Seattle Defunded Police. Now Businesses Are Leaving, and Rioters Still Aim Explosives at Cops By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/08/17/seattle-defunded-police-now-businesses-are-leaving-and-rioters-still-aim-explosives-at-cops-n799570

Last week, the Seattle City Council voted to slash funding for the police department, leading the city’s first black female police chief to resign. The council defunded the police even after antifa rioters had wreaked havoc on the city in the name of racial justice. In one particularly memorable case, rioters used a van loaded with explosives to blow open a police station. On Sunday, rioters fired explosives at police, wounding at least three of them. Some businesses in the city have had enough.

“What [the] city council has done has been more detrimental to our business than a global pandemic, by far, absolutely,” Joe Raetzer, co-owner of Steepologie Teas with his wife Andrea, told the Fox affiliate Q13 last week. His wife said there are “only so many times you can hire people and lay them off because they don’t want to be in this location, they already didn’t feel safe pre-COVID, pre-riots.”

Steepologie Teas boasted more than 300 loose-leaf teas on 4th Avenue. Seattle Apartments Magazine rated the tea shop “hands down the best tea in Seattle.” Now, the tea store has closed down permanently.

The Morning Briefing: DNC Night One—I Think the Democrats Want Trump to Win By Stephen Kruiser

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2020/08/18/the-morning-briefing-dnc-night-one-i-think-the-democrats-want-trump-to-win-n800423

Well, the 2020 Democratic National Convention (DNC) kinda/sorta got underway on Monday night and we’re still waiting to hear from the twelve people who aren’t in political media who watched it.

Those who did were in for a real treat if they’ve never had a concussion or done hallucinogenic drugs before and wondered what either is like without having to actually experience one.

After night one of the first of the COVID conventions I can see why the Republicans are playing coy about their plans for next week. It might just be best to reduce it to one big drunken Zoom meeting rather than try to create any sense of normalcy.

The DNC gave it a whirl but, hoo boy, was it a little off.

A series of individually recorded remote speeches gave it a “Gee we’re sorry we can’t be there for your 90th birthday, Uncle Joe,” vibe. That’s perfectly fine when it’s Uncle Joe’s 90th birthday but it’s not as fun if it’s Uncle Joe’s 90th attempt at becoming President of the United States. And Uncle Joe isn’t even at his own party to watch because he’s in the basement.

One of the more perplexing things was the DNC giving a speaking slot to former Ohio governor and noted mailman’s son John Kasich. Kasich brings slightly less excitement than dryer lint to any gathering he graces but what was most amusing was that during the somnambulant lead-up to the DNC, the Democrats were acting like Kasich was a real big get for them.

When Turkey’s ‘Hero’ Beheaded 800 Christians for Refusing Islam Lessons from the Martyrs of Otranto. Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/when-turkeys-hero-beheaded-800-christians-refusing-raymond-ibrahim/

The ritual decapitation of 800 Christians who refused Islam 539 years ago—and whose commemoration was last Friday, August 14—sheds much light on contemporary questions concerning the ongoing conflict between Islam and the West.

Background: When he sacked Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II was only 21-years-old—meaning he still had many good decades of jihading before him. He continued expanding into the Balkans, and, in his bid to feed his horses on the altar of Saint Peter’s basilica—Muslim prophecies held that “we will conquer Constantinople before we conquer Rome”—he invaded Italy and captured Otranto in 1480.  More than half of its 22,000 inhabitants were massacred, 5,000 hauled off in chains.

To demonstrate his “magnanimity,” Sultan Muhammad offered freedom to 800 chained Christian captives, on condition that they all embrace Islam.  Instead, they unanimously chose to act on the words of one of their numbers: “My brothers, we have fought to save our city; now it is time to battle for our souls!”

Outraged that his invitation was spurned, on August 14, Muhammad ordered the ritual decapitation of these 800 unfortunates on a hilltop (subsequently named “Martyr’s Hill”).  Their archbishop was slowly sawed in half to jeers and triumphant cries of “Allah Akbar!”  (The skeletal remains of some of these defiant Christians were preserved and can still be seen in the Cathedral of Otranto.)

