of a roughing-up.

“… Biden was wrong to intervene in the debate over Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms…. otherwise, Israeli officials may start commenting on Hunter Biden’s plea deal.” – Former National Security Advisor John Bolton, Twitter, July 31, 2023.

So, the Biden Administration delivered an “either-or” threat: stop the judicial reform or break our special relationship. The break had actually already begun with President Barack Obama, who became quixotically committed to a policy to finance and enable Israel’s self-declared arch-enemy — “Death to Israel” should probably qualify one as an arch-enemy — unlimited nuclear weapons, billions of dollars to manufacture them; ballistic missiles to deliver them, and loose change for Iran’s mullahs to continue “exporting” their Revolution into Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and Latin America.

“… the lawyers were all on one side, and they were all working to help Hunter Biden. The were all working to hide a blanket immunity agreement from the judge…” — Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Fox News, July 28, 2023.

“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” then-presidential candidate Barack Obama declared a few days before the 2008 presidential election, somehow neglecting to say what he was planning to transform it into.

FBI agents, in an illegal “state action,” attempted an end-run around the First Amendment, dishonestly colluding with Facebook and other tech companies to censor news reports about Hunter Biden’s 2020 election-altering “Laptop from Hell.”

Team Biden, in the person of Antony Blinken, had reportedly called Mike Morell to get what ultimately turned out to be 51 former intelligence officials to sign a letter falsely alleging that the Hunter Biden laptop had “all the earmarks of a Russian intelligence operation.” That letter, it turned out, was the real disinformation.

It was countered immediately on Fox Business by former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe. “Let me be clear,” Ratcliffe said, “the intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports… that Hunter Biden’s laptop is part of some Russian disinformation campaign. It’s simply not true.”

What it all comes down to is that one party seemingly decided that Obama’s promise to radically transform America was too important to trust to the electorate.

Now Blinken and Biden are supposedly qualified to give Israel’s coalition government a lecture on judicial probity and democracy?

Justice Jackson’s Dissent on Affirmative Action Ruling Just Got Worse Matt Vespa

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/07/31/again-theres-another-glaring-error-in-justice-jacksons-affirmative-action-dissent-n2626414

We’re returning to the affirmative action case that sent liberal America into a tailspin. The late June ruling by the Supreme Court struck down the practice in higher education applications as unconstitutional, leading to a couple of days of rage from progressive commentators. It quickly died because not even black Americans supported the protocol; many Black Americans were not keen on the practice.

Overall, 63 percent of Americans oppose affirmative action procedures, with Asian Americans being one of the most vocal communities voicing their opposition. The liberal media hilariously tried to manufacture the narrative that Asians support affirmative action, despite 76 percent saying they don’t think race or ethnicity should be considered in the college application process.Yet, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent in the companion case— Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina—raised some eyebrows when she cited shoddy data to justify the affirmative action process. In short, namely that black babies will die if this policy for college applications is scuttled:

“It saves lives. For marginalized communities in North Carolina, it is critically important that UNC and other area institutions produce highly educated professionals of color. Research shows that Black physicians are more likely to accurately assess Black patients’ pain tolerance and treat them accordingly (including, for example, prescribing them appropriate amounts of pain medication). For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”

Association of American Medical Colleges, who filed an amicus brief in this matter, asked that a correction be issued because, mathematically, what Jackson said is impossible. Law professor Jonathan Turley added today that there’s another issue with the dissent: she cites how black doctors can better diagnose black patients regarding pain management.

Exclusive: Poll Shows Majority Of Americans Support Voter ID, Limited Mail-In Voting By: Shawn Fleetwood

https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/31/exclusive-poll-shows-majority-of-americans-support-voter-id-limited-mail-in-voting/

New polling provided exclusively to The Federalist shows a vast majority of U.S. voters support election integrity initiatives such as voter ID requirements and limitations on the use of mail-in voting.

Conducted by the Honest Elections Project (HEP) from July 13-16, the survey reveals widespread support among the American electorate for common-sense election integrity policies. According to the poll, 88 percent of Americans support laws mandating voters show a form of ID in order to cast their ballot, including the vast majority of black (82 percent) and Hispanic voters (83 percent). Only 9 percent of those polled opposed ID requirements.

