NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Establishment Is Trying to Divide and Conquer MAGA By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on November 9th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/the_establishment_is_trying_to_divide_and_conquer_maga.html

There are videos making the rounds showing President Trump standing on stage in Miami’s pouring rain while imploring Americans to get out and vote.  The metaphor is striking.  There’s Trump, battling the elements, lively as ever, refusing to give up, insisting on finishing what he’s started.  Citizen Free Press appropriately notes that “President Trump is truly a force of nature.”

I know that the months ahead will make for some spirited political debate among friends, but I encourage you to cement in your minds this quintessential image of Trump unbroken and unbowed.  Whatever else can be said about the man (and there is plenty), he remains the only leader in our times unafraid to stand alone.  When other self-proclaimed allies run the other way or look for somewhere safe to weather the approaching storm, Trump stands inside the tempest, demanding that it give up and surrender.  That’s something that will forever separate him from those who pretend to be him.

It has become normal to deconstruct Trump’s public appeal to something as basic as he fights!  Yet it is not just that Trump fights; it is why he fights that has attracted such a diverse voting coalition unlike any other political movement today.

Consider the Republican Party’s consensus issues before Donald Trump descended the golden escalator and changed everything.  By and large, Republican politicians defended the endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq without question. They ignored the harms of illegal immigration as a taboo issue equated with racism.  And they dismissed discussion of revitalizing American industry and manufacturing as unrealistic in a globalist system where cheap slave labor is plentiful overseas.  

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Close All China Consulates, Slash Embassy Staff by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on November 9th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19104/close-china-consulates

Beijing reportedly has… used the station to track Chinese individuals of interest to the regime and, short-circuiting legal procedures, to persuade those Chinese to voluntarily return to China.

“[T]hey are very bold because they know they can do as they like and the State Department won’t do a damn thing.” — Maura Moynihan, author, to Gatestone, October 2022.

Prior to the recent indictments, the U.S. government often let off Chinese agents with only a warning, sometimes because of intervention by the State Department.

Law enforcement is essential, but it is hardly an answer to China’s massive campaigns against the United States.

One solution is to deny Chinese wrongdoers the safe havens they enjoy in America. China’s principal safe heavens are its embassy and consulates.

[T]he U.S. should also be closing China’s non-diplomatic presences — primarily banks and companies — to even out the situation.

China uses every point of contact to try to bring down America, and American institutions are now being overwhelmed by the onslaught. It may sound drastic to some, but the survival of freedom and democracy in America critically depends on getting the Chinese regime out of the U.S.

The best way to do that is to expel the military officers, spies, agents, provocateurs and criminals finding protection in China’s diplomatic presences in the United States. Nothing else would better communicate resolve to Beijing than getting dangerous Chinese actors off American soil.

The Biden administration should of course be shutting down the Chinatown police station, as well.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The DeSantis Florida Tsunami A huge re-election victory vindicates his pandemic policies.

Posted By on November 9th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ron-desantis-florida-tsunami-charlie-crist-governor-election-covid-11667964888?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Ron DeSantis was expected to win re-election as Florida Governor, but the big news Tuesday was the magnitude of his victory. His nearly 20-point rout of Democrat Charlie Crist shows the magnitude of the political change in the once-swing state and may launch the Republican’s campaign for the White House.

The Governor won nearly everywhere in the state, and notably in Democratic strongholds. He won by double digits in heavily Hispanic Miami-Dade County, which Joe Biden carried by 85,000 votes and a statewide Republican hadn’t carried since Jeb Bush won re-election 2002. Mr. DeSantis also won Osceola County south of Orlando, which has a heavy Puerto Rican population. He even won in Democratic Palm Beach County.

The DeSantis tide lifted other GOP candidates, as Sen. Marco Rubio won re-election handily. The GOP also picked up two House seats, including the St. Petersburg seat Mr. Crist gave up to run for Governor.

Florida has been trending to the GOP for some time, and previous two-term Governors Mr. Bush and Rick Scott did much to demonstrate effective Republican governance. But Mr. DeSantis won by fewer than 34,000 votes in 2018. He was leading Tuesday by nearly 1.5 million with 90% of the vote counted. Florida Democrats are going to have to rethink their campaigns in the state.

In his victory remarks, Mr. DeSantis credited his pandemic policies, stressing “freedom” over mandates, and “education” over “indoctrination.” He expanded school choice in the state, which has helped win minority voters. He opened the state for business and classroom instruction earlier than most Governors did—decisions that were widely derided in the national and Florida press. But the voters seemed to appreciate those policies and rewarded him.

