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Shapiro v. Clooney: Two Democrat Parties The Harrisburg attack on the Pennsylvania governor.

Posted By on April 15th, 2025

https://spectator.org/shapiro-v-clooney-two-democrat-parties/

EXCERPT

The current occupant is Governor Josh Shapiro. The governor, a Democrat, is, like a couple of his predecessors, also Jewish. 

Did that last fact launch the 2:00 in the morning attack on the governor this past Sunday? In which attacker Cody Balmer, 38, managed to squeeze through the black iron fence surrounding the Mansion, break a window, and toss two Molotov cocktails inside, setting the building on fire while the governor and family were sound asleep inside. A fire that did serious damage to a section of the history-laden building. (RELATED: The Left Loves Political Violence)

At this moment, Balmer’s motives beyond an expressed dislike for Shapiro are not known. There is, without doubt, a belief by many — the governor included (and I’m one as well) — that this attack was indeed motivated by antisemitism.

The governor was awakened by state police guards pounding on his door who quickly evacuated the governor and his family, which included four children, two dogs, and a visiting family member.

On Monday, Shapiro faced the TV cameras and read a statement that said, in part:

This type of violence is not okay. I don’t give a damn if it’s coming from one particular side or the other, directed at one particular party or another, one particular person or another, it is not okay, and it has to stop. We have to be better than this.

Well, amen to that. The governor has it exactly right.

Now. Let’s contrast this statement to a new Broadway play from another Democrat altogether — left-wing movie star George Clooney.

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Inflation Cools Off: Media Hardest Hit They are losing the voters, who have finally decided to end an abusive relationship. David Catron

Posted By on April 15th, 2025

https://spectator.org/inflation-cools-off-media-hardest-hit/

The general consensus among informed political analysts is that the Republicans emerged from last November’s election in control of the White House and Congress due to the border crisis and persistent inflation. The Trump administration curtailed the influx of illegal immigrants with remarkable speed and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for March suggests that inflation is also returning to the modest levels that prevailed throughout President Trump’s first term. The CPI declined by .01 percent last month, a year-over-year rate of 2.4 percent, while core inflation sank to a four-year low.

The cure for inflation required no legislative crackdown on price-gouging. All we really needed was a new president.

Moreover, wholesale prices also decreased in March. According to the Producer Price Index (PPI) report, an important indicator of future inflation pressure, “Prices for final demand goods moved down 0.9 percent in March, the largest decrease since falling 1.4 percent in October 2023.” These PPI statistics, combined with the CPI numbers, clearly portend a brighter future for long suffering consumers and the nation’s economy in general. But the legacy media are loathe to report good news if it reflects well on the new Trump administration. Instead, they search for some black cloud to tarnish every silver lining, and subject the electorate to the kind of fear mongering that pervades the following passage from a story published by the Washington Post:

As consumers and businesses face widespread uncertainty around the Trump administration’s whipsawing trade policies, a widely followed survey from the University of Michigan found that consumers’ expectations for the next year’s inflation jumped to 6.7 percent, the highest reading since 1981. It’s the fourth consecutive month that consumer sentiment has worsened, as people across demographics say they believe unemployment and inflation will get substantially worse.

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Can Trump Fix His FUBAR Tariff Rollout?

Posted By on April 15th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/15/can-trump-fix-his-fubar-tariff-rollout/

So far, President Donald Trump has been piloting his second term like Maverick from “Top Gun.” With one exception. The tariff rollout has been FUBAR, which is troubling since it’s Trump’s signature economic policy issue.

There have been glaring missteps along the way, repeated pauses, confused and conflicting messaging, turf wars. It’s draining public support and causing real economic problems as businesses can’t make plans while all this is in flux.

We aren’t privy to insider gossip to speculate why this is. But we can say that Trump needs to get his tariff act together, and fast.

Consider what has transpired in just the past two weeks:

Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement turned out to be a disaster. Not just because an island inhabited only by penguins was listed as a trade abuser, but because it quickly became apparent that the math used to set tariff rates made no sense.

