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August 2022

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

CT Port Authority Project Costs $255M, Corrupted by Unethical Gifts By Adam Andrzejewski

By on August 11th, 2022

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2022/08/10/ct_port_authority_project_costs_255m_corrupted_by_unethical_gifts_846549.html

The Connecticut Port Authority’s remaking of New London’s State Pier is costing $255.5 million and is the subject of a wide-ranging federal probe of several construction projects that were overseen by Gov. Ned Lamont’s administration.

Connecticut newspaper The Day reported that Attorney General William Tong is investigating a controversial grant in 2020 — a $523,000 success fee given to a marine consulting firm, Seabury PFRA, “for its role in choosing the politically connected operators of the port of New Haven to run the competing New London port,” the newspaper said.

An employee of the consulting firm had served on the port authority board of directors until right before his firm got the large contract.

The Seabury firm agreed to pay $10,000 in fines for violating ethics codes by giving gifts to two port authority employees and a board member, the Office of State Ethics said.

The gifts came during 2017 and 2019, a time when agency spending was out of control, not properly recorded, with lavish expense accounts and payments made to insiders without competitive bidding, The Day reported.

Former board chairpersons, Old Lyme First Selectwoman Bonnie Reemsnyder and Scott Bates, deputy secretary of the state, both resigned at the request of the governor.

While the Ethics Office fined Seabury for the unethical payments, it won’t say who got the bribes and neither will the Port Authority.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Under Biden’s DOJ, The Rule Of Law In America Has Become A Farce By: John Daniel Davidson

By on August 11th, 2022

https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/10/under-bidens-doj-the-rule-of-law-in-america-has-become-a-farce/

Biden’s Justice Department and FBI will do anything to keep Trump from regaining the White House, even if it means imitating Nicaragua.

The criminal indictment and imprisonment of former heads of state by ruling regimes in other countries is more common than most Americans probably realize. Today, former presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, Panama, Peru, Paraguay, and Costa Rica are all imprisoned — and that’s just in Central and South America.

The world is replete with corrupt leaders who criminalize the opposition and politicize domestic law enforcement. That’s why, for example, Daniel Ortega has been president of Nicaragua since 2007. When you jail your political opponents and potential rivals, as Ortega did with gusto ahead of Nicaragua’s 2021 presidential election, it’s easy to stay in office. One of the salient features of these so-called “developing countries” is that they have not developed a way to transfer power peacefully. Brute force, not free and fair elections, is how rulers of the Third World seize and retain power.

Soon, the United States might join their ranks. On Monday evening, dozens of FBI agents raided the Florida home of former President Donald Trump. The absurd pretext for the raid was a dispute over documents with the National Archives — a circumstance by no means unique to the Trump administration and one that no serious person believes could ever justify such a raid.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

‘Citizen Chronicler of the American Story’ David McCullough hooked readers on U.S. history. By James Freeman

By on August 11th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/citizen-chronicler-of-the-american-story-11660170030?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

What would we do without experts? The era of Covid has seen immense damage inflicted on Americans by some of the most highly credentialed people in our society. So let’s remember a remarkable man who didn’t leave something as important as U.S. history to the professoriate.

Bill Eville reported this week for the Vineyard Gazette:

David McCullough, a towering force in American literature and biography, winner of the President’s Medal of Freedom, two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards, died on August 7. He was 89 years old.
He died of natural causes at home in Hingham, the family confirmed, where he had lived for the past few years, with all five children by his side.

Candice Millard remembers in the Atlantic:

The first book I read by McCullough was John Adams, one of his many masterworks that begins with men on the move. “In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter,” he wrote, “two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north.” For me, that was all it took. I wanted to know who these men were, where they were going, what was going to happen next. I did not care that the book was nearly 800 pages long. I was hooked.

So were countless others. McCullough didn’t spend a career on campus, and readers may have been better for it. In 2003 Librarian of Congress James Billington wrote:

David McCullough is the citizen chronicler of the American story for our time… As an independent scholar, he is not beholden to any of the ideological causes or methodological fads that often take possession of otherwise good historians in bureaucratized academia–and cause them to end up writing more for each other than for a general audience. Unlike many revisionist historians, McCullough basically likes what he is writing about; yet he seeks to clear away myths for which he can find no factual basis.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mar-a-Lago Search Shows the Swamp’s Trump Obsession: Dan Henninger

By on August 11th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-swamps-trump-obsession-mar-a-lago-raid-fb

An FBI raid against a former president should never happen. End of discussion.

Let us assume that for 99.99% of the U.S. population in early August 2022, the last thing on their mind was Mar-a-Lago. Instead, a short list of real things preoccupying Americans would include inflation, crime, battles in Congress over spending, Ukraine fighting World War III for us in Europe, and China conducting massive live-fire military exercises around Taiwan.

So it came as a surprise to discover Monday evening that the Justice Department and FBI decided the most important thing in the world just now was raiding former President Donald Trump’s estate in Palm Beach, Fla. Among other thoughts, a three-letter acronym starting with W comes to mind.

Forgive me for not spending more than a moment on the legal niceties of this event—the applicability of the Presidential Records Act, that it had be about “something big” involving classified documents, or that no one, including a former president, is above the law. They are all beside the point.

You can hate Donald Trump until your eyes pop out, but let us be clear: He was elected the 45th president of the U.S. He served four years in office. No former president who was disliked by many—not Clinton, Reagan nor FDR—had his home invaded by a squad of FBI agents. This should never happen in the U.S. End of discussion.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

America’s Strategic Oil Reserves by Lawrence Kadish

By on August 11th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18788/america-strategic-oil-reserves

The Biden administration in April sanctioned the sale of our nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to the highest bidder. They have done so under the logic that putting more oil on the global market at a time when Russia has an energy stranglehold on Europe could force down the pump price of gasoline.