Mr. DeSantis is thought to have presidential ambitions, and his victory speech sounded like it. A national campaign is a much larger challenge than running even a large state like Florida, and Mr. DeSantis will have to cut down on his extensive use of the vertical pronoun if he wants to rally a movement.

But there’s little doubt that his Florida success will grab the attention of voters outside the Sunshine State. You can bet Donald J. Trump was watching—unhappily.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Airbus Still Does Business With Putin’s Russia But Also Wants U.S. Defense Contracts Mario H. Lopez

Posted By on November 9th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/09/airbus-still-does-business-with-putins-russia-but-also-wants-u-s-defense-contracts/

One thing made clear by Vladmir Putin’s war against Ukraine is how out of touch his calculations were regarding Ukraine’s ability to fight, the strength of his forces, and the willingness of the international community to push back against his unhinged brutality.

That last point might be the most surprising of all given the lack of a similar response to Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea and other aggressions in recent times.  Countries — including famously neutral Switzerland — and an impressive number of private companies joined in sanctions and/or took similar steps that have hurt Putin’s ability to impose more pain on the Ukrainian people.

French aerospace giant Airbus is one of the more notable exceptions to the laudable private-sector efforts.

Instead, Airbus is ignoring sanctions on Russia and has gone as far as to successfully pressure the European Union to exempt it from sanctions.  Interestingly, their position comes at a time when they are simultaneously attempting to expand their contracting work with the U.S. Defense Department.

Airbus needs titanium to manufacture planes.  Titanium and titanium alloys are widely used for aircraft.  Titanium’s density is 60% that of steel, so it is lightweight but also strong and resists corrosion.  Airbus gets about half of the titanium it uses from Russia.

After Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, Airbus continued dealing with Moscow, even going so far as to stockpile more Russian titanium while other plane makers balked at the same chance.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How The Left Obliterates Morality The descent into cultural mayhem has been a long, slow grind. by Scott Hogenson

Posted By on November 9th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-the-left-obliterates-morality/

Daniel Patrick Moynihan could never have imagined how far down America might define deviancy when he penned his seminal essay Defining Deviancy Down.

The diplomat, scholar and four-term Democratic Party senator from New York theorized that deviant behavior had become so pervasive, we must redefine it simply to cope as a nation.

“I wrote that there is always a certain amount of deviancy in a society,” Moynihan said of his 1993 essay. “But when you get too much, you begin to think that it’s not really that bad. Pretty soon you become accustomed to very destructive behavior.”

Millions of Americans are now accustomed to some of the most destructive behaviors imaginable, and recent examples of this demonstrate a breathtaking repudiation of human morality.

An American president publicly expressed support for the surgical mutilation of children. Taxpayers are funding drag queen story hours for three year olds.  High school girls are banned from their own locker room because they are uncomfortable sharing it with a boy. A teacher badgers her students not to “judge people just because they wanna have sex with a 5-year-old.”

What used to be defined as medical malpractice, criminal molestation, voyeurism and rape is not only acceptable, it’s encouraged and, in some cases, required. It is deviancy defined so downward, it’s positively subterranean.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Election forecast By Richard Baehr

Posted By on November 8th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/election_forecast.html

We have reached the point where “too close to call” does not cut it. Unfortunately, there are probably more “too close to call” Senate races than in any other recent cycle. It is also the case that sometimes the House and Senate go in different directions even when there is a strong movement towards one party or the other In House races as there often is in a new President’s first midterm. In 2018, the Democrats picked up 40 House seats but lost Senate seats in Florida, Missouri, Indiana, and North Dakota, while picking up seats in Arizona, and Nevada. In 2020, Republicans gained more than a dozen House seats but lost a net 3 Senate seats (4 in total, losing 2 in Georgia, Colorado and Arizona, and regaining Alabama).

At the moment, the Senate is divided 50-50, and the House has 220 Democrats and 212 Republicans with 3 open seats — 2 formerly Democrat-held seats  in Florida, and one formerly Republican held seat in Indiana. The GOP needs a net pickup of 5 House seats to gain majority control assuming they win the open Indiana seat.

Pretty much every serious analyst of the   House races believes the GOP is favored to regain control.  Most of those who look at individual races — Cook Political Report, Larry Sabato, and 538 — are forecasting GOP gains of around 20 seats. About half of those gains are expected to come in seats now regarded as tossups (many more seats in the tossup category are now held by Democrats than Republicans).  

