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March 2020

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Elections New Impeachment Rules Would Snare Obama Victor Davis Hanson

By on March 2nd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/01/new-impeachment-rules-would-snare-obama/

Obama was not impeached not because he did not do things that Donald Trump did, but because his opposition in the House did not do what Democrats later most willingly did: attempt a coup to remove a president without cause.

Barack Obama’s eight-year tenure was detrimental to the United States, but like most of his nonbelievers, I harbor no animosity for his person.

Few critics that I know advocated that Obama be impeached, much less removed from office, before his reelection bid—even amid his worst scandals and dangerous policies. But we are now in a new age, whose protocols might have made it impossible for the Obama Administration to have finished two terms. 

Remember, his administration ran some 2,000 guns to Mexican cartels in some hare-brained scheme to monitor violence spilling into the United States. Under the new customs, he should have been impeached for instructing Attorney General Eric Holder to refuse to testify to Congress about Fast and Furious, or at least for not handing over subpoenaed documents. Imagine a Trump gun-walking scheme in Mexico. 

It was bad enough that Holder was the first attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress, well aside from the embarrassment of his unhinged outbursts about “my people” (hint: his “my” did not mean Americans of all races and creeds). We all remember Holder’s lunatic dismissals of his own country as “a nation of cowards.” (Imagine Bill Barr referring to “my people” or calling Americans cowards)

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ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why Are Palestinians Dying in Hamas Prisons? by Bassam Tawil

By on March 2nd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15664/palestinians-hamas-prisons

The families’ calls for launching investigations into the death of their sons while in Hamas detention have been ignored not only by Hamas, but also by the international community, human rights organizations and media.

Al-Sa’afeen’s mother emphasized that the Israelis treat Palestinians much better than Hamas does. “When the Jews arrest someone, they contact his family to say they are holding him… But Hamas refused to provide us with any information about the detention of my son or his health condition…. We told [Hamas] that he’s sick and needs medicine, but they refused to give him any treatment. Until today, we don’t know why my son was arrested.”

When Palestinians die in Palestinian prisons, the murders are presumably regarded as the handiwork of supposedly savage Arabs, who are — with racist contempt — held to a lower standard of conduct than Westerners, and therefore regarded as unworthy of human rights, accountable governance, due process or equal justice under the law.

They are evidently considered “just” Palestinian families complaining about brutal torture in Palestinian prisons — so international human rights organizations do not even notice them.

Essam al-Sa’afeen, a 39-year-old Palestinian from al-Bureij refugee camp in the center of the Gaza Strip, was pronounced dead on February 23, one month after he was arrested by Hamas security forces. His family and friends are demanding answers from Hamas regarding the circumstances of the death al-Sa’afeen, a father of six.

Hamas says it has formed a commission of inquiry to investigate the circumstances surrounding his death.

According to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Interior, which is in charge of the Palestinian security forces in the Gaza Strip, al-Sa’afeen died shortly after he was transferred from prison to a hospital. The ministry said al-Sa’afeen was rushed to the hospital after a “sudden deterioration in his health condition.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Cracks Down on Religion Even Harder by Judith Bergman

By on March 2nd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15638/china-religion-crackdown

“In practice, your religion no longer matters, if you are Buddhist, or Taoist, or Muslim or Christian: the only religion allowed is faith in the Chinese Communist Party.” — A Catholic priest, AsiaNews.it, December 31, 2019.

One mother, who is a member of The Church of Almighty God, said that her son told her to abandon her faith when he returned home after school. “My son told me that if I get arrested, our entire family will be finished. He threatened to jump off the building to end his life if I continued practicing my faith,” she recently told Bitter Winter.

One shop-owner told Bitter Winter, “A few years ago, many shops sold religious couplets. In 2018, the government started banning them. Last year, all couplets were confiscated from shops, and this year, sellers are threatened to be fined and imprisoned. No one sells them in Shangqiu anymore. Who dares to risk?”

China, meanwhile, maintains that its human rights record is admirable. According to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang, “The Chinese people are in the best position to judge China’s human rights condition, which is at its historical best.” — Time.com, January 15, 2020.

China is increasing its already extremely severe suppression of religious freedom. More than a year ago, at a November 2018 hearing of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, the President of the Religious Freedom Institute, Thomas F. Farr, described China’s religious suppression as “the most systematic and brutal attempt to control Chinese religious communities since the Cultural Revolution.”