One could ask, as Congressional mid-term elections loom, and the price of gas soared to five dollars a gallon, has the White House made a strategic energy decision based on politics rather than on what is in the best security interests of our nation — because the country that is among the high bidders for our oil reserves is China.

This is the China that has obliterated Tibet.

This is the China that practices slavery, torture in internment camps, forced labor, child labor and organ-harvesting on live detainees.

This is the China that has choked democracy in Hong Kong.

This is the China that threatens the freedom of 23 million Taiwanese.

This is the China that has sought to cripple an Australian military plane flying over international waters.

This is the China that has fired missiles into Japan’s exclusive economic zone and tried to blind US pilots with laser beams.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China and Russia—With Help from Biden—Attack the Dollar by Gordon G. Chang

By on August 11th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18787/china-russia-attack-dollar

Russia and China have launched another attempt to develop a “new global reserve currency.” In other words, they are again attacking the dollar.

There is only one country that can dethrone the dollar, and it is not a BRICS nation. It is the United States. President Joe Biden is China’s and Russia’s biggest ally in “dedollarizing” the world.

Russia’s ruble, although showing surprising strength of late, is tied to a country in long-term—and seemingly irreversible—decline. Moreover, the Russian Federation, thanks to its aggression and barbarism in Ukraine, is cementing its role as a pariah.

Who wants to hold a weak Chinese currency that is racing toward the edge of the cliff?

Furthermore, Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, believes in “absolute” control of every aspect of society. The idea of free convertibility, therefore, is almost certainly anathema to him. So until China completely abandons its model of economic development and removes Xi as ruler, the renminbi cannot dethrone the dollar. The Chinese failure to make their currency widely acceptable means, as a practical matter, the BRICS currency will never get off the ground.

What are the attributes of a global reserve currency? It must be stable, it must be underpinned by a large and strong economy, it must be freely convertible, and it must be used widely.

Americans should not remain overconfident. The only reason the greenback is still the world’s reserve currency is because there is no practical alternative. China and Russia, however, are busy trying to figure out how to engineer a replacement.

“The issue of creating an international reserve currency based on a basket of currencies of our countries is being worked out,” said Vladimir Putin in June, at a meeting of the BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa—grouping.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Soldiers for the Gender Revolution Left-wing activists have smuggled radical gender theory into more than 4,000 schools. Christopher F. Rufo

By on August 11th, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/gsa-clubs-smuggle-gender-ideology-into-k-12-education

Radical gender theory has made sudden inroads in America’s schools. Many parents have watched in confusion as their children repeat the movement’s slogans and adopt synthetic sexual identities such as “non-binary,” “pansexual,” and “genderqueer.” The next question for many families is: Where does this surge in left-wing sexual ideology come from? One answer: from a network of professional activists, who have smuggled university-style gender theory into more than 4,000 schools under the cover of “gender and sexuality” clubs, or GSAs.

The main national organization behind this campaign, the GSA Network, is a professionally staffed nonprofit with a multimillion-dollar annual budget. GSA Network serves as an umbrella organization for more than 4,000 “gender and sexuality alliances” across 40 states. Once called the Gay-Straight Alliance Network, the group rebranded in 2016, reflecting a new focus on “the limits of a binary gender system.” The individual chapters, which operate in elementary, middle, and high schools, often use the language of “LGBTQ inclusion” and “anti-bullying” in their public relations, but behind the scenes, the central organization is driven by pure left-wing radicalism that extends far beyond sexuality.

According to the organization’s publicly accessible materials and administrative documents, the GSA Network’s ideology follows the basic framework of radical gender theory: white European men created an oppressive system based on capitalism, white supremacy, and “heteronormativity”—that is, the promotion of heterosexuality, the male-female binary, and bourgeois family norms. In order to fight back, racial and sexual minorities must unite under the banner of “intersectionality” and dismantle the interlocking “systems of oppression.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s war on Gaza-based Palestinian terrorists – a wake up call Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on August 11th, 2022

https://bit.ly/3p5Y7DV

The August 2022 Israeli war on Gaza-based Palestinian terrorists serves as a wake up call for Israeli and Western policy makers and public opinion molders, who are determined to observe/assess the volcanic and treacherous Middle East through the accommodating and relatively-peaceful Western lenses.

For example:

*The August 2022 war on Palestinian terrorism is a wake up call to the Israeli and Western “Palestine-Firsters.” Once again, Arab countries showered the Palestinians with an embracing-talk, but refrained from a supportive walk, militarily, financially or politically. Hence, the 2022 Arab walk was consistent with the Arab conduct during all previous military clashes between Israel and Palestinian terrorism: the First and Second Intifada of 1987-1993 and 2000-2005, the 1982-85 war against the PLO in Lebanon, and the four wars against the Gaza-based Hamas terrorists in 2008-9, 2012, 2014 and 2021.

*During the last few days, I participated in several TV panel-discussions with experts from Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. All of them concurred with my perspective on the non-centrality of the Palestinian issue in Middle East affairs, displaying indifference or hostility toward the Palestinians. They echoed the Arab image of Palestinians as a role-model of intra-Arab subversion, terrorism and ingratitude, as documented by the Palestinian intra-Arab track record.  

*In contrast to Western conventional wisdom, Arab policy makers are convinced that the proposed Palestinian state would be a pro-Iran, pro-Russia and pro-China rogue/terrorist entity, fueling domestic and regional turbulence, and intensifying the existing threats to the survival of every pro-US Arab regime.

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