RealClearPolitics (RCP) believes the GOP will win about 30 net seats assuming the two parties split those in its tossup category. The fact that Democrats are playing defense and pouring in late money and surrogates in many places where they won comfortably in 2020 suggests GOP strength and the potential to have bigger gains if the Party wins a large share of close races as it did in 2020. 

The every-ten-year redistricting after the census resulted in a small net gain for the GOP. This gain was smaller than the net effect of court-ordered redistricting  in Pennsylvania and North Carolina before 2020, which moved about a half dozen seats towards Democrats in the two states. The most gerrymandered states at this point are Illinois by and for the Democrats (14-3), and Ohio by and for the Republicans (12-3). In New York State, an attempt to create a 22-4 map for the Democrats was so egregious that a state court  threw it out. With the strong challenge by Lee Zeldin in the governor’s race, Republicans could now win 8 or 9 House seats in the state.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

News of the GOP’s Demise Was Greatly Exaggerated Just one more way the #NeverTrump conglomerate has shown itself to be #AlwaysWrong. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on November 8th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/07/news-of-the-gops-demise-was-greatly-exaggerated/

Barring an 11th-hour catastrophe or widespread cheating, Republicans are expected to stomp Democrats across the board in Tuesday’s election.

Polls show Republicans with a big edge on issues that matter most: By double digits, voters trust Republicans to handle inflation, the economy in general, and crime. Democrats only hold a slight edge on education, a longtime Democratic advantage that’s been slipping away in the post-lockdown era.

GOP candidates are competitive in races previously considered safe for Democrats, including Senate seats in New Hampshire and Washington. Republicans are not just poised to take control of the House and the Senate but possibly a handful of governorships and state legislatures, which will have a huge impact on how the 2024 presidential election is handled.

Even more alarming news for Democrats is eroding support among reliable constituencies. Latinos, blacks, and suburban white women—voters who often represent the winning margin for Democratic candidates—are moving in the direction of the GOP this year while working class whites, once the crown jewel of the Democratic Party, continue their exodus from the party that now caters to the rich and overly credentialed.

Which raises an important question: What does Bill Kristol say now?

Kristol, a founding father of the modern-day neoconservative movement who sold his soul, reputation, and part of his sanity to left-wing billionaires in his insatiable lust to destroy Donald Trump, warned for years that Trump would destroy the Republican Party. Since 2016, the notoriously-wrong pundit has predicted any number of doomsday scenarios related to Trump, most notably the demise of the GOP.

During the 2016 GOP nominating convention, Kristol lamented that the Republican Party “had fallen into the grip of a vulgar demagogue with a thuggish retinue.” A year later, Kristol declared the GOP wasn’t salvageable, promising to start an independent party as an alternative to a Trump-hijacked Republican Party. Kristol and his NeverTrump cohorts transformed into full-blown Democrats by the 2018 midterm elections. Trump, Kristol claimed in 2018, was a “cancer metastasizing at a rapid rate” within the GOP.

 “I think the party brand is getting much more enmeshed in everything Donald Trump says and stands for; the whole future of the Republican Party is now an open question,” the former aide to Vice President Dan Quayle openly mused that year. (Shortly thereafter, the owner of the Weekly Standard, the influential magazine Kristol launched in 1995, shut down the publication.)

Kristol endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and pushed for the full-scale annihilation of the Republican Party, including governors who were “killing Americans” by reopening their states’ businesses after the pandemic and “banning masks.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Lost American Generation By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on November 8th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/the_lost_american_generation.html

James Stevens Curl has recently written how he has “become increasingly concerned with creeping dumbing-down, not least in the field of education, where it became obvious to [him] many years ago that standards were dropping through the floor in the dishonest campaign by politicians and professional ‘educators’ to claim that they were getting better every year, with resulting ‘grade-inflation.'”  He “devised some very simple tests … regarding ambitions, interests, hobbies, the results of which were shocking, quite apart from that fact that the answers to [his] questioning revealed a void, a scary emptiness, untempered by any evidence of intellectual curiosity, cultural foundations, or much else besides.”

Moreover, Curl “selected a short paragraph from a published work, and asked candidates to read.”  “Many stumbled over some quite common words, but one could not read at all.  Only very few were able to get through the paragraph fluently, without making mistakes.  Simple tests in spelling, use of punctuation, and so on revealed abysmal ignorance.  It was obviously a massive lie, a confidence-trick, a disgraceful piece of jingoistic nonsense for politicians and pundits to claim for the nation a ‘world-class education,’ getting better every year.”

