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Theresa May Courts Opposition in Bid to Break Brexit Impasse Prime minister’s new tack risks leaving the U.K. with stronger ties to European Union than she has sought By Max Colchester and Jason Douglas

Posted By on April 3rd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-k-s-may-to-seek-talks-with-labour-further-brexit-extension-11554226292

LONDON—British Prime Minister Theresa May made an about-face in her Brexit strategy Tuesday by saying she would pursue a different deal with the opposition Labour Party, an approach that could keep the country more closely bound to the European Union than she previously envisioned.

Following a marathon seven-hour cabinet meeting, Mrs. May outlined plans to request a short extension of Brexit negotiations, ideally no longer than to May 22, to give the government time to hammer out an agreement with Labour and avoid leaving the bloc without a deal to smooth the U.K.’s exit.

“It requires national unity to deliver the national interest,” she said during a televised speech from inside her Downing Street residence.

The plan, which will likely lead to a softening of her Brexit deal, marks a last-hour roll of the dice for Mrs. May as she tries to find a path out of the Brexit logjam that has dominated her tenure.

After months of trying to appease euroskeptics in her Conservative Party, Mrs. May is now looking to lure opposition lawmakers instead. The Labour Party has pushed for the U.K. to remain in a customs union with the EU, a significantly different vision for Brexit than Mrs. May has espoused.

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A Rebuke for Turkey’s Strongman Erdogan’s party suffers its worst setback since it came to power in 2002.

Posted By on April 3rd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-rebuke-for-turkeys-strongman-11554247334

After President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan easily won re-election amid a currency and debt crisis last year, it seemed nothing could loosen his grip on Turkish politics. The results of Sunday’s local elections are welcome evidence that the strongman isn’t invincible.

Mr. Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) received perhaps its biggest rebuke since coming to power in 2002. Preliminary results show AKP controlling 39 of Turkey’s 81 provinces, down from 48. More significant, the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) won the mayoral election in the capital city Ankara. The opposition also leads a tight race in Istanbul, where Mr. Erdoğan launched his political career as mayor in 1994.

An AKP-led alliance still won about 52% of the overall vote, while the biggest opposition coalition trailed with some 38%. But this is an embarrassment for the president who held dozens of rallies and effectively made the local elections a referendum on his rule.

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China’s Han Superstate: The New Third Reich by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on April 3rd, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13995/china-third-reich

China’s ruler, Xi Jinping, demands that the five recognized religions — official recognition is a control mechanism — “Sinicize.” The Chinese, as a part of this ruthless and relentless effort, are destroying mosques and churches, forcing devout Muslims to drink alcohol and eat pork, inserting Han officials to live in Muslim homes, and ending religious instruction for minors.

In recent years, there have been many ugly portrayals of Africans in Chinese media, and although the skit last year was not the worst, it was striking because the main state broadcaster, by airing it to about 800 million viewers, made it clear Chinese officials think of Africans as both objects of derision and subhuman.

Concentration camps, racism, eugenics, ambitions of world domination. Sound familiar?

There is a new Third Reich, and it is China.

More than a million people, for no reason other than their ethnicity or religion, are held in concentration camps in what Beijing calls the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and what traditional inhabitants of the area, the Uighurs, say is East Turkestan. In addition to Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs are also held in these facilities.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

People for the Ethical Treatment of Plants and Rivers By Janet Levy from 2008

Posted By on April 2nd, 2019

 https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2008/12/people_for_the_ethical_treatme.html#ixzz5jyKZxqe2 

In what they deem a natural progression of age-old struggles for social justice, environmentalists gleefully predict that the 21st century will be an era of environmental justice. The freeing of nature from enslavement by man is their main objective for this period. Other goals include upholding the right of rivers to flow unimpeded, safeguarding the dignity of plants and consideration for the sensitivities of animals. According to environmentalists, social justice struggles have evolved from emancipation of slaves, suffrage for women and civil rights for minorities to, now, the fight for the inalienable, legal right of nature to exist and prosper.

If this sounds far-fetched, recent developments indicate that this phenomenon is clearly on the horizon. Wild Law – a concept that acknowledges that the elements of nature have rights and that humans exist on an equal plane with other members of the “Earth Community” – is gaining acceptance. Wild Law recognizes the rights of forests to remain unlogged, mountains to remain intact, a bog to resist a drainage project and polar bears to sue for air degradation. Recent laws in Switzerland, Ecuador and the State of Pennsylvania form the vanguard of this emerging crusade, as detailed below. Such a movement away from a human-centered world toward an earth-centered planet is a paradigm shift that could have serious consequences.

