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January 2021

Barstool Sports Raised $18 Million To Help Small Businesses, Putting Big Government’s Pathetic Relief Efforts To Shame By Evita Duffy

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/05/barstool-sports-raised-18-million-to-help-small-businesses-putting-big-governments-pathetic-relief-efforts-to-shame/

Barstool Sports founder and President Dave Portnoy has raised over $18 million for struggling small businesses that have continued paying employees despite financial devastation caused by crippling government lockdowns.

Nearly 80 businesses have already been supported by the Barstool Fund after Portnoy became fed up with unjust lockdowns and no relief. “I can’t believe in this country that what I consider the most basic right of them all, the right to earn a living, the right to earn a livelihood, is now being stolen,” Portnoy said. “And they’re saying that they protect us. Let us protect ourselves. You’re not protecting a family that you just destroyed.”

Many Americans have remarked that when it comes to COVID-19 relief, Barstool, with its private-sector fund, has been much more effective than Congress.

Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi waited months to pass a COVID-19 bill after the initial coronavirus relief benefits expired in July, even turning down a $1.8 trillion package offered by the Trump administration as a compromise. At the final hour, before the year ended, Congress finally passed a bill, but many Americans have been less than pleased to discover that millions of dollars that could have been allocated to struggling small businesses will actually be given to special interests that have nothing to do with the pandemic.

Some $25 million is going to Pakistan, $15 million to “democracy programs,” and another $10 million to unspecified “gender programs.” The Office of Diversity and Inclusion of the Appropriations Committee is receiving $1.5 million, and $200 million will be going toward new cars for foreign HIV/AIDS workers.

The Kennedy Center is receiving $40 million for operations, maintenance, and renovations — after having receiving $25 million in the first round of relief. Notably, several senators and representatives, including Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., are on the board of the performing arts center.

While we already know where some of the funds in the massive $900 billion stimulus package will go, we won’t really know who, how, or if American small businesses will actually receive meaningful assistance through the relief bill, paid for by American taxpayers.

Radical Democrats Are Turning Minneapolis Into A Violent Wasteland By Jenna Stocker

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/04/radical-democrats-are-turning-minneapolis-into-a-violent-wasteland/

If you want to know what the real-time self-destruction of a city looks like under Democrats’ dangerous ideology, Minneapolis offers the perfect model.

The world witnessed in the streets of Minneapolis this spring and summer the feature presentation after many increasingly violent coming attractions, created, produced, and distributed by a one-party, radical left government.

If you want to know what the real-time self-destruction of a city looks like, Minneapolis offers the perfect model. This is no Detroit-esque collapse prompted by the degeneration of an industry-dependent metropolis. This is the willful push down the path of ruin of a city burgeoning with opportunity and rife with promises of the American Dream. It is suicide.

Downtown’s ghost-town feel is taking a dystopian turn as empty streets are being taken over by a resurging homeless population openly using drugs and increasingly aggressive. The mentally ill are left to similar fates, often found huddled in bus shelters.

A decline in police and mental health resources compounds the impending disaster as winter deepens and shelters fill. This is a city in which some of the most recognizable companies make their national and regional headquarters: Target, General Mills, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, and Xcel Energy. They have the resources to ride out the lockdowns, but the corner hot-dog stand, skyway mini-mart, and corner bar likely don’t.

The disease plaguing the streets of Minneapolis’ north side and the areas around Chicago Avenue and Lake Street is less about COVID and more about the consequences of what Fyodor Dostoyevsky asks of man in “Notes from the Underground,” “But why has he such a passionate love for destruction and chaos?” For a far-left Minneapolis City Council at war with its police force and local citizens yet maintaining control due to leftist activism and special interests, the answer may be in the blind devotion to the radical belief of constantly burning and building into the unattainable utopia they so hubristically believe they can create.

