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June 2019

My Say: Is Stacey Abrams being groomed for higher office? By Ruth S. King

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/is_stacey_abrams_being_groomed_for_higher_office.html

The practice of opposing a party rebuttal to the president’s State of the Union speech was started in 1966, when Republicans Senator Everett Dirksen and Rep. Gerald Ford responded to Democrat President Lyndon Johnson’s State of the Union on television.  

Since then, it has become an annual event. 

Until 2019, all previous responses were delivered by contemporary senators, representatives, or governors.

Since 2011, there have been two responses — one in English and one in Spanish.  And here I was, under the illusion that English is our national language. 

So how did Stacey Abrams, an ungracious loser with no national elective office, become the Democrats’ choice to deliver a response?  Now, that is quite a strange break from tradition.

Who is pulling her strings? 

Abrams has a meager political résumé.  She served as minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017 until she became the Democratic Party’s nominee for Georgia’s gubernatorial election in 2018.  

She wrote many novels under the name Selena Montgomery.  The titles — Reckless, The Art of Desire, and Hidden Sins — evoke romance and mystery, but the reviews attribute them to her interest in social and economic policies.  Oh, well. CONTINUE AT SITE

Politicians Must Face Consequences For Crimes They Enable Malfeasant politicians must find no “sanctuary.” Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273975/politicians-must-face-consequences-crimes-they-michael-cutler

The phrase, Failure is Not An Option served as the title of the book written by Gene Kranz, Flight Director for NASA who helped create the U.S. manned space program and was instrumental in successfully returning the crew of Apollo 13 to the earth after their spacecraft suffered a catastrophic explosion half-way to the moon.

In most professions, especially where lives are on the line, failure to do the job is not an option.  This is particularly true where law enforcement and the military are concerned.  

Politicians, not unlike members of the military and law enforcement officers, take oaths of office where they swear (affirm) that they will enforce our laws and defend the Constitution.  While law enforcement officers and members of the armed forces may face dire consequences for violating their oaths of office, politicians generally do not.

Their oaths of office do not provide an “escape clause” whereby they may opt to ignore any of the laws that are not to their liking.

Unlike the entries on the menu of a restaurant where the patrons order the food that they find palatable or where they may substitute one item on the menu for another, their oaths of office demand that those who take that oath agree to enforce all laws and honor and defend all of the provisions of our Constitution.

Dereliction of duty is a serious offense for members of the armed forces and for law enforcement officers and one that carries significant consequences.

On June 4, 2019 ABC News reported, Police arrest ex-deputy who ‘did absolutely nothing to mitigate’ Parkland school massacre.

We will not delve in the specifics of this ongoing case, but it is important to note that the deputy sheriff in this case has been charged with multiple crimes, some of which are felonies, all emanating from his alleged failures to act to protect the children who were killed in that school.

Oberlin’s Comeuppance By Anthony Esolen

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/11/oberlins-comeuppance/

As I write these words, a jury in Ohio is about to decide whether an $11 million verdict against Oberlin College, for libel and tortious practices against a local family-run bakery, should be tripled for punitive damages. If it could be tripled and tripled again, it would still be only just.

Many readers will have heard the details of the events, which in quick summary are these: On the day after the election in 2016, an Oberlin College student tried to abscond from Gibson’s Bakery with two bottles of wine. One of the workers at the bakery confronted him, and a scuffle ensued both inside and outside the store, with the worker as the victim on the ground, pummeled by the perpetrator and a male friend of his, and kicked by two women, as some members of the fair sex are wont to do when their persons are not at risk.

Oberlin College then moved into action to squash the business like a bug. The dean of students passed around a flyer charging Gibson’s with a long history of “racial profiling.” She led a massive protest against the bakery, a protest that was cast entirely in the light of the recent election. The school ordered its food supplier to cancel all contracts with them. Gibson’s, which has been a fixture in town for more than 130 years, lost business which they never recovered. Finally, the owners decided to sue the college, when Oberlin refused to retract the charge of racism, and when the school demanded as a kind of blackmail that Gibson’s report all shoplifters first to the school and not to the police. The school would then give the perpetrator a warning, but no suspension. Naughty, naughty!

