NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

On the Ropes Progressive prosecutors are being ousted, one by one. Thomas Hogan

Posted By on July 27th, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/marilyn-mosby-just-the-latest-progressive-prosecutor-to-go

Last week, Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby lost in the Democratic primary contest to retain her position. Around the country, other de-prosecuting prosecutors are being removed one by one, as their failing policies and ethical problems culminate in disorder and public distrust. Is the progressive prosecutor movement on the decline?

Mosby’s original campaign platform was to ignore entire categories of crimes and to reduce sentences even for violent criminals. The criminals got the message: Baltimore was a free-fire zone. Homicides exceeded 300 per year in the Charm City every year that Mosby was in office, making Baltimore one of the nation’s most dangerous municipalities. People and businesses fled the city, with over 35,000 residents exiting, even as the rest of Maryland grew in population. Just a few weeks before the primary, a report from the Maryland Public Policy Institute detailed how many of the homicides in Baltimore were committed by criminals who would have been in jail under a normal prosecution regime. Mosby did not help her position by ending up under federal indictment for perjury charges alleging that she made false statements while applying for pandemic-related loans to buy a vacation home in Florida. Mosby’s victorious opponent, Ivan Bates, is something of an unknown quantity, but he campaigned explicitly on a public-safety platform, as his campaign materials make clear: “To build a safer Baltimore, we must have a functional and efficient prosecutor’s office led by a State’s Attorney who prioritizes public safety.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Why Florida’s DeSantis could be the cure for an ailing America

Posted By on July 27th, 2022

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/florida-desantis-cure-america

Vengeful Democrats investigating the January 6 riots may help elect Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis president in 2024. Good for them; the nation is grateful.

In spending weeks and months conducting their one-sided hearings into the riots at the Capitol, Democrats have undermined the standing of former President Donald J. Trump. There is no question that the made-for-TV show trial has taken a toll; polling confirms that Americans, including many Republicans, are disgusted by Trump’s behavior during those consequential hours.

Trump increasingly has baggage, the kind of baggage that caused Hillary Clinton to lose in 2016. When you run for president, it is not helpful if a majority of the country considers you dishonest and untrustworthy. That’s where Clinton was in the summer of 2016; that’s where Trump is now.

Democrats are congratulating themselves on this achievement. A recent Bloomberg piece was titled: “Good news for Democrats: Even Republicans are Tiring of Trump.” The story says the hearings have turned off a lot of “soft Trump” voters and Independents who are ready to “move on.”

But in possibly sidelining Trump, Democrats have unquestionably furthered the fortunes of DeSantis who, on many matrices, could be a much tougher opponent that Trump. They may in fact have cost themselves the White House in 2024.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What John Durham has proved The special counsel exploded a ‘resistance’ myth Eli Lake

Posted By on July 27th, 2022

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/what-john-durham-has-proved/

In May, when a federal jury acquitted former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann of one count of lying to the FBI, the cadre of politicians, pundits and activists that comprise what they consider a “resistance” to Donald Trump’s presidency were brimming with indignation at the insult of its having gone to trial at all.

The Sussmann prosecution was the first case from special counsel John Durham to go to trial. Durham was appointed in 2019 to investigate the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. And it took only a few hours for the jury to rule against him. As Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe told Politico: “The Durham roadshow has expended far too much of the taxpayers’ money with precious little to show for it and needs to be wound down in an orderly fashion. Enough already!”

Tribe’s view of Durham’s prosecution of Sussmann is ironic. Only a few years earlier, the very same resistance denounced anyone who attacked the integrity of Robert Mueller, the special counsel who examined the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. And yet when Mueller’s team found no evidence of conspiracy, the resistance did not complain that the hunt to prove Trump’s collusion was wasteful.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Federal complaint against Jew-hatred at CUNY documents decade of anti-Semitism By Mike Wagenheim

Posted By on July 27th, 2022

https://jns.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=20b32ab0e3215f9f006699472&id=42b89222f4&e=286aa78331

The filing from the American Center for Law & Justice calls for a U.S. Department of Education investigation into pervasive discrimination against Jews at the City University of New York.

