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POLITICS

Sen. Warren’s Proposal to Divide Jerusalem is Not Only Immoral, But Dangerous What a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem would really mean. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/senator-warrens-proposal-divide-jerusalem-not-only-frontpagemagcom/

As Democratic candidates for the presidency continue to move further to the left in an effort to distance themselves from the policies and politics of President Trump, the two frontrunners, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have increased the rhetoric against what is normally an untouchable topic for Democrats and Republicans alike: the United States’ relationship with the sole democracy in the Middle East, Israel. While no candidate could expect to survive the political cost of walking away from Israel completely— diplomatically and financially—Sanders and Warren have recently been spouting positions with regard to Israel that show they apparently feel they can make that support conditional and can change the way the U.S. has traditionally been a trustworthy diplomatic partner with shared strategic goals. 

At the J Street conference this week in Washington, D.C., for example, Sanders suggested to the attendees of the liberal Jewish Middle East policy group that, while the $3.8 billion in aid the U.S. commits to Israel each year should remain intact, he wondered out loud if this aid could be conditional. “My solution is to say to Israel: you get $3.8 billion dollars every year, if you want military aid you’re going to have to fundamentally change your relationship to the people of Gaza,” Sanders said. “In fact,” he added with breathtaking audacity, “I think it is fair to say that some of that should go right now into humanitarian aid in Gaza.” Perhaps Sanders has forgotten that the humanitarian crisis he alludes to in Hamas-controlled Gaza is largely the result of the terrorist group’s diverting of funds meant for schools, hospitals, food, and infrastructure in Gaza and using them instead for the construction of terror tunnels, rifles, bombs, and some of the 15,000 or so of rockets and mortars that have been launched from Gaza since the 2005 disengagement and have rained down of southern Israeli towns with the sole purpose of murdering Jews.

Not to be outdone in dangerous rhetoric about Israel’s future relationship with the United States, Senator Warren delivered a videotaped speech to the J Street conferees, announcing that if she becomes president she will push for the oft-discussed two-state solution, “the best outcome for U.S. interests,” as she put it. It will be “the best outcome for Israel’s security and future, and the best outcome for ensuring the Palestinian’s right to freedom and self-determination,” at the same time “ensuring an end to Israeli occupation.”  There is nothing new about that proposal; what was new, and shocking, about Warren’s speech was her strident addition to the two-state plan, namely, that Jerusalem—the spiritual and ancestral home of Judaism for some 3000 years—would be carved up into two capitals, one Israeli and one Palestinian. “I will make clear,” she announced in her professorial tone, “that in a two-state agreement, both parties should be able to have their capitals in Jerusalem.”

Kamala Harris Blames American Racism for Failed Campaign Kamala can’t fail, only America can. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/kamala-harris-blames-american-racism-failed-daniel-greenfield/

Senator Kamala Harris polled at 3% in last month’s Quinnipiac poll. That must make the San Fran and Hollywood donors who stuffed $11.6 million in her pantsuit pockets this quarter feel good about giving to charity.

A quarter of Iowa Democrat caucusgoers have a negative opinion of Harris. That’s up minus eleven points since June. So, Harris is making weekly trips to Iowa while claiming that she’s going to move there. Not even Democrats are stupid enough to believe that she’s going to leave her Brentwood mansion to move to a place where the temperatures are currently hovering around the low thirties.

And her Iowa stump speech is now all about accusing anyone who doesn’t vote for her of racism.

In her speeches, Harris claims that “electability”, the question of whether a candidate polling 3% nationwide can beat President Trump, is the “elephant in the room—but actually more accurately, the donkey in the room.”

There’s a donkey in the room all-right. Or maybe it’s a jackass.

“It’s been coming up in connection to my campaign: is America ready for that? Are they ready for a woman of color to be President of the United States?” Harris insists.

When Harris tried this line in an Axios on HBO interview, a baffled Margaret Talev asked, “America was ready for a black man to be President of the United States.”

Nancy Pelosi and Willie Brown Warning Democrats By Silvio Canto, Jr.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/nancy_and_willie_warning_democrats.html

 A few days after witnessing “Democrats minus two” vote for some version of an “impeach but not impeach” resolution, we get these two warnings from the West Coast.