While Trump called the tariffs reciprocal, they weren’t. They were instead based on trade imbalances with other nations, which even Trump supporters pointed out is a flawed metric.

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The FBI Knew All Along By Jack Cashill

Posted By on April 15th, 2025

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/04/the_fbi_knew_all_along.html

You do not have to wade far into the recently declassified Crossfire Hurricane documents to be shocked.  I had only read three pages of the FBI’s December 19, 2016 interview with the DoJ’s Bruce Ohr before learning just how early in the game the FBI brass knew that the Steele dossier was worthless.

In the way of background, on July 31, 2016, the FBI launched its counterintelligence operation into the Trump campaign, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane.”  FBI agent Peter Strzok was assigned to head it up.

If the goal was to cripple Trump regardless of the evidence, Strzok was the man for the job.  “Damn this feels momentous,” he texted his lover, FBI attorney Lisa Page, upon getting the assignment.  Two weeks later he explained to Page his motives.  “There’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” he texted her.  “It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

Ohr played a curious role in the whole affair.  He served as unofficial DoJ contact with the notorious Christopher Steele, the author of the eponymous Steele dossier.  According to Ohr, the two met for breakfast on the same day the FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane.  Steele wanted to discuss some “serious stuff” involving low-level Trump adviser Carter Page.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Fast-Growing Jewish Population May Hold Off Israel’s “Demographic Time Bomb”

Posted By on April 15th, 2025

http://bit.ly/4jmZ6cP

“Israel’s Jewish women are unusual among industrialized nations for their high birth rate, while modernizing Arab women have fewer babies than in the past.

Israelis have wondered at times whether they would be outnumbered by Palestinians and become a minority in the world’s only Jewish homeland.

The fear of a “demographic time bomb” has often been cited by those who support the two-state solution, in which Palestinians would get an independent state alongside the Jewish state. An independent Palestinian state, they say, is the only way for Israel to remain majority Jewish.

The fear may be unwarranted. A 2025 demographic study by an Israeli-American group shows the Jewish population growing more rapidly than the Arab Muslim population, particularly in Judea and Samaria—Israel’s historical names for what other nations refer to as the West Bank.

The study, which has traced the population question for two decades, found that the number of annual Jewish births increased by 73 percent from 1995 to 2024, while those among Arabs in Israel increased by only 18 percent.

Jewish births in 2024, about 139,000, were 76 percent of about 182,000 total births, compared with 69 percent of total births in 1995, according to the study, titled “2025 Israel’s Demographic Update Defies Conventional Wisdom.”

Study co-leader Yoram Ettinger, a retired ambassador who published the study in his online “The Ettinger Report,” told The Epoch Times that his group does not accept the statements of either the Israeli government or the Palestinian Authority at face value. It takes hard looks at as many figures as possible to audit the official numbers, he said.

BOOKS Comments turned off

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE CULTURE BY DIANA WEST

Posted By on April 15th, 2025

If one were to look for a unifying theme in the books and journalism of Diana West, one would quickly discover that West, by turn, is provoked, curious and relentless when it comes to campaigns of deception continuously run in media, politics, culture and academia to influence and manipulate. Such deceptions depend on twisting or, worse, omitting key facts or, almost worse than that, the lazy journalism that is no better than deception’s echo chamber.

In Wake Up and Smell the Culture and other selected essays, West skewers numerous counter-narratives and episodes of “court history,” shining a light on lost context and hidden facts. With characteristic verve, West delves, for example, into the pre-WWII origins of “America First” (no, it was not pro Nazi); examines the very real clues to “Pizzagate” (no, it was not “fake news”); and proves how conservatives to this day have been duped into carrying on Josef Stalin’s assault on Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who, as readers of American Betrayal (2013) will recall, is one of West’s historical heroes.

