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The tape of Trump seeking to dismiss Amb. Yovanovitch is a nothing burger By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/the_tape_of_trump_seeking_to_dismiss_amb_yovanovitch_is_a_nothing_burger.html

Democrats are excited that a tape has emerged in which Trump can be heard saying that he wants to have Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch fired, for they see it as more impeachment fodder. The tape, however, as is the case with so many things that excite Democrats, is actually nothing special.

It’s not clear how someone recorded a tape of a private dinner party on April 30, 2018, at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. That itself ought to be a scandal. It’s also not clear how ABC got a copy of the tape, another scandal.

Among the attendees were Trump, Giuliani, Lev Parnas, and Igor Fruman. Trump has disclaimed knowing Parnas, describing him as a groupie. Assuming that Trump is speaking the truth about Parnas (who now accuses Trump of all sorts of heinous behavior), he means that he was aware of Parnas, but that Parnas was such a meaningless, peripheral individual he made no impression on a man who routinely sees, speaks with, and even dines with thousands of people a year.

At the dinner, Trump apparently learned for the first time that Amb. Marie Yovanovitch, an Obama holdover, had been bad-mouthing him to the Ukrainians:

Parnas appears to say: “The biggest problem there, I think where we need to start is we gotta get rid of the ambassador. She’s still left over from the Clinton administration,” Parnas can be heard telling Trump. “She’s basically walking around telling everybody ‘Wait, he’s gonna get impeached, just wait.” (Yovanovitch actually had served in the State Department since the Reagan administration.)

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A British feminist says men who dislike “woke” women are destroying the world By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/a_british_feminist_says_men_who_dislike_woke_women_are_destroying_the_world.html

British actor Laurence Fox became a target when he refused to accept allegations about overarching white racism and toxic masculinity in Britain. He recently earned additional ire from the left when he announced in a Sunday Times article that he does not “date woke women.”

Woke woman Vicky Spratt was outraged. In an article at Refinery29 entitled “The Dangerous Rise Of Men Who Won’t Date “Woke” Women,”* she wrote,

Laurence Fox – who you perhaps only knew as Billie Piper’s ex-husband because you’ve never seen Lewis (what?) – does not date “woke” women who he believes are being taught that they are “victims”, irrespective of whether they are right or not.

[snip]

Not wanting to date “woke” women, far from being laughable, is actually one of the more insidious aspects of it. Spend an afternoon on any major dating app and you’ll come across (generally white) men saying openly sexist and misogynistic things. They might say “no psychos” or that they “fucking hate big eyebrows” in their bios. And, by and large, they also tend to hold extremely right-wing views and see themselves as victims of liberal thinking.

To Spratt, men who won’t date “woke” women are far-right wackos who like Jordan Peterson even though he denies white privilege and urges millennials to stop being social justice warriors. Worse, aside from the “incels” (heterosexual men who have given up on women), Spratt says that evil anti-woke-woman men are becoming right-wing!

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Righteous Anger vs. Politics as Usual By Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/righteous_anger_vs_politics_as_usual.html

There is anger and then there is righteous anger. Peter Finch yelling out the window, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

From Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, where parts of a whole are coming undone, to Hong Kong to Puerto Rico to France and Venezuela, people are mad as hell.

Consider Lebanon. Independent in 1943, but occupied by Syria from 1975-2005, and brought into Iran’s orbit through the creation of Hezb’allah in the early 1980s, the same constellation of politicians have held power since the end of the civil war in 1990. Americans appear to worry most about the security implications of Hezb’allah, a U.S.-designated terror organization with its own army and a drug/weapons/money racket in South America, pulling strings in Beirut. And worry, too, about the U.S. armed and trained Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), working alongside and sometimes in cooperation with Hezb’allah. Hassan Nasrallah calls the LAF “a partner.”

But how did Lebanon come to this point and why are people angry now?

