HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

DHS to investigate driver’s licenses for illegal aliens By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on January 2nd, 2020

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

In the last few years, numerous states have already begun to, or soon will, issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. Spurred by concerns about national security risks, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is finally investigating whether these licenses are pathways to dangerous identity fraud.

The plethora of licenses in the hands of illegal aliens has worried those concerned about voting integrity. In California, for example, the current iteration of the “motor voter” law means that anyone who obtains or renews a driver’s license is automatically registered to vote.

Technically, “Individuals with AB 60 driver’s licenses are not eligible to participate in the California Motor Voter program and are not eligible to vote.” In practice, last year the DMV admitted that it erroneously registered 1,500 drivers to vote including, it said, non-citizens (i.e., green card holder and illegal aliens). (If you’re wondering whether 1,500 is a real number, you’ll find interesting Jeff Carlson’s article about California’s overwhelming support for Hillary in 2016.)

California’s not alone. A July 2019 article from the National Conference of State Legislatures has noted the trend:

Thirteen states and the District of Columbia enacted laws to allow unauthorized immigrants to obtain a driver’s licenses. These states—California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Utah, Vermont and Washington—issue a license if an applicant provides certain documentation, such as a foreign birth certificate, a foreign passport, or a consular card and evidence of current residency in the state.

POLITICS Comments turned off

AOC to Lose Her Congressional District After 2020 Census? By Matt Margolis

Posted By on January 2nd, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/aoc-to-lose-her-congressional-district-after-2020-census/

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may be a rising star in the Democratic Party, but the district she represents could potentially not exist following the 2020 Census since New York is expected to lose as many as two House seats.

According to The City, nearly 47 percent of her district is foreign-born, and more than a quarter are not citizens—both are segments of the population that are often underrepresented in the census due to concerns of taking part in an official government count, and her district has a higher percentage than any other district. This could mean that her district could be divided up in reapportionment, meaning that she might have to face another incumbent to stay in Congress. Frank Luntz says that the state’s Democrats are actually looking to “draw out” her district.

President Trump considered an executive order to restore a question regarding citizenship to the census but ultimately backed down. Still, some say that there will be an impact on the new census, and AOC, who might be fighting for her political future, is trying hard to inform her constituents that they must participate in the census.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Yazidi Survivors Are Key to Bringing Islamic State Members to Justice By Bojan Pancevski

Posted By on January 2nd, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/yazidi-survivors-are-key-to-bringing-islamic-state-members-to-justice-11577882496

Efforts to compile testimonies from Yazidi victims offer first-hand evidence of genocide committed by the self-styled caliphate

BERLIN—Ivana says she was eight years old when she was sold as a sex slave to an American member of Islamic State after the group murdered her parents.

Five years after the terror militia sought to exterminate her fellow Yazidi, a religious minority in Iraq and Syria, Ivana’s testimony and those of hundreds of other victims offer evidence that might help bring Islamic State members to justice in the West.

European and U.S. authorities have struggled to successfully prosecute returning Islamic State members, largely because of the difficulties in collecting evidence of crimes that happened in Iraq and Syria.

But the Yazidi who survived carry detailed accounts of one of the militia’s worst crimes: The attempt to wipe out the religious minority and the mass enslavement of its women and female children. Islamic State interprets Islamic scriptures literally, using them to justify the murder and enslavement of Yazidis, who are adherents of an ancient religion that is neither Muslim, Christian nor Jewish and therefore perceived as subhuman by ideologues of the terror group. Now lawyers, activists and the United Nations are compiling these accounts to build cases against captured militants from the self-styled caliphate.

“He was horribly brutal. He and his wife owned me and another two Yazidi girls,” Ivana, now aged 13, says in a documentary about Yazidi survivors. The film, by a German-Yazidi lawyer, will premiere at the United Nations’ New York headquarters in January and is part of the documentation effort. CONTINUE AT SITE

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Nisman: The Prosecutor, the President, and the Spy- Netflix

Posted By on January 2nd, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/01/01/netflix-releases-documentary-series-on-murder-of-argentine-amia-bombing-prosecutor-alberto-nisman/

Netflix 6 part series to be released 202: https://www.netflix.com/title/80197991  

Five years after the murder Alberto Nisman — the Argentine federal prosecutor who was investigating the worst terror outrage in the history of Latin America — streaming giant Netflix unveiled its new documentary series “The Prosecutor, the President and the Spy” in its latest offerings for 2020.

Nisman spent more than a decade probing the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in the Argentine capital, and then later exposed the role of former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and her colleagues in a cover-up of Iran’s responsibility for the atrocity.

