ELECTIONS Comments turned off

As Midterms Loom, Voters Prefer GOP On Border Security, Support Building A Wall: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on October 17th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/17/as-midterms-loom-voters-prefer-gop-on-border-security-support-building-a-wall-ii-tipp-poll/

Americans overwhelmingly believe that the U.S. has a serious problem with controlling its southern border as a record flow of illegal immigration leaves many scratching their heads over whether immigration laws are enforced at all. With midterm elections just around the corner, which party has the edge on this key issue? According to October’s I&I/TIPP Poll, the answer is Republicans.

For October’s public opinion survey, I&I/TIPP asked voters a simple question: “Which party would do a better job of securing the border?”

More Americans picked the Republican Party (43%) over the Democratic Party (34%), the online poll of 1,376 adults taken from Oct. 5-7 showed. A hefty 23%, however, claimed they were “unsure.” The poll has a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points.

But as in other recent I&I/TIPP Polls, voters showed a sharp partisan split on the issue. It is, after all, one of the hot-button issues in congressional election campaigns across the country.

Among Democrats, 74% said their own donkey party would do the best job, while just 3% of Republicans and 16% of independents agreed.

Not surprisingly, the answers flip-flopped for Republicans, who by an overwhelming 91% said their own party is the best choice for securing the border, compared to 9% of Democrats and 38% of independents.

Note that independents give Republicans the nod by more than 2-to-1.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Thoughts of Chairman Xi His China combines Marxism-Leninism with nationalist aggression.

Posted By on October 17th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-thoughts-of-chairman-xi-nationalism-aggression-china-ccp-communist-power-mao-war-taiwan-south-korea-11665955319?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The most important election in the world this year is no election at all. It’s a coronation. When China’s Communist Party anoints President Xi Jinping for a third five-year term this week, it will confirm China’s combination of aggressive nationalism and Communist ideology that is the single biggest threat to world freedom. It all but guarantees an era of confrontation between China and the U.S.

We say this with regret, and not only because war with China would be a catastrophe. When China embarked on its reform project under Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s, there was reason to hope that the Middle Kingdom might eventually leave behind its murderous Communist past. For a time, into the 2000s, that still seemed possible as reforms continued and Chinese living standards increased.

The bet, which was worth taking for the sake of a better world, was that China would follow the path of other East Asian nations that evolved into democracies as the middle-class grew. But China’s Communist Party has never relinquished its grip on power as the authoritarians of Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia and the Philippines did.

In his book “The Hundred-Year Marathon,” Michael Pillsbury makes a powerful case that Chinese war hawks have been biding their time all along until China was strong enough to challenge U.S. power. But there were enough differences in elite opinion in China to think that even the Party wasn’t monolithic in its views. Mr. Xi’s consolidation of power has ended that debate, as he has become the most powerful and committed Communist leader since Mao Zedong.

In a decade Mr. Xi has crushed all dissent, imposed a vast censorship regime, and created an intrusive surveillance regime beyond anything the East German Stasi imagined. He has erased the autonomy for 50 years that China had promised Hong Kong and made Xinjiang province a prison camp for the Uyghurs.

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Left’s Motto: I Feel, Therefore I am Right Kevin Donnelly

Posted By on October 17th, 2022

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/10/the-lefts-motto-i-feel-therefore-i-am-right/

While justified as a request for greater civility and the avoidance of unjustified discrimination over the last 40 years,l political correctness has morphed into an Orwellian nightmare of distorted language and mind control. Orwell observed in his essay, Politics and the English Language, ‘If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought’ and there is no doubt we are now living in a world where reason and rationality no longer prevail and where words, phrases and concepts have been weaponised by the cultural Left in the campaign to impose its ideological agenda.

Best illustrated by the slogan “War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength”, the strategy is to force citizens to accept two or more conflicting concepts, thus, ensuring compliance by determining how people conceptualise and think. Orwell writes doublethink involves the ability “…to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic”.

Such is the bizarre and irrational world of woke. Babies are no longer born girls or boys, rather they are “assigned” a gender at birth, with some parents waiting months before they decide where their newborn infant sits on the LGBTIQ+ spectrum. In maternity hospitals breast feeding is described as ‘chest feeding’, mothers renamed ‘birthing parents’ and fathers as ‘non-gestational persons’. Woke language is also used as a weapon to vilify and attack those who refuse to conform or who dare to question what has become the new orthodoxy.

