NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Why Are U.S. Taxpayers Providing Public Pensions To Millionaire Members Of Congress? Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/06/30/the-trouble-with-speaker

Membership in the U.S. Congress is an exclusive club that comes with lucrative, taxpayer-funded privileges. Retirement perks include a lifetime pension and a taxpayer-matched savings plan with taxpayer-paid contributions of up to five percent of salary.

As the longest-serving member of Congress, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) would qualify for a yearly pension of $167,040 if he retired today. Former speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) was eligible to draw a $84,930 pension when he turned 50 in January after serving for twenty years and retiring at age 48.

Critics question the necessity of such a system. Why are U.S. taxpayers providing public pensions to millionaire members of Congress on top of a 401(k)-style plan? (The median net worth for a member recently exceeded $1.1 million.)

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com broke down benefits received by leaders from both parties: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (net worth est. $50 million to $72 million): She’ll reap $153,967 a year in public pension and social security benefits at retirement. In addition, Pelosi could cash out an estimated $1 million lump sum through her federal saving account – and that’s just the portion of the account that was taxpayer-funded.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

What Harvard and Your Local Commuter College Now Have in Common by Kevin Carey

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.nas.org/?utm_source=National+Association+of+Scholars+General&

The coronavirus pandemic has been a bull in the higher ed china shop. Administrators were forced to send students home prior to finishing the spring semester, and many graduates participated in remote commencement ceremonies complete with virtual walks across stage. Countless hourly workers—those working in dining halls, public safety, facilities, etc.—were furloughed or laid off while diversity bureaucrats continued to collect generous paychecks. Colleges and universities lost revenue at an alarming rate through tuition and room and board remission; decreased donations and yield from investments; and declining enrollment for the 2020-21 school year, to name a few factors.
 

While closing down last semester was difficult, reopening in the fall will be harder. Schools, even in rural areas, are under immense pressure from federal, state, and local authorities to both reopen and to obey health protocol faithfully, not to mention the concerned faculty and students who have to weather this storm and face its immediate and long-term consequences. Traditional, in-person higher education was simply not designed for “social distance”—many institutions have been forced to rebuild their educational infrastructure from the ground up.
 

It’s now mid-July, and time’s up. Colleges and universities around the country have begun announcing their eagerly anticipated reopening plans for the fall semester, which range from online-only instruction and closed campuses to in-person classes and nearly full-capacity operation. The Chronicle of Higher Education is tracking the reopening plans of over 1,100 colleges and universities, compiling some useful data in the process. We see that, for example, a whopping 85% of American colleges and universities are “planning for in-person” or “proposing a hybrid model” (part in-person, part online).

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Reflections on ‘aliyah’ I was smitten almost instantly with Israel for not emulating the aspects of the United States that made me want to abscond in the first place. Ruthie Blum

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.jns.org/opinion/reflections-on-aliyah/

This week marks the 43rd anniversary of my aliyah. In July 1977, I arrived in Israel for what I had thought was going to be a 12-month stint. But when I completed the one-year program for overseas students at the Hebrew University the following summer, I returned to the United States not to remain there, but to tie up loose ends. These included informing the University of Chicago, where I had spent my freshman and sophomore years, that I wouldn’t be back in the fall, and persuading my parents in New York that I hadn’t lost my marbles.

The latter turned out to be less of a problem than I had anticipated. I wasn’t dropping out of school, after all; just finishing my degree at about one-tenth of the price—and in a much warmer climate, both literally and figuratively.

Indeed, the campus of the U of C hit arctic temperatures in the winter, requiring everyone to wear down coats, fur-lined water-proof boots, thick gloves and ski masks with which to confront the fierce winds. It was also a chilly environment for a teenager like me, who registered as a Republican in my second semester as soon as I turned 18, preferred Motown to what the kids on the block in my largely Hispanic and black neighborhood in Manhattan called “white music” and announced to my uber-liberal peers—all of whom read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and called marriage “no more than a piece of paper”—that I was in college to find a suitable husband.

As if that weren’t sufficient cause for being ostracized or not taken seriously, I openly argued against affirmative action and disagreed with the mantra that abortion is an issue of a woman’s right to reign over her “own body.”

