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Come All and Receive! By Matthew Continetti

Posted By on January 24th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/02/11/come-all-and-receive/

The Democrats are routinely diluting the significance of citizenship

Gavin Newsom has big plans for California. Among his first acts as governor was to ask the state legislature to expand health coverage for illegal immigrants. California began offering insurance for illegal-immigrant children some years ago; now Newsom wants to raise the age limit for receiving subsidized health care to 26. “We will never waver in our pursuit of guaranteed health care for all Califor­nians,” he said in his inaugural address. That includes individuals residing in the state illegally.

Around the same time, on the other side of the country, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio offered a similar proposal. He wants the city to spend another $100 million on its shambolic public hospital system so that illegal immigrants are treated at clinics before they crowd emergency rooms. “From this moment on in New York City,” de Blasio said, “everyone is guaranteed the right to health care — everyone.”

The Newsom and de Blasio initiatives are more than your standard bleeding-heart social spending. Democratic politicians are beginning to act on the realization that they govern large numbers of people who, under the letter of the law, should not be here. Coastal and metropolitan Democrats increasingly represent individuals who cannot vote, do not pay income taxes, and are ineligible for military service and jury duty. This epiphany has led the progressive movement to begin to elide and subvert the distinction between citizens and noncitizens. Such policies do not simply undermine the rule of law. They erode our sense of national identity, our constitutional structure, and the idea of Ameri­cans as a self-governing people.

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Trump’s Plan to Fund Wall Fails, Two Republican Senators Defect By Jack Crowe

Posted By on January 24th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trumps-plan-to-fund-wall-fails-two-republican-senators-defect/

The Senate on Thursday voted down a Republican-backed spending bill that would have ended the longest-running government shutdown in history and allocated $5.7 billion for the construction of President Trump’s long-promised wall on the southern border.

The bill was defeated 50–47 in a vote that largely broke down along party lines, with Republican Senators Mike Lee of Utah and Tom Cotton of Arkansas the only Republican’s to vote against and Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia the only Democrat to vote in favor.

A Democrat-backed stop-gap spending bill that would have funded the government through February 8 without allocating any additional funds for border security also failed to pass the Senate Thursday afternoon.

The competing bills were widely considered test votes, as the White House and leaders of both parties were aware in advance that they lacked the bipartisan support required to clear the 60-vote threshold.

Mindful that Republicans lacked the seven Democratic votes needed to pass their spending bill, the White House reportedly viewed Thursday’s vote as an opportunity to gauge support for President Trump’s shutdown strategy within the Republican caucus. The Trump-backed bill granted a temporary, three-year asylum to immigrants brought to the country illegally as children in exchange for border-wall funding.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Destiny in Retrospect By Tracy Lee Simmons

Posted By on January 24th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/02/11/churchill-walking-with-destiny-book-review/

Churchill: Walking with Destiny, by Andrew Roberts (Viking, 1,152 pp., $40)

We might ask ourselves which is worse — disdain for Winston Churchill or simple ignorance of this colossal figure and his place in history. Ignorance may be unsurprising in a period when, as a recent poll shows, many young people think Churchill a character from fiction. But the disdain can come only from minds corrupted by propaganda and laced with ingratitude for Western civilization and, just as much, for those who have sacrificed for its defense in those darker days before our own brilliantly flabby, righteous age arrived. The fact that astronaut Scott Kelly can be slapped down for tweeting a quote by Churchill (“In victory, magnanimity”) on grounds that the great man was so clearly a “racist” is regrettable enough. That the ill-schooled Kelly so quickly apologized to trolls tells us much about the desperately low tone of our culture these days.

So perhaps yet another biography of Churchill, one of the most written-up men of the last century — this is the 1,010th biography, Roberts notes — doesn’t need to justify itself after all. This is true most especially when the British historian Andrew Roberts writes it. Churchill’s world and its environs have been so richly and perspicaciously documented by Roberts for decades that the real oddity would be his reaching the end of a fruitful career as a historian of vast events and great men with no such tome to his credit.