Multiethnic and multicultural, Lebanese politics are sliced into sectarian segments; you are Druze or Shiite or Maronite Christian. The government has no national commitments, only confessional ones, which makes it easy to set one group against another, leaving the best-armed and richest on top, i.e., Hezb’allah. That is also a recipe for corruption — take care of your own and the devil take the rest, also the devil is the rest.  Lebanon ranks 147th out of 183 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Index. There are 6-7 million Lebanese (numbers vary widely because so many live abroad). Government debt is $89.5 billion and interest payments consumed 48 percent of domestic government revenues in 2016. The debt-to-GDP ratio is 151% with an annual growth rate of negative 0.2 percent for 2019. The Lebanese pound has lost more than 60 percent of its value in recent weeks on the black market. 

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

MARILYN PENN: A REVIEW OF JO JO RABBIT

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

http://politicalmavens.com/

In order to succeed, satire and parody require a common understanding of what is being satirized. If the audience doesn’t have this, satire quickly degenerates into flat-tire. Sadly, 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, most Americans have little idea of the history of World War II and the extent of brutality that tortured and murdered six million Jews, one million of whom were children.

The elite private school Fieldston in Riverdale which has a significant population of Jewish students has had two episodes of anti-semiitism, the first featuring swastikas that appeared in hallways and classrooms in 2015. The school initially explained the swastika as an ancient symbol of peace without mentioning the word Holocaust, and only after objections from parents, did the school call an assembly to refer to the symbol in connection with the murder of six million Jews. In October 2019, a Muslim speaker from Columbia Law School spoke at Fieldston and compared the Israeli survivors of the Holocaust to Nazis, accusing them of similar violence against Palestinians It took a month before the school responded simply by reaffirming their firmly held values without specifying what these are or condemning the outrageous comparison.

The academic response to Israel Apartheid Week on campuses across the U.S. is another example of refusal to deal with the dangers of anti-semitism No other minority would be continually pilloried in this way on any American campus but objections to turning Jewish students into pariahs have been sporadic at best, and the accompanying BDS movement, directed solely at Israel, has been supported by many campus groups including faculty.

Now for JoJo Rabbit, a film about a ten year old boy infatuated with Hitler and thrilled to be a part of Hitler Youth. Hitler appears to the boy, remaining invisible to everyone else, and the two have lively exchanges about Nazis, Jews and the need to kill them whenever possible. Oddly enough in a movie that takes place during the war, there is no mention of ghettos, concentration camps or mass shootings into pits dug by the victims. The only Jew we see is a lovely young girl who is being hidden in the attic of JoJo’s house by his mother, a sympathetic Scarlett Johansson who pays for her kind empathy later in the film. Jews who were hiding during the war lived in sewers, underground cellars, sometimes on a closet shelf for prolonged periods of time None of this is revealed or mentioned in this movie. Ironically, the only military violence we see is that of the Russian and American liberators who destroy JoJo’s town with armor, machine guns and mass explosions. If asked to review this movie, it wouldn’t be strange if a student reported that WW II was about the mass destruction of Germany.

What would the reaction of Hollywood and the Left be to a movie about illegal immigrant children who were being kept in “cages” if only one was shown in a comfortable waiting room and the only violence was that of the long lines of raucous adult immigrants storming the border fences? Would this pass as an acceptable subject for satire and would the above theoretical description be considered appropriate?

JoJo Rabbit ends with a quote from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
The Squad and Black Lives Matter would never allow that quote to be affixed to their contemporary complaints. To our eternal shame, it has become acceptable when it comes to the indescribable horror of the Holocaust.

JoJo Rabbit has been nominated for six Academy Awards incuding Best Picture of the Year.

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Ruthie Blum :Gantz’s stammering stance and Netanyahu’s mudslinging Kicking off a political campaign by pointing out the flaws of one’s opponent is par for the course, and nobody knows this better than Benny Gantz.

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Gantzs-stammering-stance-and-Netanyahus-mudslinging-615191

Of all the mud slung at Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, this week’s phony scandal surrounding comments he made about his key rival in the upcoming Knesset elections deserves a prize for the slimiest.

