FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden, Iran and the Bomb Will he throw away Trump’s Mideast gains to return to a bad nuclear deal?

Posted By on November 28th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-iran-and-the-bomb-11606519663?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The Democratic establishment will soon be back in charge of U.S. foreign policy, and the question is how much they’ve learned in exile. One early test will be Iran, and whether Joe Biden will abandon the strategic gains that President Trump has made in the Middle East in a rush to return to the deeply flawed 2015 nuclear deal.

The apparent assassination of a top Iranian nuclear scientist near Tehran on Friday shows that Iran’s nuclear program remains a global security problem. No one took responsibility, but any number of countries have reason to act now in case the Biden Administration returns to a policy of appeasing Iran.

The U.S. left the nuclear accord in May 2018 and embarked on a “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign. After restoring pre-deal sanctions, the Trump Administration has added new restrictions across the Iranian economy, which is rigged to enrich the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and elites in Tehran. The White House plans to announce more sanctions through Jan. 20.

The sanctions have succeeded in weakening the rogue regime. Today Tehran exports about a quarter of the 2.5 million barrels of oil a day it shipped when the U.S. was still in the deal. This deprives the government of $50 billion in annual revenue. The economy has shrunk, while the Iranian rial has lost 80% of its value against the dollar.

Iran has responded by increasing its violations of the nuclear deal. It now has 12 times the limit of enriched uranium allowed under the accord, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said this month. It also is enriching uranium to 4.5% purity, above the 3.67% allowed under the deal but far from the 90% concentration needed for a bomb.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

When the Experts Fail, Everyone Else Pays the Price What happens when the most respected authorities get it wrong and ruin lives and economies? Not much. David Mamet *****

Posted By on November 28th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-experts-fail-everyone-else-pays-the-price-11606519279?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

The wealthy and powerful must constantly expand their operations. But even if they let their capital sit, they will need accountants, auditors, stockbrokers and consultants. How will they choose these subordinates? According to the opinions of other advisers. Those closest to the boss will have the most influence—and they can keep it, even in failure, by flattery and deference. 

This is the case with governmental power. We are all, in a sense, fools, since no one person can know everything. We all have to trust others for their expertise, and we all make mistakes. The horror of a command economy is not that officials will make mistakes, but that those mistakes will never be acknowledged or corrected.

What about our allegedly market economy? Who will be held accountable for destroying it? No doubt the destruction was carried out in good faith, but the shutdown didn’t accomplish what it was supposed to accomplish. 

We have seen shameless incompetence rewarded before.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump Challenges Biden: Prove Votes Were Not Illegally Obtained to Enter White House By Janita Kan

Posted By on November 28th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-challenges-biden-prove-votes-were-not-illegally-obtained-to-enter-white-house_3594840.html?utm_source=news&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2020-11-27-5

President Donald Trump said on Friday that Democratic nominee Joe Biden can only enter the White House as the next commander-in-chief if he is able to prove votes were not “fraudulently or illegally obtained.”

“Biden can only enter the White House as President if he can prove that his ridiculous ‘80,000,000 votes’ were not fraudulently or illegally obtained. When you see what happened in Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia & Milwaukee, massive voter fraud, he’s got a big unsolvable problem!” Trump wrote in a Twitter post.

The post is the latest indication that Trump is not giving up his efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 general election in several battleground states. The Trump campaign is facing an uphill battle in its legal challenges filed in Pennsylvania and Michigan aimed at protecting the integrity and accuracy of elections. The campaign has also expressed support for lawsuits filed in other battleground states challenging the Nov. 3 results.

Meanwhile, former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell is representing Trump-pledged presidential electors in Georgia and Michigan in challenging election results in both states over allegations of “massive fraud” in particular ballot stuffing and voter manipulation through the use of the Dominion voting system. Trump had previously announced that Powell was part of the campaign’s team but in a later statement the campaign said Powell was “practicing law on her own.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

MY SAY: HE DID IT HIS WAY

Posted By on November 27th, 2020

The other day a friend sent me a video of the three operatic tenors singing “I Did it My Way” music composed by French songwriters Claude François and Jacques Revaux. The brilliant  English lyrics were written by Paul Anka. I don’t really like cross pollination between classical and pop music so I went to Frank Sinatra’s fabulous rendition:

The last stanza so exemplifies Donald J. Trump

“For what is a man, what has he got
If not himself then he has not
To say all the things he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels
The record shows, I took the blows
But I did it my way.”

