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January 2020

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Harry and Meghan, the royal couple who made history, now are history By Andrea Widburg

By on January 19th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/harry_and_meghan_the_royal_couple_who_made_history_now_are_history.html

The Royal Divorce – that is, Prince Harry’s and Megan Markle’s breakup from the royal family — is now final. After sparking a crisis in the House of Windsor, the young Sussexes (Harry, Megan, and wee Archie) are off to make it on their own.

On Saturday, Queen Elizabeth issued a short statement saying she will always love them, Meghan did a great job during her short stint as a royal, and there’s an agreement for them to go away:

Following many months of conversations and more recent discussions, I am pleased that together we have found a constructive and supportive way forward for my grandson and his family.

Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much loved members of my family.

I recognise the challenges they have experienced as a result of intense scrutiny over the last two years and support their wish for a more independent life.

I want to thank them for all their dedicated work across this country, the Commonwealth and beyond, and am particularly proud of how Meghan has so quickly become one of the family.

It is my whole family’s hope that today’s agreement allows them to start building a happy and peaceful new life.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Government by enquiry? Great way to burn forests By Viv Forbes

By on January 19th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/government_by_equiry_great_way_to_burn_forests.html

Politicians hide behind enquiries — their magic answer to all problems, especially bushfires.

Announcing enquiries give the impression of decisive action.  They generate fees for armies of barristers, lawyers, and bureaucrats, and they provide momentary excitement for the media.

The proposed 2020 Australian Bushfires corrobboree will provide an opportunity to grandstand for the Climate Rebellion Mob, who will get starring roles on ABC/Fairfax.  Big business will probably propose a carbon tax to fight bushfires, while foresters and land owners will hardly be heard.

When the final report is ultimately delivered, the media will be off trumpeting some new climate “emergency” to scare the public.  The expensive new report will be quietly filed with all the others.

We’ve had at least 57 bushfire enquiries since 1939 — about one every two years.  Anyone who bothers to read them will soon deduce what should be done.  Nothing much has changed except that there are more people living in fire-prone zones with no protection, and more forest and private land was locked up with heavy fuel loads.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Biden was enriching more family members than just Hunter By Andrea Widburg

By on January 19th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/biden_was_enriching_family_members_other_than_hunter.html

On January 21, Peter Schweizer’s newest book, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, will be released. It should sell well given that pre-sales have already put it at #14 on the Amazon charts. As a preview of coming attractions, the New York Post published an extract from the book detailing “How five members of Joe Biden’s family got rich through his connections.”

According to Schwiezer, Biden was fibbing when he announced last year, “I never talked with my son or my brother or anyone else — even distant family — about their business interests. Period.” The truth is that Biden’s business conversations not only benefited Hunter, they also benefitted Biden’s son-in-law Howard, his brothers James and Frank, and his sister Valerie. Loose lips enrich sibs.

James Biden was a welcome friend in the Obama White House. “Sometimes, James’ White House visits dovetailed with his overseas business dealings, and his commercial opportunities flourished during his brother’s tenure as vice president.” For example, just three weeks after Biden’s longtime friend Kevin Justice, president of HillStone International, a subsidiary of a huge construction management firm, visited the White House, HillStone announced that James Biden was its new Executive Vice President.

No one cared that Biden had no experience in construction management. What might have mattered was that, six months later, the firm got a contract to build 100,000 homes in Iraq, plus a $22 million U.S. federal government contract to manage a State Department project. An executive in the parent company later told investors it helped to have the vice president’s brother as a partner. 

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BOOKS Comments turned off

Amity Shlaes’s Verdict on the Great Society: Not That Great By Nicholas J. Kaster

By on January 19th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/amity_shlaes_verdict_on_the_great_society_not_that_great.html

Seldom in history has a program been undertaken with such lofty intentions and ended in such bitter disappointment as Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” In her latest book Great Society: A New History, Amity Shlaes provides a fresh appraisal of the idealistic policies that came to define the 1960s and a historical narrative that is especially timely now.

Shlaes’ book is a follow-up to The Forgotten Man, her excellent history of the Great Depression. This book is an apt sequel, since the Great Society was promoted as the completion of the “unfinished business” of the New Deal. However, there was a significant difference between the two programs. The New Deal originated in response to a severe economic crisis. In contrast, the Great Society was enacted at a time of economic prosperity, when poverty rates were dropping.

Indeed, as Shlaes makes clear, it was the very prosperity and confidence of the postwar years that made the Great Society possible. “Compared to overcoming a Great Depression or conquering Europe and Japan,” Shlaes writes, “eliminating poverty or racial discrimination had to be easy. American society was already so good…This good society had to become, in the words of President Johnson, a Great Society.”

