Robert Rosenthal for Civil Court Judge in 2018-
For 27 years, I have fought for justice on behalf of people who are under appreciated and overlooked. My work has been difficult, but rewarding. I look forward to a new phase of my career as a judge, in which I can continue to pursue justice from the bench.”
He would be a real asset to the bench in New York….rsk
http://acdemocracy.org/political-islam-and-extremist-terrorism/
Seventeen years since al Qaeda terrorists used passenger airplanes to attack New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Western-style liberal democracies are failing to recognize the radical Islamist threat. While, as former President Obama reminds us, “we took out [Osama] bin Laden,” neither he, nor most Western leaders have taken measures to identify the ideological underpinning that fuel radical Islamists the world over, which to make things more difficult disguises itself as just another political movement, i.e., Political Islam. But President Trump did not hesitate to call a spade a spade. He condemned “radical Islamic Terrorism” when addressing the 9/11 memorial service in Shanksville, PA, commemorating the brave passengers of Flight 93, who crashed the plane, to prevent the al Qaeda terrorists from hitting Capitol Hill.
The failure to name the jihadist is caused by an unwillingness to identify the seditious nature of Political Islam has prevented Western-style democracies to defend and counter the harmful rise of radical Islam. This failure has been hastened by the imposition of “political correctness” by leaders of the global Progressive Left movement, branding every attempt to identify the Islamist threat and stop it, as hateful, racist, and incredibly even Anti-Semitic.
The latest sad evidence of the failure to identify the jihadist ideology as the basis for Islamist terrorism is the first report of the Congressional mandated Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States, titled: “Beyond the Homeland: Protecting America from Extremism in Fragile States.” The bi-partisan committee was headed by the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission, Rep. Lee Hamilton, and Gov. Thomas Kean, who once again, failed to identify the jihadist ideology that fuels “extremism.” Instead, the report concluded that “A comprehensive preventive strategy should target both the conditions and the actors that fuel violent extremism, focusing on alleviating real and perceived injustice; fostering political inclusion; curbing the spread and appeal of extremist ideology; and containing the spread of extremist groups.” Nothing about jihad or political Islam.
http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/405948-opposition-to-the-president-is-not-treason
POTUS ≠ US. It is a simple formula. If President Trump and his core supporters would internalize it, they’d be well served.
The presidency of the United States is the most significant, most powerful single office in our constitutional government. But, all the same, the president is a public servant. He is not the sovereign; we are. He represents the nation; he does not embody it.
Consequently, a betrayal of the president’s trust is not a betrayal of the country. It is dangerous to confound these two things.
The president is extremely agitated about an anonymous New York Times op-ed, penned by what the Gray Lady describes as “a senior official in the Trump administration.” I don’t blame him. The piece, in which the author brags about being part of a faction resisting the president from within, is dishonorable.
For an executive officer with integrity, there is a simple choice. If you object to the policies of an administration, or if you find the character of the president so objectionable that you have difficulty carrying out his directives, you can either (a) remain in the administration, do your best to veer the president toward policies you believe are in the nation’s interest, and then faithfully execute his lawful directives regardless of whether you agree with them; or (b) resign your position and engage in the public debate — in your own name, not in craven anonymity.
The official who authored the op-ed took the coward’s way out. He or she did not just betray the president. To the extent this self-serving preen has prompted a predictable presidential tirade and internal investigation, the author also has betrayed the selfless, patriotic administration officials who, every day, work diligently to govern and to pursue America’s best interests.
Moreover, the author has confirmed the indictment long lodged by Trump supporters: There is an entrenched “deep state” working against the president. Euphemizing it as the “steady state,” as Anonymous does, fails to camouflage the nature of the “Resistance.” And posturing about how the “steady state” beats back the president’s worst impulses does not conceal its imperious claim to be a permanent, unaccountable regime.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-top-five-ways-obama-attacked-the-free-press/
It’s been over a year and a half since Obama left office, but it still bothers me hearing him speak. Between his trying to take credit for the Trump economy or his claim that he, unlike Trump, didn’t “threaten the freedom of the press,” it’s hard not to get angry when he speaks because virtually everything he says is a lie. His trying to take credit for Trump’s economy was pathetic, but his claim that he was not an enemy of the free press deserves to be called out.
“It shouldn’t be Democratic or Republican to say that we don’t threaten the freedom of the press because — they say things or publish stories we don’t like,” Obama said during his speech at the University of Illinois. “I complained plenty about Fox News, but you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them ‘enemies of the people.’” Obama certainly had his issues with Fox News. Newsweek actually described the conflict between them as “a war.” But, Obama’s war with the media wasn’t limited to Fox News. Obama’s treatment of the media as a whole was so bad that New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan criticized the Obama administration in 2013 for its “unprecedented secrecy and unprecedented attacks on a free press.” David E. Sanger, the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, said of the Obama administration in 2013, “This is the most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.” According to a report on press freedoms by the highly respected Committee to Protect Journalists, “In the Obama administration’s Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press.”