Men arguing that not all males are sexual predators and cautioning that women should be aware of the dangers involved in walking alone through a dark and deserted park at 3am, are condemned as misogynist and sexist. Any who suggest not all cultures are equal and new arrivals should make some attempt to assimilate are attacked as racist and xenophobic. To argue it is wrong that schools and universities always portray Western civilisation as classist, sexist, homophobic, racist and guilty of oppressing ‘the other’ is to be guilty of white supremacism.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Brain Freeze: Biden Says Economy ‘Strong as Hell’ During Ice Cream Stop By Matt Margolis

Posted By on October 16th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/10/16/brain-freeze-biden-says-economy-strong-as-hell-during-ice-cream-stop-n1637517

During a campaign stop at a Baskin-Robbins in Portland, Ore., on Saturday, Joe Biden declared the economy to be “strong as hell” under his administration.

“Our economy is strong as hell,” Biden claimed while going to town on his ice cream, before adding, “the internals of it.”

What internals is he talking about? Historic inflation? Record gas prices? The weakening dollar? Economic contraction?

“I’m not concerned about the strength of the dollar. I’m concerned about the rest of the world. Does that make sense?” he said, before blaming other countries for America’s economic woes.

“The problem is the lack of economic growth and sound policy in other countries, not so much ours,” he insisted. “And that’s having, it’s worldwide inflation, and it’s consequential.”

Well, it’s appropriate he was in a Baskin-Robbins because that’s 31 flavors of stupid right there.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Poll: 64 Percent of Americans Blame ‘Woke Politicians’ for Crime Spike By Nate Hochman

Posted By on October 16th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/poll-64-percent-of-americans-blame-woke-politicians-for-crime-spike/?utm_source=r

A new Harvard-Harris poll, published earlier this week, has a number of interesting findings about the mood of the American electorate, but one stands out as particularly striking:

The fact that a majority of Democrats aren’t just ceding that “wokeness” is a problem in the abstract, but that it’s directly responsible for one of the defining issues of the 2022 election — crime and public safety — is bad news for the Left. It’s also yet another indication that the contemporary culture war can and should be a winner for Republicans, if they’re willing to run aggressively on them; these aren’t boutique right-wing base issues. They have implications that are felt across the political spectrum.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A decade later, Obama admits he made a mistake failing to support 2009 Iranian uprisings Obama said it is “hard to predict” whether current protests will force regime change, but U.S. needs to stand with the demonstrators.By John Solomon

Posted By on October 16th, 2022

https://justthenews.com/world/middle-east/decade-later-obama-admits-he-made-mistake-failing-support-2009-iranian-uprisings

Former President Barack Obama is belatedly acknowledging he erred by failing to embrace the Iranian uprising in 2009 known as the “Green Movement” as a new round of protests and strikes rage in Tehran more than 13 years later.

“In retrospect, I think that was a mistake,” Obama, said Friday, referring to his administrations tepid response to the 2009 movement. “Every time we see a flash, a glimmer of hope, of people longing for freedom, I think we have to point it out.

“We have to shine a spotlight on it. We have to express some solidarity about it,” the 44th president told the Pod Save America podcast operated by some of his former advisers.

A new uprising has been underway in Iran for 30 days, ignited by the beating death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini at the hands of the Islamic morality police.

Obama said it is “hard to predict” whether the current protests will achieve regime change, but that the West needs to stand with the demonstrators in the face of a brutal crackdown.

He hailed “the incredible courage that is taking place in Iran and those women and girls who are on the streets knowing that they’re putting themselves in harm’s way to speak truth to power.”

Obama added it was important “to affirm what they do and I hope that it brings about more space for the kind of civic conversation that over time can take the country down a better path.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tulsi Gabbard: A voice of reason by Joe Concha

Posted By on October 16th, 2022

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3689785-tulsi-gabbard-a-voice-of-reason/

“I can no longer remain in today’s Democratic Party. It’s now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness, who divide us by racializing every issue & stoking anti-white racism, who actively work to undermine our God-given freedoms enshrined in our Constitution.”

That was former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) earlier this week announcing why she left the Democratic Party. Except one could reasonably argue that the Democratic Party left Gabbard.

One thing’s certain: These aren’t your daddy’s donkeys anymore. President Kennedy won the approval of the nation based largely on a platform of lowering taxes and strengthening the U.S. military. Jimmy Carter was pro-life and god-fearing. And Bill Clinton was conservative on illegal immigration, crime and spending.

Clinton said things one would never hear almost any Democrat say today when it comes to decreasing the size of government, ending the welfare state and not spending what we don’t have. Not coincidentally, Clinton left office with the highest approval rating of any Democratic president of the television era.

But then the party went so far left that its most popular lawmakers on social media embrace socialism. President Biden and most other Democrats seem to believe that spending trillions of dollars is the best way to lower inflation. So much for not spending what we don’t have.

Some in the party also believe cashless bail laws that allow violent criminals onto the street somehow lower crime, or the opposite of the approach taken by the 1994 crime bill Biden once championed.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Unmentionable, Unspeakable, and Unutterable. Part One Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 16th, 2022

https://victorhanson.com/the-unmentionable-unspeakable-and-unutterable-part-one/

What best characterizes an Orwellian or Soviet society?

