REGULAR POSTINGS WILL RESUME ON MONDAY NOVEMBER 18TH
https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/14/impeachment-inquiry-is-bad-for-biden/
Amid the consensus that Wednesday’s congressional testimony by the Beltway version of the Duke brothers (that’s a “Trading Places” reference, millennials) fell flat without any “pizazz,” Democrats undoubtedly are scrambling to create some fireworks next week.
House Intelligence Committee chairman and Hollywood wannabe-screenwriter Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) must be channeling his inner creative genius to fabricate a dramatic role for what Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) called “the low-rent Ukrainian sequel” to the boarded-up Trump-Russia collusion theater. One can only guess who will grab the spotlight; performances from eight more impeachment accomplices begin Tuesday.
Unfortunately for the tightly scripted Schiff, one name continues to make an unwanted cameo appearance: Hunter Biden.
As former Vice President Joe Biden’s partisan bodyguards in the press bury any criticism of Hunter’s lucrative overseas business deals—the Democratic presidential candidate has declared “war” on negative coverage of his son—Schiff arguably is staging Biden’s biggest political liability for the American people to see, unfiltered.
The Press Can’t Ignore This for Long
Testimony from George Kent, a Ukraine expert in the State Department, must have Team Biden in a tizzy. On several occasions, Kent described Ukraine’s legacy of endemic corruption and the U.S. government’s attempts to curb fraud and political malfeasance in that country. Both Kent and Bill Taylor, the acting ambassador to Ukraine, confirmed that Ukraine has received $1.5 billion in U.S. aid over the past several years.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/11/trump-derangement-syndrome-fatigue-impeachment-viewership-32-lower-than-comey-hearings/
Fatigue from Trump Derangement Syndrome? The first day of impeachment hearings only brought in 13.1 million viewers.
The number becomes bleaker considering how many channels carried the hearing.
The numbers for these major hearings have declined since the Comey hearings:
The 13,098,000 who tuned in on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, CSPAN and PBS marks a 32 percent drop from the number of people who watched James Comey’s testimony to Senate Intelligence Committee in May 2017, which delivered more than 19 million viewers.
In February, former Trump personal attorney and fixer Michael Cohen’s testimony delivered 15.8 million viewers, while 13 million tuned in to see former special counsel Robert Mueller testify before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees.
https://issuesinsights.com/2019/11/15/global-warming-politics-are-dividing-us-because-thats-the-way-the-alarmists-want-it/
A CNN producer recently wrote an opinion piece headlined “Climate politics are tearing the West apart.” He got it about half right. They are tearing us apart but not for the reasons he thinks.
Johan Bader, an associate producer for “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” is in agreement with The Economist, which has declared: “environmentalism is emerging as Europe’s new culture war.” We’re seeing much the same in the U.S.
But the cultural divide is not simply “concerned citizens” who “are pouring into the streets to lambaste feckless politicians for failing to protect the planet” against neighbors who “inveigh against out-of-touch politicians for instituting environmental policies that fail to protect them.”
The schism has been caused by a coalition of anti-capitalists, arrogant academics, authoritarians who have a need to dictate to others, know-it-alls, those who relish the status of their imagined moral superiority, and inveterate virtue-signalers who have “othered” global warming skeptics as well as the agnostics who have legitimate concerns about how the policy solutions forced on them will change their lives.
The first group, the aggressors, believe that anyone who doesn’t believe what they believe is beneath them. These elitist bullies consider a conflicting opinion an indication of low intellect, or criminality, or both. That’s why they can so easily define skeptics as rubes and outlaws who should be caged.
The cultural gap has been made obvious by the Extinction Rebellion. In one of its more infamous tantrums, the “painfully middle-class agitators” went “to a working-class part of East London early in the morning to lecture and inconvenience people who just wanted to get to work,” British columnist Brendan O’Neill recently wrote in Spiked.
The tension is not produced so much by one group being more well off than the other as it is one group thinking it is smarter than the other, and is therefore justified in hectoring and obstructing the othered group, and stealing its time. This plays out in the many efforts of true believers to “educate” their inferiors.
There is of course a religious element to the global warming scare, as well.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kongs-week-of-rage-boils-over-all-day-all-night-we-are-gonna-fight-11573803380
Antigovernment protesters and police shocked Hong Kong with some of the ugliest incidents in nearly six months of unrest this week, leaving the city’s leaders scrambling for a way to restore order under increasing pressure from Beijing.
A 70-year-old man died Thursday night after being hit in the head with a brick during a clash a day earlier. A 15-year-old boy was in critical condition on Wednesday, according to the Hospital Authority, which declined to comment on his current status. Local media said he sustained injuries after appearing to be hit in the head by a tear-gas canister. And police shot a 21-year-old protester on Monday; later, pro-democracy demonstrators set a man who argued with them on fire.
On Thursday in Brazil, Chinese President Xi Jinping urged a tough police response to the protests.