And a tome any proper biography of Churchill must be. Little else can do justice to a man whose stupendous political journey lasted over 60 years and who died just past his 90th birthday. With nearly a thousand pages of chiseled prose, Roberts allows himself the room to lay out all the highlights and not a few sidelights of his subject’s long and varied life, following him from a benighted childhood and on to Harrow and Sandhurst, through military and journalistic triumphs and misadventures from Cuba to Sudan, India, and South Africa, and then by the age of 25 to Parliament, from which point the rest would be history. The result is a tour de force of scrupulous selection and astute appraisal, perhaps the best full-scale biography to date in a field where the competition has been crowded and stiff.

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Ilhan Omar Endorsed Somalia’s New President. Four Days Later, Omar’s Brother-in-Law Had a Powerful Job in His Administration By David Steinberg

Posted By on January 24th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/davidsteinberg/ilhan-omar-endorsed-somalias-new-president-four-days-later-omars-brother-in-law-had-a-powerful-job-in-his-administration/
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) became the first Somali-American legislator in United States’ history when Minnesota’s House District 60B elected her on November 8, 2016. The distinction won Omar immediate fame and influence in Somalia, which was entering the final stretch of a critical presidential election of its own.

According to prominent federal security clearance defense attorney Sean Bigley (read below), Omar’s documented actions in the weeks that followed would almost certainly prevent any applicant with such a background from obtaining or keeping a U.S. security clearance.

Ilhan Omar is now a U.S. congresswoman, however. Elected federal officials are exempted from the arduous security clearance process; they hold de facto clearances once sworn in to office. Further, Omar will likely be privy to a significant amount of classified national security information this term. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has granted Omar’s request for a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

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“Corruption … affects virtually every aspect of the Somali society: from public officials’ misuse of public goods for private gain and the solicitation of bribes in exchange for basic services to the clan-based patronage networks used to obtain employment and political appointments.” — Transparency International, 2018

The common hyperbole for describing government corruption — “rampant,” or “endemic” — does not help adequately illustrate Somalia’s recent administrations. “As bad as it gets” does the job, literally: Transparency International, the massive NGO dedicated to exposing public-sector corruption, has placed Somalia dead-last among all nations on Earth in its annual “Corruption Perceptions Index” — for 11 consecutive years. Somalia has occasionally managed to tie, though never outrank, North Korea.

Any significant involvement by a U.S. citizen in Somalia’s election process would likely raise eyebrows at America’s intelligence agencies.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinian Arab Leadership Calls “Coexistence” With Israelis Criminal By Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Posted By on January 24th, 2019

A brand new, two-story shopping mall just opened in Atorot, a poor, largely Arab section of northern Jerusalem that will serve both Palestinians and Israeli Jews. It is not being celebrated by everyone and may come with a price.

The mall has drawn the ire of Palestine Arab leadership who say ‘coexistence’ between the groups is criminal and in many ways, it reveals the internal machinations of the deep divide that has made the U.S. peace negotiations so difficult.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week that a U.S. peace push “won’t be [uniquely] a U.S.-driven process” and would require the cooperation of all parties, including allies in the region.

“Ultimately, the Israelis and the Palestinians will have to come to an agreement,” he said.

If anything, the Atorot Mall, is another test of that process. It is just across Israel’s separation barrier from Ramallah, the government seat of the Palestinian Authority. Atorot, known as Al-Ram in Arabic, is a little more than six miles from downtown Jerusalem.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum Is Israel’s inevitable war with Iran already underway?

Posted By on January 24th, 2019

https://www.jns.org/opinion/is-israels-inevitable-war-with-iran-underway/

It would be a mistake to dismiss nuclear threats coming out of Tehran as mere saber-rattling, given its stated intention and increasingly overt attempts to annihilate Israel, even at its own potential peril.

Israelis enjoying themselves on the slopes of the Mount Hermon ski resort in the Golan Heights were startled on Sunday afternoon to witness an Iranian missile heading their way. Had it not been intercepted by the Iron Dome missile-defense system, many innocent vacationers, as well as residents in the area, would have been killed.

The surface-to-surface projectile, fired by the Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force in Syria, did not cause the skiers to pack up their gear and run for shelter and hot chocolate, however. After filming the scene on phones and helmet cams, they picked up where they left off. For most Israelis, the rain of enemy rockets is not nearly as novel as mounds of fresh snow.

