‘Missing’ Biden corruption case witness Dr. Gal Luft details allegations against president’s family in extraordinary video By Miranda Devine

https://nypost.com/2023/07/05/missing-biden-corruption-case-witness-dr-gal-luft-details-allegations-against-presidents-family-in-extraordinary-video/

The “missing witness” from the Biden corruption investigation, Israeli professor Dr. Gal Luft, has laid out his bribery allegations against the president’s family in an extraordinary video filmed in an undisclosed location while on the run. 

In the 14-minute recording, obtained exclusively by The Post, the fugitive former Israeli army officer claims he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying to the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals with alleged ties to Chinese military intelligence, and that they had an FBI mole who shared classified information with their benefactors from the China-controlled energy company CEFC. 

The self-proclaimed fall guy says he provided the incriminating evidence to six officials from the FBI and the Department of Justice in a secret meeting in Brussels in March 2019 — but alleges that it was covered up. 

“I, who volunteered to inform the US government about a potential security breach and about compromising information about a man vying to be the next president, am now being hunted by the very same people who I informed — and may have to live on the run for the rest of my life on the run . . .” 

“I’m not a Republican. I’m not a Democrat. I have no political motive or agenda . . . I did it out of deep concern that if the Bidens were to come to power, the country would be facing the same traumatic Russia collusion scandal — only this time with China. Sadly, because of the DOJ’s coverup, this is exactly what happened . . .” 

Israeli professor Dr. Gal Luft laid out his bribery allegations against President Biden’s family in an extraordinary video filmed in an undisclosed location while on the run.Luft claims he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying to the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals with alleged ties to Chinese military intelligence.AP

Masked teens mugging moms, nannies in crime-ridden San Francisco: reports By Allie Griffin

https://nypost.com/2023/07/04/san-francisco-moms-nannies-robbed-by-masked-teens-in-violent-spree/

San Francisco mothers, including a pregnant woman, and nannies are being targeted in violent, broad-daylight robberies at the hands of masked minors in the crime-ridden city.

Police have connected a group of teenagers to at least 11 such attacks last week in Noe Valley and nearby areas, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The young suspects, wearing ski masks, allegedly pushed, and punched the female victims in order to steal their smartphones before escaping in a stolen runaway car, cops said.

One juvenile male suspect has since been arrested in connection to the string of robberies and police are searching for his alleged co-conspirators, the local paper reported.

The brazen crime in the affluent sections of the city has left residents on high alert.

The teens appeared to spare no mercy in the attacks, having victimized a pregnant woman and a person with a stroller in two cases, Noe Valley Supervisor Rafael Mandelman told the Chronicle.

One mother who asked to be identified by her initials CW for fear of retaliation, told the newspaper she was on her way to pick up her daughter from daycare last Monday when she was attacked.

She said she was pushing an empty stroller when a person in a gray ski mask hopped out of a car and knocked her to the sidewalk as he snatched her phone.

“I was shoved to the ground aggressively,” she said, adding that San Francisco police seemed reluctant to offer help.

A daycare worker who only provided her first name Laura told the publication that she too was violently robbed of her phone the same day while waiting for the train.

Say, Looks Like That Supply-Side Stuff Works After All

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/06/say-looks-like-that-supply-side-stuff-works-after-all/

Bidenomonics has been, and will continue to be, a disaster. This is what happens when lawmakers manipulate economies. No one should ever expect a different outcome when politicians enact ideas that they believe are so brilliant that they will overcome the laws of economics. The way out of this mess is to make a policy U-turn to both unleash the economy and expand precious liberty.

President Joe Biden last week bragged that his economic policies — straight from the Democrats blueprint that says “borrow, tax, spend, regulate, then do it all again” — are working. But as we’ve noted, Bidenomics has been a wreck, a flop that is taking us into a recession.

