Bernie Sanders forays into foreign policy display hatred of Israel and admiration and respect for Cuba. He spent some time in a socialist kibbutz in Israel where no doubt they sang “Hava Nagila’ a popular Jewish song.
Could it be that he heard “Havana Gila?” What else could explain his cupidity? rsk
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/the_democrat_response_to_the_coronavirus_is_scarier_than_the_virus.html
The Democrats claim Trump is mishandling the coronavirus threat and that they’d do better. They’re wrong. Their proposals are redundant, vapid, or dangerous.
During the recent debate, three candidates discussed coronavirus:
Amy Klobuchar urged treatment and quarantine – which is (a) obvious and (b) what Trump is doing. She accused Trump of ignoring the world (he hasn’t) and wants to improve education.
Biden did his inevitable “I already did that response,” referring to Ebola (which, thankfully for America, stayed in Africa).
Bernie Sanders accused Trump of idiocy for predicting the virus would end in April. What Trump said was that influenzas generally go away once winter ends, something that is scientifically correct. Bernie said he would work with WHO (which Trump has done).
In addition to those statements, all three say Trump cannot address coronavirus because he withdrew funds from the CDC and NIH.
On Wednesday, Pelosi issued a formal statement that also says Trump cannot fight the virus because he has shrunk government:
“The American people need a well-coordinated, whole-of-government, fully-funded response to keep them safe from the coronavirus threat. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration has mounted an opaque and chaotic response to this outbreak.
“The Trump Administration has left critical positions in charge of managing pandemics at the National Security Council and the Department of Homeland Security vacant. The Trump Budget called for slashing almost $700 million from the Centers for Disease Control. And even now, the Administration continues to devalue Americans’ health security by ransacking funding from other vital public health needs.
https://www.city-journal.org/needless-panic-over-disposable-plastic
New York City and other municipalities have banned plastic straws as part of a broader effort against plastic consumer products.
Why do our political leaders want to take away our plastic bags and straws? This question is even more puzzling than a related one that I’ve been studying for decades: Why do they want us to recycle our garbage?
The two obsessions have some common roots, but the moral panic over plastic is especially perverse. The recycling movement had a superficial logic, at least at the outset. Municipal officials expected to save money by recycling trash instead of burying or burning it. Now that recycling has turned out to be ruinously expensive while achieving little or no environmental benefit, some local officials—the pragmatic ones, anyway—are once again sending trash straight to landfills and incinerators.
The plastic panic has never made any sense, and it’s intensifying even as evidence mounts that it’s not only a waste of money but also harmful to the environment, not to mention humans. It’s been a movement in search of a rationale for half a century.
https://issuesinsights.com/2020/02/27/a-party-at-war-with-its-own-soul/
The Democratic Party is in a state of panic over an unelectable extremist emerging as the possibly unstoppable frontrunner for its presidential nomination. When an institution is in a crisis like this, its leaders get called on to step in and exercise some leadership.
The problem for Democrats is that their official leaders aren’t their real leaders.
“Bernie Sanders cannot beat Trump,” warns 94-year-old longtime party mega-donor and Joe Biden backer Bernard Schwartz, who is appealing to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to come forward and back one of Sanders’ rivals. Worse, Bernie at the top of the ticket could have a reverse coattail effect and hurt Democrat House and Senate candidates. “We are not going to win these critical House races if people in those races have to explain why the nominee of the Democratic Party is telling them to look at the bright side of the Castro regime,” warned former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg during Tuesday night’s CBS debate.
Few if any have financed the Democratic Party establishment as much as New York City investment firm CEO Schwartz, who has given millions to Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation, and well over a million dollars to congressional Democrats’ campaigns in the current election cycle. But Pelosi and Schumer can’t risk the embarrassment of backing the wrong horse on the eve of the South Carolina primary and less than a week before Super Tuesday. Biden seems poised for a comeback win in the Palmetto State but Bernie has an impressive lead in the polls in California, and a slim lead in Texas, the two biggest Super Tuesday states, as well as leading in North Carolina and Virginia, and even enjoying a slim lead in the home state of competitor Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts, all also holding their primaries this coming Tuesday.
https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/26/a-jaundiced-take-on-national-conservatism/
Serious democratic conservatives in America, Britain, Israel, and Europe should be under no illusions about the contempt directed at them by Anne Applebaum and her bloc of liberal internationalists who claim to be the great arbiters of democracy in the world today.