Disappointment was high, then, when the Israel Defense Forces announced that the popular site, adjacent to the Syrian and Lebanese borders, would be closed on Monday. The IDF was already planning the retaliatory strikes that it carried out late Sunday night against Iranian bases and soldiers stationed near Damascus—a mere 30 miles from Mount Hermon.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Global confidence reaffirmed in Israel’s economy Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger,

Posted By on January 24th, 2019

https://bit.ly/2TbG6lY

1. Israel’s most successful ever government bonds issue totaled 2.5BN Euros: 1.25BN 10-year bond and 1.25BN 30-year bond. The European demand was six times the amount of the bond issued (15BN Euros!) in spite of the low interest rate – 1.5% for the 10-year bond and 2.5% for the 30-year bond – reflecting confidence in Israel’s economy, Israel’s responsible management of its economy and Israel’s solid bond-repayment track record. Some 300 investors from Britain, Germany, France and other European countries – including European Central Banks, pension fund and insurance companies – participated in the bond issue. At the same time, Saudi Arabia had to increase its interest rate to 3%, in order to raise 3BN Euros (Globes Business Daily, January 10, 2019).

2. Israel surged to 5th place in the latest Bloomberg Innovation Index, 2019, trailing South Korea, Germany, Finland and Switzerland, ahead of Singapore, Sweden, USA, Japan, France, etc. Israel was 10th in the 2018 Index. In 2019, Israel is the only country ahead of South Korea in the category of research & development expenditure as a percentage of GDP (4.3%). Israel’s major surge is in the area of patent activity – from 19thspot in 2018 to the 4th spot in 2019. The Bloomberg Innovation Index ranks the globe’s 60 most innovative countries according to the following criteria: GDP, productivity, patent activity, concentration of researchers, postgraduate PhD students engaged in research & development per 1-million people and concentration of high-tech companies (Globes, January 22).

3. The largest ever Japanese delegation of 200 senior executives of 100 leading Japanese corporations, including Mitsubishi and Toshiba, along with Japan’s Minister of Economic Affairs, visited Israel, exploring ways and means to expand bilateral trade and investment. In 2018, Israel’s export to Japan grew 42% to $1.16BN, mostly medical, optical and metal equipment and products. Since 2014, Japanese companies have made over 200 venture capital investments in Israel’s high tech sector. However, Japan – the world’s 3rd largest economy – accounted for only 2% of foreign investment in Israel during the past five years. In addition to commercial high tech, Japan is increasingly interested in cooperation and acquisitions in the areas of defense and homeland security. Israel’s innovation track record has enticed dozens of Japanese companies to explore the potential of research, development and production cooperation with compatible Israeli companies. Japan’s and Israel’s Economic Ministers signed an agreement, enhancing digital health cooperation, teaming substantial Japanese corporations and ground-breaking Israeli startups. Another agreement highlights the matching of Israeli innovations (e.g., artificial intelligence, cyber technologies) and Japanese manufacturers, targeting the Japanese market. A leading Israeli venture capital fund, Vertex, has benefitted from hundreds of millions of dollars, invested by 31 Japanese investors, including financial institutions and major corporations (Globes, January 17).

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Exposed: Arabs silently taking over land in Gush Etzion

Posted By on January 24th, 2019

https://worldisraelnews.com/exposed-arabs-silently-taking-over-land-in-gush-etzion/?utm_source=browser&utm_medium=push_notification&utm_campaign=PushCrew_notification_1548352996&pushcrew_powered=1

Israeli NGO and politicians campaign to fight Palestinian landgrabs in areas where Israel is in full control.

By Aryeh Savir,TPS

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has recently increased its efforts to take control of a strategic area in the Nahal Heletz area between Jerusalem and Gush Etzion.

Regavim, a research-based legal advocacy NGO which says it is dedicated to ensuring accountable use of Israel’s national land, published on Wednesday a report which exposes the PA’s construction work at Nahal Heletz, near Har Gilo on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

A large number of heavy tractors have been turning the landscape of the riverbed into a wide and flat expanse, and ancient agricultural huts have been renovated and transformed into residential buildings for Arabs.

These lands are survey lands which are not privately owned and therefore can be declared state lands.

Yishai Hemo, the Regavim director in Judea and Samaria, argues that the engineering work and high cost involved in the effort prove that this is not a private initiative.

