NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Evasive Mr. Wray The FBI director knows a lot about issues that matter to the Biden regime and the media. But he isn’t so savvy when it comes to issues that matter to Americans. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on August 5th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/04/the-evasive-mr-wray/

It was time for him to fly.

FBI Director Christopher Wray, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee for the first time since July 2021, insisted he had to leave the hearing by 1:30 p.m. sharp. (It began at 10:00 a.m. on Thursday morning.) 

Despite leading a scandal-ridden agency quickly losing the trust of the American people and congressional Republicans, Wray somehow believes that setting aside less than four hours to answer questions by lawmakers responsible for checking and balancing his work is sufficient.

“I had a flight that I’m supposed to be high-tailing it to, and I had understood that we were going to be done at 1:30, so that’s how we ended up where we are,” Wray told Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member who asked why the rush. If Wray needed to leave on business, Grassley noted, “you’ve got your own plane,” referring to the taxpayer-funded Gulfstream G550 jet used to ferry the head of the FBI around the country privately.

Wray got his way—the committee wrapped shortly after 1:30 p.m. with no chance for Republicans to ask follow-up questions. It was a symbolic win and another example of how Wray almost always prevails in skirmishes between his agency and members of Congress.

To be fair, an extended appearance only would have resulted in more non-answers and political spin. 

Wray, appointed by Donald Trump in 2018, knows a lot about issues that matter to the Biden regime and national news media, such as the imaginary threat of “domestic violent extremists.” But he isn’t so savvy when it comes to issues that matter to Americans, such as a wide-open southern border, exploding crime rates, an aggressive China on the rise, and foreign terrorists who arrived here in the disorderly evacuation of Afghanistan.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Will Republicans Make Education a Campaign Issue? Dems are quickly losing their grip. Larry Sand

Posted By on August 5th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/will-republicans-make-education-campaign-issue-larry-sand/

It just doesn’t stop. In Portland, OR, the kindergarten curriculum includes an anatomy lesson featuring “graphic drawings of children’s genitalia.” The words “Boy” and “Girl” are eschewed in favor of “person with a penis” and “person with a vulva,” because, according to the curriculum, girls can have penises and boys can have vulvas. In a West Chester, PA middle school, boys were encouraged to wear dresses at the school’s Gay Pride Month celebrations. And in a New York City middle school, students are encouraged to keep a list of all the “microaggressions” they witnessed – both at schools and at home.

And while kids are getting indoctrinated into the gender and Critical Race Theory cults, their traditional learning has become an afterthought. According to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Nation’s Report Card, only 37% of U.S. public high school seniors are proficient in reading and 24% have reached proficiency in math. Additionally, proficiency is at just 22% in science and a pathetic 12% in U.S. history. This is pre-COVID data, and we can only guess how horrific the scores will be after the prolonged union-orchestrated school shutdowns.

The good news is that the American people have finally awakened to the abuse. A May poll by the American Federation of Teachers revealed that 39% of voters reported that they have more confidence in Republicans on education matters, compared with 38% for Democrats. While the Republican edge is not exactly overwhelming, it still is important, as Democrats have always prevailed in public opinion because of the perception that they were the education party. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess notes, the Democrats’ “broad support for more education spending, outspoken embrace of public education, and close ties to teachers unions and the education establishment have usually added up to a hefty advantage, one that became more significant in recent decades as education assumed a more visible, national profile.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Member of US Army Joins Palestinian Islamic Jihad Operative for Ramallah Wedding Isayed Darawad dons the American flag while supporting Palestinian terror. Joe Kaufman

Posted By on August 5th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/member-us-army-joins-palestinian-islamic-jihad-joe-kaufman/

Convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) member Hatem Fariz is back in Israel, once again leading a tour for his terrorist supporting friends. This particular trip has them attending different weddings. One of the attendees, Isayed Darawad, is a surprise, as he is a member of the US Army. And though he may wear green camos with a ‘Stars and Stripes’ patch, this is a man who believes America’s friend Israel doesn’t exist and wants to see her Jewish citizens dead. Why is Israel allowing terrorist operatives into her country, and why is the US allowing their supporters into the military?