Sophist’s Choice Diane Ravitch’s arguments against school choice miss the mark by miles.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/06/sophists-choice/

The latest anti-school choice rant comes to us courtesy of Diane Ravitch, “a historian of education,” who is the Arthur C. Clarke of her field. When she writes, the reader is treated to science fiction dosed with a substantive amount of snake oil for good measure. In the current New York Review of Books, Ravitch’s “The Dark History of School Choice” is laden with cherry-picked half-truths and a level of fearmongering guaranteed to put a satisfied smirk on the face of every teacher union leader.

Reviewing several books on the subject, she does correctly cite a few circumstances where the push for the privatization of schools was used to promote racial segregation, but her 3,700-word tirade is very light on facts and is instead primarily an excuse to bash Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Christianity, and free-market policies in education.

As director of policy at EdChoice Jason Bedrick notes, there have been seven studies examining the effect of private school choice on racial integration. Six found positive effects and one showed no significant statistical difference. Another important piece of data conveniently absent from Ravitch’s screed is that a recent American Federation for Children poll conducted by Beck Research—a Democratic polling firm—finds that nationally, school choice is very popular with Latinos—82 percent support it, while 68 percent of African Americans are in favor. It is important to note that this poll was taken in January 2020, before the teacher unions strong-armed school districts into ditching in-person learning.

Turkey and Israel: Premature Optimism for Normalization by Burak Bekdil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16901/turkey-israel-premature-optimism

It would be childish to believe that the man whose political formation was based on a militant expanse of anti-Zionism as raison d’être was not anti-Israeli, but had merely been under the influence of advisors who no longer hold sway. Erdoğan is anti-Israeli today as he was 40, 30, 20 and 10 years ago.

In August, The Telegraph revealed that Ankara had granted citizenship and passports to “senior operatives of a Hamas terrorist cell” …. Also in August, Erdoğan met in Istanbul with Hamas’s senior military leader, Saleh al-Arouri, and senior political leader, Ismail Haniyeh.

These are not blurred memories from distant past…. They follow an ideological pattern of hostility along religious lines. They do not make Erdoğan a reliable partner for peace.

As a matter of fact, none of the reasons why Erdoğan preferred to steer otherwise friendly relations between Turkey and Israel into where they stand today has disappeared. Without their disappearing for good, a reset will remain but a sweet wish.

It has been more than a decade since Turkey and Israel, once strategic partners, broke up badly, with an angry Ankara passionately vowing to isolate Israel internationally. It has also been exactly four years since the two countries decided to give peace a chance once more and appointed ambassadors. They would have to pack up and leave after 17 months of trying to put things back together again.

The decade of animosity between Turkey and Israel, clearly a choice of Turkey’s Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has produced exactly the opposite of what Ankara had hoped would happen: The Abraham Accords produced a landmark opportunity for peace in the Middle East. Israel’s former Arab foes have lined up to end hostilities, one after the other, while Turkey, oddly, criticized the establishment of diplomatic ties between the Arab world and Israel, having apparently forgotten that it already had diplomatic relations with Israel since 1949.

The United States and seven other countries recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, while Turkey campaigned for the “Palestinian capital Jerusalem.” Israel built a geostrategic alliance with Cyprus and Greece while Turkey’s tensions with the Hellenic states escalated exponentially. Turkey’s ties with fellow Muslim countries such as Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates sank from one nadir to another. Eventually, Turkey became the first country in the world that was officially sanctioned by Russia, the U.S. and the European Union. Turkey’s “isolate Israel” hysteria has practically turned Turkey into a monument of self-isolation.

BLM Agitator DeRay Mckesson: Don’t Blame Me Supreme Court takes a pass on holding a violent agitator accountable. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/blm-agitator-deray-mckesson-dont-blame-me-matthew-vadum/

While Americans were preoccupied in the fall with the presidential election, the Supreme Court quietly let Black Lives Matter agitator DeRay Mckesson, an outspoken apologist for political violence directed at police, completely off the hook for the vicious maiming of a police officer at a rowdy protest he organized.

Mckesson, of course, is on record as favoring mob violence against police officers.

