NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s Rhetoric is a Threat to the Republic This isn’t just pandering to the base by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 4th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bidens-rhetoric-is-a-threat-to-the-republic/

“That kind of rhetoric is typical, but under Obama and Biden, it’s been backed up by arrests, investigations, surveillance, raids, imprisonment, censorship and the whole banana republic gamut.”

The only good thing about this speech is that it didn’t have a color scheme out of V for Vendetta and didn’t feature Marines in the background. Whoever runs these things at least learned from that attempt at looking like Biden was about to declare martial law, suspend habeas corpus and make everyone read Gender Queer and How To Be An Anti-Racist at gunpoint in a gulag.

The bad news is no one cared about that speech except conservatives. They care even less about this one.

With the countdown underway, voters have made it clear that they care about the economy and crime. Anyone who finds the “threat to democracy” routine persuasive is already a solid blue voter and ActBlue donor who probably showed up for at least one D.C. protest.

This isn’t just pandering to the base, it’s pandering to the Elizabeth Warren base.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Soldier of Allah Anniversary Lingering lessons from terrorist Nidal Hasan’s mass murder at Fort Hood. by Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on November 4th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/weekend-soldier-of-allah-anniversary/

The U.S. Army plans to rename Fort Hood, Texas, a 214,968-acre base “ideal for multifaceted training and testing of military units and troops.” The name change does not alter reality of a terrorist attack that marks an anniversary three days before the midterm election.

At Fort Hood on November 5, 2009, U.S. Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan murdered 13 unarmed American soldiers and support personnel and wounded more than 40 others. The massacre marked a failure of political and military leadership, but there was more to it.

The Fort Hood massacre was also the worst failure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation since 9/11, which the FBI also failed to stop. The attack could have been easily prevented, long before Hasan, an ally of the Taliban, claimed so many American lives.

Born in 1970 to Muslim immigrants, Nidal graduated from Virginia Tech and in 2003 completed psychiatry training at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md. Hasan served his residency at Walter Reed Medical Center, where instructors cited his “pattern of poor judgement and lack of professionalism.”

As Lessons from Fort Hood notes, during his residency and post-residency fellowship, Hasan demonstrated evidence of violent extremism and wrote papers defending Osama bin Laden. Two officers described Hasan as a “ticking time bomb,” but the Army promoted the “soldier of Allah,” as Hasan described himself,  and considered him competent to counsel soldiers returning from combat.

On December 17, 2008, Hasan visited the website of radical Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, the al Qaeda leader who endorsed deadly violence as religious duty. Hasan sent a message to al-Awlaki and another on January 1, 2009. The messages were acquired by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in the San Diego Field Office. In early January of 2009, the emails were sent to the Washington Field Office (WFO) and FBI headquarters.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Even Biden Thinks The Economy Is Going To Crash Next Year.He Just Hopes Republicans Get the Blame

Posted By on November 4th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/11/04/even-biden-thinks-the-economy-is-going-to-crash-next-year/

David Strom at Hot Air noticed something in the Democrats’ campaign messaging as the midterm elections draw near. Namely, the emergence of a talking point about how if Republicans win control of Congress they will “crash the economy.” There’s only one reason to say this. Democrats know they’ve set the economy on course to crash and they’re hoping to blame Republicans when it does.

Describing Republicans as a threat to democracy hasn’t swayed voters, and not for lack of trying. President Biden gave a speech on Wednesday once again accusing Republicans of this crime. His party has only lost support despite two years of pushing this line.

Democrats also thought the Dobbs ruling might swing voters in their favor, apparently because they thought pro-abortion fanatics represent the general public.

Nothing seems to be effective these days at scaring voters into voting for Democrats. Not when inflation is running rampant, the border is in chaos, crime is up, and schools are pushing transgender radicalism on children.

What Democrats can’t run on is the economy. Or maybe they can?

At a recent event, President Biden warned that:

“The Republican leadership in Congress has made it clear they will crash the economy next year by threatening the full faith and credit of the United States for the first time in our history, putting the United States in default unless — unless we yield to their demand to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Democrats Face Historical Headwinds in Tuesday’s Midterm Elections

Posted By on November 4th, 2022

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/11/03/democrats_face_historical_headwinds_in_tuesdays_midterm_elections_148415.html

Regardless of all that wispy smoke Democrats and their allies in the news media are blowing, key polls suggest Republicans are still likely to win back control of the House of Representatives in Tuesday’s midterm elections and have a better than even chance to take over the Senate.

Historically, one of the strongest indicators – perhaps the strongest indicator – of how a party will do in midterm elections is the job approval rating of the incumbent president. Parties of presidents who are down in the polls usually lose congressional seats. Parties of presidents up in the polls generally gain seats in the midterms.

In other words, how a president is doing a reliable predictor of how Americans will vote in congressional elections.

The latest October Gallup Poll has President Biden’s job approval at 41% among registered voters. Among voters dissatisfied with how things are going in the country, three of four disapprove of Biden. With numbers like that, most Democrats on the ballot should be running scared.