It’s hard to imagine, given how positive the media was toward Obama, that his administration could be so antagonistic toward them. But the evidence that Obama was an enemy of the free press is astounding. The left-leaning media today may be calling Trump’s attacks on the media unprecedented, but they pale in comparison to what happened during the Obama years. Here are five examples of Obama’s attacks on the free press.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-scarborough-says-donald-trump-more-threatening-than-terrorist-attacks/
We shouldn’t be talking about Donald Trump today.
It’s been 17 years since the gut-wrenching terrorist attacks that stole the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans in New York City and in our nation’s capital and in that field in Pennsylvania. Today, we should be talking only about them, about the horror of that day, and about what our nation has done since to curb terror around the world.
We shouldn’t be talking about Donald Trump.
And yet that’s what Joe Scarborough would like us to do, today of all days. The Morning Joe host — whose Twitter bio proudly proclaims “with malice toward none” — has chosen September 11 to publish an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled “Trump is harming the dream of America more than any foreign adversary ever could.”
His evidence? The GOP is creating record levels of debt, China is projected to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, and Trump himself “has savaged America’s vital alliances, provided comfort to hostile foreign powers, attacked our intelligence and military communities, and lent a sympathetic ear to neo-Nazis and white supremacists across the globe.”
Scarborough concludes the op-ed by implying that Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was somehow less of a threat to our nation than our current president is:
Osama bin Laden was killed by SEAL Team 6 before he accomplished that goal. Other tyrants who tried to do the same were consigned to the ash heap of history. The question for voters this fall is whether their country will move beyond this troubled chapter in history or whether they will continue supporting a politician who has done more damage to the dream of America than any foreign adversary ever could.
Shameful, indefensible hyperbole at best. But at worst, this is a brazen use of an American tragedy to castigate a political enemy. It’s cry for attention, at the expense of the memories of those who died and all of those who lost loved ones that day.
The sheer inanity of Scarborough’s “argument” is compounded by the fact that, not very long ago, he didn’t view Trump as an enemy at all. He treated him like a close friend. At NRO last year, Sarah Quinlan skillfully chronicled the full history of the Morning Joe host’s over-the-top love for Trump, which carried on well into the Republican presidential primaries — until the sands of public opinion shifted and it became disadvantageous to do so.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/trump-destabilizing-status-quo-is-chaos-impeachable-offense/
Trump is destabilizing the status quo, as he promised to do. The keepers of the status quo cry foul.
Until 2017, there were certain political assumptions that most people no longer really believed but also preferred not to question — given the likely animus from the so-called bipartisan establishment, a naked entity which, by convention, we all agreed was splendidly clothed.
China could freely cheat on trade, and the U.S. could take the commercial hit, because one day its misbegotten riches would force liberalization and thereby make China a member in good standing of the family of democratic nations. After 40 years, we are still waiting on the promised democratic transformation — at great cost to the industrial and manufacturing heartland of the United States.
NATO member nations always would promise, indeed swear, that they would meet their military spending commitments, even as they had no intention at all of doing so. Fine, we shrugged, since World War II it has been the duty of the United States to lead and protect the West. What other nation had America’s inexhaustible wealth and power to subsidize rich socialist democracies, and commensurate unconcern with its own insidiously hollowed-out industrial interior? Accordingly, American presidents would lecture NATO nations about their promised obligations and meanwhile expect public nods and private snickers. In the New York and Washington corridor, the gospel was never to question the changing role or funding of NATO but always to utter “NATO is the linchpin of the West.” End of discussion.
The Palestinians will always remain “refugees” in a way that similar contemporaneously displaced people who were also forced out of their homeland — Prussians, Jews of the Middle East, or Volga Germans — no longer have refugee status, after more than 70 years. A chaotic Trump recently accepted reality and quit funding the United Nations relief organization that supposedly attends to “refugees” who in reality are a political construct deemed useful for demonizing Israel around the world.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/9-11-changed-european-radical-to-conservative-president-bush-speech/
‘Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.’
On September 11, 2001, I was sitting on the floor of my sister’s living room, babysitting her one-year-old daughter. We were lazily playing, with the afternoon news on the TV in the background. The first thing I noticed was how the anchor’s voice changed. The woman was saying “Wait, wait,” while staring to the side of the camera. There had been a horrible accident, she said, as I watched the smoke pour out of the first tower. When the second plane hit, I hoped beyond hope she was right.
I had just gotten back from a year in France. A few months earlier, I’d been standing in a crowded bar on Place de Clichy, celebrating my 20th birthday. I remember that night, although several bottles of bad white wine say I shouldn’t. I was surrounded by my peers, other upper-middle-class liberals who had fled to Paris to fulfill their fantasy. We had come to this historical city to live the life of songs and books and Technicolor movies. We were radicals. We were heroes. We were going to change the world.
