NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

State Dept Officials Colluded to Protect Iran Envoy Under FBI Investigation “The State Department never reported Malley’s suspension to the OIG, in violation of federal law” by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on September 19th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/state-dept-officials-colluded-to-protect-iran-envoy-under-fbi-investigation/

Classified information is a very serious matter. Except 99% of the time when it’s not. About the only time that classified information is really a serious issue is when it can be used to raid a certain Florida venue.

The rest of the time it just doesn’t matter. Just ask Rob Malley and an entire administration that covered for him.

The Harris-Biden administration’s suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley may have taken part in a “classified White House-organized” call after his top secret security clearance was frozen over allegations of misconduct, according to the State Department’s internal watchdog.

The watchdog report politely describes this as deviating from normal standards. Much like Al Capone was deviating from normal negotiating procedures.

An official at the heart of the Iran outreach program had multiple State Department officials cover for him, lie on his behalf to Congress and to foreign governments to cover up the fact that he was under FBI investigation.

And it got worse from there.

On April 22, 2023, the State Department notified Malley of his clearance suspension and barred him from accessing the department’s “Sensitive But Unclassified [SBU] information system.”

However, days later, under pressure from senior officials, Malley’s access to sensitive information was restored, as was his access to his State Department email account.

BOOKS Comments turned off

American Leviathan A new book explains how to break the bloated DC bureaucracy and restore the Founding Fathers’ vision. by Mark Tapson

Posted By on September 19th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/american-leviathan/

Conservatives have been complaining for a long time – at least as far back as the Reagan era – about reducing the bloated sea monster of our government bureaucracy, but not only does the state never get any smaller, it just keeps expanding, aggrandizing more power, and extending more tentacles grasping for our freedoms. What would the Founding Fathers think of what we have allowed to become of the limited-power, Constitutional Republic they left us?

Ned Ryun addresses this question in his new book American Leviathan, and traces the history of the progressive movement to undermine that Republic and replace it with an all-powerful state. Subtitled “The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism,” American Leviathan explores how our current government has little if anything in common with the free American Republic that was intended by the Founding Fathers and shaped by the original intent of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Ryun then asks, “What is the right size and scope of government for us today?” and proceeds to lay out a blueprint for rolling back this gargantuan, increasingly authoritarian bureaucracy.

ELECTIONS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Lilliputian Dems Still Struggling to Keep Trump Bound You can’t beat something with nothing. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on September 19th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-lilliputian-dems-still-struggling-to-keep-trump-bound/

Ganging up with the debate moderators, Kamala Harris still hasn’t immobilized Donald Trump. The Dems thought their fellow Lilliputian press agents masquerading as “journalists” and “moderators,” along with some mean-girl snark from Harris, could bait Trump enough to make him hang himself, and so distract millions of voters from noticing that Harris is still dodging questions about her complicity with Biden’s disastrous term, his cognitive decline, and the far-left policy proposals that have marked her entire political career.

Despite the post-debate crowing about Harris’s victory, their ropes still aren’t tight enough to keep Trump down. For eight years, the progressive Democrats have labored to restrain Trump, but he keeps loosening his bonds. Let’s hope that the Dems don’t catch on that you can’t beat something with nothing.

Trump’s term was still young when federal agencies began trying to tie Trump down. The Russia, Russia, Russia hoax; turning an unexceptional phone call with Ukraine’s president Zelensky into a flimsy impeachable offense; Trump’s private conversation in 2005 Access Hollywood leaked that turned some sexual braggadocio into evidence for a sexual assaults; numerous statements by Trump distorted with selective editing, like the “very fine people” comment edited to hide’s Trump’s exclusion of neo-Nazis and white supremacists; and the Big Lie that on January 6 Trump instigated an “insurrection” when he told attendees at a rally to march “patriotically and peacefully” to protest at the capital. And don’t forget the multiple indictments by four Dem prosecutors, all based on creative if not duplicitous reading of the laws.

