FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

And The Winner Is — Hamas! by Alan M. Dershowitz

Posted By on February 18th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20399/and-the-winner-is-hamas

What will happen if Hamas is allowed to win this war? If Hamas is permitted to accomplish what it intended by its mass murders, kidnappings and rapes? If the victims of these atrocities— the people of Israel and all countries fighting terrorism — lose? If the prospects for peace in the region and the Free World are seriously damaged? If the relationship between the US and Israel, and the loss of faith in the US as the guarantor of freedom, continues to be fractured?

Instead, the Biden administration may be rewarding Palestinian terrorists by unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian State, which will, of course, soon become militarized.

The anti-Israel left-wingers are not going to vote for Trump, who is more pro-Israel than Biden. Nor are they likely to stay home on Election Day and help Trump. Centrist voters, on the other hand, are likely to vote against Biden if they think he is beholden to the Squad or other anti-American woke extremists.

As important as are the domestic electoral implications of Biden’s weakening support for Israel, the international implications are far more consequential. The world will be a far less safe place if Israel is prevented from defeating and dismantling Hamas’s military capabilities.

Israel is doing everything reasonable to decrease civilian casualties, while Hamas tries to increase them on both sides. American policy should be to help Israel defeat Hamas and prevent the recurrence and spread of its terrorism against civilians, rather than to help Hamas secure a victory by tying Israel’s hands.

So, unless the Biden administration changes course and encourages Israel to achieve its legitimate military goal of defeating Hamas, terrorism will win and civilization will lose.

What will happen if Hamas is allowed to win this war? If Hamas is permitted to accomplish what it intended by its mass murders, kidnappings and rapes? If the victims of these atrocities — the people of Israel and all countries fighting terrorism — lose? If the prospects for peace in the region and the Free World are seriously damaged? If the relationship between the US and Israel, and the loss of faith in the US as the guarantor of freedom, continues to be fractured?

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

2024 and the invasion at the southern border The destruction of the country for the sake of temporary partisan advantage seems a high price to pay Roger Kimball

Posted By on February 18th, 2024

https://thespectator.com/topic/2024-invasion-southern-border/

Donald Trump crushed the New Hampshire primary, as every poll in Alpha Centauri predicted he would. Nevertheless, his sole remaining opponent for the GOP nomination, Nikki Haley, “vowed to fight on.” Why? A cynical person might suggest the interaction of two volatile liquids: cash, on the one hand, and consultants, on the other. Haley is swimming in both. The cash is coming from two sources: brittle, establishment faux conservatives like the Kochs and wily Dem operatives like the billionaire Reid Hoffman who, in addition to shoveling gobs of money to Nikki Haley, is also funding such entrepreneurial activities as E. Jean Carroll’s bizarre lawsuit against Donald Trump.

In a sane world, the support of a malignant figure like Hoffman would be disqualifying for Haley. Will Haley have dropped out (“suspended her campaign”) by the time you read this? Maybe. I predict, though, that as long as there is cash in the kitty, Haley’s consultants will “advise” her to “fight on.” After all, consultants are people, too, and they have mortgages and therapy to pay for.

But whenever the money runs out and Haley disappears, one thing that is not going to change is the overriding issue of this campaign. People are worried about inflation, yes; the economy, of course; America’s overextension in the foreign wars that have started since Joe Biden’s tremulous hand lay on the Bible and he promised faithfully to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” you betcha.

But as Iowa and New Hampshire and every poll taken across the fruited plain remind us, the one overwhelming, all-absorbing, keep-you-up-at-night concern is the southern border, which is to say the lack of a southern border. People everywhere, in the trenches in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, as well as far-off Iowa and New Hampshire, are terrified by the hordes of trespassers pouring over the southern border.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Defacing the Constitution Should Land You in Prison By Kayla Bartsch

Posted By on February 18th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/defacing-the-constitution-should-land-you-in-prison/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=

Among this past week’s brainless and woke happenings (but I repeat myself), one event in particular stuck out. Two “climate activists” decided that desecrating the nation’s most sacred document, the U.S. Constitution, was the best way to garner support for their cause.