In fact, American education has been sliding into the abyss for 50-plus years.  The forerunner to affirmative action was open enrollment.  Begun in the late 1960s, the result was that ill prepared students were suddenly thrust into a college environment and expected to keep up with the still rigorous college expectations.  I tutored many of these students, and to this day, I still recall asking them to use a thesaurus.  They did not know what it was or how to use it.

Fast forward a half-century, and my now-college students still do not know what a thesaurus is.  But why should they?  Spelling rules, vocabulary expansion, grammar instruction, geographical knowledge have all been deliberately cast aside.  These young people may be the most credentialed students, but they are the least educated.  It has been a purposeful and highly successful left-wing maneuver to create an “educated” class of serfs who will eventually do the left’s bidding.

The following are examples of the work I receive from what I now call the “lost generation.”  Nothing has been edited.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Plastics-and-Such: The Labor of the Virtuous By David Solway

Posted By on November 8th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/11/07/plastics-and-such-the-labor-of-the-virtuous-n1643700

EXCERPT:

Some time back, I had an interesting conversation with the friendly manager of our village garbage dump, who confided that the ordinances requiring the separation of the various kinds of refuse into separate bins and pits were nothing but bureaucratic nonsense coupled with public virtue-signalling. It made no ultimate difference to the disposal process, which I had long suspected to be the case. Though I knew that my efforts to relieve Janice of superfluous labor were likely non-starters, I had thought the words of an authority, a veritable scholar of waste management, on the question might have an effect. It was not to be. Tins, milk cartons, wine bottles and plastic containers of every conceivable stripe continued to be scrubbed to a high polish, and placed into the appropriate Tuff-Guy kitchen bags before ending their now immaculate existence in one of six different dumpsters. My argument was dismissed as typically male indifference to the niceties of household maintenance. Women always know better.

Writing in City Journal, John Tierney points out that even Greenpeace now claims that recycling is a dead end. Recycling plastic waste is environmentally harmful to reprocess, is contaminated by toxic materials, and is not economical, apart from being hopelessly impractical and labor-intensive. Sending such waste materials to landfill is both cheaper and provably less harmful to the environment, though it will inconvenience those who “perform garbage-sorting as a ritual of atonement, a sacrament of the green religion.” Tierney does not mention the scandal of polypropylene Covid masks, which not only do not prevent virion transmission and lead to hypoxia and fungoid diseases, but will eventually find their way to marine waters and can take centuries to degrade. They cannot be recycled.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Veterans Day and What’s at Stake in the Mid-Term Elections A prayer for a patriotic cultural renaissance within our Armed Services. by Scott S. Powell

Posted By on November 8th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/veterans-day-and-whats-at-stake-in-the-mid-term-elections/

When Washington politicians decided to change the dates of holidays to give federal government employees predictable three-day weekends through the 1968 Uniform Monday Holiday Act—which moved the dates of celebration of Presidents Day (formerly Washington’s Birthday), Memorial Day, Labor Day and Columbus Day—they met such opposition from Veterans about changing the date of their holiday, Veterans Day, that they gave up. Apparently, the politicians had forgotten that Veterans Day was first known as Armistice Day, and was celebrated on November 11th because that was the day agreed upon by the Allied nations and Germany to begin a total cessation of hostilities in World War I. In fact, the guns and artillery went silent on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, after some 20 million people from both sides had given their lives in the war effort.

Veterans Day would not be diminished as another commercially oriented “floating” holiday but remain a sacred and fixed day tied to history and to celebrate valor and sacrifice embodied in veterans of foreign wars.

While Veterans remain one of the most patriotic groups in America, there is great concern—even alarm—that the politization of America’s armed forces that started in the Obama years, has now again accelerated, and metastasized into nothing short of betrayal of the military by the powers behind the Biden administration.

President Joe Biden is directly responsible for the worst, most humiliating and damaging defeat in the history of American warfare—the shocking and disgraceful U.S. departure from Afghanistan starting on August 15, 2021. The botched U.S. retreat resulted in the death of thirteen Marines, with more injured, and it left behind to enemy hands several hundred Americans and some $80 billion of military hardware (much of it state of the art) that included Black Hawk helicopters, thousands of Humvees and armored vehicles, and countless numbers of assault rifles—enough to arm dozens of terrorist groups all over the world, whose primary target is the U.S and its allies. Because these results were completely avoidable, many see Biden’s decisions that brought about this disaster calculated and deliberate—as if to help our enemies.