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Ruthie Blum: Turkey, Ukraine and Israel: An electoral comparison

Posted By on April 2nd, 2019

https://www.jns.org/opinion/turkey-ukraine-and-israel-an-electoral-comparison/

Israelis across the political spectrum have been talking a lot lately about “fearing” the results of the April 9 elections. This is not only preposterous when contrasted with the situation in Turkey, but also reeks of ingratitude towards Israeli democracy.

Ahead of next week’s Knesset elections, Israelis disgusted with the ugliness of the current campaign would do well to consider the results of Sunday’s ballots in Turkey and Ukraine.

Let’s began with the latter, as a bit of comic relief—in this case, literally—is always welcome. Yes, the person who garnered the majority of votes in Ukraine’s presidential election is comedic actor Volodymyr Zelensky, the star of a popular TV series about a schoolteacher who becomes president as a result of a rant against corruption that goes viral on YouTube. Apparently, his performance on “Servant of the People” was so convincing that it caused the public to want him in the role for real.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Trump and Conservatives: It’s Complicated (But It’s Working) Charles Lipson

Posted By on April 2nd, 2019

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/04/02/trump_and_conservatives_its_complicated_but_its_working_139929.html

Donald Trump is not a conventional conservative. Far from it. He’s a populist of the right. His strong appeal to conservatives lies in his nationalism, tax cuts, deregulation, and appointment of originalist judges.

Unlike Ronald Reagan, who had well-formed political ideas, Trump’s notions about public policy come from gut instincts, reinforced by cheering crowds. Their common thread is “Don’t tread on me.”

Trump’s disdain for tradition is the opposite of orthodox conservativism. It is most visible in the wrecking ball aimed at NATO and other allies. If you are rich enough and want our military protection, he says, then pay up or forget it. Prove you deserve our protection. Show us the money.

Trump’s threat to walk away is more credible than that of previous presidents because he is instinctively closer to Robert Taft’s isolationism than to Arthur Vandenberg’s internationalism. The Taft-Vandenberg debate in the late 1940s settled Republican foreign policy for the next 60 years. Vandenberg, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led bipartisan support for President Harry Truman’s policies, including the Marshall Plan and forming NATO. The party’s stance was sealed in 1952 when Dwight Eisenhower defeated Taft for the presidential nomination.

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JUSTICE WECHT BREAKS JUDICIAL SILENCE ON ANTISEMITISM BY JOEL COHEN*****

Posted By on April 2nd, 2019

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/culture-news/282694/justice-david-wecht-antisemitism

A sitting American justice from the state of the Pittsburgh massacre speaks out on First Amendment rights, Christchurch, and the dangers of a pivotal moment in our history.

Rarely, if ever, has a sitting American judge spoken out publicly on the threat of anti-Semitism in America. However, here, Justice David N. Wecht, a judge serving on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, the highest court in the state and the oldest Supreme Court in the nation, has chosen to speak out boldly and firmly about what he perceives to be a national crisis.

The Honorable David N. Wecht was elected by the citizens of Pennsylvania to a 10-year term on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 2015. His father’s parents ran a grocery store not far from where Justice Wecht was sworn in. Before his election to the state’s Supreme Court, he served four years on the Pennsylvania Superior Court (the state’s intermediate appellate court). He attended Yale University and Yale Law School, where he served as notes editor of the Yale Law Journal, and then clerked for Judge George MacKinnon of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Justice Wecht and his wife were married at the Tree of Life synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where he grew up. Tree of Life was the site of the Oct. 27, 2018, attack in which 11 Jews were murdered by a white supremacist.

I interviewed Justice Wecht in March of this year.

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Conspicuous Grieving and the Politicisation of Tragedy Paul Collits

Posted By on April 2nd, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/04/conspicuous-grieving-and-the

The recent tragedy of Christchurch was, for once, not an act of the God of earthquakes but yet another in the long history of actions that serve to remind us all of the “evil that men do”.

One always hopes, against hope, that there will be at least a few days, even a few hours, for those grieving to be allowed to begin to deal with their losses, to come to terms with the enormity of what has occurred, and simply to set their faces to the suffering and pain that must come their way. One hopes, though sadly nowadays it is only a futile hope, that they will be left in peace by the analysers, the 24-hour-news cycle jockeys, the instant pundits and ideologues of all persuasions. But no, it was indeed too much to hope for. Even when the site of the carnage is dear, sweet, innocent New Zealand.

