Why Doesn’t Stacey Abrams Want to Run for Senate? By Jim Geraghty see note please

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-doesnt-stacey-abrams-want-to-run-for-senate/

Something ‘s afoot here….Stacey Abrams a sore loser without any national prominence was chosen to give the opposing  party’s rebuttal to the president’s State of the Union speech in 2019. Until 2019, all previous responses were delivered by contemporary senators, representatives, or governors. She is being groomed and aiming for a place on the National ticket…..rsk

Life just got a little more complicated for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. The 2020 elections looked challenging but manageable, needing to defend Colorado’s Cory Gardner, Maine’s Susan Collins, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, and Arizona’s appointed senator Martha McSally. The risk of losses were somewhat offset by some low-hanging fruit in Alabama Democrat Doug Jones, an open seat in New Mexico, and maybe some chances for an upset in New Hampshire or Michigan.

But now Republicans have to worry about an open seat Senate race in Georgia, as Senator Johnny Isakson said today that he will step down from office at the end of this year due to complications with Parkinson’s disease.

Yes, Georgia is a Republican-leaning state. When Stacey Abrams calls herself the legitimately elected governor of her state and refuses to concede the race, Republicans can point out that the official final vote count in 2018 put her down by 54,723 votes, not exactly a small margin. But Abrams did do better than almost any Georgia Democrat running statewide in a generation, with 48.8 percent, and came within 1.4 percentage points of winning.

ISIS Beheading Plotter’s Conviction Overturned by Obama-Appointed Judge By Pamela Geller

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/08/isis_beheading_plotters_conviction_overturned_by_obamaappointed_judge.html

Daoud Wright is a former Islamic State (ISIS) operative in Boston who was the ringleader of a plot to behead me. In December 2017, he was found guilty on five counts in this terrorist plot against me, which involved Wright maintaining close contact with and even financing a major American ISIS leader, Zulfi Hoxha. Yet late Wednesday afternoon, one of those convictions was overturned. Federal Appeals Court Justice David J. Barron said Wright “could have been simply been ‘role-playing’ with respect to following ISIS’s direction.”

Back when Wright was convicted, the jury didn’t think Wright was just “role-playing.” They brought the verdict in swiftly: according to WBUR, they “reached five verdicts in six hours.” Acting U.S. Attorney William Weinreb said: “Mr. Wright is a terrorist, an ISIS supporter and recruiter who intended to wage war against the United States by beheading people and killing Americans.”

Barron, in contrast, clearly has embraced the claim of the defense during the trial, that Wright was just a fat fantasist sitting in his mother’s basement playing video games and dreaming of glory. But in an extraordinary article that appeared in the left-wing Atlantic in January 2018 entitled “A New American Leader Rises in ISIS,” Seamus Hughes, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, and Bennett Clifford revealed that a “shared interest in video games may have been one of the first things that brought Hoxha together with David Wright.” The video games were not an idle pastime:

This is what energy independence looks like By Silvio Canto, Jr. (Finally!!!!rsk)

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/this_is_what_energy_independence_looks_like.html

The U.S. is now the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas.

Let me reveal my age and remember that I watched President Richard M. Nixon call for “energy independence” many years ago.   His successors have more or less said the same thing.

It appears that President Nixon’s call may soon be reality.  In fact, it looks like we may be “drowning the world” with oil, according to Nick Cunningham:   

The U.S. is still expected to account of the bulk of new drilling and the vast majority of new production, with much of that coming from shale. 

Already, the U.S. is the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas. 

And the pace has accelerated in recent years. 

Why Socialism, and Why Now? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/why-socialism-and-why-now/

“Socialist! is no longer a McCarthyite slur.

Rather, the fresh celebrity “Squad” of newly elected identity-politics congresswomen — Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — often either claim to be socialists or embrace socialist ideas. A recent Harris poll showed that about half of so-called millennials would like to live in a socialist country.

Five years ago, septuagenarian Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) was considered an irrelevant lone socialist in the U.S. Senate — Vermont’s trademark contribution to cranky quirkiness. But in 2016, Sanders’ improbable Democratic primary run almost knocked off front-runner Hillary Clinton, even as socialist governments were either imploding or stagnating the world over.

After Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 general election, Sanders is back, running as a socialist warhorse, promising endless amounts of free stuff, with those promises suddenly being taken seriously.

Sanders, like the members of the Squad, has limited political power. But the celebrity and social media influence of these new and retread socialists has been on the upswing — especially in the current 21st-century climate of radical transformations in economic and political life.

