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Keith Ellison Gets His #MeToo Moment The DNC deputy chair’s alleged pattern of abusing women. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on August 14th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271025/keith-ellison-gets-his-metoo-moment-daniel-greenfield

Until last week, Karen Monahan’s progressive credentials had been impeccable. But now the activist is one of two women who have accused one of the top figures on the left of physical and emotional abuse.

Born in Iran before the Islamic Revolution, she was adopted by American parents and not only identified as an Iranian-American, but also worked with the pro-regime National Iranian American Council (NIAC).

Keith Ellison was also a NIAC regular. He had spoken before the Iranian group and had received fundraising support from it. The first Muslim congressman from Minnesota, with a list of Islamist and leftist connections as long as his right arm, was a natural NIAC ally.

Monahan had also been an organizer with the Sierra Club and worked with the Environmental Justice Advocates of Minnesota (EJAM). Ellison was one of the founders of EJAM. Both Ellison and Monahan were leftists moving through the same claustrophobic maze of Minnesota leftist political organizations.

At some point after Ellison’s divorce from his wife, Kim Ellison, they began a relationship that lasted for years until it ended in 2016. Now, Karen Monahan is accusing Ellison of domestic abuse. Her tweets and statement allege that Ellison assaulted her, cheated on her and badly traumatized her.

BOOKS Comments turned off

V.S. Naipaul’s ‘Universal Civilization’ The ‘curmudgeon’ author and Nobelist believed that the pursuit of happiness will outlast all its rivals.By Tunku Varadarajan

Posted By on August 14th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/v-s-naipauls-universal-civilization-1534200168

V.S. Naipaul, who died Saturday at 85, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on Oct. 11, 2001, a month after al Qaeda’s attack on the American homeland. As many in the West were still struggling to fathom what drove Islamist fanatics to commit mass murder, it was reassuring to see the Nobel go to Naipaul, who had unapologetically insisted on the universality of Western beliefs.

In the days after 9/11, when a sense of spiritual decapitation briefly prevailed, a lecture Naipaul had delivered in 1990 at New York’s Manhattan Institute leapt back to life from the archives. I received it by email from a friend, read it hungrily, and passed it on to others I thought would be healed by it.

The lecture was titled “Our Universal Civilization,” and in it Naipaul tried to answer what he called some “very serious questions”: “Are we—are communities—only as strong as our beliefs? Is it enough for beliefs or an ethical view to be passionately held? Does the passion give validity to the ethics? Are beliefs or ethical views arbitrary, or do they represent something essential in the cultures where they flourish?”

In response, Naipaul extolled some of the social values al Qaeda had seemingly just attacked, among them “the pursuit of happiness” and “the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

Remembering Nobel Prize Winner V.S. Naipaul, A Brilliant Defender Of Humane ValuesBy Tony Daniel

Posted By on August 14th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/13/remembering-nobel-prize-winner-v-s-naipaul-a-brilliant-defender-of-humane-values/ With the death of the Nobel Prize winning author, we’ve lost a great writer who both valued civilization, and saw the world as it is, not how he wished it to be. There are no rose-colored glasses when reading a V.S. Naipaul book. It’s a yellowed, sere world he looks upon, and once you […]

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Kavanaugh Document Fight Grassley is following the precedents set by Democrats on Kagan.

Posted By on August 13th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-kavanaugh-document-fight-1534202892

The Senate Judiciary Committee announced Friday that confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will begin September 4, nearly two months after his nomination. That’s more than enough time for Senators to examine his voluminous public record, but Democrats are alleging a cover-up.

“We are seeing layer after layer of unprecedented secrecy in what is quickly becoming the least transparent nominations process in history,” declared Minority Leader Chuck Schumer last week.

We hear that communications are strained, if they exist at all, between the staffs of Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking committee Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who is holding her breath and stomping her feet in tune with Mr. Schumer. The California Democrat is running for re-election against a left-leaning Democrat who claims she’s not doing enough to resist all things Trump. She isn’t about to be outflanked on the left regarding Judge Kavanaugh.

