FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

America’s Enemies Fill the Vacuum She Leaves Abroad By Seth Cropsey & Harry Halem

Posted By on December 6th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/12/americas-enemies-fill-the-vacuum-she-leaves-abroad/

The oft-discussed Middle Eastern power vacuum does not exist. America’s adversaries have already filled it.

P resident Biden’s meeting with Xi Jinping on November 15 shifted media attention from COP26 back to great-power politics, but a more subtle, yet perhaps more consequential, shift has occurred over the past month. This shift is remarkable for its lack of American involvement — it presages a Middle Eastern regional transformation over which the United States will have little to no influence. Rather, Russia and increasingly China have become the region’s key external powers. The central question for both as they move forward will be the degree of Iranian expansionism they will accept.

On October 22, Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett met Russia’s maximum leader Vladimir Putin at the Black Sea resort city of Sochi. The meeting was critical for Bennett given his domestic political position. Prime Minister Bennett’s minority right-wing Yamina/New Right party holds only seven seats, compared to his coalition ally Yair Lapid’s 17. Moreover, the rest of the coalition is composed of numerous splinter, generally secular parties from left and right. Bennett will retain some control in 2023, when the premiership is scheduled to rotate to Lapid. But his numerical disadvantage bodes ill for his and his party’s long-term political prospects.

In the next election, one would expect Bennett to tilt back toward the Right, playing a key role in a center-Right coalition government to box out the secular Left, with which Yesh Atid aligns. Yet Bennett’s erstwhile ally and mentor, recently ousted prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, retains significant political power despite his ongoing corruption trial. Not only has Netanyahu emerged as Bennett’s fiercest critic — his policy criticisms have some substance. Bennett is a shrewd politician, having served in ministerial positions since 2013, and as defense minister from 2019 to 2020. But Netanyahu’s foreign-policy experience was a critical selling point for Likud voters, and a line of attack he has exploited since leaving office. Netanyahu claimed that his personal relationship with Putin gave Israel greater flexibility in Syria, allowing the IDF to conduct a long-term interdiction campaign against Iranian targets without sparking Russian resistance.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Giving Cover to Palestinian Extremists The UN and other apologists who continue to enable Palestinian terror and lies. Mon Dec 6, 2021 Joseph Klein

Posted By on December 6th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/giving-cover-palestinian-extremists-joseph-klein/

The executive director of the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) Nihad Awad, speaking at a panel that was part of the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) annual conference in Chicago on November 27, 2021, demanded that the Biden administration move the U.S. Embassy in Israel back from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. Adding insult to injury, Awad described Tel Aviv as “occupied,” but, he vowed, it “will be free later.”

AMP is an extremist pro-Palestinian group that promotes the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. There is “a significant overlap between AMP and people who worked for or on behalf of organizations that were designated, dissolved, or held civilly liable by federal authorities for supporting Hamas,” according to Jonathan Schanzer, Vice President of Research Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Schanzer testified about AMP and its radical agenda at a 2016 Joint Hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade and the Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa.

The theme of AMP’s 2021 annual conference was “On the Road to Free Palestine.” In addition to Awad, other pro-Palestinian extremists who spoke at the hate Israel propaganda fest included Linda Sansour and Zarefah Baroud.  The latter wrote an opinion piece earlier this year claiming that “racialized violence has always defined Israel,” which was posted last May on Hamas’s website.

But you don’t have to go to an American Muslims for Palestine conference to hear the vile rhetoric directed against the Jewish State of Israel and its supporters. All you need to do is to go to the United Nations.

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres (pictured above) issued a statement on November 29th commemorating the “International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.” He blamed Israel for the Palestinians’ self-inflicted plight. Guterres fed into the Palestinian victimhood narrative, claiming that “[P]ersistent violations of the rights of Palestinians along with the expansion of settlements risk eroding the prospect of a two-State solution.”

False. It is the rejectionism of the Palestinian leaders and their enablers, starting with their refusal to accept the UN General Assembly’s original two-state partition plan in 1947, and lasting to the present day, that is responsible for the Palestinians’ failure to achieve their aspiration for an independent state. By rejecting the idea of living side by side under secure and durable peace terms with the Jewish State of Israel, the Palestinian leaders and their enablers have nobody but themselves to blame for the decades-old stalemate and violence.

BOOKS Comments turned off

America’s Foreign Policy: A Century of Dangerous Illusions Freedom Center Shillman Fellow Bruce Thornton reveals the lethal consequences of not putting America first.