Note the shock over Clinton’s 2016 defeat, the furor directed at a take-no-prisoners Trump, and sudden progressive criticism of the Obama presidency as too temporizing, weak and ineffectual. And there are still other undercurrents that explain why currently socialism polls so well among young Americans.

College-educated Americans collectively owe an estimated $1.5 trillion in unpaid student loans. Many of these debtors despair of ever paying back the huge sums.

ENGLAND AND ISRAEL FROM D.P.S.

Brexit: Boris Turns to the Queen

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/brexit-boris-turns-to-the-queen/90811/

Queen Elizabeth II’s approval of the suspension of Parliament next month is an important step in protecting Britain’s decision to leave Europe. It is crucial to a plan of Prime Minister Johnson that is being set down by furious opponents as, in the words of one, “profoundly undemocratic.” What a hypocritical jibe. For Mr. Johnson seeks to redeem a Brexit referendum that is one of the great acts of direct democracy in modern history.

https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/dsei/2019/08/27/can-an-israeli-missile-give-us-army-aviation-an-advantage-in-future-warfare/

Can an Israeli missile give US Army aviation an advantage in future warfare? Jen Judson

In the mountainous desert of Arizona, an AH-64E helicopter hiding behind 1,600 feet of craggy mountain fires a missile at a target representing a Russian Pantsir medium-range, surface-to-air missile system on the opposite slope.

The Aug. 26 scenario, attended by Defense News, was part of a U.S. Army experiment to achieve greater standoff against enemy threats using the Rafael-manufactured Spike Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) anti-tank, guided missile.

Breaking News: CAIR Touts Partnership with Census Bureau by Steven Emerson

https://www.investigativeproject.org/8045/breaking-news-cair-touts-partnership-with-census

Federal law enforcement knows enough about the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) to order its agents not to engage with the group outside of criminal investigations. But despite that, the U.S. Census Bureau believes the conservative, Sunni-dominated Islamist organization is a trustworthy organization to partner with in next year’s national population count.

“CAIR is proud to partner with the U.S. Census Bureau to ensure American Muslims are fairly and accurately counted in the 2020 Census,” Executive Director Nihad Awad said in a CAIR news release. “Full participation in the census ensures that American Muslims will be better represented in Congress and that their communities receive an equal share in state and federal programs.”

It isn’t clear what CAIR or the Census Bureau will do as part of the partnership. The statement indicated CAIR will promote participation in the Census and advise people how to avoid scams. The Census Bureau did not respond to a request for comment.

“CAIR wants to ensure that that not only are American Muslim communities being fairly counted – but that their neighborhoods are getting a fair share in federal and state funding,” the CAIR release said.

Internal documents seized by the FBI show that CAIR and its founders, Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad, were deeply involved in a Hamas-support network in America created by the Muslim Brotherhood. A committee report described the group’s mission as “defending the Islamic cause in Palestine and support for the emerging movement, the Hamas Movement.”

The Tear-Stained Flogs of Climate Science Tony Thomas

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/08/the-tear-stained-flogs-of-climate-science/

“Uncontrollable weeping, depression, wee hours angst, kiddie stories that can only be read by the cognoscenti as portents of global doom — such is the lot of elite climateers. Yet they struggle on in their misery, alerting a dying and heedless world to the peril only they can see and, of course, their dire need for more grants and funding.”

Climate scientists of the apocalyptic persuasion are melting faster than Greenland ice sheets.  They sob, they rage, they suffer from what shrinks now call “environmental melancholia” or “pre-traumatic stress disorder” — mental anguish about stuff that hasn’t happened. They just can’t understand why the public – i.e. the befuddled Australian electorate – laughs off  computer-generated scenarios of the end of civilisation and, maybe, the end of the human species.

The doyen of Australia’s rising catastrophists, Dr Joelle Gergis, disclosed to August’s edition of The Monthly how she sobs about the climate peril during her kerosene-fuelled air travel.[1] Then she switches to “volcanically-explosive rage” because the hoi polloi don’t want to pay for windmill electricity fantasies.

Environmental scientist Dr Katharine Wilkinson is quoted by Mother Jones (circ. 200,000):  “For some, it’s anger or rage. For me, it’s deep grief… There is no way for me not to have a broken heart most days.”  At a recent panel discussion, she  blurted, “I have no child and I have one dog, and thank God he’ll be dead in 10 years.”

Senior weepniks include Yvo de Boer, former Executive Secretary of the UN group controlling the IPCC. Running the Bali UN climate summit, he had to be led off the podium in tears after losing a procedural motion  “as he worked round the clock to get a deal to protect the Earth from warming.”