Nor did I join the “amen crowd” ranting against the recently ended Vietnam War and looking askance at the lone veteran among us. He impressed me as a hero—manly in the way that I believed a guy should be, not someone whose flaws or misfortunes prevented him from dodging the draft. Nothing like the liberal Jewish boys I knew, whose way of impressing a date in those days was to let her pay for her own dinner.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

On The Foolish Quest For Cosmic Justice Through Government Coercion  Francis Menton

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-7-13-on-the-foolish-quest-for-cosmic-justice-through-government-coercio

A couple of days ago a reader sent me a personal email (not a comment on the blog) responding to my June 30 post with the title “Reminder: How Progressive ‘Programs’ Keep African Americans Down.” The post discussed issues including that African Americans in the United States have lower recorded average incomes and wealth than the averages of other ethnic groups. The key point made in the responsive email was this (paraphrase): “You are full of criticisms for all the attempts to solve these problems, yet you never propose any solutions yourself.”

That is correct. I have not proposed “solutions” to these “problems.” And there is a reason for that. The reason is that no “solutions” to these “problems” exist; at least, no solutions exist if the concept of an acceptable solution consists of some government spending program or order or command issued to the people.

I have put the words “solutions” and “problems” in quotes for a specific reason. The reason is that characterizing things like group income and wealth disparities as “problems” in need of “solutions” fundamentally mischaracterizes the situation. A “problem” is something that a smart person, or group of people, can sit down and “solve.” If you characterize issues like these as “problems,” you inherently imply that “solutions” must exist and that people of good will should get to work and figure out the solutions and put them into effect right away. And then, in short order, the “problem” will have gone away.

There is no solution that is going to make issues like group income or wealth disparities go away any time soon. The things that governments can do to ameliorate these issues — things like providing equal opportunity under the law, equal protection of the laws, equal educational opportunities, and so forth — have mostly already been done. I’m not saying that they have been done perfectly. No human institution is perfect. So there is always room to improve. But no actions of this sort will ever achieve perfect fairness and justice in the world, or anything close to it. And then there are massive spending and redistribution programs. Those will only make disparities worse.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Brazen Lying Is Media’s Latest Escalation In Campaign Against Trump: Mollie Hemingway

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/10/brazen-lying-is-medias-latest-escalation-in-campaign-against-trump/

As if orders went out from a central director, nearly every major media outlet flat-out lied about President Trump’s speech.

When Sen. Bob Dole accepted the Republican nomination for president in 1996, his speech hit on the themes of “honor, decency and straight talk.” He proudly mentioned the great Republican Abraham Lincoln and explicitly denounced racism.

“The Republican Party is broad and inclusive. It represents many streams of opinion and many points of view. But if there’s anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion, then let me remind you — tonight this hall belongs to the party of Lincoln. And the exits, which are clearly marked, are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise,” Dole said.

The speech was held up in 2016 as an example of how wonderful Republican candidates for president used to be before Donald Trump. So it’s interesting to also look back at how this speech was received by its critics. For example, then-Senior White House Adviser George Stephanopoulos called it “partisan, negative and divisive.”

Fast-forward 24 years to the present. Once again a prominent Republican gives a speech with themes of honor and decency and straight talk. Once again the prominent Republican explicitly and repeatedly denounces racism. The Republican praises Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, the Wright Brothers, the Tuskegee Airmen, Harriet Tubman, Clara Barton, Jesse Owens, George Patton, Louie Armstrong, Alan Shepard, Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Irving Berlin, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and Bob Hope.

And once again critics claim that the speech is “dark and divisive.”

But this time the commentary and narrative-shaping pushback that used to be left to Democratic activists such as George Stephanopoulos are now handled by corporate media activists like, well, George Stephanopoulos. OK, maybe it’s not such a significant difference after all. But it’s still noteworthy that the corporate media activists are doing what used to be left to official party activists.

BOOKS Comments turned off

TOM FITTON:A Republic Under Assault: The Left’s Ongoing Attack on American Freedom

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

In this explosive new book, New York Times bestselling author and president of Judicial Watch Tom Fitton explains how the Radical Left and the Deep State are trying to destroy the Trump presidency.

Tom Fitton’s first two New York Times bestselling books, The Corruption Chronicles and Clean House, exposed the hypocrisy and corruption of Obama’s two terms. Now, in Fitton’s latest investigative probe, he identifies the four major forces posing a continued threat to American democracy.

Deep State Efforts to Destroy the Trump Presidency: How the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign paid for the fraudulent anti-Trump “Steele Dossier,” and how it was used by the Obama FBI and DOJ to dupe the FISA Court to allow it to spy on the Trump presidential campaign AND President Trump. These and more dirty secrets of Obamagate and the impeachment coup attempt are exposed.

Hillary Clinton Email Scandal: How the Clinton team and senior officials at the Obama State Department conspired to cover up Hillary Clinton’s secret email system—and shocking revelations that tie the Obama White House to the cover-up!

