Displaying posts published in

February 2020

POLITICS Comments turned off

The price of crazy: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez yelps for help against 12 primary challengers By Monica Showalter

By on February 18th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/the_price_of_crazy_alexandria_ocasiocortez_yelps_for_help_against_12_primary_challengers.html

Why would a candidate who has more money than all her rivals put together be issuing urgent appeals across the country for funds to her campaign?

That’s what we see now with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who’s sending out pleas for money from her supporters across the country, to ward off as many as 13 primary challengers.

From CNBC, here’s one:

WASHINGTON — Former CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera added her name Tuesday to the list of candidates hoping to deny Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a second term. 

Caruso-Cabrera, who worked for the financial news network for more than 20 years, is challenging Ocasio-Cortez in the Democratic primary June 23 for New York’s 14th District. She filed her candidacy with the Federal Election Commission on Monday, becoming Ocasio-Cortez’s fifth Democratic challenger and 12th overall to file with the FEC. 

“I am the daughter and granddaughter of working-class Italian and Cuban immigrants,” Caruso-Cabrera told CNBC in a statement. “I am so lucky to have had such a wonderful career, and I want everybody to have the opportunity that I’ve had. That’s why I’m running.”

It’s weird stuff for a candidate who has so much money — $5 million–plus in the bank, against her next-challenger’s $800,000 or so, and the collective group of challengers having just $2 million at most among themselves.  According to a Politico report last month:

Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign received more than 325,000 contributions from more than 185,000 individual donors in 2019. Her fundraising in the final quarter of the year is a dramatic increase compared to the total raised for her entire first election campaign in 2018, which came in at $2.1 million.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

President Trump slaps back when Obama tries to take credit for his economy By Andrea Widburg

By on February 18th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/president_trump_slaps_back_when_obama_tries_to_take_credit_for_his_economy.html

It’s been fascinating watching the Democrats try unavailingly to address the fact that the economy under President Trump has been rocket-fueled. That effort reached its apex on Monday when Barack Obama put out a tweet boasting about how it was his Recovery Act, which he signed on February 17, 2009, that not only saved the economy but laid the groundwork for its current strength. The responses to his tweet were swift, especially from President Trump.

One of the things that truly riles the Democrats is that President Trump has so much to crow about. And crow he did during his State of the Union address, making sure to distinguish his economic accomplishments from the Obama malaise.

During his speech, Trump boasted about 7 million new jobs, which is 5 million more than projected in the Obama years; the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years; the lowest unemployment rates ever for minorities; the lowest overall unemployment for women since WWII; the record number of working Americans; the contrast between food stamp rolls under Obama (10 million added) and under Trump (7 million subtracted, plus 10 million leaving welfare); the contrast between the workforce under Obama (300,000 Americans left it) versus Trump (3.5 million joined it); the 47% gain in wealth for the bottom half of wage earners, a result of their rising wages (“a blue-collar boom”); the highest ever real median household income; the soaring stock market; and the unprecedented growth in consumer confidence.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Roger Stone Double Standard By David Harsanyi

By on February 18th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/roger-stone-double-standard/

For all the hullaballoo around the Stone case, he still faces prison — while his partners in dishonesty are lauded as patriotic heroes.

Whether Roger Stone, the loopy, self-aggrandizing political operative, deserves nine years in Supermax for obstructing an investigation into Russia–Donald Trump “collusion” is debatable. Whether the powerful men who helped create the investigation that ensnared Stone have been allowed to lie with impunity is not. They have.

Only a few days after prosecutors melodramatically left the DOJ after Trump tweeted a defense of Stone and the DOJ subsequently revised its sentencing recommendation to be more lenient, former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe was informed that he wouldn’t face charges. McCabe faced an inquiry into whether he broke the law when he denied to investigators that he had leaked information concerning a Clinton Foundation probe to the press.

McCabe went on CNN, where he is now paid to lecture citizens about the decaying state of American democracy, and claimed that being branded a liar was “one of the most sickening and demeaning experiences of my life.”

It’s a confusing statement — not merely because the IG report found that McCabe, once entrusted with immense power, had repeatedly lied under oath, but because McCabe himself had admitted to lying and apologized for it.

Was he lying about lying? Maybe he’ll tell us more in his next book.

As McCabe cozies up with his new colleagues, think of Michael Flynn, a decorated general and former national-security adviser, still mired in a four-year legal battle for allegedly misleading the FBI — not under oath — in the Russia-scare investigation that went absolutely nowhere.

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

Michael Bloomberg Is a Condescending Jerk . . . . . who made a legitimate point about how jobs are changing. By Robert VerBruggen

By on February 18th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/michael-bloomberg-is-a-condescending-jerk/

T he hunt is on for offensive clips of Michael Bloomberg talking off the cuff, and over the weekend a new one circulated. In the version passed around, Bloomberg nonchalantly tells his Oxford audience that he could teach anyone how to farm — “even people in this room”: “It’s a process; you dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.” He adds that modern “information economy” jobs require more “gray matter.”

The denunciations came quickly and furiously, many of them pointing out that farming these days is a pretty high-tech endeavor. There are three things to know about this episode.