On December 30, 2019, China’s Communist Party (CCP) announced new “Administrative Measures for Religious Groups”. The measures — which came into force on February 1, 2020 — stipulate that religious organizations exist to promote the CCP and its ideology, according to Bitter Winter, a magazine on religious liberty and human rights in China.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Democrats, Progressives and Socialists Exposing the danger. Bruce Hendry *****

By on March 2nd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/democrats-progressives-and-socialists-frontpagemagcom/

Starting today we are publishing in serial form an essay by Bruce Hendry on the existential crisis our nation is facing. The crisis has been caused by a dramatic shift to the left by one our two main political parties. Tragically, the leaders of the Democrat Party seem to have learned nothing from the social catastrophes created by socialist illusions in the past century.

By declaring himself a socialist – although “communist” would more accurately reflect his lifelong commitments – presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has done our country an enormous favor. When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, it ended a 72-year international civil war that liberated over a billion people from the chains of a totalitarian system. Yet there was a deafening and costly silence on the part of the victors over this historic result.

While millions in the former Soviet bloc gathered to praise President Reagan and America as the heroes of their liberation, western leaders were curiously mute. By the time the Wall fell, Reagan was no longer president. Under his successor, George H. W. Bush, there were no victory laps taken. No major events to celebrate the victory of the Free World or to drive home the lessons learned from this past – the bankrupting of whole continents, the engineering of famines in the Soviet Union, which had previously been the “bread basket of Europe,” the murder of more than 100 million people in peacetime for standing in the way of the socialist planners.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Could the End of the Afghanistan Misadventure Finally Be At Hand? Wilsonian nation-building failed. It’s time to discard it as a foreign policy strategy. Mon Mar 2, 2020 Robert Spencer

By on March 2nd, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/could-end-afghanistan-misadventure-finally-be-hand-robert-spencer/

Afghanistan “is not going to become Switzerland overnight,” an American official said as the U.S. and the Taliban signed a peace accord on Saturday morning, and you have to admire his understatement. The United States has sacrificed the lives of numerous heroic service members and squandered trillions for nearly two decades now in the fond hope that it could remake Afghanistan into Switzerland, and the one good thing about this “peace accord” with the Taliban is that it heralds the long-overdue end of this fool’s errand.

The old assumptions, although they have led to policies that have multiply failed, are still prevalent. The usual objections are being made. In its story on the peace accord, the Washington Free Beacon reported that “a group of Republican members of Congress” had petitioned the Trump administration, asking the President not to go through with the agreement. “They and other critics say the Taliban cannot be trusted to implement peace and that the moment U.S. forces vacate the country, terror forces will again rise to power.”

This echoed a statement from former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who said: “We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave.”

The unnamed American official said: “Everybody has the same goals. No one wants to see the return of the Islamic Emirate.” Well, sure. Everybody, that is, except the Taliban, who are still determined to reestablish their Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan. Once the American troops finally leave, “terror forces” will indeed make every effort to “again rise to power.” There will not be “stability” in Afghanistan. Does that mean that we have to keep troops there forever? Or should the United States focus on what is best for America in Afghanistan, working to ensure that the Taliban cannot engage in international jihad terror activity, and otherwise leaving the Afghans to their own devices?

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Manic reforms, depressed scores By Curtis Hier

By on March 2nd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/manic_reforms_depressed_scores.html

Our public education system is bipolar.  Its reformers are manic, but the test scores are depressed.

Bipolar disorder is a serious condition afflicting nearly six million Americans.  Unfortunately, it’s also a metaphor for our public schools. Symptoms of mania include rapid speech, grandiose ideas, and wild spending sprees.  Education “reformers” exhibit all three.

The so-called reformers of education have been rapidly and frenetically speaking seemingly forever. TED Talks and TEDx Talks and podcasts and workshops and panels and keynotes and in-service sessions and slide shows. Many, many slide shows.  It’s a lot of talking.  

Reformers have been writing rapidly and frenetically too.  As of this writing, an Amazon book search for “education reform” reveals over 20,000 titles. Google provides 272 billion results.  “Scholarly articles” for education reform yields 3.1 million sources. 

Seemingly everybody’s been published on the subject, many people with little or no experience teaching children.

When I began teaching, some of the grandest of grandiose ideas were playing out, like open space classrooms. Teachers were finally driven to distraction and erected bookshelves and crates, anything to block out other classes.  Dividers went up, and soon rooms were evident.  

Whole language was being phased out as the preferred method of teaching reading, but it left me facing a string of high-school students over a span of several years who could not spell.  Millions of students across the country were victims of the “reading wars.”

