Meet the Hudson Valley’s Anti-AOC By Joseph Duggan-(R-NY district 19)

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/29/meet-the-hudson-valleys-anti-aoc/

Is Washington, D.C. ready for a Christian Arab, pro-life—and pro-Israel!—glamorous, conservative, Second Amendment stalwart, fashion model cancer-survivor as a member of Congress?

Ola Hawatmeh is a name to learn and remember. This dynamic conservative Republican woman appears poised to win the GOP nomination to oppose a left-wing, first-term Democratic incumbent in a mostly rural and small-town, conservative district covering the Catskills and the Hudson Valley running south from the suburbs of Albany to Poughkeepsie.

Hawatmeh (pronounced ha-WAHT-meh) was born in New York state and grew up in the district. She’s a native speaker of Arabic as well as English.  She is the devout daughter of Eastern-Rite Christian parents who settled in the Hudson Valley after leaving their native homes in Jordan and Lebanon.

Ever since her surprise victory in New York’s 14th district primary and easy ride to the general election in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has captured much of the nation’s attention as a young, energetic, female federal legislator with a passionate oratorical style and glamorous looks.

Ocasio-Cortez is appealing on her side of the ideological divide because she dramatically symbolizes the possibility that an outsider can beat a well-funded pillar of the old-boy network. She offers an attractive face for the anti-establishment, left-wing of the Democratic party. She is an uncompromising socialist in an environment where that stance wins votes and accumulates power.

New York’s 19th district now is about to launch the political career of the Anti-AOC. If elected in November, Hawatmeh will become La Pasionaria of conservative politics.

The Long Decline of American Higher Education Has Begun It’s wrong to say that higher education will be unrecognizable in ten years. Rather, it will be recognizable to people who were alive in the middle of the 20th century. By Byrne Hobart

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/29/the-long-decline-of-american-higher-education-has-begun/

The paradox of American higher education is that going to college used to be aspirational, but now the sales pitch is that it’s scary not to get a degree. Long ago, universities were a place where students could explore new academic frontiers and challenge themselves with new ideas. And now, school is safe: four more years of deferring big decisions and optimizing for easy A’s.

In the last few weeks, everything has changed. Now, it’s the schools that are scared. And they should be.

The American higher education system faces four immense challenges: COVID-19, China, competition, and demographics. Think of them as two hammers and two anvils: COVID-19 is hitting enrollment and attendance, as students can’t gather on campus and are forced to reconsider whether school is the best option right now.

China has provided a steady flow of students, with strings attached; those strings are getting burdensome, and Chinese students now have better options. Competition is rising everywhere, from better trade schools to a better version of the Ivy League.

Demographics make things even more challenging: U.S. birthrates were steady throughout the 90s, but after a peak of 2.12 in 2007, birthrates steadily declined, and now average 1.77. Fewer births in 2008 translates to fewer 18-year-olds starting in 2026, with the decline slated to continue for a decade.

This means that each year, colleges around the country will face the same problem: how to pay for tenured professors, administrators, and fancy facilities while suffering from declining enrollment and an end to the rising-tuition gravy train?

It’s Time to Boycott China To ensure we recover from this virus, we must do two things: Wash our hands and wash our hands of China. By Curtis Ellis

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/29/its-time-to-boycott-china/

President Trump says he expects China will pay a “substantial” amount of money for damages caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

You can’t help but suspect the Chinese Communist Party deliberately withheld crucial information and hoarded protective supplies needed to prepare for the virus in order to wreak maximum damage both mortal and material on the West.

When asked if he will submit a bill as Germany has done, Trump demurred, saying “We have ways of doing things much easier than that.”

You bet we do.

Consider: Every dollar the CCP would possibly pay us in damages would be a dollar we gave them in the first place.

We can save ourselves the trouble of trying to collect the bill by not sending them the money in the first place.

Let’s say it out loud: Boycott China.

China’s Communist dictators have been waging economic warfare against us for decades, launching missiles from their mines, mills, and factories in an attack that has destroyed our industries as effectively as any precision-guided munitions.

Now the pandemic has wrought further destruction.

They have succeeded in effectively stopping our way of life. We can’t let them do that again.

How?

Just as the CCP has waged economic warfare against the United States, we can do the same.

The Chinese Communist Party lives off the money we send them, and we send them a lot.

We should stop sending them our money. Americans should boycott China.

Our government should boycott the CCP.

Democracies Need to Back Taiwan’s Bid to Join the World Health Organization by Jagdish N. Singh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15937/who-taiwan-support

With a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, China has so far been able to impose its will and deny Taiwan entry into the WHO. Perhaps China should no longer be on the UN Security Council?

Thankfully, the U.S. administration of President Donald J. Trump recently enacted the Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative Act, aimed at supporting Taiwan’s international presence.

As a member of the WHO, China had an obligation to provide accurate data to help the world learn more about the virus. China, however, still refuses to be transparent.

