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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!”

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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.

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The Dangers of Elite Groupthink Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 1st, 2020

https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2020/01/01/the-dangers-of-elite-groupthink-n2558749

The Washington Post recently published a surprising indictment of MSNBC host, Stanford graduate and Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow.

Post media critic Erik Wemple wrote that Maddow deliberately misled her audience by claiming the now-discredited Steele dossier was largely verifiable — even at a time when there was plenty of evidence that it was mostly bogus.

At the very time Maddow was reassuring viewers that Christopher Steele was believable, populist talk radio and the much-criticized Fox News Channel were insisting that most of Steele’s allegations simply could not be true. Maddow was wrong. Her less degreed critics proved to be right.

In 2018, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), and the committee’s then-ranking minority member, Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), each issued contrasting reports of the committee’s investigation into allegations of collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign team and the misbehavior of federal agencies.

Schiff’s memo was widely praised by the media. Nunes’ report was condemned as rank and partisan.

Many in the media went further. They contrasted Harvard Law graduate Schiff with rural central Californian Nunes to help explain why the clever Schiff got to the bottom of collusion and the “former dairy farmer” Nunes was “way over his head” and had “no idea what’s going on.”

Recently, the nonpartisan inspector general of the Department of Justice, Michael Horowitz, found widespread wrongdoing at the DOJ and FBI. He confirmed the key findings in the Nunes memo about the Steele dossier and its pernicious role in the FISA application seeking a warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

In contrast, much of what the once-praised Schiff had claimed to be true was proven wrong by Horowitz — from Schiff’s insistence that the FBI verified the Steele dossier to his assertion that the Department of Justice did not rely chiefly on the dossier for its warrant application.

When special counsel Robert Mueller formed an investigatory team, he stocked it with young, progressive Washington insiders, many with blue-chip degrees and resumes.

The media swooned. Washington journalists became giddy over the prospect of a “dream team” of such “all-stars” who would demolish the supposedly far less impressively credentialed Trump legal team.

We were assured by a snobbish Vox that “Special counsel Robert Mueller’s legal team is full of pros. Trump’s team makes typos.”

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When Anti-Semitism Doesn’t Matter By Ben Shapiro

Posted By on January 1st, 2020

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0120/shapiro010120.php3

In October 2018, during Sabbath morning services, a white supremacist attacked the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, murdering 11 people and wounding another six. In April 2019, in the middle of Passover, a white supremacist attacked the Chabad of Poway synagogue, murdering one person and seriously wounding another three. Both incidents started absolutely necessary conversations about the prevalence and nature of the white supremacist threat to Jews across the country.

Four people were murdered at a kosher supermarket in Jersey City by self-described Black Hebrew Israelites just weeks ago; five people were stabbed at a Hanukkah celebration in Monsey, New York; this week alone, New York police are investigating at least nine anti-Semitic attacks. 

The upsurge of violence against Jews in New York in particular has finally prompted commentary from Democratic politicians ranging from New York Mayor Bill De Blasio, who just weeks ago expressed shock at anti-Semitism reaching “the doorstep of New York City”; to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who expressed puzzlement at the attacks, noting broadly: “This is an intolerant time in our country. We see anger; we see hatred exploding.”

This isn’t new. Back in 2018, The New York Times admitted there was a massive spike in anti-Semitic attacks in the city — and even acknowledged that the newspaper of record had failed to cover that surging anti-Semitism because “it refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy.” But that has always been true of anti-Semitism. It’s possible, as The Times should recognize, to walk and chew gum at the same time in covering anti-Semitism.

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MY SAY: POLITICS AND THE DECADE 2010 – 2020

Posted By on January 1st, 2020

Ten year ago, in late 2019 I started the daily barrage known as Ruthfully Yours.   In 2015, I was  a  “Never Trump” acolyte who greatly preferred Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. In fact, I posted National Review’s shameful and decidedly anti-Trump issue and columnists. When he became the candidate and the alternative was Hillary Clinton I became a reluctant supporter and eventually an enthusiastic “deplorable.’

