ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Zelensky’s unfortunate Knesset address Ruthie Blum

Posted By on March 22nd, 2022

https://www.jns.org/opinion/zelenskys-unfortunate-knesset-address/

Clearly realizing, or having been told by advisers, that he’d crossed a line in his Zoom speech to the Knesset on Sunday evening, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky subsequently softened his tone. In a video message on Telegram several hours later, he said, “Of course, Israel has its interests—strategy—to protect its citizens. We understand all of it. The prime minister of Israel, Mr. [Naftali] Bennett, is trying to find a way of holding talks, and we are grateful for this. We are grateful for his efforts, so that sooner or later we will begin to have talks with Russia, possibly in Jerusalem. That’s the right place to find peace, if possible.”

It is this sentiment that he should have conveyed while calling on Israel’s lawmakers for help. Instead, the leader who is being hailed by much of the world as a heroic David fending off an evil Goliath not only chastised the Jewish state; he totally distorted Holocaust history in the process.

Invoking Golda Meir, he quoted what he called her “famous words.” He said, “We intend to remain alive. Our neighbors want to see us dead. This is not a question that leaves much room for compromise.”
This was his way of tailoring his remarks to the audience, as he had done when speaking to the British Parliament on March 9, the Canadian Parliament on March 15, the U.S. Congress on March 16 and the German Bundestag on March 17. In each case, he cited examples with which the politicians and public could relate. And though his pleas for military aid included criticism that not more is being done to come to Ukraine’s rescue, they also contained clauses of gratitude. His admonitions to Israel, on the other hand, were unequivocal.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

There’s a cultural revolution occurring in America’s legal system By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on March 22nd, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/theres_a_cultural_revolution_occurring_in_americas_legal_system.html

People who hate lawyers like to quote Shakespeare’s line from Henry VI: “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” That’s completely wrong. In the play, it was the anarchy-demanding mob that gave voice to the sentiment. Lawyers are the bulwark of the rule of law and civil society. That’s why it matters that today’s law students and young lawyers are demanding that any lawyers who deviate from woke principles when it comes to representing people or issues must be silenced and, if possible, destroyed.

It used to be that every law student learned about John Adams successfully representing the hugely unpopular British soldiers charged with murder for the Boston Massacre. He did so because he understood a principle that I vividly remember my criminal law professor articulating almost 40 years ago: Nobody, no matter the charge against him, should have to stand alone before the awesome majesty of the government which, ultimately, is both judge and executioner.

That concept is completely lost today, something that burst into full public awareness last week when more than 100 Yale law students, through noise and physical intimidation, made it impossible for Kristen Waggoner, of the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom, to speak (ironically enough) about free speech—with almost no administrative pushback and no consequences.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ted Cruz Destroys Democrats During Jackson Confirmation Hearings By Matt Margolis

Posted By on March 22nd, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/03/21/ted-cruz-destroys-democrats-during-jackson-confirmation-hearings-n1568303

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was on fire Monday during Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings. He used his time to absolutely destroy the Democrats for their past reprehensible behavior and assured Jackson that Republicans would treat her more respectfully and fairly than Democrats have treated Republican nominees.

“Now, what should this hearing be? And what should it not be?” Cruz asked. “Well, you’ve heard a number of members on the Republican side of the aisle quite clear on what it should not be. This will not be a political circus. This will not be the kind of character smear that, sadly, our Democratic colleagues have gotten very good at,” he said, before detailing the Democrats’ shameful record.

He began by talking about a weekly podcast he did a couple of years ago on which a liberal guest insisted that both Democrats and Republicans smear Supreme Court nominees. But, Cruz pointed out, this person was dead wrong. “It is only one side of the aisle, the Democratic aisle, that went so into the gutter with Judge Robert Bork that they invented a new verb, to ‘Bork’ someone.”

“It is only one side of the aisle that, with Justice Clarence Thomas, was so reprehensible that […] President George Herbert Walker Bush wrote at the time, quote, what’s happening to Clarence Thomas is just plain horrible,” Cruz continued.  “All the groups that tried to beat him up on abortion, affirmative action have now come out of the woodwork, they’re trying to destroy a decent man. As Justice Thomas observed in that hearing, what happened there was, to use his words, ‘a high-tech lynching.’ And I would note the chairman who presided over that disgrace was Joe Biden.”

