NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Respect for Authorities ‘Died Suddenly’ By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on February 11th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/respect_for_authorities_died_suddenly.html

Populations do not obey lunatics and liars for long.

Well, I guess we know where the Federal Aviation Administration got the idea to fill cockpits with pilots suffering from psychological disorders and mental deficiencies.  The FAA has been watching Dementia Joe Biden fly the United States directly into the ground for three years and decided to do for civil aviation what the White House has done for peace and prosperity.  Nothing better reflects a “crash and burn” leadership style than elevating unqualified people into positions where they can do the most harm.  It’s worked for the West Wing, the Pentagon, and the Treasury Department!  Why not for the agency responsible for air traffic control and passenger safety?  What could possibly go wrong?  

Oh, sure, perhaps flyers will die more frequently in fiery collisions or when unbolted aircraft doors shoot off into the clouds, but at least they will leave this mortal coil knowing that the people who build and pilot consumer aircraft represent such an amazing infusion of “diversity” that even the dumbest and most temperamentally unstable among us have been “included” in the life-and-death trust exercise of not falling out of the sky.  That’s what real “equity” requires — redistributing the earned responsibilities of those who have demonstrated merit and commitment to those who have demonstrated mediocrity and unreliability.  It’s why the globalists’ forced DEI standard (diversity, equity, and inclusion — barf!) across the public and private sectors should be more accurately returned to DIE — because wherever the deadly acronym dilutes excellence, living safely becomes less likely.

Come to think of it, Joe Biden is DIE’s perfect mascot.  Angry, confused, and incompetent Old Joe is the Chief Dolt and Grand Pooh-bah of an ass-backward system where the least capable in society thrive.

Given the U.S. government’s love affair with censorship and propaganda, I sometimes imagine future historians piecing through the shards of Western civilization in order to understand the reasons for its collapse.  According to the prevailing “narrative,” everything right now is tremendously great!  We are told that the economy is strong, that crime is under control, that our borders are secure, that paying twenty bucks for a fast-food hamburger is cheap, and that endless war produces endless peace.  According to the news media, Americans have never had it so good!  How then, third-millennium anthropologists might wonder, did everything go kaput so quickly?

Well, hopefully, someone in the future will stumble across a time capsule with Joe Biden’s linguistically challenged press conference from the other day, in which he angrily denounced the Potemkin special counsel’s legal conclusion that, while Decrepit Joe committed federal crimes damaging to America’s national security, he is nevertheless too senile to prosecute.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

’Zionism’ and ‘Zionist’ carry no shame By Harold Witkov

Posted By on February 11th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/02/zionism_and_zionist_carry_no_shame.html

According to the Washington Post, Facebook, due to the abundance of online antisemitic rhetoric, is considering censoring the word “Zionist.”

No doubt about it, “Zionism” and “Zionist” have become hate words du jour.  I find the whole thing quite upsetting.  But not to take it lying down, I have decided to defend the two words.

The word “Zionism” comes from the word “Zion,” a word that appears often in the Hebrew Bible and refers to the city of Jerusalem (and the Land of Israel).  Zionism is the name for the 19th-century nationalistic movement that called for the creation of a new Jewish nation in the same area where the Jewish people originated and have always had a remnant, and where the Hebrew kingdoms of the past once stood.

When Zionism was in its infancy in the 19th century, the land now called Israel was a sparsely populated region called Palestine, a small part of the Ottoman Empire.  Why was the lack of a significant population in Palestine so important?  Because it was important to Theodor Herzl.

Herzl (1860–1904) was a Hungarian Jew moved by the tragic story of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French army officer wrongly accused of being a traitor and then sentenced to Devils Island.  Shocked by the antisemitism of his day, Herzl, who would one day be known as the father of modern Zionism, believed that the Jewish people would always be second-class citizens in their native countries and called for the creation of a new Jewish homeland where the old once stood — a homeland where Jews would not be discriminated against because they are Jews.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden classified memos report re-ignites debates about dual justice, ‘diminished’ president Famed liberal icon Alan Dershowitz decries Hur decision when compared to treatment of Trump: “You can’t have two different laws for similar acts. You have to have one single standard of justice.”By John Solomon

Posted By on February 11th, 2024

https://justthenews.com/government/white-house/fribiden-classified-memos-report-re-ignites-debates-about-dual-justice

Special Counsel Robert Hur’s final report on Joe Biden’s willful retention and dissemination of highly classified information is rocking Washington, re-igniting concerns of a dual system of justice while putting the full weight of the government behind the notion that America is currently being served by a president with “diminished faculties.”