Not only did Biden openly boast as our sclerosis grows worse, he also, as Democrats always do, took a jab at “trickle-down economics,” claiming it has “failed the middle class … failed America … blew up the deficit” and “increased inequity.”

He probably would have blamed the Canadian wildfires on “trickle-down economics” had he thought about it. But there’s not much thinking going on in his head — and in fact there never has been, with his ungovernable mouth leading the way throughout his career as an elected grifter.

We don’t see Biden or any other Democrat ever coming around to supply-side economic policies, the correct terminology for what they sneeringly call “trickle-down economics,” which asserts that lower taxes and less regulatory meddling fuel economic growth. Yet they are exactly what our economy — any economy – needs, now and forever.

Movie Review: ‘Sound of Freedom’ Shines a Light on the Issue of Human Trafficking By Lincoln Brown

https://pjmedia.com/culture/lincolnbrown/2023/07/05/sound-of-freedom-shines-a-light-on-the-issue-of-human-trafficking-n1708313

Yesterday, my wife and I did two things. One was to attend a neighbor’s Fourth of July barbecue — something I have not done in about thirty years. The second was to take in a showing of Sound of Freedom. Having been on a human trafficking awareness mission trip to Cambodia, the issue is near and dear to our hearts. We have met the people whose lives were nearly destroyed by trafficking. We have heard their stories and have seen just how devastating this issue truly is.

The victims ran the gamut from five years old to late teens and early twenties. These women and children sustain emotional and psychological damage, and physical injuries from years of abuse. As I have written before, there was one child who had been poisoned. This was done to disable her so that she could beg on the streets. She lived out her short life in a wheelchair, unable to speak or walk.

Sound of Freedom tells a compelling story. It blends action with a message, departing from the glib characterization of “thriller” to produce some moving, thoughtful, unsettling, and frightening moments. Jim Caviezel does a fine turn as Tim Ballard. My wife and I met Ballard for all of three minutes at an event years ago, and Cavielzel does not look like him. But Ballard is only part of the story, as odd as that may sound.

The character of Vampiro/Batman, a former cartel member who is expiating past sins by rescuing children from the sex trade, is one of the most interesting characters in the story. He is a booze-swilling, foul-mouthed, cigar-smoking, tough guy who is fighting the good fight. Actually, he has most of the good lines, and you find yourself rooting for him almost from the moment he is introduced.

The sheer evil of an ex-beauty queen based on former Miss Cartagena, Kelly Johana Suarez, who lures children into slavery, is nothing short of chilling. The traffickers and cartel members in the film are not given “redemptive moments.” That is because there are times when evil must be recognized for what it is and not given a pass for one reason or another.

‘Just Stop Oil’ Won’t Stop Its Vandalism Wimbledon and Van Gogh aren’t political. Will the left ever say so?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/just-stop-oil-wimbledon-barclays-climate-protest-3dbfd921?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The activist group Just Stop Oil claimed credit Wednesday for disruptions at the Wimbledon tennis tournament, after two protesters ran into a match and began “throwing environmentally friendly orange confetti glitter and jigsaw pieces,” according to a statement the outfit posted on Twitter. This is the same crew that last year tossed tomato soup on a Vincent van Gogh painting.

Just Stop Oil’s complaint on Twitter is that Wimbledon made a sponsorship deal with Barclays, which the group said has “given £30 billion to oil and gas companies” over the past two years. Even under the most optimistic scenarios, the world will need oil for decades. Natural gas has been a boon for emissions reductions in the U.S., since it has led to fewer power plants burning coal.

The tennis racketeers were arrested, as they should have been. This is a bad mode of protest, and it’s probably counterproductive to the climate cause. Green groups sometimes block highways at rush hour. What is this supposed to accomplish, other than make commuters furious? Disrupting a tennis match and tossing soup at a painting are examples of protest as theater.