All those efforts and hundreds more failed to end Trump’s political career and clear the decks for a Democrat president. In fact, they’ve increased the size of his support. So now the lies are proliferating beyond those fed to a compliant media–– just like Harris, the moderators, and the media flacks during the debate every time they opened their mouths. But what else do they have to convince voters? They can’t run on the Biden and Harris record in the White House, which is as useless as Jimmy Carter’s record was in 1980.

ELECTIONS, MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Biden-Harris Price Controls Causing Senior Drug Prices to Skyrocket A recent analysis warns that drug price controls scheduled to begin in 2026 will likely lead to higher costs for millions of seniors and disabled Americans who rely on Medicare Part D. Martin Hoyt

Posted By on September 19th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/19/biden-harris-price-controls-causing-senior-drug-prices-to-skyrocket/

If there’s one axiom, we all know about Washington, D.C., is that it’s full of well-intentioned policies and unintended (read: harmful) consequences. A recent reminder of unintended policy consequences is the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The IRA was passed in August 2022, and according to its champions in Congress and the White House, it was intended to reduce the federal government budget deficit, make investments in renewable energy, lower drug prices, and fight inflation.

Two years later, we’ve unfortunately re-learned that noble intentions don’t necessarily produce good policy. The IRA has failed to achieve its objectives in many ways. One significant problem involves the introduction of drug price controls, which take effect in 2026. Due to the IRA, the federal government now has wide-ranging authority to set the price of drugs through what’s known as the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program.

A recent analysis warns that these pricing provisions will likely lead to higher costs for millions of seniors and disabled Americans who rely on Medicare Part D. This shouldn’t come as a surprise – price controls simply don’t work, and when they’re implemented, someone will eventually have to pick up the tab.  Nor should it be surprising that government spending doesn’t reduce inflation. History shows quite the opposite.

The first group of impacted drugs includes ten medicines that have been selected to have a “maximum fair price” (MFP) set under the IRA. In 2024, Medicare beneficiaries typically pay fixed copays for most of these drugs. For millions of these beneficiaries, artificially fixed-drug costs will slow their progression toward their Part D out-of-pocket limit, making them pay more in out-of-pocket costs.

ELECTIONS, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump Didn’t Start The Fire

Posted By on September 19th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/19/trump-didnt-start-the-fire/

Could Trump tone down his rhetoric? Sure. But why should he go first?

For the second time in as many months, an assassin targeted Donald Trump, and the left blamed … Donald Trump. It’s his violent rhetoric, you see, that is poisoning the body politic and causing everyone to go crazy. Or something like that.

Never mind that the second would-be assassin, Ryan Routh, had written a book in which he called on Iran to assassinate Trump, gave money to Democrats, and posted on X in April using the exact same language Democrats have been pushing for years – “DEMOCRACY is on the ballot and we cannot lose. We cannot afford to fail. The world is counting on us to show the way.”

David Frum, who we called scum in this space after he wrote in immediate wake of the last assassination attempt that Trump reaped what he sowed, was back at it again. “For a decade, this dangerous political environment has been uniquely inflamed by Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric,” he wrote this week. Plus, he said, Trump supports gun rights. Implication? Trump had it coming.

Others, such as the Cincinnati Enquirer, put it more plainly: “Donald Trump brings a lot of this stuff on himself.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Tradition of Jew-Hate by Nils A. Haug

Posted By on September 19th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20946/tradition-of-jew-hate

If the demonstrators really cared about Palestinians, as the Muslim Arab journalist Bassam Tawil points out, “they would be speaking out against the repressive measures and human rights violations perpetrated by Hamas in the Gaza Strip…. instead of improving the living conditions of their people, Hamas and PIJ leaders are imposing new taxes and leading comfortable lives in Qatar, Lebanon and other countries. Instead of bringing democracy and freedom of speech to their people, the terror groups are arresting and intimidating journalists, human rights activists and political opponents.”

“Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people,” said an eyewitness. “I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the ‘fun.'” — Eyewitness to the November 9, 1938 Kristallnacht.

Jihadist media efforts, and especially massive donations to universities from Qatar and other oil-rich Islamic countries, have been so successful that many academics and students in Western tertiary educational institutions have been captivated by the narrow ideology of Jew-hate.

“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.” — Zuheir Mohsen, PLO official, Trouw, March 1977.

In the jihadist view, Islam is the one true faith and therefore Christians, Jews, Hindus, and all other “disbelievers” are following a false religion and therefore can be righteously killed as apostates.

“[T]he Crusaders conquered Eretz Israel, reaching Jerusalem in 1099. Once there, they gathered all the Jews of Jerusalem into the central synagogue and set it afire. Other Jews, who had climbed to the roof of Al-Aksa mosque on the Temple Mount, were caught and beheaded.” — ‘The First Crusade,’ chabad.org

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Blanket Of Darkness Is Falling Over The West Armando Simón

Posted By on September 19th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/09/19/a-blanket-of-darkness-is-falling-over-the-west/

From Sweden and Germany, to Australia and New Zealand, to France and Finland, to America and Canada, to Armenia and Italy, to Britain and Ireland, a network of censorship has been developing and steadily solidifying. Censorship has even been imposed on scientists. Ironically, this blanket of darkness has occurred in those countries with the longest tradition of freedom, specifically of freedom of speech, assembly and of writing. Soon, the peoples of those countries will have to resort to samizdat.

When Musk took over Twitter and exposed the systematic censorship apparatus within the organization, he also revealed that part of the censorship was being carried out at the request of the Biden regime (Facebook likewise agreed to impose censorship). By doing so, he opened the window to what was, in fact, a governmental conspiracy to establish censorship, thereby ironically putting an end to the automatic dismissal of “conspiracy theories” for those persons who could not, or would not, connect the dots.

He also fired the vermin who were carrying out the censorship.

Leftists in the Biden regime were not happy. The White House is “keeping an eye” on Musk and X, and pseudo-President Biden has spoken out against Musk. In retaliation, the FTC was ordered to harass Musk. One would expect that the American media would support Musk, but the reverse is the case. Except for one.

By exposing to the light of day the existence this conspiratorial censorship and allowing X to become a truly free speech zone, he infuriated the totalitarian elites.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel turns the pager on terror with ruthless psychological masterstroke against Hezbollah Miranda Devine

Posted By on September 19th, 2024

https://nypost.com/2024/09/18/opinion/israel-turns-the-pager-on-terror-with-ruthless-psychological-masterstroke-against-hezbollah/

Nobody likes to see humans writhing in agony, but Israel’s daring operation to simultaneously explode pagers in the pockets of Hezbollah terrorists and their associates this week was a ruthless tactical masterstroke. 

In bloody scenes captured on video on social media, men could be seen shopping or sitting on a motorbike one minute and on the ground moaning and covered in blood the next.

At least 12 people were killed and nearly 3,000 people were injured in Lebanon Tuesday, and a similar detonation of Hezbollah walkie-talkies the next day killed another 20 people and injured 450. 

In Hezbollah’s macho culture, the psychological blow of their warriors and officials getting their genitalia blown up is acute, and so is the signal sent to Iran, that no communications devices are safe after Israel managed to kill Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh under the noses of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Tehran by tracking his whereabouts via his cellphone.

Hence the terrorists’ migration to more primitive devices like pagers.  The ingenious “Paging Hezbollah” operation was about as surgical a strike on terrorists as you could get, although Lebanese authorities claimed two innocent children were killed in Tuesday’s attack, more tragic victims of a pointless war that Hamas started on Oct. 7 last year.

Dem sympathizers 

Of course, the Hamas sympathizers in the Democratic Party like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez immediately condemned Israel with a passion that seems to evade them when Israeli civilians are raped and murdered.