The National Conservatism Conference first came to public attention in July, when its Washington, D.C., conference was widely covered in the media and generated scores of essays on the effort to combine traditional conservative ideas with the spirit of national sovereignty now sweeping the developed democracies. Now, the National Conservatism Conference held in Rome on February 3-4, titled “God, Honor, Country: President Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and the Freedom of Nations,” has attracted similar attention.
Introducing the conference, Christopher DeMuth, a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, noted that the “legacy of national freedom and biblical morality” of Reagan, John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher, was “under assault.”
“Sophisticated people in the political, media, and university establishments,” DeMuth said, “have become openly contemptuous of democratic choice.” Since the 1990s, we have witnessed “the consolidation of bureaucratic anti-democratic government in Western Europe” and are “beset by hegemonic progressivism, which seeks to quarantine religious observance, traditional culture, bourgeois social norms and the family itself.”
The Rome conference, like the Washington conference before it, featured several deep and penetrating talks and has prompted equally worthy commentary by independent observers (not all of them uncritical, of course). It has also—as DeMuth predicted—been attacked, sometimes with striking dishonesty, by the progressive Left.
One attack, however, came from journalist Anne Applebaum, the author of several admirable books on the history of the Soviet Union and Communism, who was once friendly to Reagan-Thatcher foreign policy conservatism. Her February 10 essay at The Atlantic, “This is How Reaganism and Thatcherism End,” creates a caricature of national conservatism and seriously misrepresents the substance and spirit of the conference at which I spoke.
https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/26/300-terrorists-to-be-released-in-france-by-2023/
Approximately 300 convicted terrorists currently held in French prisons are set to be released by 2023, with 43 of them to be released by the end of this year, according to Breitbart.
The announcement was made by French Justice Minister Nicole Belloubet, who said that in addition to the 43 set to be released in 2020, 60 more of them would be released by the end of 2021. Belloubet said that “they are the subject of a double measure” upon their release, consisting of “a judicial control which means that they are taken care of when they leave, and administrative surveillance measures.”
This decision was met with criticism from French law enforcement and intelligence agencies, with a statement from the Directorate General of Internal Security calling it “a major concern” to see so many terrorists released. One member of Parliament, Eric Ciotti of the Republican Party, has filed a parliamentary motion to keep terrorists in prison indefinitely if they pose a security threat.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15646/israel-election-iranians-palestinians
The Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Hamas in the Gaza Strip seem to have endorsed the banner of Netanyahu’s political rivals in Israel: “Anyone but Bibi (Netanyahu’s nickname).” The two Palestinian groups ‘ perceive Netanyahu as a major threat to their dream of destroying Israel and as someone who has further strengthened Israel’s standing in the international arena.
The Palestinians are apparently convinced that it would be easier to extort concessions from inexperienced politicians such as Benny Gantz, Moshe Ya’alon and Gabi Ashkenazi. For the Palestinians, Netanyahu is a hard nut to crack. His strong stance against their tactics of intimidation have been, for them, a source of concern.
Abbas and his officials, in short, are telling the Israelis: “Look, we have a problem here. This man, Netanyahu, will not surrender to us — and that is why you need to elect a new leader.”
Abbas, not surprisingly, would doubtless prefer Israelis to replace Netanyahu with a weak leader who would comply with all his demands and take Israel back to the indefensible pre-1967 armistice lines — a move that would most likely result in the militias of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Iran sitting on the West Bank hilltops overlooking Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport.
The Palestinians are doing their absolute utmost to ensure that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party do not win in Israel’s general election on Monday, March 2.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, seem to have endorsed the banner of Netanyahu’s political rivals in Israel: “Anyone but Bibi (Netanyahu’s nickname).” The two Palestinian groups perceive Netanyahu as a major threat to their dream of destroying Israel and as someone who has further strengthened Israel’s standing in the international arena.
