POLITICS Comments turned off

Warren: Native Americans should be ‘part of the conversation’ on reparations By John Bowden

Posted By on February 23rd, 2019

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/431250-warren-native-americans-should-be-part-of-the-conversation-on-reparations

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Friday that Native Americans should be “part of the conversation” on reparations, The Washington Post reported.Warren, a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, made the remarks to about 900 supporters at New Hampshire’s annual McIntyre-Shaheen 100 Club Dinner.

Warren is so far the only 2020 candidate to float the notion of reparations for Native Americans.“I think it’s a part of the conversation,” she said when asked whether they should receive some kind of relief. “I think it’s an important part of the conversation,” she added, according to the Post.Asked to explain her position on reparations, Warren offered few details but pointed to America’s “ugly history” of racism and pointed to her bill to address housing discrimination against black Americans, the paper reported.“America has an ugly history of racism,” Warren told attendees, according to the paper. “We need to confront it head-on. And we need to talk about the right way to address it and make change.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Riddle of Climate Change Linda Goudsmit,

Posted By on February 23rd, 2019

 http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22378/the-riddle-of-climate-changehttp://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Riddle: What climate does climate change change?The Answer: The political climate of course.

Let me explain. Pollution and climate change are two separate issues. Environmental pollution is a man-made problem that humans can and should remedy. Taking responsibility for our behavior is a necessary part of civilized life and eliminating environmental horrors like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is something we all need to support. So far so good.

Climate change, on the other hand, is a natural phenomenon that is an intrinsic part of the earth’s environmental history. For the past millions of years the natural climate on Earth has fluctuated between warm periods and ice ages in approximately 100,000 year cycles. 80-90,000 years of ice age are followed by 10-20,000 years of a warm period.

Climate change was originally called global warming but environmental politicians had to change its name because the earth was embarrassing them by cooling. A rose by any other name is still a rose and so is climate change. The cooling and warming patterns of climate change are a natural, enduring, and ongoing phenomenon.

HISTORY Comments turned off

BERNIE POWER: ALLAH MADE ME DO IT-DIVINELY INSPIRED MURDER

Posted By on February 23rd, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/02/allah-made-

Every human action, positive or negative, can ultimately be attributed to Allah, with the faithful believing a person’s eternal destiny is decreed forty days before that person is born. When a jihadi rampages, he sees himself having no more agency nor free will than the bloody knife in his hand.

A FEW days before Christmas in 2017, Saeed Noori, an Afghani refugee who came to Australia on a humanitarian visa in 2004, ploughed his mother’s car into a crowd on Flinders Street in Melbourne. As a result, sixteen pedestrians were injured and 83-year-old grandfather Antonio Crocaris later died in hospital. As he drove, Noori was shouting “Allah akbar” (Allah is great), according to the off-duty policeman who arrested him. In an interview with the police, he explained his action by saying “Allah made me do it.”

This same exclamation was used by Adel Amastaibou, a French-Moroccan, who stabbed Jewish disc jockey Sebastien Selam to death in Paris in 2003.[1] It was also the justification given by Gulchekhra Bobokulova, an Uzbek nanny, who decapitated a four-year-old girl left in her care in Moscow in 2016.[2]As Quadrant reported in its December, 2018, edition, foreign student Momena Shoma also invoked Allah’s alleged greatness as she repeatedly plunged a carving knife into the man who had taken her into his family home.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Hate-Hoax Bonfire By Jonah Goldberg

Posted By on February 23rd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/g-file/jussie-smollett-hate-hoaxes-mainstream-media/

People give in to the temptation to manufacture reasons to be pitied, and the buyers can’t resist the pitch because it comes with the opportunity to hate included.

Here’s something you might not know: In Nazi Germany, very few Jews staged bogus hate crimes against themselves.Here’s some more trivia: Very few blacks in the Jim Crow South went to great lengths to pretend that they were harassed or attacked by racists.You know why? Because that would be incredibly stupid. What, exactly, would the German Jew who staged an assault on himself gain from it? Where would he or she go to ask for sympathy or recompense? Conjure any horror story you like, the Nazi official you brought it to would say, “Yeah, and . . . ?” The black sharecropper who took the time to make his own cross and burn it on his own property would benefit . . . how?

