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June 2019

POLITICS Comments turned off

A Hawaii Democrat’s Surprising Views Tulsi Gabbard opposes impeachment and dislikes identity politics. And she’s running for president. By Michael Tracey

By on June 16th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-hawaii-democrats-surprising-views-11560714036

New York

Of all the Democratic presidential candidates, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard may most defy easy categorization. She fuses appeals to national honor—drawn from her Army service in Iraq—with resolutely left-wing policy prescriptions, especially on foreign affairs. Yet she appears frequently on Fox News, has earned plaudits from Republican colleagues, and staunchly opposes impeachment proceedings against President Trump, which she warns would “tear the country apart.”

“The whole reason the Mueller investigation started was to investigate collusion,” she said in an interview between recent campaign stops in Manhattan. The special counsel “was very clear in his report that there was no evidence found that collusion took place.” But she is at pains to distinguish her reasoning from that of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose reticence about impeachment, Ms. Gabbard says, is rooted in partisan calculation: “That’s exactly what people are sick and tired of.”

Ms. Gabbard, who represents Hawaii’s Second District, also doesn’t belabor her sex, her ethnic background (Samoan) or her religion (Hindu). “I think identity politics, again, is one of those things that is unfortunately being used to divide us. . . . [it’s] a dangerous road to walk down,” Ms. Gabbard told me in a podcast interview, lamenting fellow Democrats and the media for often treating Americans “as though we are the sum of the color of our skin.”

Since she launched her campaign in January, liberal media outlets have scorned her. NBC News published an article alleging that she had the backing of “Russia’s propaganda machine.” The Daily Beast charged that she was being “boosted by Putin apologists.”

But she’s found support from a popular alternative-media figure, Joe Rogan, who has hosted Ms. Gabbard twice on his video and audio podcast—consistently a top-ranked offering on YouTube and iTunes. Like Ms. Gabbard, Mr. Rogan is politically heterodox. He’s endorsed libertarian Republican Ron Paul, shuns ideological labels, and has a following among right-leaning listeners.

Perhaps because of her reliance on alternative media, Ms. Gabbard is unusually sympathetic to conservatives who complain of social-media censorship. Asked about YouTube’s penalization of right-wing personality Steven Crowder, Ms. Gabbard says: “I think it points to the dangerous level of power that these platforms have, and how they can seemingly arbitrarily make their own rules, and make decisions about what kind of free speech is acceptable.” It amounts to a kind of monopoly, she argues: “If you get cut out from YouTube, there’s nowhere else you’re going to be able to go.”

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Now They Want to ‘Fix’ the Climate Michael Kile

By on June 16th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/06/now-they-want-to-fix-the-climate/

They have always been around, the weeping prophets and merchants of doom, as have their credulous followers. The descendants of Jeremiah and Nostradamus also claim to have had special insight and esoteric knowledge. They urge us to make sacrifices, change behaviour, go solar and wind, buy carbon-offsets to annul our sins of emission and restructure global energy in less than ten solar revolutions. Cometh the hour, cometh a saviour: the climate fixer.

Welcome to Warmerland, where tweets warn of the coming inferno of Hothouse Earth and twits churn out yet another “tipping point”. Our Deep Fry moment could occur as soon as April 1 next year or perhaps by 2030. The Doomsday Clock is showing two minutes to midnight, so don’t miss an update.

If, as some claim, “perilous tipping points are idestabilising our global climate system and making it more unpredictable”, it has not deterred them from making dodgy causal claims, as did Canadian prime minister Trudeau in early June:

We need to be taking real action to prevent climate change [and extreme weather]. That’s why we’re moving forward on a price on [carbon dioxide] pollution right across the country.”

Yet if the global climate is “destabilised” – and “more unpredictable” – how can one make predictions about it?  What is “stability” in such a chaotic system? Where is the science on tipping points? How and when will Canadians know whether it has been effective? What are Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s key performance indicators?

The inconvenient truth is taking “real action to prevent climate change”– in Canada, Australia or anywhere — is gesture politics, a waste of other people’s money and time in pursuit of a chimera.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Uncle Bernie Saws Off His Own Limb with Outlandish Socialism Defense Bob Maistros

By on June 16th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/06/16/u

Democratic Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders’ attempt to promote “democratic socialism” as a political platform recalls former Vice President Walter Mondale’s 1984 convention speech promise: “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes. And so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”

A gift which my bosses at President Reagan’s re-election campaign accepted with undisguised glee. Especially when Fritz helpfully quantified his planned pocketbook raid, which our guys extrapolated to a $3,000 per-household hike.

Game. Set. Match. 

For some inexplicable reason — perhaps tempting polls showing that 70% or more of Democrats find socialism attractive, or young gun Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rock-star status — Crazy Uncle Bernie didn’t just climb out on a similar political limb with his own daffy idea to cling ever more tightly to the banner of “democratic socialism.” Like Fritz, he proceeded to saw the branch off himself.

Roared the Vermonter: “It is my very strong belief that the United States must … find the moral conviction to choose a different path, a higher path, a path of compassion, justice and love. It is the path that I call democratic socialism.”

Uh, huh. Certainly, going all-in on socialism is the new ticket!