Hours before he was due to unveil a complaint against the Kirchner government over its alleged collusion with Iran on Jan. 19, 2015, Nisman’s lifeless body was discovered in his Buenos Aires apartment.

The Kirchner government falsely maintained that Nisman’s assassination was a suicide until an independent police investigation in May 2017 established beyond doubt that he had been murdered.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

2019 Was Another One Of Those Tough Years For The “Experts” Francis Menton

Posted By on January 2nd, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-12-31-2019-was-another-one-of-those-years-for-the-experts

“Anyway, I plan to continue in 2020 paying no attention whatsoever to the predictions of the so-called “experts,” most particularly on issues relating to the climate and the economy. Other, of course, than making fun of them from time to time. Happy New Year!”

Woodrow Wilson was the President who began the transformation of the U.S. federal government into a collection of huge bureaucracies staffed by supposedly neutral and apolitical “experts” who could run things so much better than we ordinary humans could. A hundred plus years into this, we now have dozens of massive bureaucracies staffed by these so-called “experts.”

President Trump appears to have a somewhat different view. The New York Times of December 28 has a piece by Brad Plumer and Coral Davenport that addresses how one particular group of these so-called “experts” — scientific ones — is faring under Trump. The headline is “Science Under Attack: How Trump Is Sidelining Researchers and Their Work.” Excerpt:

In just three years, the Trump administration has diminished the role of science in federal policymaking while halting or disrupting research projects nationwide, marking a transformation of the federal government whose effects, experts say, could reverberate for years. Political appointees have shut down government studies, reduced the influence of scientists over regulatory decisions and in some cases pressured researchers not to speak publicly. The administration has particularly challenged scientific findings related to the environment and public health opposed by industries such as oil drilling and coal mining. It has also impeded research around human-caused climate change, which President Trump has dismissed despite a global scientific consensus.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Demise of the Private Colleges by Tabitha Korol Private colleges are in financial straits, induced by their own progressive policies.

Posted By on January 2nd, 2020

https://tinyurl.com/y7e6z63d

Private colleges are in serious financial trouble.  According to Bloomberg, they may have to merge with others or close their doors.  The seeds planted by the “homeless, tempest-tossed” academics from Frankfurt, Germany, 84 years ago, are now bearing fruit.                                         

The private colleges are yet another casualty of the plot against American values and exceptionalism initiated by those outcasts from the Frankfurt School of Social Theory who arrived in New York, in 1935.  The theorists began their trek through the Institutions, including higher education, changing the system that was among the best in the world, and poisoning the wells as they advanced.  Whether fools or rogues, they soon realized that the Judeo-Christian West’s superiority could only be destroyed from within, by having their operatives join the machinery of the old institutions, and by collaborating with Third World liberation movements and other dissident minority.  It would take some generations, but the prize of the most envied capitalist country in the world – America and the Free West — was worth their patience.             

                            

The learned academics within the private colleges readily complied with the new Common Core curricula, textbooks, teaching films and scripts, recognizing the Frankfurt stamp of approval.  They introduced identity politics, which now requires a six-figure professional to help the children cope with the resultant tribalism and victimhood – sorely needed funds down the drain.     

BOOKS Comments turned off

Gertrude Himmelfarb A scholar who challenged conventions about the Victorians.

Posted By on January 1st, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gertrude-himmelfarb-11577837798?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

She was an accomplished historian known for rigorous scholarship, brilliant essays, and her forceful defense of morality in democratic politics. We’re referring to Gertrude Himmelfarb, who died Monday at age 97.

A native of Brooklyn who earned degrees from the University of Chicago, Himmelfarb achieved intellectual fame as a writer with her third book, “Victorian Minds” (1968). The collection of essays on major figures in the British 19th century challenged the prevailing view of the Victorians as incurious moral prudes.

In that book and several subsequent collections, particularly “Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians” (1986), Himmelfarb contended that the old virtues—temperance, chastity, industry—didn’t repress individual creativity. Instead they enabled a century of cultural flourishing and political stability.

