Displaying posts published in

November 2018

Establishment Media Nixes Trump Ad About Dangerous Caravan Is there really no difference between a house-guest and a burglar? Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271864/establishment-media-nixes-trump-ad-about-dangerous-michael-cutler

On Monday November 5, 2018, NBC news posted a report, NBC, Fox News pull Trump immigration ad, Facebook blocks paid promotion. The online article included a tweet from Donald Trump, Jr which included a supposedly racist ad.

The article began with these two paragraphs:

NBC and Fox News said on Monday morning that they would no longer air an immigration ad from President Donald Trump that has been widely derided as racially divisive.

“After further review, we recognize the insensitive nature of the ad and have decided to cease airing it across our properties as soon as possible,” said Joe Benarroch, a spokesperson for NBC’s advertising sales department.

The article included this statement:

Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, tweeted that NBC, CNN and Facebook “have chosen to stand” with undocumented immigrants.

By standing with illegal aliens, these “news” organizations that refuse to make a clear distinction between lawful immigrants and illegal aliens have turned their backs on lawful immigrants and have harmed their reputation in the eyes of the American public.

The Blue Ripple Democrats seize House, Republicans keep the Senate. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271873/blue-ripple-matthew-vadum

Republicans strengthened their hold on the U.S. Senate last night even as they failed to resist a wave in midterm congressional elections that gave Democrats hellbent on derailing President Trump’s agenda control of the House of Representatives for the first time in eight years.

Barring a revolt in the newly expanded cohort of House Democrats, this means the increasingly frail Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California will return as Speaker of the House. The 116th Congress convenes Jan. 3, 2019.

“Today is more than about Democrats and Republicans, it’s about restoring the Constitution’s checks and balances to the Trump administration,” said the House minority leader.

“It’s about stopping the GOP and Mike—Mitch—McConnell’s assaults on Medicare, Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the health care of 130 million Americans living with pre-existing medical conditions.”

Then the 78-year-old, who frequently appears confused during public appearances, pumped her fist in the air and strangely remarked, “Let’s hear it more for preexisting medical conditions!”

Pelosi has gone against her party’s base by saying pursuing the impeachment of President Trump is a terrible idea.

A crowd of Republicans and Trump supporters at the Trump International Hotel in the nation’s capital were surprisingly conciliatory towards Democrats. They gently booed Pelosi when she appeared on television to make a victory speech but offered polite applause after that when she urged Americans to come together following a hotly contested campaign.

Trump said little about the half-victory in the midterm elections.

“Tremendous success tonight[,]” Trump tweeted Nov. 6 at 11:14 p.m. “Thank you to all!”

Going into Election Day, Republicans held 236 seats, Democrats held 193 seats, and six seats were vacant in the 435-seat House of Representatives. Republicans held 51 seats in the Senate compared to the 49 held by Democrats (including the two seats held by Independents Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine who caucus with the Democrats).

But it now appears Republicans are likely to occupy at least 54 seats in the incoming 100-seat Senate and Democrats will easily exceed the 218-seat threshold needed for House control.

HIS SAY: JOHN STUART MILL ON LIBERTY AND VOTING 1859

A time, however, came in the progress of human affairs, when men ceased to think it a necessity of nature that their governors should be an independent power, opposed in interest to themselves. It appeared to them much better that the various magistrates of the State should be their tenants or delegates, revocable at their pleasure. In that way alone, it seemed, could they have complete security that the powers of government would never be abused to their disadvantage. By degrees, this new demand for elective and temporary rulers became the prominent object of the exertions of the popular party, wherever any such party existed; and superseded, to a considerable extent, the previous efforts to limit the power of rulers.

HEMINGWAY’S JEWISH BULLFIGHTER BY EROL ARAF

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Hemingways-Jewish-bullfighter-571011

Nostrils flare dripping with venomous anger, the eyes are big, onyx and lifeless; crimson blood pours from its back consecrating the arena; the front hooves beat the ground relentlessly as dust, sweat and rage hang heavy in the afternoon sun; it snorts and roars with contempt; the head, crowned with piercing horns, is lowered; and the pent-up energy is unleashed with a furious charge at the taunting matador who turns on his axis elegantly to enshroud the incensed bull in his blood red cape as man and beast engage in a choreographed macabre dance of death.

It was at the Pamplona Fiesta in Spain in the 1920s that Hemingway fell in love with the metaphysics of bullfighting, which became a metaphor for his search for meaning and the essence of life and death. The result of this quasi-religious experience was his masterpiece Death in the Afternoon.

