NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Did George W. Betray Team GOP? By Jack Cashill

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/why_did_george_w_betray_team_gop.html

“In 2020 I boldly declared that Trump was the only thing standing between our country, the American people, and socialism.  I turned out to be correct,” said George P. Bush in announcing his candidacy for Texas attorney general.

Nearly 75 million Americans agreed, but his uncle, George W. Bush, was not among them.  It is likely that if George W. had said what George P. did, the Democrats could not have “harvested” enough votes to put their man over the top.  But he didn’t.  The result, as George P. pointed out, “was over 30 trillion dollars in total spending and 6 trillion in next year’s annual budget.”  And that is just the fiscal damage.

In the year 2000, some 50 million people elected George W. Bush president.  Despite his failings, almost all hung with him and re-elected him in 2004.  They understood that politics is a team sport.  They may not have loved their captain, but they understood he was better for the country than the other guy.   The sports enthusiast Bush is, one would think he’d get the concept of teamwork.

He did not.  At least, he did not seem to.  In his bestselling campaign book, Battle for the Soul, Edward-Isaac Dovere gives us a glimpse into what Bush was doing and saying to sabotage Trump and betray the millions of Americans who had backed both men during their presidencies.

“The two presidents hadn’t talked much in the months since Obama left office,” writes Dovere of Bush and Barack Obama, “though their staffs, along with Clinton’s and George H.W. Bush’s, were on email chains that featured rapid-fire Trump mocking and consoling one another over the state of the republic.”  As someone who voted for both Bushes, reading this made me cringe.

Dovere cited some choice lines from a speech Bush made in October 2017, hosted by the George W. Bush Institute in New York City.  For those who need a refresher, here is the passage that warmed the hearts of Democrats everywhere:

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Black Mother Reveals Critical Race Theory’s Hidden Anti-Black Racism By Tyler O’Neil *****

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/06/11/watch-black-florida-mother-eviscerates-critical-race-theory-in-2-minutes-n1453868

On Thursday, black Florida mother Keisha King testified against critical race theory (CRT) as Florida’s Department of Education considered a new rule that would ban CRT from public schools. The rule ultimately passed. King’s testimony went viral on social media, and even Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), who proposed the ban (which originally did not explicitly condemn CRT), shared a video of her testimony.

“My name is Keisha King, I’m a mom of two, one of whom is in the Duval County Public School system and one in private school thanks to school choice,” the mother, who lives in the Jacksonville area, began.

“Just coming off of May 31, marking the 100 years [after] the Tulsa riots, it is sad that we are even contemplating something like critical race theory, where children will be separated by their skin color and deemed permanently oppressors or oppressed in 2021,” King lamented. “That is not teaching the truth, unless you believe that whites are better than blacks.”

Recommended: Critical Race Theory Has Sparked a Civil War in American Education

“I have personally heard teachers teaching CRT and we have had an assembly shut down because a Duval County Public School system consultant thought it would be a great idea to separate students by race,” she recalled.

“This is unacceptable,” the black mother declared, emphatically.

She went on to counter much of the leftist rhetoric that CRT advocates use to foist this nefarious ideology on children.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How We Came to Celebrate Racism Once Again By Philip Carl Salzman

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/columns/philip-carl-salzman/2021/06/11/how-we-came-to-celebrate-racism-once-again-n1453820

While in past centuries, Americans and Canadians held negative and thus racist views of blacks, and discriminated against them, today the official government policy in both countries is that whites should be viewed negatively, and be discriminated against. Rules have been put in place in government offices, in industry, education, media, and throughout to indoctrinate against whites and in favor of “people of color,” as well as to benefit “people of color” and marginalize whites.

To illustrate, here is a brief excerpt from a recent article in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association: “Whiteness is … a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility. … Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples.” 

Governments, universities, and corporations have mandated that “people of color” get priority in hiring and promotion. Merit, encompassing achievement and potential, is now rejected as a criterion for personnel selection. Skin color is now the primary criterion of worth. 

Minorities are caught up in this racism. The tiny minority of Jewish citizens, who were never considered white until it became a bad thing, are now regarded as hyper-white, having all of the bad qualities of whites (such as Nobel prizes?) and deserving of nouveaux pogroms, in America! Anti-Semitic hate crimes have skyrocketed since the Democrat Party has made street politics popular. Asian Americans, a good-sized minority, made the mistake of being the most successful category economically and professionally. For this, they have been designated “white-adjacent” and condemned to be criticized and excluded for achieving more than their “fair share.” 

ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

Politico Admits Colluding with ‘Rival Campaigns’ to Take Out Leading NYC Mayoral Candidate By Kyle Smith

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/politico-admits-colluding-with-rival-campaigns-to-take-out-leading-nyc-mayoral-candidate/

Eric Adams, the Brooklyn Borough president and ex-cop who has surpassed Andrew Yang to become the front-runner in the New York City mayoral race (whose Democratic Party primary takes place June 22), is looking like a victim of bad journalism by Politico this week. Politico New York‘s would-be hit piece questioning Adams’s residency status took a startling turn when it revealed that it was produced in collusion with Adams’s mayoral rivals. “POLITICO and sources on rival campaigns observed him arriving at the government building close to midnight four nights in a row last week and several nights the week prior,” the site’s story noted on Tuesday. (Emphasis mine.)

Huh? Is this normal procedure for Politico, to work with this or that political campaign in service of taking out a leading political figure? Political reporters take tips from oppo researchers all the time, but they then seek to verify the rumors independently. They don’t normally join forces with one campaign to destroy another.

I suspect that Yang’s team is behind this farcical last-minute oppo-research gambit attempting to suggest that Adams secretly lives in New Jersey. As Adams has previously stated, he owns a condo in Fort Lee, right across the river from upper Manhattan, and his girlfriend lives there. Adams owns several New York City properties, some of which he rents out for income, and has cited different addresses on different public records.

The Politico story suggests that its reporters and rival oppo researchers worked together to put a tail on Adams for two weeks but discovered only the following: that he often sleeps in his office, which is Brooklyn Borough Hall. That’s a little odd, but then again Adams said last March that he was effectively living there because he was working on COVID battle plans. Adams this week invited reporters to take a look around what he says is his main residence, an apartment in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Also in recent days he introduced reporters to his 26-year-old son, whose existence he said he had kept secret from fellow officers when he was a cop. That’s a little odd, too; Adams cited privacy concerns for the younger man.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

World Leaders Must Demand Answers on COVID-19 Origins By David Asher

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/world-leaders-must-demand-answers-on-covid-19-origins/

G7 leaders should use their collective power to demand answers from the Chinese Communist Party on the coronavirus.

After a year and a half of stonewalling, destruction of evidence, and lies by the Chinese government, a growing chorus of international opinion is demanding a full and transparent investigation into the origins of COVID-19. As G7 leaders gather in Cornwall this weekend for the annual summit, they have the opportunity — and arguably an obligation — to use their collective power to demand answers from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and prevent future pandemics.

Early in 2020, a three-line whip was essentially imposed across the scientific, public-health, and political establishments, holding that the novel coronavirus likely emerged through zoonotic transfer. Despite the many scientific and circumstantial holes in this explanation, the alternative hypothesis that COVID-19 may have spread via a lab accident from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — located at the epicenter of the initial outbreak — was dismissed as a fringe theory. The zoonotic hypothesis also happened to be the preferred explanation of the CCP, which vigorously pushed this narrative while silencing its scientists, destroying evidence, and stage-managing the World Health Organization (WHO) investigation.

Now that an increasing number of scientists, reporters, and political figures are finally taking the lab-leak hypothesis seriously, elected leaders owe their citizens answers about the who, when, where, how, and why of the origins of COVID-19.

The G7 countries should launch a joint investigation into the origins of the virus to complement the ongoing Five Eyes inquiries. Countries such as Japan, Germany, France, and Italy with world-class intelligence services and medical-research institutions can share the benefits of their expertise and their insights on China. France’s cooperation is particularly important. After all, the French built the BSL-4 laboratory for advanced pathogenetic research on viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Undoubtedly, the French know many of the most sensitive secrets regarding this facility and the personnel inside the WIV, with whom they previously collaborated, and can do a great deal to help solve this mystery.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Last Voter Suppression Outrage Biden called voter ID an ‘assault’ on civil rights. What happened next?

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-last-voter-suppression-outrage-11623448789?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

With hyperbole swirling around voting reforms in Georgia, Florida, Texas, Iowa and beyond, it’s worth recalling what happened last time Democrats did this Chicken Little performance. In a 2014 speech, Vice President Joe Biden rang alarms about a “new assault on the most basic of civil rights, the right to vote.”

