NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump pushes prison reform with successful state leaders by Gabby Morrongiello

Posted By on August 9th, 2018

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/trump-pushes-prison-reform-with-state-leaders-who-have-found-success

President Trump will spend Thursday afternoon huddling with administration officials and state leaders to discuss a path forward for prison form in Congress, something his administration has privately pushed for in recent weeks.

The 4 p.m. roundtable at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey will include four Republican governors, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards of Lousiana, and Attorneys General Pam Bondi and Ken Paxton of Florida and Texas, respectively.

White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley noted in a statement Thursday that each of the participants hail “from states that have already implemented” reforms similar to those contained in the First Step Act, a bill that passed the House in May and could be the foundation for a bipartisan deal in the Senate.

The president and his team have been working behind the scenes in recent weeks to modify the legislation to include changes to current sentencing laws and measures that would target recidivism rates among previously incarcerated individuals.

According to the Washington Post, the White House is in close contact with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah on the issue.

But efforts to amend the prison system and reduce sentences for crimes like nonviolent drug offenses could be met with resistance among conservative lawmakers who typically support the president. Some have even suggested that Attorney General Jeff Sessions could complicate matters given his longstanding hard-line views on criminal justice.

“With all that I have done to help Sessions, to keep the president from firing him, I think [he] ought to stay out of it,” grassley told the Post on Thursday.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Cognitive Dissonance and the Lazy Eye by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on August 9th, 2018

A lazy eye, technically amblyopia, is a childhood disorder of sight in which each eye sees a single object but the brain does not fuse the two objects into one single object – the child sees double. Double vision is intolerable to a human being so the brain turns one eye off – hence the name lazy eye. The vision in the turned off eye weakens sometimes to the point of blindness. The goal of treatment is to have both eyes see the object and for the brain to fuse the twin images into a single object. Treatment for amblyopia is designed to force the patient to use the lazy eye. Usually the child wears an ocular patch over the strong eye that forces him/her to use the weaker eye thereby strengthening its vision. Treatment is extremely uncomfortable for the child and often resisted because the vision in the lazy eye is so much weaker than the vision in the strong eye.

So it is with cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a theory developed in the 1950s by American psychologist Leon Festinger who said that inconsistency between thoughts or between thoughts and actions leads to discomfort (dissonance) which motivates changes in thoughts and behavior. When the cognitive dissonance becomes too overwhelming the person turns one of the thoughts off. People cannot tolerate double vision and they cannot tolerate inconsistency – they seek homeostasis.

According to Festinger, “The motivation to reduce dissonance is directly proportional to the magnitude and importance of the discrepant cognitions, and inversely proportional to the magnitude and importance of the consistent cognitions.” So, the more important the subject of the discrepancy the more motivated the person is to end the discordance.

Cognitive dissonance in the 21st century has been weaponized and is the preferred leftist strategy being used to destabilize and drive America crazy – it is a malicious tool of social engineering that impels behavior change. The purpose of leftist cognitive dissonance is submission to its tenets of political correctness, moral relativity, and historical revisionism. The left wants its contradictory ideas and norms to overwhelm the population with anxiety so that traditional norms are turned off and unconventional leftist norms accepted. The left wants one eyed vision.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Summer is a time for Jewish unity and saving Jewish lives By Karna Feinstein-Cohen

Posted By on August 9th, 2018

http://washingtonjewishweek.com/47645/summer-is-a-time-for-jewish-unity-and-savi

Working for Jewish unity should have been an imperative for Jews the world over this summer. All summer long Islamic terrorists in Gaza have been sending incendiary kites in order to set fire to Israeli farmland and forests. The terrorists have also been launching barrages of missiles aimed at Israeli civilian neighborhoods. One firebomb balloon landed in the yard of a kindergarten in the southern Israeli moshav of Tkuma. All of this while the Jewish people were in the midst of the very season when we mourn the destruction of the Holy Temple.

To make matters worse, there were reports of Jews in the United States and in Britain seemingly showing more concern for our adversaries than our fellow Jews. News headlines about Kaddish being recited for Hamas terrorists, Birthright participants being led off of tours to learn about “the occupation,” and Jewish summer camp counselors conspiring to teach their campers the Palestinian narrative seemed all too frequent this summer.