I admire, respect and have great and patriotic affection for the president. He has, to the best of his abilities, kept every promise even in the face of outrageous and unprecedented efforts to destroy his Presidency.

I look forward to his resounding victory in 2020. Happy New Year to all! rsk

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Europe: Anti-Christian Attacks Reach All-Time High in 2019 by Soeren Kern

Posted By on January 1st, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15366/europe-anti-christian-attacks

The issue of anti-Christian vandalism was rarely reported by the European media until February 2019, when vandals attacked nine churches within the space of two weeks. The issue made headlines again in April 2019, when a suspicious fire gutted the iconic Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Since then, however, the European media are once again shrouding facts in silence.

“Seeking to destroy or damage Christian buildings is a way of ‘wiping the slate clean’ of the past.” — Annie Genevard, MP, Republicans Party, in an interview in Le Figaro, April 2, 2019.

“In the past, even if one was not a Christian, the expression of the sacred was respected. We are facing a serious threat to the expression of religious freedom. Secularism must not be a rejection of the religious, but a principle of neutrality that gives everyone the freedom to express his faith.” — Dominique Rey, Bishop of Fréjus-Toulon, in an interview with the Italian magazine Il Timone, August 5, 2019.

“We are witnessing the convergence of laicism — conceived as secularism, which relegates the faithful only to the private sphere and where every religious denomination is banal or stigmatized — with the overwhelming emergence of Islam, which attacks the infidels and those who reject the Koran. On one hand, we are mocked by the media … and on the other, there is the strengthening of Islamic fundamentalism. These are two joint realities.” — Dominique Rey, Bishop of Fréjus-Toulon, in an interview with the Italian magazine Il Timone, August 5, 2019.

Anti-Christian hostility is sweeping across Western Europe, where, during 2019, Christian churches and symbols were deliberately attacked day after day.

Gatestone Institute reviewed thousands of newspaper reports, police blotters, parliamentary inquiries, social media posts and specialized blogs from Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Spain. The research shows (see appendices below) that roughly 3,000 Christian churches, schools, cemeteries and monuments were vandalized, looted or defaced in Europe during 2019 — which is on track to becoming a record year for anti-Christian sacrilege on the continent.

Violence against Christian sites is most widespread in France, where churches, schools, cemeteries and monuments are being vandalized, desecrated and burned at an average rate of three per day, according to government statistics. In Germany, attacks against Christian churches are occurring at an average rate of two per day, according to police blotters.

Attacks on Christian churches and symbols are also commonplace in Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Ireland, Italy and Spain. The attacks overwhelmingly involve Roman Catholic sites and symbols, although in Germany, Protestant churches are also being targeted.

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2019’s Biggest Pop-Culture Trend: Climate Anxiety Catherine Smith

Posted By on January 1st, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/31/2019s-biggest-pop-culture-trend-climate-anxiety/

According to Grist, 2019 was officially the year the ‘climate crisis’ went mainstream. Grist makes a point that no longer is mention of the warming atmosphere, melting ice sheets, and acidifying oceans — along with the resulting human suffering — limited to the “environment” section of the newspaper.

‘Climate Crisis’ appeared everywhere in 2019. Climate Crisis came up in movies, songs, and books meant for widespread consumption and the ‘crisis got  major airtme from the Democratic presidential candidates. Grist explains that climate anxiety definitely blew up in 2019, in everything from pop hits to the Impossible Whopper.

TV

There has been no lack of climate change themes in some of the popular TV shows this year. Season 2 of HBO’s Big Little Lies spent an entire episode on the subject. The final season of The Affair jumped 30-plus years into the future to a climate change damaged Montauk.

New nature shows  came with a darker foreboding twist. Netflix’s nine-episode series Our Planet looked like Planet Earth at first glance. YouTube’s Hostile Planet series documents how animals adapt to extreme conditions, and blames ‘climate change.’

Books

This year, we saw a great deal of  books about the Green New Deal, including On by the Canadian, social activist, and well known critic of capitalism Naomi Klein. David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth had a broad reach, if its six-week stint on the New York Times’ nonfiction bestseller list (and 3 million copies sold) is any indication.

