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July 2020

Why Do The Media Ignore Good News About The Stock Market And Economy?

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/07/01/why-do-the-media-ignore-good-news-about-the-stock-market-and-economy/

Our TV-based media, so besotted with the far-left progressive agenda they now espouse, no longer seem to care about some issues of great importance – that is, unless they reflect badly on President Donald Trump or Republicans . This double standard is especially true of such bread-and-butter issues as the state of the economy and markets, which have an enormous effect on all Americans, including the so-called progressive ones.

Amid all the nonstop televised gloom and doom over the coronavirus, something strange happened in the second quarter of this year: Stock market prices soared. The Dow Jones Industrial Index jumped 18%, the S&P 500 gained 20% and the tech-oriented Nasdaq surged 31%.

Those numbers, coming on the heels of the pandemic, were good enough to be the biggest quarterly gains in 20 years.

Yet, that boom warranted nary a mention on the Big Three TV networks. For full coverage, you had to go outside to financial publications such as the Wall Street Journal and Investor’s Business Daily, the newspaper where Issues & Insights was started before becoming a stand-alone editorial and opinion site.

We were prompted to mention this by the headline we saw in the reliable and always interesting media watchdog site MRC NewsBusters: “Big Three CENSOR Stocks after ‘Best Quarter’ in 20-Plus Years, Despite Virus Spike.”

“The trend of ignoring news when it’s good continues for the Big Three evening news shows,” the story said, noting that when retail sales soared 17.7% in May, the biggest jump on record, both ABC and NBC ignored it.

Black Lives Matter: “We Are Trained Marxists” – Part I by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16181/black-lives-matter

Black Lives Matter is a Marxist revolutionary movement aimed at transforming the United States into a communist dystopia. BLM states that it wants to abolish the nuclear family, police, prisons and capitalism. BLM leaders have threatened to “burn down the system” if their demands are not met. They are also training militias.

“Cutting the LAPD budget means longer responses to 911 emergency calls, officers calling for backup won’t get it, and rape, murder and assault investigations won’t occur or will take forever to initiate, let alone complete.” — Los Angeles Police Protective League, the city’s police union.

“White people are so confused in America…. If there is systematic racism today it is a racism against white people, in the sense that white people are told that they are responsible for all the evils in the world….” — Dr. Carol M. Swain, university professor and advisory board member of Black Voices for Trump.

“We are all human beings in God’s image. Black Lives Matter and Antifa and organizations like that will not help us transcend racism and classism and the ‘isms’ that they are concerned with. There are things that can be done in the black community, but the most important thing is helping people realize to how important their own attitudes are…” — Dr. Carol M. Swain.

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that more than two-thirds of Americans support the Black Lives Matter movement. The high level of backing raises the question of how much the public knows about BLM.

On the surface, BLM presents itself as a grassroots movement dedicated to the noble tasks of fighting racism and police brutality. A deeper dive shows that BLM is a Marxist revolutionary movement aimed at transforming the United States — and the entire world — into a communist dystopia.

This is the first of a two-part series, which reveals:

BLM’s founders openly admit to being Marxist ideologues. Their self-confessed mentors include former members of the Weather Underground, a radical “leftwing” terrorist group that sought to bring a communist revolution to the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. BLM is friendly with Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, whose socialist policies have brought economic collapse and untold misery to millions of people there.

BLM states that it wants to abolish: the nuclear family; police and prisons; heteronormativity; and capitalism. BLM and groups associated with it are demanding a moratorium on rent, mortgages and utilities, and reparations for a long list of grievances. BLM leaders have threatened to “burn down the system” if their demands are not met. They are also training militias based on the militant Black Panther movement of the 1960s.

BLM, which is not registered as a non-profit organization for tax purposes, has raised tens of millions of dollars in donations. BLM’s finances are opaque. BLM’s donations are collected by ActBlue, a fundraising platform linked to the Democratic Party and causes associated with it. Indeed, BLM leaders have confirmed that their immediate goal is to remove U.S. President Donald J. Trump from office.

US Needs to Review its IRF Report on India by Jagdish N. Singh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16151/india-religious-freedom

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom apparently based its India report on the versions of evidently hostile non-governmental organizations and media outlets.

If US President Donald J. Trump is determined to promote religious freedom the world over, he also needs to call upon other nations vastly more abusive than India is to “end religious persecution.'”