BLM Race Hustlers Make Louisville Businesses ‘An Offer They Can’t Refuse’ Who gets to “own” a neighborhood? Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/blm-race-hustlers-make-louisville-businesses-offer-richard-l-cravatts/

When businesses in the NuLu district of Louisville were aggressively approached by Black Lives Matter activists last week, it raised the thorny issue of who benefits when older neighborhoods are revitalized and made more attractive by the creation of new housing and retail businesses. In this process, when older areas begin to be seen as desirable neighborhoods whose desirable locations, rich social fabric, ethnic mix, and accessibility make them attractive to new residents and the upwardly mobile, local activists start their predictable protests against development, displacement, and, worst of all, what they perceive as the dreaded gentrification that defines these older neighborhoods’ current state.

Contending that “The policies and processes of the revitalization of NuLu has [sic] displaced marginalized people from homes their families have often resided for generations, single-handedly progressing the gentrification of Black neighborhoods,” BLM protestors distributed a list of “Occupy NuLu Demands” to businesses “to express the destruction your business has caused to low-income communities, specifically those with majority Black residents.”

Referring to the economic and social rebirth of an entire neighborhood, benefiting rich and poor alike—as a “destruction” of a low-income community, of course, seems to be counter-intuitive, since most municipalities welcome upgrading of their urban cores, particularly when it eliminates pockets of poverty, widens the tax base, creates new housing, reduces crime, and stimulates the overall investment in the locality by housing developers and retail businesses—precisely what has occurred in NuLu.

The UAE Deal Shows Middle East Peace Doesn’t Depend on the ‘Palestinians’ The ‘Palestinian’ scam is dying. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/uae-deal-shows-middle-east-peace-doesnt-depend-daniel-greenfield/

The big lie that peace in the region could only come from a ‘Palestinian’ state was a scam that diplomats, leaders, and experts bought into and on which they built our relationship with Israel.

The agreement between the UAE and Israel showed that the experts were once again wrong.

We were told for generations that the region was one more negotiating session between whichever Islamic terrorist leader was running things in Ramallah and whichever Israeli prime minister had cobbled together a democratic coalition in Jerusalem away from peace.

The big lie died with a single Trump tweet announcing the deal between Israel and the UAE.

The generals, the diplomats, the pundits, and the professors, some of whom had really been working for Islamic oil states all along, had sold America and the world a big lie.

The big lie depended on a myth that was part antisemitic and part philosemitic, by turns orientalist and anti-imperialist, that everything in the region revolved around Israel. All it took to puncture that myth was the Iraq War, and the rise of Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and ISIS.

Do Polish Lives Matter? History is a lot more complicated than the racism industry would have it. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/do-polish-lives-matter-bruce-bawer/

The other day, during a discussion of the current race-war madness, a guest on Anthony Cumia’s podcast asserted with confidence that the answer to the whole problem is simple: young Americans need to be told more about the injustices historically suffered by blacks in the United States. I wanted to reach into the screen and smack him. Yes, blacks had an extremely lousy deal in America for a very long time. But young Americans know all about that. Indeed, if they emerge from their years and years of schooling with no other historical knowledge whatsoever, the one thing you can always be sure they know is that white Americans held black Africans as slaves, that chattel slavery was a cruel and evil system, and that the repercussions of that nightmare can still be felt in our own time.

Some, if not most, of those young Americans also come out of school with notions about slavery that aren’t anywhere near being true. They’ve been told – or have somehow acquired the belief – that America invented slavery. Or that American slavery was, in some way or another, uniquely corrupt. Already many students around the country are being inculcated, courtesy of educational materials furnished by the New York Times as part of the 1617 Project, in a set of preposterous, perfidious ideas, among which are these: America was founded on slavery; a devotion to human bondage is at the core of our national ideology; the American Republic was built not on glorious new Enlightenment ideas about human freedom but on an ignoble dedication to the belief that it’s okay for one person to own another.

As if all that weren’t enough. now, in the era of Black Lives Matter, adult Americans by the million are paying good money for new books that explain to them that the stain of white American racism is deep and indelible.

A black Republican in Baltimore has an awesome campaign video By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/a_black_republican_in_baltimore_has_an_awesome_campaign_video.html

As part of my work, I spend a lot of time going through the internet looking for political trends or important moments. You can spot one of those moments when, everywhere you go – Twitter, Facebook, political blogs, emails – the same thing keeps popping up. That’s what happened today. No matter where I looked, people were raving about the commercial that Kimberly Klacik put out today as part of her campaign to be elected as Baltimore’s representative in the House.

