WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

“Jack… Is a Really Kind, Funny Kid… Totally Non-violent.” by Andrew Ash

Posted By on September 18th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14838/jihadi-jack-letts-isis

“He [Jack] is a very humane person and he wanted to do something to help.” Mr Letts said about his son, then adding, “He is a really kind, funny kid who is very gentle. He is totally non-violent.”

As with so much of the mitigating rhetoric that follows the imprisonment of captured British Muslims, Mr Letts’s words sit very much at odds with his son’s previous murderous statements. How mystifying then, that such a peacenik should end up in the bloody killing-fields of Raqqa.

A far bigger problem than what to do with the likes of Jack Letts and Shamima Begum is the possibility of missing British ISIS fighters returning and making their presence felt.

No matter how heartfelt a plea their parents might make on their behalf after they are captured, their children’s real inclinations might best be measured by their actions while they were free to do as they wished.

“This power [to remove citizenship] is one way we can counter the terrorist threat posed by some of the most dangerous individuals and keep our country safe.” — UK Home Office spokesperson, August 2019.

Jack Letts, dubbed “Jihadi Jack”, the British convert to Islam who travelled to Syria in 2014 to join ISIS, has been stripped of his British citizenship. The former dual-national, whose British mother and Canadian father stand by their son, exchanged his picturesque hometown of Oxford for Raqqa, to join the ranks of ISIS. He is currently awaiting his fate in the custody of Kurdish forces.

Letts, who had previously claimed to be an “enemy of Britain” and had posted on social media messages, such as “his threat to behead a group of young British soldiers on Facebook”, now says that he regrets his past misdeeds, and the pain he has caused his parents. “I feel guilty, because I am the reason (my parents) are going through this.” He told a Sky News reporter in June, evidently oblivious to the fact that his actions caused a lot more harm than merely upsetting his parents — both of whom received a suspended prison sentence for — “making money available for a terrorist purpose”.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Kamala Harris’ Presidential Campaign Barely Has a Pulse . . . in California! By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on September 18th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kamala-harris-presidential-campaign-struggling-california-polls/

Since the early days of this presidential primary cycle, there’s been a quiet but intriguing narrative that Kamala Harris was a much stronger candidate than her national polling might suggest. The gist is that while most years, California is just an ATM for Democratic presidential candidates, this cycle the Golden State will vote on Super Tuesday, March 3. The whole process is so much earlier than usual that absentee and early primary ballots will be mailed out the day of the Iowa caucuses.

California has 495 delegates to the Democratic convention, and they are awarded proportionally — almost a tenth of the total 4535 hard delegates. The pro-Harris theory is that while everybody else is scrambling over a share of Iowa’s 49 delegates or New Hampshire’s 33 delegates, Harris can set herself up to win big in her home state and walk away with, say, 250 or so delegates just out of California, setting herself up to be the frontrunner after Super Tuesday.

It’s an intriguing theory, but history is full of candidates who thought they could make their big move after Iowa and New Hampshire and found themselves sputtering on fumes by the time their preferred primary rolled around. In Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 campaign, Florida was supposed to be the firewall, but winning tends to beget more winning, and losing tends to beget more losing. It’s really difficult to become the nominee if you don’t win Iowa or New Hampshire. The only Democrat who’s done it is Bill Clinton in 1992, and that was an oddity because Senator Tom Harkin was a home-state candidate in Iowa (so most observers discounted it), and Clinton was the “comeback kid” who finished second in New Hampshire that year. (Some might also argue that Hillary Clinton’s win in Iowa last cycle was so close it shouldn’t even count.)

ISRAEL Comments turned off

David Singer: Netanyahu and Trump Hatch Plan for a Jordan Exclave in West Bank

Posted By on September 18th, 2019

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s last-minute election pledge to apply Israeli sovereignty in parts of the West Bank could possibly see a large part of the remainder of the West Bank being offered to Jordan as an exclave in direct negotiations between Jordan and Israel.