Shlaes begins the book by discussing Bonanza, a TV western that premiered on January 2, 1960. It was an entirely new kind of Western, as Shlaes describes:

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KRD NEWS, MEDIA Comments turned off

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS PRESS DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES ON SHUTTING JERUSALEM EMBASSY Ira Stoll

By on January 19th, 2020

https://mailchi.mp/689009fcf330/krd-news-new-york-times-editors-press-democratic-presidential-candidates-on-shutting-jerusalem-embassy?e=9365a7c638

If anyone still needs proof that the NY Times is a bias, anti-Israel publication, please read today’s featured article (Ira Stoll, Algemeiner, Jan 17).

The editorial board members practically sound like paid lobbyists for the Palestine Liberation Organization, badgering the politicians to back the idea of evacuating American diplomats from the Jerusalem embassy in the next Democratic administration. krd

Democratic presidential candidates hoping to win the endorsement of The New York Times are being interrogated by Times editors about whether they’ll commit to shutting down the American embassy in Israel’s capital.

President Donald Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem in May 2018, fulfilling a campaign promise and finally bringing America into compliance with the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995. The widely predicted violent reaction by regional Arabs rapidly fizzled out. But the Times editorial board members appear to be nursing a grudge about the matter, at least to judge by their questions to the Democratic presidential candidates.

Undoing the embassy move has emerged as a standard topic in the Times endorsement interviews, as much a part of the routine as questions on more traditional Democratic platform planks such as reproductive rights or antitrust enforcement against technology companies.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What Do Democrats Fear in Donald Trump? Greatness!! J.B. Shurk

By on January 19th, 2020

www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/what_do_democrats_fear_in_donald_trump_greatness.html

James Carville says Trump is the greatest threat to America since the fall of communism.  It is easy to laugh away such a declaration, but I think there is an invaluable truth expressed.  Trump is as important in stature as the United States’ most formidable military and political opponent of the twentieth century.  Trumpism as an ideological force has the mass and acceleration of a Soviet Empire that threatened to conquer the world.  Nobody speaks about the Bush Doctrine in such terms.  Nobody confuses the Obama Doctrine or the Carter Doctrine as projecting that kind of power.  Yet here we are, just three years after the election, and somehow the belittled and mocked hotel owner from Queens has stumbled into creating a movement that matches in strength and potency what took Marx, Lenin, and Stalin over a century to perfect.  Consider the fear that Carville and his ilk must harbor about what is to come.

What does he see that makes him tremble so?  In a word, greatness.

How could he not?  When you see a man being endlessly ridiculed and scorned brush off those insults with ease and smile back, you know something is different.  When you watch a 6’3″ sack of energy bustling across the stage four or more times a day in suit and tie before tens of thousands of spectators watching his every move, and he seems more rested and comfortable than the press gallery a third his age, you know you haven’t seen this before.  When his enemies spend years using the combined forces of corporate media, the legal system, and the intelligence agencies to dispose of him one way or another, and the man responds with an off-the-cuff one-liner that shows he could not care less, you know you are dealing with something rare.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Hole in the Impeachment Case By Andrew C. McCarthy Something is missing from the charges against Trump: An indictable offense.

By on January 19th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/trump-impeachment-trial-charges-lack-indictable-offense/

Thought experiment No. 1: Suppose Bob Mueller’s probe actually proves that Donald Trump is under Vladimir Putin’s thumb. Fill in the rest of the blanks with your favorite corruption fantasy: The Kremlin has video of the mogul-turned-president debauching himself in a Moscow hotel; the Kremlin has a bulging file of real-estate transfers through which Trump laundered racketeering proceeds for Putin’s favored mobsters and oligarchs; or Trump is recorded cutting a deal to drop Obama-era sanctions against Putin’s regime if Russian spies hack Democratic accounts.

Thought experiment No. 2: Adam Schiff is not a demagogue. (Remember, this is fantasy.) At the very first televised hearing, when he alleged that President Trump told Ukrainian president Zelensky, “I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent . . . lots of it,” Schiff was not defrauding the public. Instead, impeachment’s Inspector Clouseau can actually prove that Trump was asking a foreign government to manufacture out of whole cloth evidence that Vice President Biden and his son were cashing in on the former’s political influence (as opposed to asking that Ukraine look into an arrangement so objectively sleazy that the Obama administration itself agitated over what to do about it).

