ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Vote for Joe Biden? Seriously? Biden is Bernie Sanders’s grim party in sheep’s clothing. Daniel Henninger

Posted By on October 29th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vote-for-joe-biden-seriously-11603926854?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The 2020 presidential election has been defined by three events: the emergence of the coronavirus in March, the George Floyd protests after May 25, and Rep. Jim Clyburn’s endorsement in February of Joe Biden before the South Carolina primary. There has also been one major nonevent: the Biden presidential noncampaign.

A cold-weather resurgence of the virus in the upper Midwest and Plains States has put the pandemic in front of voters in the election’s final week, while the importance of the other two events in shaping the outcome has faded, especially the Clyburn coronation.

Forgotten by many voters is that back in mid-February, after losing in Iowa and New Hampshire, it looked as if former Vice President Biden’s listless campaign would become his third failed attempt at the presidency.

Mr. Biden had distinguished himself in the primary debates only by surviving them. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the other moderate alternative to the progressive insurgency of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, wasn’t gaining traction. Mike Bloomberg landed and left like an evening moth. In short, a path was opening for Vermont democratic socialist Bernie Sanders to secure the party’s nomination.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Masks Are a Distraction From the Pandemic Reality Viruses inevitably spread, and authorities have oversold face coverings as a preventive measure. By Joseph A. Ladapo , M.D.

Posted By on October 29th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/masks-are-a-distraction-from-the-pandemic-reality-11603927026?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Dr. Ladapo is an associate professor at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.

A hallmark of Covid-19 pandemic policy has been the failure of political leaders and health officials to anticipate the unintended consequences of their actions. This tendency has haunted many decisions, from lockdowns that triggered enormous unemployment and increased alcohol and drug abuse, to school closures that are widening educational disparities between rich and poor families. Mask mandates may also have unintended consequences that outweigh the benefits.

First, consider how the debate has evolved and the underlying scientific evidence. Several randomized trials of community or household masking have been completed. Most have shown that wearing a mask has little or no effect on respiratory virus transmission, according to a review published earlier this year in Emerging Infectious Diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s journal. In March, when Anthony Fauci said, “wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better” but “it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think it is,” his statement reflected scientific consensus, and was consistent with the World Health Organization’s guidance.

Almost overnight, the recommendations flipped. The reason? The risk of asymptomatic transmission. Health officials said mask mandates were now not only reasonable but critical. This is a weak rationale, given that presymptomatic spread of respiratory viruses isn’t a novel phenomenon in public health. Asymptomatic cases of influenza occur in up to a third of patients, according to a 2016 report in Emerging Infectious Diseases, and even more patients had mild cases that are never diagnosed. Asymptomatic or mild cases appear to contribute more to Covid-19 transmission, but this happens in flu cases, too, though no one has called for mask mandates during flu season.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Bidens and Tony Bobulinski Joe owes the public a response about the family’s business.

Posted By on October 29th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bidens-and-tony-bobulinski-11603927190?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Joe Biden is asking voters to elect him on the strength of his character, honesty and judgment. Which is why Mr. Biden owes a response to new allegations about his son Hunter’s business deals.

Tony Bobulinski on Tuesday sat with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson to provide details of a 2016-17 business venture involving Hunter, Jim Biden (Joe’s brother), and CEFC China Energy, a conglomerate tied to the Chinese government. Mr. Bobulinski, a Navy veteran and financier, was recruited by Hunter and associates to serve as CEO, and the interview shed more light on hundreds of emails and documents he recently made public

Mr. Bobulinski said that in 2017 he twice met with former Vice President Joe Biden, as part of a Biden family effort at “wining and dining” him to “take on the CEO role.” He pointed to documents in which Hunter and others refer to Joe’s involvement in the deal, including an email from Hunter partner James Gilliar that proposed the “big guy” get 10% of the company equity, held in Hunter’s name. Mr. Bobulinski says “the big guy” is Joe. He also related a conversation in which he said Jim Biden said the answer to questions about Biden family involvement with foreign entities was “plausible deniability.”