In any event, Democrats are the ones demanding the unprecedented. Their latest complaint is that documents from Mr. Kavanaugh’s years in the White House counsel’s office are being vetted for release by William Burck, a former colleague in the George W. Bush White House. “Unless it was produced by the National Archives, every document you see from Judge Kavanaugh’s White House tenure was selectively chosen for release by his former deputy, Bill Burck. This is not an objective process,” said Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin.

BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘How Schools Work’ Review: The Worm in the Apple A former education secretary doesn’t pull his punches when it comes to teachers’ unions; still, the Obama administration didn’t take them on. Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews “How Schools Work” by Arne Duncan.

Posted By on August 13th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-schools-work-review-the-worm-in-the-apple-1534201715?mod=cx_picks&cx_navSource=cx_picks&cx_tag=contextual&cx_artPos=1#cxrecs_s

Political memoirs are rarely tear-jerkers, but Arne Duncan’s look back at his time as secretary of education under Barack Obama may make school reformers want to cry. It’s not so much that Mr. Duncan, who served from 2009 to 2015 after a stint as head of the Chicago public schools, was bad at his job or in any way unprepared for its challenges. In fact, as “How Schools Work” makes clear, he understood a great deal about the problems plaguing American education. But that very understanding makes his cabinet tenure—recounted here alongside other tales from his public life—feel like a painful missed opportunity.

Mr. Duncan’s theme is that our education system is built on lies. He tells the story of volunteering, while he was in college, at his mother’s after-school tutoring program in Chicago, where she helped neighborhood kids with their schoolwork. His principal charge was a young African-American named Calvin, a rising high-school senior who had more than enough basketball talent to play for a Division I team. Mr. Duncan assumed that Calvin, a solid B-student from an intact, hard-working family, just needed some help studying for the ACT ahead of applying for college—until the first day that Mr. Duncan sat down with him and realized that he was reading at the level of a second-grader. Despite a summer of hard work, Calvin wasn’t going anywhere.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Milwaukee’s Public School Barricade The bureaucracy defies a state law on selling vacant buildings

Posted By on August 13th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/milwaukees-public-school-barricade-1534203534

Teachers’ unions and their liberal allies are desperately trying to preserve the failing public school status quo. Witness how the Milwaukee Public School (MPS) system is defying a state mandate to sell vacant property to charter and private schools.

Milwaukee’s public schools are a mess. Merely 62% of students graduate from high school in four years, and proficiency rates are 15% in math and just over 20% in English. Families are escaping to charter and private schools, which has resulted in 11,000 vacant seats and a budget shortfall that’s expected to swell to $130 million within five years.

We wrote in 2015 about how MPS blocked charter and private school purchases of empty school buildings, which prevented high-performing schools like St. Marcus Lutheran from expanding. The state legislature then passed a law ordering the city and school district to sell vacant public school buildings.

Well, what do you know, the district still hasn’t sold a single vacant building to other schools despite 13 letters of interest from private and charter operators for 11 vacant buildings, according to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. Following protests from the teachers’ union, a local zoning board denied a bid by Right Step, a private school for children expelled from Milwaukee public schools. The city hasn’t even classified many unused buildings as “vacant.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

After Helsinki: A Coup in the Making Srdja Trifkovic

Posted By on August 13th, 2018

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2018/September/43/9/magazine/article/10845200

President Donald Trump’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and their joint press conference in Helsinki on July 16 have ignited an ongoing paroxysm of rage and hysteria in the U.S. media. Morbid Russophobia and Putin-hate are déjà-vu, but the outpouring of vitriol against Trump has been raised to an entirely new level. The deplorable vulgarian of yore has morphed into a metaphysical incarnation of evil, an “enemy of the people” par excellence. Orwell’s “two minutes of hatred” has become a continuous, 24/7 orgy.

The roll call of attackers reads like a Who’s Who of the U.S. Deep State. The list of their hyperbolic adjectives (including “sellout,” “traitor,” “Putin’s pussycat,” etc.) is familiar to the curious, starting with Barack Obama’s CIA chief John Brennan (“high crimes and misdemeanors”). The outraged were particularly incited by Trump’s refusal to parrot the “Russiagate” narrative, falsely presented as the result of an “intelligence community consensus.”