Hur’s 388-page report released Thursday may have spared Biden the spectacle of a criminal prosecution similar to that his Justice Department imposed on Donald Trump, but it delivered a devastating blow to the 46th president’s re-election hopes by going out of its way to explain criminal charges weren’t levied in part because jurors might see Biden as a dottering, forgetful old man incapable of criminal intent.

“Mr. Biden will likely present himself to the jury, as he did during his interview with our office, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote in explaining his rational for declining prosecution. “…It would be difficult to convince a jury they should convict him – by then a former president who will be at least well into his eighties – of a serious  felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Later, Hur added for good measure he believed Biden suffered from “diminished faculties in advancing age.”

The political fallout was instant and severe.

Biden’s lone remaining Democrat challenger for the 2024 presidential nomination, Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota, said Hur’s report exposed a “sad” reality that “the President cannot continue to serve as our Commander-in-Chief beyond his term.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Pentagon Secretly Institutionalized DEI In Its K-12 Public Schools Extreme curriculum being taught to the 70,000 children of service members. Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on February 11th, 2024

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/pentagon-secretly-institutionalized

In a Congressional hearing last spring, Gil Cisneros, then-Under Secretary for Military Readiness, announced that the Pentagon was closing its newly formed Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion within its K-12 school system and reassigning its controversial DEI chief after a ten-month internal investigation.

The Pentagon’s climb-down was a big win for OpenTheBooks.com. We had worked alongside whistleblowers, journalists, other investigative non-profits, and ranking members of Congress to expose alleged conflicts of interest, violations of military ethics policies, and radical ideologies being forced on the kids of servicemen and servicewomen.

Today, we are announcing Cisneros was actually faking. The radical curriculum was not dismantled. Instead, it was stealthily embedded into the lesson plans and classrooms throughout the entire school system.

The Pentagon, under Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, is preventing details of their DEI policies from coming to light by abusing the Freedom of Information Act. They bamboozled the public with window dressing in Congressional hearings while forcing woke extremism on the roughly 70,000 children of our military service members.

It’s critical that taxpayers understand the scope of the DEI philosophy within the DoD’s schools – deployed servicemembers often have no alternative but to use the Pentagon-run school system, called the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA).

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Jonathan Haidt: abolish DEI to save academia By John Murawski

Posted By on February 11th, 2024

https://unherd.com/newsroom/jonathan-haidt-abolish-dei-to-save-academia/

Abolishing DEI may be the only way out of the Leftist ideological capture of American campuses, Jonathan Haidt told an audience at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, on Wednesday.

Those words mark a dramatic departure for Haidt, who has been known as a restrained, moderate voice on the subject of cancel culture, identity politics and what he calls the obsession with “safetyism” that has gripped Gen Z in the past decade. Haidt, a professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is the author of “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure,” and founder of the Heterodox Academy, an academic organisation committed to the ideals of viewpoint diversity and academic freedom. 

On Wednesday the professor said that he no longer has confidence that universities can reform themselves. The reason for his volte-face: the unwillingness of university administrators who diligently police speech codes and pronoun usage to stop students and professors from chanting genocidal slogans against Jews. Indeed, the antisemitic eruptions on campus, and subsequent Congressional testimony of three elite university presidents who waffled on genocide, was “probably the most important turning point in the history of American higher education,” Haidt stated. 

Haidt characterised those events as the logical consequence of DEI, or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which emphasises one’s identity and encourages people to think in terms of power dynamics between the privileged and the oppressed. The professor described people who see the world exclusively through the lens of power dynamics as “monomaniacs,” and said they are the ones who run the campus DEI apparatus. 

He said he used to think that some parts of DEI might make sense, but now it’s clear that DEI does not work, and often makes things worse by exacerbating racial hostilities.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Dangerous Global Order with a Nuclear Armed Iran by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on February 10th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20384/global-order-nuclear-iran

America’s actions now – or else its inaction – will determine the ability of global powers to mold an international order that either upholds democratic values or succumbs to the dominance of terror groups and dictatorships.

Inaction or a failure to adopt a resolute stance against the ascent of Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism armed with nuclear capabilities, can only pave the way for a world where autocratic regimes and extremist factions dictate the course of international affairs.

As Iran is on the verge of achieving a significant milestone in obtaining nuclear weapons, concerns are mounting over the Biden administration’s lack of a coherent strategy to prevent Iran from going nuclear. Since the Biden administration took office, Iran has been rapidly advancing its uranium enrichment, approaching levels of 83.7% close to the 90% needed for nuclear weapons capability.