Posted By on December 6th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/americas-foreign-policy-century-dangerous-frontpagemagcom/

Frontpage Editors: The Freedom Center has just published a new pamphlet authored by Shillman Fellow and regular FrontPage columnist, Professor Bruce Thornton.

America’s Foreign Policy: A Century of Dangerous Illusions is a concise and powerfully-written essay on the failings of American foreign policy following a century of embracing the dangerous illusions of multinational agreements, globalist institutions, and the “rules-based international order.” 

By veering away from an unapologetically nationalist, “American First” agenda, the United States is sliding into decline in a world where dangerous adversaries threaten to surpass America in prosperity and power. 

America’s Foreign Policy: A Century of Dangerous Illusions will arm you with the insights to understand these threats and how we can recover a strong foreign policy that puts American interests first.

The pamphlet is available at the FPM store and can be ordered by clicking HERE.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Zemmour Throws His Hat in the Ring A presidential candidate patriotic Frenchmen can believe in. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on December 6th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/bawer-zemmour-bruce-bawer/

Well, he’s in. And he did it in a pretty spectacular way.

Last week, in a seven-minute video, Éric Zemmour – the fearless columnist and TV commentator whose latest book, France Has Not Yet Had the Last Word, I wrote about here last month – officially announced his candidacy for president of France. And it could hardly have been more powerful. It wasn’t just an announcement; it was an oration for the ages.

“My dear compatriots,” began the man widely known as “France’s Trump,” “for years, the same feeling has gripped you, oppressed you, haunted you: a strange and penetrating feeling of dispossession.” As he spoke, music played. Beethoven’s Seventh. Many commentators jumped on this: how could a man so preoccupied with all things French use a German symphony for his music bed? Fair enough: it would’ve made more sense to pick, say, Faure’s Requiem or Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time.

Zemmour continued. “You walk the streets of your city and you don’t recognize it. You look at your screens and you are spoken to in a language that is strange and, quite frankly, foreign.” The video cut back and forth between a shot of Zemmour reading his announcement – an old-fashioned radio microphone in front of him, a wall of old books behind him – and images of street violence, girls in hijabs, soccer players “taking the knee,” subway crime.

Wherever you go, said Zemmour, “you have the impression that you are no longer in the country you know.” From this description of today’s France – a description to which most Frenchmen, judging by recent polls, would vigorously nod assent – Zemmour looked back to the France of a generation or two ago, the France of history, and the France of national myth: “You remember the country you knew in your childhood, you remember the country your parents described to you; you remember the country you find in movies or in books; the country of Joan of Arc and Louis XIV, the country of Bonaparte and General De Gaulle….”

And, as we viewed images of Versailles, a classroom, a theater stage, a laboratory, the names rolled on: Hugo, Descartes, Pasteur, Molière, Racine. Even Jean Gabin and Alain Delon. Although Zemmour gave France credit for the invention of the car (arguable), it was an impressive and, yes, powerful litany. I know it was powerful because it worked on me – a person who’s capable of being quite snotty about the French.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden Admin Waives Sanctions on Iran as Nuclear Talks Restart Critics accuse admin of ‘delivering a dressed-up Chanukah present to the regime’ Adam Kredo

Posted By on December 6th, 2021

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/biden-admin-waives-sanctions-on-iran-as-nuclear-talks-restart/

The Biden administration quietly waived sanctions on Iran to allow the hardline regime to sell electricity to Iraq, according to a non-public notification obtained by the Washington Free Beacon that was provided to Congress just as nuclear talks between the United States and Tehran resumed this week.

The timing of the waiver notification—which was signed Nov. 19 but not transmitted to Congress until Nov. 29, the day nuclear negotiations resumed—has prompted accusations the Biden administration is offering concessions to Tehran to generate goodwill as talks aimed at securing a revamped version of the 2015 nuclear deal restart following a months-long standoff.

During the several-month pause, Tehran increased its nuclear program, including the enrichment of uranium and installation of advanced nuclear centrifuges. One senior congressional source familiar with the matter said the delay in transmitting the waiver to Congress indicates the administration is sensitive to the optics of waving sanctions just as negotiations resume.

