Displaying posts published in

December 2019

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Contemptible Tissue of Lies Surrounds Impeachment Conrad Black

By on December 21st, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/20/a-contemptible-tissue-of-lies-surrounds-impeachment/

Impeachment is just an effort to strengthen the Democrats as they make the uphill battle to persuade the voters to evict President Trump next year for confected moral turpitude, since he can’t be challenged on his accomplishments in office.

Even as the House Democrats voted to impeach the president this week, there was universal recognition that the effort to remove him was a dead pigeon on arrival at the Senate (assuming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi summons the courage to apprise the Senate officially of the results of the House vote).

The battle, for some time already, has been at the public relations level, and there the president is winning. USA Today, an anti-Trump newspaper with regular anti-Trump polling results, reported a five point decline in the numbers of people who approved impeaching the president, and other polls indicate that this is a clear trend; he is now ahead of where President Obama was in the polls eight years ago. These polls also probably reflect the gathering disquietude of the country about revelations of unprecedented political skulduggery by the FBI in the Horowitz report.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Robert Mueller’s Dossier Dodge Why did the special counsel not tell America that Christopher Steele’s information was false?

By on December 21st, 2019

In her public order Tuesday, Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court didn’t mention Robert Mueller. But her stinging rebuke of the FBI for abusing the FISA process to obtain a warrant to spy on Carter Page invites the question: How could the special counsel have ignored the Steele dossier?
Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirms the FBI sought to verify the claims former British spy Christopher Steele made in his dossier. Yet during an appearance before the House Intelligence Committee on March 20, 2017, when Mr. Comey was asked directly if the bureau was investigating them, Mr. Comey answered: “I’m not gonna comment on that.

He had good reason to dodge. By that time, the Horowitz report makes clear, the FBI knew that most of the Steele dossier’s claims were unreliable. Yet rather than take a hard look at it, Team Mueller made a deliberate choice to tiptoe around it. In his opening statement to Congress when he testified this July, Mr. Mueller declared he would not address “matters related to the so-called Steele dossier,” which he said were out of his purview.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The New War Against Africa’s Christians Fulani raiders ‘are Islamic extremists of a new stripe, more or less linked with Boko Haram,’ but present throughout Nigeria. By Bernard-Henri Lévy

By on December 21st, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-war-against-africas-christians-11576880200?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Lagos, Nigeria

A slow-motion war is under way in Africa’s most populous country. It’s a massacre of Christians, massive in scale and horrific in brutality. And the world has hardly noticed.

A Nigerian Pentecostal Christian, director of a nongovernmental organization that works for mutual understanding between Nigeria’s Christians and Muslims, alerted me to it. “Have you heard of the Fulani?” he asked at our first meeting, in Paris, speaking the flawless, melodious English of the Nigerian elite. The Fulani are an ethnic group, generally described as shepherds from mostly Muslim Northern Nigeria, forced by climate change to move with their herds toward the more temperate Christian South. They number 14 million to 15 million in a nation of 191 million.

Among them is a violent element. “They are Islamic extremists of a new stripe,” the NGO director said, “more or less linked with Boko Haram,” the sect that became infamous for the 2014 kidnapping of 276 Christian girls in the state of Borno. “I beg you,” he said, “come and see for yourself.” Knowing of Boko Haram but nothing of the Fulani, I accept.

The 2019 Global Terrorism Index estimates that Fulani extremists have become deadlier than Boko Haram and accounted for the majority of the country’s 2,040 documented terrorist fatalities in 2018. To learn more about them, I travel to Godogodo, in the center of the country, where I meet a beautiful woman named Jumai Victor, 28. On July 15, she says, Fulani extremists stormed into her village on long-saddle motorcycles, three to a bike, shouting “Allahu Akbar!” They torched houses and killed her four children before her eyes.

When her turn came and they noticed she was pregnant, a discussion ensued. Some didn’t want to see her belly slit, so they compromised by cutting up and amputating her left arm with a machete. She speaks quickly and emotionlessly, staring into space as if she lost her face along with her arm. The village chief, translating for her, chokes up. Tears stream down his cheeks when she finishes her account.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

CNN Is Not a News Network By Charles C. W. Cooke

By on December 21st, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/31/cnn-is-not-a-news-network/

And Jim Acosta is no reporter

When ThinkProgress announced that it was going out of business, a few observers wondered aloud, “Why didn’t anybody buy it?” But why would they have, when we have CNN?