A new federal complaint last week to the U.S. Department of Education is accusing the City University of New York of becoming a “pervasively hostile environment for Jewish students” over the last 10 years.

The July 19 filing from the Washington D.C.-based American Center for Law & Justice cites a laundry list of harassment of Jewish students and faculty, as well as other violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, across the CUNY system and dating back nearly a decade.

Jeffrey Lax, the Orthodox Jewish business department chair at CUNY’s Kingsborough Community College and founder of S.A.F.E. (Students and Faculty for Equality) CUNY, told JNS that this is at least the third known—and to date the broadest—federal complaint lodged on the matter. “I think the point of this filing is to show how pervasive and systemic the anti-Semitism is across the board throughout CUNY,” Lax told JNS.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Sexual Experiment at the Ivy Leagues By Abigail Anthony

Posted By on July 26th, 2022

With courses such as ‘Queer Dance’ and events featuring the drag queen ‘LaWhore Vagistan,’ campus life today is steeped in gender and sexuality.

Until very recently, most people were unaware that asserting that only women can menstruate and become pregnant could be controversial, or that pronouns could be incendiary. Yet today, gender ideology dominates the news cycle. Netflix employees protested Dave Chappelle’s comedy special with “transphobic” jokes. Avid Harry Potter fans boycotted J. K. Rowling’s work because of her supposedly “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” views. It’s not merely a culture war. The State Department recognized International Pronouns Day. Recently, President Biden signed an executive order to “advance LGBTQI+ equality,” which in part promotes “expanded access to gender-affirming care,” even for minors.

How did such radical social change happen so quickly? As incubators of gender fundamentalists, universities are equipping students with ever-expanding terminology for sexual orientation and encouraging activism without cultivating a sense of intellectual humility. Graduates become the directors of corporations, editors of newspapers, and staffers to politicians, thus occupying powerful positions that shape American culture. To help readers understand the college-campus dynamics, National Review compiled academic coursework, extracurricular programming, and institutional resources related to gender and sexual ethics at the eight Ivy League institutions, which serve as exemplars of higher education and train the country’s future elites.

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ambassador Nides: ‘Nothing Political’ About Biden’s Visit to East Jerusalem But the visit became political when the Israeli flag on the presidential vehicle was removed. Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on July 26th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/ambassador-nides-nothing-political-about-bidens-hugh-fitzgerald/

Joe Biden’s visit to east Jerusalem, without any Israeli official allowed to accompany him, and with the Israeli flag on his car replaced with a Palestinian one, was not meant to send a political message about the status of Jerusalem, according to the US Ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides. A full report on Nides’ naively enthusiastic remarks is here: “Biden’s east Jerusalem visit was not meant as political statement – interview with Nides,” by Lahav Harkov, Jerusalem Post, July 18, 2022:

…“The capital of Israel is Jerusalem,” Nides said. “The president said it, I said it, it is the position of the US.”

But Biden did not say anything about Jerusalem being the “undivided” capital of Israel. He left open the possibility of a future Palestinian state with its capital in east Jerusalem. Some say that he semaphored vexilogically his support for that Palestinian capital to be placed in Jerusalem. 

Biden’s visit to the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem on Friday was “a healthcare event, nothing to do with politics,” the ambassador said. “It had nothing to do with the status of Jerusalem. We could not have been clearer about it. Those who want to make it political, that’s their problem. It was about giving money to these hospitals.”

That visit became political when the Israeli flag on the Presidential vehicle was removed and replaced by a second American flag, when that vehicle travelled to the hospital in east Jerusalem. It became political, too, when the Bidenites refused to let any Israeli accompany the President on his trip to the hospital. These were meant, unhappy Israelis believe, as signs of support for the Palestinian claim to east Jerusalem.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Muslims Slaughter 20 Nigerian Christians in ‘Retaliation’ For Western Actions The Islamic terrorist’s “blame game.” Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on July 26th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/muslims-slaughter-20-nigerian-christians-raymond-ibrahim/

Last May, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (“ISIS”) published a video of the execution of about 20 Christian civilians in Nigeria.  As with many other such ISIS-type videos, the terrorists stood behind their bound and kneeling victims, before knocking them over and carving their heads off to cries of “Allahu Akbar.”