According to the Baltimore Sun, Klacik is trying to be the first Republican to represent Maryland’s 7th District, which encompasses much of Baltimore City, as well as parts of Baltimore and Howard countries. Klacik’s website says that she’s a native of Accokeek, Maryland, the home of the Beretta gun. She founded and runs a nonprofit called “Potential Me,” which assists “under served women with workplace development.” Having a business taught her the virtues of self-reliance and payrolls.

Klacik a true conservative: She believes in school choice; the Second Amendment; a free market in healthcare along the lines that Rand Paul proposed; the end of socialism in her district, which means no more channeling taxpayer money to bureaucrats for failed programs; the end of abortion (which also, to her, means better access to birth control); and developing Baltimore’s economic potential.

Klacik has put out one of the best campaign videos I’ve ever seen, entitled “Black Lives Don’t Matter to Democrats.” In it, she walks through the wreck that was once one of America’s more beautiful and historic cities, talking as she goes about the damage that unbroken Democrat rule has done to Baltimore.

Questions for Dr. Fauci Why such opposition to Hydroxychloroquine? An open letter. by George Parry *******

https://spectator.org/questions-for-dr-fauci/

As you may be aware, health-care providers across the country and around the world have reported great success in using Hydroxychloroquine + Zinc + Azithromycin (the “HCQ cocktail”) to treat COVID-19. According to these physicians and researchers, the key to success is to use the HCQ cocktail within the first seven days after onset of COVID-19 symptoms.

Nevertheless, ever since President Trump endorsed Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), its use has become a highly politicized and controversial matter. The opposition to HCQ started with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At the same press conference that the president first expressed hope about using HCQ to treat COVID-19, Dr. Fauci challenged its effectiveness and stated that he would not take it outside the confines of a clinical trial.

Since then the opposition to HCQ has increased even to the point where it is almost impossible to find physicians willing to prescribe it and pharmacies willing to provide it.

Three practicing physicians have published the following “Open letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci regarding the use of Hydroxychloroquine for treating COVID-19.” It is a devastating written cross-examination of Dr. Fauci that contains much valuable life-saving information and squarely addresses the needless deaths that have occurred due to the opposition to the HCQ cocktail.

When the history of the COVID-19 pandemic is written, one of the key issues will be why the United States’ medical and government establishments joined forces to deprive the American people access to a safe, inexpensive, and highly effective outpatient treatment that could have saved tens of thousands lives and definitively obliterated the purported justification for the social and economic lockdowns that have destroyed lives, livelihoods, and the economy.

Andrew Cuomo’s Shameless Revisionism By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/democratic-convention-andrew-cuomo-coronavirus-revisionism-shameless/?itm_source=parsely-api

During the virtual Democratic National Convention tonight, New York governor Andrew Cuomo had the temerity to tell a national audience that, “Our way worked. And it was beautiful.”

The shameless and vulgar self-aggrandizing — which he’s only able to get away with because of criminal lack of media scrutiny — didn’t end there, as Cuomo went on to say idiotic things like, “in many ways, COVID is just a metaphor” and “COVID is the symptom, not the illness.” It’s important to keep reminding Americans that there is no leader in the United States — or anywhere in the free world, for that matter — who did a worse job preserving life than the governor of New York. 

Cuomo Turns Convention Speech Into Extended Metaphor Comparing Trump to COVID By Zachary Evans

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/democratic-convention-andrew-cuomo-compares-trump-to-cornavirus/

New York governor Andrew Cuomo turned his Democratic convention speech into an extended metaphor in which he compared President Trump to the coronavirus.

“We know that our problems go beyond the COVID virus: COVID is the symptom, not the illness,” Cuomo said in a live speech broadcast without a physical audience. “Our nation is in crisis, and in many ways COVID is just a metaphor.

“A virus attacks when the body is weak, when it cannot defend itself,” Cuomo continued. “Over the past few years America’s body politic has been weakened…Only a strong body can fight off the virus, and America’s divisions weakened it. Donald Trump didn’t create the initial division, the division created Trump: he only made it worse.”

Cuomo went on to compare the country’s government to an “immune system,” and blamed the federal government for failing to contain coronavirus. With over 32,000 coronavirus deaths, New York has suffered the highest death toll of any U.S. state during the pandemic.