NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joe Biden’s Excuse for the Horrible Jobs Report Is Ridiculous and Insulting By Stacey Lennox

Posted By on September 4th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2021/09/03/joe-bidens-excuse-for-the-horrible-jobs-report-is-ridiculous-and-insulting-n1475789

The wisdom of putting Joe Biden behind a podium more frequently in the wake of the disaster in Afghanistan is questionable. Yet, following the disastrous August jobs report, he ambled out to explain why the projections were off by a factor of three. Today he was mumbling Joe rather than petulant Joe. A slew of recent polling indicates Americans are feeling less safe, less secure, and less prosperous.

Predictably, these sentiments have cause Biden’s approval ratings to crater. While his handling of COVID-19 propped him up above 50% overall approval for most of the summer, polling shows even his marks on the pandemic are sliding. In Rasmussen’s daily Presidential Tracking Poll, his Approval Index dipped to -21 on August 24 and has remained at least -20 heading into the Labor Day holiday. There is speculation that it could be a durable decline rather than a blip.

Incredibly, Biden opened his remarks by saying, “As we head into Labor Day weekend, we have more evidence of the progress of our economy from last year’s economic calamity.” Someone needs to tell him the baseline is February of 2020. No one gets credit for reopening an economy artificially shut down by the government. Employees returning to their jobs and closed businesses reopening is not economic growth. And frankly, even those two things are not happening fast enough.

The only reason the economy did not completely collapse is because the economic fundamentals were strong. By  continuing to blow out spending, the Biden administration is eroding the foundations of the U.S.’s economic strength going into the pandemic. Still, mumbly Joe wants us to celebrate 235,000 new jobs when over 700,000 were forecasted. Employers are not going to create many jobs when there are already more than 10 million open nationwide.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel: Still the ‘Strong Horse’ by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on September 4th, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17617/israel-strong-horse

Currently — excluding its ventures into South America from where it can more easily threaten North America — Iran, sometimes via proxies such as the Houthis, Hamas or Hezbollah — has successfully inserted itself into Yemen, in a seeming bid to overthrow and supplant Saudi Arabia, as well as in Iraq, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.

The first time around, during the Obama years, one might understand the fantasy that enriching and empowering Iran might lead it to give up its long-desired nuclear program and expansionist activities, not to mention the extreme abuses of its citizens at home. Now, however, the world has seen that the plan did not work, and that Iran had been cheating all along, anyhow.

What in the world, then, is the US expecting from repeating this disastrous exercise? For both the Israelis and the Gulf’s Arab monarchies, Iran’s Shia regional empire and drive to lead the Muslim world is still justifiably considered an existential threat.

Israel — no longer diplomatically isolated — appears to be assuming a more prominent political and military role in the Middle East. Following Israel’s generous peace terms with its Arab neighbors, states such as Egypt and Jordan decided decades ago to establish diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. More recently, Islamic countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan also decided to normalize ties with Israel. Presently, these strong new ties appear to be leading to cooperation on an ever-deeper strategic level, especially regarding the destabilizing threat to the area posed by an increasingly aggressive and hegemonic Iran.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Australia Traded Away Too Much Liberty How long can a democracy maintain emergency restrictions and still call itself a free country? By Conor Friedersdorf

Posted By on September 4th, 2021

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-australia-still-liberal-democracy/619940/

In a bid to keep the coronavirus out of the country, Australia’s federal and state governments imposed draconian restrictions on its citizens. Prime Minister Scott Morrison knows that the burden is too heavy. “This is not a sustainable way to live in this country,” he recently declared. One prominent civil libertarian summed up the rules by lamenting, “We’ve never seen anything like this in our lifetimes.”

Up to now one of Earth’s freest societies, Australia has become a hermit continent. How long can a country maintain emergency restrictions on its citizens’ lives while still calling itself a liberal democracy?

Australia has been testing the limits.

