IMMIGRATION, MEDIA Comments turned off

The Highly Conditional Priorities of Our National News Media By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on June 26th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-highly-conditional-priorities-of-our-national-news-media/

A few respondents have observed that there were some liberals who complained about the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement policies back in his first term. That’s swell, but the amount of attention and outrage directed at separating families, crowded detainment facilities and cooperation with local law enforcement was miniscule from 2009 to 2012 compared to that of today — so miniscule that some of us could fairly conclude that the methods used in immigration enforcement were a second, third, or fourth-tier issue for most Democrats and most people in the national news media, and that many Democrats believed those methods were reasonable and justified as long as their preferred president was running things.

The argument isn’t mere hypocrisy; the argument is that large swaths of the national news media are only truly interested in topics when they are useful for demonizing Republicans. Immigration-enforcement methods that were bottom-of-page-A24 news in the Obama administration become top-of-page-A1 news in the Trump administration.

For example, Vladimir Putin is pretty much the same guy today that he was five years ago and ten years ago and 15 years ago. But the amount of coverage of his regime and the threat it represents to the United States increased exponentially once it became clear that President Trump had a friendly (some would say spectacularly naïve) perspective about him. Even now, the context for most of the discussion about Putin and Russia’s regime remains focused on the treat he presents to Democratic odds of winning in 2020 as opposed to the threat he presents to the United States and its allies. You see overwhelming coverage of the potential for more ridiculous Facebook ads and comparably little coverage of an estimated 120,000 Russian troops in eastern Ukraine.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Erdoğan’s loss is Israel’s gain Istanbul, home to 20 percent of the Turkish population, has been emboldened by the mayoral victory of Ekrem Imamoğlu. It won’t take long for other areas of the country to follow suit. Ruthie Blum

Posted By on June 26th, 2019

https://www.jns.org/opinion/erdogans-loss-is-israels-gain/

When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared, during the lead-up to the country’s March 31 municipal elections, that “whoever wins Istanbul, wins Turkey,” he couldn’t have imagined that the catchy campaign slogan was going to energize his rivals and bode ill for his own continued reign of terror.

Even the initial mayoral victory of Ekrem Imamoğlu—the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate challenging Binali Yıldırım, a former prime minister from Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)— three months ago in Turkey’s largest city didn’t seem to pose too great a problem for the Turkish despot. All he had to do was deem the election invalid on the basis of some phony “administrative error” and force a new round of polls. Which he did, on May 6, by having Turkey’s “Supreme Election Board” annul the Istanbul results.

If that didn’t work, he could always add a few dozen people to the already jam-packed jails, filled with anyone who dared to look at him cross-eyed.

Or so he must have thought.

What he didn’t realize, however, was that the extra few weeks before Sunday’s Istanbul election “redo” would work in Imamoğlu’s favor, enabling him to win by a far wider margin than the first time.

Imagine the Turkish tyrant’s horror at the massive crowds of secular CHP supporters, persecuted Kurds and disgruntled devout Muslims—sick and tired of backing the party hacks of an Islamist autocrat whose agenda never helped them improve their lot—gathering in the streets and hanging from balconies to cheer Imamoğlu.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The US mindset on Israel Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on June 26th, 2019

https://bit.ly/2ZGSEoi

The US mindset on Israel – unlike the US attitude toward other countries – is a bottom-top phenomenon: a derivative of the US public worldview, which feeds legislators in the House and Senate and policy-makers in the White House.

The US mindset on Israel draws its strength from the religious, ethical, moral and cultural roots of the US society, which were planted in 1620 and thereafter upon the arrival of the Early Pilgrims, and bolstered by the Founding Fathers, who authored the US Constitution in 1787.

For example, the Early Pilgrims referred to their 6-8 week sail in the Atlantic Ocean as the “Modern Day Exodus” and “Parting of the Sea.” Their destination was “the Modern Day Promised Land.” Hence, the hundreds of US towns, cities, parks and deserts bearing Biblical names such as Zion, Jerusalem, Salem, Bethel, Shilo, Bethlehem, Dothan, Hebron, Gilead, Carmel, Rehoboth, Boaz, Moab, etc.