The survey’s findings paint a vastly different picture than the one crafted by legacy media and Democrat politicians, who for years have maliciously smeared voter ID laws as Republican-sponsored tools designed to “suppress” the votes of racial minorities. Two years ago, for example, Democrats and their propaganda press allies used this tactic to smear Georgia’s passage of an election integrity law that contained a provision mandating voter ID for absentee voting. President Joe Biden went so far as to label the bill “Jim Crow on steroids.”

Not only did Georgia experience record early voter turnout ahead of its Nov. 8 general election and Dec. 6 Senate runoff, but a poll conducted after the 2022 midterms revealed zero percent of black Georgia voters said they had a “poor” experience voting in the elections.

The HEP survey also found overwhelming opposition to noncitizens and minors voting in U.S. elections. In recent years, Democrat-controlled cities such as Washington, D.C., have passed measures permitting foreign nationals to vote in their respective municipal elections. Meanwhile, blue localities in states such as Maryland and California have passed measures allowing kids as young as 16 to vote in local elections.

According to HEP’s polling data, 89 percent of voters “think that American elections should only be for American citizens, including 82% of Democrats, 80% of Black voters, and 78% of Hispanic voters.” The survey also found 72 percent of voters oppose dropping the voting age to 16.

Dark Green Lunacy as a Cardinal Virtue Peter Smith

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2023/07/dark-green-lunacy-as-a-cardinal-virtue/

“We are not dealing with rational people. Explain until the cows come home that achieving net zero is impossible. Explain that wind, solar and batteries cannot replace a coal power station. Marshall your data, your facts. It will be to no avail. The inmates are running the show.”

John Clauser is an American physicist and the 2022 (joint) Nobel Prize winner. As we’ve heard, he was cancelled from addressing the IMF about “climate change.” Well, that’s understandable. I mean, he’s not a qualified climate scientist or anything. He’s not in the same league as, say, Greta Thunberg or Al Gore, John Kerry, António Guterres or Tim ‘dams won’t fill’ Flannery. Apparently, he knows a thing or two about quantum entanglement. This is where two particles interreact and separate but then, like identical twins, behave as though they are one, doing exactly the same things no matter how distant apart; apropos their direction of spin. Strange business.

Stranger still are climate-change ministers mirroring sub-atomic life; interacting at United Nations COP meetings before going home and spinning as one. Spruiking net zero, with the same cunning plans to get there. To wit, taxing emissions, banning the sale of ICE cars, and ordering by proxy thousands of turbine blades, solar panels and batteries from China. Might this similarity have piqued Clauser’s interest in climate science? Perhaps not.

Clauser has recently been elected to serve on the board of directors of the CO2 Coalition. Best to go to the source itself for reliable information on the Coalition; hence the link I’ve provided. Because, according to Wikipedia, “it spreads misinformation about climate change.” Misinformation, hmm? More like disinformation, if you ask me. Don’t let them off the hook. The Coalition sets out deliberately, with nothing less than malice aforethought towards the IPCC, to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. What perfidy is that?

Back to Clauser. Maybe he knows a little more about climate science than you would think. More than does your average quantum physicist; if you can describe quantum physicists as average. Anyway he has a theory. In a nutshell, he believes that cumulous clouds keep the earth’s temperature fairly stable. He reckons that when sunlight reaches the earth it evaporates sea water – covering two-thirds of the earth’s surface – producing cumulous clouds which reflect back 90 percent of the sunlight which hits them. It’s akin to a thermostat controlling the temperature. The warmer it gets, the more evaporation, the more cumulous clouds, the more sunlight reflected back. Viola! He further reckons that the radiative heat transfer rate associated with atmospheric CO2 is “nearly two orders of magnitude smaller than the effective stabilisation of the input-power provided by the cloud-based thermostat.” Thus he believes that the effect of CO2 is diddly squat, to put it in precise scientific language. If I remember rightly, Richard Lindzen also refers to clouds reflecting back sunlight. It seems worthwhile investigating. That is, if you had an interest in discovering the truth and weren’t as mad as a hatter.