Voter Fraud: How Soros-funded groups attack states that seek to protect clean elections by challenging voter ID laws, and how the Left is cynically peddling COVID-19 crisis electoral “reforms,” such as mail-in voting, which could increase voter fraud and election chaos. And shocking numbers about dirty voting rolls across the nation!

Illegal Immigration: How deadly illegal “sanctuary” policies are exploding across America, and how our nation’s sovereignty has been under assault by radical open-border advocates.

Subversive Deep State collaborators with ties to the Clinton and Obama machines not only launched countless—often illegal—operations to stop and then remove Trump, but even more alarmingly, are working to transform the United States into something truly unrecognizable to all who believe in liberty and the rule of law.

Today one of their main targets is President Donald J. Trump.

Tomorrow it could be you and anyone who believes in the US Constitution, believes the United States must have clearly defined and protected borders, believes in the need for a strong military, believes in the value of hard work and faith, and believes in the rule of law and American exceptionalism.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: Abbas Signs His Own Death Warrant by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16222/palestinians-abbas-hamas

By courting Hamas, Abbas and Fatah are emboldening an Islamist movement that seeks to extend its control from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank. Hamas’s declared goal is to replace Israel with an Iranian-style Islamist state.

Abbas may also be using his renewed ties with Hamas as a way of pressuring the international community into providing him with more financial aid.

Hamas evidently wants to use the West Bank as a launching pad for carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel.

Hamas also does not appear to be headed towards recognizing Israel’s right to exist. As such, Abbas seems to be handing Hamas the noose that eventually will be tied around his own neck.

After renouncing all agreements and understandings with Israel and the United States, including security cooperation, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his ruling Fatah faction are now cozying up to their rivals in Hamas — a move that may prove to be counterproductive and pave the way for the resumption of massive anti-Israel violence.

By courting Hamas, Abbas and Fatah are emboldening an Islamist movement that seeks to extend its control from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank. Hamas’s declared goal is to replace Israel with an Iranian-style Islamist state.

Abbas may also be using his renewed ties with Hamas as a way of pressuring the international community into providing him with more financial aid. The message he is sending to Western donors is: “If you don’t fully support us and exert pressure on Israel, I will throw myself into the arms of Hamas.”

The apparent rapprochement between Fatah and Hamas began earlier this month when the two parties held a joint press interview by videoconference, during which they announced their intention to work together to “topple” both Israel’s plan to apply its sovereignty to parts of the West Bank and US President Donald Trump’s Peace to Prosperity vision for solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The appearance of Jibril Rajoub, Secretary-General of the Fatah Central Committee, alongside senior Hamas official Saleh Arouri, a founding commander of Hamas’s military wing, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, was aimed at sending a message to the Palestinians and the rest of the world that when it comes to Israel and the US, the Palestinians are prepared to lay aside their differences and stand united against “conspiracies aiming to liquidate the Palestinian cause and national rights.”

Although he holds the title of “Deputy Chairman of Hamas’s Political Bureau,” Arouri, who is currently based in Lebanon, is anything but a politician.

In 2018, the US Department of State offered a reward of up to $5 million for information that would lead to the identification or location of Arouri and two senior Hezbollah military operatives. In addition to his political activity in recent years, Arouri has played a major role in forming ties between Hamas and Iran and Hezbollah. He also deals with the construction and handling of Hamas terrorist infrastructure in the West Bank, where Rajoub lives and works.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hagia Sophia and Turkey’s Supremacism by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16230/hagia-sophia-turkey-supremacism

Why now? Erdoğan possibly thought the move could reverse the ongoing erosion of his popularity due, among others, to a looming economic crisis. All the same, it appears to be wrongly timed, as presidential and parliamentary elections are three years from now and Turks are notorious for not having a good memory. Praying at the Hagia Sophia Mosque will not turn a hungry man into a happy man.

“This is against the Quranic commandments… Prophet Mohammed never converted a Jewish or Christian house of prayer into a mosque.” — Cemil Kılıç, Muslim theologian, t24.com.tr, July 12, 2020.

An Islamist leader decides to convert a monumental cathedral into a mosque, and his fans, are spilling out hatred against Jews. This is Turkey’s new normal.

According to his fans and political allies, Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, conquered Istanbul for the second time when he signed a decree to convert the monumental Hagia Sophia cathedral in Istanbul, built in 537, into a mosque. With that logic, he became the first statesman who conquered a city that already belongs to his country.

“First, you should fill Sultanahmet (Blue Mosque, Istanbul) … This is a plot, this is sheer provocation,” Erdoğan told a crowd as recently as in March 2019 when party fans demanded the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque. He was right. Most of Istanbul’s nearly 3,000 mosques (one mosque per 5,000 population) do not attract crowds. Sixteen months later, Erdoğan changed his mind.