Have I mentioned that African-Americans who live in town, including one long-time employee, have treated as absurd and offensive any charge of racism against the Gibson family or the business? Should I have had to mention it?

Another Media-Fueled Collusion Narrative Falls Apart By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/11/another-media-fueled-collusion-narrative-falls-apart/

It’s a familiar pattern in the Trump era: A partisan figure tasked with thwarting the president—say, Special Counsel Robert Mueller or former FBI Director James Comey—is portrayed as a fair-minded arbiter of truth and justice, a vanguard of our highest democratic institutions, bravely taking on the Bad Orange Man. Such figures are cast as heroes impervious to political bias. Every move they make, we are told, is for our own good. We are not to question their unimpeachable integrity, their stellar reputation or their motives.

Such was the case with Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous dossier that served as the raison d’etre for the FBI’s investigation into Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

In order to legitimize the dossier’s dubious claims, the media characterized Steele as an objective player in the nascent Russian collusion plotline, a former British intelligence officer leveraging his long-time Kremlin connections to root out a corrupt scheme between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin to steal an American election. His work was a profile in courage, we were told; he was a highly-regarded compatriot in America’s fight to make sure our new president was not in fact a covert Russian stooge.

But now that Steele faces questioning by a federal prosecutor assigned to investigate the corrupt origins of the FBI’s probe into the Trump campaign, it’s obvious that the early hype about Steele was just one more example of the media’s complicity in the Russian collusion coup.

Disband Students for Justice in Palestine and All BDS Movements An open letter to Attorney General William Barr. Professor Jason D. Hill

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273966/disband-students-justice-palestine-and-all-bds-jason-d-hill

Editors’ note: Jason D. Hill is a professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. Below is his Open Letter to Attorney General, William Barr making the argument to disband Students for Justice in Palestine and all BDS movements.

Mr. Attorney General, On May 16, 2019, The German Parliament voted, as you know, to condemn as anti-Semitic, the BDS movement in Germany. The BDS is a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that targets Israeli organizations, academic institutions and companies engaged in entrepreneurial activities in Israel to weaken the Israeli economy and politically in an attempt to force Israel to change its policies towards Palestinians living there.

BDS movements, mainly conducted by their most visible branch,  Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)  are prolific on US campuses and enact a reign of verbal terror, and physical and psychological violence against anyone who dares to be pro-Israel, critical of Palestinian terrorist or defend Israel against false charges of it being a genocidal an apartheid state. Really, it represents an assault against Western civilization and United States interests and should properly be considered a national security threat.

As a recent victim of vicious assaults by members of the SJP at DePaul University where I am full tenured professor, and, with the highest praises and respect from the Acting Provost Salma Ghanem, for the ways in which members of the DePaul community made their voices heard—I call for a disbandment of all SJP campus units by the US Justice department, and a thorough investigation into the motives and political involvements of higher level academic bodies that endorse these organizations which have ties with terrorist organizations such as Hamas.

Land and Demagogy in Africa By Sarah Ruden

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/06/24/land-and-demagogy-in-africa/

An author’s up-close view of how disregarding property rights entrenches misery

In starting to confiscate land from white farmers without compensation, the South African government is acting in one of Africa’s most destructive patterns. But to make that case I need the testimony of a most special inside-outsider, who died a number of years ago.

My friend John Broom, white and British-born, was a partner in the Zimbabwean branch of Deloitte & Touche, and then a long-term exile to South Africa and the finance director of the Quaker Peace Center. In 2000, shortly after the Zimbabwean farm invasions began, he nudged me into visiting his modest apartment in a Cape Town suburb: He had things he needed to say to me. Arriving, I found he had a small album lying ready on a table. It was a folder for business cards, more than a hundred of them from the Eighties, and he invited me to page through while he explained what this and that card represented.

