ELECTIONS Comments turned off

‘I Don’t Think’ Biden Can Serve Second Term, George Stephanopoulos Says after Post-Debate Interview David Zimmerman

Posted By on July 10th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/i-dont-think-biden-can-serve-second-term-george-stephanopoulos-says-after-friday-interview/

The ABC host later said he regretted answering the question.

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos said Tuesday that he doesn’t believe President Joe Biden can serve a second term, four days after interviewing the incumbent following his worrisome debate performance late last month.

“Do you think Biden should step down?” an anonymous person on the street in Manhattan asked the political commentator in a 20-second video posted Tuesday afternoon by TMZ. “You’ve talked to him more than anybody else has lately.”

“I don’t think he can serve four more years,” Stephanopoulos responded as he walked away. The pedestrian replied: “You don’t think he can serve four more years? All right, that’s an answer.”

Hours after the clip was published, Stephanopoulos said he regretted answering the question.

“Earlier today, I responded to a question from a passerby. I shouldn’t have,” he told TMZ. An ABC spokesperson added, “George expressed his own point of view and not the position of ABC News.”

On Friday, Stephanopoulos conducted a 22-minute post-debate interview with Biden. During the exclusive sit-down, the 81-year-old president failed to allay voters’ concerns about his health and age following the CNN debate on June 27. Biden described his performance that night as a “bad episode” and insisted he has no “serious condition,” but he declined to take an independent cognitive test to prove that claim.

“Look, I have a cognitive test every single day,” Biden told Stephanopoulos. “Every day, I’ve had tests. Everything I do. You know, not only am I campaigning, I’m running the world. And that’s not — it sounds like hyperbole, but we are the central nation of the world.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Abandoning Israel and the Jews Britain’s new Labour government is already playing to a despicable gallery, both within and without Melanie Phillips

Posted By on July 10th, 2024

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/abandoning-israel-and-the-jews

Five days after Britain’s Labour party won an overwhelming parliamentary majority in the general election, we can see the outline of what this is likely to mean for British Jews and their country’s relationship with Israel. That outline is not reassuring.

The new Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is said to have purged his party of antisemitism and has persuaded many British Jews that he has made Labour safe again for Jewish voters. On Sunday morning, he told the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas — antisemite, Holocaust denier and fan of Hitler’s wartime ally in the Middle East — that an independent state was the “undeniable right” of the Palestinian people and that “financial support for the Palestinian Authority” was one of his “immediate priorities”. 

He did not tell Abbas that a condition of this financial support was that the PA must stop paying financial rewards to terrorists and their families for murdering Israelis. Nor did he say that a condition of receiving more British taxpayers’ money was that the PA must end its indoctrination of Palestinian Arab children in Nazi-themed demonisation of the Jews, teaching them that their greatest ambition should be to murder Jews and steal all their land. 

Instead, Starmer proceeded to lecture Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin  Netanyahu, that there was a “clear and urgent” need for a ceasefire in Gaza as well as an immediate increase in the volume of humanitarian aid reaching civilians. As for the war being waged by Hezbollah in Lebanon against northern Israel, Starmer warned Netanyahu:

It was crucial all parties acted with caution.

What kind of “caution” does Starmer suggest is appropriate in the face of a threat of genocide by Hezbollah and its patron, Iran? Or to put it another way, with Hezbollah primed to unleash its armoury of 150,000 rockets and other missiles that can reach all of Israel, and with Iran itself along with Iraqi, Syrian and Houthi militias not to mention the terrorist armies of the “West Bank” all primed to attack Israel if it launches all-out war against Hezbollah, does Starmer really believe that Israel actually needs to be told to act “with caution”? 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hannah E. Meyers Trespass Without Fear New York’s criminal-justice reforms make it hard to prosecute squatters.

Posted By on July 10th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trespass-without-fear

New York is suffering a “finders keepers, losers weepers”–style squatting epidemic, enabled by the state’s cumbersome civil process for abused landlords. As several recent stories make clear, the state’s housing courts are far too sympathetic to invaders masquerading as tenants. The situation had grown so dire that New York’s legislature passed a measure in April excluding from the definition of “tenant” those who intrude and then hunker down on property without permission.

The new law opens the possibility of a criminal-justice solution to the state’s squatting problem. But a pivotal question remains: Will New York’s 62 district attorneys, encumbered by a decade of pro-defendant policy reforms, successfully prosecute these non-tenants’ crimes? Recent experience suggests that they will struggle to do so, especially in trespass cases.

