NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Alvin Bragg’s ‘hush money’ case: No due process and a judge whose objectivity is highly suspect By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on April 3rd, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/04/alvin_bragg_s_hush_money_case_no_due_process_and_a_judge_whose_objectivity_is_highly_suspect.html

From the second it was filed, it was clear that Alvin Bragg’s indictment against Donald Trump for the payments he made to Stormy Daniels was a due process disaster. The complaint alleges legal conduct and then concludes that this legal conduct constituted illegal action of an undisclosed nature. The case should have been tossed instantly. But now that we know that the judge trying the case has deep Democrat ties and is trying to prevent Trump from exposing those ties, it’s becoming clear why it’s proceeding to trial.

Last year, John Hinderaker, who is no Trump fan, eviscerated Bragg’s indictment:

You can read Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Donald Trump and a supporting statement of facts here. The indictment is what we expected. It all has to do with paying $130,000 to Stormy Daniels for a non-disclosure agreement, which was legal. The payment was made by “Lawyer A,” Michael Cohen. Trump reimbursed Cohen using Trump’s own money, which was legal. The “34 counts” arise out of the fact that by agreement, Cohen got reimbursed by sending monthly invoices to Trump or his revocable trust. So for each monthly bill from Cohen, we get three counts of falsifying documents: one for the invoice, one for the ledger entry, and one for the check stub. Pathetic.

The indictment alleges that all of this was done “with intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof,” but it never says what that other crime was. The second crime is mandatory because without it, falsifying a business record under New York law is a misdemeanor on which the statute of limitation has run. Presumably the second crime is alleged to be a campaign finance violation. But the payment to Daniels did not violate the campaign finance laws.

What this all boils down to is that, despite 34 counts against him, Trump has no idea what crime he is alleged to have committed.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Biden Must End Qatar’s Malign Role in Gaza Ceasefire Talks and Pier by Con Coughlin

Posted By on April 3rd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20529/qatar-role-gaza-hamas

In one of the more high profile cases involving Qatar’s financing of terrorism, the family of murdered American journalist Steven Sotloff claimed in a federal lawsuit in 2022 that prominent Qatari institutions wired $800,000 to an Islamic State “judge” who ordered the murder of Sotloff and another American journalist, James Foley. The two were beheaded in Syria in 2014, their killings filmed and published in grisly propaganda videos.

The US moved its forces to Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base from Saudi Arabia in 2003, after the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001. There seems no reason why it could not be moved once again to a country in the region that does not support terror groups.

Of even greater concern [than Qatar contributing $5.1 billion to US campuses since 1986], though, is the Biden administration’s willingness to allow Qatar to play a prominent role in negotiations for a ceasefire in Gaza and manage humanitarian aid delivered to a new pier being built in Gaza, even though Doha’s negotiating status and that of a potential caretaker have been thoroughly compromised through its involvement in creating Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure.

Given Qatar’s well-documented support for Hamas, it is clear that no meaningful resolution of the Gaza conflict is possible so long as Doha is continuing with its efforts to negotiate a settlement that is favourable to Hamas, one that would enable the terrorist movement to remain in control of Gaza, or that Qatar should operate, or indeed have anything to do with, the delivery of “humanitarian aid” to what seems planned as Hamas’s new beachhead.

Rather than allowing Qatar to continue playing its double game, where Doha pretends to be a close ally of the West while at the same time sponsoring terrorist groups such as Hamas and the Taliban, the Biden administration needs to wake up to the real threat Qatar poses to the security of the Middle East, and concentrate its efforts on negotiating a ceasefire deal and finding a custodian for Gaza and its new pier that do not require Qatar’s malign involvement.

After the success the Gulf state of Qatar achieved in helping restore the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, Doha is now investing all its energy in seeking to keep Hamas in power in Gaza.

For more than a decade, the tiny Gulf emirate has been using the massive profits it derives from its vast energy resources to sponsor radical Islamist ideology that underpins terrorist organisations such as Hamas.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Death Cult of the ‘Palestinians’ When nothing is better than martyring yourself. by Larry Estavan

Posted By on April 3rd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-death-cult-of-the-palestinians/

The self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell for the sake of Gaza brought to mind a friend who joined the International Solidarity Movement shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Steve had been returning home from San Jose State with the most astonishing supposedly college-educated facts about Israel that set my understanding of history and the world on its ear. But he invoked names like Noam Chomsky, whom my family had taught me to revere, so I just listened.