Before 2020, the idea of Australia all but forbidding its citizens from leaving the country, a restriction associated with Communist regimes, was unthinkable. Today, it is a widely accepted policy. “Australia’s borders are currently closed and international travel from Australia remains strictly controlled to help prevent the spread of COVID-19,” a government website declares. “International travel from Australia is only available if you are exempt or you have been granted an individual exemption.” The rule is enforced despite assurances on another government website, dedicated to setting forth Australia’s human-rights-treaty obligations, that the freedom to leave a country “cannot be made dependent on establishing a purpose or reason for leaving.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joe Biden Is Lying To Americans About Afghanistan ‘Whether it is true or not,’ this president and his enablers ‘need to project a different picture’: that the Afghanistan retreat was a great success.By John Lucas

Posted By on September 4th, 2021

https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/03/joe-biden-is-lying-to-americans-about-afghanistan/

John Lucas is a practicing attorney in Tennessee who has successfully argued before the U. S. Supreme Court. Before entering law school at the University of Texas, he served in the Army Special Forces as an enlisted man and then graduated from the U. S. Military Academy at West Point in 1969. He is an Army Ranger and fought in Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader.

Earlier this week, this writer addressed the Biden administration’s instinctive lying on matters big and small, concluding: “When the president allows his key advisors lie to us about a dog bite, the only confidence the American people can have is that he will not be honest with us about these and other life-and-death matters if the truth would hurt his poll numbers or endanger Democrats’ reelection chances.”

Regrettably, recent events confirm that the president’s deceptions and misstatements are intentional and driven by political motives. This was confirmed by multiple events, some the very next day after the previous article published.

The first confirming event was in President Biden’s own words. Biden verified that lying about success in Afghanistan is part of his political strategy.

A Foreign Quid Pro Quo Based on Lies

In a bombshell report on Aug. 31, Reuters reported on an audio recording of a July 23 call between Biden and then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. It released a transcript. In the call, Biden stated, “I need not tell you the perception around the world and in parts of Afghanistan, I believe, is that things aren’t going well in terms of the fight against the Taliban.”

Biden then gave Ghani his marching orders: “And there is a need, whether it is true or not, there is a need to project a different picture.” His own words condemn the president: “Whether it is true or not…” As the indispensable Mollie Hemingway noted on Fox News on Sept. 2, “What this phone call shows is that the withdrawal was, like so many other parts of the war, communicated to the American public with lies.” Indeed it was.

But this was even worse. Again, Hemingway: “While the previous president was impeached over a phone call and accused of a quid pro quo, here you actually have a president asking someone to lie on his behalf and conditioning military aid on part of those lies.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

An American Soul The central mission of Harry Jaffa’s life was the philosophical and rhetorical defense of classical natural right, the Western tradition, and the United States. By Michael Anton

Posted By on September 4th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/03/an-american-soul/

A review of The Soul of Politics, by Glenn Ellmers (Encounter, 416 pages, $31.99)

The late Harry V. Jaffa, who died in 2015 at age 96, is known primarily for three things. First, for his revolutionary work on the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln, exemplified in Jaffa’s two masterworks, Crisis of the House Divided (1959) and A New Birth of Freedom (2000). Second, for penning Barry Goldwater’s famous 1964 convention speech, including its most infamous line: “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” And third, for his ornery, pugilistic written feuds with former friends (e.g., Walter Berns, Martin Diamond, Allan Bloom, and Harvey Mansfield) and eminent conservatives (Mel Bradford, Willmoore Kendall, William Rehnquist, Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, and Edwin Messe, among others).

All of that is true but doesn’t even come close to exhausting Jaffa’s range and importance. As a scholar and teacher, he was intimately familiar with seemingly every significant book or idea from the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds. As an interpreter of the modern world and man’s place in it, he was a pathbreaker and, I would say, without peer.

Jaffa’s thought is hard to summarize, for at least two reasons. First, because he wrote no systematic book or account laying it all out in one place. To understand Jaffa one must read all of him: the three stand-alone books (in addition to the two on Lincoln, there is also one, his first, on Aquinas), plus the essay collections, plus articles written for others that he never republished, plus the many little Claremont Institute monographs, plus various lectures and other articles scattered throughout the archives of various publications too numerous to mention. The “selected” bibliography at the back of The Soul of Politics runs to 20 pages! Jaffa was so prolific that, as one despairs of finding the time to read it all (it helps to go to grad school, preferably at an early age and with the firm conviction that reading is the most important thing in the world), one wonders how he managed to write it all.

