ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Middle East Vibrations Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on October 17th, 2020

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

One more regional look.

Although I don’t think the Saudis will “make peace” any time soon, the Kingdom has been publicly pleased with the current machinations and publicly furious with Palestinian leadership. Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former Ambassador to the U.S. and head of security for the Kingdom, gave an extraordinary interview to Al Aribiya. Not pro-Israel, not even historically accurate in many ways, but the truth of the Saudi position…..

In the movie, “The Guns of Navarone”the WWII commandos evade the enemy, scale the mountain, enter the fortress, plant the explosives designed to wreck the guns used against Allied forces, and escape to a safe place to watch the effects. But there are no effects, no blast. One team member berates the explosives expert, who calmly replies, “It is the accumulation of little vibrations that does it.” And indeed, in short order – and in the nick of time – the accumulated vibrations crumbled the side of the mountain, washing away the guns that threatened the allied advance.

It isn’t always that – sometimes it is Hiroshima and Nagasaki – but the old Middle East appears to be crumbling bit by bit, decision by decision.

Two fundamental propositions underpinned the old Western (read State Department) view of the Middle East: that the Palestinians had to be satisfied before the Arab States could make peace with Israel; and that this was, in large measure, due to the adamant and sometimes violent “Arab Street” that would rise up against conservative Arab leaders if the Palestinians were unsatisfied, or the status of Jerusalem changed.

The move of the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem produced hardly a ripple. Resolution of Israel’s Golan border was met with yawns.

President Donald Trump’s “Vision” for Middle East Peace changed the focus from Palestinian demands to Israel’s security – leaving room at the table for the Palestinians, should they accept the invitation and its conditions. The participation of the Ambassadors from the UAE, Oman, and Bahrain in the White House ceremony with the President and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a visible vibration, but it followed years of quiet communication and consultation (and trade) between Israel and Gulf States concerned about Iran. Modification in the “Vision,” led to the Abraham Accords between Israel, Bahrain and the UAE, with the U.S. as mediator and witness.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Behind the social-media blackout of Biden family corruption If a bombshell goes off in the forest and no one is allowed to talk about it, does it make a sound? Charles Lipson

Posted By on October 17th, 2020

https://spectator.us/behind-social-media-blackout-biden-family-corruption/

Hunter Biden is now the subject of multiple stories involving serious corruption. Whether he committed any crimes is a question for prosecutors and the courts. Whether he was paid handsomely for his family’s political clout is a question for voters.

You wouldn’t know that from ABC’s pathetic town hall with his father Joe Biden on Thursday night. They spoke with him for 90 minutes and didn’t ask a single question about the shocking emails published by the New York Post. That’s either journalistic malpractice or public-relations work. After all, the emails raise profound questions that the candidate needs to answer. They appear to show his son, Hunter, repeatedly using his last name to fill his pockets.

Hunter’s family is his only asset. How else did someone with no special skills manage to collect such huge payments from foreign companies with deep interests in US policy? He has no knowledge of Ukraine or China, no experience in energy or banking, and a crack pipe full of personal problems. So, how exactly did he get rich?

It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out the answer. Joe Biden himself could figure it out. The money was meant to open doors in the Obama administration and potentially a future Biden one. It was meant to inform mid-level US bureaucrats and diplomats that these companies had very powerful connections. The message: your bosses will be happy if you meet with these fine folks and even happier if you can help them.

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De Blasio’s years-long effort to push McCray into politics ends with a thud By Nolan Hicks and Julia MarshOctober

Posted By on October 17th, 2020

https://nypost.com/2020/10/16/de-blasios-big-effort-to-push-mccray-into-politics-fizzles-out/?utm_campaign=ipad_nyp&utm_source=mail_app

Mayor Bill de Blasio spared no expense to burnish the image of his wife, Chirlane McCray — but like many of his big bucks plans it all came to nothing.

Hizzoner’s effort to use millions in tax payer money to make McCray a political star came crashing down this week when the city’s First Lady changed course and declared she would not run for Brooklyn Borough President.

Throughout his time in office de Blasio set McCray up to follow in the family’s politics biz, including giving her a staff that in recent years grew to a size larger than any First Lady’s in recent memory.

The McCray team had a $2 million payroll, and as recently as August included a chief-of-staff, senior adviser, speechwriter and a videographer.  At one point civil rights activist and political heavy hitter Rachel Nordlinger was McCray’s top lieutenant.

Hoping to give her a huge feather in her cap, de Blasio also made his wife the face of City Hall’s much-ballyhooed ThriveNYC mental health initiative in November 2015.

But the program has burned through an estimated $1 billion, while being blasted for showing little success in helping the needy.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Normalization With The Saudis…At What Price? by Gerald A. Honigman

Posted By on October 17th, 2020

There’s much talk now, in the wake of other Gulf Arab breakthroughs, that Saudi Arabia is being heavily courted to join the normalization/peace movement regarding Israel. 