These two men — who look like malnourished vegans paying out-of-pocket for a Ph.D. in Peace Studies — dumped reddish-pink powder over themselves and the Constitution’s display case on Wednesday afternoon.

Why the reddish-pink powder? Who knows. (It probably symbolizes the blood of an endangered wombat, or something.) What is certain, however, is that the particulate substance has been hard to remove.

Subsequent analysis revealed that the powder dumped on the case was a mixture of pigment powder and cornstarch. The resulting substance was so fine that an industrial vacuum could hardly pick it up, nor could the powdered pigment be cleaned with water because it would just turn into paint.

While none of the substance penetrated the bulletproof case, the stunt still proved a headache for the Archives staff to clean and forced the National Archives to stay closed for days — a major letdown for all of the families visiting the capital with the express purpose of making a pilgrimage to the text’s temple.

The pasty duo enacted their stunt unhindered by the “security guards” at the National Archives. Nearly four minutes passed before the clods were stopped.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Mayorkas Is Not the Right Target for Impeachment over the Border….That person is President Biden. Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on February 18th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/02/mayorkas-is-not-the-right-target-for-impeachment-over-the-border/

There is one official in the United States who has the undeniable statutory and constitutional authority to end the border catastrophe — for which that official is wholly responsible. That official is not Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. It is President Joe Biden. This is not to say Mayorkas is undeserving of the impeachment that House Republicans approved on Tuesday — only after losing a similar, party-line squeaker last week in a fit of incompetent vote-counting. But since this is merely a gesture — since there is not the slightest possibility that the Democrat-controlled Senate is going to convict and remove high-ranking Biden administration officials for carrying out Biden policy Democrats support — why not aim the gesture at the right target?

Like many of us, I’ve been ambivalent about the Mayorkas-impeachment gambit. Notwithstanding the ill-informed insistence of Representative Ken Buck (R., Colo.) in a National Review column this week, there’s no real doubt that the willful failure to secure the border is an impeachable offense, and that Mayorkas has willfully failed to secure the border, his main job. Nevertheless, in my 2014 book on impeachment, Faithless Execution, in discussing the debates that led to the congressional impeachment power that Madison regarded as “indispensable,” I made much — because the Framers had made much — of the interplay between impeachment and the constitutional concept of the unitary executive.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Western Farmers: Fork in the Road by Amir Taheri

Posted By on February 18th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20398/western-farmers

Globalization rules enabled many nations to use their comparative advantage in terms of climate, richness of soil, less expensive labor and variety of products to claim a growing chunk of the traditional Western markets. At the same time, Western farmers had to cope with the growing cost of environmental measures concocted by the “save-the-planet” lobby.

The real world is divided into nation-states with frontiers, different cultures and legal systems, and resistance to the one-size-fits-all sought by ultra-globalists.

Protesting European farmers demand a “level-playing field”, something that, if regarded as a perfect model, does not and cannot exist in every human transaction. The “win-win” concept peddled by ultra-globalists is a myth. What matters is that the sum-total of relations among nation-states does not favor some and hurt others in the medium and long term.

Most polls show that most Europeans sympathize with their farmers. But will they continue doing so if the price is more expensive and less varied food and ditching part of the ecological dogma?

In the past few weeks European farmers have taken to the streets of their capitals to advertise a rebellious mood that few expected to see.

Having enjoyed a comfortable life for decades, thanks to subsidies from their respective governments and the European Union’s Common agricultural Policy (CAP), they were not expected to invade the grand capitals together with their sheep, cows and tractors with a litany of woes.

The question of food security was first raised after World War II as a top priority for Western European nations as they tried to rebuild their shattered economies.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The antisemitism crisis is out of control In both Britain and America, politics is becoming increasingly distorted Melanie Phillips

Posted By on February 18th, 2024

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/the-antisemitism-crisis-is-out-of?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The war in Gaza is prying open a potentially game-changing fissure in British politics that has wider implications for the western world.