Furthermore, the Philadelphia Liberty Bell, which represents the Founding Fathers’ concept of liberty, features an inscription from Leviticus, 25:10, which presents the Biblical core of liberty – the Jubilee: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land and all the inhabitants thereof.” Moreover, Yale University’s seal is inscribed in Hebrew letters: אורים ותומים, which was the power of the High Priest during the Exodus from Egypt. And, the seal of Columbia University features the four Hebrew letters of God: יהוה (Jehovah) and one of God’s Angels: אוריאל (Uriel – Divine Light in Hebrew). The battle against slavery was based on Biblical values and themes, such as “Let My People Go,” and a key leader in that battle, Harriet Tubman, earned the name “Mama Moses.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

My Testimony on Reparations written by Coleman Hughes

Posted By on June 25th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/06/20/my-testimony-to-

Editor’s note: Coleman Hughes delivered the following testimony at a United States House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Bill H.R. 40 on June 19, 2019. If passed, the bill would establish a commission for reparations.

Nothing I’m about to say is meant to minimize the horror and brutality of slavery and Jim Crow. Racism is a bloody stain on this country’s history, and I consider our failure to pay reparations directly to freed slaves after the Civil War to be one of the greatest injustices ever perpetrated by the U.S. government.

But I worry that our desire to fix the past compromises our ability to fix the present. Think about what we’re doing today. We’re spending our time debating a bill that mentions slavery 25 times but incarceration only once, in an era with zero black slaves but nearly a million black prisoners—a bill that doesn’t mention homicide once, at a time when the Center for Disease Control reports homicide as the number one cause of death for young black men. I’m not saying that acknowledging history doesn’t matter. It does. I’m saying there’s a difference between acknowledging history and allowing history to distract us from the problems we face today.

In 2008, the House of Representatives formally apologized for slavery and Jim Crow. In 2009, the Senate did the same. Black people don’t need another apology. We need safer neighborhoods and better schools. We need a less punitive criminal justice system. We need affordable health care. And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery.

Nearly everyone close to me told me not to testify today. They said that even though I’ve only ever voted for Democrats, I’d be perceived as a Republican—and therefore hated by half the country. Others told me that distancing myself from Republicans would end up angering the other half of the country. And the sad truth is that they were both right. That’s how suspicious we’ve become of one another. That’s how divided we are as a nation.

If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further, making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today; we would insult many black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors; and we would turn the relationship between black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction—from a union between citizens into a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants.

EDUCATION, HISTORY Comments turned off

The Fog of Youth: The Cornell Student Takeover, 50 Years On written by Tony Fels

Posted By on June 25th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/06/25/the-fog-of-youth-the-cornell-student-takeover-50-years-on/

On April 20, 1969, an era of student rebellions that had rocked American campuses at Berkeley, Columbia, San Francisco State, and Harvard reached a culmination of sorts with the triumphant exit of armed black students from Cornell’s Willard Straight student union building after a two-day occupation. The students had just won sweeping concessions from the university’s administration, including a pledge to urge faculty governing bodies to nullify reprimands of several members of the Afro-American Society (AAS) for previous campus disruptions on behalf of starting up a black studies program, judicial actions that had prompted the takeover. White student supporters cheered the outcome. And when the faculty, at an emergency meeting attended by 1,200 professors, initially balked at the administration’s request to overturn the reprimands, the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) led a body that grew to six thousand students in a three-day possession of the university’s Barton gymnasium. Amid threats of violence by and against the student activists, the faculty, in a series of tumultuous meetings, voted to reverse themselves, allowing the crisis to end. Student protestors claimed victory for a blow successfully dealt to what they held to be a racist institution.

This positive interpretation of the meaning of the Cornell events has surprisingly remained mostly in place among the left-leaning participants (all within the SDS orbit) with whom I have kept in touch over the past 50 years. Most other former New Leftists whom I have spoken with or who have written about the crisis see it roughly the same way. One might have thought that decades of personal maturation would have produced profound doubts about the wisdom of such extreme actions taken when we were still in, or just past, our teenage years.