Mr. Bobulinski sounded credible. He said he wants to clear his name of accusations that he was a tool of foreign election-meddlers, and he repeatedly declined opportunities to speculate or get partisan. He said he felt a duty to American citizens “to go on record and define the facts for them and let them do their own work, let them decide how they view those facts or not.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Logic of Trump: Let Us Count The Reasons

Posted By on October 29th, 2020

https://www.nysun.com/national/logic-of-trump-let-us-count-the-reasons/91317/

It is a squeeze to reduce the number of logically indisputable reasons why President Trump should be reelected to a single column, but I will attempt it. Reelection is the only way of restoring the conditions that Mr. Trump created that eliminated unemployment prior to the onset of the COVID-19 crisis.

This, coupled to his near-elimination of illegal immigration (against fierce Democratic resistance), generated greater percentage income growth amongst the lowest 20% of income-earners than among the top 10% — a noteworthy start on addressing the universal income-disparity problem.

Only a Trump victory would ensure retention of the present relatively low personal and corporate income-tax rates and the avoidance of insane, highly damaging, and counterproductive shutdowns in cowardly terror of the coronavirus, which only mortally threatens 1% of the population, who can be isolated and protected.

Only a Trump victory would prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear military power within five years and North Korea from resuming its missile tests over Japan and South Korea. There are no grounds for confidence that the Democrats would maintain a firm but not belligerent economic and strategic containment strategy towards China, coordinated with India, Japan, South Korea, and other key allies in south and east Asia and Australasia.

We know that if Mr. Trump were defeated, the country would be subjected not just to the self-flagellating provisions of the Paris Climate Accord, but also to the $100 trillion Green Terror assault on the petroleum industry and a bone-cracking rise in electricity costs after closing gas-fired electricity plants.

The Democrats remain committed to giving the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas a veto over any resolution of their conflict with Israel, and since they do not accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, that would ensure continued stagnation, attrition, and terrorism, financed by a newly enabled Iran. The Trump strategy is steadily lining up the support of the Arab states in favor of a comprehensive solution that would give Palestine a modest state and a great economic incentive for peace, and security at least for Israel.

MEDIA Comments turned off

New York Times Editors Want to Send $5 Billion More to Iran. Here Are Nine Reasons They’re Wrong. by Ira Stoll

Posted By on October 29th, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/10/28/new-york-times-editors-want-to-send-5-bil

The New York Times is seizing on the coronavirus pandemic to push the idea of easing American economic sanctions on Iran, notwithstanding Iranian interference in American elections.

A staff editorial the Times published earlier this month was headlined, “Iran’s Covid-19 Death Toll Is Rising. Show Mercy, Mr. Trump.” It argued for relaxing the sanctions against Iran, calling them “particularly cruel during a pandemic.” The Times followed up days later by publishing an opinion piece describing Iranians as “crushed” by “extreme US sanctions.” And by publishing a follow-up editorial inaccurately claiming “Sanctions against Iran are opposed by allies and threaten a humanitarian disaster.”

Here are nine reasons the Times editorial line is misguided:

It relies on a discredited expert. The Times editorial says: “Barbara Slavin, director of the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council, calls the American ‘maximum pressure’ campaign against Iran ‘sadism masquerading as foreign policy.’” Slavin had to apologize in 2017 after being photographed making an obscene gesture to protesters against the Iranian regime. Back in January 2020, Slavin wrote a Times op-ed headlined “Qassim Suleimani’s Killing Will Unleash Chaos.” The chaos she predicted failed to materialize. The Times fails to mention that the Atlantic Council’s funders include foreign governments and foreign individuals, oil companies, a nuclear power company and undisclosed “anonymous” donors, some of which may want to do business in Iran or have commercial interests affected by the sanctions. The line about “sadism masquerading as foreign policy” is clever, but sending money to an enemy country, as the advocates of eased sanctions want to do, is masochism masquerading as foreign policy.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Jim Biden refuses to answer questions about family’s business dealings By Alex Pappas, Marisa Schultz

Posted By on October 29th, 2020

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/jim-biden-refuses-to-answer-questions-family-bus

Jim Biden, the brother of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, refused to answer questions Wednesday when approached by Fox News outside a house in Maryland about claims the former vice president had knowledge about the family’s overseas business ventures.