First, Willie Brown, retired Democrat, warned Democrats about impeachment.  He was brutally honest:    

If the goal was to damage President Trump by formalizing the impeachment inquiry, it’s Mission Unaccomplished for House Democrats.

If anything, the vote solidified Trump’s hold on power. There were zero GOP defections, meaning we have zero drama heading into the public phase of impeachment. Everyone is pretty much in the same lanes they’ve been in since the Russian-collusion investigation, the obstruction of justice investigation and every other investigation.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, that gives people little reason to be glued to their screens when House committees take public testimony. The basic story — Trump pressured Ukraine to announce investigations into Democrats that would help Trump — is out there already. People know how they feel about it, and if you believe the polls, they’re pretty evenly split on whether the president deserves to be thrown out of office.

Again, that was Willie Brown, not Rush Limbaugh.

Senators Sanders and Warren Offer ‘The Squad’ Squalid Middle East Peace Plans by Edward Alexander

https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/10/31/senators-sanders-and-warren-offer-the-squ

“In the warmest of human hearts,” the socialist Irving Howe once wrote, “there is always a cold spot for the Jews.” The plans which socialist Bernie Sanders and more-than-socialist Elizabeth Warren have just set forth for resolving the Israel-Palestine “conflict” demonstrate that, in their view, Jews have not done enough dying in the past century.

The plans certainly give no evidence of compassion for the three generations of Israelis who have had to bury their own children. No, their compassion is reserved, in Sanders’ case, for the Arab residents of Gaza, ruled by the Hamas organization, whose written constitution pledges its votaries to “kill Jews wherever you find them,” and who use the billions of dollars sent them by charitable organizations to achieve that aim.

Sanders wants America to send funds intended for Israel to Gaza so its rulers will have money to pay for electricity and groceries, lest they be forced to divert the fabulous sums of money they now receive for more sanguine purposes, especially underground tunnels into Israel to perpetrate raw murder.

Warren, less patient than Sanders, would like to give the Palestinian Arabs joint control of the city of Jerusalem so that they can plant their “capital” city in Israel’s capital. The Arabs never, in their long history in the region, thought of making Jerusalem even the capital of a province. But when their war of 1948 against the nascent Jewish state gave the Jordanians half of the city, they showed, apparently unbeknownst to Warren, what happens in such an arrangement: they proceeded to destroy the synagogues, the cemeteries, the holy places, and the Jewish inhabitants of their half with a savagery that would have shamed animals.

Since in this enterprise of Middle East peacemaking, nothing succeeds like failure, the Palestinians were again, in later years, offered control of eastern Jerusalem by Ehud Barak and other Israeli doves, but to no avail.

It is no accident that Senators Sanders and Warren should offer their pro-Arab peace schemes, brimming with repudiation of their party’s long-standing political and spiritual bond with the Jewish people, at just this time.

The Reserve Army of the GOP By Matthew Continetti

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/trump-reelection-campaign-white-working-class-democratic-nominee/

How the white working class — and the Democratic nominee — could save Donald Trump in 2020

At first glance, President Trump’s reelection chances don’t look good. Stories about impeachment and presidential misbehavior dominate the news. Trump’s disapproval rating is high. Independent voters are against him. GOP congressmen are retiring from suburban districts that trend Democratic. The generic ballot is about where it was last cycle. Trump’s win in 2016, when some 78,000 voters in three states gave him the Electoral College, was a close-run thing. Seems hard to repeat.

And yet liberals are filled with apprehension. They are coming to recognize the potential size of the president’s pool of supporters. They fret over the capacities and liabilities of the eventual Democratic nominee. And their concerns are related: Trump’s ability to recapitulate or expand his winning coalition depends in large part on the identity of his opponent. Given these uncertainties, it would be foolish to predict Trump’s fate. He might even be stronger than he appears.

“Despite demographic trends that continue to favor the Democrats, and despite Trump’s unpopularity among wide swathes of the electorate, it will still be difficult for the Democrats to prevail against an incumbent president who has presided over a growing, low-unemployment economy and retains strong loyalty among key sectors of the electorate,” write Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin of the Center for American Progress. No conservatives they.