Indeed, in the tradition of The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy (2019), West newly unspools communist associations in the pasts of Judge Tanya Chutkan and Victoria Nuland. In the spirit of bi-partisan targeting, West also exposes the shocking conservative crack-up, circa 2016, over the candidacy of Donald Trump in the must-see-it-to-believe-it compendium, “The Right’s Anti-Trump Lexicon.” West also turns her sprightly pen to popular culture in a series of magazine essays she wrote on the way to The Death of the Grown-Up (2007). In all, an invaluable collection from one of our most provocative writers.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: Slaughtering Jews While Falsely Using Al-Aqsa Mosque as a Pretext by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on April 14th, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21549/palestinians-slaughtering-jews-al-aqsa-pretext

Peaceful and permitted outdoor tours to the grounds around the Al-Aqsa Mosque are regularly described by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas as violent incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

It is time for the US and other Western countries to impose consequences on Palestinian leaders, especially Mahmoud Abbas and his senior representatives, for spreading falsehoods and libels against Israel and Jews. It is precisely this type of rhetoric that incentivizes Palestinians to carry out terrorist attacks against Israelis and Jews. The message to Palestinian leaders should read: “Stop using the Al-Aqsa Mosque as an excuse to slaughter Jews. The mosque remains intact, and is not facing any threat, despite Palestinian libels and lies.” Failure to comply would result in international donors imposing financial sanctions on the Palestinian leadership.

If anyone is desecrating the mosque, it is those who exploit it to encourage their people to carry out terrorist attacks.

As the Hamas-Israel war continues in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has resumed its false claim – first propagated in 1929 by Adolf Hitler’s subsequent ally, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, and again and again after that — that that Jews are violently “storming” the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and planning to divide it in time and space between Jewish and Muslim worshipers.

Such claims were also used by the Iran-backed Hamas terrorist group to justify the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, in which Gazan terrorists murdered 1,200 Israelis and wounded of thousands. On that day, another 251 Israelis were kidnapped to the Gaza Strip, where 59 -alive and dead – remain in captivity. It is worth noting that Hamas called its invasion of Israel “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.”

Shortly after the October 7 massacre, Hamas published a report highlighting the motives behind the cross-border attack on Israel. According to Turkey’s Anadolu Agency, the report, titled “Our Narrative, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood,” said that:

“Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was a necessary step and a natural reaction against Israel’s plans to eliminate the Palestinian cause, seize lands, Judaize the Palestinian lands, and establish complete control over Al-Aqsa Mosque and holy sites.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China and Those Not-So-Rare Earths Graham Pinn

Posted By on April 14th, 2025

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/qed/china-and-those-not-so-rare-earths/

“As ideology dictates renewable electricity sources, and conflict looms, these rare earths are fundamental. Demand for graphite, lithium, cobalt and manganese is surging but, without meeting the increase in future demand for REE’s, we cannot keep the lights on, never mind fight a war.”

As demand increases and China restricts supply, rare earth availability is causing increasing political tensions. Donald Trump is looking for supplies in Greenland, in Ukraine, and in Australia.

Rare earths, also known as rare earth elements (REE’s), are a set of 17 nearly indistinguishable, lustrous heavy metals, most with unpronounceable names. As it happens, it is something of a misnomer to describe them as rare because they are actually quite common. Cerium, for example, is the planet’s 25th most abundant element, even more plentiful than copper.

Compared with other minerals such as iron or bauxite, however, they are thinly spread, making mining difficult, with processing requiring enormous amounts of raw ore. They do at least tend to occur together, but this makes their separation another production issue. Current methods of extraction result in toxic contamination of soil and water and, further complicating matters, deposits are usually found with thorium and uranium, meaning the 2000 tonnes of waste typically generated to produce a single tonne of REE is radioactive. This plunges environmentalists into a state ongoing cognitive dissonance: while they hail the production of CO2-free “clean-energy” minerals as key to “renewable” power sources, they must also countenance the pollution and environmental degradation extraction causes. Fortunately, consistency has never been a prerequisite for the green movement.