Climate as a cause has become the province of too many fanatics willing to break the law. Will their progressive allies bother to call them out? This kind of nonsense on the left too often gets dismissed as some quirky souls who go too far because they care so much. If antiabortion activists were regularly blocking traffic or defacing art, there’d be no end to the handwringing in the press about extreme tactics on the right.

Climate activists who have a quasi-religious viewpoint aren’t interested in listening to facts, but here’s a line from a March article in NPR, a news source they might trust: “China permitted more coal power plants last year than any time in the last seven years.” Maybe they should try going to Beijing and splashing soup around Tiananmen Square. See how that goes.

Justice Jackson’s Incredible Statistic Her dissent from the ruling on affirmative action makes an obviously implausible claim. By Ted Frank

https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-jacksons-incredible-statistic-black-newborns-doctors-math-flaw-mortality-4115ff62?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Even Supreme Court justices are known to be gullible. In a dissent from last week’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson enumerated purported benefits of “diversity” in education. “It saves lives,” she asserts. “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live.”

A moment’s thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible. Imagine if 40% of black newborns died—thousands of dead infants every week. But even so, that’s a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%.

How could Justice Jackson make such an innumerate mistake? A footnote cites a friend-of-the-court brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which makes the same claim in almost identical language. It, in turn, refers to a 2020 study whose lead author is Brad Greenwood, a professor at the George Mason University School of Business.

The study makes no such claims. It examines mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for black newborns with black pediatricians (though no statistically significant improvement for black obstetricians).

Lacking Unity, Can America Survive Our Growing Differences? I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/05/lacking-unity-can-america-survive-our-growing-differences-ii-tipp-poll/

How are Americans feeling these days? Certainly not united. Our nation appears to be indivisible in name only. Even more surprising, a significant number of people have even begun to wonder if the United States of America as we know it will even exist in the future, data from the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

Starting with the Unity Index, the proprietary I&I/TIPP gauge of national harmony, we ask people each month if they feel our common bond remains. They are then given five possible responses: “very united,” “somewhat united,” “somewhat divided,” “very divided” or “unsure.”

For June’s national online I&I/TIPP poll of 1,358 adults, taken from May 31-June 2, just 24% of respondents declared that they felt the U.S. was “united.” Among that group, only 9% said the U.S. was “very united,” while 15% called it “somewhat united.”

But by nearly 3-to-1, 74% of respondents called America “divided.” Of those, 42% said it was “very divided,” while 32% termed it “somewhat divided.”

America’s Censorship Regime is in Congress’s Crosshairs: Ben Weingarten

https://weingarten.substack.com/p/americas-censorship-regime-is-in?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Chilling revelations on the rise of feds’ Orwellian speech police

Imagine an America where the feds surge actual speech police wherever chatter on social media questions the integrity of the vote — speech police who then take to the airwaves to attack those making the claims.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider that last summer a national-security agency actually mulled the idea of deploying a “rapid response team” to local jurisdictions to help election officials fend off “mis-, dis- and mal-information”-related “threats,” including through communications — an idea one federal official called “fascinating.”

That revelation comes from a new report from the House Weaponization Subcommittee on little-known Homeland Security sub-agency Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — which as readers know was the focus of my Congressional testimony in May as the linchpin of federal government-led speech policing.

I wrote about that report in today’s New York Post, detailing the ways in which through both oversight and legislation action, the Republican-led House is working to defund and dismantle the regime.

My column comes on the heels of an incredible July 4th ruling from Judge Terry Doughty out of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.

The judge, who presides over Missouri v. Biden, the case that has blown the lid off the mass public-private surveillance and censorship regime under which Americans have been suffering, issued a temporary injunction on Independence Day freezing all federal government-led censorship efforts.

Palestinian state – consistent with US interests? Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger

http://bit.ly/44cJNfV

According to the late Prof. John Galbraith, the enemy of conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of facts, which may expose conventional wisdom as useless or dangerous.  Prof. Galbraith also suggests that conventional wisdom does not accommodate itself to the real world, but to a certain view of the world.