The Democratic difficulty has a name: the Electoral College. Twice in the 21st century, the level of the presidential vote has mattered less than its distribution. Trump’s people are spread much more evenly across the country than his opponents are. His base of white voters without college degrees, say Teixeira and Halpin, “make up more than half of all eligible voters in critical Electoral College states he won in 2016—including Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and in key target states for 2020 such as New Hampshire.”

Bonfire of the Democratic Party’s Once-Rising Stars By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bonfire-of-the-democratic-partys-once-rising-stars/

Let the 2020 cycle be a warning to political correspondents who write glowing profile pieces on the next great Democratic party hope. For some of us, the best part of this cycle so far is watching the slow-motion implosion of so many wildly over-hyped “rising stars” of the Democratic party — relentlessly trying and failing to gain traction against a trio of well-worn septuagenarians. This primary is turning into a giant bonfire of once-promising political talents who could make national reporters swoon.

As far back as 2017, Vogue and other national glossies gushed over the presidential potential of Kirsten Gillibrand.

Beto O’Rourke was the favorite subject of glowing profiles in national publications throughout 2018.

Julian Castro spent much of the past decade being touted as “the Latino Obama.”

Cory Booker was the subject of documentaries and a social media star . . . and like the rest, he’s an afterthought.

And as our John McCormick notes, Kamala Harris’s campaign may be reaching the stage of an M.Night Shamalayan character — long since dead, but still walking around in denial of this difficult truth. Harris stands out from the others because in early summer, she appeared to have reached the top tier, or at least be knocking on the door. But difficulties in defending her record as a prosecutor have her well behind everywhere, even in her home state.

Some of the blame for these crash-and-burn campaigns goes beyond the candidates. It’s tougher to stand out among twenty-something candidates than among a half-dozen. Booker spent much of his career emulating the early Barack Obama and trying to cultivate a post-partisan problem-solver image, and with the election of Donald Trump, Democrats aren’t as interested in that — consider him a species that could not adapt to political climate change.

Kamala Harris To Cut Staff And Restructure Campaign To Save Sinking Presidential Bid By Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/30/kamala-harris-to-cut-staff-and-restructure-campaign-to-save-sinking-presidential-bid/

Kamala Harris, according to a memo obtained by Politico on Wednesday, is reportedly letting go of “dozens” of campaign staff at her Baltimore headquarters and will send some to Iowa as she hopes to save her presidential ambitions.

Harris’ decision to double-down on Iowa comes after her campaign posted poor fundraising numbers for the third quarter, struggling to garner the necessary resources and support required to be a competitive candidate. Politico reports that the “overhaul will touch nearly every face of Harris’ operation,” with staff layoffs and reassignments coming from New Hampshire, Nevada, and California, the senator’s home state.

High-level campaign staff, including Campaign Manager Juan Rodriguez will also see their salaries cut.

Harris’ latest decision to re-focus her efforts on Iowa comes after the California senator already announced in September that the month of October would be focused on the critical first-in-the-nation caucus state, spending 15 of the month’s 30 days so far in the Hawkeye state.

“I’m f-cking moving to Iowa,” Harris was caught joking to Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono.

The campaign pledged a third-place finish in the state to stay competitive in the primary, a campaign promise that Harris’ latest moves signal might have been a bad bet as she finds herself polling worse there than she did at the beginning of the month.

According to Real Clear Politics’ latest aggregate of polls, Harris is only polling with 2.7 percent support, trailing behind six other candidates and tied with Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and billionaire Tom Steyer.

Harris entered the race as a top-tier candidate. With a breakout moment at the first Democratic primary debate calling out former Vice President Joe Biden for his previous opposition to bussing, Harris was once seen as a candidate on the rise before seeing a steady decline in support starting in July.

Nationally, Harris is at 5 percent support in Real Clear Politics’ aggregate of polls, behind Biden, Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

The J Street Democrats Ben Shapiro

https://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2019/10/30/the-j-street-democrats-n2555560

This week, four of the top candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination — Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro and Bernie Sanders — gathered at the J Street Conference to explain why the United States ought to pressure the state of Israel to make concessions to terrorists, why the Obama administration was correct to appease the Iranian regime and why American Jews ought to value the opinions of Bernie Sanders over those of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the future of Jewish safety. Two other top Democrats — Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden — sent video messages in support of the group.