Rare earths have diverse applications in electrical and electronic components, lasers, glass, and industrial processes. In the modern age of so-called clean energy, their use has assumed critical importance for batteries, the magnets essential for electric vehicles and wind turbines, not to mention drones, missiles and other military hardware. The global demand for REE’s continues to soar and is expected to at least double again over the next ten years, leaving a supply gap.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Washington Post’s Clinging to Fake Story Reminds Us What the Media Really Is Robert Spencer

Posted By on April 14th, 2025

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2025/04/13/washington-posts-clinging-to-fake-story-reminds-us-what-the-media-really-is-n4938874

There couldn’t possibly be a clearer example of media perfidy and dishonesty: back in May 2017, the Washington Post published a story about how President Trump supposedly urged Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and National Security Agency Director Adm. Michael S. Rogers to deny that there was any evidence that he had colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. There was just one catch: the story was false, and Rogers said as much to the FBI as far back as June 2017. Yet not only did the Post not take the story down; it’s still up, eight years later and long after the Russian Collusion hoax has been definitively debunked.

The story was one of many in the Post about Trump’s much-publicized collusion with Russia that won the Post the Pulitzer Prize. And apparently that was all that mattered. Truth? Accuracy? Integrity? Come on, man! 

The story, along with the rest about the alleged Russian Collusion, sold papers, and made the WaPo seem as if it was once again on the cutting edge of investigative journalism. The Post was even fearlessly taking on a president of the United States, recalling the heady days of Watergate when Woodward and Bernstein bearded the wily Tricky Dick, became Redford and Hoffman, and made the Post into one of the leading newspapers in the left’s constellation of propaganda organs.

The opportunity to relive the glory days was apparently too much for the Post, and overrode all other considerations. As Matt Margolis noted Sunday, “it’s unclear whether the Post knew Rogers disputed their report before publishing it, but Rogers made it clear to investigators shortly afterward that the story was false.” 

Did Rogers, or the FBI, notify the Post also that the story was false? That is unclear, but the WaPo should have made it its business to know. It was, after all, a newspaper, and not just any newspaper, but one that was leading the covering of the allegations of collusion against the sitting president. Did the Post have no contact with Rogers despite the fact that its story was about him? Did it have no contacts in the FBI? Or was the story just too good, too damning of Trump, for the Post to be all that concerned about accuracy? 

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The UK’s free-speech crisis is about to get so much worse The Crime and Policing Bill could unleash terrifying new censorship powers. Andrew Tettenborn

Posted By on April 14th, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/13/the-uks-free-speech-crisis-is-about-to-get-so-much-worse/

The UK government’s Crime and Policing Bill poses a formidable threat to free speech in the UK. The bill, which is currently at the committee stage in the House of Commons, promises to keep our streets ‘safe’ by giving courts a new power to issue ‘respect orders’. These orders are potentially so draconian and wide-ranging that they could well end up being used for very different purposes – including silencing anyone who says anything online that the authorities disapprove of.

Under the bill, police, local authorities and a number of other bodies will be empowered to ask courts for ‘respect orders’ that can either prohibit someone from doing or require them to do ‘anything described in the order’. You read that right – anything. The only condition that needs to be satisfied is that the court thinks, on a balance of probabilities, that the person ‘has caused, or is likely to cause, harassment, alarm or distress to any person’. This essentially amounts to ‘precrime’. There won’t even be a need to warn people. The court can issue an interim order without notice. Once the order (which can be indefinite in duration) is there, breaching it carries an unlimited fine or two years in prison.

This spectacularly authoritarian measure is supposedly aimed at street hoodlums, but it is not restricted in any meaningful way. It is a racing certainty that the courts will not apply any limits to its scope.

This bill is a particular threat to free speech. Already, you have to worry that police might turn up at your door over a controversial social-media post. At least at present, the poster has a reasonable chance of defending themselves. While our hate-speech laws are vaguely worded and authoritarian, at least the onus is on the authorities to investigate and prosecute.

This changes dramatically under the Crime and Policing Bill. If it passes, all the police would have to do is persuade a county court judge that people are distressed by the post in question. Then, the poster can be compelled, on pain of prosecution, to delete the offending content, not refer to the subject concerned online again and even stay off social media altogether. They might even be forced to provide an official with the passwords to all of their internet-enabled devices.

This law could be used to attack practically anyone who criticises or makes life difficult for their elected officials. It would be straightforward for, say, a local council to obtain such a ‘respect order’, telling a pesky critic to pipe down indefinitely or face possible imprisonment.