WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey, Russia, Iran: Filling the Vacuum by Erick Stakelbeck

Posted By on October 16th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15034/syria-kurds-turkey-russia-iran

The U.S. Congress is looking to push back against Erdogan’s brazen foray into northeastern Syria. For months, there has been a bi-partisan effort on Capitol Hill to convince the Trump administration to implement sanctions on Turkey in the wake of its purchase of the Russian S-400 missile system. The events of this past week will likely only escalate pressure by Congress against the Erdogan regime.

“We defeated ISIS,” a Peshmerga general said, “only to see Iran and its Shia militias become stronger. They are filling the vacuum.”

Islamist-led Turkey has now joined those same Iranian-led forces in filling that vacuum — with the full acquiescence of the United States.

On the Iran-Iraq border a few weeks ago, I found myself just a few hundred meters from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), standard bearers of a regime that has practically copyrighted the phrases, “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”

At the Kurdish Peshmerga military base stood a series of small, white structures spread out across the mountaintops on the Iranian side of the border.

“IRGC observation posts,” said one of my Kurdish hosts, eying the mountains warily.

The Pershmerga generals interviewed in Iraqi Kurdistan seemed eager to talk about the threat posed by the IRGC and the Iranian regime—not only to the Kurds, Israel and the broader Middle East, but also to the United States.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: ON THE DEBATES

Posted By on October 16th, 2019

Tulsi Gabbard is the winner on her biography, substance, delivery and independence in a liberal circular firing squad.

However, the winner is President Donald Trump. As Peter Smith, an Australian journalist puts it:

“Republican presidents are always demonized by the Left but this time, with this president, it is different. The hate is palpable, extreme and unremitting, the depths unfathomable to which his enemies will descend in order to stitch him up with this bogus conspiracy or that one. Yet, with an aplomb not seen outside a superhero comic, he pummels them left and right. “

Peter Smith

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Elite Universities Have Failed to Produce Elites The nation is in desperate need of a true aristocracy of merit. Zachary D. Rogers

Posted By on October 16th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/15/elite-universities-have-failed-to-produce-elites/

The higher education system composed of “elite” institutions has failed to produce a truly educated elite to serve the nation. They have instead produced bureaucrats, financiers, and the engineers of Silicon Valley. Highly ranked and regarded institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton or “public ivies” like the University of Virginia, University of Michigan, and UC Berkeley have failed to produce men and women who are statesmen, creators, and leaders.

Students, parents, and high school administrators spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to get themselves and their students into these institutions. Why? Not because of the promise they will receive an education (one cannot call four years almost entirely devoid of facts and disconnected from reality an education) but because it is expected that the time and money spent will launch them towards financial and professional success. This is a tragedy for the nation and a disaster for these institutions. It is something that cries out for reform and action from conservatives.

The nation is in desperate need of a true aristocracy of merit. Throughout history, the elites of the regime, whether Roman, English, or American have shaped the virtues, goals, and laws through their influence and example. The current system is failing to produce them. Instead, it has given us students who work aggressively to be admitted into highly ranked institutions and, once admitted, are rarely kicked out. Immense resources are devoted to assisting these students, and if they are struggling there is a program, tutor, or relaxed deadline to ensure they graduate.

We have created a ruling class where admission into the elite, powerful, and wealthy circles of the nation is secured by one’s college acceptance. It is well known and expected that these students will go on to become doctors, politicians, scientists, businessmen, and bankers. They are not taught to think or to understand how man has answered the perennial questions of existence. Neither are they equipped with a firm grasp of history, literature, or reality. Instead, they are trained to mouth the pieties of our “thought leaders.” Praise of diversity and tolerance is demanded of them. Likewise, they are to refrain from controversial behavior (such as support for the Second Amendment, opposition to homosexuality or abortion). This reflects a failure in understanding what a liberal arts education is and its importance for a free society.

One can only hope that out of the sheep at Harvard and Yale there might arise a statesman. Yet we cannot count on this.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Tulsi Gabbard Lambastes CNN, NY Times for Suggesting She’s a Russian Asset, Slams Dem Foreign Policy Consensus By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on October 16th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-slams-cnn-ny-times-for-suggesting-shes-a-russian-asset-slams-dem-foreign-policy-consensus/

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D., Hawaii) slammed CNN and the New York Times during Tuesday evening’s debate, which the two outlets co-hosted, accusing both of smearing her by attributing her call for an end to the “regime-change war” in Syria to a nefarious allegiance to Russia.

“The New York Times and CNN have also smeared veterans like myself for calling to an end to this regime-change war,” Gabbard told the crowd in Ohio.

“Just two days ago, the New York Times put out an article saying I am a Russian asset and an Assad apologist and all these different smears,” the Hawaii Democrat continued. “This morning a CNN commentator said on national television that I’m an asset of Russia. Completely despicable.”

A Times article published October 12 accused Gabbard of “defending the brutal Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad.” Hours before the debate, a CNN analyst called the senator a “puppet for the Russian government.”

Gabbard also blamed President Trump for ordering the withdrawal of U.S. troops from northern Syria, a move that has garnered bipartisan criticism.