That is why the news that a Magen David Adom ambulance was donated by a coalition of synagogues in suburban Philadelphia was especially encouraging and heartwarming to hear just before Tisha B’Av.

Unfortunately, at this time, Israelis need to know that Red Magen David Adom ambulances must be depended upon once again to save the lives of Jews.

The Talmud Bavli in Sanhedrin 37a states: “Anyone who saves the life of one of the children of Israel, the verse ascribes him credit as if he saved an entire world.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

New Heights of Turkish Hypocrisy by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on August 9th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12817/turkish-hypocrisy

According to a 2015 news report, there were only 1,244 Greeks left in Istanbul at that time. In addition, even those tiny minorities are reportedly leaving Turkey in increasing numbers, to escape the instability and aggression they suffer in the country.

Many Muslim Turks who are on the receiving end of Erdogan’s human-rights abuses, seem shocked by the current undemocratic events in Turkey. They should not be; such abuses have been going on in the country for decades. The Turks are likely to continue living under the oppression that they themselves have created.

Erdogan needs to be reminded that it is not Israel — a vibrant and flourishing democracy with equal rights for all its citizens — whose behavior is reminiscent of dark chapters in history. It is Turkey.

During a parliamentary meeting of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) on July 24, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Israel the “most Zionist, fascist, and racist state in the world.” Referring to the recent passage by Israel’s Knesset of the “Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People,” Erdogan attacked the Israeli government’s view as “no different from Hitler’s obsession with the Aryan race.”

In fact, there is nothing “fascist” or “racist” in Israel’s new law. On the contrary, as David Hazony noted in the Forward:

“This law has been in the works at least since the early 2000s, a time when two major forces arose that threatened the Zionist project as it was historically understood. The first was the rise of ‘post-Zionism,’ a small but passionate intellectual-political movement that explicitly repudiated the idea of a ‘Jewish state’ and sought to transform the country into a “state of all its citizens” by stripping it of any connection to Jewish history, peoplehood, or symbolism.

ISRAEL, MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Hamas Blackmail, Media Silence by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on August 9th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12808/hamas-corruption-media-silence

Hamas’s strategy is to remain in power forever; to achieve that goal, it is prepared to do anything. Hamas has always acted out of its own narrow interests while holding the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip hostage to its extremist ideology and repressive regime.

“Those who claim to be confronting Israel are nothing but corrupt, extortionist bribe-takers. Today, every politician in the Gaza Strip is well aware of the fact that the corruption at the border crossings has become the norm of the official establishment, and not actions by individuals or a certain apparatus.” — Hassan Asfour, former Palestinian Authority minister, human rights activist and political columnist.

Here one always needs to ask: where is the role of the international media in exposing Hamas’s corruption and exploitation of its own people? Why is it that the mainstream media in the West does not want to pay any attention to what Asfour and other Palestinians are saying? The answer is always simple: As far as foreign journalists are concerned, if Israel is not the one asking for bribes or blackmailing the Palestinians, there is no story there.

Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group that rules the Gaza Strip, says it wants Israel and Egypt to keep the border crossings with its coastal territory open on a permanent basis. The message that Hamas has been relaying to Israel and Egypt has been along the lines of: If you seek a cease-fire, you must reopen, on a permanent basis, the Kerem Shalom commercial border crossing (with Israel) and the Rafah terminal along the border with Egypt.

It is worth noting that the Kerem Shalom border crossing has been open for most of the time in the past few years, with Israel allowing the entry of goods and medical supplies into the Gaza Strip. Recently, Israel shut down the border crossing temporarily, but only after Palestinian rioters had set the terminal on fire at least twice in the previous weeks. Israel’s decision temporarily to shut down the Kerem Shalom also came in response to hundreds of kite and balloon arson attacks launched from the Gaza Strip against Israel, and which have set fire to more than 30,000 dunams (more than 7,400 acres) of land in southern Israel

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Model Loses in the Midwest If socialism is so popular, why aren’t the socialists winning? Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on August 9th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270979/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-model-loses-midwest-daniel-greenfield

“Abdul El-Sayed’s Campaign Is a Test for Leftism in the Midwest,” New York Magazine declared.

That was on Sunday.

On Monday, ThinkProgress called El-Sayed’s campaign one to prove “Democratic socialism can win in the Midwest.”