Eventually, my friend’s passion about “Palestine” led him to join the International Solidarity Movement. Steve used his connections in the international judo community as a pretext to enter Israel, after which the ISM smuggled him into Nablus, a city about 30 miles north of Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, the area today referred to as the West Bank.

Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian National Authority, the deadly rival to Hamas in Palestine, administers Nablus. But rivalries notwithstanding, both Hamas and Yasser Arafat’s groups try to persuade credulous college age kids to martyr themselves for Palestine.

While Steve served his month-long tour of duty in Nablus, I read about the ISM online, and I did not like what I found.

Lee Kaplan’s “StoptheISM” website was instrumental in helping me understand that the ISM was not a peace organization.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Protecting Squatters How woke politicians are doing it – and very successfully. John Stossel

Posted By on April 3rd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/protecting-squatters/

What if you come home and find strangers living in your house?

I assumed you order the squatters out, and if they resist, call the police, and they will kick them out.

Wrong.

Pro-tenant laws passed by anti-capitalist politicians now protect squatters. If a squatter just lies about having a lease, the police won’t intervene.

“It’s a civil matter,” they’ll say. “Sort it out in court.”

Great. Court might cost $20,000. Or more. And courts are so slow, eviction might take years.

In my state, New York, homeowners can’t even shut of utilities to try to get the squatter out. That’s illegal. Worse, once a squatter has been there 30 days, they are legally considered a tenant.

This month, NYC police arrested a homeowner for “unlawful eviction” after she changed locks, trying to get rid a squatter.

“Squatter rights,” also known as “adverse possession” laws, now exist in all 50 states. As a result, evicting a squatter legally is so expensive and cumbersome that some people simply walk away from their homes!

BOOKS Comments turned off

Marxism: the Next Generation A new book traces the genealogy of wokeness. by Bruce Bawer

Posted By on April 3rd, 2024

https://www.frontpagemag.com/marxism-the-next-generation/

If more Americans had been familiar a couple of decades ago with the history recounted in the pages of Next Gen Marxism – a cogent, comprehensive new book by Mike Gonzalez, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and Katharine Gorka, an expert on the terrorist threat (and Sebastian Gorka’s better half) – a lot would be different. For one thing, Barack Obama would almost certainly never have been elected president. Fewer people would’ve been suckered into the George Floyd hysteria. Parents would’ve been warned a lot sooner about the existential danger of sending their kids off to study in the Ivy League. And that’s just for starters.

For the history told in Next Gen Marxism is the history of what we now know as wokeness – the leftist sociocultural ascendancy manifested in (among much else) cancel culture, the Antifa and BLM riots, DEI, “judicial reform,” “squatter’s rights,” the near-ubiquitous promotion of transgender ideology, and (not least) the conspiracy of Hollywood, the media, the D.C. swamp, and Big Tech to destroy Donald Trump’s first term and deny him a second.

It can feel as if the woke madness slithered out of nowhere, like some poisonous snake, just a few years ago, only to be coiling itself tightly around our throats very soon afterward. But in fact, this toxic creature has a long lineage that leads back to Rousseau and the French Revolution in the 18th century, Marx and Engels in the 19th, and the Russian Revolution in the 20th. Then there’s Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), whose revolutionary writings – notably his theory of hegemony – have made him, in the authors’ words, “the unrivaled Marxist political theorist of the past half century.” (And guess who, of all people, is America’s “top Gramsci scholar”? None other than Pete Buttigieg’s father, Joseph. It’s one of a number of surprises here – surprises that, perhaps, shouldn’t be quite so surprising.)

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Many Ways A Porous Border Means Crime Without Boundaries: James Varney and Abigail Degnan

Posted By on April 3rd, 2024

https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/01/the-many-ways-a-porous-border-means-crime-without-boundaries/

It’s undeniable that the massive surge in immigration since the Biden administration relaxed border policies has been accompanied by much more crime, however unquantifiable.