Approached at a residence on the Eastern Shore, Jim Biden repeatedly rebuffed questions in his driveway as Fox News asked questions from a distance in the street.

“I don’t want to comment about anything,” Jim Biden said.

Asked if he cared to answer questions, Biden said: “Nope.”

Two sources confirmed the person was Jim Biden, including a neighbor who viewed a picture of the footage. The Eastern Shore house is linked to Jim Biden in public records.

It comes a day after Tony Bobulinski, a former business associate of Hunter Biden, told Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” in an exclusive interview, that the former vice president’s denials of knowledge or involvement in his son’s foreign dealings are “a blatant lie.”

Asked why he and Hunter Biden allegedly wanted to meet with Bobulinski, Jim Biden replied: “What are you talking about?”

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Alex Traiman With bilateral agreements, Trump administration reverses Carter, Obama settlement policies

Posted By on October 29th, 2020

https://www.jns.org/opinion/with-bilateral-agreements-trump-administration-reverses-carter-obama-settlement-policies/?utm_source=

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the signing “an important victory against all those who seek to delegitimize everything Israeli beyond the 1967 lines.”

Less than one week before Americans will decide whether to entrust President Donald Trump with another four years in office, the current administration completed its reversal of a legacy U.S. policy prejudiced against Israeli settlements.

The United States and Israel signed new bilateral agreements on Wednesday that further enhance the cooperation between the close allies in the areas of science, industrial research and agricultural.

Yet perhaps more noteworthy is that legacy “geographic restrictions” have now been removed from existing agreements.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman noted at the ceremony that the two nations were to “sign a revision that will eliminate the geographic restriction that prohibits the funding of American and Israeli joint research and development and cooperation over the Green Line.”

According to Friedman, the Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation (BIRD), the Binational Science Foundation (BSF), and the Binational Agricultural Research and Development Foundation (BARD) agreements each contained a passage stating that: “The cooperative projects sponsored by the foundation may not be conducted in geographic areas which came under the administration of the government of the State of Israel after June 5, 1967, and may not relate to subjects pertinent to such areas.”

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Regional and Global Threat Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on October 29th, 2020

 https://bit.ly/37RszKK

Will the next US Administration sustain the realization that the clear and present threat of the transnational Muslim Brotherhood to every moderate Arab regime in the Middle East and North Africa (second only to the threat posed by Iran’s Ayatollahs) has been a key incentive for the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to conclude the US-backed peace accords with Israel?

Will the next US Administration acknowledge the role played by Muslim Brotherhood subversion and terrorism in Saudi Arabia’s decision to expand security and commercial cooperation with Israel?

According to Prof. Albert Hourani, a leading Middle East historian, Oxford University’s St. Anthony’s College (A History of the Arab Peoples, pp. 445-446), the following are the tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood: “A total rejection of all forms of society except the wholly Islamic one…. The true Islamic society…was the one which accepted the sovereign authority of God [Allah]…which regarded the Quran as the source of all guidance for human life…. All other societies were societies of jahiliyya (ignorance of religious truth), whether they were communist, capitalist, nationalist, [followers of] false religions, or claimed to be Muslim but did not obey the Sharia…. The leadership of Western man in the human world is coming to an end…because the Western order has played its part, and no longer possesses that stock of values which gave it its predominance…. The turn of Islam has come….”

