EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Melissa Langsam Braunstein :Harvard Students Vote To Send Student Money To Anti-Semitic Group Israel Apartheid Week has a history of not promoting open, honest, or nuanced conversation. It’s about slandering democratic Israel by comparing it to apartheid South Africa.

Posted By on April 5th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/05/harvard-students-vote-send-student-money-anti-semitic-group/

If everyone admitted to a college is invited to campus, but Jewish students are made to feel less welcome, is the campus still everyone’s home? I never wondered about this as an undergraduate. But I absolutely did this week, after reading that Harvard’s Undergraduate Council (UC) funded Israeli Apartheid Week on campus.

When I arrived in Cambridge in the fall of 1996, Harvard felt like the Upper West Side’s northern outpost. That is, it was very culturally Jewish — Seinfeldian, if you like. Obviously, most students weren’t Jewish, but there was a decent-sized Jewish minority, and we were well integrated into campus life. It was an incredibly comfortable place for someone like me who was actively involved with the campus Hillel and kept kosher. But I’m not so sure I’d feel identically if I were a student there now.

This year doesn’t mark Harvard’s first IAW, but it appears to be the first one that’s received funding from the student government. And that seems like a notable change.

The UC, which is supposed to represent all Harvard undergraduates, recently voted 21-13-4 to grant $2,050 — serious money for student groups, and more than the UC’s typical grant — to fund the Palestine Solidarity Committee’s Israeli apartheid Week.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Chevron Keeps Winning, Its Leftist Foes Keep Losing By Jack Fowler

Posted By on April 5th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/chevron-keeps-winning-its-leftist-foes-keep-losing/

There is always a latest chapter in the Legal Fraud of the Century, which is the story of a determined leftist environmentalist cabal’s attempt to shake down of Chevron for many billions over bogus claims – adjudicated in a bribed and perjury-ridden Ecuador courtroom — that the energy company (via Texaco, which it purchased in 2001) had devastated rainforests and forced cancer upon the locals when drilling for oil in the South American country in previous decades.

American courts have ruled that the shakedown – masterminded by Steven Donziger – was a criminal RICO operation. The subsequent wreckage of his cabal (an excellent description of such is Kevin Williamson’s 2014 NR piece on how its nefarious role in the case crushed Patton Boggs) is vast, but like Monty Python’s Black Knight, the disbarred attorney continues to hop the globe seeking a court or international tribunals that will order Chevron or a local subsidiary to fork over the penalty determined by the corrupt Ecuador court.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Beto O’Rourke: Trump’s Rhetoric Echoes the Third Reich By Mairead McArdle

Posted By on April 5th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/beto-orourke-trumps-rhetoric-echoes-the-third-reich/

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke compared President Trump’s rhetoric to that of Nazi Germany Thursday, citing in particular Trump’s controversial comments about illegal immigrants.

At a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa, the former representative from the border town of El Paso, Texas was harshly critical of “the rhetoric of a president who not only describes immigrants as rapists and criminals, but as animals and an infestation.”

“Now, I might expect someone to describe another human being as an infestation in the Third Reich,” O’Rourke remarked to a crowd of students at Morningside College. “I would not expect it in the United States of America.”

Later Thursday, O’Rourke doubled down on his comments, telling reporters, “I compared the rhetoric that the president has employed to rhetoric that you might have heard during the Third Reich.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Court Ruling Implies That Barr Must Redact Grand-Jury Info from Mueller Report By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on April 5th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/mueller-report-attorney-general-grand-jury-information/

Democrats will complain, but the attorney general can’t be faulted for following the law.

In disclosing the Mueller report, Attorney General William P. Barr will have to redact grand-jury information. That is the upshot of the ruling today by a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

I flagged this case, now called McKeever v. Barr (formerly McKeever v. Sessions), last week. It did not arise out of the Mueller investigation, but it obviously has significant ramifications for the Mueller report — in particular, how much of it we will get to see.

