ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Second Republican debate: Here’s the biggest winner and the biggest loser

Posted By on September 29th, 2023

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/second-republican-debate-biggest-winner-biggest-loser

Expectations are everything in life, and they certainly were key to the outcome of the second Republican debate held at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.

The winner of the evening was Gov. Ron DeSantis, for whom expectations were low. The audience was reminded of his achievements and why the Florida governor is running second in the GOP primary polls. 

Nikki Haley, from whom much was expected, failed to live up to her performance in the first debate, but held her own. 

Vivek Ramaswamy was not as annoying as in the first debate, but he has yet to show he is ready to be president. 

South Carolina Senator Tim Scott was more combative, as expected, but probably did not move the needle on his chances.

As for everybody else – with respect, it is time for Mike Pence, Chris Christie (seriously), and Doug Burgum to drop out of the race. Fewer contestants would mean less fighting for air time and less bickering; that would be a relief.

DeSantis had a great deal at stake coming into the second GOP debate. His polls have been slipping, he has made some mistakes in his campaign and he is widely viewed as unable to connect with voters.  

Helped by low expectations, DeSantis had a good night. He may not bounce in the polls, but he should have stopped the bleeding.  He trained his fire on Joe Biden, blaming the president (rightly) for too much government spending and for inflation; he also criticized former President Donald Trump, who again declined to participate in the GOP forum. 

Throughout the evening DeSantis pointed to his accomplishments in Florida – in education, the state is ranked number one, and Florida is also enjoying a 50-year low in crime, for instance. 

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

“Migration” by Sydney Williams

Posted By on September 29th, 2023

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“No nation in history has survived once its borders were destroyed, once its citizenship was rendered

no different from mere residence, and once its neighbors with impunity undermined its sovereignty.”

                    Victor Davis Hanson (1953-)                                                                                                                                             

Over two and a half million illegal migrants have crossed our southern border this fiscal year. Last week, 10,000 crossed into Eagle Pass, Texas, a city of fewer than 30,000. The United States is not alone in being inundated by swarms of migrants. On Italy’s island of Lampedusa, where 6,000 locals reside, 11,000 migrants arrived in five days last week. In the UK’s The Spectator, on the same date, Douglas Murray wrote: “Keep allowing people with no discernible asylum claims to land by the thousands, from a continent with hundreds of millions more to come, and you will be fêted. Stop the law-breaking and you will find yourself prosecuted.” Today, the problem of illegal immigration appears insoluble. It seems to be, as Churchill once said about Russia: “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” It is neither a mystery nor insoluble. But it is a problem political leaders in Washington and Brussels refuse to address honestly.

On one side, there are those who despair a humanitarian crisis – people living in utter poverty and under dictatorial regimes. These people are willing to accommodate victims (perceived or real) without reserve. On the other side are those willing to exercise any measure to keep out all illegal immigrants – a wall, armed guards, barbed wire, refusals to let over-crowded boats dock. It is a problem in need of the common sense of a Jeeves, when too much of the West is led by well-intentioned, feeble-minded Bertie Woosters.

Migration has been a factor in human evolution for at least 200,000 years – since homo sapiens began leaving Africa. For the first 180,000-190,000 years our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, migrating from one area to another, depending on weather and food availability. They first populated the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Around 15,000 years ago they sailed to Australia, and crossed the Bering Sea to the Americas, Sometime about 12,000 to 13,000 years ago our ancestors began to transition from nomads to farmers, raising crops and animals for food, and around 3,000 BCE city states were created, to satisfy a need for laws to govern society and commerce.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Scale of Alleged Biden Foreign Influence Peddling Unprecedented in History of D.C. Corruption, Impeachment Witness Testifies Ryan Mills

Posted By on September 29th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/scale-of-alleged-biden-foreign-influence-peddling-unprecedented-in-history-of-d-c-corruption-impeachment-witness-testifies/

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, testifying during the first House impeachment inquiry hearing into President Joe Biden, said Thursday that while Washington, D.C., is “awash” with influence peddling, the “size and complexity” of the allegations against Biden and his family are unprecedented.

House leaders, he said, have a “duty” to determine if the president was involved in a pay-to-play scheme.