When President Biden’s supporters attacked him for describing the man who allegedly murdered Georgia co-ed Laken Riley as an “illegal,” they shined a light on one of the most contested words in American politics.

The progressive push to describe border crossers as undocumented or unauthorized can also serve to downplay and obscure the massive issue of crime perpetrated and spawned by the influx of millions of migrants since Biden was elected — often in ways that leave the migrants themselves as victims.

While migrant advocates argue that illegal arrivals commit crimes at lower rates than Americans, the claim is unverifiable because the federal government and most states do not break down crimes by immigration status.

Criminologists also note that it ignores the vast web of statutory crimes concurrent with illegal immigration — drug smuggling, human trafficking, child labor violations, prostitution, the black market in employment, and so on.

What remains undeniable by the law of averages is that the massive surge in immigration since the Biden administration relaxed border policies — a surge it puts at more than 4 million people, but other sources put at millions more — has been accompanied by much more crime, however unquantifiable.

Millions of migrants, though not all, run afoul of laws by their situation more than by overtly malign criminal intent. But their first step across the border is a lawbreaking one, and it is often followed by life on the law’s margins: living in the U.S. without insurance or proper work papers, providing illicit labor for unscrupulous or blasé employers, turning to black markets for counterfeit Social Security cards, and often becoming targets for robbers or extortionists. Their desire to come to America creates a vast pool of criminality involving them or those illegally profiting from them.

“On some criminal matters, like homicides, we’ve got a good sense of the scale there whether we solve them all or not,” said Alex Nowrasteh, a vice president at the Cato Institute who studies the economic impact of immigration. “But some of this other stuff is like all black markets in that it is opaque behavior. We don’t know how much crime there might be and in a sense I think it’s sort of unknowable.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

‘The Most Terrifying Poll Result I’ve Ever Seen’

Posted By on April 3rd, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/03/the-most-terrifying-poll-result-ive-ever-seen/

Earlier this year, pollster Scott Rasmussen asked voters a simple question: “Would you rather have your candidate win by cheating or lose by playing fair?”

The answers he got back were, as he put it in a Daily Signal podcast last week, “the most terrifying poll result I’ve ever seen.”

Among all Americans, just 7% said they would want their candidate to win by cheating. As Rasmussen put it, he’d rather see that number lower, but that’s not bad.

But more than a third of the elite 1% he surveyed would condone cheating. And among those who are “politically obsessed” – meaning that they talk about politics every day – that number shot up to 69%.

Keep in mind that this elite 1% group is overwhelmingly liberal. According to Rasmussen, these are mainly well-educated urbanites who make more than $150,000 a year and think Joe Biden is doing a great job. Nearly three-quarters identify as Democrats.

They are also highly influential when it comes to policy, and they are completely out of touch with everyday Americans. A few examples from the survey:

Nearly 60% say there is too much individual freedom in America – double the rate of all Americans.
More than two-thirds (67%) favor rationing of energy and food to combat the threat of “climate change.”
Nearly three-quarters (70%) of the elites trust the government to “do the right thing most of the time.”
More than two-thirds (67%) say teachers and other educational professionals should decide what children are taught rather than letting parents decide.
Nearly three-quarters (74%) say they are financially better off than before COVID, compared with 20% of the general public.

These elites are also the people who are constantly wailing and gnashing their teeth about how Donald Trump is a “grave threat to democracy.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Injustice of the Trump Gag Order Andrew McCarthy

Posted By on April 3rd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/the-injustice-of-the-trump-gag-order/

Biden’s provocative speech is allowed because he didn’t direct anyone to do anything; Trump’s is suppressed even though he didn’t direct anyone to do anything.

New York state judge Juan Merchan has expanded the gag order he slapped on former president Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, to include prohibiting Trump from speaking about his daughter, Loren Merchan, a Democratic political operative.

Merchan doesn’t contend that Trump threatened his daughter. Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, the elected progressive Democrat who sought the gag order and later asked for it to be ratcheted up, has not accused Trump of incitement, much less sought to arrest and charge him for such an offense. How could he? There is no evidence that Trump called for violence or even verbal attacks against Merchan’s daughter.

Instead, Merchan rationalizes that Trump is a powerful figure whose followers construe his statements as directives to resort to intimidation and, potentially, violence — even if the statements do not literally say any such thing. Ergo, Trump must be silenced as if he is guilty of coercion.