It would also undoubtedly be better for the world if all 184 countries afflicted with Covid-19 and its ruinous economic aftermath would stop doing business with China: it has proven that it is not friend.

Recently, 127 European parliamentarians backed a bid by Taiwan (The Republic of China) to join the Geneva-based World Health Organization (WHO). All democratic governments — in fact, every government: 184 have been ravaged by Covid-19 and its economic ravages — need to make Taiwan’s WHO membership a reality.

The WHO was founded in 1948 with a mandate to ensure that all peoples of the world attain the highest possible level of health. Ironically, the WHO excludes Taiwan and its more than 23.8 million people from its care. WHO shares little of its biomedical and health research information with Taiwan, which is not invited even to its emergency meetings.

China Exploiting the Coronavirus Pandemic to Expand in Asia by Con Coughlin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15956/china-expansion-asia

The incident prompted a furious response from the Vietnamese government, which accused Beijing of violating its sovereignty and threatening the lives of its fishermen. The US State Department said it was “seriously concerned”….

The dispute concerns China’s recent announcement that it intends to administer two disputed groups of islands and reefs in the waterway. One district covers the Paracel Islands, and the other has jurisdiction over the Spratlys, where China has built a network of fortified man-made islands. The Philippines has a presence of its own on at least nine islands and islets in the area, and bitterly opposes Chinese attempts to extend its influence.

Despite the Trump administration’s preoccupation with tackling the coronavirus pandemic, Washington is not prepared to tolerate China’s aggressive actions. Three ships from the US Seventh Fleet, together with an Australian frigate, have responded by sailing through the disputed waters in a show of force.

China’s communist leadership may believe that they can take advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to bully their Asian neighbours. But this show of force by the US Navy should send a timely reminder to Beijing as to which country is the real military power in the region.

While the rest of the world is preoccupied with tackling the coronavirus pandemic, China is intensifying its efforts to extend its influence in the South China Sea by intimidating its Asian neighbours.

The arrival of China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier, together with five accompanying warships, in the South China Sea earlier this month has resulted in a significant increase in tensions in the Asia-Pacific region as Beijing seeks to take advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to flex its muscles.

China Committed an Act of War By William L. Gensert

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/china_committed_an_act_of_war.html

Xi and the CCP thugs running China committed a deliberate act of war the moment they banned air travel from Wuhan to all other Chinese cities while allowing international flights to proceed unmolested to the far corners of the globe.  They did this despite knowing those flights out of China comprised desperate souls escaping a homegrown pandemic and a communist regime willing to let them die to save face.  It was an artificial diaspora intended to seed humanity with the Xi Plague.

It has been shown that ChiVid-19 came from a “wolf” bat, a particular type of bat not sold in the Wuhan “wet” market located mere feet from China’s only level 4 research lab — a lab that, coincidentally, was studying various strains of coronavirus.

Did China deliberately unleash COVID-19?  I doubt it.  Hanlon’s Razor dictates that one should never put off to malice what can be explained more easily by incompetence.  No, COVID-19 is not a deliberately created biological weapon.  While the infectious nature is perfect, its kill rate is minimal, rendering it marginal as a weapon of war.  The actual weapons being worked on in China’s labs are likely much more deadly.

The WuFlu was a viral study gone awry — an accident that escaped the lab because although China is a first-world manufacturer, it is a third-world country with a per capita income not much greater than Botswana’s.  China is a nation where tens of millions of people still live in caves and half the population still does not have indoor plumbing or toilets.

Scotland Swaps One Blasphemy Law for Another By Madeleine Kearns

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/scotland-blasphemy-law-repeal-new-speech-restrictions-replace-old-ones/

Out with the old and in with the new.

On Friday, reports emerged that the Scottish Parliament had introduced a bill decriminalizing blasphemy. No one has been prosecuted under the blasphemy law in question for 175 years, but still, the law “no longer reflects the kind of society in which we live,” the government said.

Fair enough, one might think. But look closer: The new bill does not simply repeal the dormant blasphemy law, as reports suggest. Instead, it replaces the law with a new one, designed for actual use in the 21st century. Reflecting “the kind of society in which we live,” the new bill is neither freer nor more liberal than the old one; it merely enshrines the policing of a different kind of speech.

The single sentence abolishing “the offence of blasphemy,” does not appear until part four of the Hate Crimes and Public Order (Scotland) Act. In part one, the drafters make the bill more palatable by creating enhanced penalties for existing crimes that are “aggravated by prejudice.” In explaining how this could be applied, Lord Bracadale, who conducted an independent review of the legislation, gave ministers two hypothetical scenarios:

A man who was annoyed at the noise his gay neighbor made putting out the bins in the early morning engaged in abusive shouting, in the course of which he made comments about the neighbor’s sexual orientation including hoping that “people like you die of AIDS. . . .”

A man shouts at a disabled person in a wheelchair on a street saying, “get out of my way you cripple” and proceeds to tip them out of their wheelchair . . .