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MEDIA, POLITICS Comments turned off

If you think Democrats and the media are politicizing coronavirus, you’re right By Andrea Widburg

By on March 2nd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/if_you_think_democrats_and_the_media_are_politicizing_coronavirus_youre_right.html

The media routinely call Trump divisive and controversial, forgetting that they are the ones stirring up the divisions and the controversy. Looked at objectively, Trump’s presidency is consistent with the American mainstream through Reagan. Indeed, even though some values have changed since Reagan’s time, Trump is still well within American norms. It’s the media that’s advocating for divisive and controversial policies, both at home and abroad.

Mostly, the media’s name-calling has been merely irritating. After all, people who wish to do so have been able to separate the wheat from the chaff. The habit, however, went from irritating to dangerous with coronavirus’s appearance on the scene. From the first day, the media decided to use coronavirus as a way to destroy Trump’s reelection chances.

To that end, the media has consistently lied about how Trump has handled the disease. American Thinker detailed some of those lies on Sunday. That post, however, pales in the face of an epic Twitter thread that Steve Guest, the GOP’s Rapid Response Director wrote on the same day. It’s a long thread because there are so many instances of the left’s rank dishonesty in politicizing the coronavirus, so this post will only repeat some of it. However, you really should read the entire thread if you want to understand how badly the Democrats and the media are gaslighting the American people:

You can find the entire Twitter thread here.

The Democrats and their media handmaidens are lying to you because they can. There are no consequences for what they’re doing. Democrat politicians keep collecting votes from hardcore supporters or from credulous members of the public and media figures keep their jobs. Indeed, the only thing that will make a leftist lose his or her job is daring to oppose leftist convention wisdom.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Bye, Buttigieg By Jim Geraghty

By on March 2nd, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bye-buttigieg/

Pete Buttigieg is leaving the presidential race. His decision comes as a surprise; this morning, his campaign was still urging supporters to get out the vote on Super Tuesday.

A decent number of Buttigieg supporters are now up for grabs in the Super Tuesday states. Buttigieg is at 13.3 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average of Massachusetts, 13 percent in Colorado, 11.5 percent in Virginia, 9.5 percent California, 7.5 percent in Texas, 6.8 percent in North Carolina.

(As of Thursday, more than 2.7 million voters in California had returned ballots in early voting. Hope they didn’t vote for Tom Steyer or Pete Buttigieg.)

Last week, Morning Consult asked Buttigieg supporters who their second choice was and found them splitting pretty evenly: Sanders 21 percent, Joe Biden 19 percent, Warren 19 percent, and Mike Bloomberg 17 percent. If Buttigieg supporters do split that way, each of those four candidates would get another 2 to 3 percent, which could put some of them above the 15 percent threshold in certain states.

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Afghan Withdrawal Deal Trump agrees to a 14-month timeline if the Taliban honor their security commitments.

By on March 2nd, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-afghan-withdrawal-deal-11583106215?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

President Trump has made clear he wants all American troops out of Afghanistan, and on Saturday the U.S. signed an “agreement for bringing peace to Afghanistan” with the Taliban. The coming months will tell if this is a genuine path to peace or political cover for a U.S. exit.

The good news is that this agreement is better than what the U.S. had seemed to accept in September. The Taliban have killed thousands of Americans, and Mr. Trump shouldn’t reward them with a Camp David signing ceremony as he first suggested.

The Taliban, or at least their representatives, have agreed to negotiate with the elected Afghan government for the first time. The Taliban want to establish an Islamist emirate and have previously refused to talk to the Kabul government. The Taliban have also promised to reduce their attacks on Afghan civilians and troops, as a week long test leading to Saturday demonstrated is possible.

For the first time the Taliban have also forsworn support for al Qaeda and are promising to prevent Afghanistan from being a safe haven for any group planning attacks against the U.S. This is the reason the U.S. sent troops to the country after 9/11, and the deal makes clear this is the main American priority.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

‘Mayor’ Pete Runs Out of Obama Speeches to Pilfer. Drops Out of Democratic President Race. By Victoria Taft

By on March 2nd, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/election/mayor-pete-runs-out-of-obama-speeches-to-pilfer-drops-out-of-democratic-president-race/

Mayor Pete Buttigieg has told his staff that he’s pulling out of – suspending – his Democratic presidential campaign.

The former South Bend, Ind., mayor had his campaign staff leak the news to media outlets Sunday afternoon. Buttigieg was expected to speak to supporters in South Bend Sunday night.

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