According to Merchan, Trump must be treated differently because he’s like a government, not an ordinary defendant: “The conventional ‘David vs. Goliath’ roles are no longer in play as demonstrated by the singular power [Trump’s] words have on countless others.”

But wait, isn’t Trump just using his “bully pulpit”?

After all, only two weeks ago, the Biden administration told the Supreme Court that when the government uses its “bully pulpit” — when it uses the singular power of its words to persuade others — it is not to be blamed for the abusive action of others as long as it hasn’t specifically directed them to take any such action.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

South Africa: Safe-haven for Hamas, Islamic State and al-Qaeda Terrorists by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on April 2nd, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20489/south-africa-hamas

“The South African government is the same thing as Hamas. It’s an Iranian proxy, and its role in the war is to fight the ideological and ideas war to stigmatize Jews around the world. ” — Frans Cronje, CEO Race Relations Institute, interview on Chai FM Radio, January 26, 2024.

The ANC’s lax monitoring and prosecution of the terrorist presence in South Africa may have been the result of an understanding between the government and terrorist groups not to execute terror operations in the country while permitting fundraising to continue without interference from South African law enforcement agencies.

Adding to South Africa’s concerns is the possibility that its citizens waging jihad in Mozambique may eventually return and apply their combat experience at home to target the ANC regime.

South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) has close and long-standing ties to the terrorist organization Hamas. As early as 2015, Hamas had developed personal ties with South Africa’s then-President Jacob Zuma. In October 2015, the ANC hosted a Hamas delegation led by terrorist mastermind Khaled Mashaal, who met with Zuma in Pretoria.

South Africa might appear to have scored another diplomatic victory propaganda victory by getting the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to accept onto its judicial docket the African state’s charge that Israel’s presence in the West Bank is an illegal occupation. This recent initiative follows South Africa’s December 29, 2023 presentation to the ICJ that Israel’s military operations in Gaza were supposedly acts of genocide against the territory’s civilian population.

While South Africa’s latest grandstand maneuver will most likely fail on its lack of merit, the effort did succeed in exposing yet another unsavory dimension of the relationship between South Africa and the terrorist organization Hamas, which initiated the war against Israel on October 7, 2023.

BOOKS, MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

A Stalin-Era Story, Roiling Russia Jay Nordlinger

Posted By on April 2nd, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/04/a-stalin-era-story-roiling-russia/

The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov’s classic, becomes a movie

It’s a miracle,” everyone says. It’s a miracle that Michael Lockshin’s adaptation of The Master and Margarita made it to Russian screens. It’s a further miracle that the adaptation, this movie, has stayed there (so far). Among those who use the word “miracle” is Lockshin himself.

He is the director, and The Master and Margarita? That’s the classic novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, the Russian writer who lived from 1891 to 1940. He worked on the novel from 1928 until his death. In 1930, he burned his manuscript. Then he started again. The novel could not be published during his lifetime. Stalin would not have liked it. It was published decades after Bulgakov’s death, with the first complete version appearing in 1973.

Maybe the most famous line of the book is “Manuscripts don’t burn.” Bulgakov may have picked this up from Christopher Marlowe, whose Doctor Faustus cries, “I’ll burn my books!” (but it is not so simple). There is a lot of the Faust legend in The Master and Margarita: Goethe, certainly. There is even a character named “Berlioz.” (Hector Berlioz composed a kind of oratorio — which can also be staged as an opera — called “The Damnation of Faust.”)

So, that’s what The Master and Margarita is about? A pact with the devil? What the novel is about is a complicated, not really answerable question. Michael Lockshin puts it amusingly, in a conversation with me: “Ask ten Bulgakov scholars what the novel is about, and you’ll get ten different answers. Ask a hundred, and you’ll get a hundred.”

The book has a devil character, yes. (His name is “Woland” and he pays a visit to Moscow, entourage in tow.) The book deals with religion and irreligion. There is a love story. There are various stories, interweaving.

Regardless, everyone can agree on this: The novel depicts the condition of the artist under dictatorship — the life that Bulgakov was living. The life that many were living. Lockshin’s film adaptation depicts the same.