ISRAEL Comments turned off

The left’s war on Israel is coming into the open By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on March 12th, 2022

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

Following the Holocaust, many in the world understood that Jews, the ongoing victims of the world’s oldest hatred, needed a safe haven where they would be masters of their own destiny.  That haven was Israel, a land acquired through an unbroken four-thousand-year history, purchase, and gift, and, eventually, through attacks against them, the spoils of war.  For many years, American support for Israel was consistent across the political spectrum.  However, as Israel became associated too strongly with America during the Cold War, the left turned against her — and now leftists, including those in the Biden administration, are increasingly open about their animosity.

A couple of days ago, The Washington Free Beacon revealed that the Biden administration is offering almost $1 million in taxpayer money to whatever groups can dig up dirt on Israel:

The Biden administration is offering nearly $1 million for groups to investigate alleged human rights abuses in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, an effort that will delegitimize Israel, according to sources who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.

The State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) is soliciting nonprofit groups to apply for grant money up to $987,654 to “strengthen accountability and human rights in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza,” according to a grant notice first posted online in mid-February.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Biden’s America-Wrecking Climate Agenda Steve Milloy

Posted By on March 12th, 2022

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/03/12/bidens_america-wrecking_climate_agenda_147323.html

President Biden is driving fossil fuel-powered America into a wall so that he can replace it with a “green energy”-powered America. The Biden administration euphemizes this as a “transition.” It is not. It’s just a collision that will result in America being totaled.

Since Joe Biden became president, he has done everything in his power to de-power America. On Day 1, he killed the Keystone XL Pipeline, halted new oil and gas drilling on public lands, and rejoined the Paris climate agreement, which commits America to cutting our greenhouse gas emissions but not China’s.

Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency reinstated Obama-era rules to make it more expensive to produce oil and gas, issued rules to make internal combustion engine-powered cars more expensive, and gave “green” California the unprecedented (and probably unconstitutional) authority to dictate what kind of cars all Americans can drive. Biden has empowered the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission with the authority to block new oil and gas pipelines on the basis of climate concerns, and is continuing to halt new oil and gas drilling on federal lands in defiance of a federal court order.

These and many other anti-fossil fuel actions have raised gasoline prices roughly one dollar per gallon since Biden took office. Then Russia invaded Ukraine, exacerbating an ongoing global energy crisis (worsened by European climate policies). Gasoline prices have increased another 60 cents since the Ukraine invasion, and are not likely to stop rising any time soon.

Normally in response to such an energy crisis, a U.S. president might at least temporarily put aside an unpopular political agenda to ease supply issues and alleviate pain at the pump. Not Joe Biden. He is doing anything but that. Biden first announced during his State of the Union address that he and other allied nations were going to release 60 million barrels of oil from national strategic petroleum reserves around the world, including 30 million from the United States.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

JUST PUBLISHED – OPEN THE BOOKS OVERSIGHT REPORT: INVESTIGATING FAUCI’S FINANCES

Posted By on March 12th, 2022

https://mailchi.mp/e0a2af1f130f/35b-from-us-taxpayers-funded-world-health-organization-58871?e=0c8ccf8e98

Where has Dr. Anthony Fauci gone?!

Noone seems to have heard from Fauci since the mid-January U.S. Senate hearing when he was grilled on his finances. Senator Marshall’s questions were premised on our OpenTheBooks findings on Fauci’s financials.

The senate hearing – where Fauci called Marshall a “moran” – was Fauci’s last prominent public event.

So, we’ve been hard at work to break down everything you need to know about Dr. Anthony Fauci and his finances. And now it’s all in one place…

We’re excited to share our newest 20-page Oversight Report – just published this week – INVESTIGATING FAUCI’S FINANCES – free to download right now.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Couple Of Really “Smart” Guys Set Out To Prosecute Donald Trump Francis Menton

Posted By on March 12th, 2022

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-3-11-a-couple-of-really-smart-guys-set-out-to-prosecute-donald-trump

From time to time on this blog I have had occasion to note the extent to which many of the seemingly “smartest” people in our society time and again fall hook, line and sinker for the most preposterous mass hysterias. When it really counts, the people who have risen to the very top ranks of our social hierarchies prove to have no critical thinking capabilities whatsoever. For some entertaining reading about various self-made billionaires, former cabinet secretaries, and the like, making utter fools of themselves, you might try my posts from February 9, 2017 (“Watch Out For Rule By The ‘Smart’ — Part III”), or June 25, 2014 (“Watch Out For Rule By The ‘Smart’”). Both of those posts dealt with the topic of attempts to alter world temperatures through government taxation and spending.