As a child, I was aware of CNN in part because its introductory bumper featured the sinister voice of Darth Vader, and in part because it was both the prototype and the stereotype of the 24-hour news channel. CNN showed up in movies, either as itself or in parodies that imitated its role. It was on in the airports and the hospitals and the hotel lobbies, and in the waiting room at the dentist’s office. When something bad or exciting was happening, you would tell your friends, “Turn on CNN.”

CNN was careful and self-consciously nonpartisan — or, at least, it was keen for viewers to believe that it was. Its slogans were “This is CNN” — well, yes — and “The most trusted name in news,” and it cultivated its position within the firmament in much the same way as does Wikipedia today. It could be sensationalist and intrusive at times, but it was sensationalist and intrusive in the way that the paparazzo is rather than in the way that protesters who bang drums in your face and insist that you give up gasoline are. In short, it was what it said it was: a news network.

It is no longer that. These days, CNN is a peculiar and unlovely hybrid of progressive propaganda outlet, oleaginous media apologist, sexless cultural scold, and frenzied Donald Trump stalkerblog. When news breaks, it is no longer useful or appropriate to tell someone, “Turn on CNN,” because if he did, he would be as likely to be presented with a wall of advocacy and obsession as with the headlines of the hour. Today, CNN does not broadcast the news; it broadcasts what it wants you to think the news is. At long last, it has become Fox.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Brexit, for Real This Time By Douglas Murray

By on December 21st, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/31/brexit-for-real-this-time/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-issue&utm_term=first

The Conservative-party electoral win puts an end to years of attempted sabotage

Here are two quotes about Brexit. I will tell you whom they are from, but try to guess the date.

The first is from the European Union’s Brexit negotiator, Guy Verhofstadt: “Brexit will now happen. . . . The EU must now focus on building a new close, fair and lasting partnership with Britain. It is in our common interest.”

The second quotation is from the U.K.’s former Conservative deputy prime minister and fanatical pro-EU campaigner, Lord Michael Heseltine. “We’ve lost. We have to face up to that. We’re going to leave the European Union.”

Neither statement is in itself remarkable. The sole remarkable point is the date of each of these statements. Neither was issued on June 24, 2016, the day after the British people voted in a referendum by a majority to leave the European Union. The first quote — from Verhofstadt — was tweeted out on December 13, 2019. The second — from Heseltine — comes from an interview he gave on December 14 of the same year. That is, both came in the immediate aftermath of Boris Johnson’s huge 80-seat-majority win in the British general election of December 12, 2019.

In most regards the result of that election has caused unalloyed celebration for people on the political right.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Twitter Removes Thousands of Accounts Linked to Saudi Government Influence Operation By Mairead McArdle

By on December 21st, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/twitter-removes-thousands-of-accounts-linked-to-saudi-government-influence-operation/

Twitter announced Friday that it has pemanently removed over 88,000 accounts associated with Saudia Arabia, many of which were linked to state actors.

The mammoth social media platform said in a blog post that it has released data about 5,929 now removed accounts linked to a “significant state-backed information operation” originating in Saudi Arabia for violating Twitter’s platform manipulation policies.

That group of accounts was part of a larger network of more than 88,000 accounts engaging in “spammy behavior,” Twitter’s investigative team found. The platform has permanently suspended all of the network’s accounts and shared details about the network with peer companies, according to the blog post.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

CAIR Pennsylvania Poster Girl Resigns in Shame By Leonard Getz

By on December 21st, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/12/cair_pennsylvania_poster_girl_resigns_in_shame.html

Movita Johnson-Harrell seemed to take pride in her position as the first Muslim woman elected to the Pennsylvania State Legislature. Now that record will forever have an asterisk next to it as Johnson-Harrell has turned herself in to Pennsylvania  Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s Office, pleading guilty on charges of perjury, record tampering, and embezzling over $500,000 in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security disability funds, as well as donations to Motivations Education and Consultation Associates (MECA), a charity she established to  allegedly serve the mentally ill and drug addicted poor in her predominately African-American neighborhood.

In a press conference, Attorney General Shapiro described Johnson-Harrell’s actions as “brazen corruption… her theft knew no bounds.”  Johnson-Harrell stole funds that personally belonged to the residents of her facilities and used it to purchase fox furs, trips to Mexico, to make payments on a Porsche, pay delinquent utility bills, cover her granddaughter’s private school tuition and even fund her political campaign.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

VICTORY: Mizzou Pays Hillsdale $4.7M to Teach Free-Market Economics By Tyler O’Neil

By on December 21st, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/victory-mizzou-pays-hillsdale-4-7m-to-teach-free-market-economics/

This week, the University of Missouri agreed to pay $4.7 million to support the teaching of free-market Austrian economics at Hillsdale College, in order to honor the donor intent of the late Sherlock Hibbs. A Mizzou grad, Hibbs gave $5 million to his alma mater specifically to establish professorships on Austrian economics.