Queens district attorney Melinda Katz has been in the news for a high-profile prosecution against Brian Rodriguez, who featured in a video that went viral in April. Rodriguez, a 35-year-old burglary and narcotics ex-con, was allegedly occupying a Queens house that Adele Andaloro inherited from her parents. Before Andaloro could eject him, Rodriguez reportedly sublet her rooms. When she had the locks changed and tried to retake her property, he claimed squatter’s rights after 30 days—and had her arrested!

Katz’s office, to its credit, charged Rodriguez with five counts: burglary in the second degree, grand larceny in the fourth degree, criminal possession of stolen property in the fourth degree, criminal trespass in the second degree, and criminal mischief in the fourth degree. If convicted, Rodriguez faces up to 15 years in prison.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald The Times Turns on a Dime Determined to help force President Biden out of the race, the Paper of Record suddenly applies withering scrutiny to his every word.

Posted By on July 10th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-new-york-times-fact-checks-biden

To measure the terror now gripping the mainstream media in the wake of the Biden–Trump debate, consider this: the New York Times is now fact-checking Joe Biden in favor of Donald Trump.

Monday’s print edition of the Times contains an article titled “In ABC Interview, Exaggerations about Polling and Trump.” The article applies a level of scrutiny to Biden’s Friday interview with ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos that is nearly unprecedented toward a Democratic candidate.

The Times now quotes Biden verbatim, with the clear intention of putting his verbal shuffles on full display:

Biden: “After that debate, . . . I did events in—in—in Georgia, did events like this today, large crowds, overwhelming response, no—no—no slipping.”

So remorseless is the Times toward Biden’s speech stumbles that it even records a missing syllable:

“The New York Times had me behind before anything having to do with this race—had me hind—behind 10 points.”

Factual errors that before would have been allowed to pass unnoticed are now harvested and amplified:

Before the interview on Friday, Mr. Biden said of Mr. Trump at a rally in Wisconsin that he would “beat him again in 2020.” At a Fourth of July barbecue with military members and their families, Mr. Biden referred to Mr. Trump as “one of our former colleagues” before correcting himself. And at a fund-raising reception in East Hampton, New York, he confused Italy and France when referring to the location of a veterans’ cemetery he recently visited.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Why Gavin Newsom Must Never Become U.S. President Newsom is unqualified to be president of the United States for the same reasons he is unfit to be governor of California. By Edward Ring

Posted By on July 10th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/07/10/why-gavin-newsom-must-never-become-u-s-president/

As President Biden’s age threatens to derail his reelection campaign, waiting in the wings and trying not to appear too eager is Gavin Newsom. It’s not easy. Wanting to be president with an intensity that might make Gollum’s lust for the One Ring appear prosaic, California’s governor knows that if Biden drops out, he’s the oddsmakers’ favorite.

But there is absolutely nothing Gavin Newsom has ever done that qualifies him to be president of the United States. If Newsom becomes the next U.S. president, he will accelerate a process that is already well underway and must be stopped at all costs: turning all of America into California.

There are glaring examples of California’s over-the-top embrace of progressive extremism. Identity politics. Race and gender “equity.” Decriminalizing crime and hard drugs. A complete failure to manage the state’s homeless, much less help them. An obsession with climate change that has inspired laws that reach into virtually every facet of life. Shortages of energy, water, and housing. And prices for goods and services so punitive that millions have fled.

Under Gavin Newsom’s watch, the state is devolving into feudalism: a massive underclass that can’t survive without government assistance, supervised by an elite minority that will retain political power by continuing to dole out that assistance. The formula is simple: make life progressively more difficult for ordinary Californians, tell them their travails are the result of bigotry and climate change, then secure their votes by offering them more government benefits.