In this theater-like play, he said the supreme court would decide on the fate of Hagia Sophia. Under a constitutional amendment in 2010, Erdoğan won the authority to appoint all members of that court, the Council of State. Erdoğan said he would respect the court’s verdict in “whichever direction it comes.”

And, unsurprisingly, the verdict came in the direction Erdoğan wanted: On July 9, the Council of State decided to void a cabinet decision, signed in 1934 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, designating Hagia Sophia as a museum, in a show of respect for Christianity. Only an hour after the verdict was announced, Erdoğan signed a decree for the conversion into a mosque of the monument on UNESCO’s World Heritage List.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: Cancel culture coming for Broadway’s most famous hits? By Ruth King

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/cancel_culture_coming_for_broadways_most_famous_hits.html

Broadway has been depressingly dark for months, so Disney produced Hamilton on TV for a large and grateful audience. However, the PC monitors, who never rest, criticized the play for portraying principals who were slave owners.

When the lights go on again, will they come for the theater?

Could Driving Miss Daisy ever be performed again? It is a heartwarming tale by Alfred Uhry about the relationship of an elderly Southern Jewish woman, Daisy Werthan, and her black chauffeur, Hoke Coleborn. It enjoyed wide praise in various iterations on stage and in a movie, but today it would raise the hackles of political correctness officers.

South Pacific?  No way! “There is nothing like a dame” is male chauvinism writ large. Could it be saved if the original song is performed by a chorus of female soldiers? Or if the lyrics were changed to “there is nothing but a they.”

“Climb every mountain, Ford every stream.” That’s not The Sound of Music for the disabled. Really what were they thinking?

Goodbye to Jerome Kern and Showboat: “Tell me he’s lazy, tell me he’s slow, tell me I’m crazy, (maybe I know). Can’t help lovin’ dat man of mine.”

That is a subliminal racist stereotype. These lyrics are insensitive… although Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and Shirley Bassey and Barbra Streisand recorded great renditions without getting the vapors.

Guys and Dolls, a masterpiece by Frank Loesser based on Damon Runyon stories, is sexist right in the title.  Are you kidding? Binaries and trans maybe but rhyming is hard. And it’s about the Salvation Army and gamblers… not hip.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

America, Warts and All -Reflections on the most interesting country in the world By Joseph Epstein

Posted By on July 14th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/07/27/america-warts-and-all/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

I grew up in a household in perennially corrupt Chicago, where all politicians were considered guilty until proven innocent. This seems to me even now a sensible standard, and well beyond the city limits of Chicago.

The one exception to this standard chez Epstein was during World War II, when my father was a strong supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Even here, though, he was less for Roosevelt than against the American isolationism, which he detested, of Roosevelt’s opposition. Eager for the United States to join the war against the Nazis, not least to help stop the mass murder then in progress of European Jews, my father was so passionate about this that he would not allow Colonel McCormick’s isolationist Chicago Tribune in the house. He used to tell the story of one day having a flat tire when a driver in a Tribune truck pulled up to help him. “Get the hell out of here, I don’t need your goddamn help,” my father told the guy. Recounting the story, my father commented, “That’s how stupid politics can make you!”

Politics, I know, has made me stupid more than once during my life. Happiness is often cited as the end of politics, but politics hasn’t brought all that much happiness into the world. The more intensely political the time, the less happiness seems available. Nor is truth another leading by-product of politics. I used to say that I have never lost a political argument, a claim whose remarkableness is offset only by the sad fact that neither have I ever won one. As for politics and rational argument, Jonathan Swift nailed it nicely when he remarked that it is useless to attempt to reason a man out of something he wasn’t reasoned into. 

This is truer than ever today, when our politics seems more divisive than I and most other people can remember. The politics of rivaling interests of an earlier time — labor versus management, big versus small government, urban versus rural — seemed more sensible, certainly less heated. Today our politics presents us with rivaling virtues, which is, somehow, more poisonous. “I’m for social justice, for eliminating poverty and all traces of racism and making the world the better place I know it can be,” says the new progressive, adding, “unlike you, Schmuckowitz, with your pathetic greed, belief in a decadent capitalism, and total failure of imagination.” The conservative replies: “Without liberty, the spirit of entrepreneurship and its resultant prosperity, and proper respect for our country’s best traditions, we are nowhere, and your naïve utopianism, Schlepperman, not to mention indignation and anger, are no help.” So they go on, Schmuckowitz and Schlepperman, back and forth, each informing the other that, let’s face it, I am a much better person than you.