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Look Ahead, Not Backwards, to Hold the Justice Department Accountable The minimal tools to, at the very least, embarrass top officials and expose the existing rot within the Justice Department are in the hands of House Republicans. They would do well to use them. By Julie Kelly

Posted By on May 19th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/18/look-ahead-not-backwards-to-hold-the-justice-department-accountable/

Release of Special Counsel John Durham’s report on law enforcement and intelligence misconduct related to the 2016 presidential election has been met with outrage, recriminations, and a justified amount of vindication for those, including President Donald Trump, who helped expose the brazen operation from the start. 

Trump is taking a well-deserved victory lap, to the extent one can be had, punctuated with angry denunciations of the scandal’s perpetrators. Conservative media is carefully dissecting the report to confirm once again the existence of what can only be described as a legitimate seditious conspiracy—not the phony January 6 sort—concocted by the country’s most powerful interests to take down a duly elected president. U.S. Representative James Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, invited Durham to testify next week.

Unfortunately, the collective reaction is an exercise in futility. No one, as many observers readily admit, will be held criminally responsible. The corrupt scheme’s collaborators receive book royalties, speaking fees, and coveted gigs at cable news outlets and nonprofits rather than lengthy prison sentences despite Senator Rand Paul’s wishcasting. 

Some, including Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, populate the upper echelons of the BIden regime. Biden himself played a key role in perpetuating the destructive lie.

But relitigating the past in the public square, as vindicating as it may feel, is fruitless. The same corrupt elements are still at work, taking aim not just at Trump but his allies and voters in the shadow of another national election. Trump summed up the current threat in a message posted Wednesday morning on Truth Social.  

Trump’s unjustified optimism in the final sentence notwithstanding, he is correct. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s handpicked special prosecutor, a man who has not been seen in public since his appointment more than seven months ago, is hauling everyone from Mar-a-Lago maids to former Vice President Mike Pence before grand juries considering charges against Trump for his role in January 6 and the handling of classified documents. A steady drip of leaks from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office keeps Trump’s suspected criminality on the front pages; at the same time, Smith refuses to disclose the names of taxpayer-paid staff conducting the unwieldy investigations.

Federal indictments are imminent.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Dirty Money that brought down banks is trying to bring down a Supreme Court Justice. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on May 19th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-dirty-money-behind-the-lynching-of-clarence-thomas/

The country is witnessing the second high-profile lynching effort of Justice Clarence Thomas. Even while the media ignores the millions from foreign nationals passing through shell companies to the Biden family, it has pushed invented scandals for Thomas while demanding his resignation to make way for a radical leftist Biden court appointee.

While no one expects anything but lies and smears from the media, few are aware of how the smear campaign against Justice Thomas was organized and who is funding it.

Before it was splashed all over the media, the Clarence Thomas smears were mostly generated by ProPublica with articles such as “Clarence Thomas’ Secret Life of Luxury” then rebroadcast by the media in stories such as “ProPublica: GOP megadonor paid private school tuition for grandnephew of Justice Clarence Thomas” which keep the smear campaign going.

While the media is deeply interested in who paid for Thomas’ grandnephew’s education, it’s uninterested in where the money that funds ProPublica’s smear campaign is coming from.

ProPublica has amplified the coverage of Harlan Crow, a conservative donor who is friendly with Thomas, but is less interested in discussing some of the men who back its operations. Its leftist smear campaigns are funded by the man who helped bring down the economy with his abusive tactics, a former Enron executive and FTX crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried.

The money that brought down banks is now trying to bring down a Supreme Court Justice.

ProPublica is a leftist nonprofit set up as an “ethical watchdog” by Herbert Sandler, listed by Time Magazine, as one of the 25 people to blame for the financial crisis of 2008, and more bluntly by Saturday Night Live as, ““people who should be shot”. (In a sign of the power and influence of the Sandlers, the SNL skit was quickly censored and cannot be found on NBC.)

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Murdered Like Animals’: The Genocide of Christians in Nigeria Reaches New Heights by Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on May 19th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19648/murdered-like-animals-the-genocide-of-christians

[S]ince the Islamic uprising began in 2009, 52,250 Christians “have been butchered or hacked to death” in Nigeria. — Report by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (“Intersociety”), April 10, 2023.

