ELECTIONS Comments turned off

How to Steal an Election… and Get Away with It By David Solway *****

Posted By on September 10th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/09/09/how-to-steal-an-election-and-get-away-with-it-n913707

There is only one way that Donald Trump can lose the forthcoming election, and that is if it is stolen from him outright. A fair election would likely lead to a landslide triumph for the incumbent president, but a fair election is precisely what the hard-left Democrats appear to have no intention of permitting.

The methods they will deploy to ensure a Biden victory are pretty well known to anyone who has been paying attention: vote harvesting, counting mail-in ballots (“at least once,” as Rick Moran writes), the dead vote, the multiple vote, the illegal immigrant vote, polling booth intimidation, a media blitzkrieg, Big Tech platform censorship, state pressure on the Electoral College, and anything else a felonious party can come up with. Indeed, this swindle-in-the-making should be screamingly obvious, but I have encountered far too many people who have swallowed the leftist Kool-Aid in a single gulp, true believers ripe for electoral trickery and political dissimulation.

Naturally, the mainstream media are presenting the process the other way round. For example, USA Today claims that the Democrats should be planning to prevent Trump from stealing the election. Leftist organizations like MoveOn.org and Michelle Obama’s voter registration group are strenuously lobbying for mail-in voting. Can one really wonder why? Leftist sites like The New York Times, Salon, The New Stateman, and legions of others are already interpreting Trump’s very reasonable suspicion of easily faked, replicated, and concocted mail-in ballots as a sign of his nefarious intent.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Environmentalists Destroyed California’s Forests By Edward Ring

Posted By on September 10th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/09/environmentalists-destroyed-californias-

The catastrophic fires that have immolated millions of acres of forests in the Golden State were preventable, and for decades, everyone knew what had to be done.

Millions of acres of California forest have been blackened by wildfires this summer, leading to the usual angry denunciations from the usual quarters about climate change. But in 1999, the Associated Press reported that forestry experts had long agreed that “clearing undergrowth would save trees,” and that “years of aggressive firefighting have allowed brush to flourish that would have been cleared away by wildfires.” But very little was done. And now fires of unprecedented size are raging across the Western United States.

“Sen. Feinstein blames Sierra Club for blocking wildfire bill,” reads the provocative headline on a 2002 story in California’s Napa Valley Register. Feinstein had brokered a congressional consensus on legislation to thin “overstocked” forests close to homes and communities, but could not overcome the environmental lobby’s disagreement over expediting the permit process to thin forests everywhere else.

Year after year, environmentalists litigated and lobbied to stop efforts to clear the forests through timber harvesting, underbrush removal, and controlled burns. Meanwhile, natural fires were suppressed and the forests became more and more overgrown. The excessive biomass competed for the same water, soil, and light a healthier forest would have used, rendering all of the trees and underbrush unhealthy. It wasn’t just excess biomass that accumulated, but dried out and dead biomass.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The ‘Woke’ Indifference to Jew Hatred by Judith Bergman

Posted By on September 10th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16311/woke-jew-hatred

Twitter itself plays a significant role in promoting anti-Semitism.

Despite thousands of complaints, Twitter left most of the rapper’s (Wiley’s) tweets up for six days and only decided to ban him for life after a 48-hour boycott of the platform by thousands of British users, including Home Secretary Priti Patel.

Twitter has even tried to claim that the genocidal variety of Jew hatred, the kind at which Iran’s leaders excel, does not violate its rules.

It appears that the self-righteous outrage of the wokerati is absent when the person at the receiving end of racism is a Jew.

Jew hatred in the United States has grown more prevalent in recent years.. In 2019, there were 2,107 anti-Semitic incidents, according to a May report by the Anti-Defamation League. It was the highest number in 40 years. The incidents included 61 physical assault cases, 1,127 instances of harassment and 919 acts of vandalism.

Antisemitism is also peaking in several European countries: In 2019, Germany, with 2,032 incidents, saw the highest number of anti-Semitic crimes in nearly two decades. The United Kingdom registered “a record number” of anti-Semitic incidents in 2019 for the fourth year in a row with 1,805 incidents — “the highest number ever logged in a calendar year and a 7% increase on 2018”, according to a report in The Guardian. In France, anti-Semitic attacks surged by 74% in 2018 compared to the previous year and an additional 27% in 2019. One violent attack in 2018 was the brutal murder of Mireille Knoll, an 85-year-old French Jewish Holocaust survivor, who was murdered in her Paris apartment by two men, who shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they stabbed her 11 times and set her apartment on fire.

The growth in anti-Semitism comes a mere 80 years after millions of Jews were rounded up in Europe and subjected to enslavement, mass shootings, “medical experiments”, and industrial mass murder in Nazi concentration camps, for no other reason than being Jewish.