On Tuesday, socialism and leftism failed the Midwest test.

Bernie Sanders, socialism’s confused grandpa, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, socialism’s new model, had flown out to campaign for El-Sayed’s gubernatorial campaign in Michigan. A Guardian article sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation had dubbed the Muslim socialist candidate, “The New Obama”.

El-Sayed had run on socialized medicine under its current misleading brand of “Medicare for All.” It had proven financially unviable everywhere from Vermont to California. And Michigan’s finances make it an especially terrible candidate for socialized medicine. But socialism is having a moment. Or is it?

Bernie Sanders, Linda Sarsour and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the entire left, couldn’t manage to drag El-Sayed over the finish line in a state with a large Muslim population. And El-Sayed didn’t just lose.

He lost badly.

The media had been trying to build up El-Sayed as another Ocasio-Cortez while repeatedly claiming that there was a tight race. The election showed that there had never actually been much of a competition.

El-Sayed isn’t socialism’s only Midwestern misfire. A few days ago, the New York Times was touting Cori Bush as the woman to pull off Ocasio-Cortez’s playbook in the “heartland”. Like El-Sayed, Cori Bush was running on a $15 minimum wage, “Medicare for All” and free college.

Bush was a Black Lives Matter organizer. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came to campaign for her. Like Cortez, Bush was supposed to beat Rep. Lacy Clay, a CBC hack welded to his seat by identity politics, by applying the same insurgent tactics that had allowed Cortez to beat Rep. Joe Crowley in New York.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Ancient War Between the Press and the President By Victor Davis HansonAMERIC

Posted By on August 9th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/09/the-ancient-war-between-

The ancient war between the press and the president

The media are furious that President Trump serially decries “fake news.” He often rants that journalists who traffic in it are “enemies of the people.”

Reporters have compared Trump to mass murderers such as Stalin and Hitler because of his dislike of the press.

Trump may be crude to reporters, but journalists are also not so innocent. They have brought much of the present calumny upon themselves in a variety of ways.

The media seem to have little concern that their coverage is biased even though polls show that the vast majority of Americans believe the media intentionally reports fake news.

Indeed, fake news is not a Trump exaggeration. Despite coverage to the contrary, Trump did not remove a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office. Testimony by former FBI Director James Comey revealed that senior Trump campaign officials did not consult “senior Russian intelligence officials,” as the New York Times reported. Putin denied having compromising information on Trump during an NBC interview after an earlier NBC report said Putin did not deny having such information.

Despite hysterical reports that in testimony before Congress, Comey would refute Trump’s claim that Comey had assured him he was not under investigation, Comey instead confirmed Trump’s story.

MEDIA Comments turned off

The Genocidal Elite, Part I: Who’s Afraid of Sarah Jeong? By Mytheos Holt|

Posted By on August 8th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/08/the-genocidal-elite-part-i

Rahm Emanuel famously warned against letting a crisis go to waste. In the case of the New York Times’ hiring of Sarah Jeong, he’s right.

Make no mistake: Jeong’s hiring is a crisis. It is a crisis for journalism, a crisis for elite opinion, and a crisis for America above all. Those who gloat that Jeong’s hiring is merely another step toward an awakening for most Americans to the bias of the “fake news” media (which it is), or toward liberals accepting extreme positions that are electorally untenable to appease their extremist “woke” base (which it also is), are comforting themselves with minutiae to avoid the truly unsettling larger impact of this development.

Jeong’s hiring is more than a moment of indecent exposure for the New York Times. It is a moment of indecent exposure for the corporatist Left, represented by former President Barack Obama and composed of his core coalitions: coalitions that currently control most levers of cultural power in America.

Since it is apparently unacceptable to refer to Sarah Jeong as racist, as Andrew Sullivan recently discovered to his woe, I’ll avoid the “r-word” and be more descriptive. Jeong is not only a repulsive, hardened bigot whose sentiments would be out of place anywhere but with Stormfront if they weren’t about white people (as was ably demonstrated by the normally infuriating Candace Owens), she is also an unapologetic advocate of ethnic cleansing and genocide. What else can one make of her tweets “#CancelWhitePeople” (cancel them how, exactly?) and “White people have stopped breeding. You’ll all go extinct soon. This was my plan all along”?