In just the first 100 days of this year [Jan.1-April 10], “no fewer than 1,041 defenseless Christians were hacked to death by Nigeria’s Jihadists …” — Report by Intersociety, April 10, 2023.

[R]oughly 15-20% of the slaughters were attributed to “Nigerian security forces, particularly the Nigerian Army.”

By far, however, the worst killers are the “Jihadist Fulani Herdsmen who specifically target and massacre Christians and wantonly destroy or burn down their sacred places of worship and learning; homes and farmlands.” — Report by Intersociety, April 10, 2023.

The Intersociety report makes clear that the jihadists are fervently trying to cleanse Nigeria of any Christian presence….

“This Jihad is based on the Doctrine of Hate taught in Mosques and Islamic Madrasas in northern Nigeria as well as the supremacist ideology of the Fulani. Using both conventional (violent) Jihad, and stealth (civilization) Jihad, the Islamists of northern Nigeria seem determined to turn Nigeria into an Islamic Sultanate and replace Liberal Democracy with Sharia as the National Ideology. … We want a Nigeria, where citizens are treated equally before the law at all levels….” – Christian Association of Nigeria, May 4, 2018.

Turkey…, once a bastion of ancient Christianity with churches everywhere, has, after the Turkish conquest, become so thoroughly Islamized, that its ancient basilicas, such as Hagia Sophia, now serve as mosques.

Although the report appeared on April 10, the massacres and atrocities have continued relentlessly since.

Sunday, Apr. 16…. One 5-year-old boy was beheaded.

[N]ews outlets—including the Catholic News Agency—fail to identify the religions of either the murdered or their murderers. This video, which otherwise captures the tragic aftermath, refers to the Muslim terrorists as “bandits” and their Christian victims as “villagers.”

Esther Duniya, a 14-year-old Christian girl, was abducted from school and forcibly converted to Islam. Instead of helping her father and aunt recover her, police handed the girl “to Daawa, the Islamic group in charge – of converting and indoctrinating Muslims converts….” — The Guardian, May 10, 2023.

[T]he government of Muhammadu Buhari, the Muslim president of Nigeria, has only “protected” the “Jihadist Fulani Herdsmen” to “the extent that the Jihadists now invade any Christian Community of their target at will and slaughter its natives and takeover their lands and properties at will.” — Report by Intersociety, April 10, 2023.

According to several Christian leaders in Nigeria (see below), the reason formerly simple Fulani herdsmen have, since Buhari became president in 2015, managed to kill nearly twice as many Christians as the “professional” terrorists (Boko Haram, ISWA, etc.), is “because President Buhari is also of the Fulani ethnic group.” — Breitbart, June 27, 2018.

“Under President Buhari, the murderous Fulani herdsmen enjoyed unprecedented protection and favoritism… Rather than arrest and prosecute the Fulani herdsmen, security forces usually manned by Muslims from the North offer them protection as they unleash terror with impunity on the Nigerian people.” — Rev. Musa Asake, the General Secretary of the Christian Association of Nigeria, January 16, 2018.

“What Obama, John Kerry and Hilary Clinton did to Nigeria by funding and supporting [current president Muhammadu] Buhari in the 2015 presidential election and helping Boko Haram in 2014/2015 was sheer wickedness and the blood of all those killed by the Buhari administration, his Fulani herdsmen and Boko Haram over the last 5 years are on their hands.” — Femi Fani-Kayode, Nigeria’s former Minister of Culture and Tourism, churchmilitant.com, February 21, 2020.

Despite all this, the American “mainstream” remains committed to describing the jihad in Nigeria as a byproduct of “inequality” and “poverty,” to quote former US President Bill Clinton, who once explained what was “fueling all this stuff” (the “stuff” being a reference to the genocide of Christians in Nigeria).

In their quest to blame anything and everything but Islamic, specifically jihadist, ideology, even climate change has been added to the mainstream arsenal of reasons fueling the genocide of Christians.