In our hypersensitive, hyper-racialized “woke” culture, where speaking obvious truths such as “all lives matter” will get you immediately cancelled, terminated from your job and classified as racist, one would assume that the rise in anti-Semitism would prompt maximum outrage. Promoting anti-Semitism, however, rarely gets anyone — apart from the occasional white supremacist — cancelled. This double-standard continues despite hate speech being generally considered completely unacceptable and dangerous, as reflected in the policies against hate speech of the social media and tech giants.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Threatens Total Economic War by Dumping Treasuries: Be My Guest by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on September 10th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16485/china-threatens-dumping-treasuries

China’s Communist Party publicly talking about an American default is… essentially a declaration of intent to destroy the American economy. Washington should fight back.

No amount of persuading, cajoling or badgering has worked to convince China to accept agreements and norms.

Trump can hasten the departure of businesses from Chinese soil with tariffs and administrative measures restricting international commerce. The loss of access to the U.S. market would shake China. Last year, China’s merchandise trade surplus against America amounted to 81.8% of its overall merchandise trade surplus, showing extreme dependence on the American market…. Trump can also order American companies to end their technical cooperation agreements with Chinese entities, prohibit portfolio investments in Chinese markets, and end all sales of tech products.

China may not recover from such actions. Case in point: There is now talk that Huawei Technologies, which six months ago looked as if it would take over the world’s 5G networks, may go out of business because it is having difficulty buying chips to install in equipment

Many Americans have been intimidated, saying Washington cannot oppose China because it owns Treasury debt. That is a hollow threat… The net result of China carrying through on its threat is to leave U.S. Treasury obligations in the hands of countries far more friendly to the United States.

On September 3, the Global Times, the Communist Party tabloid, reported that Beijing was “likely” to sell some or all of its U.S. Treasury holdings.

More important, the paper suggested the United States might for the first time ever default on its debt obligations.

China is certainly trying to destabilize the United States, and it looks as if it’s about to declare total economic war on America.

Beijing has tipped its hand. The question for the Trump administration, therefore, is whether America should strike first.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Private School Primacy? It’s back-to-school decision time for many parents. By Larry Sand

Posted By on September 10th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/09/private-school-primacy/

With schools set to reopen, it’s time for parents to choose how best to proceed with their children’s education in our COVID-obsessed country. If there is no in-school option, how many will stick with online education from their local public school? And how many will opt to home school or select a private school, many of which will have traditional learning or at least more rigorous online learning?

While it is too soon to have a definitive answer, here are a few bones to chew on. According to a recent Civis poll, about 40 percent of parents of k-12 students nationwide say that they have “disenrolled their children from the school they were originally supposed to attend this year, in response to school reopening plans.” And of those who have removed their kids, 20 percent have signed them up at a private school.

Here in southern California, school districts are taking a hit, though primarily in lower grades. As reported by the Los Angeles Times Howard Blume, kindergarten enrollment in LAUSD is down 14 percent from last year.

Many who choose private schools will soon discover the difference between them and the public school variety. A recent survey conducted by Dick Carpenter and Josh Dunn, professors at the University of Colorado, speaks volumes. They found that in the spring, 89 percent of private school children received live, online instruction by their teachers, but only 56 percent of public school children did. They also report that 65 percent of private school parents said their teachers “graded student assignments and those grades played an important part in the overall assessment for the year,” but that was true for just a third of public school children.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

The Democrat Election Plan: Chaos The threat is real, and it’s coming. Big time. Kenneth R. Timmerman

Posted By on September 10th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/democrat-election-plan-chaos-kenneth-r-timmerman/

Options traders who specialize in hedging against risk get it. According to a recent report from FoxBusiness, “the options markets are signaling the very real possibility that neither President Trump nor Joe Biden will be the clear-cut winner on Election Day, Nov. 3.”

Instead of a clear-cut victor there will be chaos. So-called “peaceful” protests. Media outrage. Riots.

And the chaos will all be aimed at one goal: changing the outcome of the election, which otherwise the Democrats are sure to lose.

How can I say this?

Because I’ve been studying the Democrats’ game plan for the past eight years, since I was a Republican nominee for Congress in Maryland in 2012.

I saw first-hand many of the tactics that a former Democrat Party election operative recently revealed in a stunning insider’s account published by the New York Post.

The operative, a self-styled Bernie Sanders supporter, accomplished his dirty work for years in New Jersey, and “led teams of fraudsters and mentored at least 20 operatives in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania,” the Post reported on August 29.

BOOKS Comments turned off

There is something very wrong with some in the top ranks of America’s military By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on September 10th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/there_is_something_very_wrong_with_some_in_the_top_ranks_of_americas_military.html

With Bob Woodward’s anti-Trump book about to be published, the media is focusing entirely on the easily debunked claim that Trump mishandled the Wuhan virus by “lying” to the American people. What the media is ignoring, however, is a much more serious claim, which is that former Secretary of Defense General James Mattis plotted to overthrow Trump and his administration. This fact, if true, supports my long-time fear about the damage Obama inflicted on the upper echelons of the Pentagon.