MEDIA Comments turned off

Is It Twitter’s Policy That Users May Not Dissent (or Joke) on the Trans Issue? By Charles C. W. Cooke

Posted By on March 22nd, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/is-it-twitters-policy-that-users-may-not-dissent-or-joke-on-the-trans-issue/

EXCERPTS

Caroline notes that:

The Babylon Bee, a Christian satire site, was locked out of Twitter Sunday for a satirical post that named transgender Cabinet member Rachel Levine “Man of the Year.”

Twitter claimed that the article violated its rules against “hateful conduct” when it notified the Bee that its account had been frozen.

In theory, “You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease” sounds rather straightforward. In practice, it’s nothing of the sort. At this very moment, there are people on Twitter hoping aloud that Clarence Thomas dies. Day in, day out, those same people write that Thomas is “not black,” and even that he’s a “race traitor.” For some reason, they never seem to get suspended. Presumably, Twitter’s defense is that this is somehow “different.” If so, then Twitter should own that difference and help us all understand where its lines have been drawn.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Zelensky’s Holocaust Denial Should Be a Red Line for Jews Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on March 22nd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/03/zelenskys-holocaust-denial-should-be-red-line-jews-daniel-greenfield/

Ukraine’s leader Zelensky had previously exploited and lied about the Holocaust, but not as much as he did in his attack on Israel.

First, Zelensky appropriated the Holocaust by falsely claiming that Putin’s invasion is another genocide. It’s wrong, but it’s far from genocide.

“That is why I want to remind you of the words of a great woman from Kyiv, whom you know very well. The words of Golda Meir. They are very famous, everyone has heard of them. Apparently, every Jew. Many, many Ukrainians as well. And certainly no less, Russians: “We intend to remain alive. Our neighbors want to see us dead. This is not a question that leaves much room for compromise.”

The Jews actually faced genocide at the hands of the Nazis and the Ukrainians. They face genocide again at the hands of Ukraine’s Iranian trading partners.

No one who hasn’t completely bought into the insane propaganda believes that Putin is about to kill millions of Ukrainians, to march men, women and children into pits and machine gun them, as the Nazis and Ukrainians did to the Jews at Babi Yar.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Most Americans Are Moving On from Covid. Progressive Elites Aren’t By Nate Hochman

Posted By on March 22nd, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/most-americans-are-moving-on-from-covid-progressive-elites-arent/

Mandates and masks and fear are no longer normal — unless you read or write for the New York Times.

T he chaotic news cycle in Ukraine has overshadowed a significant development domestically — the drastic shift in public opinion on Covid-19 precautions. “Two years after the start of the pandemic, the nation is ready to move on,” Axios reported last week. “64% of survey respondents now favor federal, state and local governments lifting all COVID-19 restrictions, up 20 percentage points since early February.” (Although “three in four say they’d go back to masking if infections increase again where they live,” it noted.) On top of that, “84% say their state of emotional well-being is good, the highest shares for both since May 2020.” And “75% said the country is moving toward a time when COVID won’t interrupt daily life, up from 66% last month.”

Notably, it’s Democrats who are reporting the largest shift in views toward the pandemic. According to recent numbers from Morning Consult, “the share of adults who say COVID-19 is a severe health risk in their local community fell to an all-time low of 17%, driven by a roughly 20-point decrease among Democrats in recent weeks. Just under a quarter of Democrats now say COVID-19 is a severe local risk, compared with 12% of Republicans, a level that has also fallen since late January.” From January 14 to March 13, the share of American adults who see Covid as a “severe” health risk fell 17 points, from 34 to 17 percent. Among Republicans, that number fell 11 points, from 23 to 12 percent. But among Democrats over that time period, it fell 23 points, from 46 to 23.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Our Surreal “Rage of Self-Mutilation” Biden’s shameless negotiations with the Mullahs are nearing completion. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on March 22nd, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/our-surreal-rage-self-mutilation-bruce-thornton/

That phrase is how Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described the 20th century’s catalogue of horrors: two world wars, fascism, communism, Nazism, mass slaughter, the Cold War and its apocalyptic stakes–“oceans of blood and mountains of corpses, Auschwitz and the Gulag,” as George Weigel put it. And that catalogue continues today in Ukraine, with mechanized violence and wanton inhumanity on a scale we haven’t seen since 1945.