The second reason is that Jaffa’s thinking changed over time. One can see the evolution in stages as one reads, in chronological order, with the mature Jaffa emerging fully and finally only with New Birth, which is easily his most difficult work, itself impossible to summarize, and the full understanding of which requires familiarity with the rest of Jaffa’s oeuvre.

Glenn Ellmers has now done what, before he did it, I would have said could not be done. He has clearly and accessibly summarized Jaffa’s thought without oversimplifying or giving (almost) anything short shrift.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Climate ‘crisis’ more dangerous than terrorism? Get real, Biden By Vijay Jayaraj

Posted By on September 4th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/climate_crisis_more_dangerous_than_terrorism_get_real_biden.html

The resurgence of Taliban is now expected to pose a serious threat to U.S. and global security.  Thirteen U.S. servicemen and nearly 200 Afghans were already killed in blasts outside Kabul Airport on August 26, 2021.  Yet President Biden says the biggest threat to the U.S. is a climate that has been undergoing naturally driven makeovers for eons.

“This is not a joke,” said Biden.  “You know what the Joint Chiefs told us the greatest physical threat facing America was?  Global warming.”

During Biden’s presidential campaign, John Kerry said, “America will soon have a government that treats the climate crisis as the urgent national security threat it is.”  And here we are.

In April, U.S. secretary of defense Lloyd Austin termed climate change an existential threat, saying, “From coast to coast and across the world, the climate crisis has caused substantial damage and put people in danger.”

Categorizing climate change as a more serious threat than, say, terrorism or a hostile China is a public policy blunder that at least equals the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and exposes an ignorance of science.  The Biden administration’s statements are void of numbers, data, and statistics.  This is because the metrics of key climate parameters stand in stark contrast to the claims.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Proof that modern academic leftism is insanely stupid By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on September 4th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/proof_that_modern_academic_leftism_is_insanely_stupid.html

I quickly realized as I shepherded my children through public school and college that leftists in education are incredibly uninformed to the point of abject stupidity. My kids became used to the fact that I would become almost incoherent with rage when I read through illiterate and factually inaccurate lessons or assignments from their teachers. However, I have never come across anyone as spectacularly uninformed as Dr. Linda ManyGuns who works at Mount Royal University, in Alberta, Canada. Dr. ManyGuns has declared war on oppressive capital letters.

What you must appreciate before getting into Dr. ManyGuns’ truly astonishing dive into stupidity is that she really is a faculty member at Mount Royal University, in Calgary, a public university with a $99 million (Canadian) endowment and over 14,000 students. Just this April, Mount Royal University proudly announced that she was its new “associate vice-president of indigenization and decolonization,” responsible for “providing vision, strategy, leadership and direction to advance indigenization and decolonization commitments.”

Dr. ManyGuns is a woman with a long, successful academic career as both a student and educator. In addition to the obvious qualification of being a “Blackfoot woman” and an elder for “the Buffalo Women’s Society and part of the Beaver Bundle Society,”

ManyGuns has a Bachelor of Arts from St. Thomas University, a Master’s from Carleton University, a law degree from University of Ottawa and a doctorate from Trent University. Her academic papers and projects are always on Indigenous subjects and informed by traditional knowledge.

For 11 years, ManyGuns was a professor in the University of Lethbridge’s Department of Indigenous Studies. She understands the importance of Indigenous students succeeding in their education and while serving as chair, updated the 45-year-old curriculum. Previously, as a waitress, high steel construction worker and chef, ManyGuns experienced discrimination and lateral violence but refuses to let it define her.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Wisconsin Legislature Votes to Perform Audit of State’s 2020 Presidential Election Results Beginning Soon By Joe Hoft

Posted By on September 4th, 2021

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/wisconsin-legislature-votes-perform-audit-states-2020-presidential-election-results-beginning-next-couple-weeks/

Wisconsin is finally beginning a forensic audit of the results in the state from the 2020 Election.