It is astonishing to note that the International Religious Freedom (IRF) Report, released by the US Department of State on June 10, 2020, ranks India on its lowest grade, “Countries of Particular Concern (CPC).” The report recommends that the US State Department meet people from India’s “religiously persecuted” communities and slap sanctions on the agencies and officials responsible for the predicament of the affected.

The report also groups India with countries, such as China, Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia, which have long been notorious for their religious freedom rights violations. It says that India’s newly passed Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) makes the Muslims in the country “bear the indignities and consequences of potential statelessness.” It also claims that the Narendra Modi government allows “campaigns of harassment and violence” against Muslims and other religious minorities.

The report suggests that the government-perpetuated discrimination against religious minorities in India can be discerned in the newly changed status of the Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir region, the enactment of the cow-slaughter and anti-conversion laws, the inflammatory remarks of some Hindu-majority parties against minority communities, and the Supreme Court’s decision in the Babri mosque case. The report also alleges that in February this year “, three days of violence erupted in New Delhi with mobs attacking Muslim neighborhoods.” Finally, it adds that innocent members of minority communities “are being punished under India’s cow protection laws” that prohibit the export or import of beef.

Castro Fan Karen Bass Vetted for Biden VP Los Angeles Democrat seeks “new path of support and collaboration” with Communist Cuban regime. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/castro-fan-karen-bass-vetted-biden-vp-lloyd-billingsley/

“Congresswoman Karen Bass, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, is undergoing vetting as a candidate to be Joe Biden’s running mate,” Bo Erickson of CBS News reported on June 24.

In March, the five-term Los Angeles Democrat endorsed Biden for president, but even some Democrats were troubled by one of Bass’s previous endorsements.

“The passing of the Comandante en Jefe is a great loss to the people of Cuba,” said Bass in a statement after Fidel Castro passed away on November 25, 2016.  “I hope together, our two nations will continue on the new path of support and collaboration with one another, and continue in the new direction of diplomacy.” Democrats had often praised Castro, but Karen Bass used the official designation, Comandante en Jefe, for a Communist dictator one generation out of Europe.

Fidel Castro’s father Ángel Castro y Argiz immigrated from Spain in 1906 and ran a sugarcane farm. Fidel attended Catholic boarding schools and the University of Havana where the law student “organized violent gangs” for “political aims.” The revolution of the late 1950s included not a single Afro-Cuban, and the Communist Fidel was Commandante en Jefe for more than 50 years, with not a single free and fair election.

Fidel Castro drove a formerly prosperous nation to sub-Haiti levels of poverty. His repression was such that thousands of Cubans fled at the first opportunity, leaving everything behind, at great risk to their own lives. That is why the Straits of Florida have become a graveyard without crosses.

What Will a Trump Re-Election Mean For the Middle East? The region’s future hinges on what happens in November. Joseph Puder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/middle-east-conundrum-joseph-puder/

With the Middle East awaiting the U.S. elections, there is no significant military or political movement in the region. The Arab world, much like the rest of the world, is preoccupied with the coronavirus crisis, and its severe impact on the local economies in the region. The Arab world, divided into royalist, presidential, and parliamentary systems, none of them democratic, all having conflicting interests, are now in the same boat because of the coronavirus crisis. In Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Syria and the Arab Gulf states, the current focus is on internal issues, specifically health measures that would prevent the spread of coronavirus infections and the economic impact it has caused. As far as external issues are concerned, there is a conundrum. Who will be the next U.S. president? Many external decisions will await the results of the U.S. presidential elections, and the direction of the next American president.

Iran is not an Arab country, but it too is enmeshed in recovering from the economic damage caused by the coronavirus, and the impact of the U.S. sanctions on its failing economy. The regime is burdened by the lack of credibility and trustworthiness. The ayatollahs poor handling of the coronavirus crisis, coupled with the downing of the Ukrainian jetliner by the Iranian military in January, 2020, at the loss of 176 lives, exposed the regimes incompetence. Then they lied about it. The Islamic Republic of Iran is hoping for a Democrat party victory in the November, 2020 U.S. elections, and the defeat of Donald Trump in particular. They are expecting that Joe Biden as President will end the sanctions and rejoin the 5+1 nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

Iraq is now more stable, following six months of failed attempts to form a government. The new Prime Minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, a former head of Intelligence, is not an Iranian puppet. He is committed to lead Iraq out of its economic crisis, due in part to the collapse of the price of oil, Iraq’s primary export. Iraq has also endured a health crisis brought about by the coronavirus, and a resurgent Islamic State terrorism (IS). The appointment of al-Kadhimi as prime minister, and the strengthened position of the Kurdish President of Iraq, Barham Salih, (this reporter interviewed Barham Salih in 1993), both of them reformers, has dealt a blow to the pro-Iranian groups in Iraq. The election of al-Kadhimi was welcomed by Washington.