The continuity in interpretation by former SDSers is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that the nation at large took a distinctly critical view of the same events right from the start. Most Americans immediately recoiled at the sight of the widely reproduced image, captured in a Pulitzer prize-winning photograph, of the bandolier-wearing student leading the Willard Straight Hall activists, rifles at their side, out of the building. Headlines describing Cornell’s “capitulation” and “disgrace” typified national news coverage. Among 4,000 letters written to Cornell’s top administrators after the crisis, under five percent viewed the administrators’ actions favorably, and the student rebellion no doubt helped reinforce the country’s shift toward conservative dominance that had begun the previous November with the election of Richard Nixon. Yet through this immediate aftermath and on into the future, most of the aging participants have shown little evidence of rethinking.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

12 Things Americans Can Learn From Israel’s Pro-Parenting Culture In Israel By Melissa Langsam Braunstein

Posted By on June 25th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/25/12-things-americans-can-learn-israels-pro-parenting-culture/

There’s longer maternity leave, better health care, designated days for families, and very little helicopter parenting. Can we learn from them?

Do rising expectations for parents help explain falling fertility rates? It certainly sounds logical, at least as one piece of a complex puzzle. Consider that our culture frequently paints parenting as joyless, anxiety-inducing, and expensive. So why would millennials and Generation Z be gung-ho about it?

In his Father’s Day column, Ross Douthat wondered whether current parenting norms are making parents unhappy. He observed that “parents everywhere seem harassed and exhausted, while marriage and childbearing both are falling out of fashion.” That’s true enough across the West—except for in Israel.

Consider that the total fertility rate for American women, “an estimate of lifetime fertility, based on present fertility patterns” dropped to a record low 1.73 in 2018. That puts us squarely below the 2.1 children per woman needed for populations to avoid shrinking. Israeli women, by contrast, average 3.1 kids apiece.

Before we consider why that gap exists, let’s stipulate that 8 million-plus people live in New Jersey-sized Israel, so this is not an apples-to-apples comparison. But I surveyed friends who’ve lived in both countries about the differences, and they offered several. Parenting in Israel is a completely different experience. Perhaps it’s time we consider improving our own parenting culture.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Fraudulent Paper Trail Through the Anti-Trump Conspiracy Diana West

Posted By on June 25th, 2019

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-fraudulent-paper-trail-through-the-anti-trump-c

Remember the simple rule: Anyone who pronounces on Trump–Russia from the baseline of, “Yes, the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC),” or its current, fuzzier iteration, “Russia interfered in the 2016 election,” is either directing, party to, or victim of a seditious campaign of deception against the U.S. people based on a series of untrustworthy if not downright fraudulent documents.

As a longtime student of “Russian interference,” I hasten to add I never rule out “Russian interference”; I just expect to find it inside the anti-Trump conspiracy. But that’s another story.

The outrageous fact is, a stack of dodgy documents makes up the shaky foundation of one of the most virulent attacks on our nation in history; to date, though, they have largely passed inspection. Even as they variously come under scrutiny and dispute, they remain in place, undergirding escalating attacks on the legitimacy of the 2016 election and the presidency of Donald Trump.

There is simply no coming to terms with this conspiracy inside the U.S. government until the U.S. people are able to recognize the fraudulence of the paper trail that got it started, and see that those involved in perpetrating these frauds upon us, the People, are, as we often say but never do, brought to justice.

I hate to say it, but I have a hard time believing we ever will see justice. Still, for the record, here is a list of dodgy documents that set us off on this dangerous voyage through U.S. sedition. Reading through, do bear in mind this rule of thumb from West’s Encyclopedia of American Law: “Evidence is not relevant unless its authenticity can be demonstrated.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Humanitarian Hoax of Planned Parenthood: Killing America With Kindness – hoax 34 by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on June 25th, 2019

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22862/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-planned-parenthood

   http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Planned Parenthood began in 1916 as the American Birth Control League when Margaret Sanger and her two sisters opened the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, NY. They distributed birth control, birth control advice, and birth control information. Abortion was illegal and throughout her incumbency Margaret Sanger maintained that abortion would not be necessary if women had access to birth control. In 1942 the name American Birth Control League was changed to Planned Parenthood Federation of America. What happened?

Planned Parenthood began advocating for abortion law reform in the early 1950s. At first they focused on therapeutic abortions – medically necessary abortions in the first trimester before the fetus is viable outside the womb. By the 1960s, Planned Parenthood advocated liberalizing abortion laws to include non-therapeutic abortions.