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Matthew Walther: The Mueller Joke *****

Posted By on February 23rd, 2019

https://theweek.com/articles/824999/mueller-joke 

Excerpts:
“From the very beginning, the special counsel investigation has been a string of anecdotes, compound adjectives (“Russia-linked”), and vanquished dreams in search of a conspiracy. The only crimes of which Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, and the rest have been accused are ones that were alleged to have been committed either well before or long after the 2016 election; in many cases, indeed, they were said to have occurred during the course of the investigation itself — process crimes. None of the charges in question were about colluding with Russia. The only one that has even directly involved the presidential election was a violation of federal campaign finance law.

“The findings of the special counsel, if they are ever in fact released to the public in full, are likely to be insignificant. The investigation itself, however, has been one of the most consequential events in recent American history. It has forced the Democratic Party to change its position on Russia from “The ’80s called” to clamors for a new Cold War. It has led hard-news television reporters to make comments about anodyne diplomatic proceedings that would have done the John Birch Society proud during the height of McCarthyism. It has led otherwise sensible adults to attempt to make arguments about the supposedly sacrosanct nature of the American election system that they will, I hope, find embarrassing in just a few years. It has prevented the duly elected president of the United States from doing his job, poorly or otherwise.”

POLITICS Comments turned off

Clumsy Kamala By Matthew Continetti

Posted By on February 23rd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/kamala-harris-presidential-campaign-style-own-worst-enemy/

Why Kamala Harris may be her own worst enemyNo Democrat running for president has had a better 2019 than Kamala Harris. The numbers tell the tale. The California senator was in the low single digits in polls conducted before her official launch on January 28. She is now in the low double digits, running third behind Joe Biden, who enjoys cosmic name recognition, and Bernie Sanders, whose devoted supporters brought him a second-place finish last time. But polls do not tell the whole story.

Harris raised $1.5 million in the day after declaring her candidacy. That number, impressive for a senator not even a third of the way through her first term, has been bested only by Sanders, a socialist who has a venture capitalist’s talent for raising money. He brought in $5.9 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign. Harris, however, has something Sanders does not.

She is a fresh face of middle age (54 years) and of diverse background (her father is Jamaican, her mother Indian) whose chief rivals at the moment are two geriatric white men. As Democrats search for someone new to lead them against President Trump, Harris has distinguished herself from the field. Her CNN town hall drew record ratings, while Amy Klobuchar’s flopped. And Harris leads the 2020 Democrats in social-media interactions, according to an Axios/Newswhip study. She’s had a good launch. But there’s a caveat.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

If Working with Moscow Is ‘Collusion,’ It’s a Bipartisan Offense By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on February 23rd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/russia-collusion-democrats-republicans-foreign-policy-history/

D.C. has been delusional about the Kremlin since the 1990s.When the “collusion” music stopped, was Donald Trump the guy left without a chair?If the latest reporting is accurate, we’ll find out soon enough. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is said to be wrapping up his probe. His final report could be submitted to Attorney General William Barr in a matter of days.

Did Trump and his presidential campaign “collude with Russia” in the sense of conspiring to commit cyberespionage? That is, were they complicit in Russian intelligence’s hacking attacks on Democratic-party email accounts? There has been no indication that Mueller has such evidence. That is significant because Mueller is a prosecutor. Notwithstanding the irregular counterintelligence framework of the special counsel’s appointment, the principal job of a prosecutor is to determine whether crimes were committed. Espionage conspiracy is the collusion crime that launched the investigation.