And herein lies Newsom’s biggest crime, one shared by the progressive elites that run California and intend to take over the world. It is the biggest lie of modern progressivism—the corrupt foundation of their power. Newsom and his ilk are telling California’s middle class that what they have attained is socially unjust and ecologically unsustainable. They tell us that the ideals of equity and environmentalism compel us to live in high-density, low-impact housing, utilize shared transportation, and limit our consumption of anything that elevates our “carbon footprint.” And they are telling us that our taxes must be utilized to offer these same limited amenities to anyone who is “underserved,” “historically disadvantaged,” “unhoused,” or in any way a victim of “systemic discrimination.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Sexual Assaults on October 7 Omitted From the White House Fact Sheet All sexual assault victims are equal – but some are . . . by Hugh Fitzgerald

Posted By on July 10th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-sexual-assaults-on-october-7-omitted-from-the-white-house-fact-sheet/

Recently the White House issued a Fact Sheet providing what was supposed to be a comprehensive list of sexual assaults carried out in “conflict zones” all over the world. This Fact Sheet did indeed include a great many places where mass rapes have occurred, including sexual assault victims in Ukraine, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Iraq, South Sudan, Sudan, and Syria. But one place was unaccountably, and unacceptably, left out: Israel, where on October 7, 3,000 Hamas operatives from Gaza smashed through the border into the country’s south and proceeded to rape, torture, mutilate, and kill Israeli men, women, and children. A total of 1,200 Israelis were killed, and 260 were kidnapped and taken back to Gaza on the backs of pickup trucks, in cars, and slung over the shoulders of motorcyclists. The sexual assaults were sadistic in nature. Many consisted of mass rapes, followed by mutilation of the sexual organs of the victims, who only then were killed. In some cases, the breasts of women were sliced off and thrown about in a ghoulish game. Men, too, were subject to sexual assault and mutilation, including having their genitalia cut off. The Hamas perpetrators were having a high old time of it — what fun to rape, torture, and murder helpless Yahudim — and they proudly filmed their exploits, so as to be able to show their relatives and friends back in Gaza.

This horrifying assault became known at once all over the world. It certainly made a deep impression in Washington. Yet for reasons we do not know, when at the end of June, the U.S. government released its Fact Sheet on sexual assaults in conflict zones around the world, it left out any mention of the rapes, tortures, and murders of Israeli girls and women by Hamas.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Animal Farm Democrats A glimpse into leftist self-destruction. by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 10th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/animal-farm-democrats/

Leftists make up things as they go along, as yesterday’s heresies (e.g., Biden seems demented) become today’s orthodoxies (e.g. Biden really is demented)—depending on the current party directive about what is most advantageous.

So many of the Democrats current dilemmas are self-inflicted— a result of their often illegal and always unethical efforts to warp democracy that boomerang upon them and remind us that hubris really does earn nemesis.

Note that there would never have been any presidential immunity suit before the Supreme Court had the Biden administration just not orchestrated local, state, and federal prosecutors to neuter Trump, Joe Biden’s 2024 presidential opponent.

That current lawfare effort marked the third sequential attempt to sabotage a political opponent’s campaign—following Hillary’s 2016 Russian “collusion”/Steele “dossier” scam, and Joe’s 2020 Russian “disinformation”/ “51 intelligence authorities” ruse.

In other words, had Nathan Wade not synchronized with the White House counsel’s office, had Merrick Garland not had his third-ranking federal prosecutor take over the Manhattan prosecution from the incompetent Alvin Bragg, and had not Garland picked the biased and previously failed special counsel Jack Smith to hound and rush to judgement Trump, the question of presidential immunity from Biden’s orchestrated lawfare would have never come up before the court.

The leftwing panic over Biden’s cognitive decline in the debate is not because he is clearly unable to fulfill the duties of a president (is there any other job in America that Joe Biden could perform other than being in charge of the nuclear codes?), and thus might injure the country. The hysteria instead arises solely because he might lose the Democrats power, either by losing the election—or by winning it, then crashing, and passing the country off into the hands of a cackling Kamala Harris.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Kamala’s Legacies Ignoring victims of terrorist mass murder, legalizing crime . . . and voter fraud. by Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on July 10th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/kamalas-legacies/

One day before the deadline, California Gov. Gavin Newsom scrapped plans to place on the November 5 ballot a measure to compete with an already qualified proposition to reform Proposition 47. That measure, passed by voters on November 4, 2014, is a legacy item for Kamala Harris, who could be on the ballot for president this November 5.

As California’s attorney general in 2014, Harris named a proposition that changed thefts of property valued under $950 from felonies to misdemeanors. Harris called it the “Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act” but failed to explain how legalizing crime made schools and neighborhoods safer. She has claimed she took no position on the act, but the ballot language has exposed that falsehood.