Wisconsin Republican state legislators approved an audit of the state’s 2020 presidential election results, to begin in the coming weeks. Former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman was appointed to oversee the investigation of the election results..

Gableman traveled to Arizona last month to learn about their election audit and how it could be useful in Wisconsin.

“I learned a lot there that will be helpful to my investigation,” said Gableman, who also attended the election fraud symposium led by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell in Sioux Falls, South Dakota last month.

Gableman’s investigation is one of several in the state of Wisconsin. The nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau is reviewing the results of last year’s election. Republican State Rep. Janel Brandtjen, chairwoman of the Assembly Elections Committee, issued subpoenas to election clerks in Brown and Milwaukee counties for voting machines and ballots.

President Donald Trump issued a statement calling Brandtjen a “strong and great leader.”

“All eyes are on Wisconsin as they begin their election audit,” said Trump. “Hopefully Republican Speaker Robin Vos has the integrity and strength Wisconsin needs to support Rep. Brandtjen’s efforts. Our Country is counting on it!”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Economy Sputters in August, Jobs Report Falls Far Short of Expectations By Zachary Evans

Posted By on September 4th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/economy-sputters-in-august-adding-only-235000-jobs/?utm_source=

The U.S. economy added about 235,000 new jobs in August according to U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics released on Friday, falling far short of economists’ expectations of around 728,000 new jobs.

The U.S. unemployment rate fell slightly to 5.2 percent in August from 5.4 percent in July, the Bureau said.

The disappointing August jobs report comes after extensive employment gains in the previous two months. Employers added a million jobs in July and 962,000 in June, according to revised official estimates.

Areas that saw job gains in August include manufacturing, transportation and warehousing, and private education. Leisure and hospitality jobs remained unchanged, the Bureau said, although restaurants lost 42,000 jobs over the past month.

Continued spread of the Delta variant of coronavirus has hindered some economic growth, economists told the Wall Street Journal. Overall, around 5.3 million fewer people were employed as of August than in February 2020 before the coronavirus pandemic caused widespread business shutdowns.

The U.S. economy has seen high levels of inflation, with consumer prices rising 5.4 percent in July 2021 over the same month in 2020. Supply shocks have also disrupted certain sectors, such as a shortage of semiconductor chips that has caused automaker GM to temporarily shut down factories.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What the Highly Vaccinated States Are Showing Us By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on September 4th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/what-the-highly-vaccinated-states-are-showing-us/

Massachusetts is one of the most vaccinated states, yet it still saw a 25-fold increase in active COVID-19 cases from July 6 to August 31.

In yesterday’s Morning Jolt, I laid out how between July 6 and August 31, the number of active cases of COVID-19 infection in the state of Vermont increased 23-fold — from 114 to 2,668. But as dire as that sounds, the state is not really in a public-health crisis — hospitalizations and daily new deaths remain low in Vermont, in large part because the state is heavily vaccinated. (It also helps that Vermont is one of the least-populated states in the country.)

It’s a mostly but not entirely similar situation in the higher-populated, more urban state next door. Massachusetts ranks third in the country in percentage of total population that is fully vaccinated, at 66.1 percent — and remember, this figure includes kids 11 and under who can’t get vaccinated. Massachusetts ranks second in the country in percentage of total population that has one dose, at more than 75 percent. By August 31, every county in Massachusetts had at least 68 percent of eligible people — those age 12 and over — vaccinated. And an astounding 99 percent of Massachusetts senior citizens are vaccinated.

Once again, we see that high vaccination rates do not prevent the Delta variant from infecting lots of people in a state. On July 6, Massachusetts had 1,349 active cases of COVID-19 infection; by August 31, the state had 34,671 active cases, a 25-fold increase. It cannot be emphasized enough: Vaccination does not prevent infection and cases, and an increase in cases is not necessarily a reflection of low vaccination rates in an area.