Not surprisingly, Hemingway intensely admired Sidney Franklin, a sublime bullfighter, who was born in Brooklyn, New York to Orthodox Jewish parents. Writing in Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway said, “Franklin is brave with a cold, serene and intelligent valor, but instead of being awkward and ignorant, he is one of the most skillful, graceful and slow manipulators of a cape fighting today. His repertoire with the cape is enormous, but he does not attempt by a varied repertoire to escape from the performance of the veronica as the base of his cape work and his veronicas are classical, very emotional, and beautifully timed and executed. You will find no Spaniard who ever saw him fight who will deny his artistry and excellence with the cape.” Hemingway adds, “He is a better, more scientific, more intelligent, and more finished matador than all but about six of the full matadors in Spain today and the bullfighters know it and have the utmost respect for him.”

In his book Double-Edged Sword: The Many Lives of Hemingway’s Friend, the American Matador Sidney Franklin, Paul Bart observes that Death in the Afternoon describes Franklin as having the “ability in languages, the cold courage and the ability to command of the typical soldier of fortune.”

“Yet Franklin wasn’t any kind of soldier,” writes Bart, “resembling instead the womanly Europa in the classical Greek myth where Zeus disguises himself as a bull to rape Europa.” Benjamin Ivry expands on the theme of rape when he writes that Franklin’s bullfighting career was punctuated by genuine violations of his body. In a particularly horrific 1930 episode requiring multiple surgeries, a dying bull’s horn “caught Sidney at the base of his tailbone, plunging into his abdominal cavity through the rectum, piercing the sphincter muscle and large intestine.” Franklin repeatedly risked similar gory disasters long after this 1930 catastrophe.

Citizenship and Choice By Angelo Codevilla

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/05/citizenship-

As caravans of would-be illegal migrants heads for our southern border, each bigger and better organized than the last; as Chinese travel agencies schedule trips to America for mothers-soon-to-be; as the number of births to foreigners and illegals added to the results of chain migration (a.k.a “family reunification”) make up an ever-growing part of the voting public; and as the Democratic Party stakes its future power on importing a new set of Americans it can control, more and more of today’s Americans are realizing that our immigration system since the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 is a political scam.

It is past time we address the question of whom we shall call to join this political enterprise called the United States of America as full members—and why we should be calling them—with the seriousness it deserves. The short answer has to be: that we choose to admit them because they understand, love, and are eager to support what this country is about.

With few exceptions (Indians, descendants of slaves and of the fewer than 3 million who set the country’s character in 1776-89) today’s Americans are people or descendants of people who chose to join this country and its character. Uniquely in history, America has been able to assimilate people of all colors and creeds because these people very much wanted to be assimilated. Many were Americans at heart before they got here. That’s why they came.

My friend, Peter Schramm, recalled his father—realizing that the 1956 revolution against the Soviets was going to fail—telling the family that they would flee to America. Now Peter, who was 10 years old at the time, would have gone anywhere his father asked him to go, but he was confused about why his dad had chosen America, so he asked, “Why America?” His father’s answer is instructive: ““Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place.”

Philip Ayres: America’s Poor White Trash

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/11/lubbers-crackers-obsquatulators-americas-poor-white-trash/

Since Trump’s election the centre of gravity in the Republican Party has moved in the direction of the lower-middle and working classes. As ballots in the November 6 midterms are cast and tallied, a guide to the lineage of the lubbers, hicks, crackers and absquatulators who may well decide it.

On a Hudson Valley day in 1993, during a course I was running, I alluded to class in America and was politely contradicted by a student: “Ours is a classless society”—this was at Vassar, one of the Seven Sisters, Jacqueline Kennedy’s college. I mentioned the Winthrops, Adamses, Cabots, Lodges, Quincys and Thayers, New England names so far up the class ladder that they wouldn’t be caught dead in the social pages, but she was a scholarship girl from out west and hadn’t heard of them. Some of the others were related to them.

The American underclass goes back further than any of those names, to the late 1500s. Nancy Isenberg has written what claims to be the first book exclusively devoted to it. There are countless histories of the American working class and of poverty in America, but this book is about “white trash”. The category is folded in with, if not entirely co-extensive with, the poorest white urban and rural populations in the South (the term is not generally applied in the North or the West). It requires a set of descriptors all to be present, and Isenberg never delineates these clearly: bottom-class Anglo-Saxons, poorly or averagely educated, with few resources, in a stable mode of being (they are not becoming anything), fixed or transient, rural and urban-peripheral, careless in demeanour and manners.