At a July 9, 2016 protest that social media star Mckesson (who has a million followers on Twitter) unlawfully led onto a highway in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the police officer involved suffered brain trauma, a head injury, and lost teeth after an unknown assailant threw a rock or piece of concrete at him. Mckesson, who had encouraged people to block Airline Highway outside the city’s police headquarters, managed to extract a cash payment from the city over his allegedly heavy-handed, livestreamed arrest, as the Advocate reported Nov. 22, 2016. (Mckesson also filed a frivolous lawsuit against former Judge Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News host, and Fox itself, for defamation. A judge of the Supreme Court of the State of New York dismissed the action in March 2019.)

True to form, Mckesson painted himself as a victim. 

“The police want protesters to be too afraid to protest, which is why they intentionally created a context of conflict, and I’ll never be afraid to tell the truth,” he later said, according to the New York Times. “What we saw in Baton Rouge was a police department that chose to provoke protesters to create, like, a context of conflict they could exploit.”

The BLM radicals were protesting the police-involved July 5, 2016 death of a notoriously violent criminal who had reportedly menaced an innocent by-stander with a gun. Recidivist felon Alton Sterling, a registered sex offender well known to local law enforcement, was shot to death by police in Baton Rouge after a physical struggle with police in which Sterling reached for a weapon.

On January 6, We Learn Whether our Constitution Will Hold And whether congressional Republicans care. Mark Levin

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/january-6-we-learn-whether-our-constitution-will-frontpagemagcom/

January 6 is the day we learn whether our Constitution will hold and whether congressional Republicans care.

The 2020 presidential election was, in several targeted battleground states, an unconstitutional electoral exercise. Even putting aside evidence of significant fraud, virtually none of which received a hearing by our courts, events leading up to and including the November national election constituted a radical and grave departure from the federal electoral system adopted by the framers of the Constitution and the state ratification conventions. Now, let’s be clear: None of this matters to the Democrat Party, since it and its surrogates perpetrated these unconstitutional acts, as I shall soon explain. Nor does it matter to the media, which is utterly illiterate on the subject and unequivocally supports the supposed outcome in any event. But it should be of great moment and concern to the people of this country and especially to congressional Republicans in both Houses, for if the latter do not at least confront and challenge this lawlessness on January 6, when Congress meets to count the electors, it will be the GOP’s undoing and, simultaneously, the undoing of our presidential electoral system. Ultimately, it will be the people of the United States who love our republic who will be the losers.

Win, lose, or draw, on January 6, the Republicans must not act as if “the people have spoken” and be cowered into passivity or worse, such as joining the Democrat Party and media hecklers, by insisting that they are part of a lawless party seeking to “reverse the results of the election.” Too many Republicans have already buckled, including the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, Sen. John Thune, and Rep. Adam Kinzinger. No doubt others who are unreliable and cowardly when facing the organized mob will follow. But let us not be judged by those who have intentionally and strategically manipulated our politics and the law to undermine our constitutional order. It is they who must be condemned.

NATIONAL REVIEW HEADLINES TODAY

Trump’s Shameful Georgia Call

By Rich Lowry

If he were to succeed in his bid to remain in office, he’d provoke a disastrous constitutional crisis.
Blame Everything, but Especially Trump
By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Another ‘Perfect’ Phone Call

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Trump’s attempt to bully the Georgia secretary of state into giving him a win in the state is beyond the pale.

Trump’s Final Insult

By Kevin D. Williamson

There simply is no defending the post-election shenanigans he is currently up to.

Trump Attacks Georgia Gov. for Abandoning Election Fight, Vows to Campaign against Him

By Brittany Bernstein

President Trump opened his remarks at the rally saying he had run in two elections and ‘won both of them.’
This Is Not a Coup — Just a Very Cynical Fraud

By Dan McLaughlin

Congressional Republicans are engaging in sheer political theater to flaunt their loyalty to Trump, and they know it.

If This Be Treason, Make The Most Of It Lewis K. Uhler and Peter J. Ferrara

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/05/if-this-be-treason-make-the-most-of-it/

Patrick Henry was the initial Governor of Virginia. In a speech before the First Continental Congress, Henry compared King George III of Great Britain to Julius Caesar. In reply to cries of treason among the divided Congress, Henry responded “If this be treason, make the most of it.”