Turley was one of four witnesses — three Republicans and one Democrat — who testified during the hearing. None of the people who testified were direct fact witnesses to any crimes or to an alleged Biden-family scheme.

Republicans claim that there is a mountain of evidence that Biden’s family members, including his son Hunter and brother James, enriched themselves by selling the “Biden brand,” access to Joe Biden when he was vice president and a candidate for president, to foreigners.

Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio called it a “tale as old as time” and the “oldest story in the world.”

Turley, who previously testified in the impeachments of presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, said that comments by Hunter Biden and the “labyrinth of accounts and companies” used by the president’s family members to transfer money make the inquiry credible.

“The question is, did the president know? Did he encourage this type of corruption?” Turley said during questioning by Representative Glenn Grothman (R., Wis.). “You have to begin with the recognition that what Hunter Biden and his associates were doing was corrupt.”

Grothman asked Turley whether there was any precedent for the scale of foreign influence peddling Biden is alleged to have participated in.

“Influence peddling is the favorite form of corruption in Washington, D.C., and this city is awash in it,” Turley responded. “But have I seen anything of this size and complexity? No.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Ukrainian Gordian Knot: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 29th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/28/the-ukrainian-gordian-knot/

Most Americans understandably favor the Ukrainian resistance against Vladimir Putin’s Russian naked 2022 aggression.

Yet for Ukraine to break the current deadlock—our generation’s Verdun with perhaps 600,000 combined casualties so far— and “win” the war, it apparently must have the military wherewithal to hit targets inside Russia.

Such strategically logical attacks might nevertheless provoke a wounded and unpredictable Russia finally to carry out its boilerplate and ignored existential threats.

From the last 75 years of big-power rivalries, the operational “rules” of proxy wars are well known.

In Vietnam, Korea, and Afghanistan, Russia supplied America’s enemies—sometimes even sending Russian pilots into combat zones.

Thousands of Americans likely died due to our adversaries’ use of Russian munitions and personnel.

Likewise, Russia lost 15,000 fatalities in its decade-long misadventure in Afghanistan. In part, Moscow’s defeat may have been due to deadly American weapons, including sophisticated Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

In the bloody decades of these big-power proxy wars, many were fought on or near the borders of Russia or China.

Yet none of these surrogate conflicts of the nuclear age ever led to hot wars between the U.S. and Russia or China.

But Ukraine risks now becoming a new—and different—proxy war altogether.

Never has the U.S. squared off against Russia or China in a conventional proxy war over either’s respective historical borders (whether illegitimate or not).

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joe Biden’s so-called “Successful and Effective Presidency” Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 29th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/joe-bidens-so-called-successful-and-effective-presidency/

So, we are assured by David Ignatius that Biden has had such “a successful and effective” presidency that he must now step down, deprive us of his genius, and rest upon his laurels?

All of Biden’s initiatives now poll below 50 percent. Biden himself struggles to poll above 40 percent. That is no surprise given his record of governance.

Candidate Biden by design had told illegal aliens to come into the U.S. during the 2020 campaign. And they immediately took him up on it. Nearly eight million have now swarmed in, without background checks, medical exams, COVID vaccinations and testing, or any examination at all. We will deal with that disaster for decades to come.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas was appointed to lie that the border was secure, on the expectation that his erasure of it altogether would not be impeachable, given political realities. So egregious were the arriving numbers and annihilation of U.S. immigration law, that even Democrats and leftists in Chicago and New York now want illegal aliens to go back to Texas (but not to Mexico), as they de facto redraw the U.S. border on Texas’s northern state boundaries.

We don’t dare call the Biden invitation to eight million, “The Great Replacement Theory” of altering the demography to ensure future leftwing voters. “They,” however, boast of just that agenda with slogans and book titles like “The New Democratic Majority” and “Demography is Destiny.”

