WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Putin Critic Alexei Navalny Hospitalized in Suspected Poisoning By Zachary Evans

Posted By on August 20th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/putin-critic-alexei-navalny-hospitalized-in-suspected-poisoning/

Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, a staunch critic of President Vladimir Putin, was hospitalized in critical condition after a suspected poisoning on Thursday morning.

Navalny was on a flight to the Siberian city of Tomsk when he fell ill, and the plane made an emergency landing in Omsk where he was brought to intensive care. The hospital has so far refused to share medical details with Navalny’s personal physician, although doctors did say the opposition figure was on artificial ventilation.

“We assume that Alexei was poisoned with something mixed in his tea; it was the only thing he drank all morning,” Navalny spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh wrote on Twitter. “Now he is unconscious.”

Anatoly Kalinichenko, deputy head doctor at the First Emergency Medical Hospital in Omsk, told journalists that he could not say whether Navalny’s life was in danger.

“Poisoning is being looked at as one of the possible reasons for the deterioration of his condition,” Kalinichenko said.

Navalny has vocally criticized Putin for years, and is able to reach millions of followers through his YouTube channel. In July, Navalny led a series of protests against proposed constitutional amendments that would allow Putin to remain in power until 2036.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

MOSHE DANN: UNDERSTANDING THE UAE DEAL

Posted By on August 20th, 2020

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/understanding-israels-deal-with-the-uae-639256

Diplomatic recognition of Israel, is a clear statement in support of Israel’s right to exist, and its right to pursue policies to protect itself, and, by extension, the entire region.
Seen through the lens of the Sunni-Shi’ite conflict, and especially the threat (to Sunni Arabs) of Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah, the move by moderate Sunni Arab states to reconcile with Israel is inevitable and wise. It is motivated by fear of Iran. In this context, therefore, hatred toward Israel and support for the Palestinian cause (eliminating Israel) are relatively minor concerns. The reason for recognizing and establishing full diplomatic relations with Israel is existential, not emotional – and it has global consequences.

Former US president Barack Obama’s deal with Iran, including sending planeloads of cash to Iran, and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s promise to renew this policy of appeasement empowers Iran and directly threatens Sunni Arab states. President Donald Trump’s reelection, therefore, is essential to protect them from Iranian aggression. In addition, Russian and Chinese support for Iran is seen by Sunni Arab states as a threat to their existence.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Goodbye — Sort of — to Germany? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 20th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/american-troop-drawdown-germany/

Why should America anchor Germany’s defense? It cuts deals with Russia, has never met its NATO commitment, and is the most anti-American nation in Europe. 

President Trump recently ordered a 12,000-troop reduction in American military personnel stationed in Germany. That leaves about 24,000 American soldiers still in the country.

A little more than half of the troops being withdrawn will return home. The rest will be redeployed to other NATO member nations, such as Belgium, Italy, and perhaps Baltic and Eastern European countries.German chancellor Angela Merkel is said to be furious. She claims that the redeployments will “weaken the [NATO] alliance.” German commercial interests chimed in that the troop withdrawals will hurt their decades-old businesses serving U.S. bases.

Perhaps, but Merkel surely cannot be surprised. Six years ago, all NATO members pledged to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense. Yet only eight of 29 so far have kept their word.

Germany spends only about 1.4 percent of its GDP on defense. As NATO’s largest, wealthiest, and most powerful European member, it sets the example for the rest of alliance.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Portland businesses fleeing downtown offices over nightly BLM riots Lee Brown

Posted By on August 20th, 2020

https://nypost.com/2020/08/19/portland-businesses-fleeing-downtown-ov

Large companies are fleeing offices in downtown Portland — because nightly Black Lives Matter riots are making the heart of the Oregon city a no-go area, according to a report.

“Businesses are leaving,” Andrew Hoan, president and CEO of the Portland Business Alliance (PBA), told KATU.

“The financial consequences to the downtown corridor are a running calculation that is almost impossible to wrap your mind around,” he said — with one company already saying the riots have cost $20 million in damage and lost business.

“You have blocks and blocks of plywood. You have graffiti. You have an accumulation of damages that are unrepaired, an ongoing perception that coming downtown is not a safe place,” Hoan said.