De Blasio the Denier By The Editors

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-crisis-bill-de-blasio-new-york-city-mayor/

De Blasio launched a broadside against “the Jewish community” after a large crowd turned out for a rabbi’s funeral in Williamsburg as though the event corporately implicated the more than 1 million Jews living in New York City, drawing criticism from the city’s ADL and other local Jewish leaders.

In the middle of March, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio was among those not entirely sold on social distancing as a prophylactic measure against the coronavirus epidemic. “If you love your neighborhood bar, go there now,” he famously said. A few days later, he was threatening to padlock the city’s synagogues — permanently — if social-distancing protocols went unheeded.

We sympathize with those New Yorkers driven to drink or inspired to prayer by Mayor de Blasio’s incompetence, vanity, and stupidity, which have been highlighted by but are by no means limited to his response to COVID-19. For the time being, they must suffer in their households rather than in congregation.

In all likelihood, the coronavirus has been spreading in New York since February. The city’s jam-packed subway system, carrying five million riders a day, should have counseled particular vigilance. But even with the examples of California’s and Washington’s cities before him, the mayor was slow to move. He dragged his staff along to a crowded YMCA for a workout even as he was ordering gyms closed around the city. The city schools remained open until March 15, and it was left to New York governor Andrew Cuomo to negotiate their closure while teachers were threatening a wildcat strike. De Blasio delayed against the advice of his own aides and health experts. A 36-year-old principal subsequently died of COVID-19. The city’s refusal to disclose infections in the schools “kept families in the dark and left more lives at risk,” as one city councilman put it.

De Blasio was warned in early March that the city needed to take more aggressive action against the epidemic, but he wrote off advice from health commissioner Oxiris Barbot and others, worried that a lockdown would hurt the city’s economy. Extended deliberations controlled by political concerns rather than medical ones wasted precious time. “He has long distrusted the top brass of the health department,” Politico reports, “feeling they do not understand politics and public relations.” That may be the case, but their job is not public relations — it is public health.

Ignoring the advice and recommendations of the relevant experts in order to tend to his political concerns, Mayor de Blasio effectively became a member of that class of villain most hated by his progressive allies: a denier. His refusal to concede the facts and his desire to subordinate good policy to political expediency were compounded by his general executive incompetence, for instance in leaving city agencies without necessary guidance for implementing work-from-home policies. He insisted that the city’s hospitals were well prepared for the crisis; the actual situation in the city’s public hospitals was shortly thereafter described as “apocalyptic” by one physician.

Israel’s 72nd, Locked-Down Independence Day: Still Thriving and Growing By P. David Hornik

https://pjmedia.com/columns/p-david-hornik/2020/04/29/israels-72nd-locked-down-independence-day-still-thriving-and-growing-n386797

As of Tuesday evening and Wednesday, Israel turns 72. But something—to paraphrase the Haggadah, the text that’s read for the Passover ceremony earlier in the spring—makes this Independence Day different from all others: we’re under a strict lockdown, the strictest yet since the COVID-19 era began.

Although, as in many other countries, restrictions are gradually being eased, today they’re back in full force because the government fears the effects of intermingling and, particularly, of large gatherings.

It means that, for this day, we’re not supposed to stray more than 100 meters from our homes. Even grocery stores are closed. The police have set up 44 roadblocks to prevent intercity travel. The usual public events are canceled.   

But one of the most popular of them—the annual flyby of air force planes—will happen on a smaller but still significant scale. As the military announced: “Four Efroni planes will fly over the country’s hospitals and salute the efforts of medical teams and the entire healthcare system, who are fighting the war against the coronavirus.”

Despite this mostly quiet, subdued Independence Day, there is—as in other years—much to celebrate. The annual demographic data are in from the Central Bureau of Statistics, and they’re distinctly upbeat.

FBI notes detail effort to catch Flynn in lie to ‘get him fired’ as Trump adviser ‘What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?’ John Solomon

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/breaking-fbi-notes-detail-effort-catch-flynn-lie-get-him

A senior FBI official’s handwritten notes from the earliest days of the Trump administration expressed concern that the bureau might be “playing games” with a counterintelligence interview of then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to get him to lie so “we could prosecute him or get him fired.”

The notes and other emails were provided to Flynn’s lawyers under seal last week and released Wednesday night by court order, providing the most damning evidence to date of potential politicalization and misconduct inside the FBI during the Russia probe.

The notes show FBI officials discussed not providing Flynn a Miranda-like warning before his January 2017 interview —  a practice normally followed in such interviews — so that he could be charged with a crime if he misled the agents, the officials said.

“What is our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?,” the handwritten notes of the senior official say. The notes express further concern the FBI might be “playing games.”

Multiple officials confirmed to Just the News that the author of the notes is William Priestap, the now-retired FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence and the ultimate supervisor for fired agent Peter Strzok, who led the Russia probe.