While shalom/salaam is good, it’s important to realize that, as with another alleged soon-to-be Arab or Arabized nation–the Sudan–Saudi Arabia comes into this with its own severe baggage  https://ekurd.net/what-arab-nation-next-israel-2020-09-29.  And yes–it would be nice for Israel to be able to cut travel time and save fuel by being able to fly over Saudi air space…etc..

For starters, however, let’s just say that the much-touted, decades old Saudi peace (of the grave) plan must be dropped like a nuked potato.

As a reminder, back when he was still a senator, a Times Of London story on November 16th, 2008, reported that President-elect Obama stated that Israel would be crazy (exact words) not to accept the resurrected, alleged Saudi “Peace Plan.” 

A bit earlier, a stop along President George W. Bush’s Middle East trip–after further pressuring Jews to accept his State Department’s vision of Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas’s latter day terrorist Arafatians as being the good cops as opposed to simply more honest Hamas bad cops–took President Bush to the sands of the Saudis and other Arabian Peninsula nations.

A photo was published worldwide of the President wielding a sword along with Bahraini hosts, and Dubya brought along a New Year’s present — tens of billions of dollars in military aid…

Hey, if we don’t sell it to them, the Brits, Germans, French, and so forth certainly will. So goes the argument…And with Bahrain now opening doors to Israel, perhaps it wasn’t a bad decision after all.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Bring Them In Big Tech oligarchs must answer Congress’s questions about election interference. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on October 16th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/15/bring-them-in/

As I have reported over the past several weeks, Big Tech monopolies are interfering in the 2020 election on behalf of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. Their involvement, some rightly argue, is straight-up electioneering and could constitute egregious campaign finance violations since corporations are prohibited from directly donating to political candidates. By banning Republican content while amplifying Democratic Party messaging this close to a national election, Big Tech in essence is contributing potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in free advertisements (in-kind contributions) to Democratic candidates, including their nominee for president. “Twitter, and Facebook…they’re like really, it’s a massive campaign contribution,” President Trump said on Fox Business News Thursday morning.

Their involvement will extend past Election Day and into January 2021 if the results are still unknown. In the interim, Silicon Valley oligarchs plan to crush any online dissent, including by the president of the United States, if a message runs afoul of plans to install Joe Biden in the White House. Even if Trump legitimately wins reelection, any premature declaration of victory will be suppressed or outright removed from social media and Internet search engines.

Whatever attempt there may have been to conceal this orchestrated operation, however, was blown wide open Wednesday after the New York Post published explosive emails and photos retrieved from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop computer. Communications appear to confirm that Joe Biden met with an executive of Burisma and his son in 2015 despite Biden’s repeated denials. 

BOOKS, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

DAVID GOLDMAN REVIEWS ANN APPLEBAUM’S “TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY”

Posted By on October 16th, 2020

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/applebaum-pride-prejudice/

Anne Applebaum’s Pride and Prejudice

This is not a book, but rather an Atlantic essay puffed into a $25 sale item with grotesquely large type and comically wide margins. The typography offends the eye almost as much as the content offends the mind. It is a barely coherent rant against ex-friends and political opponents. It is a tantrum from a liberal who expected a univeralist millennium after the fall of Communism and discovered to her horror that national identity still matters.

Half a century of Nazi and Communist occupation nearly crushed the spirit of the nations of Eastern Europe; a decade ago they approached the point of no return for demographic extinction. The new nationalists who now govern Hungary and Poland, the objects of Applebaum’s direst imprecations, have rebuilt vibrant economies, raised birth rates, and established viable democracies out of nearly-ruined Soviet colonies. Despite their missteps—which are frequent and sometimes grave—they have restored hope for the future to lands which not long ago seemed like a cemetary of the human spirit.

Anne Applebaum’s list of little Hitlers includes some ex-friends who came to her 1999 New Year’s Eve party in Poland, when her husband Radek Sikorski was a foreign ministry official, as well as former acquaintances like British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The renegade party guests somehow morphed from democracy activists into Nazis, because they suffer from “authoritarian personalities,” Applebaum avers. Also on her list are “the old Hungarian right, the Spanish right, the French right, the Italian right, and, with differences, the British right and the American right, too.” It is hard to separate Applebaum’s ideological rancor at friends who moved away from the liberal dogmas of 1989 and her personal disappointment over her husband’s career.

Boris Johnson a crypto-fascist? Who but the overwrought Ms. Applebaum noticed! She would have a pint at the pub with Johnson when she was Deputy Editor of the Spectator and he was Mayor of London, but since then she has discovered that the Prime Minister is a liar, a home-wrecking philanderer, and a budding authoritarian due to his opposition to Brexit. She claims that the rising fascists of the British Isles duped their compatriots into voting Leave by lying about money that might be saved for the National Health Service.

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Huawei Plays Matador to Trump’s Bull David Goldman

Posted By on October 16th, 2020

https://www.newsweek.com/opinion

Bulls usually lose bullfights not because they fail to charge, but because they charge at the matador’s cape rather than at the matador himself. President Trump has no qualms about charging at China’s national champion Huawei, but he is charging at the equivalent of the matador’s cape.