There are no circumstances in which Israel is allowed to defend itself.

IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Road to Springfield Roger Franklin

Posted By on September 18th, 2024

https://quadrant.org.au/features/america/the-road-to-springfield/

EXCERPT

Consider for starters residents’ testimony at a recent city council public hearing (video below) which heard of Haitians fetching their duck dinners from the pond in the local park, of setting up camps on residents’ front lawns, of intimidating shoppers in the aisles at Walmart and getting behind the wheel without knowing how to drive. That last charge has been officially acknowledged by an emergency deployment of state troopers sent to stop a surge in “erratic driving” in the town, where an unlicenced Haitian on the wrong side of the road last year rammed a school bus and took the life of an 11-year-old boy. That Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has ordered the Springfield traffic blitz can be taken as confirmation there is more than racism behind complaints about Haitians’ estrangement from community norms. Spare a minute or two to watch the video below and, when you’re done, compare the witnesses’ sincerity, their end-of-the-rope pleas, with the Panglossian platitudes of a media that favours the agenda over truth, wokeness above evidence.

An obvious thought, one that doesn’t bespeak a hint of racism, is how any of us might react were tens of thousands of uninvited strangers to arrive in our towns or suburbs, few speaking English and bringing with them customs distinctly at odds with, in Springfield’s case, the culture and traditions of a largely white, Grant Wood kind of town. But that’s a matter which simply can’t be addressed, isn’t permitted to be addressed, for it would be a career-killer for any news show producer giving voice to the heresy that diversity might not be such a strength after all.

The trouble in Springfield began, as do many things with the best, of intentions. The DeWine family sponsors a charity in Port-au-Prince and official connections grew, sponsored migration with them. Then came the Biden administration’s open borders and life in Springfield changed suddenly and dramatically. No one is quite sure just how many Haitians now call the town home, with estimates ranging from 12,000 to twice that number. In a town of 58,000 even the lower figure represents a lot of new neighbours. How many are legal, how many undocumented, how many hold long-term temporary visas? Nobody really knows. The driver who rolled that school us flew to Brazil, came overland to the Texas, declared himself to immigration authorities and was granted one of several varieties of long-term visas, then loaded aboard an aeroplane bound for Ohio. The rest is history and a funeral.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald Trump Made Them Do It The New York Times finds victim-blaming repellent—except when the victim is the former president.

Posted By on September 18th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-new-york-times-blames-trump

The New York Times devotedly follows the cardinal rule of liberalism—never blame the victim!—at least for officially designated victims of American racism and classism. Slavery, for example, not higher rates of criminal offending, is responsible for blacks’ “unequal involvement in the criminal justice system.” If unwed mothers are poor, the reason lies in heartless welfare rules, not in the decision to have a child out of wedlock.

But when it comes to Donald Trump, victim-blaming is de rigueur. According to the Times’s premier Trump-basher, Peter Baker, Trump is responsible for the attempted assassinations against him. “At the heart of today’s eruption of political violence is Mr. Trump, a figure who seems to inspire people to make threats or take actions both for him and against him,” writes Baker in today’s lead print story. Trump “inspires” the attacks against him. It is hard to imagine this line of thinking applied to other victims of assassination attempts—Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln, for example—but it is as tautologically true in their case as in Trump’s.

Baker recycles the fiction that MAGA supporters, inflamed by Trump’s fulminations regarding Haitian peticide, made bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio. (In fact, as Ohio governor Mike DeWine revealed, the menacing came from bad actors abroad.) But relentless Democratic rhetoric about Trump’s dictatorial intentions and the evils perpetrated by Supreme Court justices, among other alleged conservative opponents of democracy, has no apparent bearing on the death threats and attempts against Trump, conservative justices, and Republican politicians.

The elite press’s inability to escape its ideological bubble and to apply neutral standards of analysis could not be more acute. That inability is as responsible for today’s political hatreds as anything Trump has ever said.