Alas, there is a phenomenon emerging in the age of instant media and of hopelessly divided societies – perhaps we should call it Tarrant’s Law – of the shrinking of the time between an atrocity and the first political comment about it. There can be little doubt that this time lapse is getting shorter and shorter, and that the propensity to be outrageous in one’s politicisation has proportionally increased as well. The prize for Christchurch surely goes to the tweeters who blamed Donald Trump, for “enabling” white supremacist slaughters. But there have been other contenders; politicising tragedy now takes a number of broad forms.

First, there is the naming of adjectival terrorism. The aversion that many in the mainstream and leftist media and across most police forces to placing the “M” adjective in front of terrorists who slaughter Christians and the infidel generally, lest we light a fire under rampant, casual Islamophobia, strangely vanishes in cases where Muslims are the sad victims of the slaughter.

In cases like Christchurch, the adjectives tumble out. There were three here: “Australian”, “white” and “right wing”. Labelling early saves analysts and ideologues the trouble of justifying this later. By then, everyone is usually on board with the descriptors, and therefore with the embedded understanding of why something like this happens. The use of adjectives merely saves you from having to come up with any deeper explanation of what are inevitably complicated matters with both proximate and remote causes.

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The Primordial Ooze of the Collusion Conspiracy It all began with the infamous dossier, compiled by a former intelligence agent hired by Fusion GPS. by Peter Van Buren

Posted By on April 2nd, 2019

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-primordial-ooze-of-the-collusion-conspiracy/?utm_source=ntnlreview&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=amconswap

The end of the Special Counsel’s investigation into the non-existent conspiracy between President Donald Trump and the Russians has created an army of “Mueller Truthers,” demanding additional investigations. But Republicans are also demanding to know more, specifically how the FBI came to look into collusion, and what that tells us about the tension between America’s political and intelligence worlds. In Rudy Giuliani’s words “Why did this ever start in the first place?”

The primordial ooze for all things Russia began in spring 2016 when the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, through a company called Fusion GPS, hired former MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele to compile a report (“the dossier”) on whatever ties to Russia he could find for Trump.

Steele’s assignment was not to investigate impartially, but to gather dirt aggressively—opposition research, or oppo. He assembled second and third hand stories, then used anonymous sources and Internet chum to purported reveal Trump people roaming about Europe asking various Russians for help, promising sanctions relief, and trading influence for financial deals. Steele also claimed the existence of a “pee tape,” kompromat Putin used to control Trump.

Creating the dossier was only half of Steele’s assignment. The real work was to insert the dossier into American media and intelligence organizations to prevent Trump from winning the election. While only a so-so fiction writer, Steele proved to be a master at running his information operation against America.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Blend Texas House and Senate Bills for a Campus Free-Speech Win By Stanley Kurtz

Posted By on April 2nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/blend-texas-house-and-senate-bills-for-a-campus-free-speech-win/

The Texas State Legislature is considering several bills designed to protect freedom of speech on the state’s public-university campuses. The Texas State Senate has already passed a bill with many positive features, from the creation of a disciplinary code for shout-downs, to protection against the use of security fees as a tool of censorship, to protection for student groups facing discrimination for their beliefs. Although the Texas Senate bill is clearly a step forward, it is also weak in areas where bills being considered by the Texas State House are strong.

Two campus free-speech bills have been introduced in the Texas State House, one by Representative Bill Zedler and one by Representative Briscoe Cain. Readers may remember that Cain was himself subjected to an outrageous shout-down at Texas Southern University in 2017.

The Zedler bill includes two features in particular that would strengthen the senate bill. First, the Zedler bill would create an oversight system controlled by the university’s regents. This is critical, because the refusal of campus administrators to protect basic rights is at the center of the campus free-speech crisis. Administrators at the University of Texas, Austin, for example, have established a bias-reporting system that severely inhibits free speech. And Briscoe Cain himself was prevented from proceeding with his talk not only by student disruptors, but by the president of Texas Southern University. So we can’t rely on university administrators to report on their own performance, which is what the Senate bill does. Once administrators know that their bosses, the regents, are going to submit an annual oversight report to the legislature, which holds the university’s purse-strings, they will be far more likely to protect free speech on campus. So creating an oversight system is the single most powerful step the legislature can take to ensure that the new law will actually be enforced.