At issue was this question: Does a federal court have the authority to order disclosure of grand-jury materials if the judge decides that the interests of justice warrant doing so; or is the judge limited to the exceptions to grand-jury secrecy that are spelled out in Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure? The D.C. Circuit’s McKeever ruling holds that the text of Rule 6(e) controls. Consequently, judges have no authority to authorize disclosure outside the rule.

This is significant for the Mueller report because Rule 6(e) does not contain an exception to secrecy that would permit disclosure to Congress.

The case involves a writer, Stuart McKeever, who was researching a book on the disappearance of Columbia University professor Jesús de Galíndez Suárez in 1956. It was suspected that Galíndez, a very public critic of Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, was kidnapped and flown to the D.R., where he was murdered. In the course of a federal investigation, suspicion fell on John Joseph Frank, a former FBI agent and CIA lawyer, who later worked for Trujillo. Frank was eventually prosecuted for failing to register as a foreign agent but never charged with any involvement in Galíndez’s murder.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The stunning truth about Ivy League scholarships…

Posted By on April 5th, 2019

https://www.openthebooks.com

The 25 colleges and universities with the largest endowments in the nation hold a quarter-trillion in existing assets. So, why do these schools reap billions from the Department of Education each year?

Collectively, the eight schools of the Ivy League have a $119 billion endowment fund.

Let’s put this into perspective: With this amount, the Ivy League could provide full-ride scholarships to its entire undergraduate student body for the next 51 years without any new gifts.

With continued gifts at the present rate, this could go on forever.

The Ivy League schools can’t argue they need taxpayer assistance… And yet, the Ivies reaped $26 billion in federal funding over a six-year period.

We published a full editorial at the Washington Times, co-authored with economist Stephen Moore, on this fiscal phenomenon. Read the editorial here.

Remember, this is just one example of the wasteful spending we uncovered in our investigation into the U.S. Department of Education.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Selective Compassion

Posted By on April 5th, 2019

From the “End of Day” Report Newsletter: Sent by Janet Levy

As we are experiencing a massive surge in illegal immigration at our southern border, I want to revisit a critical element that is often overlooked in this debate.  The media and many on the left speak of illegal immigration as a humanitarian issue or they couch it in terms of compassion. 

But where is the left’s compassion for taxpayers and for the innocent American victims of criminal illegal aliens? Whenever President Trump talks about illegal immigration, he frequently says that open borders means more crime. 

Predictably, left-wing pundits accuse the president of being “xenophobic,” even though he often praises legal immigration. But the president is absolutely correct. 

Not every illegal immigrant coming across the border is looking for work and a better life. According to government statistics, illegal aliens make up 21% of the federal prison population. 
The 730,000 criminal aliens in state and federal prisons were responsible for 7.5 million offenses. 

They committed: 1 million drug crimes500,000 assaults133,800 sex offenses33,300 homicide-related offenses24,200 kidnappings and1,500 terrorism-related crimes.It cost taxpayers $2.5 billion a year to incarcerate them.  Texas bears the brunt of this burden.  In the past eight years, it has incarcerated nearly 200,000criminal aliens.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Arguments In Favor Of Brexit Are More Persuasive Than Ever by Francis Menton

Posted By on April 5th, 2019

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-4-4-the-arguments-in-favor-of-brexit-are-more-persuasive-than-ever

Back at the time of the UK’s referendum on “Brexit” in June 2016, I wrote two posts on the subject: one on the June 23 date of the vote, and the other four days later. The first advocated in favor of the “leave” position, and the second gave some reasons to believe that the just-endorsed departure would be a good thing.

One of the things I predicted was that the actual departure would not happen quickly or easily. The reason was that the forces of “stay” controlled high positions in the government and other leading institutions, had much to lose personally, and would not give up easily:

[D]o not expect the totalitarians and vested interests to give up easily. I anticipate a protracted campaign of obstruction and delay, as the grafters desperately fight and claw to hang onto every last grant and perk.

Boy was I right about that one! Here we are, going on three years later, and the Brexit has still not occurred.

