NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

The Voter-Suppression Myth By Erick Erickson

Posted By on July 20th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/07/27/the-voter-suppression-myth/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=

Democrats manufacture the alleged problem, and then the media amplify it

Both parties engage in mythmaking to justify defeats or amplify wins. Since 2016, media dominated by the Left and sympathetic to the Democrats have pushed myths as justification for failure. Russia stole the 2016 election. It could not be that Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate beaten by a man not very well liked outside a core group of supporters. It had to be theft.

Grievance increasingly fuels the American political landscape. Republicans fundraise off toppled statues. Democrats fundraise off Donald Trump possibly beating their candidate. After 2018, grievance combined with progressive white guilt has given rise to more mythology. Now, it is not just the president collaborating with Vladimir Putin to steal elections. It is also Republicans suppressing the votes of minorities. The Democrats are not only manufacturing the mythology but using a playbook to create problems they can then blame on Republicans as proof of their claims.

In 2018, the national media fawned over Beto O’Rourke in Texas. His supposedly Kennedyesque looks and propensity for F-bombs gave him an absolute pass on being both a white man who drove a Hispanic Democrat from office in a primary and one who attempted to flee the scene of a wreck he caused while drunk. The media wanted nothing to do with those stories because he was trying to take out a Hispanic officeholder named “Ted Cruz.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Guess What? We Need More Police in Urban Neighborhoods, Arresting More People By Rich Lowry

Posted By on July 20th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/law-enforcement-shootings-other-crimes-spike-in-poorest-neighborhoods-when-cops-pull-back/

Shootings and other crimes spike in the poorest neighborhoods when cops pull back.

New York City needs more arrests. More arrests in the subways. More arrests in housing projects. More drug arrests. More arrests of gang members.

And it isn’t alone.

If there’s one lesson from the unrest and anti-police agitation in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, it’s that poor minorities living in distressed neighborhoods pay the highest price — in fear and in blood — when the cops retreat and the worst elements feel emboldened.

The spikes in shootings in cities around the country haven’t taken place in high-end neighborhoods, not in Billionaire’s Row in Manhattan, not in Buckhead in Atlanta, not in Forest Glen in Chicago.

No, they blight the most marginal neighborhoods and make everyday life a hazard for people who have no option but to live in a tough place. The last couple of months should have made it obvious that what these people have to fear most is not the cops or white supremacy but the violent, vengeful, and heedless young men in their midst.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Portland Police Association office set on fire amid protests By Rebecca Klar

Posted By on July 20th, 2020

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/508025-portland-police-association-office-set-on-fire-amid-protests

The Portland, Ore., Police Association office was set on fire Saturday night amid protests throughout the city, police said in a statement Sunday. 

Around 10:45 p.m. people broke into the Portland Police Association office and ignited a fire “within a few moments.” Police declared the situation a riot, according to the statement. 

Several people in the crowd were arrested and officers were able to distinguish the fire, police said. Portland Police did not use any CS gas, according to the statement. 

Tear gas was deployed, The Associated Press reported citing pictures and videos from the scene, but the newswire noted it was not necessarily CS gas. 

Police said groups scattered into the neighborhood, with a large number people regrouped near North Interstate Avenue and North Lombard Street. As officers moved the crowd to the south on North Interstate Avenue, people in the crowds “threw rocks, gopher gassers, and launched paint filled balloons at officers,” injuring some officers, police said. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

12 officers injured, businesses and precincts damaged during protest in Seattle

Posted By on July 20th, 2020

https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/12-officers-injured-businesses-precincts-damaged-during-protest-seattle/BGPRGI37RJFNFECJBOHQEL6ZIE/

Twelve officers were injured, businesses and police precincts were damaged and two arrests were made during a protest that turned destructive in Seattle on Sunday.

According to police, the protest began around 10:30 a.m. as a peaceful demonstration calling for the abolition of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, at Westlake Park.

Around 1:30 p.m., police said a secondary group of demonstrators joined in and were seen carrying baseball bats.

Police said the group marched south on 5th Avenue toward the Seattle Police Department headquarters and damaged businesses on the way.

The group damaged the old federal courthouse building, graffitied the SPD headquarters and graffitied and broke windows at the Municipal Court building, police said.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

National Museum of African American History apologizes for chart listing attributes of ‘whiteness’ after criticism from Donald Trump Jr and the conservative media

Posted By on July 20th, 2020

https://news.yahoo.com/national-museum-african-american-history-113916415.html

The National Museum for African American History and Culture removed a chart listing “whiteness” attributes after receiving criticism from Donald Trump Jr and conservative media.