Something similar just happened to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in the current Congress. He proclaimed he would contest the electoral vote for “King” Biden on January 6 when the Electoral College reports to Congress, on evidence of widespread ballot fraud in 6 swing states: Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada. Democrats in response called for him to be arrested for treason.

Cruz speaks for millions of Americans, and the vast majority of Republicans, who believe Democrats stole the election for Biden. They don’t believe vote totals showing that, campaigning from his basement in Delaware, Biden got more votes than even Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, or Hillary Clinton in 2016, or any other candidate for President in American history!

Indeed, if that ballot fraud is allowed to prevail without challenge, Americans will have lost their Constitutional Republic and the very idea of democracy itself. The Constitution provides that even in federal elections states are to follow the laws provided by their state legislatures. But in the six swing states challenged, the election laws provided by their state legislatures were not followed.

An Administration Of Plagiarists: What This Means For The Country

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/06/an-administration-of-plagiarists-what-this-means-for-the-country/

Sen. Kamala Harris has fallen into the same frying pan Joe Biden found himself in 1987 when he stole a speech from a member of the British Parliament. But Harris’ appropriation of someone else’s story is indicative of more than a deep character flaw. It’s confirmation these people have nothing to offer but old, tired ideas, some of them taken from history’s worst people.

In a story published in October, the Democratic California senator recounted an incident from her childhood, in which she was “being wheeled through an Oakland, California, civil rights march in a stroller” and at “some point” fell out. Her fall went unnoticed by “the adults” who were “caught up in the rapture of protest,” and “just kept on marching.” When she was eventually found, her mother, says Harris, asked her what she wanted and what she needed.

“And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom.’”

Compare that tale to the words of Martin Luther King Jr. from a 1965 interview:

I never will forget a moment in Birmingham when a white policeman accosted a little Negro girl, seven or eight years old, who was walking in a demonstration with her mother. ‘What do you want?’ the policeman asked her gruffly, and the little girl looked him straight in the eye and answered, ‘Fee-dom.’ 

Anyone Notice That Biden Tried To Bribe Georgia Voters With $2,000 Checks

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/05/anyone-notice-that-biden-tried-to-bribe-georgia-voters-with-2000-checks/

At a speech in Georgia on the eve of two runoff elections that will determine the control of the Senate, Joe Biden tried to woo voters to his side by promising them $2,000 in cash if they voted for the Democratic contenders.  

What he didn’t tell Georgians is that if they elect those two Democrats – Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock – Biden will take all that money away, and more, to pay for his radical leftist agenda.

“If you send Jon and the reverend to Washington, those $2,000 checks will go out the door, restoring hope and decency and honor for so many people who are struggling right now,” Biden said during his speech. “If you send Sens. Perdue and Loeffler back to Washington, those checks will never get there. It’s just that simple.”

Has vote-buying ever been more flagrant?

Never mind that passing out deficit-financed checks will do little to help the economy recover.

What Biden is hoping to buy with that money isn’t “decency and honor.” What he’s wishing for is a blank check to impose the most sweepingly radical agenda ever proposed by a presidential candidate. With Democrats in control of the House and Senate, he will have that blank check.

Biden only hinted at this in speech, saying: “With their votes in the Senate, we’ll be able to make the progress we need to make on jobs, on health care, on justice, on the environment, on so many important things.’

What he means is, Democrats will be able to:

Eliminate the filibuster in the Senate, removing any chance for the Republicans to stop the Democrats’ leftist agenda.
Pack the Supreme Court with liberals who will rubber stamp unconstitutional intrusions into our lives.
Impose the Green New Deal on the country, which will effectively give the federal government control over every aspect of our lives in the name of fighting “climate change.”
Raise taxes through the roof, and steal money out of people’s retirement accounts.
Pass a raft of mandates on businesses in the name of “fairness.”
Finish the job of nationalizing health care.