Last weekend, a recording surfaced of a meeting of the Lancashire Labour Party in late October. It revealed that Azhar Ali, who was subsequently selected as the Labour Party candidate for a parliamentary by-election that will be held in Rochdale later this month, said Israel deliberately allowed the October 7 pogrom to occur in order to give itself “the green light” to invade Gaza.

Despite this blood libel, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who has pledged to rid the party of antisemitism, said he was satisfied that Ali had made a genuine apology for the statement.

Nearly two days later, after it emerged that Ali had also blamed people in the media “from certain Jewish quarters” for Labour’s suspension of one of its MPs for using the phrase “between the river and the sea,” Starmer stripped Ali of Labour support.

This was too late to stop Ali from standing in the by-election. Since Labour has withdrawn its endorsement, the party now has no candidate.

This chaos is potentially disastrous. Rochdale is 30 per cent Muslim. Also standing for election, as the candidate for the Respect party, is the demagogic, virulently anti-Israel George Galloway — who was himself expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 for opposing the “war on terror”. He is now well-placed to capitalise on the explosive Muslim hostility to Israel and win the seat.

Shortly after Ali was finally disowned, it was revealed that, at the same Lancashire meeting, Graham Jones — a former MP who is now a parliamentary candidate seeking to regain his former seat — repeatedly referred to “f***ing Israel”.

He also ranted that Britons who volunteer to fight for the Israel Defence Forces “should be locked up,” claiming falsely that such volunteering was illegal. Jones was suspended by the party, this time immediately.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

State Department Threatens Congress Over Censorship Programs A year after its censorship programs were exposed, the Global Engagement Center still insists the public has no right to know how it’s spending taxpayer money Matt Taibbi

Posted By on February 18th, 2024

https://www.racket.news/p/state-department-threatens-congress?

The State Department is so unhappy a newspaper published details about where it’s been spending your taxes, it’s threatened to only show a congressional committee its records in camera until it gets a “better understanding of how the Committee will utilize this sensitive information.” Essentially, Tony Blinken is threatening to take his transparency ball home unless details about what censorship programs he’s sponsoring stop appearing in papers like the Washington Examiner:

The State Department tells Congress, which controls its funding, that it will only disclose where it spent our money “in camera”

A year ago the Examiner published “Disinformation, Inc.”, a series by investigative reporter Gabe Kaminsky describing how the State Department was backing a UK-based agency that creates digital blacklists for disfavored media outlets. Your taxes helped fund the Global Disinformation Index, or GDI, which proudly touts among its services an Orwellian horror called the Dynamic Exclusion List, a digital time-out corner where at least 2,000 websites were put on blast as unsuitable for advertising, “thus disrupting the ad-funded disinformation business model.”

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Many Reporters Paid for Covering the Russiagate Story Matt Tiabbi

Posted By on February 18th, 2024

https://www.racket.news/p/many-reporters-paid-for-covering?

Three years ago, on February 25th, 2021, Aaron Maté at RealClearInvestigations ran “In Final Days, Trump Gave Up on Forcing Release of Russiagate Files, Nunes Prober Says.” Extensively quoting former Principal Deputy to the Acting Director of National Intelligence Kash Patel, Aaron wrote a section on “Assessing the ‘Intelligence Community Assessment,’” detailing a lot of the same story Michael Shellenberger, Alexandra Gutentag and I ran in Public and Racket Thursday. Describing a 2018 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) report on the subject, Aaron wrote:

The March 2018 House report found that the production of the ICA “deviated from established CIA practice.” And the core judgment that Putin sought to help Trump, the House report found, resulted from “significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments.”

Many of us who followed this story — a number of reporters on both sides of the aisle did so obsessively — have long had a good idea about the general direction of that House investigation. The tale of improper CIA and FBI surveillance mixed with manufactured intelligence has been in the ether since late 2017 and early 2018.