Of course, as we’ve repeatedly observed, not all “collusion” is criminally conspiratorial — even if some of it involves dirty politics or is otherwise unsavory. It is easy to evaluate crime: A person is either guilty or not guilty of conduct Congress has criminalized; if the proof is there, he should be convicted. But when behavior is not criminal, yet we are being urged to condemn it because it was undertaken with a particular country, shouldn’t we evaluate how our government has regarded that country?When it comes to “collusion with Russia,” there was an awful lot of that going on in the Bipartisan Beltway throughout the quarter century before Trump launched his White House bid.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Smollett Hoaxers Again the media rushed to conclude the worst about their countrymen.

Posted By on February 22nd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-smollett-hoaxers-11550795374

If you are wondering why the President of the United States took time Thursday to fire off a tweet about the Jussie Smollett case, the answer should be obvious: Mr. Smollett was soaking up the media’s attention this week. That said, the Smollett hoax is instructive—not for what it says about President Trump’s Twitter habits, not even for what it says about Jussie Smollett, but for what it reveals about the practices and social mind-set of the country’s primary media outlets.

Since January, this country has experienced two media bonfires—over Covington Catholic’s high school students and now Jussie Smollett—whose common element is the reflexive judgment that much of American society is irredeemably bigoted.

The first incident occurred on the National Mall between students from Covington, Ky., and a Native American drummer. Within minutes of a video emerging of Nicholas Sandmann smiling into the face of Nathan Phillips, the media—newspapers, TV and social media—erupted with condemnation of the teenager. Mr. Sandmann was also wearing a MAGA cap, which for much of the media now seems to be de facto proof of multiple anti-social phobias.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Aid Showdown in Venezuela Will Maduro use violence against people bringing food and medicine?

Posted By on February 22nd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/aid-showdown-in-venezuela-11550795476

The fight for democracy in Venezuela has retreated from the front pages, but an important moment arrives Saturday when thousands of Venezuelan exiles will try to deliver food and medical supplies to their suffering compatriots. Dictator Nicolás Maduro may try to block the aid, and his forces may resort to violence.

The help from abroad is welcomed by Juan Guaidó, who has been recognized by more than 50 countries as Venezuela’s legitimate government since the elected parliament recognized him as Interim President under the constitution last month. The U.S. has promised $20 million in assistance and Canada has pledged $40 million, though some of that is for refugees in neighboring countries.

Mr. Maduro won’t let the aid arrive via normal port or airport destinations. So the humanitarian convoys plan to cross into Venezuela at two locations across the Colombian and Brazilian borders, as well as via the island government of Curaçao. The volunteers delivering the supplies are taking great personal risks because no one knows how the Maduro forces will respond if the convoys insist on entering and setting up distribution centers. A surrounding swell of public support could protect them, but not if the military or regime militia start shooting.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

“Make Turkey Great Again” Collides with the U.S. by Burak Bekdil

Posted By on February 22nd, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13788/make-turkey-great-again

One of Erdoğan’s regional policy priorities, as U.S. troops in neighboring northern Syria prepare to leave, is to prevent Turkey’s south from witnessing the emergence of “a Kurdish belt”.

While the U.S. supports the idea of a buffer zone in northern Syria to keep Kurdish militants and Turkish troops at a safe distance from each other, Erdoğan insists on sole Turkish control over the planned 20-mile-deep strip.

If Turkey, a NATO member, goes ahead with purchasing Russia’s S-400 air and anti-missile defense system, the U.S. Congressional bill requires the departments to include a detailed description of plans for the imposition of sanctions, pursuant to section 231 of the Countering Russian Influence in Europe and Eurasia Act of 2017 (Public Law 115-44).The summer peak of the crisis between Turkey and the United States, two NATO allies in theory, has been replaced by cautious pessimism.

Few Turks today remember the days of massive Turkish protests against President Donald Trump and his administration, often exhibited in childish ways such as groups gathering to burn fake U.S. dollars or smashing iPhones in front of cameras.

This is, however, an extremely fragile tranquility.On February 25, after keeping the position vacant since October 2017, Washington nominated David Satterfield, a career diplomat, as new ambassador to Ankara, an appointment that still needs to be confirmed by the Senate. In Ankara, a complex puzzle awaits Ambassador Satterfield.