The consequences of Iran possessing nuclear weapons should not be downplayed or overlooked. The Iranian regime has repeatedly threatened to annihilate Israel, and views that goal a central pillar of its ideology. This commitment is rooted in religious prophecies from the regime’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and current Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, foreseeing the eventual eradication of Israel.

General Hossein Salami, chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has explicitly outlined the regime’s aggressive stance, stating on Iran’s state-controlled Channel 2 TV in 2019, “Our strategy is to erase Israel from the global political map.” Khamenei’s 416-page guidebook, Palestine, further emphasizes the regime’s dedication to Israel’s destruction.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

U.S. Asset or U.S. Adversary? Why Qatar Looks Worryingly Like Both Ben Weingarten

Posted By on February 10th, 2024

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/02/07/us_asset_or_us_adversary_why_qatar_looks_worryingly_like_both_1008791.html

After Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, one of the terrorist organization’s chief financial sponsors, hosts of its leaders, and backers of its propaganda found itself singled out by America’s leaders – not for condemnation, but praise.

Timmy Davis, Biden envoy: “Qatar could not have done more than it did in 2023 to play an indispensable role on the world stage.” 
Department of State/Wikimwedia

“The U.S.-Qatar partnership could not be stronger, and Qatar could not have done more than it did in 2023 to play an indispensable role on the world stage,” U.S. ambassador to Qatar Timmy Davis wrote on X last December.

The Biden administration, from the president on down, has lauded the emirate throughout the Israel-Hamas war, especially for its shepherding of negotiations between the two sides for a ceasefire and hostage releases – a role Qatar is singularly capable of filling in part because it maintains Hamas’ “political office” in its capital city, Doha.

At the annual Qatar-led Doha Forum last December, Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham echoed the Democratic administration, while also thanking Qatar for its assistance evacuating Americans during the deadly Afghanistan withdrawal – a success attributed in part to its harboring of another terrorist group, the Taliban.

Graham too thanked Qatar for accommodating “10,000 American airmen who live better than [at] any air base in the … world” – a reference to Al Udeid, the largest such facility in the region

House Armed Services Committee member Rep. Jack Bergman, a Michigan Republican, highlighted the irony of this bipartisan praise, noting, “Our brave men and women in uniform who have served out of Al Udeid … have gone on missions to combat terrorist groups funded by Qatar.”

Richard Goldberg: Qatar’s playing a “kind of terror-finance double game.”
Foundation for Defense of Democracies

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The DEI Rollback Hasn’t Made It to Nebraska DEI is is alive and well at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s College of Engineering By John Sailer

Posted By on February 10th, 2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/diversity-equity-inclusion-nebraska-john-sailer

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s College of Engineering might sound like one of the last places in higher education where you’d expect to find evidence of DEI orthodoxy influencing big decisions. Nebraska is a red state and UNL is a public school. Plus, you’d expect hiring at an engineering school to be based on, well, scientific criteria. 

But through a public records request, I reviewed every diversity recruitment report created by the school over the last four years. And I’ve discovered that even here, DEI has been central to hiring decisions. 

For example, in 2020, when the school set out to hire a professor of National Defense/Computer Network Security, the search committee made its priority clear: each candidate’s “diversity” score—assessing how well applicants understand things like “many intersectional aspects of diversity”—was given equal weight to factors like research and teaching experience. 

Another search in 2021, for a professor of Big Data/Cybersecurity, stated: “the weight of the ‘diversity’ scores were equal to the other scored areas that contributed to the candidate’s overall score.”

And applicants have been ruled out for failing to clear DEI hurdles. According to one report, from 2021, “a small number of candidates” in a search for a professor of thermal sciences “were eliminated based on absence or weak diversity statement.” In another case that year, three applicants for a role in environmental engineering “did not include diversity statements and were disqualified from the search.”

Per the college’s diversity and inclusion plan, which is still in place, the reports carry high stakes: a search that fails to show “a serious consideration” of DEI-related issues risks being canceled, resulting in no hire at all.

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The Justice Department won’t prosecute Biden? Color me shocked Don’t we have trials precisely to establish the guilt or innocence of a defendant? Roger Kimball

Posted By on February 10th, 2024

https://thespectator.com/topic/justice-department-prosecute-biden-shocked-robert-hur/

“No reasonable prosecutor”: remember him? He’s back! No, not James “Higher Loyalty” Comey. He’s sitting in a corner somewhere counting his doubloons. But like some inky creatures of the deep, he emitted lots of spawn. They’re maturing now and taking after dear old dad. 