In a last-minute, apparently desperate attempt to undermine the current Israeli prime minister’s chances of winning another election, the PA has launched a public relations campaign to explain to the Israeli public why they should not vote for Netanyahu.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15647/iran-election-result
In many respects the ayatollahs only have themselves to blame for this dire outcome. Prior to the poll they attempted to fix the election in their favour by refusing to allow large numbers of potential candidates, many of whom were highly critical of how the country is being run, even to contest the election.
This maneuver meant that around half of all candidates, including 90 serving members of the outgoing parliament, were disqualified prior to the election, prompting a nationwide boycott over what many Iranians regarded as a sham election.
The result is, as the outcome from the parliamentary elections has graphically illustrated, that growing numbers of ordinary Iranians are now desperate to see fundamental changes in the way their country is run, changes that can only take place when the ayatollahs finally admit that they can no longer have the support they need to keep their repressive regime in power.
Iran’s ruling regime is facing a credibility crisis in the wake of this week’s parliamentary election results, as the vast majority of Iranians demonstrated their contempt for the way their country is being run through the simple expedient of refusing to vote.
Prior to the vote, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s Supreme Leader, made an impassioned plea to voters to demonstrate their support for the regime by casting their vote for the regime’s designated candidates, warning that boycotting the election would provide US President Donald Trump with a propaganda victory.
“Anyone who cares about Iran’s national interests should participate,” he declared, adding that Iran’s “enemies want to see what the results of the US maximum pressure are” — a reference to the punitive sanctions regime that has been imposed on Tehran by the Trump administration.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/one-biggest-dangers-free-world-being-oblivious-dr-shmuel-katz/
In the age of misinformation, disinformation and outright lies, too many people are oblivious to the reality that surrounds them. In many cases, the fact that their personal well-being, may be negatively affected by the on-going trends, did not trigger their conscious perception of reality.
Wishful thinking was for a long time a serious motivation to make irrational decisions. The classical example was the “Peace for our times” Chamberlain’s interpretation of Hitler’s letter promising peace and tranquility in Europe before the Second World War.
Another delusional action was related to the infamous “Iran Deal” which looked promising on paper but very rapidly, it became evident that there were many problems with the deal which gave the radical Iranian leadership a clear pass to possess atomic weapons after several years. During this period of time, they could cheat the observers, continue producing nuclear material, improve on their delivery systems, expand their efforts to destabilize their target countries and establish a terror infrastructure that will support their long-term goals of international domination. Interestingly, in the near future, elections for national leadership are looming in Israel and in the USA. In both countries important decisions will have to be made, which will determine the future of both countries. For some reason people like to make the differences between the two major opposing parties as a quarrel between Left and Right. In reality the decision relates to choices which will have significant effects on national security and on economic stability. People must understand that there is no real “free” government awarded “free stuff”! There is always somebody who will have to pay for it. Margaret Thatcher used to say that “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money!”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/abc-suspends-correspondent-david-wright-lloyd-billingsley/
ABC News has suspended correspondent David Wright, Valerie Richardson of the Washington Times reports, after a Project Veritas video caught him referring to President Trump as “this f–king president” and declaring himself a socialist.
The video, to be released today, was taken at a New Hampshire event on February 11. When asked if he is a socialist, Wright said, “Oh, yeah. More than that, I consider myself a socialist.” Wright added that “there should be national health insurance,” and “I’m totally fine with reining in corporations. I think there are too many billionaires, and I think there’s a wealth gap. That’s a problem.”
According to CNN, Wright had been suspended “to avoid possible appearance of bias,” and would be “reassigned away from political coverage when he returns.” ABC did not indicate when that would be, or how long Wright has been suspended.
“David Wright is an Emmy Award-winning ABC News correspondent who has traveled the world, covering major news events in the U.S. and overseas,” ABC explains. “His work can be seen on ‘World News Tonight, ‘Nightline,’ ‘Good Morning America’ and other ABC News platforms. Although based in New York, Wright travels frequently to Washington, D.C., to help out with the network’s coverage of the Trump White House.”
Top Stories @ Fox News