Richard Goldberg, the former director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction on Trump’s White House National Security Council, told the Washington Free Beacon that the latest electricity waiver amounts to a “dressed-up Chanukah present to” Iran.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Media Stonewalls on the Steele Dossier News companies are even more reluctant than other businesses to come clean about their misbehavior. By Eric Dezenhall

Posted By on December 6th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-media-stonewalls-steele-dossier-disinformation-trump-nyt-washington-post-trump-11638718026?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

‘Why don’t they just fess up and say they’re sorry?” That is the question journalists have asked about the corporate and institutional clients of my crisis-management business. It’s a question media companies should be asking themselves amid the implosion of the Steele dossier. Here we are, a few weeks after the dossier was discredited, and no one has paid a price.

Having had media companies as clients, I’ve found that when they’re under fire, they behave no differently from chemical or drug companies. Why? Because they don’t see coming clean as being in their self-interest.

Among other things, the truth can tarnish the brand and jam them up in court. So they often deny, stonewall, close ranks, and attack their critics. Two things media companies have that other businesses don’t is the ability to deliver news instantly and the mantle of moral authority.

The crisis confronting the news media post-dossier is rooted in disinformation. In the crisis business, we often do detective work to uncover the sources of disinformation leveled at our clients. The first factor in a successful disinformation campaign is an audience that desperately wants to believe something. Then you find a plausible allegation that fits the marketplace. Next, you implant an outrageous allegation within the plausible one. Finally, you find a trustworthy person, someone simpatico with media organizations, to let it rip.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

IRS data proves Trump tax cuts benefited middle, working-class Americans most Justin Haskins

Posted By on December 6th, 2021

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/irs-data-proves-trump-tax-cuts-benefited-middle-working-class-americans-most/ar-AARsJrs?li=BBnb7Kz

President Biden and congressional Democrats’ Build Back Better (BBB) Act is now in the hands of the Senate. That legislative body’s 50-50 partisan split will undoubtedly make the bill’s passage difficult.

In order for BBB to become law, Democratic Senate leadership will need to convince moderates such as Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) that the legislation’s $2.4 trillion price tag can be offset by expanding the IRS and its enforcement efforts while imposing substantial tax reform measures.

Congressional Democrats have argued that one of the best ways to pay for the legislation is to raise taxes on wealthy households, which, according to many on the left, have benefited disproportionately and unfairly from the 2017 tax reform law passed by Republicans and signed by former President Trump. The latest data, however, proves that this claim is pure mythology.

Income data published by the IRS clearly show that on average all income brackets benefited substantially from the Republicans’ tax reform law, with the biggest beneficiaries being working and middle-income filers, not the top 1 percent, as so many Democrats have argued.

A careful analysis of the IRS tax data, one that includes the effects of tax credits and other reforms to the tax code, shows that filers with an adjusted gross income (AGI) of $15,000 to $50,000 enjoyed an average tax cut of 16 percent to 26 percent in 2018, the first year Republicans’ Tax Cuts and Jobs Act went into effect and the most recent year for which data is available.

Filers who earned $50,000 to $100,000 received a tax break of about 15 percent to 17 percent, and those earning $100,000 to $500,000 in adjusted gross income saw their personal income taxes cut by around 11 percent to 13 percent.

By comparison, no income group with an AGI of at least $500,000 received an average tax cut exceeding 9 percent, and the average tax cut for brackets starting at $1 million was less than 6 percent. (For more detailed data, see my table published here.)

That means most middle-income and working-class earners enjoyed a tax cut that was at least double the size of tax cuts received by households earning $1 million or more.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Epidemic of smash-and-grab crime is definitely man-made By Jonathan Turley

Posted By on December 6th, 2021

https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/584323-epidemic-of-smash-and-grab-crime-is-definitely-man-made

Crime is raging across the country, from violent attacks to brazen shoplifting to mob “smash and grab” attacks. The White House this week had a simple answer for the cause of this rising lawlessness: It was not “defund the police” efforts, or more restrictive policies for police and prosecutors. It was the familiar scourge cited in debates ranging from infrastructure to supply chains to tax increases — the pandemic.

The pandemic now seems to have reached the mythic levels of gods who once were blamed for everything that went wrong in life. Africans had Anansi the Spider, while the Norse had the trickster Loki. Both were known to assume different identities to wreak disorder or steal precious things.

For politicians, it is useful to have a lurking Loki to explain that social problems are not really of their making, the result of their failures. The Loki factor was evident in the press conference this week when Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked about the rising lawlessness seen in major cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles: “Does the president still think that crime is up because of the pandemic?” White House press secretary Jen Psaki replied that “many people have conveyed that.”