Consider Huawei’s handset business, which depends on high-end chips manufactured by Taiwanese foundries. Because the Taiwanese use some American equipment to manufacture the chips, the U.S. has imposed an effective blockade on Huawei’s outsourcing, and China does not (yet) have the domestic capability to make high-end chips. A similar ban blocks Huawei’s access to key American chip-design software.

Huawei will lose market share in the low-margin handset business, and Chinese competitors like Xiaomi will pick up the slack (which explains why the latter’s stock price has jumped this year from HK$8 to HK$22). Huawei will have little difficulty using older chips for 5G base stations, installing the lion’s share of the six million units that China has ordered to build out its 5G network over the next two years.

Huawei’s most important business, though, will emerge unscathed from U.S. sanctions. American strategists think that Huawei is a telecom equipment company. Among other things, Huawei is the world’s largest telecom equipment manufacturer, with a 31 percent market share during the first half of 2020—more than the combined share of the second and third position companies, Ericsson and Nokia. Huawei, though, is first and foremost a big data and artificial intelligence (AI) company—the most inventive and imaginative one in the world. Let’s call this combination “BD/AI,” for short.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Can the Democrats Sell Their Worst Candidate Ever? By Jack Cashill

Posted By on October 16th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/can_the_democrats_sell_their_worst_candidate_ever.html

Even before anyone ever heard of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Democrats were facing a marketing challenge unknown in the era of moving images: selling a candidate that no one — with the possible exception of Jill “Edith Wilson” Biden — could possibly be enthused about.

By any standard, especially by progressive Democratic standards, Joe Biden is a flaming mess. No Democrat of any age will have ever pulled the lever for a less attractive candidate. Compared to Joe, Hillary Clinton was JFK. Hillary actually had fans.

Democratic leaders and their increasingly Pravda-like media allies know what a mess Biden is. In 2019, before he emerged as the candidate, they openly shared their misgivings. In early June 2019, for instance, both the New York Times and the Washington Post produced video hit pieces highlighting Biden’s problematic history. These pieces were triggered, wrote the Post, by the fact that the Biden campaign “lifted language without credit, at times word for word, when crafting its education and climate plans.”

The Post video dealt largely with Biden’s plagiarism issues dating back to his first presidential run in 1987. Although the tone of the narration is not as harsh as it should be, the revelations are damning. Biden’s plagiarism comes across like a cry for help. It is hard to decide which was more pathetic: lifting the speeches and hardscrabble life details of Welsh Labour Party’s Neil Kinnock or swiping virtually word-for-word JFK’s memorable 1961 inaugural address.

A follow-up Post article, also from June 2019, noted that Biden’s credibility problems did not end in 1987 with his withdrawal from the presidential race. In 2007, running for president once again, Biden claimed he had been “shot at” in Iraq’s Green Zone. He had not, but this was not the only time he lied about Iraq.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Democrats Are Done with Democracy Those who want to preserve the consent of the governed need to vote accordingly on November 3.By Ned Ryun

Posted By on October 16th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/10/14/democrats-are-done-with-democracy/

After a century of progressives hollowing out our constitutional republic from within through their administrative state governing philosophy, their patience has finally run out.

In spite of controlling nearly every major institution in this country, in spite of the massive and sprawling bureaucracy they’ve created to enforce their will, the ignorant masses still do not understand what’s best for them—and in 2016 dared even to elect the Big Bad Orange Man. So progressives have decided enough is enough: now the peasants must submit. They must force us to be “free.” This messy democracy and our constitutional republic are wildly inconvenient and Democrats are done pretending to abide it. 

Democrats have decided that the time for one-party rule is upon us in this country. If you were to look at one overarching theme of 2020, the most important issue at stake on November 3 is: Will our constitutional republic and our democratic process continue, and will the American people still have a voice in deciding where this country goes after Election Day? 

Because Democrats fully intend to take that right away.

ELECTIONS, MEDIA Comments turned off

Social Media Censoring Of Biden Influence-Peddling Must End Now

Posted By on October 16th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/10/16/social-media-censoring-of-biden-influence-peddling-must-end-now/

It seemed perhaps a bit excessive when President Donald Trump referred to Democratic candidate Joe Biden as a “grifter.” But after reviewing the incriminating emails found on son Hunter Biden’s laptop, if anything Trump’s remark might be an understatement.

We’re writing this knowing full well that the progressive apologists for Democratic Party crimes at social media giants Facebook and Twitter probably won’t let this be shared. They’ve basically dammed up the truth so no one can share it, hoping it will all go away.

It won’t. The news is getting out. And it isn’t good for either Joe Biden or his freeloading son. The evidence clearly suggests that both Bidens profited from the vice president’s office during the Obama administration, in essence selling access for cash.

What’s galling is that Biden had heretofore denied any contact at all with Hunter’s many global partners, saying he had “never spoken” to his son “about his overseas business dealings.”

But the newly discovered trove of emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop says otherwise.