The former is, at best, a coy reference to genocide. The latter is literally a celebration of ethnic cleansing. Unless whites cannot be the targets of genocide or ethnic cleansing in the Left’s warped moral universe, which would not surprise me, Joeng is a woman who has endorsed both. Granted, as far as the Left is concerned, she’s probably in great company. They still haven’t apologized for supporting Robert Mugabe, after all.

Yes, All White People
The fact of Jeong’s being an open would-be conspirator in genocide against whites is a gift to white supremacists everywhere. The otherwise alarmist sophistry about “white genocide” peddled in alt-right circles looks a lot more credible when an editor of the New York Times admits to wanting that very thing, and the paper stands by her.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Can Iran Wait out Trump’s Pressure Campaign? BY Lawrence J. Haas

Posted By on August 8th, 2018

U.S. foreign policy toward Iran is approaching a “back to the future” moment, with the Trump White House resurrecting the strategy pursued by President George W. Bush (and, for a while, President Barack Obama) of pressuring Iran economically into abandoning its nuclear pursuits.

The question now is whether President Trump, or if necessary a successor, will push this pressure campaign – which the Administration is supplementing with outreach to Iran’s people and more security cooperation with its regional adversaries – to its conclusion.

If so, the regime in Tehran, which is presiding over an increasingly troubled economy and restive populace, may reach a point where it must choose between its nuclear program and its continued rule.

That’s what Secretary of State Mike Pompeo predicted in May when, after Trump announced that Washington would withdraw from the global nuclear agreement with Iran, Pompeo said that new U.S. sanctions would force Tehran to make a choice: “fight to keep its economy off life support at home or squander precious wealth on fights abroad.”

That Washington is shifting course on a major challenge of foreign policy, with a President upending the approach of his predecessor, is hardly unprecedented. For more than half a century, U.S. policy toward the Cold War shifted from containing the Soviets to engaging in détente to seeking an end to Soviet rule. U.S. human rights policy shifted just as dramatically, with some Presidents denouncing the abuses of allies and adversaries alike and others downplaying them in the interest of realpolitik.

POLITICS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: JOHN JAMES (R) FOR MICHIGAN SENATE*****

Posted By on August 8th, 2018

Michigan’s Underdog Senate Primary Winner John James Offers A Bright Future For Voters And Republicans
Ignoring the Michigan race as an easy win for an incumbent Democrat is a mistake, with several factors making this a contest to watch.By Margot Clevelandhttp://thefederalist.com/2018/08/08/michigans-underdog-senate-primary-winner-john-james-offers-bright-future-voters-republicans/

Political newcomer John James won Michigan’s Tuesday Republican senatorial primary. The previous underdog finished with a solid 9 percent victory over opponent Sandy Pensler, thanks in part to a late-July endorsement from Donald Trump. Trump also recorded a telephone pitch for James that went out to Republican voters the day before they headed to the polls.

James, who suffers from sparse name recognition, will face Democrat Debbie Stabenow when voters head to the polls in November. Prior to the primary, Stabenow held a nearly 20-point lead in a hypothetical head-to-head contest between the Democrat senator and the political novice, leading national pundits to write off the contest.

RealClearPolitics, for instance, sees the seat staying in Democratic hands because of Republicans’ failure to “come up with a solid challenger.” Even with the increasing focus on the 2018 midterm elections—which will determine control of the Senate for the remainder of President Trump’s first term—Michigan’s Senate battle remains but a blip in the national coverage.

Ignoring the Michigan race, however, is a mistake, with several factors making this a contest to watch. First, beltway observers ignore James’ appeal. Salena Zito, whose on-the-ground, back-roads reporting of election 2018 proved prescient, captured this reality in her profile of the senatorial candidate, “John James Could Be the Future Republicans Have Been Waiting for.”

James is a young, accomplished, determined, devout black man, the kind of new conservative that the Grand Old Party needs to shake up next year’s midterm election cycle. He is at once full of energy, grace, command, and passion.

When this young man tells you he is running on conviction, everything about him tells you he is not a poser. He says: “I am called to a life of service. I want to serve my country and my community and my state. When I would come back from Iraq on leave during the great recession, the economic and societal devastation I saw here in my own state floored me.’”