In February 2003, the FBI announced the arrests of four individuals whom the law enforcement agency described as being members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group recognized by the US government as being a terrorist organization. One of the individuals was Tampa-area resident Hatem Naji Fariz, a then-manager of a medical clinic. After a lengthy trial, Fariz pled guilty to providing material support to PIJ. Following his jail sentence, Fariz became managing director of Al-Qassam, the mosque founded by his PIJ co-defendant, Sami al-Arian, and named after one of the main inspirations for PIJ, deceased Palestinian militant icon, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam.

Through Al-Qassam, a.k.a. the Islamic Community of Tampa (ICT), Fariz runs a travel agency, the Adam Travel Tampa Hajj Group, which he uses to take excursions to Israel, a nation PIJ is sworn to destroy. Many of the people Fariz takes with him on these trips have like feelings towards Israel and Jews in general. They post videos on social media of Israelis being blown up during ambushes and videos of successful rocket attacks on Israeli civilian structures. They post memorials for their favorite dead leaders from Hamas and PIJ. They call on “Allah” to “take revenge on the Jews.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Shame of the Nation The root cause of the American crisis is the moral depravity of the ‘Woke’ progressives. David Horowitz

Posted By on August 5th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/moral-dimension-crisis-we-face-david-horowitz/

Everyone can sense that the political situation we find ourselves in is anything but normal. Yet the language we use to describe current conflicts is a language designed to frame them in the category of politics as usual – only perhaps more so. In speaking about current conflicts, we focus on the surface “issues” that divide us – a record inflation, off-the-charts crime waves in our urban centers, a humanitarian crisis at our southern border. Sometimes we sum it up as a double standard in the justice system that treats violent leftists as “peaceful protesters” and public school parents concerned about the abuse of their children as “domestic terrorists.” That juxtaposition gets us closer to the true nature of the conflict. But it is still inadequate to the gravity of the political moment, suggesting that progressives simply fail to understand the issues at hand.

But they understand them very well. For progressives the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the “revolution” – the
“re-imagining” and transformation of American society into a future where genders are selected and “social justice” prevails.  That goal is so worthy and so necessary, it justifies any and all means to achieve it. Once this is understood, one can see that under the surface of the crises we face is a sinister force that poses an existential threat to our way of life – a threat far more immediate than the so-called climate apocalypse.

Morality is about following rules that ensure virtuous ends. Detach the means from the ends and what you get are the totalitarian regimes that have blighted the modern era. At the root of the current American crisis is what can only be described as the moral depravity of the “woke” progressives and their radical agenda.

Is this extreme? How else to describe Senator Elizabeth Warren’s response to the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade with a call – unopposed by her Democrat colleagues – to close the nation’s 3,000 private “crisis pregnancy centers.”[1]

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The great White House replacement Joe Biden is an errand boy, a figurehead, and he has outlived his plausibility Roger Kimball

Posted By on August 5th, 2022

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/great-white-house-jettison-biden-harris/

I like it when I can endorse the other side. It makes me feel like I’m part of the big happy family of man instead of just another snarling partisan. So it was with gratitude that I absorbed David Axelrod’s recent observation about Joe Biden on CNN. Pay attention now: Axelrod was the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and what he doesn’t know about the emotional weather of the left is not worth knowing. “There is this sense that things are kind of out of control,” quoth Axelrod when asked about the Big Guy™, “and he’s not in command.” Right you are, Dave! My only question is: what took you so long?

Of course, Axelrod’s devastating admission was not a disinterested or impartial judgment. Nothing Obama’s main men say is that. Every word is calculated for political advantage. But the question is, whose advantage? I am not entirely sure. I am confident, though, that Axelrod’s breathtaking admission was part of the next step in resetting the political chess board. It was another stage in the emergency effort at damage control that the shadowy cadre of people who actually run the United States have been undertaking ever since the full magnitude of Joe Biden’s incompetence became manifest.