What do these two scenarios have in common, besides being fictional? Answer: If either of them were real, we’d already be talking about President Pence’s upcoming State of the Union address.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Keep an eye out for Israel Derangement Syndrome Juliet Moses

By on January 19th, 2020

ttps://www.spectator.com.au/2020/01/keep-an-eye-out-for-israel-derangement-syndrome/

I am not a psychiatrist, but I’ve observed a kind of psychosis in far-left activists of the West who claim to be progressives championing the Palestinian cause: Israel Derangement Syndrome, or IDS.

Sufferers of this insidious illness don’t rationally advocate for Palestinians and criticise Israeli policies, in the same way they’d criticise other states. They are doctrinaire cultists possessed of an unadulterated, unhinged hatred for Israel, which they see as a uniquely evil state that must be eradicated. Until then, it will be their all-consuming, defining cause; never mind the Uyghurs, Kurds or Iranian women. In indulging in the delusion that the end (of Israel) goal will eventually occur, they are complicit in perpetuating the conflict and emboldening the despotic regimes that act against the interests of the very people they purport to champion, the Palestinians.

Corbynism is the most recent prominent example of IDS. While we will no longer be bombarded with its leader’s sneering visage, the animosity towards Israel that its dogmatism exemplifies, replete with conspiracism and terrorist sympathising, is unlikely to fade. And it is rising across the Atlantic

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

America Is Deeply Divided Because The Left Has Become So Shallow Frank Bullit

By on January 18th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/01/18/america-is-deeply-divided-because-the-left-has-become-so-shallow/

Virtue signaling and luxury beliefs have driven us apart.

‘The country is hopelessly split,” says the November 2018 Intelligencer headline. According to The Hill, “Analyst says U.S. is most divided since Civil War.” Not quite a year ago, the History Channel reported that “some historians are also raising the alarm over division in the country.”

Naturally, President Donald Trump and everyone who voted for him are being blamed for the bitter breakup. But this is nothing more than the political left projecting on others the exact sort of behavior it’s engaged in.

An angry mixture of Democrats, “progressives,” socialists, and democratic socialists that makes up the political left is driven not by ideas but by its members’ desperate need to establish their social status. They want to be identified with those they consider “cool.” Think of Barack Obama, most high-profile Democratic politicians, celebrities, and media stars.

Yes, it’s a lot like high school.

The pursuit of social status is done through virtue-signaling (which “does not require actually doing anything virtuous … It takes no effort or sacrifice at all,” says the author of the term), and the holding of luxury beliefs. The former, artfully defined in Wikipedia as “the contrivance of a false appearance of virtue or goodness,” is used to confirm the latter, which has been described as ”ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class,” as well as “good public relations” that protect “you from being branded a bigot and being expelled from public society.”

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MEDIA, POLITICS Comments turned off

WHO IS MANU RAJU? HE IS JUST WHAT McSALLY CALLED HIM….A LIBERAL HACK….

By on January 18th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/16/az-sen-martha-mcsally-calls-cnn-reporter-a-liberal-hack-triggering-liberal-hacks-on-twitter/

AZ Sen. Martha McSally Calls CNN Reporter a ‘Liberal Hack,’ Triggering Liberal Hacks on Twitter Debra Heine

Commentary editor Noah Rothman simply called McSally’s words “pretty uncalled for.”

But they were called for, as Raju is one of the Hill’s most shameless and reliable mouth pieces for Democrats.

Until the Russia Collusion hoax fizzled, Raju was one of its biggest peddlers.

In December of 2017, for instance, Raju was involved in”one of the most humiliating spectacles in the history of the U.S. media,” as the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald put it.

With a tone so grave and bombastic that it is impossible to overstate, CNN went on the air and announced a major exclusive: Donald Trump, Jr. was offered by email advanced access to the trove of DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks – meaning before those emails were made public.
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There was, alas, just one small problem with this massive, blockbuster story: it was totally and completely false. The email which Trump, Jr. received that directed him to the WikiLeaks archive was sent afterWikiLeaks published it online for the whole world to see, not before. Rather than some super secretive operative giving Trump, Jr. advanced access, as both CNN and MSNBC told the public for hours they had confirmed, it was instead just some totally pedestrian message from a random member of the public suggesting Trump, Jr. review documents the whole world was already talking about. All of the anonymous sources CNN and MSNBC cited somehow all got the date of the email wrong.

Federalist co-founder Sean Davis challenged Tapper to explain how the CNN reporter could have gotten that story so wrong without being either a liberal hack or “too stupid to read the date on the email.”

The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway called Raju “a favorite and reliable leak recipient for Democrats.”

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