Displaying posts published in

February 2020

Bernie Sanders takes heat in a messy debate – here are the highlights from South Carolina

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/25/democratic-debate-recap-highlights-from-south-carolina.html

In the first Democratic presidential debate since Sen. Bernie Sanders earned a big target on his back, Democratic candidates jumped into an often chaotic and uncomfortable fray.
The candidates on stage included Sanders, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Mike Bloomberg, Tom Steyer and Pete Buttigieg.
None of the seven candidates emerged from the debate, at times a choppy affair as White House hopefuls interrupted each other and talked over the CBS News moderators, untouched by opponents’ venom.

The Democrats Make Bloomberg Their PC Punching Bag But it seems a dubious way of getting votes. How many American voters subscribe to political correctness? Joseph Epstein

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-democrats-make-bloomberg-th

Poor Democrats. As if they don’t already have enough trouble, they also happen to be lashed to political correctness. How firmly lashed we learned at last week’s presidential debate, in which candidates competed over who is the most PC.

This came out emphatically in the attacks on Michael Bloomberg. He was vulnerable on the two major political-correctness fronts: race and the treatment of women. Nearly everyone on the debate stage took a moment out to spit upon Mr. Bloomberg for his stop-and-frisk policy while mayor of New York. That the policy seemed to work, radically reducing the number of murders in New York, mattered little beside what the other candidates took to be its inherent and loathsome racism. The logic, apparently, is that it is better to live in a murderous city than a racist one. One of the hallmarks of political correctness is that words matter more than deeds.

Nor are the purveyors of political correctness notable for self-examination. Thus Bernie Sanders, a mere millionaire with the utmost contempt for billionaires, blithely called Mr. Bloomberg a racist. Sen. Sanders apparently forgot that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union at a time when it was still murdering its own citizens and sending them to gulags. He apparently also forgot that he long approved of the cruel and stunting regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Sanders was one of those people Lenin called “useful idiots,” dupes of a murderous regime. Is a useful idiot in a position to call another man racist? Perhaps, since there is nothing politically incorrect about being a useful idiot, whereas a racist is clearly beyond the pale.

Nunes: House Republicans Are Mulling Criminal Referrals Against Mueller Prosecutors Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/25/nunes-house-republicans-are-mulling-criminal-referrals-against-mueller-prosecutors/

House Republicans are prepared to send criminal referrals to the Justice Department alleging that some of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors purposefully misled the courts and Congress.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told investigative journalist John Solomon that his team found glaring evidence of deception while scouring documents recently released by the FBI, including witness reports known as 302s.

“We’re now going through these 302s, and we’re going to be making criminal referrals on the Mueller dossier team, the people that put this Mueller report together,” Nunes said during an interview on the John Solomon Reports podcast.

In one instance, Mueller’s deputies seem to have distorted FBI interview memos of key figure George Papadopoulos, concluding wrongly that he was trying to thwart or frustrate the investigation’s efforts to question Mifsud, when the 302 show that he was actually trying to be helpful.

According to the sentencing memo signed by [Aaron] Zelinsky and fellow Mueller prosecutors Jeannie Rhee and Andrew Goldstein: Papadopoulos’ “lies undermined investigators’ ability to challenge the Professor or potentially detain or arrest him while he was still in the United States. The government understands that the Professor left the United States on February 11, 2017 and he has not returned to the United States since then.”

But FBI 302 reports detailing agents’ interviews with Papadopoulos show that he had in fact supplied information that would have enabled investigators to challenge or potentially detain or arrest Mifsud while he was in the United States.

Kansas Fourth State to Introduce a Campus Intellectual Diversity Bill By Stanley Kurtz

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kansas-fourth-state-to-introduce-a-campus-intellectual-diversity-bill/

Kansas has just become the fourth state to file a Campus Intellectual Diversity bill based on model legislation I proposed and explained here on the Corner last year. In the Kansas House of Representatives, bills are sponsored by committees, rather than by individual members. The sponsor of Kansas HB 2697 is the Committee on Education. The individual member who requested that HB 2697 be introduced is Representative Randy Garber. Garber deserves considerable credit for taking that initiative. The Kansas bill follows on similar bills introduced in Arizona, Missouri, and Iowa.

Like the other three bills, the Kansas Campus Intellectual Diversity Act instructs the public university system to stage debates, panels, and individual lectures that explore our most widely discussed public-policy controversies from diverse and conflicting perspectives. These debates, panels, and lectures will be open to the public. Videos of the events will also be posted online. The goal is to broaden the scope of viewpoints considered on campus and to educate students and the public through the clash of ideas. Frequent thoughtful debate over our sharpest national controversies should normalize disagreement and lower the emotional temperature on campus. Greater freedom of speech will result. (I lay out some additional thoughts on these bills here.)