Justice Sotomayor’s Supreme Court Staff Sold Her Books By Adam Andrzejewski

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/07/31/justice_sotomayor_uses_supreme_court_staff_to_sell_books_969348.html

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s taxpayer-funded staff helped organize events to sell her books, for which she has made $3.7 million since joining the court in 2009, according to an Associated Press investigation. Her salary on the court is $285,000.

In 2019, Sotomayor hosted an event at a Portland public library for her book “Just Ask!” Before the event, a Sotomayor aide emailed the organizers, informing them they had not bought enough books. “For an event with 1,000 people and they have to have a copy of Just Ask to get into the line, 250 books is definitely not enough,” said her aide, Anh Le, in an email, the AP reported.

Staff pushed books at other events as well. Before events at UC Davis Law School, University of Wisconsin, Clemson University, and Michigan State University, taxpayer-funded staff pushed organizers to buy books, or to buy more than their original order. Some books were shipped to the Supreme Court, where her staff brought them to her to sign in her chambers.

The court defended Sotomayor, saying in a statement that, “When [Sotomayor] is invited to participate in a book program, Chambers staff recommends the number of books (for an organization to order) based on the size of the audience so as not to disappoint attendees who may anticipate books being available at an event.”

What’s more, Sotomayor’s publisher, Penguin Random House, has had several matters before the court in which Sotomayor did not recuse herself.

“Justice Sotomayor would have recused in cases in which Penguin Random House was a party, in light of her close and ongoing relationship with the publisher,” the Supreme Court said in a statement. “An inadvertent omission failed to bring Penguin’s participation in several cases to her attention; those cases ultimately were not selected for review by the Court. Chambers’ conflict check procedures have since been changed.”

The Bidens: “Stone Cold Crooked” (6) — What Did China Get For Its Money?  Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2023-7-30-the-bidens-stone-cold-crooked-6-what-did-china-get-for-its-money

On July 27 (last Thursday), Representative James Comer of Kentucky appeared on Senator Ted Cruz’s podcast. Comer is the Chair of the House Oversight Committee, and the guy who has subpoenaed, and little-by-little is getting, the bank records of transfers from foreign governments to Biden family companies. Late that evening, Twitchy posted about an 8 minute clip from the podcast of Comer discussing some of the things his subpoenas had uncovered. Comer particulrly discusses one large payment from a Chinese government-connected entity, much of which went to various Bidens.

Separately on the same day, July 27, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio released on Twitter (or is it now “X”?) a thread that he called “The Facebook Files, Part I.” Jordan, in addition to being the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, also serves as Chair of is Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Government. In that capacity, Jordan had received a trove of internal Facebook communications documenting pressure from the White House to suppress various true information, notably information relating to the origin of the Covid virus in the Chinese Wuhan laboratory. The Wall Street Journal on July 28 had further reporting on the Facebook emails newly released by Jordan’s Subcommittee.

In other words, we’re starting to learn what China got in return for its investment in the Bidens.

I can’t find a transcript of the Comer appearance on Cruz’s podcast, but you can watch it at the Twitchy link, and in addition, the Twitchy piece contains a summary of what Comer said, posted on Twitter by a user going by the handle @KanekoaTheGreat.

Much of Comer’s discussion deals with the remarkable fact that some six major U.S. banks have filed no fewer than 170 Suspicious Activity Reports with respect to transactions conducted by Biden family members. (Comer specifically mentions JPM Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America as among the banks that filed the SARs.). Comer (who says he is a former bank director) then says that filing of even two SAR reports as to an individual could make it difficult for that individual to open a bank account. (I’m not sure that that is true. However, I have several ex-colleagues who went on to become bank regulatory lawyers, and all of them have told me that the filing of a SAR against someone is by no means a routine step. So I have no doubt that 170 is truly extraordinary.)

The Times Latest DeSantis Smear Job is Laughably Dishonest By Carpe Diem

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/25/the-times-latest-desantis-smear-job-is-laughably-dishonest/

Although almost nothing is certain in life, there are two things we can be sure of when it comes to The New York Times: their “journalists” are not only incredibly dishonest, but are also horrible at math.