The silent, collective acceptance of the truth that never can be spoken, and the lies of the apparat that everyone else knows are not true.

Think of some of the astounding truths that we simply ignore.

Hillary Clinton

We have spoken about Clinton before, but the degree of her transgressions seems to increase with every recent disclosure. In 2015–16 Hillary Clinton for the first time in U.S. history hired a thuggish hit team of oppo researchers to manufacture dirt on her opponent Donald Trump.

Then she trumped that crime by hiding her payments behind three paywalls. Then her team enlisted a corrupt FBI to hire her own two hirelings, Christopher Steele and Igor Danchenko, as informants to spread their lies, smears, and dirt throughout the apparat, deep state, and fusion media.

In other words, Hillary Clinton was the first presidential candidate in history, who, hand-in-glove with the FBI, almost won the presidency by systematically violating a myriad of laws (hiring two foreign nationals to work in a presidential campaign, destroying subpoenaed records and devices, racketeering, and conspiracy to deceive the government, etc.) in her efforts to destroy Donald Trump.

Then without a hint of shame, Hillary Clinton immediately became the nation’s most prominent election denier by declaring Trump illegitimate. She insisted that he was not the true winner of the 2016 election, as her minions did their best to warp electors to reject their constitutional duties to vote according to state tallies.

Then licking her wounds in defeat, she bragged that she was joining the “Resistance.” And she would go on to advise Biden in 2020 not to accept a popular vote loss.

Think of it: Hillary Clinton sought to destroy the integrity of the entire 2016 election.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Why ‘Bros’ Bombed The exact right amount of people saw the gay romcom. Isaac Grafstein

Posted By on October 16th, 2022

https://www.commonsense.news/p/why-bros-bombed?utm_source=email

The algorithm knows I’m a man and gay, so I’m often served news about Britney, bodybuilding videos, and, more recently, nonstop ads for the Universal movie Bros, written by Billy Eichner. 

The film’s poster features two men groping each other’s jeans-ed butts. At this year’s VMAs, Eichner took the stage to urge audiences to see his movie, gushing that the film “is making history as the first gay romcom ever made by a major studio and the first where every role is played by an openly LGBTQ actor.” Headlines called Bros “hilarious,” “history-making” and “groundbreaking.”

So when I settled into the theater last Sunday evening with a friend (and a bag of heavily buttered popcorn) as the trailer for the Whitney Houston biopic, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, played, I was ready to be wowed.  

The film follows Eichner’s character, Bobby, a mouthy podcaster opening up an LGBTQ museum (cringe) and his relationship with Aaron, a chiseled lawyer with a penchant for group sex portrayed by Luke Macfarlane. (I won’t complain.) The two meet-cute in a nightclub and then must navigate the complex world of gay relationships, commitment issues and insecurities.

There are moments when Bros is funny—a self-deprecating lampoon of gay life. But mostly it’s a preachy, self-indulgent dumpster fire. At one point, Bobby harangues Aaron’s mother about the need to teach her second-grade students about queer history. The two long hours are replete with partisan finger-wagging, lamentations about erasure, and performative apologies from Bobby for being a “cis white guy.” Half of this alleged comedy is devoted to Bobby’s cranky monologues. 

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Prosecutors: U.S. election firm gave Chinese workers ‘superadministration’ access to election data Supervisor described policy as “huge security issue.”

Posted By on October 16th, 2022

https://justthenews.com/government/security/prosecutors-us-election-firm-gave-chinese-workers-superadministration-access

A U.S. election technology company currently embroiled in scandal gave Chinese subcontractors high-level security access to American election data, according to a warrant filed by prosecutors this week in Los Angeles. 

Authorities earlier this month arrested Eugene Yu, the CEO of the election software company Konnech, on charges of grand theft and embezzlement related to his work with that firm. Controversy has also swirled over Konnech’s alleged storage of poll worker data in servers located in the People’s Republic of China.

Konnech says on its website that it offers its PollChief “election logistic software” to nearly three dozen clients across the United States. The warrant for Yu’s arrest, meanwhile, made startling allegations related to the handling of sensitive data for those clients. 

The charging document, filed in the Superior Court of the State of California for the County of Los Angeles on Thursday, claims that a project manager in August “wrote that any employee for Chinese contractors working on PollChief software had ‘superadministration’ privileges for all PollChief clients.”

The project manager reportedly described the decision as a “huge security issue;” He later stressed to workers at the company the “need to ensure the security privacy and confidentiality [of] our client data.” 

The warrant also alleges Konnech employees “sent personal identifying information of Los Angeles County election workers to third-party software developers who assisted with creating and fixing” the company’s PollChief software.

Konnech did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News on Saturday. Yu’s arrest warrant recommended that he be given no bail while being detained.

Yu could reportedly face up to a decade in prison if convicted on the charges.