Key indicators suggest Americans are in a sour mood over a slew of issues.

COVID and its disruptions of everyday life still have people anxious. High cost of groceries, gasoline, and mortgages are straining family budgets. Rising crime and murder rates in cities have people fearful. And the relentless tide of illegal immigration at the southern border poses serious physical and financial challenges to communities struggling to absorb migrants.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Bloated College Administration Is Making Education Unaffordable Our campuses are stuffed with non-academic office workers. If elected to Harvard’s Board of Overseers, I‘ll propose firing most of them. Harvey Silverglate

Posted By on November 4th, 2022

https://quillette.com/2022/11/02/bloated-college-administration-is-making-education-unaffordable/

With the first semester of the new academic year upon us, many students and parents are asking: How did college tuition skyrocket to the point where many middle-class families must mortgage (or re-mortgage) their homes, or prematurely raid their retirement funds, to send even a single child to a typical four-year college, whether public or private?

Most college professors are fairly well paid, to be sure. And buildings and grounds can be costly to maintain. But none of this fully explains why tuition and fees have been increasing well beyond the rate of inflation. At Harvard University, the 2022–2023 cost of attendance for non-commuting students (which includes tuition, room, board, and fees) is estimated at $76,763. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the corresponding figure is $79,850. At Boston University: $82,760. Even at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, a public institution, it’s $34,834 for in-state students and $55,296 for out-of-state students.  

Image produced by chartr.

As someone who’s been involved in legal matters pertaining to higher education since the beginning of my career 55 years ago, I’ve had a chance to observe this phenomenon, and have naturally wondered at the cause. The short answer that I’ve come up with can be summarized in two words: administrative bloat. At Yale University, for instance, there are now as many administrative staff as undergraduates. Even among university academics, there seems to be far more resources dedicated to busywork. Every dean, it seems, has a deputy dean; with deputy deans sometimes having several assistant deputy deans. Many of these positions come with secretaries and other forms of administrative support.  

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Hollywood Power Brokers Mugged by Reality L.A.’s mayoral race pits a black congresswoman endorsed by Obama against a billionaire developer. “I can’t tell you the number of people who tell me, ‘I’m voting for him, but I’m not telling anyone.'” Peter Savodnik

Posted By on November 4th, 2022

https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-hollywood-power-brokers-mugged?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

“This is like a breaking point,” said Nicole Avant, who served as U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas under Barack Obama and is the wife of Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos. We were talking about Los Angeles, where she was born and grew up and met her husband. “Who is in charge here? How is this happening? It’s the drug addicts in front of people’s houses, it’s people naked in the street—there’s so much chaos, and Rick is the opposite of that, and we just need to reel things in and do things in a different way.” She was referring to Rick Caruso, the billionaire real-estate developer running for mayor of the second-biggest city in the country.

Avant is black Hollywood royalty. Her father, Clarence Avant, now 91, was a legend in the music industry, managing the likes of Sarah Vaughan, Freddie Hubbard and Bill Withers. They called him the Black Godfather. 

So you might think that Avant would be supporting Karen Bass’s bid to be mayor of Los Angeles. Bass, who is black, is a six-term Democratic congresswoman. In 2020, she was on Joe Biden’s vice-presidential shortlist. Days ago, Obama, Avant’s old boss, endorsed her.

But Avant is backing Bass’s rival, Caruso—who was a Republican for years, and then, in 2011, switched his registration to “decline to state,” and then, in January of this year, switched to Democrat, just in time to run for mayor in a city overflowing with Democrats.

To Avant, to any number of Caruso supporters, all that is beside the point. Los Angeles, they say, is heading toward a cliff and everything is at stake in this election.

Avant said she found it “very insulting” when Bass supporters told her she had an obligation to support Bass because she’s a black woman. “I don’t ever vote on race or gender,” Avant said. “I’m a free thinker. People told me not to support Barack Obama and to support Hillary Clinton for the same reason, because she’s a woman. You can’t win.”

“The concept of hiring the best person for the job, especially in a situation like this, is not gone,” Bryan Lourd, co-chairman of the Creative Artists Agency and a Caruso supporter, told me. “I don’t think this city survives with more of the same old ideas about leadership.” (CAA is the biggest shop in town and represents, among many other celebrities, Scarlett Johansson, Steven Spielberg, Ava DuVernay and Reese Witherspoon.)

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

How the Projectionist Game is Played. Part Two—Election Denialist! Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 4th, 2022

https://victorhanson.com/how-the-projectionist-game-is-played-part-two-election-denialist/

Think of any recent leftwing accusation against the Right. Then automatically assume that it is evidence of the accuser’s own culpability for the very charge he levels against others. In other words, the Left projects upon its opponents exactly what it fears is most incriminating among its own ranks. As a general rule, leftwing projectionism is a sign of culpability.