Some of the businesses would have been small and ordinary — a picture-framing service and a gift shop, for example. The cards of individuals whose lines of work I couldn’t have identified on my own proved far more interesting. This guy, said John, was an engineer overseas, an expert in processing gold. He explained that, as a rule, Africa controlled too few stages in the addition of value to the raw commodities it produced. Gold, a big part of this natural wealth, was a painful example. Why couldn’t there be a broad-based jewelry trade in a place like Zimbabwe?

John was one of those people who know everybody’s business. He was talking to me because he knew I was stringing for a South African investigative magazine that I found too politically correct (it even supported President Thabo Mbeki in his AIDS denial) and also publishing in conservative journals back in the States. I was going to listen to him about the essential post-liberation role of capitalism.

About the gold processor, God alone knows how John had connected the dots over thousands of miles, but the 1979 end of the black–white civil conflict in Rhodesia, which turned it into liberated Zimbabwe and saw the lifting of international sanctions, coincided with the retirement of this man, whose wife wanted him out of the kitchen. He had agreed to set up shop in Zimbabwe if John would write him the business plan and obtain a license from the new government.

Church Hosts Summer Camp to Train Grade School Kids to Be Antifa Activists By Jeff Reynolds

https://pjmedia.com/parenting/church-hosts-summer-camp-to-train-grade-school-kids-to-be-antifa-activists/

I’m so old I can remember when disseminating communist propaganda in public schools was frowned upon.

Last Friday afternoon, I was sitting at my computer when I received an email from Peachjar. This is a service used by several school districts near me in the Portland area that sends home digital fliers to parents in lieu of paper fliers to advertise extracurricular activities sponsored by various groups in the community. My son’s middle school uses this service, and I receive a few emails a month from them. I’ve used the service myself to send advertisements for recruiting events for Scouts, and I’ve received other fliers such as music lessons, sports teams, and the like.

This one, however, was quite different.

There’s so much wrong here it’s hard to know where to start.

The first thing that struck me, before anything else, was the mask-clad, fist-raising elementary school kids in the illustration. Teaching incoming 4th-8th-graders how to riot, become members of antifa, and join a communist revolution seems a bit much—even for Portland, Oregon. Notice the star on the mask and the raised fist. Classic imagery from the USSR, China, and other violent Marxist revolutions in the 20th century.

RUTHIE BLUM-AN ILL DESERVED ATTACK ON AMBASSADOR DAVID FRIEDMAN

https://www.jns.org/opinion/an-ill-deserved-assault-on-ambassador-david-friedman/

He said nothing controversial whatsoever about the West Bank, except in the eyes of those who consider any Israeli territorial or other claims illegitimate.

Palestinian and leftist Jewish leaders called for America’s Israel ambassador to be fired for telling The New York Times in a recent interview that the Jewish state has, “under certain circumstances, the right to retain some, but unlikely all, of the West Bank.”

Yes, for daring to suggest that Israel has the right even to “some” of its land, David Friedman was called a “settler” by Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who had previously dubbed him a “son of a dog.”

And the P.A. Foreign Ministry announced that it would weigh filing a complaint against Friedman at the International Criminal Court for “trying to impose his racist visions and threatening peace and security in the region, as well as exposing the Palestinian people to several dangers and conspiracies.”

J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami was equally incensed, accusing Friedman of “once again [making] clear that he is acting not as the U.S. ambassador to Israel but as the settlement movement’s ambassador to the United States. By essentially giving the Netanyahu government a green light to begin unilaterally annexing Palestinian territory in the West Bank, the Trump administration is endorsing a flagrant violation of international law.”

Peace Now chimed in, referring to Friedman as a “Trojan horse sent by the settler right, which sabotages Israel’s interests and the chance for peace,” and urging U.S. President Donald Trump to “send him packing.”

The outcry over Friedman’s perfectly reasonable remark is worthy of note, particularly in view of what the U.S. envoy said next.