The Muslim Brotherhood is the largest Islamic terror organization in the world – supported mostly by Turkey’s Erdogan, Iran’s Ayatollahs and Qatar – with political branches throughout the globe (including in the USA), aiming to rid the Arab world of Western “infidel” influence (which drew the current map of the Middle East), topple existing Arab regimes in a subversive and revolutionary manner, Islamize Arab societies, establish a “divinely-ordained” pan-Islamic regime and spread Islam through violence/terrorism, as well as via political and organizational involvement (e.g., the Freedom and Justice Party in Libya, the ruling Ennahdha Party in Tunisia, the Justice and Development Party in Morocco, the recently dissolved Islamic Action Front in Jordan, the Islamic Constitutional Movement in Kuwait, Jamaat-e-Islami in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and the Welfare Party of India).

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Moshe Phillips:The Syrian peace mirage posted by the Washington Times Peace with Syria is a suicidal fantasy – the war torn country is unstable, and would insist on Israel giving up the Golan Heights.

Posted By on October 28th, 2020

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/290041

As soon as the headlines hit about the breakthrough in Sudan-Israel relations, pundits were already suggesting that the next news in the thawing of Arab nations toward Israel will involve Saudi Arabia. Whether or not this turns out to happen, one thing that is a certainty is that many former U.S. State Department and other American foreign policy alums will continue to push for Israel to make concessions that the vast majority of Israelis will never entertain under any circumstances.

While there is a sense of inevitability for Israelis that further normalization announcements are forthcoming, there are not any Israelis to be found who are speaking optimistically about any sort of peace with Syria while it remains under Assad’s totalitarian rule. But that didn’t stop one former US National Security Council (NSC) staffer from bellowing forth his ideas about this. Ideas that are dangerous and unwelcome in Israel.

In the immediate aftermath of the announcement that Sudan was recognizing Israel and agreeing to relations, Benjamin Netanyahu told the media that “the clear fact of the matter is that for 25 years we didn’t have a [normalization] agreement and under Trump’s leadership we have three deals in six weeks.”

David M. Halbfinger and Ronen Bergman unsurprisingly explained in The New York Times on October 24 that this Sudan news “does not represent the same kind of landmark strategic achievement as the peace treaties decades ago with Egypt and Jordan, once-bitter Arab enemies on its borders.”

The Sudan development is undeniably more closely akin to the evolution of relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain than to the treaties with Egypt and Jordan, although Sudan was actively hostile to Israel and took part in the 1948 War of Independence.

Egypt and Jordan were at various times “confrontation states,” that is, the nations that sent troops to battle Israel on the frontlines in war after bloody war. As did Syria and, it’s worth noting, Iraq.

What is often not understood, though, is that Syria is still officially at war with Israel. While there have been armistices, Damascus in a state of war with the Jewish State.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Big Picture and the War for the White House By Bryan Preston

Posted By on October 28th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/election/bryan-preston/2020/10/28/the-big-picture-and-the-war-for-the-white-house-n1102713

Four years ago I was a very reluctant Trump voter.

I had laughed at a friend who told me, about two weeks before the 2016 election, that Donald Trump would win. It seemed absurd. Clinton was a lock. Everyone knew that.

But when it came time to vote, I looked at Trump and didn’t know what I would get. I looked at Hillary Clinton and knew exactly what I would get if she won.

As I weighed up the two candidates I figured at least I might get something I’d like from Trump. Maybe a good judge or two. Maybe a tax cut. Clinton was a guarantee that I would get no policy I could support, no good judges, nothing but corruption, deceit, and endless media fawning over every breath she took. She would be horrible. Trump might be interesting. He might be better than I expected, or worse, but he couldn’t be worse than Clinton.

So I rolled the dice and voted for Trump.

It was liberating. I hadn’t advocated for him. He wasn’t my first choice.

Four years later, as I explain in this week’s War for the White House podcast with Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw and Townhall’s Reagan McCarthy, I wasn’t reluctant at all. Based on my policy preferences and goals for the future of this country, Donald Trump has earned four more years in the Oval Office.