Before doing so, one of the masked Muslims, speaking in the Hausa language, said that the execution of these Christians was “to avenge the killing of the group’s leaders in the Middle East earlier in 2022.”  This is apparently a reference to ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi—a man with a reputation for extreme brutality—who was killed last February during an airborne raid by U.S. and Kurdish forces in northwestern Syria.

The reader may be pondering how impoverished Christian civilians in Nigeria are connected to or responsible for the activities of U.S. and Kurdish forces in Syria.  The fact is, Muslim terrorists are notorious for offering any number of pretexts—many of which border on the absurd—to justify their cowardly targeting and murdering of the Christian minorities in their midst.

For example, ISIS cited similar “grievances” to justify its grisly slaughter of 21 Christians—20 Copts and one Ghanaian—on the shores of Libya in 2015.  An article in Dabiq, the Islamic State’s online magazine in English, titled “Revenge for the Muslimat [Muslim women] Persecuted by the Coptic Crusaders of Egypt,” claimed that the 21 Christians were slaughtered in “revenge” for two Coptic women who, back in 2010 and according to Islamic propaganda, were compelled by Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church to recant their voluntary conversion to Islam and return to Christianity.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

‘You Will Own Nothing, And Like It’ — The Real ‘Clean Energy’ Future

Posted By on July 26th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/26/you-will-own-nothing-and-like-it-the-real-clean-energy-future/

‘We’re going to build a different future with one — one with clean energy, good-paying jobs.”

That was President Joe Biden talking about the climate “crisis” and how it “is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world.”

Right about the time Biden was giving this speech, the World Economic Forum painted a picture of what Biden’s future would look like.

Suffice it to say, if you like socialism, you’ll love it. Because it involves a radical transformation of our economy that brings the end of private ownership of things like cars, phones, laptops, and other electronic devices.

The WEF article begins by admitting something that the left usually refuses to acknowledge: There aren’t enough metals around to power everything with “clean energy.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

CLIMATE EMERGENCY? WHAT A CROCK

Posted By on July 26th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/25/climate-emergency-what-a-crock/

Joe Biden did not declare a climate emergency last week, as many in his party urged him to do. One Democratic senator claimed that the changing climate required “bold, intense executive action” from the president. Another said Biden needed to move because “the climate crisis is a threat to national security.” But there’s no emergency. It’s a wholly manufactured charade.

Though he put off an executive action, Biden said last Wednesday that he has “a responsibility to act with urgency and resolve when our nation faces clear and present danger. And that’s what climate change is about. It is literally, not figuratively, a clear and present danger. The health of our citizens and our communities is literally at stake.” 

His non-COVID fever continued:

“Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world. … Right now, 100 million Americans are under heat alert – 100 million Americans. Ninety communities across America set records for high temperatures just this year, including here in New England as we speak.”

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

FDA Violated Its Own Safety and efficacy Standards in approving Covid-19 Vaccines for Children….James Agresti

Posted By on July 26th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/25/fda-violated-own-safety-and-efficacy-standards-in-approving-covid-19-vaccines-for-children/

The FDA recently authorized Pfizer’s and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccines for children as young as six months. Troublingly, the evidence the FDA used for those decisions violates at least three safety and efficacy standards from earlier FDA publications about Covid-19 vaccines:

In 2021, the FDA warned that “antibody tests should not be used to evaluate a person’s level of immunity or protection from Covid-19 at any time, and especially after the person received a Covid-19 vaccination.” Yet, antibody tests are the main evidence the FDA cited when approving these vaccines for young children.
In 2021, the FDA declared, “We know from our vast experience with other pediatric vaccines that children are not small adults,” and thus, a “comprehensive evaluation of clinical trial data” is necessary to “support of the safety and effectiveness” of vaccines before they are “used in a younger pediatric population.” Yet, the FDA used small studies with narrow data and claimed these vaccines are effective and safe for children by extrapolating from studies done on adults.
In 2021, the FDA wrote that “the primary study objective” is that the vaccines are at least 30% effective with 95% confidence in preventing Covid-19. Yet, none of the studies on young children met this threshold, and some were negative, meaning that the vaccine could increase the chances of catching Covid-19.