The Conservative Treehouse caught the Mattis item:

According to a pre-release excerpt from the Washington Post Bob Woodward writes about a discussion between General James Mattis and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats about a plot to overthrow the elected government of the United States.

[snip]

What do you call a conversation between the Defense Secretary and the head of the U.S. intelligence apparatus where they are talking about taking “collective action” to remove an elected President?  That’s called sedition…. A seditious conspiracy.

It began to be clear last October that the Obama administration (with some help from Bill Clinton’s presidency) had seeded the Pentagon with leftist generals whose allegiance was to the Deep State, to cultural leftism, and to the infamous and profitable “military industrial complex” that Eisenhower warned about in 1961.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Even Fauci can’t tolerate Bob Woodward’s lies about Trump and COVID By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on September 10th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/09/even_fauci_cant_tolerate_bob_woodwards_lies_about_trump_and_covid.html

A conservative friend of mine called me in some distress. Her elderly parents, who are politically conservative, are voting for Biden because they think that Trump mishandled the Wuhan virus. Democrats are targeting this demographic – aged people who still reasonably fear getting infected — which is why they’re trumpeting Bob Woodward’s claim that Trump lied about the virus and that people therefore died unnecessarily. The allegation, though, is false and needs to be debunked hard and fast.

The Democrat’s current problem is that the Wuhan virus is receding, which decreases people’s sense of panic, an emotion that Democrats have been using to help position Biden as the “safe” choice. Although people are still getting infected, they’re younger, so the mortality rate has plummeted.

When it comes to the elderly, who are the most vulnerable, states such as New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Pennsylvania have already killed them thanks to the policy of forcibly introducing infected patients into nursing homes. Other states protected their elderly and are steadily getting better at treating them, limiting their chances of dying.

The people who are getting infected now are younger people who have almost no chance of dying from the Wuhan virus – and for those unfortunate enough to get seriously ill, again, we know better how to treat them. Additionally, it appears that the body will repair the damage that the virus causes to people’s hearts and lungs.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Coming Backlash to the Oscars’ Diversity Mandate By Kyle Smith

Posted By on September 10th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/the-coming-backlash-to-the-oscars-diversity-mandate/

Far from appeasing the hashtag activists, the Oscars have merely announced that the quota wars have begun.

I t’s easy to make fun of the Oscars’ new set of diversity requirements: Are we going to have to watch Lieutenant Colonel Anne Hathaway tossing grenades at Jerry in the next WWI movie? In the media, the initial response has been to gush praise for this “landmark,” “watershed” moment in which the Academy Awards have mandated hiring quotas for any film that wishes to be eligible for Best Picture (but not any of the other awards).

In about ten seconds, I predict, the Left is going to be furious. “We’ve been had,” they’ll surely scream. Let’s look at the details.

In order to qualify for Best Picture consideration, films will have to meet two out of four specified criteria. The first is the showiest but also the silliest, calling for diversity in casting and themes; it’s unworkable if you’re starting, as do a great many Oscar contenders, with an established historical record. You can’t pretend that Ford v. Ferrari or The Irishman was about minorities or women or gay liberation or handicapped people. Most producers of top-quality films will simply laugh off that top-line requirement and try to hit two of the other three. Which won’t be that hard.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Standing Up for Freedom . . . By Jay Nordlinger Prague’s Mayor Zdenek Hrib

Posted By on September 10th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/prague-mayor-zdenek-hrib-stands-for-freedom/

Vaclav Havel was the leading dissident in Communist Czechoslovakia, and the first president after the Fall of the Wall. All over the world, he became a byword for freedom, democracy, and human rights. There is still a Havel tradition in the Czech Republic, even if it is not the dominant one.

Havelians, if you will, traveled to Taiwan last week, in a show of support for that brave, beleaguered democracy. Communist China was very unhappy. The trip was a “despicable act,” said a Chinese foreign-ministry spokesman. The foreign minister himself, Wang Yi, said that the delegation’s leader — Milos Vystrcil, president of the Czech senate — would “pay a heavy price.”

A second foreign-ministry spokesman, however, pointed out that the Czech government had “distanced” itself from Vystrcil and his delegation. They did not “represent the government’s policy,” said the spokesman — and he was absolutely right.

The Czech president, Milos Zeman, is a warm supporter of the Chinese government, and of the Russian government as well. This shows the split in Czech society (and Europe more broadly). I will have more to say about Zeman, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin in due course.

Zeman said that the senate president had engaged in a “childish provocation.” He further said that the senate president would be excluded from any further foreign-policy briefings by the government.