First, the version of the clip that went around left out important context. Bloomberg was very explicitly not talking about modern farmers, but rather about “the agrarian society” that “lasted 3,000 years” before the industrial era, which lasted 300. His point was that the modern economy does not create good, reliable jobs for low-skilled workers the way that past economies did. You can see the full discussion starting around 41:30 here (though the actual query that prompted Bloomberg’s rambling answer starts at 37:30):

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Time Is Running Out: The U.S. Needs a High-Tech Manhattan Project By David P. Goldman

By on February 18th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/time-for-a-high-tech-manhattan-project/

We’re getting our heads handed to us. I don’t like to be the bearer of evil tidings, but I hate losing. The only I hate more than losing is trying to make ourselves feel better while we’re losing, rather than winning. We need to wrest the initiative in high tech from China and re-establish American dominance in telecommunications, computation, artificial intelligence, materials science, chip design and lithography, manufacturing, and other key fields. I don’t care how much it costs. If we don’t spend the money to ensure America’s number one position now, we’ll go broke in any case.

We sat on our hands while China’s Huawei took the lead in the game-changing technology that will usher in what the Chinese call the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 5G telecommunications (which we are rolling out at a snail’s pace while China surges ahead) make possible industrial robots that design production processes by themselves, driverless cars, virtual-reality controlled surgery at long distance, and a dozen other breakthroughs. China is getting the jump on us while we dither. Think Manhattan Project. Think Sputnik moment. Think JFK’s Moonshot. Think Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. We need a grand mobilization of material and human resources to meet the challenge of the 21st century.

You can’t stop something with nothing, and all of our attempts to slow Huawei down have failed miserably. Excepting Japan, Israel and Australia, every one of our allies has invited Huawei in to build 5G networks because the alternative would cost another two years and 50 percent more. Either they don’t believe what we’re saying about Huawei’s capacity to spy on them, or they don’t care. We shut down component sales to Huawei, and Huawei now builds smartphones and base stations with zero U.S. components. It now makes chipsets for smartphones and AI processers that rival the best America can produce.

Continue reading →
FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

A Campaign Against Bureaucratic Bloat in U.S. Foreign Policy Trump’s national security adviser has a plan of attack for a problem decades in the making. By John Lehman

By on February 18th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-campaign-against-bureaucratic-bloat-in-u-s-foreign-policy-11581974339?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The press has been focused recently on Lt. Col Alexander Vindman’s departure from the National Security Council. But less noticed is the substantive overhaul of the council’s staffing practices, announced last fall by national security adviser Robert O’Brien. President Trump’s renovation of the White House’s top advisory body could help streamline American security for years to come.

The problems that plague the NSC trace to before its founding in 1947. The White House has long sought to centralize decision-making to overcome the political jockeying that often takes place within the national-security establishment. I have lived half of my professional life in the policy world of Washington and half in the financial world of New York. The former is much more Hobbesian and bitter than the latter—and always has bee

After securing victory in World War II, for example, federal policy makers were at each other’s throats over whether to share nuclear technology with the Soviet Union through the Baruch Plan. The branches of the armed services feuded over roles, missions and funding. President Truman and congressional leaders nonetheless produced a few lasting achievements, including the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

But the bitter postwar years also featured terrible blunders in China and Korea. Truman’s radical strategy to shrink the Navy, while declaring Korea outside America’s vital interest, led almost immediately to the Korean War. Journalist John Osborne told me that during those years he was run ragged between the White House and the Pentagon. Both were leaking classified information aimed at opponents in government.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europeans Try to Have It Both Ways They expect American protection but aren’t prepared to defend their own countries. By Walter Russell Mead

By on February 18th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/europeans-try-to-have-it-both-ways-11581974424?mod=opinion_featst_pos2

How solid is the West? At last weekend’s Munich Security Conference, the world’s largest gathering of security policy makers and officials, the theme was “Westlessness,” referring to the sense of disorientation that many Europeans feel in this age of America First.

Since the 1940s, U.S. leadership in the service of a united and secure Europe has been the one unchanging feature in the Continental landscape. For generations, the U.S. committed to protect Europe from Russia, maintain bases in Germany to prevent it from threatening its neighbors, and promote European integration. Now Europeans don’t know where they stand, and a mixture of bafflement, anger, disappointment and fear fills the atmosphere at conferences like the one in Munich.

There’s little doubt that Trump administration policies, ranging from trade wars to toughness on Iran, have tested trans-Atlantic relations to the breaking point. But to understand the growing weakness of the Western alliance, Europeans need to spend less time deploring Donald Trump and more time looking in the mirror. A good place to begin is with a Pew poll released earlier this month on the state of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Superficially, the poll looks like good news. In 14 European countries plus Canada and the U.S., a median 53% of respondents said they had a favorable view of NATO, while only 27% saw the alliance unfavorably. Despite double-digit declines in NATO’s favorability among the French and the Germans, these numbers aren’t bad. Mr. Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel are all less popular in their home countries than NATO is.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Spring 2020 Madness on College Campuses The Marxist indoctrination heats up. Jack Kerwick

By on February 18th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/spring-2020-madness-college-campuses-jack-kerwick/

The first academic semester of 2020 has only recently gotten underway, and colleges and universities around the country seem to be competing with one another in a feverish race to prove which is most committed to advancing the prevailing leftist dogma of the day.