Meanwhile the Brexit “process” has turned into a Perils of Pauline soap opera, barely escaping one supposed disaster after another seemingly every few days.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on April 5th, 2019

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22541/the-squeaky-wheel-gets-the-greasehttp://goudsmit.pundicity.com  http://lindagoudsmit.com

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease” is an American proverb that means that whoever screams the loudest gets the attention.The Council on Islamic-American Relations (CAIR) is a very squeaky wheel. 

CAIR is the propaganda arm of the Muslim Brotherhood whose unapologetic stated objective in North America is settlement – NOT assimilation. The tactical strategy for the Muslim Brotherhood in America is documented with precision in their 1991 Explanatory Memorandum which was recovered in an FBI search of the Virginia home of Ismail Elbarrasse. The Memorandum was found among 80 banker-boxes worth of documents discovered hidden in Elbarrasse’s sub-basement.

The document confirms that most Muslim-American groups in the United States are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Explanatory Memorandum was entered into evidence in the 2008 U.S. v Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial that convicted HLF leaders of providing material support to Hamas Terrorist Organization. In other words the Holy Land Foundation, an Islamic “charity” was the fundraising arm of the Palestine Committee in the US. The Palestine Committee was created by the Muslim Brotherhood to support Hamas in its efforts to create an Islamic Palestinian state by eliminating the State of Israel through violent jihad.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Right From Wrong: Benny Gantz’s immoral analogy Yes, the leading contender in the race for the premiership actually compared the incumbent leader of the only democracy in the region to a radical Islamist autocrat. By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on April 5th, 2019

Blue and White Party chairman Benny Gantz crossed a rhetorical redline this week that made every other malicious maneuver of the current campaign, on both sides of the political spectrum, seem like child’s play.
https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-From-Wrong-Benny-Gantzs-immoral-analogy-585792

In an interview he gave on Tuesday – exactly one week ahead of the Knesset elections – Gantz likened Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-From-Wrong-Benny-Gantzs-immoral
Expressing “deep worry” for Israeli democracy, Gantz explained, “What we… see is a phenomenon reminiscent of Turkey, where Erdogan is protecting himself from investigations and from other efforts aimed at preventing corruption.”

Even the Times of Israel reporters did a double take on that statement – which was not only a pathetically mild and misleading description of Erdogan’s Stalin-like purges and absolute control of every sector of Turkish society, but also an egregious misrepresentation of Netanyahu’s legitimate efforts to counter charges that have not even been formally brought against him. Unlike Turks subjected to Erdogan’s repressive rule, after all, Israeli citizens enjoy human and civil rights. Among these is the presumption of innocence.But it was only the former part of Gantz’s outlandish analogy that his interviewers challenged, by asking whether he really fears that Israel “could become like Turkey.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Turkey’s Elections: What Do They Mean for Turkey and Erdoğan? by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on April 5th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14004/turkey-municipal-elections-results

The election results in Istanbul, now disputed by the AKP, put the opposition candidate into the lead by a margin of 23,000 votes in a city with 10.5 million voters.

“Though Turkey’s government and many commentators are blaming the Trump administration and foreign speculators for the country’s economic downturn, the reality is that it was already ‘baked into the cake’ many years ago due to the credit bubble that formed.” — Jesse Colombo, Forbes.

Simple religious Islamist conservative and ultra-nationalist populism are still keeping Erdoğan in power, but there are signs that, if the economy keeps getting worse, those forces may not be able to save him. There are signs that this is taking place.

On March 31, the Turks went to the ballot box to elect mayors for their cities. Ostensibly the election results marked President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s 15th consecutive election victory since his (Islamist) Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in November 2002. The AKP won the biggest number of votes (44%) nationwide. Its ultra-nationalist ally, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) won 7% of the vote. That was good news for Erdoğan. In reality, it was good but incomplete news for Turkey’s Islamist strongman.

“Who loses Istanbul [in elections] loses Turkey,” Erdoğan roared in a 2018 speech, underlying the importance of big Turkish cities in municipal elections.