Exposing the Lies of Black Lives Matter Where black racism and Marxism are dressed up as “social justice.” John Perazzo

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/07/exposing-lies-black-lives-matter-john-perazzo/

Black Lives Matter (BLM) was established in 2013 by a trio of self-identified Marxist revolutionaries. Striving to make white Americans “uncomfortable about institutional racism” and the “structural oppression” that allegedly “prevents so many [black people] from realizing their dreams,” BLM contends that blacks living under America’s “white supremacist system” are routinely targeted for “extrajudicial killings … by police and vigilantes.” That claim has become an article of faith for the millions of American leftists who dutifully parrot BLM’s talking points. The remainder of this article is dedicated to providing hard data which exposes BLM’s worldview as nothing more than a mountain of malicious lies.

Debunking BLM’s Claims About Police Use of Force

A major Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report in 2001 examined incidents where police in the United States used deadly force to kill criminal suspects between 1976 and 1998. During that 23-year span, 42% of all suspects killed by police were black – a figure that comported precisely with the percentage of violent crimes committed by African Americans during that same period. This is enormously significant because we would expect that in police forces not plagued by systemic racism, officers would shoot suspects of various racial or ethnic backgrounds at rates closely resembling their respective involvement in the types of serious crimes most likely to elicit the use of force by police. And indeed, that is exactly what the evidence shows.

The same BJS report found that in nearly two-thirds of all justifiable homicides by police during 1976-98, the officer’s race and the suspect’s race were the same. When a white or Hispanic officer killed a suspect, that suspect was usually (63% of the time) white or Hispanic as well. And when a black officer killed a suspect, that suspect was usually black (81% of the time).

The BJS report also examined the rate at which officers killed suspects of other racial or ethnic backgrounds. In 1998, the “black-officer-kills-black-felon” rate was 32 per 100,000 black officers, more than double the rate at which white and Hispanic officers killed black felons (14 per 100,000). That same year, the rate at which white and Hispanic officers killed white or Hispanic felons (28 per 100,000) was much higher than the “black-officer-kills-white-or-Hispanic-felon” rate of 11 per 100,000.

Caution: Anything You Say Will Be Racist Somehow By Eileen F. Toplansky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/caution_anything_you_say_will_be_racist_somehow.html

I first learned of John Leo in 1999 when he penned the clever and prescient piece titled “A Waspish, Niggardly Slur,” wherein he exposed the dangerous trend in language manipulation that is now so wildly prevalent.  It was an equal-opportunity poke at the absurd lengths to which people will go to accuse someone of racism.

Leo explained that a Washington, D.C. white mayoral aide, David Howard, had used the term “niggardly.”  A black official took offense because he felt that it was a racist term.  In fact, niggardly means miserly or cheap and has nothing whatsoever to do with race.  Nonetheless, Howard offered his resignation, and then Mayor Anthony Williams accepted the resignation, explaining that “although Howard didn’t say anything that was in itself racist” (emphasis mine), “using a word that could be misunderstood was like ‘getting caught smoking in a refinery with a resulting explosion.'”

Thus began the onslaught of alleged coded insults that has now metastasized so that everyone is afraid of calling a spade a spade.  The “expression ‘to call a spade a spade’ entered the English language when Nicholas Udall translated Erasmus in 1542.  To be clear, ‘the ‘spade’ in the Erasmus translation has nothing to do with a deck of cards, but rather the gardening tool.  The early usages of the word ‘spade’ did not refer to either race or skin color.  The Oxford English Dictionary says the first appearance of the word spade as a reference to blackness was in Claude McKay’s 1928 novel Home to Harlem, which was notable for its depictions of street life in Harlem in the 1920s.  ‘Jake is such a fool spade,’ wrote McKay.  ‘Don’t know how to handle the womens [sic].’  Fellow Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman then used the word in his novel The Blacker The Berry: A Novel of Negro Life, a widely read and notable work that explored prejudice within the African-American community.”