Doocy persisted: “So when a huge group of criminals organizes themselves and they want to go loot a store — a CVS, a Nordstrom, a Home Depot until the shelves are clean — do you think that’s because of the pandemic?” Psaki replied: “I think a root cause in a lot of communities is the pandemic, yes.”

That damned Loki.

Whole stores have been ransacked by gangs, and the crime is sweeping large and small businesses alike. At the same time, shoplifting has reached such high levels in cities like San Francisco that stores like Walgreens are closing up due to the losses.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

RUSSIA HOAX WHITEWASH ERA BEGINS (2) BY SCOTT JOHNSON

Posted By on December 6th, 2021

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/russia-hoax-whitewash-era-begins-2.php

The Clinton presidential campaign’s fabrication of the Russia hoax is the dirtiest trick in American political history. Beginning with Glenn Simpson/Fusion GPS and the Perkins Coie law firm, it enlisted co-conspirators in the Obama Department of Justice, the FBI, and the mainstream media. The principals are not only still at large, they have achieved high office, wealth, riches, and Pulitzer Prizes. They will never be brought to justice. They won’t even break a sweat.

We were never meant to be clued in. As the veil of the fraud was pierced by Rep. Devin Nunes and others including, most recently, John Durham, we now have a good handle on the con. It is almost unbelievable. It is also an inexhaustibly rich subject.

Matt Taibbi took up the role of the mainstream media at his TK News site in “The Russiagate Whitewash Era Begins” (mostly behind his subscription paywall, but also available in the form of a YouTube video and podcast).

To Taibbi’s assessment we can now add Aaron Maté’s RCP column “Five Trump-Russia ‘Collusion’ Corrections We Need From the Media Now — Just for Starters.” In addition to citing a few of the egregiously ludicrous stories that we paused over at the time, the column takes a look back at some of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Russia hoax journalism of the New York Times and the Washington Post:

In this article, RealClearInvestigations has collected five instances of stories containing false or misleading claims, and thereby due for retraction or correction, that were either among the Post and Times’ Pulitzer-winning entries, or other work of reporters who shared that prize. Significantly, this analysis is not based on newly discovered information, but documents and other material long in the public domain. Remarkably, some of the material that should spark corrections has instead been held up by the Post and Times as vindication of their work.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Fossil Fuel Restriction Dam Starting To Break Francis Menton

Posted By on December 6th, 2021

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-12-4-fossil-fuel-restriction-dam-starting-to-break

Somewhere a couple of decades or so ago, the rich parts of the world embarked on a program of replacing energy from fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) with energy from intermittent “renewables” (mainly wind and solar). In trendy academic, journalistic, and otherwise progressive circles, the idea took hold that this was the way to “save the planet.” This program was undertaken without any detailed engineering study of how or whether it might actually work, or how much it might cost to fully implement. In the trendy circles, there took hold a blind faith in the complete ability of the government, by dispensing taxpayer funds, to order up whatever innovation might be needed to move us forward to this energy utopia.

The latest UN-orchestrated effort to implement the renewable energy program, known as COP 26, has just broken up. To read the verbiage emanating from the affair, all is on track, if a bit slower than one might have hoped.

But I have long predicted that this program would come to an end when (absent some miraculous innovation that nobody has yet conceived) the usage of the renewables got to a sufficient level that their costs and unworkability could not be covered up any longer. Until very recently the pressure of elite groupthink has been able to maintain a united front of lip service to the cause. But consider a few developments from the past few weeks, just since the end of COP 26:

Japan

Japan tends to keep its head down in international affairs, and at COP 26 signed on to the happy talk group communiqués without raising any particular issues. But there is no getting around that Japan has the third largest economy in the world — after the U.S. and China, and larger than any European country — so its actions in energy policy are inherently significant. Also, Japan has relatively little energy production of its own, is heavily dependent on imports, has harsh winters, and has a growing Chinese military and economic threat right on its doorstep. Is Japan really going to trust its fate to intermittent wind and solar energy?

On December 1 Bloomberg reported: “Japan Is Backing Oil and Gas Even After COP26 Climate Talks.” It seems that this rather significant country may be seriously re-thinking the move away from fossil fuels. Excerpt:

Government officials have been quietly urging trading houses, refiners and utilities to slow down their move away from fossil fuels, and even encouraging new investments in oil-and-gas projects, according to people within the Japanese government and industry, who requested anonymity as the talks are private.