May he prevail in his quest for electoral justice…..rsk

EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Progressive Assault on Selective High Schools Instead of fixing public education, the left tries to end testing at schools it deems inequitable.By Chester E. Finn Jr.

Posted By on November 27th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-progressive-assault-on-selective-high-schools-11606349353?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring has fired the latest salvo in America’s assault on meritocracy: a 61-page opinion holding that the suburban Loudoun County school system discriminated against black and Hispanic youngsters because its selective-admission high school, the Academies of Loudon, hadn’t admitted enough of them. Never mind that—as Mr. Herring acknowledged—the school’s test-based admissions process is open to all and fairly managed. Because its results have a “disparate impact,” the school system must scrap it.

Nationwide, selective-admission public schools, also known as “exam schools,” are under attack because the demographics of their student populations don’t match those of their communities. Much like elite universities, critics allege, these schools have been admitting far too many whites and Asians and not nearly enough blacks and Latinos.

The ruckus began in New York, where admission to nine of the city’s hundreds of high schools is governed by the eighth-grader’ scores on a specialized admission test. Topping the list are Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, and there’s no denying that they’re full of Asian and white kids, many from low-income and middle-class families. This has raised hackles for decades, but Mayor Bill de Blasio and his schools chancellor have recently pushed to make the admissions process more “equitable.” They want to reserve places for black and Latino children, abolish the entry exam, and instead admit top students from every middle school in the city.

But is every middle school churning out eighth-graders with the requisite skills and knowledge to succeed at Bronx Science? Are all children who make good grades eager, motivated learners ready to make the most of what these high-powered schools have to offer?

BOOKS Comments turned off

Unmasking Antifa A new book exposes the origins, nature, tactics, and aims of this dangerous “idea.” Mark Tapson

Posted By on November 27th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/unmasking-antifa-mark-tapson/

The other day on Facebook a friend posted something critical of the domestic terror group known as Antifa, and someone came to its defense by echoing Clueless Joe Biden’s recent, bizarre declaration that Antifa is not an organization but “an idea.”

It is true that Antifa is not an organization in the strict sense, but Biden’s vague description is either stunningly uninformed or a weak attempt to deflect criticism from its masked militant members. I’m betting on the latter, because Democrat leaders have been curiously reluctant to condemn Antifa’s strategy of violence and intimidation toward the purportedly “fascist” supporters of President Trump.

To educate the Facebook commenter and Biden supporter who believes Antifa actually opposes fascism, I recommended the new book Unmasking Antifa: Five Perspectives on a Growing Threat, edited by the Center for Security Policy and featuring FrontPage Mag contributor Matthew Vadum, because there is no better dissection of the origins, nature, tactics, and aims of this anarchic “idea” and its dangerous adherents than this compact exposé.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Election Findings Could ‘Easily’ Overturn 3 States, Data Analyst Concludes By Charlotte Cuthbertson

Posted By on November 27th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/election-findings-could-easily-overturn-3-states-data-analyst-concludes_3595153.html?utm_source=morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2020-11-27

WASHINGTON—The former data and strategy director for President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign says he has found enough evidence to suggest the election results could be “easily” turned to favor the current president.

“I have no confidence that Joe Biden is the deserved winner of this election, based on our findings,” Matt Braynard said in a Nov. 25 video. “He may have won, he may not have won. Trump may have lost, Trump may have been reelected.

“We just can’t know because of how bad this election system has operated.”

Braynard assembled a team just days after the election to look for inconsistencies in six contested states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Nevada.

The group initially identified 1.25 million voter issues and followed up on them through phone calls and by cross-checking data against other databases.

The team ran several major analyses including of voters who had moved out of state but still voted in the state they had left; voters who registered to vote using a post office box number rather than a residential address as required; voters who requested a mail-in ballot and sent it in, only for it not to be counted; voters who didn’t request a mail-in ballot and didn’t receive one, but discovered a vote had been cast in their name; as well as research on people who voted more than once and on those who are listed in the death index.

Change of Address

One of Braynard’s biggest findings involved voters who had submitted a National Change of Address form to the post office, indicating they had moved out of state, yet appeared to have voted in 2020 in the state they moved from.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

An Illegitimate Election Plunges the Republic into a Crisis This is how elections are conducted in Third World countries – and now in America. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 27th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/illegitimate-election-plunges-republic-crisis-daniel-greenfield/

“The crisis of the republic is emerging out of the shadows of the state and we have to meet it. Its urgent question is whether ours is a government of the people or a people of the government.”