Worst of all has been the Biden administration’s response. In 2020, Trump placed Nigeria on the State Department’s list of Countries of Particular Concern—that is, nations which engage in, or tolerate violations of, religious freedom. Under Biden, however, the State Department removed Nigeria—this nation where one Christian is butchered every two hours—from the list.

For mainstream media and politicians, black lives—52,250 now and counting—do not matter — at least not when those lives are Christians’ being slaughtered by Muslims.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Have You Looked Inside Any of These Books? Page through a few of the titles removed from Florida schools—some outright pornographic—and ask yourself if kids should be reading them.Dave Seminara

Posted By on May 19th, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/article/have-you-looked-inside-any-of-these-books

President Joe Biden and the Democrats think that they’ve found a potent campaign issue in “book banning.” Indeed, a recent piece in Politico asserts that the Biden campaign has “made the issue of book banning a surprisingly central element of his campaign’s opening salvos.” Florida governor Ron DeSantis has been the most prominent Republican leader supporting the removal of inappropriate books from schools. I live in Florida, and I checked out five of these “banned” books to see why they were removed from school libraries.

All five books were easy to find at my local library. They are categorized as “young adult,” i.e., titles intended for children ages 12 to 18, according to the American Library Association. After reviewing them, I’m convinced that the overwhelming majority of the public wouldn’t find their removal controversial, if they knew what was contained in these provocative, and in some cases pornographic, titles.

Politico quotes a Democratic pollster who claimed that “book banning tests off the charts,” with Americans overwhelmingly opposing it. “They associate it with really authoritarian regimes, Nazi Germany,” said Celinda Lake. This is likely because the media and Democrats have misled the public in several ways. First, in using the word “ban,” they’ve created the impression that books removed from schools are also being removed from public libraries and bookstores. They’re not.

Second, prominent figures on the left have not told the truth about the content of the “banned” books and which ones have been removed from schools. For example, many progressives promoted a false claim that Duval County, Florida banned books about Robert Clemente, Hank Aaron, and Rosa Parks. Duval County schools wrote a post on February 17 correcting the misinformation, but that didn’t stop Alexandria Ocasio Cortez from blaming the GOP for allegedly prohibiting a book about Parks in Duval County more than a month later in a speech on the floor of Congress. “The Life of Rosa Parks— this apparently is too woke for the Republican Party,” she said.

The first book I looked at, This Book is Gay, written by transgender author Juno Dawson, is marketed as a “bestselling exploration of sexuality and gender for young adults.” Dawson writes in one chapter that “perhaps the most important skill you will master as a gay or bi man is the timeless classic, the handjob.” She continues, “Something they don’t teach you in school, is that in order to be able to cum at all, you or your partner may need to finish off with a handy.” The book also offers graphic descriptions of oral and anal sex, among other adult topics. “Being on bottom makes a dude no less manly than his top partner,” Dawson writes of anal sex. “He is literally taking it like a man.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Past Week Proves It — Democrats Are The Brainless Party

Posted By on May 19th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/19/the-past-week-proves-it-democrats-are-the-brainless-party/

If Republicans are the stupid party – and you will get no argument from us here about that – perhaps the correct label for today’s Democratic party is “brainless.” Witness what it did in just the past few days:

President Joe Biden showed up at the pro-abortion EMILY’s List gala, where he said “I also want to thank my buddy Kamala who I work for up in the White House for leading on this issue.”

This is not the first time Biden has mistaken Harris as president. The fact that she could be president is worse, since there are few in public office as dimwitted as she. Recently, Harris offered this pearl of wisdom at an event honoring National Small Business Week: “Some of our younger small business owners actually self-identify as entrepreneurs. They’re small business owners also.”

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, the darling of the left, had this to say to a witness during a Senate Banking Committee hearing this week:

“Is it a staggering responsive … responsibility … that the the head of a bank could literally could literally crash our economy. Astonishing. That’s like if you have, I mean like … and, and they also realize is that-that-that now they have, it’s in the guaranteed a guaranteed way to be saved, by again by no matter no matter how, you know. So, it’s, it’s, you know, isn’t it appropriate that the those kinds of this kind of control should be more stricter to prevent this kind of thing from going? Or should we just go on and start bailing and sailing whoever bank, regardless of how however there’s their conduct is?”