The chart listed “hard work,” “respecting authority,” and “objective, rational linear thinking” as some of the attributes of “white dominant culture, or whiteness.”

Donald Trump Jr. criticized the graphic earlier this week, tweeting: “These aren’t ‘white’ values. They’re American values that built the world’s greatest civilization. They help you succeed here, no matter your color.”

Museum officials issued an apology on Thursday, saying they “need these types of frank and respectful interchanges as we as a country grapple with how we talk about race and its impact on our lives.” 

The Smithsonian National Museum for African American History and Culture in Washington DC has removed an online chart listing “hard work” and “rational linear thinking” as attributes of white culture after criticism from Donald Trump Jr. and the conservative media.

POLITICS Comments turned off

David Catron: Why the Polls Predict Trump Will Win Voter expectation data buried deep in some surveys suggest another upset.

Posted By on July 20th, 2020

https://spectator.org/why-the-polls-predict-trump-will-win/

Lately, pollsters and pundits have been nervously pondering the following question: “If Trump is behind in the polls, why do most voters say, in the same surveys, that he will win the upcoming election?” As Harry Enten recently noted at CNN, “An average of recent polls finds that a majority of voters (about 55%) believe that Trump will defeat Biden in the election. Trump’s edge on this question has remained fairly consistent over time.” This is far more than mere statistical curiosity by number nerds. Several peer-reviewed studies have shown that surveys of voter expectations are far more predictive of election outcomes than polls of voter intentions.

Voter expectations concerning who would win a given election were consistently more predictive than surveys using only conventional polling questions. 

The polls that appear to portend a one-term presidency for Trump actually predict that the president will trounce Biden badly this November.

According to studies conducted by researchers in the United States and in Europe, any pollster attempting to divine the outcome of an election should pay far less attention to what survey respondents say about the candidate they plan to vote for than the candidate they actually believe is going to win. Professor Andreas Graefe of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LSU Munich), proclaims these citizen forecasts, as they are sometimes categorized, “the most accurate method that we have to predict election outcomes.” Dr. Graefe elaborates on this assertion at considerable length in Public Opinion Quarterly under the title “Accuracy of Vote Expectation Surveys in Forecasting”:

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MOSHE PHILLIPS: IN MEMORY OF “BUDDY” KORN -JOURNALIST, ACTIVIST

Posted By on July 20th, 2020

https://www.jns.org/opinion/buddy-korn-jewish-activist-journalist-mentor-and-mensch/

Bertram (Benyamin) “Buddy” Korn, a Jewish activist, journalist, and community organizer, passed away on July 5 at the age of 64 shortly after contracting COVID-19. His contributions to the Jewish community were vast, and it was more often behind the scenes than not that we benefited from his work without knowing it.

Korn’s passing should not occur without examination of his unparalleled influences on the Jewish community that he loved so dearly. As one of the founders of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), and later as a Jewish newspaper editor in Florida and Philadelphia, he began his work defending Israel in the media, and at the same time grooming a generation of mission-driven journalists for the Jewish community.

His work as a pro-Israel grassroots organizer and community-builder took on a myriad of forms: He volunteered in CAMERA’s D.C. office before helping guide its relaunch as a national organization (in addition to his leadership of CAMERA’s Philadelphia office). Later, he worked with various organizations as a paid professional, board member and adviser. Zionist and religious organizations, and Holocaust-educational efforts, benefited from his hard work.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Stone Commute Highlighted Democrats’ Hypocrisy––But Now They’re Waking Up By Joan Swirsky

Posted By on July 20th, 2020

https://canadafreepress.com/article/the-stone-commute-highlighted-democrats-hypocrisybut-now-theyre-waking-up

“Two-thirds of battleground state voters who chose Trump in 2016 but selected Democrats in the midterms say they will return to the president”

“Trump Spares Stone from Imprisonment, Sparking Howls of Amnesiac Democrats” was the colorful headline of a recent Wall St. Journal piece by journalist, author and former Asst. U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of NY, Andrew C. McCarthy.

The “Stone” in the headline referred to Roger Stone, a longtime associate of President Trump who was sentenced to 40 months in prison two years ago for lying to Congress, among other counts, during the failed fiasco of the Mueller investigation into the non-existent collusion of then-candidate Trump with Russian operatives to rig the 2016 election in his favor. 