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Right Resists Unity At Its Own Risk BY: David Isaac

By on June 16th, 2019

“Shooting in the halftrack,” an Israeli phrase connoting friendly fire, was the term used to describe the behavior of Israeli right-wing politicians and pundits, who spent last week sniping at one other. Israeli history is rife with examples of right-wing divisions leading to left-wing victory, a lesson its politicians struggle to learn.

One needn’t delve deeply into Israel’s past. In April, a multitude of parties split the right-wing pie into smaller pieces—the electoral threshold is set at 3.25 percent. Each party needs at least that percentage of the general vote to win four seats in Israel’s Knesset. If a party doesn’t make it, all its votes are lost.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw the danger, which is why he knocked heads together in February, convincing the Jewish Home and National Union parties, which had already made an alliance, to bring into the fold the more extreme Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Strength”) Party. They went into the election under the ticket “United Right.”

It wasn’t enough. A quarter-million votes were still lost due to the failure of two parties, the New Right and Zehut, to cross the threshold. This is what gave Avigdor Liberman of the Israel Beiteinu Party the ability to torpedo Netanyahu’s coalition efforts. Liberman withheld his party’s support over a law concerning military recruitment of the ultra-Orthodox. Netanyahu couldn’t muster a majority to govern. Back-to-back elections were called, a first in Israel’s history.

Liberman hopes to become the go-to address for anyone unhappy with religious influence in society. Although the other parties on the right would love to punish him by pushing him below the electoral threshold, current polls have him gaining three to four more seats over the five he won last time. That means he might again be the deciding factor—Netanyahu’s nightmare. The right needs a cushion to cancel out Liberman, so that they won’t need him to form a coalition.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Covering Up Our Culture to ‘Avoid Giving Offense’ by Giulio Meotti

By on June 16th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14363/covering-up-culture

Recently, some major conservative intellectuals have been sacked in the UK. One is the peerless philosopher Roger Scruton, who was fired from a governmental committee…

Then it was the turn of the great Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, whose visiting fellowship at Cambridge University was rescinded…

By refusing to confront the speech police, or to support freedom of expression for Salman Rushdie, Roger Scruton, Jordan Peterson, Charlie Hebdo, and Jyllands-Posten — just the tip of a huge iceberg — we have started down the road of submission to sharia law and to tyranny. We all have been covering up our supposedly “blasphemous” culture with burqas to avoid offending people who do not seem to mind offending us.

Three years ago, the Italian government made a shameful decision. It veiled its antique Roman statues to avoid offending Iran’s visiting President Hassan Rouhani. Nude statues were encased in white boxes. A year earlier, in Florence, another statue featuring a naked man in Greco-Roman style had also been covered during the visit of the crown prince of Abu Dhabi. Now, one of the most famous British art galleries has covered two paintings, after Muslim complaints that they were “blasphemous”.

At the Saatchi Gallery in London, two works, again featuring nudes, this time overlaid with Arabic script, prompted complaints from Muslim visitors, who requested that the paintings be removed from the Rainbow Scenes exhibition. In the end, the paintings were covered with sheets. “The Saatchi is behaving like Saudi Arabia, hiding from public view artworks that blaspheme against Islam”, commented Brendan O’Neill on Spiked. One expert described the paintings as “The Satanic Verses all over again”. The reference was to the book by Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, published in 1988. Iran’s “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 condemned Rushdie to death for writing the book. The bounty on Rushdie’s head was increased to $4 million in 2016 when a group of Iranians added $600,000 to the “reward” — with no protest from Britain.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Diplomatic Gesticulations Won’t Solve the Iran Problem by Amir Taheri

By on June 16th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14381/iran-diplomatic-gesticulations

That leaves the remaining members of the P5+1 with a clear choice: either pronounce the Obama [Iran] “deal” dead and seek a framework for new talks on how to solve the perennial “Iran problem” which, paradoxically, all say they are concerned about, or to unite to neutralize the United States and help Iran carry on as usual.

The present impasse may be breached in two ways.

The first is for actual or wannabe mediators to side with the US and tell the mullahs that they cannot have their cake and eat it. Once the mullahs have understood that putative “mediators” could direct their efforts at finding ways of organizing a retreat that avoids utter humiliation for the Khomeinist regime. That should not be difficult as all the remaining P5+1 nations, including Russia, share Washington’s concerns about Tehran’s “exporting revolution” and developing long-range missiles capable of carrying yet non-existent nuclear warheads.

The second way to breach the impasse is to admit that the Obama “deal” is a dead horse that will not come back to life no matter how one kicks it.

What do politicians do when they cannot do anything but are obliged to pretend that they are doing something?

One answer provided by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, is simple: you organize a meeting.

The meeting that Lavrov is setting up, later this month in Moscow, will bring together junior diplomats from Iran plus Britain, China, France and Germany, that is to say the countries (aside from the US) that formed the notorious P5+1 group created by Barack Obama to give a veneer of legal respectability to the so-called “nuke deal” he concocted with the Iranian mullahs.

For all intents and purposes the “deal’ died when the Trump administration in Washington decided to simply ditch it. Lacking an enforceable legal status, the “deal” always depended on the willingness of the participants to implement it. With Americans walking away from it, there is no way the other nations still apparently in the game could put it on a life-support machine.

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