The orchestrated outrage in question followed the launch of the Likud Party campaign on Tuesday evening in Jerusalem. During the flashy event – which resembled a rock concert replete with adoring fans – Netanyahu ridiculed Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz for being indecisive and ill-fit to lead the country.The way he did this was to show a video clip of Gantz fumfering in response to questions about policy, and then to imitate the Blue and White leader’s faltering.

Making fun of the fact that Gantz’s entire platform is based on an “anybody but Bibi” mantra, Netanyahu said, “It used to be ‘either us or them.’ Today, it’s ‘either us or eh, eh, eh.’ Now the question is, ‘What would they be doing? What would they be doing if they were [heading] the government?”

Nothing unusual there. Kicking off a political campaign by pointing out the flaws of one’s opponent is par for the course. Nobody knows this better than Gantz, whose fledgling political career has consisted solely of attacks on Netanyahu.

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How A Bumbling Fool Marches From Triumph To Triumph Francis Menton

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-1-20-how-a-bumbling-fool-marches-from-triumph-to-triumph

I’m old enough to remember the press coverage of Ronald Reagan as President. It was not as uniformly and aggressively hostile as the current coverage of President Trump, but close. The gist was that this guy was a bumbling fool who didn’t understand anything about either foreign or domestic policy. He had gone to a nothing college that no one had ever heard of. All the smart people knew that the right foreign policy was to reach accommodations with the Soviet Union, but instead he put us at risk of World War III by calling it an “Evil Empire” and vowing to out-compete it. The smart people also knew that the right domestic policy was massively increasing government spending, but instead he fought to restrain the government’s domestic footprint.

The Soviet Union collapsed, and the economy soared.

I thought that Reagan was quite intelligent; but another possibility is that you don’t need to be all that intelligent to do a good job as President. All you need to do is to replace the progressive program of utopian fantasies and wishful thinking with a small dose of reality and common sense.

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BRUCE KESLER: A PERSONAL RECOLLECTION OF JIM LEHRER

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/34531-A-personal-addition-to-Jim-Lehrers-standards-for-journalists.html

Back in the late ’60’s until the ’80’s I told friends that if they wanted to be really, although relatively quickly, informed about most sides of a complex issue, then they should be regular watchers of the Lehrer News Hour on PBS. Unfortunately, his successors there have not kept to that high standard, devolving into just another partisan gab.

I had personal correspondence with Jim Lehrer back in the days when I wrote many times a day for posts and publications. One such sticks in my mind. I’d just visited the traveling Vietnam memorial wall, and commented that it brought up so many feelings and memories that I had nothing to say, I was dumbstruck. Until that time, I hadn’t known that Lehrer served as a Marine officer.  He wrote back to me that he had the same reactions and feelings as I.

In the linked obit, Jim Lehrer’s standards of journalism are listed. I would add one more: if you’ve nothing really worth saying, don’t say it.

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Jim Lehrer’s old school journalism is exactly how we should still be doing it today The Texas great was a true newspaperman

Posted By on January 25th, 2020

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/2020/01/23/jim-lehrers-old-school-jo

By Dallas Morning News Editorial

When he signed off from his long and excellent broadcasting career, Jim Lehrer was still the same sort of journalist that he started as. He was, as he put it, a newspaperman.

The term is dated now, but Lehrer described in a common term then something important about the kind of journalism he did. It was a journalism that was sober and serious, more attached to reason than emotion, and in relentless pursuit of the facts.

His journalism was rooted in the way he did his job early in his career on the city desk of the Dallas Times-Herald and The Dallas Morning News, before he sat in front of a camera at KERA and launched himself in broadcast.

The camera’s lights never changed the man or the way he did his work, and the nation was better for it.

In his years alongside Robin MacNeil and alone, Lehrer, who died today at 85, presented the news fairly, fully and with genuine balance, standing as an example of how the work should be done of both presenting and consuming information about our world.

And it stands in such stark contrast to the nonstop nonsense of bias, noise and garbage that presents itself as television news today. That is entertainment created to hold eyeballs and sell ads. And that wasn’t Jim Lehrer’s journalism.

Lehrer was of the old school. In public broadcasting he perhaps did not have the same pressures that commercial television might have applied. But given his personal character and his strong sense of the ethics of journalism, we doubt any commercial calling would have fit him at all.