ANTI-SEMITISM, ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Marvel, and the ‘Scandal,’ of Jerusalem Anti-Semitism is rooted in envy of the Jewish people’s eternal endurance. By Meir Soloveichik

Posted By on May 19th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-marvel-and-the-scandal-of-jerusalem-day-anti-semitism-missiles-gaza-b01f4eda?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Thousands of religious Israelis are celebrating Jerusalem Day, which began Thursday at sundown. On Friday morning at the Western Wall, they will recite psalms of thanksgiving commemorating the moment in the Six Day War of 1967 that Israeli soldiers conquered the ancient city of Jerusalem, making it the heart of Israel’s capital. Those assembled won’t merely mark a military achievement 56 years ago. Their minds will travel back to the earliest origins of the sacred city, to its conquest by King David and to the empires that have destroyed it, only to have it rise again from the ashes. They will ponder how Jewish Jerusalem reflects the miracle of Jewish existence: one that allows us to understand why, for better or worse, the world’s attention remains riveted on Israel.

No city in the world has a history like Jerusalem, and no other people has a relationship to a location like the Jews do to it. To study Jerusalem is to study the story of the world: from Egyptian pharaohs to Mesopotamian kings, from Greek and Roman emperors to kaisers and sultans. They, and others, sought to end Jewish presence in the ancient city permanently. Yet Jerusalem is a Jewish city restored, while other ancient cities of biblical past—Babel, Pi-Rameses, Nineveh—are in ruin.

As Norman Podhoretz once put it, Jerusalem reflects “the scandal of Jewish particularity”: The uniqueness of one city in world history testifies to the enduring nature of one people on this earth. Established as Israel’s capital when now-extinct empires bestrode the world, it was toward Jerusalem that the Jews prayed in exile, binding themselves to it as empire after empire became the Ozymandias of its age. Jews celebrate the anniversary of the Jewish return to ancient Jerusalem not only because it is central to their spiritual lives but also because it is a reminder of God’s providence in the history of their people and of the world.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The EPA Threatens to Turn Out the Lights Its proposed power-plant emission rule would destabilize the energy grid and end reliable electricity. By William S. Scherman

Posted By on May 19th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-epa-threatens-to-turn-out-the-lights-electricity-generation-energy-grid-natural-gas-coal-co2-a5ca4d77?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Imagine flipping a light switch and not knowing if the lights will come on. Normally unthinkable. But the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed power-plant rules would destabilize the energy grid, resulting in less-reliable electric service.

The EPA’s aggressive standards require all coal-fired power plants to use a new and still-tricky technology called carbon capture and storage, or CCS, to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 90% by 2035, or begin co-firing with natural gas. In addition, natural-gas-fired plants must capture 90% of emissions by 2035 using CCS or switch almost entirely to hydrogen by 2038. The only other option for both: shut down.

These nascent technologies simply won’t get the job done in the next few years. CCS is used at only one commercial power plant in North America. The only U.S. coal plant to implement CCS successfully closed in 2020 for economic reasons.

CCS holds great promise, but there are significant operational and economic hurdles to its widespread deployment. The Biden administration recently acknowledged that building and using CCS faces many of the same permitting and regulatory problems plaguing other energy infrastructure

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: THE LEFT DESTROYS EVERYTHING IT TOUCHES

Posted By on May 19th, 2023

https://victorhanson.com/institutions-breaking-bad/

As a general rule, the Left eventually destroys everything it touches.

It sees all institutions as ideological fodder, to be warped and twisted, as a necessary means to serve higher political ends. Think of an institution that started out in theory as at least neutral, apolitical, and benign, and then ponder how utterly corrupt it has become.

Public Broadcasting. The public was delighted over a half-century ago with the novel idea that it could enjoy drama, documentaries, and in-depth news—without soap and car commercials (as if something can ever be “free” without consequences). Who did not enjoy the importation of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation or the multi-episode version of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius?

Remember the first decade of the MacNeil/Lehrer Report? It was a mostly honest liberal version of the news, delivered by two professional journalists, both superior to a Dan Rather or Peter Jennings.