Back in March, I predicted that the Democrats were prepping to eject Biden. One sign of that, I said, was the fact that elements of the regime-propaganda secretariat — in this case the New York Times — had suddenly gone off the reservation by admitting that Hunter Biden’s “Laptop from Hell” was not “Russian disinformation” as they and all their cohort had insisted, but was, in fact, the real deal. And not just the salacious stuff about Hunter’s “private” life, but also all the possibly criminal stuff about Chinese involvement with the Bidens’ finances and, especially, Joe Biden’s personal involvement with various schemes involving millions of dollars.

Why would the Times admit such a thing? For the same reason that David Axelrod would make his admission about things spinning “out of control” and Biden being “not in command,” i.e., bonkers.

One of the big problems for the Dems is that before they can do something about Biden himself, they will need to do something about his cackling number two, Kamala Harris. It was the same sort of problem they faced when the regime decided to jettison Richard Nixon. The junta could easily mount televised congressional hearings and cashier Nixon. But then Spiro Agnew, his vice president, would slide into the top spot. That was unacceptable. So the first task had to be to nobble Agnew. Agnew made this easy because there were pictures of him accepting paper bags of cash in exchange for political favors. It will not be so easy with Harris. Her corruption is of a more systemic but less obviously criminal sort.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Say, Whatever Happened To That New COVID Surge Everyone Was Freaking About?

Posted By on August 5th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/05/say-whatever-happened-to-that-new-covid-surge-everyone-was-just-freaking-about/

As recently as two weeks ago, the big story of the day was the coming surge of a new, highly infectious COVID variant, called BA.5. The Biden administration warned about it. Los Angeles county considered renewing its indoor mask mandate. The head of the World Health Organization said that “new waves of the virus demonstrate again that the Covid-19 [pandemic] is nowhere near over.”

Look at some of the headlines:

“BA.5 Will Cause ‘Even Greater Surge,’ Warns UCSF’s Wachter of Highly Infectious COVID Subvariant,” KQED, July 6
“The BA.5 COVID Surge Is Here,” New York Magazine, July 8
“Los Angeles could reinstate mask mandates as COVID cases rise,” CBS News, July 8
“As new COVID variants surge, White House urges caution, pushes boosters,” Boston Globe, July 12
“Experts rue simple steps not taken before latest COVID surge,” ABC News, July 13
“The ‘worst variant’ is here,” CNN, July 14

Well, the data from the Centers for Disease Control show that the number of new infections has remained pretty flat since late May and is now trending downward. In, fact, the rate of new infections appears to have topped out right when the media were playing up the coming “surge.”

CDC data show that the seven-day moving average for new cases peaked at 129,823 on July 17. It had fallen to 119,034 by Aug. 2.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Your Tax Dollars Went to China, Saudi Arabia and WHERE? Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on August 5th, 2022

https://mailchi.mp/b694bc49f90d/35b-from-us-taxpayers-funded-world-health-organization-59147?e=0c8ccf8e98

BILLIONS SPENT ON PRIVATE BUSINESS DEALS IN HOSTILE NATIONS

Ever heard of the Export-Import Bank? It’s little-known, but it’s not like your local credit union. It’s part of the federal government and it spends BILLIONS of your tax dollars!

The bank is meant to finance deals that boost exports and small businesses when private capital can’t be found.  But most of the money goes to huge corporations like Boeing and General Electric – or to countries that are openly hostile to the United States! 

Since 2007, Chinese companies have received more than $6.4 billion even though the nation has the second largest GDP in the world – AND even though they’re threatening us over Taiwan! 

Russian companies, which often line the pockets of oligarchs, received $1.9 billion – even though Russia is fighting a land war in Europe and could be responsible for food and fuel shortages worldwide! 

Saudi Arabian companies took over $6.9 billion in financing – even though President Biden called them a pariah over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

The icing on this awful cake? These deals and capital assurances are guaranteed by YOU, the American taxpayer. If any of this cash is lost in a country that’s economically or politically unstable, that’s tax dollars down the drain. 

With widespread turmoil around the world, we need to take a SERIOUS look at where we fund private business deals. 

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Miners Explore Amazon Basin To Support “Green” Energy; New York Times Horrified Francis Menton

Posted By on August 5th, 2022

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-8-3-miners-explore-amazon-basin-to-support-green-energy-new-york-times-horrified

The front page of today’s New York Times features a big article clearly intended to get the readers riled up about the latest environmental horror that must be stopped. The headline is “The Illegal Airstrips Bringing Toxic Mining to Brazil’s Indigenous Land.” Subheadline: “The Times identified hundreds of airstrips that bring criminal mining operations to the most remote corners of the Amazon.”