Look at the interest rate, the inflation rate, and the price of gas and diesel since Biden took office and the squeeze explains why he does not poll 40 percent confidence on the economy. Ditto crime. The administration smiles as Soros-elected prosecutors downgrade felonies to misdemeanors, and misdemeanors to nothingness. The embarrassing lunacy of defunding the police is now rarely mentioned because police forces nationwide have been virtually defunded and even the Biden people are not happy with the scary results.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: THE GOP DEBATE

Posted By on September 28th, 2023

I watched the messy and shrill GOP debate last night with the misgiving that none of it really mattered. Elections in America are the hallmark of democracy and equality. Every single citizen in America- rich, poor, black, white, radical, conservative, orthodox, secular, atheist, etc. has that day to express a national choice. But, and this is a huge but, that precious freedom to choose is endangered by the lack of real election integrity.

The media libels and disinforms with alacrity. Many pollsters routinely ask yes or no questions designed to elicit shaky results to favor chosen candidates, and shady revised election rules threaten the integrity of results in a preponderance of states and districts.

Not a single candidate last night even brought it up. rsk

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Heather Mac Donald But Johnny Can’t Spell G-A-Y With large majorities of their students incompetent in English and math, Los Angeles schools are ramping up efforts—for more gay pride and gender indoctrination.

Posted By on September 28th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/but-johnny-cant-spell-g-a-y

It has been almost 90 days since Gay Pride month. According to the Los Angeles Unified School District, that is too long a hiatus from the imperative of immersing young children in the arcana of gay and trans identity. So throughout the week of October 9, many elementary school classrooms in Los Angeles will celebrate “National Coming Out Day,” which falls on October 11.  

October is itself LGBTQ+ History Month, the Los Angeles Unified School District bureaucracy has reminded what it calls the district’s “fabulous educators.” Other LGBTQ+ programming will take place throughout October, picking up where Gay Pride month left off.  The goals for the so-called Week of Action are ambitious: to turn six-year-olds into budding gender and critical race theorists.

An LAUSD teacher forwarded me the district’s “toolkit” for teachers laying out that agenda. Use of the toolkit, decorated with a Black Power Fist superimposed on neon rainbow stripes, is nominally optional, but elementary school teachers who forego LGBTQ programming during the Week of Action will surely risk stigmatization. (The district did not respond to queries regarding expected classroom participation rates.)

At the Week of Action’s start, teachers should engage kindergarten and first-grade students in discussions about identity, aided by an activity called an “Identity Map.” Pupils chart their experiences of discrimination or privilege along 12 axes, including race, gender identity, sexuality, mental health, and body size. This mapping allows seven-year-olds to see themselves through the “lens of intersectionality.” Teachers then post the identity maps on the wall for a class discussion about students’ multiple “identities.”

Each elementary school day during the Week of Action can be devoted to a different LGBTQ+ celebrity, whose identity will be announced in morning assemblies, suggests the toolkit.

Monday is Jazz Jennings Day. Jennings’s fame rests on being one of the youngest children to date to claim a trans identity. “Assigned male at birth,” as Jazz’s publicity materials inevitably put it, Jazz allegedly asserted female identity at age two, and was diagnosed with gender dysphoria at age four. Subsequent surgery tried to cut Jazz’s body into a simulacrum of a female one and resulted in undisclosed “complications.” On Jazz Jennings day, the LAUSD recommends that kindergartners engage in the fabulous activities of “Which Outfit” and “Which Hairdo.” (One day is not enough to acknowledge the fabulousness that is Jazz. January in the LAUSD is devoted to holding Jazz and Friends Reading Events, supplemented by reading inclusive books in every grade.)

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Senate Forces Fetterman to Wear Big Boy Pants, Passing a Formal Dress Code By Stephen Kruiser

Posted By on September 28th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stephen-kruiser/2023/09/27/senate-forces-fetterman-to-wear-big-boy-pants-passing-a-formal-dress-code-n1730465

Our seemingly long national nightmare is over: Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) will no longer be able to dress like a homeless crackhead at work.

After Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) made a unilateral decision to relax the unwritten dress code to accommodate Pennsylvania’s most notorious outpatient, his colleagues decided to get it in writing.

CBSNews.com:

The U.S. Senate has passed a resolution formalizing business attire as the proper dress code for the floor of the chamber by unanimous consent.

This comes after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer chose to stop enforcing the unwritten requirement, and Democratic Sen. John Fetterman’s casual dress became a flashpoint in the Capitol.

The bipartisan bill from Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney requires that members abide by a real dress code – rather than an unwritten custom – when on the Senate floor, that includes a coat, tie, and slacks for men.