But by the new millennium, the non-political programming began to become overtly ideological. “Nature” documentaries began plugging manmade, disastrous “global warming” to “climate change” to “climate chaos” themes. The PBS NewsHour house “conservatives” were more liberal than most Democrats of the age.

The quirky Garrison Keillor’s liberal, but interesting radio show, A Prairie Home Companion was finally Trotskyized by #MeToo, along with the blotted-out name of Keillor himself.

Many originally thought that NPR might resemble a more lavishly funded form of a mostly nonpartisan C-SPAN, as envisioned, say, by the talented, fair-minded, and astute Brian Lamb of Booknotes. But listen to NPR now and one would conclude that transgenderism is the new normal, that about four people voted for Donald Trump, that BLM/Antifa are similar to the Elks or Rotary, and the dossier is still “Russian collusion,” and Hunter’s laptop remains “disinformation.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Dithering Biden is Seriously Harming Ukraine’s Victory Prospects by Con Coughlin

Posted By on May 18th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19646/biden-harming-ukraine-victory-prospects

While U.S. President Joe Biden has constantly pledged his support for Kyiv, his rhetoric has invariably failed to result in providing the Ukrainians with the military support they require. Even when, as happened earlier this year, the White House reluctantly agreed to provide Ukraine with Abrams tanks – a move that was only approved after Washington came under intense pressure from allies such as Poland – the slow delivery timetable has made Ukrainian commanders despair that the equipment will ever actually arrive.

As for the promised Abrams tanks, U.S. officials readily admit that the Abrams are months away from arriving as the Pentagon looks at its stocks to see what it can send.

In a recent interview with Foreign Policy magazine, Sasha Ustinova, a Ukrainian lawmaker, confirmed the U.S. military had delivered far less than what Valeriy Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top general, had asked for from the Pentagon. U.S. military aid is only arriving piecemeal as the Biden administration warns it is nearing the end of its ability to provide weapons that can be pulled off of the Pentagon’s shelves to give to the Ukrainians.

Ustinova said that Ukraine hoped to begin the offensive in April, but the lack of weapons has pushed the launch date back indefinitely.

Certainly, any delay in the Ukrainians launching their offensive will only help to convince the Kremlin that, despite all the setbacks it has suffered over the course of the past year, it may still end up winning the war.

The Biden administration’s constant dithering over supplying weapons to Ukraine is proving to be a decisive factor in the Ukrainian military’s decision to delay its long-awaited spring counter-offensive against Russian forces.

Since the end of last year, when the Ukrainians inflicted a series of humiliating defeats against their Russian foes, Kyiv has been warning that it is in urgent need of fresh supplies of military equipment from its Western allies if it is to continue its campaign to liberate Ukrainian territory from Russian occupation.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

New York Mayor Eric Adams praises yeshivah learning “We need to be duplicating what you are achieving,” he said.

Posted By on May 18th, 2023

https://www.jns.org/new-york-mayor-eric-adams-praises-yeshivah-learning/?utm_source=sendinblue&utm_campaign=Daily%20Syndicate%2005-17-2023&utm_medium=email

(May 17, 2023 / JNS) New York City Mayor Eric Adams called for public schools in the five boroughs to learn from the success of some of their non-public counterparts.

Adams said at the annual 2023 Teach NYS dinner on May 10 that “instead of us focusing on how we can duplicate the success of improving our children, we attack the yeshivahs that are providing a quality education that is embracing our children.” Teach NYS is partnered with the Orthodox Union.

The mayor also noted that yeshivahs “have turned around the question mark of ‘how are our children.’ You are making an exclamation point that’s saying, ‘Our children are fine.’ ”

Referencing the recent criticisms and investigations into New York’s Jewish schools, Adams said that “people are asking questions … about what is happening in our yeshivahs across the city and state, while at the same time, 65% of black and brown children never reach proficiency in the public-school system, but we’re asking, ‘What are you doing in your schools?’ ”

He urged: “Let’s reach across our ethnic, cultural and religious philosophies … and appreciate the religious philosophies that are part of the educational opportunity.”