“The Hibbs case will have a resounding impact on higher education and giving,” Peter Herzog, lead trial counsel for Hillsdale College and partner at Wheeler Trigg O’Donnell, said in a statement. “Donors might reconsider or reevaluate institutions that are not like-minded in their missions and commitments. Colleges and universities will do what they want with your money unless you make sure they can’t.”

Hibbs, a 1926 University of Missouri graduate, made the bequest in his will before he died in 2002. He gave the money in order to establish three chairs, funded at $1.1 million each, and another three distinguished professorships, with two funded at $567,000 and another at $566,000. In each case, the professor must be a “dedicated and articulate disciple” of Austrian economics. Mizzou accepted the gift, yet more than a decade after his death, the express wishes of the bequest were not carried out, former Gov. Jay Nixon (D-Mo.) told PJ Media in July.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Feminism: A Self-Canceling Project By David Solway

By on December 21st, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/feminism-a-self-canceling-project/

One hears a lot of talk about cancel culture these days, but little discussion of how a cultural movement goes about canceling itself. This is especially the case with feminism. The entire program is ruptured by flagrant violations of common sense and manifold contradictions it cannot resolve. One scarcely knows where to start in disentangling the skein of incongruities, mystifications, fallacies, and inconsistencies which comprise its dogma and determine its destructive course in the public domain.

Many of the movement’s disabling contradictions have been abundantly documented in various books, some of the most decisive including Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young’s misandry volumes Spreading Misandry and Legalizing Misandry; William Collins’ The Empathy Gap; Patricia Pearson’s When She Was Bad; Christina Hoff Sommers’ Who Stole Feminism?; Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly’s The Flipside of Feminism; Janice Fiamengo’s Sons of Feminism; Bettina Arndt’s #MenToo, Stephen Baskerville’s The New Politics of Sex; Esther Vilar’s The Manipulated Man; and Megan Fox’s Believe Evidence: The Death of Due Process from Salome to #MeToo to mention only a few. Some of these self-canceling anomalies are worth reviewing to demonstrate the magnitude of feminism’s ideological incoherence.

As I wrote in an earlier article, “The most flagrant contradiction in the feminist psyche is modeled on the entitlement behavior of feminists who morbidly inveigh against the ‘patriarchy’ while enjoying the benefits of a world the much-maligned patriarchy built—a world of comfort, ease, leisure, advantage, convenience, security and plenty which they have no intention of rejecting or abandoning.” Attacking the “patriarchy” as the most oppressive institution on the face of the planet and vilifying men as rapists, conquistadors, exploiters, and irremediably toxic abusers of women, they issue their writs of attainder from a cozy, safe and privileged environment that men created for them. Every amenity they enjoy, every labor-saving appliance, utensil, mechanism, and implement they take for granted, every technological innovation, scientific discovery, and medical advancement from which they benefit is almost entirely the gift of men that they refuse even to acknowledge.

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HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

VICTOR SHARPE:The other inconvenient truth: The Arab slave trade

By on December 21st, 2019

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/191219

Those of us who know history are familiar with accounts of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. Indeed over the last 2,000 years each century has been more murderous than the previous one.

We understand that Communism is a ruthless killing machine and ideology that must be resisted at all costs, even as so many of our youth foolishly embrace it under the mistaken guise of “social justice.”

There are historical and modern events that cast Islam equally as ruthless and deadly: A pitiless, “ideology wrapped in a religion,” to quote Winston Churchill.

Traveling back in time, we must acknowledge the abiding horror of the slavery practiced by Muslims upon hapless black Africans – a searing crime which has existed since Islam’s founding in the 7th century.

While the anti-slavery abolitionist movements in Europe and North America began their epic movement to end slavery during the 19th century. there was barely any opposition to slavery as practiced within the Muslim world.

Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, while continuing to spew his vile racist and bigoted words against Christians and Jews, refuses to admit to what Islam has perpetrated down the dark centuries of mans’ inhumanity to his fellow man. As an African American, as an avowed Muslim and as a defender of Arab terrorism, his silence is hideously revealing.

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