“We need to start to turn the corner now, so that this sort of irreparable damage does not last,” the business leader said.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Book of the Week: ‘Reclaiming Common Sense’

Posted By on August 20th, 2020

https://www.realclearbooks.com/book_of_the_week/2020/08/19/book_of_the_week_reclaiming_common_sense_574721.html

EDITOR’S NOTE: In this RealClearBooks series, we highlight recent nonfiction books from across the political spectrum. This week’s book is Robert Curry’s ‘Reclaiming Common Sense’, published by Encounter Books.

In America today, right is wrong, men are women, 2+2=5, and the truth as we all understood it is over. What happened? In his philosophic survival guide for our postmodern age, Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World, Robert Curry describes a war on reality that spilled from the academy into all corners of American life and scrambled our rational mind in the process.

Though BLM, gender, and environmental activists often dominate our post-truth headlines, the left’s war on common sense is not merely intended to advance noisy progressive pet schemes. In fact, Curry reveals, subverting the truth as we know it is central to a far a more insidious plot to erode and eliminate the very conditions that make our Constitution work. For, as Curry writes, a war on reason is a war on the mind itself, and with it our capacities to think clearly and govern ourselves.

In a series of thoughtful vignettes, Curry urges Americans to preserve our fragile republic by restoring the common-sense realism that informed our Founders and grounded our nation as a shared project. These wise passages are essential reading for those who see and feel America drifting into a surreal state. In fact, as Reclaiming Common Sense underscores, those perceptive powers are the very thing that unite us and make our experiment in self-rule possible. Don’t let them go.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

In Dark and Divisive Speech, Obama Seeks to Turn Back Clock on America Andrew Stiles

Posted By on August 20th, 2020

https://freebeacon.com/parody/in-dark-and-divisive-speech-obama-seeks-to-turn-back-clock-on-america/

To the delight of professional journalists, former President Barack Obama gave a jaw-dropping speech at the Democratic convention on Wednesday. Its dark and divisive tone signaled an attempt to drag America backwards by electing the man who served for eight years as his vice president.

Obama’s speech was the rhetorical equivalent of a culture war Hiroshima blast. It offered some token words of praise for Joe Biden, whom he repeatedly urged not to run, but was infused with the desperate rantings of a man who needs to be praised. “He made me a better president,” Obama said, effortlessly hogging the spotlight as usual.

Obama assailed the convictions of Donald Trump supporters, suggesting they “don’t believe” in American principles. He cast the stakes of the upcoming election in stark terms, inviting Americans to fear their neighbors, described only as a nefarious “they” secretly plotting to destroy the country from within.

“They are counting on your cynicism. They know they can’t win you over with their policies. So they’re hoping to make it as hard as possible for you to vote, and to convince you that your vote doesn’t matter,” Obama said while making threatening hand gestures at an oversized U.S. Constitution—an ominous backdrop for a speech teeming with vengeful rage. “That’s how they win.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

AD Jerusalem Post Opinion Who’s afraid of a fourth round of elections? – opinion Cries of ‘Bibi must go’ couldn’t me more ironic, with most Israels having no desire to return to the ballot box for the fourth time in under two years. By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on August 20th, 2020

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/whos-afraid-of-a-fourth-round-of-elections-opinion-639375

Israel’s High Court of Justice on Wednesday rejected a petition by residents of Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood – the location of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s official Balfour Street residence – that the continuous mass protests in the area be limited or halted completely.

According to the dozens of petitioners, the demonstrations not only have been causing a severe disruption to their daily lives – with the deafening din disturbing their sleep – but pose a health risk. After all, participants at these events, many without face-coverings, or who wear their masks around their necks, gather in the thousands, making it impossible for them to adhere to coronavirus social-distancing regulations.

Justices Uzi Vogelman, Yael Wilner and Alex Stein ruled that due to the special status of the Prime Minister’s Residence, the rights of political protesters must be given priority over those of neighborhood denizens. The judges also opined that a reasonable balance between the rights of the demonstrators and residents has been achieved through the presence of police, who have been entrusted with enforcing COVID-19 mandates.