‘Gray Matter’–Deficient Americans By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/gray-matter-deficient-americans/

The billionaires and bureaucrats depend on the skilled workers they mock — and that makes them more than a little uneasy.

F ormer New York mayor and multibillionaire Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, four years ago at Oxford, England, dismissed farming, ancient and modern. He lectured that agriculture was little more than the rote labor of dropping seeds into the ground and watching corn sprout — easy, mindless, automatic.

“I could teach anybody,” Bloomberg pontificated, “even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer.”

He contrasted such supposedly unintelligent labor of the past (and present) with the “skill set” of the current “information economy” that requires “how to think and analyze.” In this new economy, he said, “you have to have a lot more gray matter.”

Gray matter?

For all his later denials and efforts to contextualize those remarks, Bloomberg seems to see both ancient and modern agriculture, and farmers, as either unskilled or not very smart, as if the genetically inferior gravitate to muscular labor far from the “skill sets” of those like Mike Bloomberg. He certainly has no idea about either the sophistication of ancient agriculture or the high-tech savvy of contemporary farmers — much less just how difficult it is, and always was, to produce food, much less that history is so often the story of mass famine rather than bounty and plenty.

Bloomberg’s apparent dismissal of rural people might seem odd, given that Democrats profess allegiance with the working classes and muscular labor. But, in fact, his disdain is perversely logical and indeed predictable.

Stunner: Watch Side-by-Side Video of Re-Pete Buttigieg and Obama Giving the Same Speech. By Victoria Taft

ttps://pjmedia.com/trending/stunner-watch-side-by-side-vide

Pete Buttigieg is Barack Obama’s Mini Me, or, as one Twitter user put it, “Fauxbama.”

Buttigieg’s speech cadence, his shirt sleeves and even the knot of his tie are the same as President Obama’s.

And now a political Twitter account called “The Recount” has found that former Mayor Buttigieg’s words are exactly the same as Obama’s.

For years Barack Obama reused and recycled Deval Patrick’s old “no red America, no blue America, just the United States of America” speech written by their mutual political spirit animal David Axelrod. Obama, ahem, borrowed Elizabeth Warren’s “you didn’t build that” trope to denigrate initiatives by business owners to support the idea that government help was really responsible for your success.

But now the former president knows what it’s like when someone plagiarizes him.

Watch this video and marvel at the chutzpah of Buttigieg. It’s not as funny “bad lip reading” but it is amazing to behold:

Did Obama’s DOJ Leak Michael Flynn’s Russia Phone Call To Set Him Up? Wilson Miller

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/25/did-obamas-doj-leak-michael-flynns-russia-phone-call-to-set-him-up/

Did the Department of Justice leak or arrange the leak of Michael Flynn’s call with Sergey Kislyak to get around the FBI’s efforts to keep secret the investigation of Flynn?

One of the great mysteries of the Trump-Russia saga that remains unsolved three years later, or at least uncharged, is who leaked Gen. Michael Flynn’s calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

As incoming national security advisor, Flynn spoke with numerous foreign officials in the lead-up to inauguration. This included a conversation with Kislyak on Dec. 29, 2016 in which they discussed, among other things, measures taken by the Obama administration (also on Dec. 29) to expel Russian agents and levy financial penalties in response to Russia’s “malicious cyber-enabled activities” relating to the 2016 election.

Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly responded to these sanctions the next day. He declined to escalate the situation, promised there would be no retaliatory expulsions, and said he would “take further steps towards restoring Russia-U.S. relations.” According to the Statement of Offense filed in Flynn’s criminal case, on Dec. 31, Kislyak “called Flynn and informed him that Russia had chosen not to retaliate in response to Flynn’s request.”

Meanwhile, President Obama’s Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) staff wondered why Putin didn’t retaliate. Andrew McCabe, who was serving as the FBI’s deputy director at the time, maintains that the PDB staff requested information on Putin’s response. The intelligence community answered. It turns out they had information on Flynn’s calls with Kislyak.

McCabe wrote that he shared this information with FBI Director James Comey, who passed it on to director of national intelligence James Clapper. It was Clapper who informed President Obama. The Department of Justice had this information as well. In his book, “The Threat,” McCabe noted that “at Justice, one question arose: Was this a violation of the Logan Act?”