An exclave is a piece of land that is politically attached to a larger piece but not physically conterminous (having the same borders) with it because of surrounding foreign territory.
Netanyahu’s pledge was clear:

“We will apply sovereignty in the Jordan Valley and the Northern Dead Sea as soon as the next government is established in the next Knesset.  Today I have appointed a working team led by the director-general of my ministry, Ronen Peretz, to formulate an outline for applying sovereignty to the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea”
Netanyahu has now gone even further reportedly saying that if re-elected he plans to annex additional “vital” parts of the West Bank in coordination with the United States.
Trump’s Ambassador in Israel, David Friedman, has already indicated that Trump’s plan will not call for the creation of an additional Arab state between Israel and Jordan based on the 1949 ceasefire lines agreed between those two former enemies.

Friedman declared:

“Under certain circumstances, I think Israel has the right to retain some, but unlikely all, of the West Bank.”
Friedman then declined to say how the United States would respond if Netanyahu moved to annex West Bank land unilaterally – stating:

“We really don’t have a view until we understand how much, on what terms, why does it make sense, why is it good for Israel, why is it good for the region, why does it not create more problems than it solves. These are all things that we’d want to understand, and I don’t want to prejudge.”
Trump seemingly has not yet secured an ironclad guarantee from Jordan or any other Arab interlocutor that they stand ready to negotiate with Israel on Trump’s plan. Releasing it without such a guarantee would constitute political suicide for Trump.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Relax, We’ve Already Seen the Worst of Global Warming Peter Smith

Posted By on September 18th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/09/relax-weve-

“God forbid we have a real global crisis to deal with. Either we won’t believe it after suffering this present hoax or we’ll think that the equivalent of building some windmills will solve it. What global warming / climate change/ climate emergency (choose your favourite) has shown is that large sections of humankind are susceptible to hysterias promoted by elitists; and that governments are singularly incapable of acting resolutely to combat crises to which they say they subscribe. ”

A friend of mine, Geoff Hogbin (Free to Shop, CIS, 1983), made an incisive throwaway comment some time back which has stuck with me. How would the climate models do he said, sceptically, if they were required to perform across data from the end of the Industrial Revolution; from say the mid-nineteenth century. Of course, there is a data problem. Or I imagine that there is.

The official atmospheric concentration of CO2 measured at Mount Mauna Loa in Hawaii goes back only to 1958. HADCRUT temperature data on a global scale goes back to 1850 but you have to ask how consistent are the temperatures recorded in the 1850s with those in the last ten, twenty and fifty years? Satellite temperature data which is probably more reliable than land and ocean-based measures only goes back to the end of 1978.

If it were possible, I would like to see the climate models applied to separate sub-periods, at least back to 1850, to see how they perform. I will guess. They wouldn’t do too well. But my prejudice is showing.

When, four decades ago, I dabbled in econometrics, an important test of a model calculated over a whole data series was to see how it performed using only the first half of the data set and then separately the second half. Was it good for all seasons? Usually it wasn’t. Conclusion: throw it away and begin again.

Almost all of the climate models have over-predicted global temperatures. Or, again, I think that they have. It is easy to find commentaries which say that they have a pretty good record overall, as it is to find the opposite. Hard for us ordinary punters to get a handle on it.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump Supports Brazilian President, Exposes Chile’s ‘Hillary’ There’s a reason the U.S. president gets along so well with Brazil’s leader. Humberto Fontova

Posted By on September 18th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/trump-tropics-slaps-down-chiles-hillary-humberto-fontova/

“I have gotten to know President Bolsonaro well in our dealings with Brazil. He is working very hard on the Amazon fires and in all respects doing a great job for the people of Brazil – Not easy. He and his country have the full and complete support of the USA!” (Pres. Trump Tweet, Aug. 27.)

“In recent months we have seen also a shrinking of civic and democratic space (in Brazil) highlighted by documented attacks against human rights defenders, restrictions on the work of civil society and attacks on educational institutions.” (Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and President of Chile from 2006 to 2010 and again from 2014 to 2018.)

Other items of interest on Bachelet’s C.V. which aren’t often mentioned by the mainstream media: Bachelet’s family served as apparatchiks in Salvador Allende’s Soviet/Cuba-run regime from 1970-73, and were arrested after Pinochet’s coup. Michelle herself, while in college, was a member of Chile’s Socialist Youth (Communist) organization. In 1974 she was arrested and briefly detained. Upon release, this hallowed spokeswoman for human rights and democracy was welcomed with open arms by machine-gun-and-barbed-wire-enclosed Stalinist East Germany, where she lived comfortably until returning to Chile in 1979.

HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Back Story to Hollywood’s Anti-Trump Blacklist Recalling the director who pushed back at the Hollywood Left — and was glad he did. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on September 18th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/back-story-hollywoods

Debra Messing and Eric McCormack, billed as “co-stars” of something called Will & Grace, have called for the “blacklisting” of those attending fundraisers for President Trump. As the Washington Examiner put it, this was “so that Hollywood Democrats could refuse to work with them in the future.” As RT.com had it, this drew “natural comparisons to the late Sen. Joe McCarthy’s efforts in the 1950s to rid Hollywood of ‘Communist sympathizers.’” These efforts might pack more clout if they had the history right.

The primary investigator of Communism in Hollywood was a House committee that started with a probe of fascism during the 1930s, and as William F. Buckley said, should have been called the Committee to Investigate Fascism and Communism. It wound up being called the House Committee on Un-American Activities and after World War II, congressional sleuths were after Communist International (Comintern) agent Gerhart Eisler, whose brother Hanns Eisler was a composer in Hollywood.

When HCUA reps showed up there, that caught the attention of many in the dream factories. As Budd Schulberg noted, the Communist Party was the only game in town during the 1930s and 1940s. The CPUSA controlled unions that read incoming scripts and trashed the work of conservative writers. The Party also smeared and blacklisted actors they didn’t like and attacked them directly during the violent studio strikes and jurisdictional disputes following World War II. The chief anti-Communists were liberal Democrat union leaders such as Ronald Reagan of the Screen Actors Guild and Roy Brewer of IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. 

Reagan was one of the “friendly” witnesses before an HCUA hearing in Washington in November of 1947. The “unfriendly” witnesses, originally 19, were pared down to the “Hollywood Ten,” including Stalinist screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and John Howard Lawson, CPUSA straw boss in the talent guilds. Defiant studio heads proclaimed they would not fire Communists but changed their minds after the hearings.

That was the origin of the “Hollywood Blacklist” legend, and it all took place before Joe McCarthy was any kind of player. Senators do not serve on House committees and McCarthy never had anything to do with Hollywood. His wild, accusatory style did great harm to anti-Communists, particularly the liberal Democrats among them. Anybody who raised any concern about Communism could be smeared with “McCarthyism,” a preferred incantation of the Left for decades. (Although it is crucial to stress that McCarthy’s cause, not his style, was legitimate and has been vindicated.)

MEDIA Comments turned off

Hating Kavanaugh, Killing Journalism The New York Times took its best shot at Justice Kavanaugh — and destroyed itself. David Greenfield

Posted By on September 18th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/hating-kavanaugh-killing-journalism-daniel-greenfield/

Robin Pogrebin, a culture reporter for The New York Times, and Kate Kelly, a Wall Street reporter for the same paper, got together to write The Education of Brett Kavanaugh despite being curiously unqualified.

In sharp contrast to Carrie Severino, a former law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and chief counsel for the Judicial Crisis Network, who co-authored Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation, neither Pogrebin nor Kelly are especially familiar with the world they’re writing about.

And it shows.

Why send a business journalist and a culture reporter to write a book about a legal battle in Washington D.C.? There are two answers. The Education of Brett Kavanaugh is being published by Penguin Random House. Pogrebin is the daughter of leftist feminist author Letty Cottin Pogrebin. Pogrebin’s books, including her last major book Deborah, Golda and Me (Pogrebin has turned on Israel, allying with anti-Israel groups and endorsing boycotts of parts of Israel) have tended to be published by Penguin.

That’s the less cynical answer. The more cynical answer is that nobody actually cared.

MEDIA Comments turned off

NYT op-ed brazenly calls for packing the Supreme Court By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on September 18th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/nyt_oped_brazenly_calls_for_packing_the_supreme_court.html

Just two days after publishing its disgraceful, deceptive op-ed impugning Justice Kavanaugh, the op-ed page editors of the New York Times implement stage two of the paper’s campaign today with an op-ed by its own writer Jamelle Bouie: “To Balance the Scales of Justice, Don’t Be Afraid to Pack the Court.”

The subtitle alone gives away the game: “The lifetime appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh cry out for Democratic hardball in response.”