The first birth control pill was commissioned by Margaret Sanger and funded by suffragist Katherine McCormick, heir to the International Harvester fortune. On May 9, 1960 the FDA approved the pill and women’s reproductive freedom became foundational to the Women’s Liberation Movement, the sexual revolution, and the anti-establishment counterculture movement which supported Planned Parenthood’s rejection of all limits on abortion.

By 1969 Planned Parenthood was demanding total repeal of all abortion laws.

In 1973 the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Roe vs Wade and abortion was legalized in America. Women had the right to choose whether to have an abortion, but the right was not absolute because of the competing interests of protecting prenatal life, and also the government’s interest in protecting women’s health. The Court issued restrictions that addressed the complexity of the issue in what is known as a balancing test.

“The Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the three trimesters of pregnancy: during the first trimester, governments could not prohibit abortions at all; during the second trimester, governments could require reasonable health regulations; during the third trimester, abortions could be prohibited entirely so long as the laws contained exceptions for cases when they were necessary to save the life or health of the mother.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

U.S. – China Trade War, Part Two: The Thucydides Trap by Chet Nagle

Posted By on June 25th, 2019

https://creativedestructionmedia.com/analysis/2019/06/22/u-s-china-trade-war-part-two-the-thucydides-trap/“We have met the enemy, and they are us.”

Pogo

Intellectual elites and mainstream media have been captivated by Dr. Graham Allison and his prediction that China and the United States are inexorably heading toward war. Like Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, “The End of History and the Last Man,” Dr. Allison’s book is fatally flawed. 

Fukuyama’s analysis of the fall of the Soviet Union created a storm of controversy in learned circles. He postulated that the victory of democracy and capitalism over communism meant that there were no more challenges to freedom and global security, and therefore history was ended. His book is based on philosophers like Plato, Hegel and Marx. Like Fukuyama’s work, the best-selling book by Dr. Graham Allison “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?” is also based on an ancient Greek philosopher. 

The Greek philosopher Allison used was also a general in the wars in which Sparta, an ascending power, ultimately defeated Athens, the most powerful city-state in the Greek multi-state ‘polis.’ Based on a comment by general-philosopher Thucydides, “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable,” Allison and his team in Harvard’s ‘Thucydides Trap Project’ cited 16 instances in the last five hundred years in which an established power was challenged by an ascending power. In 12 of those 16 examples, the rivalry resulted in war. 

Allison considers the United States and China to be the 17th case, with the Harvard Belfer Center describing it as “irresistible rising China is on course to collide with an immovable America.” Among the reasons the work of Allison and his team is flawed, besides describing China as “irresistible,” is that they ignored important details in their 16 examples. One such detail is that in 11 of the 12 cases that resulted in war, the cause was a rising power (like Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany) that was violently and aggressively expanding its territory.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Insider Blows Whistle & Exec Reveals Google Plan to Prevent “Trump situation” in 2020 on Hidden Cam

Posted By on June 25th, 2019

https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/06/24/insider-blows-whistle-exec-reveals-google-plan-to-prevent-trump-situation-in-2020-on-hidden-cam/
BIG UPDATE: YouTube has REMOVED the video from their platform. The video is still available on this website page.
UPDATE 1: Congressman Louie Gohmert issued a statement, saying “Google should not be deciding whether content is important or trivial and they most assuredly should not be meddling in our election process. They need their immunity stripped…”
UPDATE 2: Google executive Jen Gennai RESPONDED to the video, saying, “I was having a casual chat with someone at a restaurant and used some imprecise language. Project Veritas got me. Well done.” 
Insider: Google “is bent on never letting somebody like Donald Trump come to power again.”
Google Head of Responsible Innovation Says Elizabeth Warren “misguided” on “breaking up Google”
Google Exec Says Don’t Break Us Up: “smaller companies don’t have the resources” to “prevent next Trump situation”
Insider Says PragerU And Dave Rubin Content Suppressed, Targeted As “Right-Wing”
LEAKED Documents Highlight “Machine Learning Fairness” and Google’s Practices to Make Search Results “fair and equitable”
Documents Appear to Show “Editorial” Policies That Determine How Google Publishes News
Insider: Google Violates “letter of the law” and “spirit of the law” on Section 230