Wow, this is bad. The airstrips are “illegal.” The mining is “toxic,” and not only toxic but also “criminal.” And it’s all happening in the most pristine place left in the whole world, the “remote corners of the Amazon,” much of it inhabited by the most innocent of all innocent indigenous people, the Yanomami.

So what is driving this big rush of miners into these remote regions? Could so-called “green energy” — with its vast demands for raw materials like nickel, manganese, aluminum and iron — have anything to do with it? If so, you won’t learn anything about that from the Times.

The obvious purpose of this lengthy Times piece is to get you outraged about the criminal mining wildcatters now said to be swarming the Amazon jungle. The piece starts with research conducted by the Times, using satellite photographs, that has identified a large number of airstrips — close to 1300 of them — that have been carved into the Amazon jungle, and that are now being used to bring in supplies to support the development of new mines.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

SLEEPWALKING INTO WAR WITH CHINA- DAVID GOLDMAN

Posted By on August 5th, 2022

https://compactmag.com/article/sleepwalking-into-war-with-china

Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan marks the beginning of a new and dire strategic crisis with China. Whether by accident or design, the Biden Administration is sleepwalking into war with China—quickly, but not quickly enough for most Republican leaders. While the United States wasted $6 trillion or more in failed nation-building campaigns during the past 20 years, China focused its military resources on surface-to-ship missiles, modern aircraft, submarines, and electronic warfare measures on its coast. If we fight China on its home seas, we probably will lose.

“There is a fundamental asymmetry of strategic interest in Taiwan.”

There is a fundamental asymmetry of strategic interest in Taiwan between China and the United States. China is not a nation-state but a polyglot empire. Only 1 in 10 Chinese converses in Mandarin, the state dialect, according to a 2014 government study. Most speak one of 200 dialects. China is held together as it has been for thousands of years by a common tax collector in Beijing and the Mandarin bureaucracy, recast as the Chinese Communist Party. One rebel province—as Beijing views Taiwan—sets a precedent for many. Countless times in its long history, China has fragmented into warring provinces, encouraged during the 19th and 20th centuries by foreign powers.

Opposition to Taiwanese sovereignty is a raison d’etre of the Chinese state, and Beijing will go to war to prevent it. Beijing will tolerate the status quo, but not if it believes the United States is promoting Taiwanese sovereignty.

What makes Pelosi’s visit so provocative is her constitutional status as second in the line of presidential succession. A visit by an American vice president would, in diplomatic protocol, verge upon diplomatic recognition and crosses a red line; a visit by the next-in-line to the vice president touches that red line.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Decline and Fall of Newspapers By Charles Lipson

Posted By on August 5th, 2022

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/08/04/the_decline_and_fall_of_newspapers_147991.html

A few years ago, you would have unfolded your newspaper and read opinion and analysis like this. Those days are gone. Today, most of us get our news and commentary online, perhaps supplemented by network or cable television, although TV viewership is far smaller than in the days of  “The Big Three.” Buried alongside those iconic broadcasters is the public’s confidence in news from all sources. Only 16% of Americans say they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, only 11% in TV news. Those numbers keep sinking. Today, if Walter Cronkite ended his broadcast, “And that’s the way it is,” most people would just smirk.

How dramatic is this change in the way we get our news? What’s driving it? What have we gained and lost? And how do these changes affect our deeply divided nation?

The most important point is the most obvious: The changes are huge – and irreversible. One recent study shows that in our country of 332 million people, no newspaper has a print circulation of more than 1 million. Only nine have more than 100,000 subscribers. Among the 25 largest papers, only one showed an increase in circulation, and it serves a retirement community. It’s shocking, really, that a paper with less than 50,000 subscribers is among the nation’s largest.

The decline is relentless. Print papers are losing one out of eight subscribers every year. Their daily circulation, over 63 million at its peak in the 1980s, is now about one-third that size. Over 25% of all American newspapers have died in the past 15 years.