So they slime justices appointed by President Trump and campaign on destroying the Court’s authority because those appointees are somehow illegitimate.

Lying behind all of this is the growing conviction on the Left that the Supreme Court no longer will be a vehicle for imposing progressive policies without having to change the law or the Constitution.  Even worse, the SCOTUS may become a vehicle for limiting or rolling back some of those policies it formerly imposed — pre-eminently Roe v. Wade, but also other court-imposed doctrines that the Left assured us were now “the rule of law” once the progressive court decided them.

When the Left loses a game, it tries to change the rules.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Woke History Is Making Big Inroads in America’s High Schools By John Murawski

Posted By on September 17th, 2019

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/09/17/woke_history_is_making_big_inroads_in_americas_high_schools_120363.html

Like growing numbers of public high school students across the country, many California kids are receiving classroom instruction in how race, class, gender, sexuality and citizenship status are tools of oppression, power and privilege. They are taught about colonialism, state violence, racism, intergenerational trauma, heteropatriarchy and the common thread that links them: “whiteness.” Students are then graded on how well they apply these concepts in writing assignments, performances and community organizing projects.

At Santa Monica High School, for example, students organize and carry out “a systematized campaign” for social justice that can take the form of a protest, a leaflet, a workshop, play or research project. They demonstrate their mastery of the subject matter by teaching about social justice to middle school students.

 
“Breakup letters” with oppression: Classwork at Environmental Charter High School in Lawndale, Calif.
YouTube/echslawndale.org/videos/ 

Students at Environmental Charter High School in Lawndale are assigned to write a “breakup letter with a form of oppression,” such as toxic masculinity, heteronormativity, Eurocentric curriculum or the Dakota Access Pipeline. Students are asked to “persuade their audience of the dehumanizing and damaging effects of their chosen topic.” 

Students at schools in Anaheim, San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco are taught how to write a manifesto to school administrators listing “demands” for reforms. Some conduct a grand jury investigation to determine who was responsible for the genocide of the state’s Native Americans. And one class holds a mock trial to determine which party is most responsible for the deaths of millions of native Tainos: Christopher Columbus, the soldiers, the king and queen of Spain, or the entire European system of colonialism.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrats’ Impeachment Theater: Corey Lewandowski and Executive Privilege By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on September 17th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/democrats-impeachment-theater-corey-lew

How you come out on the question about the scope of obstruction should determine how you come out on the question of executive privilege.

President Trump’s former campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski is scheduled to testify this afternoon before the House Judiciary Committee. The White House is not objecting to his appearance but has reportedly instructed him not to answer questions about his communications with the president. (See the letter of White House counsel Pat Cipollone to House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler.) This raises an interesting question: May the president assert executive privilege to shield disclosure of his communications with people who are not part of the White House staff and the broader executive branch?

Lewandowski was not a government official in June and July 2017, when, according the Mueller Report, the president instructed him to convey a directive to then–attorney general Jeff Sessions. The directive was for Sessions to narrow his recusal from the Russia investigation so that he could limit then–special counsel Robert Mueller’s jurisdiction — such that Mueller could investigate only to prevent Russian meddling in future elections. That is, Mueller would end his probe of Kremlin interference in the 2016 campaign, on the rationale that Trump had done nothing wrong. Sessions was to add that he had been with Trump for nine months on the campaign and therefore knew that “there were no Russians involved with him.”

The last claim was an overstatement. We now know that the Trump organization was involved in negotiations for Trump Tower Moscow throughout the 2016 campaign. Moreover, while there is no evidence that candidate Trump himself was informed about the matter, his top campaign officials (his son Don Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his then–campaign manager Paul Manafort) met in June 2016 with a lawyer they understood to be a Kremlin emissary (Natalia Veselnitskaya, with an entourage of Russians in tow) in the expectation (unfulfilled) of receiving campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton. (Ironically, as I further detail in Ball of Collusion, Veselnitskaya obtained the materials she presented from Fusion GPS, the same outfit that was working for Clinton to scrounge up campaign dirt on Donald Trump from Russian sources.)

My purpose here, though, is to focus not on questions about the president’s credibility, which congressional Democrats have every right to highlight. Let’s stick with executive privilege.