The Chinese government will “firmly support the Hong Kong police in strictly enforcing the law and firmly support the Hong Kong judicial bodies in severely punishing the violent criminals in accordance with the law,” Mr. Xi said. He made his comments on an international stage at a summit of leaders from emerging markets.
Clashes between protesters and police this week turned universities into battlefields, rendered highways and tunnels unusable, disrupted public transit and frequently left the city’s bustling financial district under a fog of tear gas. Shops across the city closed, further crippling an economy that has already tumbled into a recession. The Hang Seng Index, the city’s stock market, dropped 4.8%, its worst week since early August.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15155/france-inverted-colonization
Soon after, Muslim organizations that had asked for students to have the right to wear the veil in schools also asked for a change in the school curriculum — in history, so that Muslim civilization would be presented in a more “correct” and “positive” way.
“If the way I dress disturbs you, leave my country”. — Signs at a demonstration, October 27, 2019.
“Any criticism of Islam is now blasphemy.” — Ivan Rioufol, columnist, Le Figaro, November 4, 2019.
Details lead one to see that the anti-Christian acts were mostly acts of church vandalism, the anti-Semitic acts were very often violent attacks against Jews or cemetery desecrations, and that the anti-Muslim acts were almost only anti-Muslim graffiti or the laying of slices of bacon the entrance to a mosque or in the mailbox of a Muslim organization. No Muslims were physically attacked.
“We are not in a project of assimilation.” — Yassine Belattar, former advisor to French President Emmanuel Macron, October 27, 2019.
Éric Zemmour has suggested that France is threatened not by a risk of “partition”, but by an inverted “colonization”.
On October 12, 2019, a meeting of the Regional Council of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté was held in Dijon, a quiet town in central France. A woman wearing a long black veil was in the audience, apparently accompanying a group of students. All at once, the head of the National Rally party group at the Regional Council, Julien Odoul, rose and said that the presence of a woman wearing an Islamic headscarf in a public building was incompatible with the values of the French Republic:
“We are in a public building, we are in a democratic enclosure. Madame has all the time to keep her veil at home, in the street, but not here, not today. It’s the Republic, it’s secularism. It’s the law of the Republic, no ostentatious signs.”
He was neither threatening nor violent, yet his words immediately upset others in the room. A boy, apparently the son of the veiled woman, rushed crying into her arms. She then left the room slowly, accompanied by other children.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-deval-patrick-daydream-11573777283
There’s fashionably late, and then there’s showing up to a soiree as the dishes are being cleared. Which one is Deval Patrick ? On Thursday the former two-term Governor of Massachusetts joined the Democratic campaign for President. Nothing against the 17 other hopefuls, he said, but they’re selling either “nostalgia” or polarization: “It’s our way—our big idea—or no way.”
There’s something to this analysis. The Democratic war horse in the lead, Joe Biden, looks unsteady. Close behind are a proud socialist, Bernie Sanders, and a furtive one, Elizabeth Warren, both of whom pledge to eliminate private insurance used by some 170 million people. Far back lag the rest: a 30-something mayor, floundering Senators, Andrew Yang.
At least a few Democrats are now wondering if they can order off menu. Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire ex-Mayor of New York, is weighing a 2020 bid. Hillary Clinton, no introduction required, says she is “under enormous pressure from many, many, many people to think about it.” But those late entries are plausible in that Mr. Bloomberg is a billionaire and Mrs. Clinton is universally known.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/academia-producing-men-and-women-without-chests-jack-kerwick/
“Learning, then, demands fortitude, an intestinal fortitude, in fact, to meet ideas that clash with one’s own certainties, and engage civilly with those who advance those ideas. When, however, the university promulgates and enforces with an iron hand an orthodoxy, thus, immunizing students from any and all ideas that conflict with that orthodoxy, it promotes softness, weakness, shallowness.”
At the risk of sounding redundant, the public nevertheless needs to be reminded of just how politicized—and, thus, intellectually flaccid—academia has become.
Real Clear Education recently published its “2019 Survey of Campus Speech Experts.” The report identifies those colleges and universities that are “best” and “worst” for “free speech and viewpoint diversity.” That of the 22 invitees—“academics, pundits, and policy experts”—who accepted the invitation to participate in this study the vast majority (though not all) are right-leaning is instructive, for Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to express concern that professors will inject their politics into the classroom.
As a Pew Research Center study informs us, 79% of Republicans have this concern compared to only 17% of Democrats who do so. A comparable disparity exists between the 75% of Republicans versus the 31% of Democrats who are concerned that colleges are determined to shield students from perspectives that they may find offensive.
Yet Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to be concerned with viewpoint diversity precisely because it is the leftist ideology associated with Democrats that has long since prevailed in academia.
The panelists consistently ranked University of Chicago as the best of institutions when it comes to “speech climate.” They just as consistently ranked Yale University as the institution in “most need for improvement” when it comes to this subject.