PROFESSOR EDWARD ALEXANDER“SEATTLE’S JEREMIAH”: A HALF-CENTURY OF DEFENDING ISRAEL AND THE JEWS By Moshe Phillips

https://www.voteherut2020.com/ ]

His hometown newspaper calls him “Seattle’s Jeremiah.” An Israeli publication once hailed him as “Jewry’s premier polemicist.” After half a century fighting for Israel and the Jewish people in the trenches of the literary world, Edward Alexander is in yet another battle—as a candidate on the Herut list in the current U.S. elections for the World Zionist Congress. Alexander grew up in the heavily-Jewish Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The “most vivid and satisfying memory” of his childhood occurred in May 1948, when he was eleven years old. It involved Brooklyn Dodgers star Jackie Robinson, whom he and his boyhood pals regarded as “the greatest man in the world,” and David Ben-Gurion who was “a close second to Robinson in our esteem.” “These two heroic figures came together for me almost magically when I heard Robinson address a block party to celebrate Israel’s independence,” Alexander recalled.

“I consider myself lucky,” he wrote, “never to have been disillusioned about what my parents taught me: that both men symbolized the belated righting of ancient historical wrongs, that Robinson was indeed a uniquely courageous figure and that the birth of Israel just a few years after the destruction of European Jewry was one of the greatest affirmations of life ever made by a martyred people…” After earning his bachelor’s degree in English literature at Columbia, Alexander completed his master’s and Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. That was where he met his future wife, Leah. She, too, was a scholar of English literature and her senior thesis, on Henry James, was published as a book. Leah passed away in 2017.

The young couple settled in Seattle in 1960, where Alexander became professor of English at the University of Washington and, later, the first chairman of the school’s Jewish Studies program. Alexander’s academic career began in conventional fashion, teaching a full load of courses and authoring books that were well-regarded in his field although they did not attract the attention of the wider public. He wrote volumes about such noted 18th-century literary figures as Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill as well as more recent giants, including Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe. But the UN’s infamous Zionism-is-racism resolution and the rise of the Soviet Jewry protest movement in the 1970s inspired the Alexanders to dive head first into the world of Jewish controversy. In 1976, Edward and Leah traveled to the Soviet Union to assist refuseniks.

Never forget the media’s blind eye to Obama’s corruption Jack Hellner

www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/never_forget_the_medias_blind_eye_to_obamas_corruption_.html

The media are outraged that former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich had to serve only eight years out of a fourteen-year sentence for corruption.  They say it sends a bad message that political corruption is OK.  But what is outrageous and sends a message that political corruption is OK is when the Justice Department, most of the media, and other Democrats didn’t care about the massive political corruption of Barack Obama throughout his political life and supported him no matter what he did.

Obama was above the law.

In 2004, then–Illinois senator Obama stole one million dollars of taxpayer money, disguised as a grant, and gave it to his wife’s employer, where family friend Valerie Jarrett happened to be a director.  Jarrett had hired Michelle as an executive at $120,000 per year.

After the hospital got the million, Michelle got a $197,000 raise to $317,000 for what seemed to be a part-time job.  (I am sure all of us can relate to a 200% raise or a $317,000 salary.)  Michelle’s main job was to dump low-income, unprofitable patients onto other hospitals (the Obamas have always been so compassionate and empathetic).  To tell the poor how good this was, the hospital hired David Axelrod, a campaign adviser for Obama.  Later on, they hired the corrupt family friend Eric Whitaker in an executive position.

In summary, Senator Obama stole taxpayer money to pay family, friends, and political supporters.

Ruthie Blum Polls, Gaza, Netanyahu and Gantz

https://www.jns.org/opinion/polls-gaza-netanyahu-and-gantz/

Even members of the public forced into bomb shelters on a regular basis realize that the prime minister is doing the best he can to keep Hamas at bay, while reserving the option to launch a ground incursion into Gaza as a last resort.

During live coverage of the bombardment of southern Israel by Islamic Jihad rocket fire on Monday, a Red Alert siren sent a TV reporter—along with a local shop owner whom he was interviewing and other people taking cover from the terrorist barrage from Gaza—into a nearby stairwell.

Tragically well-versed in the drill, the handful of passers-by entered the building and positioned themselves, single file, down a flight of steps, with the broadcast journalist and his cameraman in tow. As all waited for the wail of the siren to subside—listening for the familiar sound of explosions from projectile landings, Iron Dome interceptions and Israel Defense Forces’ bombings of terrorist targets over the border—the interview continued.

But it didn’t proceed as the reporter had hoped or anticipated.

After bemoaning the near-bankruptcy that his shoe store has been suffering as a result of the security situation in his city, the interviewee praised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“There’s nobody like Bibi!” he exclaimed, smiling broadly.

“No, no, let’s not talk politics,” the reporter admonished.