Mr. Biden took specific aim at voter-ID laws, calling them “an attempt to repress minority voting, masquerading as an attempt to end corruption.” The Associated Press reporter covering the speech added: “Biden said if the laws had been in effect during the 2012 election and only six percent of black voters who cast their ballots had been unable to vote, President Obama would have lost Florida.”

Today 36 states have voter-ID laws of some kind, and Mr. Biden’s dire story of politically motivated disenfranchisement hasn’t panned out. “Strict ID Laws Don’t Stop Voters”: That was the headline last month in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Earlier versions of this study have circulated for a while, but the latest one merits a look. The authors analyzed 10 years of data, from 2008 to 2018, precisely when Mr. Biden warned of voter suppression.

Even “strict” voter-ID laws, the authors said, “have no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation.” But the ID laws appeared to lift turnout slightly among nonwhite voters, relative to whites.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Demonization of Benjamin Netanyahu He’s simply an Israeli patriot, but detractors called him an enemy of peace, even a Republican. By Ron Dermer

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-demonization-of-benjamin-netanyahu-11623430571?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, have worked for more than a quarter-century to tarnish his image in the U.S. and around the world.

In 1996, when Israelis first elected him to put a brake on a dangerous Oslo process, Mr. Netanyahu was depicted as an enemy of peace. For three years, his opponents insisted that if only Israel were rid of Mr. Netanyahu, it could make peace with Yasser Arafat. They were wrong. Ehud Barak defeated Mr. Netanyahu in 1999 and offered Arafat sweeping concessions at Camp David a year later. Instead of peace, Israel got scores of suicide bombings and the worst wave of Palestinian terrorism in its history—the so-called second intifada in which more than 1,000 Israelis were murdered.

That was followed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s 2005 decision to withdraw from Gaza. Just as Mr. Netanyahu predicted, Israel’s unilateral concession led only to further aggression. Hamas, a genocidal terror organization committed to Israel’s destruction, took over Gaza and turned it into a base from which thousands of missiles have been fired at Israeli cities.

Mr. Netanyahu returned to the premiership in 2009. The preceding bloody decade should have made it obvious to all that Palestinian leaders didn’t want peace. But Mr. Netanyahu was scapegoated again. Now Mahmoud Abbas was cast as a peacemaker instead of Arafat, who died in 2004. While few Israelis believed such nonsense any longer, many foreign policy makers did, including key officials in the Obama White House.

This time, another element was added to the demonization of Mr. Netanyahu: American partisan politics. Not only was he cast as an enemy of peace; he was accused of being a Republican. His critics portrayed his legitimate opposition to a Democratic president’s dangerous Middle East policies as an illegitimate effort to intervene in American politics.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

David Goldman “China can help US out of its inflation trap.” China appears to be offering a deal to Washington

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://asiatimes.com/2021/06/china-can-help-us-out-of-its-inflation-trap/

NEW YORK – “Goods produced by China’s hundreds of millions of workers are a strong anchor for stabilizing global inflation” read the banner headline at China’s “Observer” (guancha.cn) website June 10, quoting People’s Bank of China official Guo Shuqing, the Communist Party representative at the central bank.

The “Observer” site frequently floats trial balloons for China’s top policymakers.

Guo dismissed the reassurances of Western central bankers and offered an alarming assessment of inflation risk: “Inflation is coming as scheduled. Moreover, the magnitude is higher than the expectations of central bankers in the United States and Europe, and the duration of inflation does not seem to be as short as many experts predict.”

He added, “When fiscal expenditures are already largely supported by the central bank’s printing of money, it is like an airplane entering tailspin, and it is difficult to pull out of the dive. Before 2008, the Fed’s balance sheet was only more than US$800 billion, and now it is nearly $8 trillion, and the ratio of US federal debt to GDP has surpassed the highest record created during World War II.”

Nonetheless, Guo argued, China can help: “For a considerable period of time, China has supplied about half of the world’s finished goods, and on the whole has not increased export prices, laying a solid foundation for global epidemic prevention and control, and for economic recovery. If the large amounts of currency issued by the most developed countries have been the driving force for global inflation, then the goods produced by China’s hundreds of millions of workers are the anchor for stabilizing global inflation.”

Beijing is sending a message to Washington: You have a big problem with inflation, and we can help – in return for other consideration. China and the United States had a tacit deal during the 2000s: You buy our goods, and we invest the proceeds in US Treasury securities. That kept US interest rates artificially low during the housing bubble years.