A recent example of the phenomenon of the smart dopes now comes forth from the District Attorney’s office of New York County — that is, the people here in Manhattan charged with the enforcement of the New York State criminal laws. In this instance the subject of the hysteria was the idea that Donald Trump, President of the United States, needed to be charged with some sort of violations of the New York criminal law arising out of his business dealings.

Although prosecutors don’t publicly announce when they start investigations, it is clear from various court filings along the way (e.g., Trump’s lawyers opposing enforcement of subpoenas) that the DA’s criminal investigation of Trump was well underway as early as 2019, that is, in the middle of Trump’s term as President. The Manhattan DA at the time was Cyrus Vance, Jr. If you are old enough, you will recognize from Vance’s name that he is the son of the Cyrus Vance who was Secretary of State when Jimmy Carter was President, and also at various times Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Army, and other such government positions, in between stints as big-time partner of big-time law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden goes bonkers over inflation Monica Showalter

Posted By on March 12th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/biden_goes_bonkers_over_inflation.html”

Joe Biden should be hopping mad about inflation, which rolled in at 7.9% and is destroying the purchasing power, wage gains, and savings of the citizenry even as he touts good economic times in his speeches.

Instead, he’s going bonkers over the voter reaction to inflation, not the inflation itself.

“I’m sick of this stuff!” he hollered.  “We have to talk about it because the American people think the reason for inflation is the government spending more money.  Simply.  Not.  True.”

But of course, it is perfectly true.  He’s wallowing in denial about it and now thinks he can yell his way into making Americans think differently.

In his wretched King Lear-like rant, brimming with rage and self-pity, Biden whimpered that Americans were just poor simpleton peasants who don’t understand inflation and don’t give Joe and all his “achievements” the credit they deserve:

Yes, they do, Joe. Yes, they do.

What do we make of this crazed rant against reality?  PJMedia’s Robert Spencer, for one, thinks it could be the dementia kicking in.

What’s happening to the American economy is entirely the fault of the old man who is shouting about how sick and tired he is of people saying it’s his fault and of the bright young Leftists with whom he has filled his administration and who are anxious to seize as much of the fruit of the labors of the American people as they can, so as to finance their various utopian boondoggles.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Why Are the Biden Administration, EU, Appeasing the Iranian Regime? by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on March 12th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18315/biden-administration-eu-iran

Many Iranians, meanwhile, in defiance of Iran’s regime, gathered outside the Ukrainian embassy in Tehran to express their support for the Ukrainian people, criticize the Iranian government for supporting Russia, and chanted “Death to Putin”.

As police began cracking down on the protesters, the Biden administration and the EU remained silent.

Why are the Biden administration and the EU appeasing the Iranian regime, which has for four decades attacked Americans and carried out terrorist activities and assassinations?

The Biden administration and the other members of the JCPOA nuclear deal negotiated in 2015 (China, France, Russia, the UK and Germany) — with the European Union — instead of holding Iran to account, are evidently determined to reward it. It is not quite clear for what. For years of unspeakable behavior, both to its own citizens and internationally?

Meanwhile, as the US has been negotiating this new agreement, US intelligence services have just identified “at least two Iranians” as trying to assassinate former officials of the Trump administration. The Biden administration is said to have been trying to cover up the plot lest it derail the negotiations to shower Iran with “rewards”.

The Iranian regime, an official state sponsor of terrorism, has carried out terrorist activities around the world for almost four decades. Why are the Biden administration and the EU not implementing the same policies towards Iran’s regime as they are towards Russia?

While the European Union has leveled different kinds of sanctions on Russia, including restricting access to the EU’s capital and financial markets, the EU nevertheless continues to appease Moscow’s staunch ally, the world’s largest sponsor of state terrorism, Iran.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Janet Sobel: The woman written out of history: Kelly Grovier *****

Posted By on March 12th, 2022

-https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20220307-janet-sobel-the-woman-written-out-

In 1938, a Ukrainian-born grandmother created one of art’s biggest shocks – but it was attributed to the US painter Jackson Pollock. For International Women’s Day, Kelly Grovier explores the influence of Janet Sobel.

This is the way the story has always been told: in 1947, Jackson Pollock, the pioneering American painter whose rugged name rhymes with the verve of his virile persona, finally lost patience with the fussy finesse of careful brushstrokes that had defined art history. Chucking his bristles and easel aside, he grabbed some sticks and started flinging paint directly on a canvas he’d stretched out on the floor. With a flick of his wrist while galloping around the work like a ranch hand roping a rampant calf – not so much painting a passive image as lassoing an untamable one – Pollock had hit upon a fresh new mode of energetic artistic expression, one with muscle and swagger befitting the wild west of his Wyomingite birth and the wide, dry lightning plains of his unbridled psyche.