I’ll list just a few of the names who reported stories in this direction over the years, in some cases day after day on broadcast shows.

An attentive reader will notice nearly everyone on the list has been denounced at some point by the mainstream commentators who got this story horribly wrong. Aaron, considered a traitor by former mainstream colleagues, faced pressure from staff at The Nation, was denounced by The Guardian as part of a “network of conspiracy theorists,” and failed to gain support from any major media outlet or press advocacy organization when the FBI passed on an outrageous request from Ukrainian secret services to remove him from Twitter.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Michael Shellenberger: Obama Partisan Wrote False 2017 Russia Intelligence Assessment, Says Insider House Intelligence report that debunked the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian election interference was written by “introverted, wonky, and nerdy professionals” not “political hacks”

Posted By on February 18th, 2024

https://public.substack.com/p/obama-partisan-wrote-false-2017-russia

Around 10 a.m. on a Saturday in August 2018, someone made the extraordinary decision to show a White House staff member a top-secret report written by investigators working for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), which is universally pronounced as “hip C.”

The still-secret, never-released HPSCI report concluded that the Russian government wanted Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, to win the 2016 election and that then-CIA Director John Brennan had manipulated a January 2017 “Intelligence Community Assessment,” or ICA, which had come to the opposite conclusion.

“There was the top-secret version I was shown,” said the man, who came forward after reading yesterday’s report by Public and Racket. “There was an even more highly classified version that I was not shown, which had more details.”

The HPSCI offices are located in a large complex underneath the capitol visitor’s center. “It was built after 9/11,” he explained. “It’s a huge underground facility that the public never sees. The whole office is a SCIF.”

A SCIF is a Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility and is pronounced “skiff.”

The former White House staffer did not want to say who brought him into the HPSCI SCIF to read the report. They did so secretly. There is no record of him reading the report.

“About one-quarter of HPSCI staff are former intelligence officers,” he said.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Elite Colleges Reconsidering SAT Score Requirements By Eric Lendrum

Posted By on February 17th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/16/elite-colleges-reconsidering-sat-score-requirements/

Several elite universities are considering reversing recent decisions to reduce or even eliminate requirements for application that include standardized test scores such as the SAT exams.

According to Axios, multiple colleges used the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to weaken the importance of SAT and ACT test scores in most student applications. But in recent weeks, several schools have reversed course; Yale is considering repealing its prior policy of making SAT/ACT requirements optional, with Dartmouth already reinstating the requirements earlier this month. MIT reversed a similar policy back in 2022.

Other schools that have eliminated SAT/ACT requirements include Harvard and Columbia. Harvard, along with Cornell and Princeton, have extended their policy of making the scores optional, while Columbia’s policy remains permanent.

One of the motivating factors behind the reversal is ongoing research showing a clear correlation between students’ standardized test scores, and their subsequent academic performance and graduation rates in college. Some schools had previously opposed the test requirements for reasons of “diversity,” baselessly accusing the tests of being “racist” and against minority students.

Dartmouth pointed to a study that had been commissioned by the university’s president, which “confirms that standardized testing — when assessed using the local norms at a student’s high school” is crucial in evaluating an applicant’s potential.

In a statement, Yale’s undergraduate office said that they “expect to announce a decision on its long-term testing policy in the next few weeks.” In the meantime, students applying for the Fall of 2024 will still fall under the “not optional” category when it comes to standardized tests.

Brown University is currently awaiting a committee’s recommendations on how to move forward with standardized testing, as well as other practices such as legacy admissions and early decisions. The committee is expected to finish its report in the next few months.

There are still over 2,000 schools in the country which remain either optional or completely free of standardized test requirements ahead of the 2024-2025 academic year. Meanwhile, the National Education Association (NEA) has demanded that all colleges eliminate testing requirements, with NEA president Becky Pringle declaring in a statement that “All students deserve and have the ability to demonstrate knowledge in many ways that are measurable by those who know them best: Their educators.”