By contrast, when the American Israel Public Affairs Committee held its annual conference in March, not a single Democratic presidential candidate showed up. The Democrats are, by and large, simply too ashamed to stand with an actual pro-Israel group, although prominent congressional leaders still show up to mouth nostrums about bipartisan support for Israel.

But the heart of the Democratic Party has moved against Israel. That’s because Israel is economically successful, while its enemies are not; Israel is liberal, while its enemies are not; Israel is the tip of the spear of Western civilization in an area known for its tribalism and brutality. This means that according to the radical left, Israel is an exploitative country hell-bent on domination, despite its lack of territorial ambition — Israel has signed over large swaths of land won through military victory to geopolitical enemies, and offered much more repeatedly.

So the Democrats built up and gave credence to J Street, a Trojan horse group dedicated to undermining American support for Israel and justifying left-wing hatred of the Jewish state. J Street was founded by Clinton operative Jeremy Ben-Ami and Israeli far-left political figure Daniel Levy in late 2007. One of its chief sources of funding — a source obscured in the early years by its founders — was anti-Israel radical George Soros.

I Can Defeat Trump and the Clinton Doctrine The U.S. will stop trying to overthrow governments and police the world. By Tulsi Gabbard

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-can-defeat-trump-and-the-clinton-doctrine-11572389508

Hillary Clinton emerged recently to claim, with no basis in fact, that I am being “groomed” by the Russian government to undermine America. As a major in the National Guard who served in Iraq—one of the many disastrous regime-change wars Mrs. Clinton championed over her career—I swore an oath to only one authority: the U.S. Constitution.

I’m running for president to undo Mrs. Clinton’s failed legacy. From Iraq to Libya to Syria, her record is replete with foreign-policy catastrophes. It’s a primary reason why I resigned as vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to endorse Bernie Sanders. Mrs. Clinton and the powerful media and political network she built up over decades have never forgiven this slight. The smears have been nonstop ever since.

Hardly a week goes by when I’m not asked a question about how I’m being secretly backed by Russia or other foreign powers—on top of countless other falsehoods intended to destroy my reputation. Those who are indebted to the war machine and the overreaching intelligence agencies, as well as their cheerleaders in the media, are determined to take me down because they know they can’t control me. I’m directly challenging their power.

This isn’t a petty “spat” between Mrs. Clinton and me. It’s a serious contrast in views about the choice voters face as they decide which Democratic candidate is best equipped to defeat President Trump. Mrs. Clinton already lost to Mr. Trump once. Why would Democrats think a Hillary 2.0 candidate would result in anything different?

The Democratic establishment is right to panic Katrina vanden Heuvel

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-democratic-establishment-is-right-to-panic/ar-AAJw9j6

The Democratic donor class is panicking. With former vice president Joe Biden burning through cash yet unable to put away his rivals, the chances of a progressive left nominee leading the ticket in 2020 are on the rise. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) are outpacing Biden in fundraising and running circles around him on the debate stage. And members of the party establishment are seemingly desperate for someone to swoop in and save them.

Last week, the New York Times published an eye-popping story about a recent dinner at a ritzy Manhattan hotel, where Democratic big donors fantasized about possible late entrants to the presidential race. Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Obama were among those discussed as potential alternatives to the current field. Former secretary of state John F. Kerry, former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr., former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) have also been encouraged to run. Oprah Winfrey, once considered a possible candidate herself, has even touted Disney CEO Bob Iger as the ideal nominee.

This sort of speculation is a tradition in presidential primaries. It’s also evidence that Democratic elites are detached from reality. Clinton’s book tour and scheduled appearance at a Clinton Foundation conference on “economic inclusion and growth” on Nov. 20 (the same day as the next Democratic debate) have fueled rumors about her intentions. But she and Kerry are the last two Democrats to lose in a general election. Bloomberg is the definition of a plutocrat. What can any of them offer, aside from money, that the existing crop of centrists cannot?