She also wrote with insight on the follies of the French Revolution and the assorted non-philosophies known as postmodernism, and she was unafraid to criticize eminent peers when she thought their writings wrongheaded or precious. She memorably found fault with Roy Jenkins’s biography of Winston Churchill for failing to acknowledge what every ordinary person knew: Churchill was a great man.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Rock-throwing Iraqi militias quit U.S. Embassy after protests Ahmed Aboulenein

Posted By on January 1st, 2020

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-security-usa/rock-throwing-iraqi-militias-quit-u-s-embassy-after-protests-idUSKBN1Z01N9

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Supporters of Iranian-backed Iraqi paramilitary groups who stormed the U.S. Embassy’s perimeter and hurled rocks in two days of protests withdrew on Wednesday after Washington dispatched extra troops and threatened reprisals against Tehran.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/tear-gas-fired-iraqi-protesters-gather-outside-u-s-embassy-n1109216

Iraqi protesters withdraw from perimeter of U.S. Embassy, building now secured
By Saphora Smith

Iraqi protesters withdrew from the perimeter of the U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad on the second day of demonstrations against deadly U.S. airstrikes last weekend, U.S. officials said.

“All protesters withdrew from the area in front of the US embassy and left the Green Zone. The embassy is now completely surrounded and secured by security forces,” the Joint Operation Command said Wednesday.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump enters 2020 on a bull market high By Brett Samuels and Naomi Jagoda

Posted By on January 1st, 2020

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/476299-trump-enters-2020-on-a-bull-market-high

President Trump is entering 2020 on a Wall Street high, boasting strong stock market numbers that he hopes will buoy his political prospects entering a reelection year.

Tuesday marks the final day of trading for 2019, and both the S&P 500 and Dow Jones indices are poised to finish the year with significant gains. The Dow is up about 22 percent from a year ago, and the S&P is up just over 28 percent in that span as of the closing bell on Monday.

Analysts said that some of 2019’s stock market gains are a rebound from a decline in stock prices at the end of the year but that the stock market is still ending 2019 at a level above 2018’s peak and there haven’t been any major corrections this year.

“It was a great year, as far as market performance is concerned,” said Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst for S&P Dow Jones Indices.

The Washington Post reported Saturday that the Dow Jones gains in Trump’s time in office so far lag the gains in the same time periods of Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s administrations, but they exceed gains made during other recent presidencies. The rise in the Clinton era coincided with a tech boom, while the rise in the Obama years came after a financial crisis that saw markets hitting a low point at the beginning of his administration.

Trump claimed during a recent trip to London for a NATO gathering that he doesn’t pay attention to the stock market and prefers to watch job numbers. But the president’s Twitter feed indicates otherwise.

He has tweeted a dozen times in December alone about the state of the stock market, touting each new record high in an effort to connect the boost in numbers to his time in office.

“New Stock Market high!” Trump tweeted Dec. 16. “I will never get bored of telling you that — and we will never get tired of winning!”

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

Deep in the Age of Unreason Eric Utter

Posted By on January 1st, 2020

www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/deep_in_the_age_of_unreason.html

There was once an Age of Reason.  Today, we appear to be living in the Age of Unreason.  Or insanity.

As I’ve noted in previous posts, it is exceedingly difficult today for a sane person to believe what he observes on a daily basis, whether it be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stating that the world will end in 12 years, Nancy Pelosi demanding that Republicans in the Senate put on a “fair” trial, pundits and talking heads blithely comparing President Trump to Hitler or the devil, people being threatened with fines or job loss for “misgendering” someone, or the pronouncements that men are having their own babies…to name but a few of the absurdities now passed off as news.  Additionally, nearly every progressive policy prescription is utterly, demonstrably devoid of reason and logic.

To wit: Abortion should be legal, as it’s simply “a woman’s choice” to do what she will with her body?  No.  She can’t light up a cigarette in a public restaurant.  She can’t depress the accelerator of her car too far without being issued a ticket for speeding or worse.  She can’t drive drunk.  If she is conservative, she often can’t even speak without being shouted down or chased off college campuses.  She may be asked to leave a restaurant while quietly dining with family.  She may even be assaulted. Just ask Sarah Sanders, Candace Owens, or Michelle Malkin, among many others.

Guns are bad and should be banned?  Then why are most mass murders committed in gun-free zones?  Why are the cities with the strictest gun control laws typically the ones with the most homicides?

The Green New Deal will save the planet, benefit the economy, and increase employment?  No, you can’t spend more money than exists in the world and ban all energy extraction industries without destroying the economy on a worldwide scale (all to possibly keep the planet’s temperature from rising 0.5 degrees Celsius by 2100).  And there are already more jobs in the U.S. than people to fill them, so…?

Moreover, Democrats and leftists (sadly, there is not much distinction anymore) routinely project their thoughts, motives, and actions onto Republicans and conservatives, aided by their lapdogs in the pathetically compliant mainstream media.  (See Trump’s Ukraine “quid pro quo” versus Biden’s, for example.)  And roughly half of the population can’t or won’t see their ruse.