Movies

The 8th-highest-grossing movie of the year Frozen II, the sequel to Disney’s 2013 masterpiece Frozen, wherein Anna and Elsa must save their kingdom from a natural world that is “out of balance” by reckoning with their family’s harmful environmental legacy.

Fast food 

Fast food became a ‘climate crisis’, about how “cutting carbon-intensive animal products from your diet is one of the simplest ways to significantly reduce your carbon footprint, and beef became the worst sinner of 2019, with 20 times the climate impact of plant-based proteins like beans and soy. So replacing our hamburgers with processed faux meat made of soy-and-coconut-oil. 2019 might be the first year that fake burgers got big.”

Celebrities

Celebrities didn’t hesitate to speak up about climate change this year. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex made the environment their ‘issue of the Month’ in July. They were blasted for being climate change hypocrites after taking two private jet trips in one week. Pictures emerged of the royal couple in Nice, on the French Riviera boarding with their son a 12-seater Cessna, which costs around $24,000. The Cessna would have generated seven times more carbon emissions per person than a standard commercial flight.

The 81-year-old-star Jane Fonda, wanted her chance in the limelight and first got arrested in October for protesting climate action” in solidarity with the Fridays for Future movement, the weekly school strike for climate action started by Swedish youth activist Greta Thunberg.” Fonda has been protesting every Friday, getting arrested, and her famous friends — including Sam Waterson and Sally Fields — have been joining her.

Pop music

Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” catchy tune even involves ‘climate change’ – Lil Nas claimed on Twitter . Other artists like “Billie Eilish” and “Lana Del Ray” included ‘climate anxiety’ in their music and used the burning planet as a backdrop against the usual pop-song stuff, like the triumphs and woes of growing up and falling in love. The 1975 teamed up with Greta Thunberg, youth activist and Time Person of the Year, to record a “song” that’s just her reading one of her speeches over background instrumentals.

This mass climate change charade shows no signs of slowing down, and will no doubt continue well into 2020.

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On the Moral Status of Islam in the United States Revolutions of the deepest kinds always begin with our children. Jason D. Hill

Posted By on January 1st, 2020

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/moral-status-islam-united-states-jason-d-hill/

Several months ago, Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán and Canada’s leading intellectual Jordan Peterson met to lambast illegal immigration and political correctness, which they believe make sensible public discussions impossible. Peterson also made a noteworthy claim worth thinking about. He said Islam is not compatible with democracy and that this issue has been barred from public discussion.

A chief spokesperson for the Nation of Islam, Ava Muhammad, has officially gone on record disparaging Jews by stating that Jews are “godless… blood-sucking parasites [that] sell us alcohol, drugs, depraved sex, and every other type of low-life thing.”

A statement like Ava Muhammad’s above is a grave reminder to us that Peterson is correct. Islam is not only incompatible with democracy — it is inimical to America’s fundamental values and principles.  More important, it is in violation of the United States Constitution. It is time for the United States to face the truth about a moral and political ideology whose stated goal is the abolition of our political system.

When we examine the application of Sharia law in the West, most particularly in Europe, where it is gaining ascendancy, people will come to see a few fundamental tenets about Islam. Its foundation and governing principle is that Sharia law regulates the personal and public behavior of all Muslims and non-Muslims under its governance. When we think of Islam mainly as a religion, we cannot disambiguate it from Sharia law, which, when examined, allows us to see that the legal, cultural and political aspects of the religion supersede the purely private religious aspects of it. World Islam has become, above all, a political ideology.

Sharia law is a weaponized political tool supervening the public sphere that violates every sacred tenet of American life.

The institution of slavery remains lawful under Sharia law. Those who repudiate their faith in Islam directly or indirectly are guilty of capital offenses. It therefore conflicts with our constitutional human right of freedom of conscience and religion. The Sharia law of apostasy restricts other human rights, such as freedom of expression and association. Sharia law does not guarantee equal rights for men and women.