When asked how Washington would react if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu followed through on his campaign vow ahead of the April 9 Knesset elections to annex part of Judea and Samaria, Friedman replied: “We really don’t have a view until we know how much, on what terms, why does it make sense, why is it good for Israel, why is it good for the region, why does it not create more problems than it solves. These are all things that we’d want to understand, and I don’t want to prejudge.”

“Dirty, Predatory, Reptilian, Vile, & Wicked …” Ayatollah Ebadi on U.S. and “Zionists”

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2019/06/dirty-predatory-reptilian-vile-wicked.html

Gee! Nobody’s perfect, but that’s a bit thick!

It’s what this devastatingly handsome young fella thinks of “the enemies” of Iran, and he lists those enemies in ascending order of, well, all those things, “the Zionists” (now, ain’t that a surprise?) being the worst of all.To quote the translator and uploader, Memri.org:

‘Ayatollah Alireza Ebadi, Khamenei’s representative in the Iranian city of Birjand, said in a May 31, 2019 Friday sermon that aired on Khorasan Jonoobi TV (Iran) that Iran’s “impure and evil” enemy are a “fusion” of Jews and polytheists, and he described it as a dirty, predatory, reptilian, satanic, vile, and wicked “crossbreed of dogs and wolves” that has “pounced on the convoy of humanity.”
 He said that the U.S. was built by oppressive Europeans on the graves of 80 million indigenous people, but that the Zionists are the worst of Iran’s enemies.
 Ayatollah Ebadi then told a story about a doctor who wanted to cure himself of feeling connected to the village fool, and Ebadi said that, likewise, anyone who is attached to the West and its “dirty, anti-human, liberal-democratic ideology that has destroyed the world” should cure themselves.’

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oafFiOonf4Y)

From the distracted, embarrassed looks on some of the listeners’ faces, I’d wager that not everyone takes what he’s saying too seriously …

The rise and fall of Oxfam, the billion pound charity mired in a sex scandal Robert Mendick

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/06/11/rise-fall-oxfam-billion-pound-charity-mired-sex-scandal/

“”Controversies would follow. For example, Scarlett Johansson, the Hollywood actress, quit as an Oxfam ambassador in a row over her endorsement of an Israeli company operating in the West Bank. She had, said the actress, a “fundamental difference of opinion” with the charity.”

The mixed bag of academics, Quakers and general do-gooders who had gathered inside the Old Library at the University Church in Oxford on October 5 1942 had wanted to help the people of Greece.

The country, occupied by the Nazis and subjected to an Allied naval blockade, was suffering a catastrophic famine. From humble origins – the meeting was chaired by the local vicar Dick Milford – a £1 billion a year international aid empire would be born; an empire whose tentacles stretch into politics, entertainment and trade and which grew so large it covered up a sex scandal that, when it finally became public, almost brought it down.

The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, first begun almost 77 years ago and later shortened to the nifty moniker Oxfam, is now far more than just a famine relief charity. Oxfam is a brand. And now a damaged one.

Its first shop at 17 Broad Street in Oxford, set up in 1948 also doubled up as its headquarters. Now Oxfam operates almost 750 shops in the UK – by comparison Waitrose runs half that number of outlets – that includes not only regular charity stores but specialist bookshops and furniture stores and even boutiques selling bridal wear.

Oxfam puts on its own music festival – called Oxjam – and even provides stewarding for Glastonbury. In the 1960s, Oxfam rolled out its first international franchise to Canada and there are now 19 Oxfam ‘confederations’ working in 90 countries worldwide.

The charity, under the 24-year stewardship of Leslie Kirkley, grew in the 1950s from a “local charity to a world-renowned aid agency”.  In the late 1970s Oxfam effectively got political, launching its first campaigns’ department and followed that with reports on topics that included “Bitter Pills”, which examined the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and poverty.

Controversies would follow. For example, Scarlett Johansson, the Hollywood actress, quit as an Oxfam ambassador in a row over her endorsement of an Israeli company operating in the West Bank. She had, said the actress, a “fundamental difference of opinion” with the charity.