Weekend break with no internet
https://babylonbee.com/news/report-kamala-harris-already-vetting-vp-picks
U.S.—Supporters of Kamala Harris have been eagerly awaiting an announcement on who her VP pick will be when she takes over as president approximately 5 minutes after Joe Biden is inaugurated. According to sources close to the campaign, she is already vetting possible candidates for the job.
“I am proud to announce I will soon be announcing my pick for Vice President of the United States,” said Harris. “We have searched all across this great land. While I cannot yet confirm who my pick will be, I can say this: my pick for VP will be even MORE of a woman and even MORE of color than I am. It will be the most colorful and womanly team ever!” She then threw her head back and cackled maniacally.
https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/13/bidens-ukraine-problem-isnt-going-away/
Plenty of Biden bombshells could come to light through Senator Ron Johnson’s committee, the Justice Department, and conservative media over the next several weeks.
The public is mostly unaware that a key motive behind the Democrats’ impeachment effort was to criminalize any interest in the Biden family’s shady dealings with the persistently corrupt country of Ukraine. As damaging news coverage of Hunter Biden’s multimillion dollar gig with Burisma, the troubled Ukrainian energy company, escalated in the fall of 2019 and threatened to derail Joe Biden’s third run for the presidency, the Biden campaign declared open season on journalists.
A Biden spokeswoman lashed out at the New York Times for publishing “malicious claims” about her boss and his son; the campaign warned social media companies not to run ads featuring the infamous clip of Biden bragging about trading U.S. foreign aid in exchange for the firing of a prosecutor investigating Burisma. The fervor quickly died down after Democrats successfully changed the subject, building an impeachment case against President Trump that portrayed his brief mention of the Bidens during a phone call with the Ukrainian president as “election interference.”
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/slain-dhs-whistleblower-philip-haney-not-resting-lloyd-billingsley/
Through his work in the Middle East, Philip Haney gained deep knowledge of Islam, jihad, and terrorist networks around the world. In 2016, Philip Haney authored See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad. Haney was reportedly at work on a sequel, which has yet to appear.
On February 21, 2020, Haney was found dead from a gunshot wound in Amador County, California. Haney’s friends denied he was suicidal, and some were certain he had been murdered. CNN set the tone for the way establishment media would cover the case.
“Haney’s controversial accusations that the Obama administration could have prevented terrorist attacks were polarizing among Americans,” Laura Hoy reported on February 23. Hoy had no take on whether Haney’s accusations were true, and she included no citations from Haney’s book or his Frontpage articles such as, “Deobond Attacks in San Bernardino, Sri Lanka,” and “The Terrorist Ties that Bind.”
As Hoy explained, “Haney’s death is likely to become political ammo for Republicans heading into the 2020 presidential elections.” That raises questions about another key player in the case.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/why-trump-should-win-bruce-thornton/
Less than three months from election day, Democrats and NeverTrump Republicans keep telling us (and themselves) that President Trump “is in trouble” in his bid for reelection. Trump’s enemies chant poll numbers like incantations, even though that juju failed spectacularly in 2016. They harp on Trump’s media-manufactured “failures” like his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and his response to the ongoing riots instigated by Black Lives Matter and its Antifa brown-shirts. And as has been true from the start, the bulk of their criticisms are really about subjective and self-serving standards of “comportment” and “decorum” and “norms” that reflect the bipartisan “cognitive elite” and big-government functionaries.
But a more sober analysis suggests that the president has a faithful and energized base and a record of accomplishment compared to the Dems’ lunge to the lunatic left. Moreover, the spectacle of civic destruction, increasing violent crime, and nakedly partisan and authoritarian excesses on the part of blue-state governors and mayors will give Trump a decided edge with the bulk of ordinary Americans.
First, Trump’s economic success has been stalled not because of any missteps by his administration, but by a pandemic originating in totalitarian China and worsened by its willful obscuring of the virus’s origins and lethality. Voters with common sense and fairness know that the current recession is not Trump’s fault, and that having rescued the economy once, he can do so again. They also can see that blue-state governors have needlessly exacerbated the economic damage by imposing draconian and arbitrary lockdown orders based not on science, but on their increasingly obvious desire to wound the president politically even if it means immiserating their own citizens.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/08/americas_current_suicide_attempt.html
It’s tempting to look on current events as unprecedented, with divisions as deep as at any time since the Civil War. An antidote to this ahistorical view is to read (or re-read) historian Paul Johnson’s 1983 Modern Times — especially the chapters titled “American’s Suicide Attempt” and “The Collective Seventies.” Moreover, what we are experiencing now, as a renewed suicide attempt gains traction, can be seen as a direct result of those policies and the misconceptions that produced them. As Johnson sees it, a good part of the suicide attempt stemmed from the Vietnam War and the attempt by another Johnson, President Lyndon Johnson, to eradicate poverty.
As historian Johnson sees it, President Johnson believed in the boundless capacity of the American economy to deliver. While President Kennedy found it difficult to educate congress in his social spending ideas, to honor his memory, in the wake of his assassination in 1963, Johnson was able to pass bills to fund “The Great Society.”