The early British colonial settlements in America, particularly in Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas but also in New England, were largely developed by the use of unfree white labour—indentured servants (classed as chattels, movable goods and property, their contracts saleable and inheritable) and transported convicts (vast numbers; for an upbeat novelistic account read Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders: Moll, a criminal, and her criminal mother, were at separate times dumped in Virginia). This was an underclass seen as expendable human waste. It grew rapidly with inbound accretions through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was early viewed as a permanent breed: “waste people” was a common term for them, unwanted and unsalvage­able. In each era the American mainstream distanced itself from its white trash, to whom were attached memorable labels: “lubbers”, “clay-eaters”, “crackers”, “rubbish”, “rednecks”.

A Month of Multiculturalism in Britain: by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13259/britain-multiculturalism-october

There were 140 new cases of female genital mutilation (FGM) in Birmingham between April and June 2018.

“There remains a huge problem with professionals viewing forced marriage as a cultural issue rather than a crime. Many aren’t even aware there is a law.” — Jasvinder Sanghera, attacking the government’s failure to tackle the problem of forced marriages.

The Ministry of Justice blocked plans for an academic study into why prisoners convert to Islam and how it can lead to radicalization. “They will have been concerned about what this proposed project will discover,” a source said.

October 1. So-called “cutters” are being flown into Britain to perform female genital mutilation (FGM) on young girls, according to The Independent. “The practicing community talk together, saying, ‘My girl needs to be cut,’ and pay the cutters to come into the UK and cut the girls here,” said Hoda Ali, an FGM activist who works in West London. She added: “The reality is we need to open our eyes. We don’t need to think just about faraway countries because right now we have girls who are in their late teens or even early twenties who were cut in this country. They are British girls who were born here and they were cut here.”

October 2. Women and girls who are coerced into marriage by their families will be allowed to give evidence in secret so they can object to their foreign spouses’ visas without fear of repercussions, according to legal changes announced by Home Secretary Sajid Javid. The changes come two months after The Times revealed that the Home Office was issuing visas to known abusers in forced marriage cases.

October 3. Zakaria Mohammed, a 21-year-old drug dealer from Aston, Birmingham, was sentenced to 14 years in prison after admitting to charges of modern slavery. Mohammed groomed his victims — a 14-year-old girl and two runaway 15-year-old boys — before making them sell class-A drugs from squalid flats a hundred miles from their homes. The teens, who were transported from Birmingham to Lincoln to work as “expendable workhorses” in drug dens, were found by police in a drug-infested apartment in Lincoln. The Telegraph reported it was the first time in British legal history that a drug-dealer has been convicted for breaching the Modern Slavery Act by trafficking children.

Germany: Merkel Throws in the Towel by Stefan Frank

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13238/germany-merkel-resignation

It was the policy of unchecked mass-immigration against which Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party finally revolted.

The race to succeed Merkel as the party’s chair is wide open, and these days, being a Merkel confidante is a liability rather than an asset.

The next party leader’s sole role will be to share the blame for any new election defeats, starting with the elections to the European Parliament in June 2019 — unless he distinguishes himself from Merkel and presents a set of convincing ideas for Germany’s future.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on October 29, 2018, announced her resignation, a day after her party, the Christian Democrats (CDU), suffered yet another crushing election defeat. Merkel said she would step down as leader of her party in December and would not seek re-election in 2021.

In the state election in Hesse, Germany’s two biggest parties received their worst results in more than half a century. The CDU dropped from 38% to 27%, the Social-Democrats (SPD) from 30% to less than 20%. Both parties continue a losing streak that shows no sign of reversal. Rather, the downturn seems to be accelerating. In last year’s general elections, Merkel’s party and its ally, the Social Democrats, recorded their worst results up to then in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. Throughout much of Germany’s postwar history, the CDU and SPD each used to achieve about 40% of the votes. In last autumn’s general elections, the CDU and SPD combined barely managed to surpass the 50% threshold to form a government. Recent polls see them combined at barely 40% (24% for the CDU and 15% for the SPD).

“The time has come to open a new chapter,” Merkel said. In a letter to the party, Merkel admitted mistakes that her government may have made “in recent weeks and months”. According to Merkel, the voters did not acknowledge the current government’s “decent” achievements due to the latter’s wrong “work culture” that “doesn’t meet” Merkel’s “personal standards” — apparently referring to the public feud between her and the CDU’s Bavarian sister-party CSU over immigration policy.