“During the summer of 1947,” Camille Paglia writes in her excellent survey of milestones in the history of image-making, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars, “there was a major breakthrough: he invented his signature ‘drip’ style, which would transform contemporary art.” Pollock’s was an instinctive, shoot-from-the-hip technique that didn’t painstakingly plot its next move – rather, one that grabs a bottle, takes a swig, wipes its lips on its cracked knuckles, and couldn’t care less who’s watching. This is painting free from form and formalities, the kind of painting that only an American, a real American, could invent.

BOOKS Comments turned off

M. Stanton Evans, Prophet of Our Moment It is always worthy to celebrate the legacies of our heroes, and there is much more of this capacious man that we can learn from today.  By Steven F. Hayward

Posted By on March 12th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/11/m-stanton-evans-prophet-of-our-moment/

The essay is adapted from “M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom,” by Steven F. Hayward (Encounter, 400 pages, $33.99).

 

Although M. Stanton Evans passed on only seven years ago, he is already being forgotten by the current generation of conservatives and is wholly unknown to a rising generation of young conservatives. This is a shame, not only because he deserves to be remembered on his merits alone, but because in many ways he anticipated both the conservative populism that finally expressed itself with the arrival of Donald Trump, and a deep antipathy toward our foreign and defense policy elites that is also a highly salient conservative disposition of today. Stan perceived both things more than 50 years ago, and can be said to have anticipated—and approved of—national conservatism before anyone else.

Evans was a remarkable figure who was in the middle of key moments of the conservative movement since shortly after he graduated from Yale in 1955. A working journalist for more than 40 years, he also found time to be the principal author of the Sharon Statement that marked the founding of the Young Americans for Freedom. He wrote the statement of the “Manhattan 12” that declared a “suspension” of conservative support for President Nixon in 1971. As chairman of the American Conservative Union in the mid-1970s, he founded the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that is now the veritable Woodstock for any ambitious conservative politician.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

FEMINISM + JUSTICE BY THANE ROSENBAUM

Posted By on March 12th, 2022

https://whiterosemagazine.com/contributor/thane-rosenbaum/

Before Alice Sebold became a bestselling, critically acclaimed novelist (the film The Lovely Bones was an adaptation from her first novel of the same name), she signaled her arrival as a writer with an important voice and compelling tale, as evidenced by her memoir entitled, Lucky. 

The book was a searing and, at times, improbably witty retelling of her freshman year at Syracuse University when in 1981, while she was walking late at night, an assailant with a knife dragged her into a tunnel and raped her. The book details her experience with the hospital that treated her injuries along with her own efforts to heal—unsurprisingly, without much success. Much of the book is devoted to her reliance on law enforcement and the criminal justice system to hold her attacker to account. 

It made for a gut-wrenching read: A woman who served as an eyewitness to a heinous crime committed against herself. 

Sebold ended up identifying the man who assaulted her and testified against him. He was convicted of rape and sentenced to 25 years in prison, serving 16.

Stories of sexual violence against women are inexorably disqualified from happy endings.

At the police station, one of the detectives thought it might be helpful for her to know that the last sexual assault victim on campus was raped and dismembered by her attacker. In this way, he reasoned, Sebold should consider herself “lucky”—hence, the book’s alluring title.

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Putin’s ‘De-Nazification’ Claim Began With Marx and Stalin Anti-Semitic myths have long been a staple of communist ideology and Soviet disinformation.By Juliana Geran Pilon

Posted By on March 12th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/putins-de-nazification-claim-began-with-marx-and-stalin-world-imperialism-russia-soviets-communism-11647032625?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Vladimir Putin’s pretext for war against Ukraine—to “de-Nazify” a democratic country led by a Jewish president—would be preposterous were it not resting on a myth long a staple of Soviet disinformation and ideological warfare.

The rationale harkens back to the centuries-old caricature of the greedy Jew, Shakespeare’s Shylock, recycled by Karl Marx in his 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question.” Claiming that “the God of the Jew is money,” Marx, himself a Jew, blamed capitalist exploitation on greed, specifically the Hebrew variety.

Decades later, as fascism joined Nazism, Marxists consigned both to the last stage of capitalism and history. Come the revolution, the Marxists reasoned, when communism abolishes property and thus greed disappears, so will Judaism. That explains in part why many communist Jews in Russia abandoned their religion and traditions.

But that apostasy wasn’t enough for Joseph Stalin, who never trusted his Jewish comrades, notably his principal rival, Leon Trotsky (born Lev Davidovitch Bronstein ). In the 1930s, Stalin found the perfect rationale for killing his opponents and escalating internal repression: The “traitors” were in league with “world imperialism.”

This neo-Marxist narrative persisted and Mr. Putin, a KGB colonel turned billionaire, is using an updated version against Ukraine. Here’s a brief history.