The people with me in that bar were a random sample of the political atmosphere of Europe at the time. Militant feminists, pro-Palestinians, members of the autonomic environmentalist movement, and your run-of the-mill anti-government thugs. Having a friend who had been jailed for rioting was as necessary as a Malcolm X T-shirt and a back-pocket paperback of Catcher in the Rye. I gladly picked up that uniform, just as I picked up rocks and banners knowing that this was the ticket to ride.
Raised in a family of academics, this was a natural evolution on my part and a result of a serious political interest. I identified as an intellectual and as a political thinker with a critical mind. What I failed to acknowledge at the time was that my country was a controlled environment and that the spectrum on which political analysis took place was limited. Not unlike The Truman Show, where the choices you think you are making were already made for you long ago, and any dreams of a different fate are swiftly corrected.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/09/that_silent_coup_in_the_white_house.html
With reference to the much ballyhooed early September op-ed piece in the New York Times authored by “Anonymous,” which set off iterative bomblets throughout the kingdom of Donald and his closest and supposedly most trusted aides, several points to keep in mind:
With technology available to all, not least to tech-savvy Millennials trolling the current presidency, feigning (perhaps) respect for their CEO, President Donald Trump, it is a simple thing to suss out writers’ frequent usage of standout terms and phrases, such as, of course, the so-called telltale “lodestar.” Even specific grammatical constructs can be programmed and revealed by the same modality.
It’s called forensic linguistics.
A few days ago, TheWeek.com wrote about this in a piece called “The delicate art of using linguistics to identify an anonymous author.” It noted: “There’s the anonymously-authored book Primary Colors, closely paralleling Bill Clinton’s campaign…”
Mike Pence took a lot of the initial suspicion of being the author of the Times piece, but he denied it, and there is no other evidence besides a single word – his common use of “lodestar” – to argue he was involved. That White House chief economics man, Larry Kudlow, has used such words, too, is no guarantee of anything dispositive, either, as it would be highly uncharacteristic of Kudlow to pen such a combative piece against a man he has professed as worthy of our attention and respect. Thus, the frequency of such idiosyncratic terms as “lodestar” is debunked: any high-schooler could have divined that Pence, say, hit that word X number of times. It would be, furthermore, a usage that would deflect adults into a slotted canyon of blame; a Millennial would savor that. An adult over the age of normalcy and thought would not have done that word usage search and then planted that telltale, so-called.
http://dailycaller.com/2018/09/10/bob-woodward-accuracy-issues-watergate-trump/
Bob Woodward’s new book “Fear” presents a scathing depiction of President Donald Trump’s administration.
Woodward has a muddy history with a trail of allegations that he embellished the truth or otherwise misled his readers.
Media coverage of Woodward’s book has been largely positive and ignores Woodward’s controversial record.
Longtime journalist Bob Woodward’s best-selling new book, “Fear,” presents a scathing depiction of President Donald Trump and his ability to perform his duties as commander-in-chief.
While senior Trump officials including Secretary of Defense James Mattis have denied quotations attributed to them in the book, media coverage of “Fear” has been largely positive, emphasizing the 75-year-old Woodward’s experience and trustworthiness.
But that coverage has left out part of the story: repeated, credible charges — including from well-respected fellow journalists — that in previous books Woodward embellished the truth, made dubious bombshell claims or was otherwise misleading.
Woodward’s former editor at the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, though publicly complimentary of Woodward, privately doubted some of the more dramatic elements of Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate-era bestseller, “All The President’s Men.”
Bradlee and Woodward’s former assistant at the Post, Jeff Himmelman, revealed Bradlee’s nagging doubts in a 2012 biography of the longtime editor.
Bradlee gave Himmelman full access to his files, which revealed that details about Woodward’s relationship with infamous Watergate source “Deep Throat” gnawed at Bradlee years later. Details such as Woodward communicating with Deep Throat by placing a flag in a potted plant on his balcony, or their dozens of shadowy garage meetings.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/09/11/joe_scarborough_hypocrite_138043.html
September 11 should not be about politics, nor about Donald Trump, and surely not about Joe Scarborough. Only 17 years separated from that incredibly painful day, the solemnity of our national remembrance should remain particularly poignant and reservedly reverent. After all, there are many thousands of still-school-aged young Americans who lost parents on that fateful day or in the global military struggle that followed.
But MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” callously used the calamity of 9/11 to take cheap political shots at President Trump, writing in a Washington Post op-ed that he “is harming America more than any foreign adversary every could” and declaring on-air that Trump presents a “graver threat” to America than the 2001 attacks did. Such hyperbole would be ridiculous and disqualifying coming from some anonymous troll on Twitter, but is jaw-dropping from a former congressman and prominent cable news morning host.
Imagine, for comparison, a major television host in the 1950s, like Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow, declaring that President Eisenhower presented a “graver” threat to America than Tojo and the Imperial Japanese Army did at Pearl Harbor?
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