Johnson writes:
The danger of the kind of welfare state Johnson was creating was that it pushed people out of the productive economy permanently and made them dependents of the state. Poverty increased when families split up, either by old people living apart or by divorce. Legislation often promoted these processes.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16265/modern-slavery-britain
According to the report, despite the scale of the crimes, prosecutions have barely increased…
“This is a systemic issue that is borne out of poor regulation, poor legislation and exploitation at every level. You have to ask yourself who actually has the power to change this? And that buck stops with government”. — Adam Clarke, deputy mayor of Leicester, Sky News, July 13, 2020.
The protesters of historical slavery could well be wearing clothes produced by the marginalized, victimized modern slaves who have no access to the justice and equality for which the protesters claim to be fighting.
It is telling that both public and private resources, as well as endless media coverage, are being dedicated to the issue of “racist statues” and historical slavery, while the plight of living, suffering modern slaves — an issue that needs tremendous effort to be tackled to even some degree — barely interests anyone.
A new British report, “It Still Happens Here: Fighting UK Slavery in the 2020s”, by The Modern Slavery Policy Unit, a joint initiative led by the anti-slavery charity Justice and Care and The Centre for Social Justice, has estimated that “there could be at least 100,000 victims [of modern slavery] in the UK, with the actual number likely to be even greater”.
According to the report:
“Many thousands of children, women and men of all nationalities and backgrounds — including a growing number of British citizens — continue to be trafficked and exploited for profit by ruthless criminal networks. They are tricked, taken and coerced into sexual slavery, crime, hard labour and domestic servitude. Forced addictions are increasingly used as methods of control”.
I knew and appreciated Helen Freedman the co-Executive Director of Americans For a Safe Israel (AFSI) for decades. We spoke recently, and weakened as she was, she never lost that particular fight and determination to support Israel and its legitimate and historic claim to sovereignty in Judea and Samaria. She walked the walk in countless visits and missions to the whole area and especially to Hebron, the first capital of the Jewish people. She was buried there yesterday.
My condolences to Judy Kadish, Helen’s daughter and co-Director of AFSI, to Charlie, to her son, to her wonderful brother and sister-in law. Your great loss is shared by thousands and all present and past members of Americans for A Safe Israel. Her memory is a blessing.
Ruth King
https://bit.ly/3ame0hg
Israel’s regional posture of deterrence and global high tech prominence have motivated the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to conclude the August 13, 2020 peace accord with Israel.
The same Israeli features have prompted the pro-US Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain and Kuwait, as well as Jordan and Egypt, to dramatically expand their security and commercial cooperation with Israel.
The UAE considers strategic cooperation with Israel, in general, and the peace accord, in particular, a critical added-value to its line of defense (second only to the US) against lethal threats such as Iran’s conventional and terror offensive, persistent Muslim Brotherhood terrorism, ISIS and Al Qaeda terrorism, Turkey’s operational and logistic support of the Muslim Brotherhood and Turkey’s military base (5,000 soldiers) in the pro-Iran Qatar. The UAE, as well as all other pro-US Arab regimes, recognize Israel as the most effective and reliable “life insurance agent” in the region.
These rogue elements have become regional and global epicenters of Islamic terrorism and drug trafficking in Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe, North and Central Africa, South and Central America, with sleeper cells in the US.
Israel’s posture of deterrence and growing cooperation with all pro-US Arab regimes has spared the US the need to deploy more aircraft carriers and ground forces in the Middle East and neighboring regions.
The UAE has become a leader in the Arab battle against global Islamic terrorism (following years of UAE financing Islamic terrorism), targeting 82 Islamic terror organizations, which operate in Germany, Norway, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, the Persian Gulf, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, etc.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/13/us/yale-discrimination.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20200813&instance_id=0&nl=breaking-news&ref=headline®i_id=2636639&segment_id=36042&user_id=2dfc89bd6c52e6103e5ac62f916a8f0d
The Trump administration said the university discriminated against Asian-American and white applicants. Yale defended its practices and vowed to maintain them.
The Justice Department on Thursday accused Yale University of violating federal civil rights law by discriminating against Asian-American and white applicants, an escalation of the Trump administration’s moves against race-based admissions policies at elite universities.
The charge, coming after a two-year investigation, is the administration’s second confrontation with an Ivy League school; two years ago, it publicly backed Asian-American students who accused Harvard in a lawsuit of systematically discriminating against them.
The department’s finding could have far-reaching consequences for the ongoing legal challenges to affirmative action, which are expected to eventually reach the Supreme Court. Some conservative groups have long opposed affirmative action, a tool born in the civil rights era, and a handful of states have banned such policies at public universities.
“There is no such thing as a nice form of race discrimination,” Eric S. Dreiband, the assistant attorney general for the civil rights division, said in a statement announcing the Justice Department’s move against Yale. “Unlawfully dividing Americans into racial and ethnic blocs fosters stereotypes, bitterness and division.”
The Justice Department said that Yale had violated Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action by using race not as one of many factors in deciding which applicants to invite to the freshman class, but as a predominant or determining factor in admissions — an effect that was multiplied for competitive applicants.