So far, however, enforcing the law at these events has been difficult, leading to clashes between police and demonstrators, with the former using water cannons as one method to disperse oversized crowds.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Chicago’s Terror Cells Is it time for Trump to send in the troops? Jason Hill

Posted By on August 20th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/chicago-descends-anarchy-jason-d-hill/

Last week in Chicago saw the most major of American cities in the Midwest descend into chaos and mayhem as looters and rioters took to the city’s downtown streets and unleashed a reign of destruction and nihilistic terror. Acting under the pretenses of social justice, and outrage at police brutality against blacks, anarchists and Black Lives Matter supporters reveal a desire not to peacefully protest whatever reasonable grievances they think they might have, but rather to destroy principles of civility, property rights and the First Amendment. And, of course, they also clearly wish to unload their absolute unfiltered hatred of law enforcement.

More than 100 people were arrested between Sunday night and Monday morning after an overnight spate of violence that seems to have begun with a 20-year-old man who, unprovoked, opened fire at police officers. Thirteen officers were injured in displays of violence around the city. Police Superintendent David Brown on Monday described the incident not as peaceful protests, but as incidents of pure criminality.

On Monday evening, the looters, rioters and anarchists again struck the wealthy section of downtown Chicago’s Gold Coast region, looting and destroying designer stores including Ralph Lauren, Jimmy Choo, and Geneva Seal. U-Haul trucks were seen waiting on the sides of roads to deposit the burglarized property from the city’s prime real estate area. 

A Black Lives Matter Chicago organizer said Monday that the mobs who vandalized and looted downtown businesses the night before did nothing wrong, calling it “reparations” for Black suffering.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Undignified Obama What an ex-president’s inflammatory and hateful nominating-convention address was made of. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on August 20th, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/08/undignified-obama-matthew-vadum/

Last night Barack Hussein Obama gave what was probably the most undignified, inflammatory, hateful nominating-convention address of a former president in the history of the United States.

“This administration has shown it will tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win,” he said August 19, puffing himself up with a studied indignation.

This is the same, shameless, Saul Alinsky-worshiping liar who presided over a seditious plot, a rolling coup attempt, to overthrow his successor using the CIA and FBI, the early outlines of which this writer sketched in Obama’s Insurrection.

The real-life conspiracy to oust Trump, though not (yet) successful, has allowed Democrats and their Deep State allies to practice these dark arts over the past four years that they may soon use to remove the mentally incompetent Joe Biden from the Oval Office to pave the way for Kamala Harris, who is not black despite what her publicists in the media say, to become president.

No one in the media seems to have noticed that the party of LGBT and racial utopia is now headed by a man who is apparently not completely convinced of the rectitude of those causes.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Calling Out Democrats’ Lies at Lame Zoom Convention By Rick Manning

Posted By on August 20th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/19/calling-out-democrats-lies-at-lame-zoom-convention/

The biggest lie, among many, at the Democratic Party’s Orange Man Bad Fest on Tuesday night was that President Trump did not act aggressively or effectively to save lives from the Chinese coronavirus.

Here are a couple of key facts that Bill Clinton must have missed: President Trump ended flights from China in January, only to be attacked for “hysterical xenophobia” by former Vice President Joe Biden in Iowa on February 1. President Trump ended travel from Europe in March to the dismay of Democrats, including Biden who said the order was “counterproductive.”

On March 13, as part of a larger announcement by President Trump on COVID-19 response, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued an updated Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidance for how nursing homes should handle coronavirus cases.  

These measures, along with the Trump Administration’s historic industrial mobilization to ensure Americans have the necessary personal protective equipment (PPE) to fight the coronavirus, are saving lives. The Monday morning quarterbacking at the Democratic convention this week is simply an attempt to deflect from the failed policies of their own party leaders, specifically New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo forced nursing homes in his state to accept COVID-19 patients, knowing those facilities could not treat them. His recklessness infected the most vulnerable populations in the state with the deadly virus and was in direct violation of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services guidance. The CDC directed nursing homes to only admit COVID patients if “the facility can follow CDC guidance for Transmission-Based Precautions” and to keep only those COVID-infected patients for which they could safely care for.