“The slaughter of the Kurds being done by Turkey is yet another negative consequence of the regime-change war that we’ve been waging in Syria,” Gabbard said. “Donald Trump has the blood of the Kurds on his hand — but so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have supported this ongoing regime-change war in Syria that started in 2011, along with many in the mainstream media, who have been championing and cheerleading this regime-change war.”

Gabbard added that she would end “regime-change” wars in the region by ceasing “draconian sanctions,” which she called a “modern-day siege.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Kurdish, Syrian, and Turkish Ironies By Victor Davis Hanson *****

Posted By on October 16th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/kurdish-syrian-turkish-ironies/

Critics now upset about abandoning our Kurdish friends demanded abject withdrawals — and the abandonment of friends — in Afghanistan and Iraq.

O utrage met Donald Trump’s supposedly rash decision to pull back U.S. troops from possible confrontational zones between our Kurdish friends in Syria and Recep Erdogan’s expeditionary forces.

Turkey claims that it will punish the Syrian Kurds for a variety of supposed provocations, including aiding and abetting Kurdish terrorist separatists inside Turkey. But what they say they can so easily do and what they really can do inside Syria are, of course, two different things.

A Noble People
Most Americans in general favor the Kurds and oppose the Turks. Aside from Israel, Kurds are about the only American allies in the Middle East who predictably fight alongside our troops against Islamists, theocrats, and Baathists. They admire Americans, and for the most part they do not indulge in the normal anti-American histrionics. They despise ISIS as much we do and are on the front lines combatting ISIS atrocities.

Skeptics might suggest that they do so mostly for self-interested reasons. But all people do that. And what is unusual about the Kurds of Iraq and Syria is the number of times they have risked their lives in battle alongside our own soldiers. For that alone, they deserve special American dispensations and should not be left to the vagaries of Turkish or Russian air power or any combined Turkish, Syrian, Islamist, or Iranian cynical alliance.

Like the Poles, the Armenians, the Greeks, and the Israelis, the Kurds are an honorable, ancient, and brave people who drew history’s unfortunate lot of living in a dangerous geography between much larger and aggressive nations. And, to be frank, all these endangered peoples at some point in their histories, ancient and modern or both, seem to have fought against Turkish forces, been targeted by them, or threatened by Ankara.

HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Senate Voted to End Emergency on the Border But Hezbollah, ISIS, gangs and drug cartels didn’t get the memo. Michael Cutler

Posted By on October 16th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/senate-voted-end-emergency-border-michael-cutler/

On September 25, 2019 the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch posted a disturbing report, “Senate votes to end border emergency under which Trump redirected military funds to wall construction” that began with the following paragraph:

The Senate again approved a resolution to end President Trump’s national emergency at the southern border, with Republicans joining Democrats in a bid to prevent the president from redirecting military funds toward a border wall, though Trump was expected to veto it again.

The report went on to note that the Republicans control the Senate and ended with this sentence:

The vote was an unusual display of Republican rebellion against the president’s quest for his signature policy initiative, which led to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history that ended earlier this year.

The Democrats refused to accept that there was a crisis on the southern border in the first place, and now the Republican-controlled Senate has voted, yet again, to “end the crisis”!

What has not been determined, or reported upon, is how our politicians from either political party have come to the insane conclusion that the emergency on the treacherous southern border has ended.

Certainly the “all clear” has not sounded.

While President Trump has been successful in reducing the number of illegal aliens who are being apprehended by the Border Patrol along the southern border–though a number of tactics including getting Mexico to deploy their forces along the border and with other diplomatic initiatives–tens of thousands of illegal aliens continue to be apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol each month and narcotics continue to be seized along that troubled border.

HISTORY Comments turned off

Christopher Columbus: A Progressive Tool for Discrediting America The Left’s vicious assault on American history ensues. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on October 16th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/legacy-christopher-columbus-bruce-thornton/

The recent attacks on historical monuments by the “woke” progressive Philistines, and the New York Times’s “1619 Project” aimed at rewriting America’s history as a racist plot, are just the latest in the left’s long assault on American history. Long before this current iconoclasm, Christopher Columbus has been the arch-villain in the left’s Orwellian revision of American history as peculiarly and irredeemably evil from its birth.

Attacking and demonizing American history predates the current frenzy of revisionism and virtue-signaling, for it is one of the progressive left’s favorite tools for undermining the patriotic solidarity that binds us together and undergirds our political order.

This long assault on America’s founding and exceptionalism has been a weapon of the left for weakening the US’s most successful and powerful enemy. The left can never forgive the US for achieving “prosperity, power, the tendency towards uniformity of economic conditions,” as Raymond Aron pointed out in 1957, “by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention” and the “revolutionary code.” The left has to discredit America’s foundations in order to show that its success has come at too great a price––the institutionalization of racist oppression and inequality that has created “white privilege” and “white supremacism.” What better place to start than with Christopher Columbus, who began the evil colonization of and genocide against the innocent American peoples? And Columbus’s most malign heir has been the United States.