Donald Trump did deny the integrity of the 2020 election and does to this day. While he is probably wrong that the final and “real” popular vote count would have given him a popular vote victory, he is right to lodge legitimate objections to the way the balloting was conducted in some states on the following bases:

a) The Left funded a massive effort to change balloting laws in key pivotal states under the cloak of the Covid pandemic in spring 2020. The effect of liberal state court decisions or administrative edicts was often to nullify the state legislatures’ laws and rights to establish voting procedures. More practically, they changed state laws on the books that governed the rejection rate of non-Election-Day ballots. The result was the rejection rate dropped in many states even as they were flooded with historic numbers of non-Election Day ballots, most of them for Joe Biden.

A normal 3-5 percent rejection rate fell, depending on the state, to between 2.0 and 0.5 percent—despite more than 102 million ballots not cast on Election Day. Ballots that did not match registrars’ lists, that had incomplete or wrong names, that did not have full addresses, or that did not have signatures or signatures that matched the printed names, were often accepted. And there may have been many millions of such ballots that in prior elections would have been summarily rejected.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Some Thoughts On Affirmative Action Francis Menton

Posted By on November 4th, 2022

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-11-2-some-thoughts-on-affirmative-action

The Supreme Court arguments in the Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action cases took place on Monday. I listened to some substantial portion, although it was not possible for me to listen to the whole thing (some 5 hours in total). From what I heard, I agree with most commenters that affirmative action in the form currently practiced throughout academia is not likely to survive.

Affirmative action is one of those issues on which the opinions of our intellectual elites diverge almost completely from the opinions of normal people. In a piece on Tuesday (November 1) discussing the likely outcome of the Harvard/UNC case, the New York Times took note of the broad public opposition to affirmative action in college admissions, even extending to heavily Democratic constituencies:

[A] majority of Americans oppose the policy. Nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults said in March that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions, a Pew Research Center survey found. . . . Even in liberal states, most voters do not support affirmative action. In 2020, about 57 percent of Californians rejected an amendment to the state’s Constitution that would have let government and public institutions, including public universities, adopt affirmative-action policies.

According to the cited Pew survey, even majorities of blacks and Hispanics oppose affirmative action in college admissions:

A majority of Black, Hispanic and Asian respondents opposed the consideration of race or ethnicity.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Here’s All The Left Wing Political Violence The Corporate Media Seems To Have Forgotten About : Sarah Weaver

Posted By on November 4th, 2022

https://dailycaller.com/2022/11/02/left-wing-political-violence-corporate-media/

The media appears to have rediscovered political violence the morning of October 28 when news broke that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul was attacked by a hammer-wielding mad man in their California home.

The days of hysterical coverage that have since followed — certainly warranted to some degree for an alleged attempt on the life of a woman third in line for presidency — nonetheless represent a pattern of disproportionate opportunism that seems to strike whenever the corporate media and Democrats decide certain violence could serve a politically expedient end.

In case they’ve forgotten or would rather not discuss it, here is a small slice of left-wing political violence over the years that has either been excused, dismissed or under-covered.

Fire-bombings at Pro-Life Pregnancy Centers

Three pro-life pregnancy centers were firebombed in the course of one month following a leak of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Heath Center. Many of these attacks were carried out by the radical pro-abortion group Jane’s Revenge, which has openly endorsed violence against pro-life individuals and organizations. Multiple pro-life centers, in Colorado, Virginia, Oregon, and other states, were vandalized or firebombed in the week after the Dobbs decision came out.

Lee Zeldin Attacked

Republican New York gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin was attacked on stage during a July campaign rally. The suspect shouted “you’re done,” then rushed stage with a knife. While some on the left, such as President Biden and New York governor Kathy Hochul, condemned the attack, the media was relatively silent on what was effectively an assassination compared to their breathless coverage of the Pelosi attack.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s right to sideline the Left By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on November 4th, 2022

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-721418

The emerging landslide victory for the camp headed by Israeli opposition leader Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu is causing more than the average stir. Though there’s nothing unusual about a losing side feeling disappointed by an unwanted result at the ballot box, the outcome of Tuesday’s Knesset elections – the fifth round in three-and-a-half years – is generating a level of disgruntlement not seen in the country since 1977.

That was the year when Menachem Begin, founder of the Likud Party now chaired by Netanyahu, became premier. The upheaval ended three decades of Labor Party dominance.

Panic on the Left was palpable and shrill, with detractors calling him a terrorist, likening him to Mussolini and bemoaning Israel’s inevitable downfall at his hands. Not only was the frenzy unwarranted but in retrospect, it was laughable.

Today’s equally undue apoplexy surrounds two phenomena: Netanyahu’s smashing comeback, which his foes had been doing everything to quash, and the meteoric rise to mega-popularity of Otzma Yehudit MK Itamar Ben-Gvir.

At Netanyahu’s behest prior to the election, Ben-Gvir and Religious Zionist MK Bezalel Smotrich merged their factions so as to prevent the possibility of split and wasted ballots. The move turned out to be a brilliant one, as together they garnered a large number of seats.