Merkel went on to say, “For the rest of the election period, I’m ready to continue to work as Chancellor,” meaning that she will step down as chancellor in 2021 at the latest, or maybe a bit earlier, if there is a chance to enthrone her protégée, CDU general secretary Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, before the next elections.

Kramp-Karrenbauer’s success, however, is far from guaranteed. The race to succeed Merkel as the party’s chair is wide open, and these days, being a Merkel confidante is a liability rather than an asset. For months, pundits in Germany and abroad had speculated about the “end of the Merkel era”, even more so after she had lost a key supporter in a party rebellion earlier this year. On September 25, in a surprising vote among members of the CDU and CSU parties, Merkel’s longtime ally Volker Kauder was ousted after 13 years as parliamentary group leader of the combined faction.

Louis Farrakhan, Live from Tehran Democrats’ favorite hatemonger leads “Death to America and Israel!” chants in the Islamic Republic. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271861/louis-farrakhan-live-tehran-lloyd-billingsley

Monday November 5, one day before the election, marked the resumption of sanctions on the Islamic regime by the Trump administration. Nation of Islam boss Louis Farrakhan flew to Iran to speak out on behalf of the ruling mullahs.

As Fox News reported, Farrakhan told Mohsen Rezaei, Secretary of Iran’s Expediency Council: “Today, I warn the American government that sanctioning Iran is a big mistake.” The eager Farrakhan failed to flag any mistakes by the Iranian Islamic regime, the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism. And Farrakhan took care to time his visit with an important event.

Thirty-nine years ago, in 1979, the Islamic regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini invaded the U.S. embassy in Tehran, took more than 50 American diplomats and civilians hostage, and held them for 444 days. Farrakhan marked the anniversary by telling law students at the University of Tehran, that “America has never been a democracy” and then led the students in a chants of “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!”

No one in America had ever seen a performance quite like that. On the other hand, in his live Tehran show the Nation of Islam boss was not advancing any new themes.

On October 14, the 23rd anniversary of the Million Man March, Farrakhan addressed a cheering audience in Detroit: “To the members of the Jewish community that don’t like me — thank you very much for putting my name all over the planet…I’m not mad at you, ‘cuz you’re so stupid.” The Nation of Islam leader also claimed “I’m not an anti-Semite. I’m anti-Termite,” and repeated that message in a tweet.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz denounced the speech and called out presidents Obama and Clinton, along with former DNC boss Keith Ellison, for their ties to Farrakhan. Even so, prominent Democrats running for office were not swift to denounce Farrakhan for his Jews-are-termites speech. In fact, Farrakhan thrives on special treatment from high-profile Democrats.

Brazil Is Moving Its Embassy to Jerusalem Evangelical voters throw their support to another populist pro-Israel president.By Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/brazil-is-moving-its-embassy-to-jerusalem-1541464850

Shortly after Jair Bolsonaro’s decisive victory in the Brazilian presidential election last week, the populist leader said he would follow through on his campaign promise to move Brazil’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Like Donald Trump, Mr. Bolsonaro—himself a Catholic but married to an evangelical Protestant pastor—owes his political success in large part to support from evangelical voters. As recently as the 1970s, Brazil was almost uniformly Catholic. But in one of the greatest religious shifts of modern times, the largest country in Latin America is today nearly as evangelical as the U.S.: 25% of Brazilians identify as evangelical Christians, compared with 26% of Americans, according to the Joshua Project. As in the U.S., many evangelical and Pentecostal Christians instinctively support Israel and endorse a law-and-order agenda at home.

At a time of increased anxiety for many Jews in Europe and North America, the rise of evangelical and Pentecostal Christian support for Judaism and Israel in much of the world is a heartening sign. Based on a literal approach to the Bible and a covenantal theology that attributes a continuing religious significance to the Jewish people and their state, these two rapidly spreading forms of Protestant Christianity tend to promote a climate of respect for individual Jews as well as support for Zionism. They view the continued existence of the Jewish people as a mark of God’s faithfulness and believe the Jewish people have a special place in God’s plan as recipients of his favor.

Improved relations with Israel are a hallmark of evangelical political influence. Guatemala, another historically Catholic country, is now about 40% Protestant. It opened an embassy in Jerusalem two days after the U.S. did. Although Latin American countries have typically been hostile to Israel since the 1967 war, that’s changing rapidly.