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The Dangers of Defining Deviancy Up written by Ilana Redstone Akresh

Posted By on January 24th, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/01/24/the-dangers-of

In 1993, then-Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan published an essay entitled “Defining Deviancy Down,” in which he argued that understanding the shift towards more permissive attitudes regarding crime and violence is crucial to their reduction. Specifically, he asserted that the redefinition of norms around deviant behavior (or “defining deviancy down”) had collectively shaped society in unintended ways, resulting in a desensitization to what might have once been considered shocking. By way of illustration, Moynihan referenced the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago—the notorious gangland execution of seven men committed during the prohibition era. He reminded his readers that those killings had elicited universal public outrage, and then contrasted that reaction with a contemporary example: “On the morning after the close of the [1992] Democratic National Convention in New York City in July,” he wrote, a headline reported “3 Slain in Bronx Apartment, but a Baby is Saved…A mother’s last act was to hide her little girl under the bed.” These were also execution-style killings, but they were greeted with only a barely discernible nod of dismay. In the six decades between 1929 and 1992, a transformation had occurred in the levels of violence and criminal behavior that the public seemed willing to accept.

The idea of defining deviancy down has attracted renewed attention from commentators in the Trump era. In recent years, Moynihan’s analysis has been used to understand how Trump’s impact on the culture has increased the acceptability of previously taboo language, attitudes, and behaviors. In November 2015, Jonathan Capehart wrote an article for the Washington Post entitled “How Trump is ‘defining deviancy down’ in presidential politics.” Capehart argued that, “As the 2016 Republican presidential contest drags on, [Moynihan’s] diagnosis fit politics in general and the campaign of Donald Trump in particular. Just when you thought the Big Apple billionaire couldn’t sink any lower, he does. He gleefully dances through the nativist, racist, misogynistic slop as if he were Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain. And to make matters worse, Trump is rewarded for it.” In a similar vein, Albert Hunt wrote an op-ed for Bloomberg in May 2017 entitled, “The Age of Trump is ‘Defining Deviancy Down’: When the president seems inept or corrupt, we shrug. If he ever fumbles through adequately, he is praised.”

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Leftist Jew Hatred Has Come to America By Karin McQuillan

Posted By on January 24th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/23/leftist-jew

The ascendancy of the hard Left, which is Barack Obama’s lasting legacy, is transforming life in America for Jews. The comfort, safety, and equality of American Jews are not acceptable to leftists. According to the doctrine of intersectionality, minority groups are united in grievances against Western Civilization and whiteness. The Left began with blacklisting and boycotting conservatives. Now American Jews are in the crosshairs, no matter how liberal their politics.

The response from the mainstream Democratic Party has been to jump on the bandwagon. Will American Jews jump off? Not as long as they continue to live in Democrat communities and work in the professions on the two coasts and college towns, where becoming Republican means losing your friends, being shunned at synagogue, and stunting your career—or if you are starting out in life, being shut out of careers in academia, the arts, mainstream journalism, and Silicon Valley. For most Jews, the social and career cost of changing party affiliation is a such a tall cliff, it feels suicidal, that is, the loss of their entire identity. People don’t make changes like that easily.

Why do American leftists have such a problem with Jews? The short explanation is the identity politics that are President Obama’s toxic legacy to the country, by which he and his thousands of trained activists have redefined the Democrat Party. You’ve got to fit into a favored grievance group, and no matter how left-wing they are, Jews are white. Equally bad, their ethnic group as a whole is wildly successful. Jewish success strips the grievance crowd of their main argument.

Jews have suffered huge discrimination in America. They arrived penniless and made it in one or two generations, embracing America with love despite the discrimination they faced everywhere. Jews do not do grievance and envy and self-destructive addictions, it is just not in their Biblical culture. Shut out of corporate America, elite colleges, medical schools, law offices and banks, they created their own. As small and large independent businessmen, Jews made it in America. Jews are living proof that nothing can stand in your way in America if you have good values like education and a strong family. The identity politics, blame-America crowd can’t stand the Jewish-American success story.

American Jews count their blessings for our wonderful country where we all have the God given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, in recognition that God created all men of equal worth in His eyes. America is the only country on earth, outside of Israel, where Jews have been treated fairly and allowed to flourish. The left hates America. Sohrab Ahmari points out “The intersectional left is committed to the opposite idea–that everywhere in the West, there are hidden ‘structures of oppression’ that trap minorities along the lines of race, gender and sexuality.” Jews have no place in this ideology. So they are cast out.