The Huge Law Enforcement Scandal that Cries Out for Justice By Rael Jean Isaac

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/the_huge_law_enforcement_scandal_that_cries_out_for_justice.html

In the American Thinker (June 30), Jack Cashill offers an eloquent plea for an Atticus Finch to take up the cause of George Zimmerman in suing those responsible for perpetrating the Trayvon Hoax.  There is another case, also in Florida, awaiting its Atticus Finch, the product of an earlier moral panic, the now largely forgotten “mass sex abuse in daycare” hysteria.  These cases, replete with lurid charges the media mindlessly and breathlessly disseminated in the 1980s and ’90s, are today widely recognized as a modern version of the Salem witch trials of the 1690s, down to allegations of Satanic rituals by caregivers.  Despite this, one victim remains incarcerated.  Frank Fuster has now served thirty-five years in prison for a crime not only that he did not commit, but that never happened.  His first parole hearing is scheduled an unbelievable 114 years from now — in March 2134.

Why is Fuster alone still in prison when the dozens of other victims of the daycare hysteria were all released, most of them long ago?  That includes— just to cite a sample — the Edenton 7 in North Carolina, whose plight was brilliantly set forth by Ofra Bikel on PBS; the Amiraults in Massachusetts, for whose defense, in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, Dorothy Rabinowitz won a Pulitzer; Kelly Michaels, the young aspiring actress sentenced to 47 years for supposedly sexually molesting virtually all the three- to five-year-old children at Wee Care Day Nursery in New Jersey; and the 43 adults charged with close to 30,000 crimes against young children in Wenatchee, Washington.  Sometimes justice was wickedly slow, as in the case of Fran and Dan Keller, who served 21 years in prison before they were finally released in 2013 and their conviction set aside.  The couple, who ran a daycare center out of their Texas home, had each been sentenced to 48 years on absurd testimony that included accusations that they had drowned and dismembered babies in front of other children, transported the children to Mexico to be sexually abused by soldiers in the Mexican army, dressed as pumpkins and shot children in the arms and legs, and so on.

The Coronavirus Credibility Gap Politicians and experts sow distrust with double standards on protests and dissembling about masks.By Joseph A. Ladapo

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-coronavirus-credibility-gap-11593645643?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The American public is fractured over policy responses to Covid-19. That rift is most visible in debates about masks and new rounds of shutdowns. Such disputes are common in a country as diverse and opinionated as America. But political leaders and health officials have sown distrust by politicizing the pandemic response.

Political leaders and health officials have often invoked “science” to justify decisions manifestly guided by their personal preferences. That costs them credibility. Restoring public confidence will require acknowledging their role in politicizing the pandemic, yielding to accommodations and sensible alternatives in the areas of greatest controversy, and focusing on the widely supported goal of not overwhelming hospitals, rather than less meaningful metrics such as increases in Covid-19 cases.

One of the earliest signs of politicization was the broad animus directed at protesters who objected to the lockdowns. In a country where liberty and free expression are as fundamental as air and water, it is remarkable how casually political leaders and health officials disparaged and banned their activities—and even targeted protesters for prosecution. Politics was also at play when New York Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered police in Brooklyn to break up a crowd of mourners who gathered for a Hasidic Jewish funeral, warning that their actions were “unacceptable” and threatening to arrest them.

Contrast this with the approach that many of the same political leaders and public-health experts took toward the protests catalyzed by George Floyd’s killing. These protesters were neither maligned nor targeted with fines and arrests based on social distancing or mask mandates. They were often joined in the streets by politicians such as Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.

The Meaning of Hong Kong China snuffs out a beacon of freedom, a warning to the world.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-meaning-of-hong-kong-11593645526?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

China’s decision to impose its national-security law on Hong Kong is a seismic event that goes well beyond the sad fate of its 7.5 million people. The illegal takeover shows that Beijing’s Communist rulers are willing to violate their international commitments with impunity as they spread their authoritarian model.

We say this with regret because we were among those who hoped, amid China’s reform era that began in the 1980s, that the Middle Kingdom could be drawn into a world of peaceful global norms. Hong Kong, a showcase of the prosperity that economic freedom and the rule of law can produce, was a lesson for Beijing to learn from.

Now those hopes are crushed, as China’s Communist legislature imposed the national-security law that ends Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” governance and subverts the rights promised under the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984. Beijing promised to preserve Hong Kong’s legal autonomy and freedom of speech, assembly, the press and other liberties. The 7.5 million now subject to this sweeping legislation weren’t even permitted to read the text until it passed.

In a statement Tuesday, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam claimed that the national-security law “only targets an extremely small minority of offenders while the life and property as well as various legitimate basic rights and freedoms enjoyed by the overwhelming majority of citizens will be protected.”