This past April, the nation of Brunei, in a four-page document addressed to the European Parliament, defended its new sharia law implementation by insisting that stoning to death for adultery and extramarital sex, amputation for offenses such as sodomy and theft, and the death penalty for homosexuality be regarded as permissible because these come from Allah.

In 2011, a Muslim group in Denmark in a “Call to Islam” campaigned vigorously in parts of Copenhagen and other Danish cities into “Sharia Law Zones” that would function as autonomous “enclaves” ruled by Islamic law. The agenda was to make parts of Copenhagen and other Danish cities into “Sharia Law Zones” that would function as autonomous “enclaves” ruled by Islamic law. Salafism, a sect within Islam, calls for the destruction of Western democracy and demands that it be replaced by a universal Islamic caliphate and worldwide Islamic theocracy ruled by Islamic law. So does the charter of Hamas. The statement referred to man-made laws and rules as obstacles to be destroyed by all Muslims and exhorted Muslims to rid the world of the great evil of democracy. Islamic courts are also operating in many of Germany’s big cities. In Britain, a Muslim group called “Muslims against the Crusades” has called for the application of Sharia and championed turning twelve cities, including a renamed London called “Londonistan,” into independent Islamic states. Ruled by Sharia law, the states within Britain would operate completely outside British jurisprudence.

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Impeachment Fallouts By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 1st, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/trump-impeachment-fallout-unpredictable/

‘I hate the people who hate him.’

Impeachment is shaping up as unpredictably explosive, but not in the way imagined.

There are lots of things that we do know about the present impeachment of Donald Trump — and we know that there are even more areas that remain unknown.

Quietly, the approval ratings of Trump have been rising to pre-impeachment levels and are nearing a RealClearPolitics average of 45. Support for impeaching Trump and/or removing him is not increasing as the House Democrats expected. It is essentially static, or slowly eroding, depending on how polls phrase such questions.

Apparently, an exhausted public did not see “Ukrainian” impeachment as a one-off national crisis akin to the Nixon inquiry and the Clinton impeachment and trial that merited national attention. The impeachment vote instead is being confirmed in the public mind as part of a now boring three-year impeachment psychodrama (from impeachment 1.0, the Logan Act, the emoluments clause, the 25th Amendment, and Michael Avenatti/Stormy Daniels comedies to Robert Mueller’s “dream team” and “all-stars”). The progressive logic of the current jump-the-shark monotony is to become even more monotonous, the way that a driller leans ever harder on his dull and chipping bit as his bore becomes static.

The Democrats believed that all of these efforts would be like small cuts, each one perhaps minor but all combining to bleed Trump out. But now we know, given polling data and the strong Trump economy, that the long odyssey to impeachment has had almost no effect on Trump’s popularity, other than losing him 3–4 points for a few weeks as periodic media “bombshells” went off.

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The Religious Bigotry of NeverTrumpers Evangelicals do not have to explain why they support Donald Trump. They are not required to answer to people who hold them in contempt. Julie Kelly

Posted By on December 31st, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/30/the-religious-bigotry-of-n

The mockumentary that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” featured many sidesplitting moments; host Chuck Todd and other Democratic activists disguised as journalists spent an hour solemnly discussing the “assault on the truth” inflicted by Donald Trump and his “cult-like” followers.

The very same propagandists responsible for spreading fake news and conspiracy theories about collusion between Team Trump and the Russians proceeded to scold the president, his advisors, and conservatives for allegedly spreading fake news and conspiracy theories. It was hilarious.

The executive editor of the Washington Post, the news organization that has published thousands of stories pushing the Russian collusion hoax, lamented: “[W]e live in an environment where people are able to spread crazy conspiracy theories and absolute falsehoods and lies.”

The executive editor of the New York Times, a news organization also responsible for publishing thousands of articles pushing the Russian collusion hoax, concurred. “I think our newsrooms have been sort of rebuilt to do this, is to very aggressively sort out fact from fiction and to very aggressively work to make sure that people trust us and understand that that’s our job,” Dean Baquet explained.

The program should take a place alongside “Spinal Tap” and “Best in Show” as one of the best parodies ever produced.