Case in point, their most recent pile of nonsense—unleashed by their so-called “investigative team,” titled “The Steep Cost of Ron DeSantis’s Vaccine Turnabout.”

This 3,000-plus word smear piece dressed up as journalism is nothing more than a heap of lies, omissions and easily disproven Covid theories—all in a pathetic attempt to discredit Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s strong record on Covid—in which he protected the most vulnerable, saved hundreds of thousands of jobs, allowed businesses to thrive, kept children in school and preserved the liberties and freedoms of Floridians.

Virtually every claim the Times makes about DeSantis, is either not backed by any legitimate science, data, or is a complete fabrication and distortion of the governor’s record.

Then again, no one should be surprised that one of the three “journalists” responsible for this hogwash is none other than Sharon LaFraniere, whom the Times boasts in her bio, received a “Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on Donald Trump’s connections with Russia.” In other words, she received an award for something that not only never occurred—but that this sad leftist propagandist outlet is still peddling and celebrating.

Let’s dive right into the Times lunacy.

The piece starts out hilariously enough by claiming that in September 2020, Dr. Deborah Birx who was part of the White House coronavirus task force, received what was described as an alarming call from DeSantis’s then Florida surgeon general, Dr. Scott Rivkees. What was so alarming? DeSantis no longer supported what the Times considered “preventive Covid measures,” including limiting indoor dining.

In other words, given that thousands of restaurants in lockdown states had either closed permanently during Covid, or were forced to adopt ridiculous and unscientific measures that only allowed them to operate at roughly twenty-five percent capacity, DeSantis wanted the businesses in his state to actually be able earn a profit. The governor did not want restaurants in Florida to have to close through no fault of their own; he did not want employees to be laid off and he wanted customers to be free to choose if they thought eating out was worth the risk. Oh the horror.

The Times also conveniently ignored that DeSantis only wanted to do away with so-called mitigation measures once the data clearly showed who was most adversely affected by the virus, and once it became obvious that states with extreme lockdowns fared no better than places that remained open.

What a travesty.

The Biden Presidency Is Unsustainable The Harris Dilemma By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/31/the-biden-presidency-is-unsustainable/

Imagine if Gavin Newsom was currently Vice President amid the final meltdown of the Biden family consortium.

Does anyone doubt that Biden would then either be forced to resign by Democratic politicos (for reasons in addition to his escalating dementia), or would be impeached and perhaps abdicate Nixon-style?

The presence of the now predictable mediocrity of Kamala Harris and the impossibility, given her race and gender, of removing her, for now is about all that keeps a cognitively declining Biden still in office. The Left fears what she could do as president to the Democratic Party; conservatives are terrified of what she could do to the country.

Joe Biden’s bewilderment exempts his embarrassments from accountability in the way that Hunter Biden’s addictions excuse his past serial criminality. But the passes granted to both father and son would be now unsustainable with a viable Vice President in waiting.

Indeed, the Harris problem explains some of current Democratic strategy.

Backroom leaks and growing insider rumors of Biden dementia confirm the portrait of an often befuddled president whom the public by now knows all too well.

The aimless House Democrats’ “how-dare-you-even-consider-an-impeachment inquiry” furor, coupled with their half-hearted efforts, along with the media, to refute the actual charges of corruption of the Biden family, suggest that he will not run for reelection—but also not be impeached much less convicted or removed under the 25th Amendment.

So the Harris dilemma explains a lot: finding a way to keep her out of current power until Biden somehow finishes his first term, and thus letting the Democratic 2024 primary candidates organically abort her presidential aspirations.

There are a few problems, however, with this strategy.

One, can Joe Biden finish his first term?

That would require his staff to shorten his already truncated workday for the next 18 months to about 2-3 hours of work per day.