GLARING HYPOCRISY

Stone, now 67, was arrested in a predawn raid on his home by a heavily armed SWAT team, a saga that was “coincidentally” caught by a CNN camera crew who just happened to be parked outside his home at 4 a.m. Imagine that.

According to Jan Wolfe from Reuters, Stone had connections to the WikiLeaks website, which released damaging emails about Trump’s election rival Hillary Clinton. Uh oh…can’t have those damning e-mails released. Hence the sadistically harsh sentence––the original recommendation was seven-to-nine years––and the brouhaha about Stone’s commutation.

Of course, the leftwing media were “outraged,” “shocked,” “appalled” at President Trump’s miscarriage of justice, although interestingly the president didn’t issue a full pardon, so the felony conviction of Mr. Stone still stands, as does his appeal. 

But you would think, as reported by investigative journalist Mark Hyman, that he had just pardoned two-dozen FALN Puerto-Rican terrorists who murdered at least 24 people. 

Or commuted the 58-year sentence of far-left terrorist Susan Rosenberg after only 16 years. It is so consistent with her hate-America mindset that today, Rosenberg is a member of the board of directors for the left-wing group that handles the donations made to the Marxist-front organization, Black Lives Matter (BLM). 

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Curse Him, Then Copy Him by Amir Taheri

Posted By on July 19th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16257/curse-him-then-copy-him

In elite circles, notably in Europe, Trump-bashing is regarded as a sign of intelligence and cursing him a duty of progressive humanists.

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson campaigned and won on a Trumpian platform of national identity and industrial revival. Even Germany’s Angela Merkel, a sneaky critic of Trump, now talks of the need for a bigger defense budget, curbs on globalization and Russia as a threat.

Last month, however, he [French President Emmanuel Macron] adopted a Trumpian stance against the Black Lives Matter (BLM) lava that had reached France. He said he would not allow French history to be re-written and the police to be insulted; nor would he let anyone topple statues or change street names. He rejected what he called “separatism”, attempts at conjuring double-barrel identities such as “African-French”.

In his idiosyncratic, not to say gauche, style Trump attacked domestic and foreign policies that no longer worked. He also tried to rebalance globalization to halt the long-term de-industrialization of the United States. Prior to the coronavirus crisis, his administration had one of the best records in job creation and the reduction of poverty among black Americans.

By all accounts, Donald J Trump is an atypical character among the men who have served as President of the United States. That maybe the reason for the atypically hostile, often violent, sentiments he provokes among political foes.

In elite circles, notably in Europe, Trump-bashing is regarded as a sign of intelligence and cursing him a duty of progressive humanists.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The United Nations’ Institutional Racism by Judith Bergman

Posted By on July 19th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16214/united-nations-institutional-racism

There is simply a whopping international double-standard here on what passes as institutional racism and what does not — and it needs to be acknowledged.

At the very least, people might question whether an organization that has made discrimination against one country in the world one of its operating principles… is worth the exorbitant cost. The United States, for instance, as the organization’s single largest donor, in 2018 funded the UN to the tune of $10 billion.

At a minimum, instead of paying a mandatory “slightly less than one-fifth of the body’s collective budget” every year, the US — and the UN — would fare far better if the US paid for what it wanted and got what it paid for. At present, the UN has long ceased being a force for good and is being used, first, to prop up its majority of un-transparent, unaccountable anti-democratic despots, and second, to perpetuate conflicts — largely at the US taxpayers’ expense.

All those who truly care about the eradication of discrimination and racism should ask themselves why, if racism is unacceptable everywhere else, it should still be a matter of course at the UN.

As accusations of “institutional” racism in organizations, professions, universities and cultural institutions continue to make the headlines, no one is calling out the institutional racism of the United Nations (UN).

What is institutional racism? The first entry on Google tells you, “Institutional racism is a form of racism that is embedded as normal practice within society or an organization”.

If you google “racism”, a Google dictionary defines it as:

“Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized”.

The UN counts all the states in the world as its members, and all are ostensibly equal under international law, to which the UN claims to adhere. According to its own rationale, therefore, all the member states in the UN should be treated equally by the organization’s various bodies and be judged according to the same standards. If the UN would systematically single out a minority of only one member state to be condemned for alleged human rights abuses for example, while completely ignoring the documented human rights abuses of an entire host of member states, this double-standard would amount to systematic discrimination, or “racism”, against that state according to the definition of “institutional racism” mentioned above.