BOOKS Comments turned off

DAVID GOLDMAN: A REVIEW OF JOSEPH JOHNSTON’S “THE DECLINE OF NATIONS”

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/but-thou-shalt-endure/

“In his indictment of America’s national decline, Johnston’s belief that America has the wherewithal to restore itself shines through.”

Joseph F. Johnston is an attorney and writer who has read widely in history and philosophy. His new book, The Decline of Nations: Lessons for Strengthening America at Home and in the World, is a deep meditation on the national condition, motivated by the hope that we will escape the almost universal fate of nations to rise and then decline. He believes that our problem began with the abandonment of moral certainty in favor of relativism. His survey of the damage to American culture and mores extends from the expansion of the welfare state and the enervation of private initiative to literary habits, sexual behavior, demographics, and high culture. Every college student in the country should be tied to a chair and made to read it (or, if needed, hear it read aloud).

In his conclusion, he offers a well-considered set of remedies. “Low rates of taxation, limited government, free markets, encouragement of private enterprise, fiscal responsibility, sound money, and the rule of law” are the foundation of economic strength. This in turn depends on educational excellence, by “providing parents with an alternative to public schooling.” Jurisprudence should return to “the objective truths of an acknowledged moral order.” America’s military strength must be rebuilt, focusing on defense against nuclear missiles, terrorism, cyberwar, and space technologies, without overextending our capacity to “protect countries that are unwilling to protect themselves.”

Demographics and Decline

In 2008, the United States was an outlier among the large industrial nations with a total fertility rate of 2.1 live births per woman. That is the total number of births the average woman is expected to have during her lifetime. The US National Center for Health Statistics reported in May that the total fertility rate (TFR) had fallen to just 1.64, close to that of Europe or China. We have heard forecasts of demographic doom for years from the Old World and East Asia; a new study in The Lancet forecasts that the population of the European Union will fall by a third, to 308 million from 446 million, by the end of this century. It appears that the bell also tolls for us.

The long-term consequences of demographic winter will be devastating; in the United Nations’ low-fertility scenario, the US will have 71 citizens over the age of 65 for every 100 of working age (Europe would have 84, and Japan 120). The unfunded liabilities of the Social Security and Medicare systems now exceed $113 trillion by some estimates, and a smaller working-age population would struggle to support them.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China’s New Power Play: More Control of Tech Companies’ Troves of Data Beijing is calling on tech giants to share their information—and asserting its authority over data held by U.S. companies in China as well By Lingling Wei

Posted By on June 12th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-new-power-play-more-control-of-tech-companies-troves-of-data-11623470478?mod=hp_lead_pos7

Shortly after rising to power in late 2012, Xi Jinping made his first company visit in his new job as China’s Communist Party chief, to Tencent Holdings Ltd. There, he raised a topic that has become both an opportunity and a challenge for his rule: the vast troves of personal data being gathered by the country’s technology companies.

Mr. Xi complimented Tencent’s founder, Pony Ma, on the way the company was accumulating information from millions of users, and harnessing that data to drive innovation. He also suggested that data would be useful to Beijing.

“You have the most sufficient data, then you can make the most objective and accurate analysis,” he told Mr. Ma, according to state media accounts. “The suggestions to the government in this regard are very valuable.”

More than eight years later, those suggestions are becoming demands. The government is now calling on big tech companies like Tencent, online retailing giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd. to open up the data they collect from social media, e-commerce and other businesses, according to official documents and interviews with people involved in policy-making.

The complex new web of laws and regulations around sharing digital records is being driven by the huge growth in data held by China’s tech giants—and a belief that the government should be able to access it. The efforts are also part of Mr. Xi’s quest to rein in the increasingly powerful tech sector, which has pushed back on some of Beijing’s previous data-sharing efforts. The most recent law, passed Thursday, will make it harder for companies to resist such requests.

China’s leaders worry that the country’s tech giants could be using their extensive personal and corporate digital records to build alternative power centers in the one-party state. That concern led Mr. Xi to halt a planned initial public offering by Jack Ma’s financial-technology behemoth Ant Group Co. late last year.

Chinese government entities involved in the effort to regulate data, including the State Council and the Cyberspace Administration of China, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Beijing is also intensifying the pressure on foreign firms operating in China to keep records gathered from local customers inside the country, so the government has more authority over the records. Western companies have long complained such “data-localization” requirements could stifle innovation in their global operations or enable Chinese authorities to steal their proprietary information.