Kay S. Hymowitz: Barbie’s Checkmate Greta Gerwig’s film is outfitted with so many layers of irony as to disarm the doll’s—and the film’s—most ardent critics.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/barbies-checkmate

I know. You’ve had it up to here with Barbie. You don’t care about the stunning $162 million global record-breaking opening weekend. You roll your eyes at the Barbie luggage, the candles, the ice cream, the Airbnb listing, the NFTs. You’re sick of the whole “women are so oppressed yet so wow.” You’ve heard it a million times already; the future is female.

Well, you may not be interested in Barbie, but Barbie—or more precisely, Mattel, Barbie’s corporate puppet master—is interested in you. Young children are Mattel’s core customers, but the company has set its sights on a much wider market. It sees the movie as a way for everyone—“teens, young adults, moms, glammas [a portmanteau for glamorous grandmas]” to “engage in the franchise,” in the words of Richard Dickson, Mattel’s former president and COO (now CEO of clothing retailer Gap).

Judging from the pink tsunami of the past few weeks, Mattel’s efforts are paying off. We shouldn’t be surprised. The movie is only the latest in a long series of brilliant chess moves confirming Mattel’s place as the World Champion Grand Master of marketing to progressive, relatively affluent, sophisticated consumers. I don’t know whether the company or the movie are actually as woke as some are grumbling, but I do know Mattel saw the sales potential of the woke phenomenon when Nikole Hannah-Jones was still in elementary school.

Consider Barbie’s origins. For much of commercial toy history, baby dolls were your basic girl toy. Girls would pretend to bottle-feed, dress, and comfort their dolls in imitation of their housewife mothers, who, in turn, tended to their real-life average of five (!) children. The end of the baby-doll era came in the late 1950s, after Ruth Handler, along with her husband Elliot, a founder of the young Mattel company, had a eureka moment. During a visit to Germany, she spotted an unusual doll known as Bild Lilli in a shop window. Based on a risqué comic book character, Lilli was mostly sold in tobacco shops. The character was something of a floozy, with many R-rated adventures. At the time, Lilli was coveted not by little girls but by grown men, though exactly what they did with the dolls no one was saying. To create Barbie, Mattel desexualized and Americanized Lilli, giving her a California glow, evening out her dramatically arched eyebrows and toning down her red, puckered lips. One other seemingly trivial but significant change: Lilli’s shoes were molded to her invisible feet; Barbie’s shoes are removable.

Director Greta Gerwig’s movie opens with a hilarious take on Barbie’s arrival in the U.S. market. A gargantuan doll dressed in a zebra-striped bathing suit and sunglasses suddenly appears, monolith-like, astride a group of sad-looking young girls. Dressed in dowdy, Amish-inspired smock dresses, they are awestruck at this vision of adult sexiness and glamour and immediately smash their baby dolls in angry disgust, a scene that Gerwig gleefully sets to the majestic orchestral opening of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, made famous by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In the Name of Climate Change: Travel Restrictions and the Great Reset By Janet Levy

If you experienced unprecedented delays during air travel this summer, the airlines likely blamed it on the weather.  You might have been surprised, for bad weather wasn’t reported in the news.  But here is what should surprise and shock you even more.  The real reason – a shortage of pilots and air traffic controllers (ATCs) – is linked to the Great Reset, the agenda to control people and restrict freedom conceived by the global elite and being implemented through leftist groups and their sympathizers.

It is now well known that Klaus Schwab, chief of the elitist World Economic Forum (WEF), set the Great Reset in motion during the pandemic, calling it an opportunity to “reflect, reimagine, and reset the world.” The COVID lockdown also connects to the story of the recent flight delays, because it was during the pandemic that travel restrictions were imposed worldwide and pilots and ATCs were laid off.  At London’s Heathrow, alone, for example, traffic plunged more than 75% – from 80 million passengers daily to about one million.  The ostensible reason for limiting travel was to curb contagion and virus mutation.  But a sinister agenda was afoot.

The travel restrictions, quarantines, vaccine passports, social distancing, the lockdown itself, and other measures were not so much for disease control as for imposing the dystopian New World Order.  COVID was a smokescreen.  In the name of a recovery plan, radical steps were initiated to restructure the world economy and usher in an extreme environmentalist and statist framework of governance as the new norm