Every journalist practicing the craft today should listen to his words about how to do the job and do it well. Because that is exactly what he did.

Here is what he said.

People often ask me if there are guidelines in our practice of what I like to call MacNeil Lehrer journalism. Well, yes, there are, and here they are. Do nothing I cannot defend. Cover, write and present every story with the care I would want if the story were about me. Assume there is at least one other side or version to every story. Assume the viewer is as smart and caring and as good a person as I am. Assume the same about all people on whom I report. Assume personal lives are a private matter until a legitimate turn in the story absolutely mandates otherwise. Carefully separate opinion and analysis from straight news stories and clearly label everything. Do not use anonymous sources or blind quotes except on rare and monumental occasions. No one should ever be allowed to attack another anonymously. And, finally, I am not in the entertainment business.

Rest in peace, Jim Lehrer. You were a great newspaperman.

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Nadler’s Folly By Matthew Continetti

Posted By on January 24th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/trump-impeachment-trial-jerry-nadler-audience-left-wing-democrats/

Impeachment’s target audience isn’t moderate Republicans. It’s left-wing Democrats.

Jerry Nadler must have missed the day in law school where they teach you about persuasion. The House Democrat made a critical error early in the trial of President Trump. He didn’t just say that Republican senators, who voted to begin the proceedings without calling witnesses, were part of a cover-up. He said they had committed treason: “So far, I’m sad to say, I see a lot of senators voting for a cover-up. Voting to deny witnesses and obviously a treacherous vote. A vote against honest consideration of the evidence against the president. A vote against an honest trial. A vote against the United States.”

Easy, tiger. All Republicans did was follow the precedent of the Clinton trial. They also admitted the House evidence into the record. The vote on witnesses will arrive next week. Hysterical accusations of national betrayal won’t win the Democrats any converts. When Trump counsel Pat Cipollone said Nadler should feel embarrassed after insulting 53 U.S. senators, Chief Justice Roberts intervened to “admonish the House managers and the president’s counsel in equal terms to remember that they are addressing the world’s greatest deliberative body.” Roberts played it safe. He rebuked both sides. Nadler, though, was the reason he intervened.

Roberts had company. Nadler’s comments also bothered Lisa Murkowski, who said his accusation was “offensive.” Susan Collins put out a similar statement. Murkowski went further, saying she was puzzled the House didn’t go to court to force testimony from administration officials. “The House made the decision that they didn’t want to slow things down by having to go through the courts,” she said. “And yet now they’re basically saying you guys gotta go through the courts. We didn’t, but we need you to.” Why, it’s almost as if the Democrats are out for political gain rather than justice.

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Sweden and its Welfare State in Crisis by Nima Gholam Ali Pour

Posted By on January 24th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15414/sweden-welfare-crisis

Within a generation, Sweden’s third largest city, Malmö, will have a population in which the majority of people are of foreign background. How will integrating immigrants take place then, and which group will be integrated into which?

At the same time, many children born in Sweden learn Swedish so poorly that they cannot really speak it, because there is not enough Swedish spoken in some preschools and grade schools. This change is unfolding at a rapid pace.

It is not just Swedish society that will look radically different within a decade. The Swedish welfare state, which has been the hallmark of the Swedish state around the world, is also changing or possibly even being phased out.

The Swedish welfare state has often been praised by the left in the United States. After the migration crisis of 2015, however, when Sweden was flooded by Syrian refugee claimants, Sweden is now facing a welfare crisis that threatens the entire Swedish welfare state model.

Sweden had 9.7 million inhabitants in 2015, before it received 162,000 asylum seekers. 70% of those asylum seekers came from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. 70% of those asylum seekers were also men. The migration crisis created an unsustainable financial and social situation that caused the Swedish political establishment to rethink its stance on asylum migration, which, until then, had been extremely liberal.

Asylum migration has continued, nevertheless. Between 2016 and 2018, more than 70,000 additional migrants have applied for asylum in Sweden, and more than 105,000 asylum migrants have been granted asylum.