The panelists offered their thoughts as to why they ascribe as much importance as they do to the campus speech climate. Below is a small, select handful of particularly noteworthy comments that represent the shared judgments of the entire panel:
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/house-democrats-impeachment-circus-rolls-joseph-klein/
The House Democrats’ impeachment investigation circus moved into its televised public hearing phase, presided over by ringmaster House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff. The public hearings began on Wednesday. The way things are going, the Democrats will need all the comfort they can get from the therapy dogs who were brought to the Hill by Pet Partners, a therapy-animal registration organization, and the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council. The Ukraine case narrative the House Democrats have been trying to build against President Trump, centering on his July 25, 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Trump’s alleged use of “irregular” channels to Ukrainian officials to push his personal political agenda, is turning into a quagmire. As Jonathan Turley, professor of law at George Washington University who testified as a constitutional expert in the Clinton impeachment hearings, wrote, “Democrats want to move forward on a barely developed evidentiary record and cursory public hearings on this single Ukraine allegation.” He added, “If Democrats seek to remove a sitting president, they are laying a foundation that would barely support a bungalow, let alone a constitutional tower. Such a slender impeachment would collapse in a two mile headwind in the Senate.”
The Democrats are trying to establish what some of their more outspoken members have charged variously as President Trump’s “abuse of power,” “extortion,” “bribery” and a “shakedown.” They base their accusations of presidential “crimes” on the shaky allegation that President Trump used the leverage of withheld security assistance and the dangling of a White House meeting to improperly advance the president’s personal political interests over the national security interests of the United States. What has emerged so far, and will likely continue, is a desperate attempt by the Democrats and their friends in the mainstream media to make a mountain out of a molehill, using mainly hearsay and circumstantial evidence from witnesses in the foreign policy and national security establishment who don’t like the direction of President Trump’s policy towards Ukraine.
The Democrats have some fundamental problems that undermine their case. Much of their case relies on secondhand, thirdhand and even fourth-hand hearsay evidence. The bizarro world they inhabit is illustrated by this nugget from Democrat Rep. Mike Quigley, describing his understanding of what constitutes credible evidence: “Hearsay can be much better evidence than direct … and it’s certainly valid in this instance.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/how_fordham_university_lost_to_radical_palestinians_in_court.html
Coinciding with the 2019 National Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) conference held in Minnesota this past weekend, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) released an alarming report that exposes the toxic ideology that characterizes this radical campus group. The ISGAP report confirms what observers of radicalism in higher education have documented for years: that while SJP purports to be a group whose mission is to achieve a peaceful and just resolution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict by supporting Palestinian self-determination, in fact, as the report put it, “SJP is steeped in an ideology that has roots in racist and antisemitic extremism.”
That toxic campus radicalism has meant that administrators, supporters of Israel, pro-Israel speakers, and Jewish students and organizations have experienced the caustic side-effect of SJP’s presence on campus. As SJP grew more aggressive in its demonstrations and behavior, it occasionally, though rarely, has been sanctioned or restrained.
Finally, in 2016, one university, Fordham University in New York, cognizant of SJP’s history of poisoning dialogue on campuses and promoting a campaign of libels, defamation, and lies against Israel and Jewish students, reversed the decision of the student government to allow SJP to become a recognized student organization and decided that SJP, based on its sorry record at other universities, had no place at Fordham. Dean Keith Eldridge, aware of SJP’s methods and ideology, bravely decided that “while students are encouraged to promote diverse political points of view, and we encourage conversation and debate on all topics, I cannot support an organization whose sole purpose is advocating political goals of a specific group, and against a specific country [emphasis added], when these goals clearly conflict with and run contrary to the mission and values of the University[.] … The purpose of the organization as stated in the proposed club constitution points toward … polarization.”
SJP immediately sued Fordham, in Awad v. Fordham University, 2019 WL 3550713, asserting that the decision to block it from becoming a recognized student organization was, as the judge ultimately found in reversing the dean’s decision in 2019, “arbitrary and capricious,” and “it must be concluded that [Dean Eldridge’s] disapproval of SJP was made in large part because the subject of SJP’s criticism is the State of Israel, rather than some other nation,” and that “his only articulated concern was that SJP singled out one particular country for criticism and boycott.”
In fact, Fordham’s instincts were well founded in that the dean knew, based in SJP’s record elsewhere, of its pattern of radicalism, misbehavior, toxic speech, and overtly anti-Semitic behavior. That radicalism has been problematic, particularly since research by the AMCHA Initiative, an organization that tracks anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism at universities, “indicate[s] a significant increase in actions which directly harm or threaten Jewish students, including physical and verbal assaults, destruction of property, harassment discrimination and suppression of speech, at schools with an SJP or similar anti-Zionist chapter.” Equally serious is the report’s findings that SJP’s presence resulted in “incidents of Israel-related anti-Semitic harassment increase[ing] 70%.”