The College Fix, a student-led campus watchdog publication, is an excellent resource for anyone interested in keeping apprised of the current scene in academia. It’s a particularly invaluable source for parents who are considering investing tens of thousands of dollars into their children’s “education.”

Consider:

At Dartmouth College, an institution that charges $75,000 a year in tuition, students have recently had their classes interrupted by a “Green New Deal” activist. A young woman to whom, out of “courtesy,” The Dartmouth Review refers simply as “Katie,” has spent months disrupting lectures for the purpose of promoting the causes—like the Green New Deal, as well as “free” education and Medicare for all—advanced by the Sunrise Movement and the New Hampshire Youth Movement (NHYM) by which she’s employed.

The NHYM is affiliated with the Sunrise Movement. Unsurprisingly, both are doctrinaire left-wing organizations. “Katie” insists that students are to support only those politicians who “support our values.” As to the nature of those values, there is no doubt, to judge from the card that “Katie” disseminates to students.

There is space on the cards in which students are to supply not only their personal contact information, but, by way of checking off a series of boxes, indicate their political priorities. “I’m voting on February 11th for…” is listed at the top. Beneath that are the following issues: “Immigrant Justice;” “Racial Justice;” “Green New Deal;” “Free College for All;” “Voting Rights;” “Medicare for All;” “LGBTQIAP + Rights;” “Affordable Housing;” “Reproductive Rights;” and “Other.”

“Katie,” in other words, campaigns for the Democratic Party in both college classrooms and campus buildings. In doing so, she violates Dartmouth’s anti-solicitation policies. The latter demarcates a public space on campus for activism.  

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Criminalizing Dissent By Karen D. Hurvitz and Ilya I. Feoktistov

By on February 18th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/criminalizing_dissent.html

DPS NOTE: Off the wall intolerable. The left has gone fascist: Cancel culture gets police powers and goes after Jewish student at UMass Amherst

Louis Shenker, a 21-year-old junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,  just wanted his MAGA hat back from the graduate student who ripped it off his head on campus. He wore the hat to a December 6, 2018 protest organized by the university’s graduate student union against Trump and local police. Video shows that when Louis, who is 5’6’’ and 140 pounds, arrived wearing the MAGA hat and holding a large sign, he was immediately surrounded by a hostile mob of older grad students cursing at him and calling him a white supremacist. A woman lunged from the mob and snatched Louis’s MAGA hat. Careful not to get caught on camera hitting Louis with their hands, they instead mobbed him like a colony of enraged penguins, using their bodies to push him from all sides, occasionally pecking at his head with their cardboard signs, and chanting in unison: “THE PEOPLE, UNITED, WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED.”

“Get the f**k out of here, you shouldn’t be in an anti-racist march!” screamed the hat thief. A soft-spoken professor in the crowd warned Louis: “It’s actually dangerous for you to come by yourself like that.” As the protesters began to march and Louis tried to keep up while pleading for his hat, many of them, including several graduate student union members dressed in United Auto Workers gear, elbowed Louis into walls, lampposts, and other obstacles. “You act like a Nazi, you’re going to get treated like a Nazi,” a female protester yelled at the Jewish grandson of Holocaust victims.  Louis left without his hat.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Political Trials Should Be Tried Outside of the Beltway Julie Kelly

By on February 18th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/17/political-trials-should-be-tried-outside-of-the-beltway/

The justice system situated in our nation’s capital is toxic, destructive, and demonstrably unfair. Barr should move any trial out of Washington—West Virginia or North Carolina, perhaps?—and at least give the accused a fighting chance.

Attorney General William Barr is enlisting U.S. attorneys outside the Beltway either to investigate or review several high-level cases related to President Trump, the Washington Post reported over the weekend. Barr has asked federal prosecutors from “far-flung offices,” as the Post described it, located in remote places such as Connecticut and Chicago, to handle these sensitive matters.

Barr’s legal shuffling of the deck includes the egregious prosecution of Lt. General Michael Flynn; the investigation into Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s counterintelligence probe of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign; and new material collected by Rudy Giuliani detailing alleged corruption in Ukraine possibly tied to U.S. politicians.

Given the accusations from Trump foes that Barr is doing Trump’s bidding from his corner office at the Justice Department, this otherwise rational move prompted convulsions of panic in the nation’s capital. Some distraught observers grimly warn that transferring politically charged cases out of the most politically obsessed town in the world is just what Joseph Stalin would do.

David Laufman, a former Justice Department official and Obama donor involved in the agency’s 2016 exoneration of Hillary Clinton, claimed he was “baffled” as to why any federal lawyer would accept such an assignment. “‘Why would they be associating themselves with investigations that are evocative of the manner in which repressive regimes throughout history have behaved?’” Laufman told Post reporters.

Continue reading →