Yet today our social, political, and cultural dysfunctions are more insidious, as over the last few decades they have distributed, promoted, and indulged failures of morality, technocratic hubris, and common sense of the sort that were the predicates of all the disasters of the 20th century. Only now they are at a level of surreal silliness and stupidity that would be mordantly funny if the stakes for our civilization weren’t so high.

Now comes proof in the news that the indirect negotiations between the Biden administration and the genocidal clerical regime in Iran are nearing completion. Since its beginning in the Obama administration, this diplomatic attempt to keep nuclear weapons out of the mullahs’ hands has defied facts and logic, and relied on magical thinking. How else other than surreal can we describe a process that aims at merely delaying, rather than preventing, an illiberal, fanatical cabal from obtaining weapons of mass destruction?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Are You Better off Today Than a Year Ago? By Four to One Americans Say NO! Terry Jones

Posted By on March 22nd, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/03/21/ii-tipp-poll-are-you-better-off-today-than-a-year-ago-by-4-to-1-americans-say-no/

Are you better off today under President Joe Biden than you were a year earlier? And are you financially prepared for a downturn in the economy or a job loss? The March I&I/TIPP Poll suggests most Americans would answer “no” to both of those questions.

The poll asked: “Generally speaking, is your family better off today than it was one year ago, worse off than it was one year ago, or about the same as it was a year ago?”

Fewer than one in five (20%) said they were “better off.” while more than twice that number — 42% — said they were “worse off.” Another 36% said they were “about the same.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

VITAL QUESTIONS FOR KETANJI BROWN JACKSON

Posted By on March 22nd, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/03/22/how-is-boofed-pronounced-and-other-vital-questions-ketanji-brown-jackson-must-answer/

By all evidence, Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court will be a shoo-in. Not because she’s supremely qualified, but because her nomination — as the press reminds us in every headline — is “historic.” Yes, there are and have been black justices and women justices, but never, ever a black woman justice! Who would dare stand in the way of history?

President Joe Biden assumed that by checking all the correct woke boxes his candidate could escape the sort of vicious scrutiny, rumormongering, character-destroying attacks visited upon Republican nominees – apparently forgetting that Democratic nominees always get a free pass from the media, and from genteel Republicans.

Nevertheless, if Democrats want to at least give the appearance of fairness, they should ask Jackson the same questions they asked the last two Republican nominees to the court.

We’re not talking about those silly questions that might reveal her judicial philosophy. Although there is plenty there worthy of careful scrutiny. Joel Pollak over at Breitbart News put together a handy list of such questions, ranging from: Do you believe current penalties for sex offenders are too harsh? What do you think of Biden’s decision only to select a black woman as a nominee? Do you support critical race theory? Do you agree with the “1619 Project” that America was founded on slavery? Do you support court-packing? Can we have rule of law with an open border?

Democrats have already labeled such questions as racist.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Pain in the Gas Inflated by taxes and regulations, prices at the pump are higher in Democratic-leaning states. Steven Malanga

Posted By on March 22nd, 2022

https://www.city-journal.org/gas-prices-higher-in-democratic-leaning-states

The average price of one gallon of regular gasoline in the United States rose by a dollar, to $3.31, during Joe Biden’s first year in the White House. Now, supercharged by war in Ukraine, the price has soared to $4.27 per gallon. That average, though, is misleading. The actual price of gas at the pump varies widely by state, with nearly a $2-per-gallon difference between the costliest and the least expensive states. While some of those differences have to do with geographic factors that affect distribution costs, state policies—including taxes and regulations—also play a significant role in the vastly different burden consumers face around the country.

The highest gas prices are found disproportionately in high-tax, heavily regulated Democratic states, while the lowest gas prices show up in so-called red or purple states. California leads the way at a whopping $5.78 per gallon, followed by Nevada, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Illinois, Connecticut, and New York among the lower 48 states (Hawaiian and Alaskan geography make any comparisons with the rest of the country difficult). At the bottom sits Kansas, at $3.81 per gallon, followed by Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Iowa.

The price of a barrel of oil accounts for about 56 percent of the cost of this gas. Taxes on average compose about 15 percent of the price, and distribution and marketing costs amount to the rest. State gas taxes are an obvious culprit, but extraordinary fuel standards beyond the national level force up prices, too—as do regulatory constraints on building pipelines and refineries, which inflate distribution costs.