However the presidential election turns out, one thing is clear, half the country will believe that the man officially sitting in the White House is an illegitimate pretender.

And that’s the way it’s been throughout this century.

The crisis of presidential legitimacy really kicked into gear in 2000. Before that people might hate the president, but the opposing political party wouldn’t insist on his illegitimacy. Afterward every president has been treated as an illegitimate criminal to be opposed and driven out.

Twenty years later, the Democrat strategy of presidential illegitimacy has brought the country to the brink of civil war. Declaring that President Bush was illegitimate wasn’t just rhetoric. Congressional Democrats fought certification of the election results in 2000 and 2004, and touted impeachment. The Iraq War did not radicalize Democrat opposition to Bush, like the pandemic, it gave the already radicalized Democrats a tangible thing to justify their treason.

The Democrat doctrine of presidential illegitimacy changed how our government worked.

The first duty of House Democrats became public shows of resistance and hostility to an illegitimate president. And presidents responded by acting unilaterally through executive orders and actions. The collapse of relations between the executive and legislative branches led to a stalemate that benefited the unelected parts of the government: judicial and administrative.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Obama’s Reason to Hate Still surging in 2020. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on November 27th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/obamas-reason-hate-lloyd-billingsley/

In his new book A Promised Land, former president Obama claims he sought “a broader struggle for a fair, just and generous society.” That quest brought criticisms including: “how whites avoid taking the full measure of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, and their own racial attitudes. How this left Black people with a psychic burden, expected to constantly swallow legitimate anger and frustration in the name of some far-off ideal.” This recalls a theme from the author’s first book.

“Black people have a reason to hate. That’s just how it is. For your sake, I wish it were otherwise. But it’s not. So you might as well get used to it.”

Thus spake the poet “Frank” in Dreams from My Father. Frank is giving advice to young Barry, about to leave Hawaii for Occidental College in Los Angeles. As Frank warns, “They’ll train you so good you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit.”

After Dreams from My Father was published in 1995, the author acknowledged that “Frank” was Frank Marshall Davis, still identified as a black journalist and poet. Davis was also a longtime Communist Party activist on the FBI’s security index. When the Dreams author became a rising star in politics, Davis disappeared from the audio version of the book and made no appearance in The Audacity of Hope.

That book mentioned David Axelrod, who in 2007 had been proclaimed “Obama’s narrator” by the New York Times. The next year, the Dreams author became president and set about transforming the United States. As Paul Kengor documented in The Communist, the domestic agenda of the Dreams author bore striking similarities to the views of Frank Marshall Davis. In 2015, Davis did not appear in David Axelrod’s massive Believer, which still proved enlightening on racial themes.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama: My Racist Mentor’s “God Damn America” Taken Out of Context Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on November 27th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/11/obama-my-racist-mentors-god-damn-america-taken-out-daniel-greenfield/

During the 2008 election, it was an uphill battle getting Barack Hussein Obama to disavow his racist mentor, Jeremiah Wright.

After giving a speech defending Wright, and falsely accusing America and his grandmother of racism, he was finally forced to condemn him in a very narrow sort of way, falsely stating, “I reject outright the statements by Reverend Wright that are at issue.”

The political elites, including the media, backing Obama heaved a huge sigh of relief and pretended that it was over.

Wright went on to closely embrace Farrakhan, he had been a former Black Muslim, and spew hate. But the Wright issue resurfaced again as Warnock, the Democrat Senate nominee in Georgia, had been out there defending Wright.

Michelle Obama, in her latest memoir, appeared to distance herself from Wright.

“This wasn’t helped by the fact that ABC News had combed through twenty-nine hours of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, splicing together a jarring highlight reel that showed the preacher careening through callous and inappropriate fits of rage and resentment at white America, as if white people were to blame for every woe. Barack and I were dismayed to see this, a reflection of the worst and most paranoid parts of the man who’d married us and baptized our children” her memoir states.

“Seeing an extreme version of his vitriol broadcast in the news, though, we were appalled. The whole affair was a reminder of how our country’s distortions about race could be two-sided — that the suspicion and stereotyping ran both ways.”