Proposition 47 launched a crime wave across the state, with 31,322 vehicle break-ins in San Francisco alone in 2017, a 24-percent increase from the previous year. The measure empowered criminals to break into vehicles in broad daylight with bystanders present. The arrest rate in San Francisco, where Harris previously served as district attorney, was less than two percent, and under Proposition 47 criminals could expect at the most a citation.

The consequences of the pro-crime measure were obvious to all but the willfully blind, but the attorney general kept on the quiet side. That emboldened the terrorists embedded in the Golden State.

On December 2, 2015 at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik gunned down Robert Adams, Isaac Amianos, Bennetta Betbadal, Harry Bowman, Sierra Clayborn, Juan Espinoza, Aurora Godoy, Shannon Johnson, Larry Daniel Kaufman, Damien Meins, Tin Ngyen, Nicholas Thalasinos, Yvette Velasco, and Michael Wetzel. The dead and wounded included blacks, Hispanics, Asians and immigrants, but Harris failed to call the mass murder a hate crime or even gun violence.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

‘They’ shrieked about ‘global warming’ — but now they admit we were ‘accidentally cooling’ By Jack Hellner

Posted By on July 9th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/07/they_shrieked_about_global_warming_but_now_they_admit_we_were_accidentally_cooling.html

When it comes to climate science, basically, researchers, mainstream media outlets, the UN, and the Democrats simply make things up as they go along to fit the narrative. 

When the earth didn’t warm up as much as they predicted, they changed the terminology from global warming to climate change.

When hundreds of dire predictions never came true, and they had no scientific data to support their policies to destroy industries and our quality and way of life, they just made things up, just like they did with COVID.

Now, take a look at this, from The Washington Post, via Yahoo News:

We’ve been accidentally cooling the planet — and it’s about to stop

It is widely accepted that humans have been heating up the planet for over a century by burning coal, oil and gas. Earth has already warmed by almost 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since preindustrial times, and the planet is poised to race past the hoped-for limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

But fewer people know that burning fossil fuels doesn’t just cause global warming – it also causes global cooling. It is one of the great ironies of climate change that air pollution, which has killed tens of millions, has also curbed some of the worst effects of a warming planet.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Adopt Deterrence: US Waning Support for Ukraine, Israel and the Philippines Is a Threat to the Free World by Con Coughlin

Posted By on July 9th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20769/adopt-deterrence

The US neglect of vital security issues, from waning support for Ukraine and Israel, to its refusal to acknowledge the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear programme, is inflicting serious damage to America’s status as a global superpower.

America’s alarming non-confrontational policy towards the mullahs — even asking Europe not to censure Iran for its growing nuclear weapons program — has been a mainstay of both the Biden and Obama administrations. Their encouragement of Iran to acquire nuclear bombs has led the mullahs and their proxies to expand their malign activities throughout the region. Biden’s impotence has effectively invited Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia that controls most of Lebanon, to escalate its attacks against Israel with the aim of opening a new front on Israel’s northern border…

Another area where Washington’s incompetent handling of key security issues is the Pacific, where apparent US aversion to upsetting the Communist dictatorship headed by Chinese President Xi Jinping has recently led to an increase in aggressive Chinese military conduct towards the Philippines as part of Beijing’s efforts to expand its control over the South China Sea.

Washington’s persistent dithering on China, as well as other vital issues of global security such as Ukraine, Iran, and failing wholly to back Israel fighting not only for its own existence but protecting freedom in the West from aggressive autocracies, will certainly lend encouragement to Putin and other dictatorial regimes in Beijing and Tehran that the US will not present a serious challenge to their efforts to expand their global influence.

If the current administration allows terrorists and aggressors to win, what message does that send to all terrorists and aggressors?

The only way for the US to reclaim its global stature as the leader of the free world, after having tried everything else, is finally to adopt deterrence: warn every US adversary that if it provokes Washington, the response to each of them and their regimes will be a cost they do not wish to contemplate.

Whether US President Joe Biden remains in office or not, his recent debate with former President Donald J. Trump and has exposed the global catastrophe that US policies under the current administration have wrought.

The US neglect of vital security issues, from waning support for Ukraine and Israel, to its refusal to acknowledge the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear programme, is inflicting serious damage to America’s status as a global superpower.

Arguably the most damning examples of America’s increasingly faltering grip on key foreign policy issues were Biden’s recent decisions to slow-walk arms deliveries to Israel and failing to show sufficient solidarity for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.