Trump’s refusal was justified, on factual as well as political and moral grounds. No evidence of any kind exists to prove Russian meddling in the presidential election, or thereafter. It never will be found, for the simple reason that both Podesta’s and DNC emails were leaked, not hacked. The meddling myth is just a tool the Deep State has used since late 2016 to torpedo Trump’s attempt at détente with Moscow. Its operatives saw this attempt, with reason, as a threat to the maintenance of the duopolistic, neolib-neocon system of full-spectrum global dominance.

Just three weeks after the Helsinki summit, it is tricky to discern its implications and likely consequences, but three themes seem clear.

First and foremost, nothing of substance has been settled. It is of course possible and desirable to make a fair and enduring deal with Russia on all contentious issues (Ukraine, Syria, cyberspace, terrorism, trade, etc.). In operational terms, the biggest problem for Trump is not how to keep his supporters loyal; it is how to ensure that his own bureaucratic machine will obey and apply his vision, regardless of what Putin and he may yet agree to next fall. A chronically disloyal civil-service apparatus—especially at the Department of State and the CIA, but also at Defense—overwhelmingly subscribes to the Weltanschauung of Trump’s haters and detractors.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Fox & Friends picks up the Newton school scandal

Posted By on August 13th, 2018

Fox News reports on Newton teachers’ emails against “objectivity” in the classroom.

APT recently unearthed emails from Newton high school teachers which show extreme political bias and a pathologically politicized approach to educating Newton students. One teacher writes of not wanting to “get fired for being a liberal propagandist,” while another fears that “the call for ‘objectivity’ may just inadvertently become the most effective destructive weapon against social justice.”

Our exposé of this scandal in The Federalist went viral, and has now made Fox News.

Fox & Friends has featured APT’s findings on the Newton schools scandal twice in two days now.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Gayle Harris, Suffragan Bishop for the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, defames Israel

Posted By on August 13th, 2018

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

To quote CAMERAorg:

‘G while speaking at a meeting of the denomination’s House of Bishops during the 2018 General Convention.

During her testimony in favor of a resolution that condemned Israel for allegedly mistreating Palestinian children (but made no mention of the hate-indoctrination on television shows broadcast by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority), Harris accused Israeli soldiers of shooting a 15-year-old Palestinian boy in the back 10 times.

When did this happen? What is the name of the victim? The first that the world heard of this atrocity was from Harris herself speaking at a church meeting a few years after the alleged incident happened. That doesn’t make any sense. Since when would Palestinian leaders fail to broadcast such an atrocity to the world?

Harris also told a story about Israeli security officials attempting to handcuff a three-year-old boy after his rubber ball bounced off the Temple Mount onto the Western Wall.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center highlighted the absurdity of the bouncing-ball story: “There is a high stone wall on top of the Temple Mount that blocks balls and people from going over the side.” Moreover, as anyone who has been on the Temple Mount can attest, Israeli soldiers do not need to “come up” to the Temple Mount as Harris stated, because they are already stationed on the site.

CAMERA has called on Bishop Harris to provide confirmatory details about these stories and if she can’t retract them and apologize for spreading unsubstantiated propaganda to her fellow Bishops. The Israel-Palestinian conflict is tragic enough. It does not need to be made worse by unsubstantiated atrocity stories that only serve to demonize Israel.’ (See also here and here)

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Supreme Leader Rules Out U.S. Talks in Trump-esque Style “THERE WILL BE NO WAR, NOR WILL WE NEGOTIATE WITH THE U.S.,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweets By Asa Fitch in Dubai

Posted By on August 13th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/irans-supreme-leader-rules-out-u-s-talks-in-trump-esque-style-1534172157

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ruled out direct talks with the U.S. on Monday, rejecting an offer from Donald Trump in the president’s own style—a strongly worded, all-caps tweet.

“THERE WILL BE NO WAR, NOR WILL WE NEGOTIATE WITH THE U.S.,” Mr. Khamenei, who has final say in state matters and must approve any political talks, said on his official Twitter account.

“Even if we ever—impossible as it is—negotiated with the U.S., it would never ever be with the current U.S. administration,” he added in a separate tweet.

The pronouncement, which repeated comments from a speech Mr. Khamenei delivered earlier Monday, appeared to erase any uncertainty over Iran’s response to Mr. Trump’s offer late in July for unconditional talks