“Though we’ve never had an official dress code, the events over the past week have made us all feel as though formalizing one is the right path forward,” Schumer said. “I deeply appreciate Senator Fetterman working with me to come to an agreement that we all find acceptable, and of course I appreciate Sen. Manchin and Sen. Romney’s leadership on this issue.”

Savor the moment, my fellow Americans, this may be the last reach-across-the-aisle, Kumbaya vote we see on either side of Capitol Hill for a while.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s Booby Trap For a Republican President Protecting bureaucracy instead of democracy. by Betsy McCaughey

Posted By on September 28th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bidens-booby-trap-for-a-republican-president/

The Biden administration is setting a booby trap in case a Republican wins the presidency in 2024.

Last Friday, the White House unveiled a proposed rule that would make it even harder than in the past for an incoming Republican president to wrestle control of the left-leaning federal bureaucracy and actually implement the conservative policies promised to voters.

Of the 2.2 million federal civil workers, only 4,000 are presidential appointees. The rest stay in their jobs, from one administration to the next, protected by rules that make it nearly impossible to discipline or replace them.

They overwhelmingly favor the Left. A staggering 95% of unionized federal employees who donate to political candidates give to Democrats, according to Open Secrets. Only a tiny 5% support Republicans.

Some federal workers in high positions slow-walk or even derail a Republican president’s agenda — and get away with it.

Why bother to vote if the left-leaning deep state stays in charge no matter who wins the presidency?

GOP candidates Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis are vowing to conquer this obstructionism.

Everett Kelley, union president of the American Federation of Government Employees, claims GOP contenders want to “politicize routine government work.” Nonsense. We’re not talking about mail carriers. It’s time to make lawyers, PhDs and other top-level career bureaucrats implement the president’s agenda, not their own.

After Trump won in 2016, they went to town neutralizing him on almost every policy front, explains James Sherk, special assistant to the White House Domestic Policy Council under Trump.

Career lawyers in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division flat out refused to challenge Yale University’s discrimination against Asian American applicants. Trump had to recruit lawyers from other divisions. After Joe Biden became president, the DOJ dropped the case. But the same career lawyers who refused to sue Yale made the losing argument in support of affirmative action before the U.S. Supreme Court.

HISTORY Comments turned off

The Roman Empire Through Virgil’s Eyes What makes Rome and its fate so significant for Americans today. by Bruce Thornton

Posted By on September 28th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-roman-empire-through-virgils-eyes/

Recently a trend on Tik-Tok had its fifteen minutes of click-fame.  It seems that some women are asking their men how often they think about the Roman Empire. The usual suspect experts were consulted, and of course they conclude that this interest in Rome reflects modern males’ angst over, or nostalgia for a time when patriarchy dominated, and manly deeds defined the male sex––the original “toxic masculinity.”

There’s nothing wrong per se with thinking about ancient Rome. Since Edward Gibbon’s magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the history of Rome has been a cautionary tale of how great empires collapse. Given the abundance of empirical evidence––invasions of unvetted migrants, our geopolitical enemies’ increasing challenges, a looming fiscal apocalypse, and suicidal social and cultural corruption––our country may be experiencing Rome’s fate, making its history deserving of our attention. And one place to start is reading what one brilliant Roman thought about the then new empire.

There’s no greater witness than the poet Virgil, who came of age during the last years of the Roman Republic, a century when social disorder, civic violence, and civil wars between Roman generals and their legions were chronic. Virgil’s Aeneid (19 B.C.) tells the story of Rome’s beginnings in the invasion of Italy by Trojan refugees, and also explores the tragic costs of civilization, and the lofty idealism that some great empires have claimed to represent.

That theme is what makes Rome and its fate so significant for us Americans, who are watching a floundering foreign policy lurching between appeasement and half-hearted interventions abroad.

Virgil has several scenes that make Rome’s imperial idealism explicit. One dimension of Rome’s greatness was its virtue: not just courage, the most important virtue for every civilization, but also pietas, the duty and responsibility one owes to family, the dead, the gods, and Rome itself. Virgil’s hero Aeneas is known for this virtue, hence the honorific pius attached to his name.