Indeed, the march of Middle East facts has exposed the alarming flaws of the Palestinian-oriented Western conventional wisdom, which has attempted to reshape Middle East reality in accordance with its own worldview.

For example:

*Since 1948, contrary to Western conventional wisdom, Arab countries have never flexed their military (and barely their financial and diplomatic) muscle on behalf of the Palestinian cause, as evidenced by the July 2023 war/battle between Israel and Palestinian terrorism, the previous 2021, 2014, 2012 and 2008 wars against Gaza Palestinian terrorism, as well as the 2nd (2000-2005) and 1st (1987-93) Intifada and the (1982) war against the PLO in Lebanon.

*Since 1948, Middle East reality has demonstrated that in contradiction of Western conventional wisdom, Arab national interests transcend – and often conflict with – the Palestinian issue. Therefore, no Arab-Israel war (1948/49, 1956, 1967 and 1973) erupted due to – or on behalf of – the Palestinian issue. Moreover, the six Israel-Arab peace accords with Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and the Sudan were concluded because they bypassed the Palestinian issue, eliminating the Palestinian veto power, which has been enshrined by Western conventional wisdom, torpedoing all Western peace proposals.

*Moreover, no Israel-Arab peace treaty has been suspended due to Israel’s wars/battles against Palestinian terrorism. Arabs concluded peace with Israel, in order to advance their own interests, and do not sacrifice these interests on the altar of Palestinian interests.

Should US Troops Stay in Syria? by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19775/us-troops-syria

The primary agenda of the Russian-Iranian meeting was reportedly “to discuss expelling the United States from Syria, which may indicate Russia’s intent to facilitate Iranian-backed attacks on US forces.”

Above all, the US presence is important as a blocking force to deny Iran an uninterrupted land bridge to Lebanon and the eastern Mediterranean, and to check the Iranian regime’s long-term expansionist dream of “exporting the revolution.”

Iran already effectively controls three countries in addition to its own – Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen – and has been broadening its influence throughout Latin America.

Any drawdown of the US troop presence at al-Tanf will also tempt adversarial “great powers” in Syria — such as Iran, Russia and especially Turkey — to attack US allies in the region, starting with the Kurdish-majority Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

The US presence, in addition, greatly helps safeguard the liberty of countless Syrians from the tyrannical Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad…

The pro-democratic forces in Syria and border regions in Iraq also help to prevent the remnants of the Islamic State (ISIS) from reconstituting itself into a robust terrorist entity, as they have already started to do.

US Assistant Secretary of Defense Celeste Wallander, during her September 2022 visit to the region, characterized the mission of these forces as “to ensure the enduring defeat of ISIS.”

Departure also would likely further decrease confidence in US pledges to defend vulnerable democracies throughout the world. Both Taiwan and archipelago countries in Southeast Asia would probably be the most affected by any US plan that abandoned the Kurds to Turkey, Iran and ISIS.

A withdrawal of US forces from their current Syrian redoubts will almost certainly imperil the sovereignty of Iraq, Syria as well as the mission of Kurdish troops. These missions include: guarding prisons that hold hundreds of incarcerated ISIS jihadists as well as monitoring the expansive displaced persons camp at al-Hol, which hosts tens of thousands of the wives and children of ISIS jihadists.

If the Kurds are not able to execute their mission of suppressing ISIS, the failure would quickly lead to a rapid expansion of the terrorist group.

[C]losure of the US mission in Syria would cause alarm among allies and risk accelerating an already precipitous decline in US influence throughout the Middle East…. There is little doubt that the image of US primacy on the world stage, as after the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, will deteriorate even further. Ally and adversary alike will seek non-American alternatives to protect their national interests.

Although continued US troop presence in Syria is not without risk, withdrawal from the region would no doubt trigger an even greater risk to America’s interests — while remaining in Syria accomplishes much at minimal cost.