POLITICS Comments turned off

CNN Presidential Debate Show Dem candidates pine for socialism, trash Trump and tout impeachment. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on October 16th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/cnn-presidential-debate-show-lloyd-billingsley/

The undercard of the Democrat debate kicked off Tuesday morning when previously missing-in-action Hunter Biden gave an interview with ABC News. Joe Biden’s son conceded it was “poor judgment” to be involved in ventures in Ukraine and China that have complicated his father’s situation. On the other hand, Hunter insisted he “did nothing wrong at all.”

Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders had just emerged from Heart Attack Hotel and Elizabeth Warren had not, as she claimed, been fired because she was visible pregnant. Like her false claim to be a Cherokee, that was no obstacle to a continued run for president, at least for Democrats.

The real back story came on Monday, with the revelation from the O’Keefe video that CNN was determined to, as Jeff Zucker said, “stay very focused on impeachment.” When the show started at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, it was a joint production with CNN’s impeachment surge. Anderson Cooper asked the twelve Democrats if it was better to let the voters decide.

“The president obstructed justice and done it repeatedly,” said Sen Elizabeth Warren. “Donald Trump broke the law. Impeachment must go forward.”

Socialist Bernie Sanders called Trump “the most corrupt president in the history of this country.” So Sanders called for a “speedy impeachment process,” and “McConnell must allow a free and fair trial.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Hong Kong Crackdown Has Begun Beijing hasn’t sent tanks into the streets. It’s trying to do the job with criminal gangs and technology. By Jillian Kay Melchior

Posted By on October 16th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hong-kong-crackdown-has-begun-11571180182

Hong Kong

The Chinese crackdown here is under way. Tanks haven’t rolled into Hong Kong à la Tiananmen Square in 1989. But Beijing is carrying out a subtler, though often still violent, effort to suppress dissent, hoping the world won’t notice. Ask Stanley Ho Wai-hong of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions.

The 35-year-old pro-democracy labor activist planned a community event Sept. 29 in Sai Kung, a fishing village in Hong Kong’s New Territories. But that afternoon, tens of thousands were rallying in the city against China’s human-rights abuses, so Mr. Ho canceled his event at the last minute. He was driving away when a stranger called him and asked him to come back so villagers could give him a gift. “It was a trap for murder,” he told me at the hospital earlier this month.

When he arrived back in Sai Kung, he says, three men ambushed him and bludgeoned him with metal rods. Mr. Ho fell to the ground and tried to cover his skull with his hands. It took only half a minute for bystanders to rescue him, but “30 seconds is a long time.” The attack left Mr. Ho with seven gashes in his head and five bruises on his back. His right thumb and three other fingers were broken, the left index finger so severely that he needed surgery.

Other pro-democracy figures have been the targets of criminal violence, including lawmakers Lam Cheuk-ting and Kwong Chun-yu; an unnamed reporter for the Apple Daily news paper; Davin Wong, a student activist who was acting president of the Hong Kong University Students’ Union; and Jimmy Sham, convenor of the Civil Human Rights Front, which organized several protests with a million or more participants in Hong Kong this summer. The home of Apple Daily publisher Jimmy Lai was firebombed in September, and posters hung up in the metro system recently advertised his personal phone number as well as those of his children. Plainclothes thugs have also beaten up protesters, most famously in Yuen Long district in July, where some 45 were injured. CONTINUE AT SITE

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Paul Craig Roberts: Oligarchs Will Crash US Financial System To Boot Trump Out Of Office

Posted By on October 16th, 2019

https://usawatchdog.com/

There is only one restraint that’s keeping the oligarchs from crashing the US economy right now. Paul Craig Roberts explains…

Economic expert and award winning journalist Dr. Paul Craig Roberts predicts that the oligarchs of the New World Order (NWO) will do anything to boot President Trump out of office. Dr. Roberts, who has a PhD in Economics and is a former Assistant Treasury Secretary in the Reagan Administration, predicts the NWO will take down the financial system as a last resort if all else fails. Dr. Roberts explains, “Now, if they can’t get Trump out, they will crash it. There will be a big crash before the election, and people will blame Trump. That’s about how smart Americans are. Now, there is one constraint for the Fed doing that because the Fed is a tool of the New York banks. If they crash the economy, they are going to crash those New York banks. That’s the only restraint on the elites. That’s their ultimate nuke. If they can’t get him out, they will say, okay, we are going to bring down the economy and too bad for the New York Banks, or they will find some special way to bail them out while everything else goes: the pension funds, the hedge funds, the mutual funds. They will wipe us out in order to get rid of Trump.”

Dr. Roberts says forget about the Left/Right Democrat and Republican paradigm. Dr. Roberts explains, “This isn’t a Democrat vs. Republican thing. This is the elite, the establishment, the oligarchs and the people who rule the country. They are defending their power. Trump was elected by the people. Remember, Hillary called people who voted for Trump ‘deplorables.’ So, the people who go against the elite candidate are ‘deplorable.’ The voters are ‘deplorable.’ That’s what this is about. They have to get him out for that reason. They also know if they get him out for that reason, every other person that would step forward and actually try to lead the country rather than serve the ruling class, that person will know that he hasn’t a chance. Even if he gets into office, he’s going to be excoriated, framed up, lied about and driven out. Nobody will want that grief.”