Remember the original sitcom. Despite the best efforts of every one from the country’s “intelligence” chiefs to its fawning media, news emerged that Hillary Clinton had essentially run the State Department from an insecure server in her home. 

On that server, it transpired, there were thousands of classified documents (along, of course, with yoga routines and plans for her daughter’s wedding). Presented with a subpoena to turn in the classified docs — there were some 30,000 of them. Hillary simply BleachBit the lot and dared Comey to do something about it.

He didn’t, of course. “No reasonable prosecutor,” you see would pursue such a case. Now James Comey’s spiritual heir has strode into the limelight. Meet Robert Hur, the very, extra-special, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious special counsel charged with looking into Joe Biden’s possession of classified (many “top secret” and above) in his den, basement, in his garage behind his vroom-vroom Corvette and in sundry other places in Washington’s Chinatown. 

Yes, Hur said, Biden’s behavior presented “serious risks to national security.” But he still was declining to prosecute. Why? In part because the president of the United States — an “elderly man with a poor memory” — would be “sympathetic” to a jury.

“Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” Hur’s 350-page report admitted. “These materials included 1) marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and 2) notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods. FBI agents recovered these materials from the garage, offices and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home.”

Not to worry, though. Hur concluded that the evidence “does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” I am not a lawyer, but isn’t that why we have trials, precisely to establish the guilt or innocence of a defendant? 

Back when the news about Biden’s illegal possession of classified documents broke, I wrote a story in these pages pointing out “it’s different when Biden does it.” If you are Donald Trump and have classified documents in a locked room in a secure building protected by the Secret Service, you can expect a raid from the FBI and Jack Smith’s ghoulish salivating rictus to hover over you with subpoenas and the threat of jail or firing squad.

But then Donald Trump is a Republican. He is treated one way. Joe Biden is treated another way. In our increasingly Stalinist system, members of the nomenklatura are treated one way, everyone else is on his own. 

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Here is How the Dems Could Replace Biden Through an Internal Coup And who could replace him. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on February 10th, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/here-is-how-the-dems-could-replace-biden-through-an-internal-coup/

I spent years telling skeptical conservatives that, yes Biden was going to run for reelection. Many didn’t believe it until he filed, became the automatic frontrunner, and had no opponents to speak of.

And while public perceptions of his state keep dropping, the Democrats have few options.

Sure, rank and file Dems could shift their support to Rep. Dean Philips, who is in possession of his full faculties and actually campaigning, but there’s zero sign of that happening. Instead, New Hampshire Dems wrote in Biden after he refused to even compete in their state in order to score a big hand-delivered win in South Carolina. (With 4% turnout.)

But here are the four scenarios ranked in order of probability.

1. Biden is the nominee – barring a serious medical breakdown, the frontrunner becomes the party nominee. – Most likely

2. Biden resigns – significant pressure is brought to bear on Biden, his aides and family members to get him to drop out – second most likely

3. Philips beats Biden – panicked by Biden’s poor polls and deteriorating condition, Democrats ignore the party and switch to Philips – least likely

4. DNC removes Biden  – that’s the interesting ‘X’ scenario.- third most likely

Even if Biden does drop out, the results will be messy. It’s too late for anyone else to file to run. The only other candidate on the ballot is Rep. Dean Philips who has few allies and the Dem establishment is not about to let a dark horse whom they piled on win. They’d rather have Trump than Philips. (If you’re skeptical, think of all the Republicans who would rather have had Hillary than Trump.)

But what if Biden doesn’t drop out?

Let’s go back for a moment to Hillary Clinton’s fainting incident which was publicly dismissed, but privately was taken very seriously.

Then-Democratic National Committee head Donna Brazile considered replacing Hillary Clinton at the top of the party’s ticket last year after the presidential nominee appeared unsteady and stumbled following a September 11 memorial service in New York, Brazile writes in her new book.

As rumors swirled about Clinton’s health and the future of her presidential campaign, representatives of Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley contacted Brazile, she writes, apparently to offer their services.

“Gee, I wonder what he wanted to talk to me about?” Brazile writes about Biden.

Brazile writes that she considered several potential replacements for Clinton and Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., the vice presidential nominee, and concluded Biden and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., would be the strongest combination to beat Donald Trump in November.

Brazile, who was abruptly brought on to replace former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz during the party’s convention last summer, did not have the power to unilaterally remove Clinton and Kaine.

But DNC rules give the party’s chairman the authority to set the ball in motion.