The scientists’ pals in the media have got infected too: “Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist turned journalist, has written about his own efforts to contend with climate-change–induced depression:  ‘It’s only getting worse. I confess: I need help.”

Former Army Captain Describes How Social Justice Warrior Policies Harm Military Readiness Debra Heine –

amgreatness.com/2019/08/27/woke-military-former-army-captain-describes-how-sjw-policies-harm-military-readiness/

A former Army officer says former President Barack Obama’s social engineering policies did great harm to the U.S. military and the nation is still “paying a price” for it.

Former U.S. Army Captain James Hasson—a decorated Afghanistan veteran and now a contributor to the Washington Examiner—appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight Monday evening to talk about his new book, Stand Down: How Social Justice Warriors Are Sabotaging America’s Military. 

“The Army that I joined during Barack Obama’s first term was nothing like the Army that I left at the end of his second, Hasson said. “Social justice warriors imposed a progressive agenda on the military with no regard for the harm they caused to military readiness or national security. We’re still paying the price and the American people deserve to know.”

“Traditionally conservatives believe that the left goes after the military by inadequately funding it—just not giving it enough money,” Carlson noted. “You describe in this book something that is far more sinister and effective where they basically try to rot it from the inside.”

The spy in your wallet: Credit cards have a privacy problem By Geoffrey A. Fowler

https://www.washingtonpost.com
In a privacy experiment, we bought one banana with the new Apple Card — and another with the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa from Chase. Here’s who tracked, mined and shared our data.

You might think my 29-cent swipe at Target would be just between me and my bank. Heavens, no. My banana generated data that’s probably worth more than the banana itself. It ended up with marketers, Target, Amazon, Google and hedge funds, to name a few.

Oh, the places a banana will go in the sprawling card-data economy. Despite a federal privacy law covering cards, I found that six types of businesses could mine and share elements of my purchase, multiplied untold times by other companies they might have passed it to. Credit cards are a spy in your wallet — and it’s time that we add privacy, alongside rewards and rates, to how we evaluate them.

Tech columnist Geoffrey A. Fowler tracked the same purchase at Target with two kinds of credit cards: the Chase Amazon Prime Rewards Visa and the Apple Card. (James Pace-Cornsilk/The Washington Post)

Apple, branching out from gadgets, just began offering a needed alternative. The new Apple Card’s best attribute is privacy (though the fashion faux pas of its white titanium has gotten more attention). Apple restrains bank partner Goldman Sachs from selling or sharing your data with marketers. But the Apple Card, which runs on the Mastercard network, doesn’t introduce much new technology to protect you from a lot of other hands grabbing at the till.

With my banana test — two bananas, one purchased with the popular Chase Amazon Prime Rewards Visa and the other with Apple’s Mastercard — I hoped to uncover the secret life of my credit card data. But in this murky industry, I was only partly successful. Unlike my other recent technology experiments, such as watching what my iPhone does while I sleep, I couldn’t hack into my cards to follow the data.

How To Replace Howard Zinn’s Communist Account Of U.S. History For American Kids By Joy Pullmann

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/28/replace-howard-zinns-communist-account-u-s-history-american-kids/

Americans’ affections for and knowledge of their country need to be fed. The lovely new history ‘Land of Hope’ does so. Another new book, ‘Debunking Howard Zinn,’ provides medicine to those food cannot restore.

The perfect companion accompanied my family’s trip West this summer in the modern covered wagon: A new, single-volume book of U.S. history. As our RV motored across the plains, I read of how they were discovered and settled. I looked across the prairies, the badlands, and the mountains and imagined myself coming in an ox-drawn cart instead of a motor vehicle with a gas stove and bathroom.

“Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story,” by University of Oklahoma historian Wilfred McClay, is extremely readable. It’s written in a conversational but not casual tone, and thus approachable to readers from around age ten onward (if the ten-year-old is accustomed to reading large books like “The Lord of the Rings,” as mine is). An attractive writing style may be its first virtue, because an open door is required for people to enter.

A second virtue is the book’s brevity. To be sure, it is a large and somewhat heavy volume, of 429 pages not including the end material. But that is not too much gas for racing across approximately 500 years of history. I found myself constantly wishing to hear more about the people and ideas in the book, and sad but understanding to instead be whisked away to the next set. Thankfully, McClay provides an extensive “additional reading” list to help satisfy a problem inherent to writing a one-volume overview of American history.