HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

The Chinese Communist Party’s Secret Projects in the US: What Is Going On? by Pete Hoekstra

Posted By on April 27th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19607/communist-china-michigan

Two Chinese companies, Gotion and CATL, are on the verge of building two new battery manufacturing facilities in Michigan. These companies were lured by billions in state and local tax incentives and infrastructure investments, and the environmental requirements buried in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

[T]he state of Michigan is making a big bet on electric vehicle (EV) technology in concert with the Chinese Communist Party. What could go wrong?

The answer to that is simple: Plenty. At a time when bipartisan members of Congress on the Select Committee on the CCP are conducting war games simulating a U.S. response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, one has to ask is this the right moment to seek more Chinese investment in the state. Especially when one of those projects is just 100 miles from where the U.S. is training Taiwanese troops to defend against a Chinese Communist invasion.

Already, Virginia, home to numerous military and intelligence facilities, has rejected one of the two projects out of national security concerns.

As… outlined in the unprecedented joint news conference by the FBI and MI-5, the threat from the Chinese Communist Party is real, dangerous and pervasive.

Another red flag is the secrecy shrouding the projects. Although the state is in the process of providing substantial sums in taxpayer money to private entities, many of the details have been covered by Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs). Members of Congress, state legislators, local elected officials, and state and congressional staff have been forced to sign NDAs so they can access information taxpayers and the media have been prevented from seeing. What is so secret that it requires taxpayers to be shielded from information about the projects that their dollars will fund? Local newspapers have requested information through Freedom of Information Act requests, but they have been denied.

Not only are the projects shrouded in a veil of secrecy, there are legitimate concerns about various organizations actually adhering to the Foreign Agents Reporting Act (FARA). This act requires individuals working on behalf of a foreign entity to register their activities with the Justice…. Former Ambassador Joe Cella and I have… have jointly submitted a request to the Justice Department to review specific individuals and their compliance with federal disclosure laws.

[N]ow is the time for both battery projects to be paused. It is time for legislators to engage in their fiduciary responsibility, recognize the changed environment, and reevaluate plans to spend taxpayer dollars to fund two Chinese companies, the CCP, and potentially even the Taliban and the re-emerging Islamic State. It is a new day and US taxpayer money should not be backing potential adversaries.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trans Marathoner Defeats 14,000 Women in Race after Competing as Man Months Earlier By Caroline Downey

Posted By on April 27th, 2023

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trans-marathoner-defeats-14000-women-in-race-after-competing-as-man-months-earlier/?

A transgender runner on Sunday defeated thousands of women in the female category of the London Marathon after competing as a man in the New York City race just months prior.

Glenique Frank, a 52-year old male athlete who now identifies as female, finished in 6160th place out of 20,123 entrants, outpacing 14,000 women.

“Girl power!,” Frank said to a reporter after the London event, flexing his biceps and abdomen muscles for the camera. Frank listed all the other races he’s participated in recently. For all of those, he was referred to as “Glen” rather than “Glenique.”

“My beautiful son stood there” on the sidelines to support, Frank said. “He’s having a baby, so I’m going to be a granny.”

Frank then ran off from the camera, wearing a transgender flag as a cape. The spectacle soon received intense backlash from some female professional runners.

“Males in the F category is UNFAIR for females,” Olympic marathoner Mara Yamauchi tweeted in response to the viral video of Frank.

Yamauchi suggested that Frank’s category switch enabled him to transcend his previously mediocre status. Last November, for example, he ran the NYC Marathon in the men’s category and finished 14,096th out of 26,539, according to Yamauchi.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

MY SAY: IT’S THE AGENDA STUPID!

Posted By on April 27th, 2023

It’s the economy, stupid is a phrase that was coined by James Carville in 1992 to promote the election of Bill Clinton.

Forgive my paraphrasing, but the election of 2024 is a do or die moment for reversing the precipitous slide in American deterrence, foreign policy and prestige, education, national culture, freedom to dissent and patriotic pride occasioned by the election of 2020.

Restoring a modern conservative agenda requires two full terms in the White House and the present leading candidate cannot meet that requirement.

Unlike the Democrat party mired in destructive “progressive policies” the GOP has a multitude of younger, energetic, determined and experienced candidates who should be encouraged and promoted to national status in 2024. rsk

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Dominion vs. ‘Russian Collusion’ and ‘Disinformation’ Massaging a U.S. election by conspiring to concoct a disinformation campaign must be as actionable as Dominion’s postelection claim of $757 million in damages. That’s exactly what happened in 2016. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 27th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/04/26/dominion-vs-russian-collusion-and-disinformation/

Fox News is reeling, both financially and with respect to its talent, after being drawn into a long lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems. 

The network just settled for an astounding $757.5 million and soon after released Tucker Carlson, the network’s highest-rated host.

The voting machine company had alleged some of Fox’s hosts had either promulgated, or allowed their guests to push, a false narrative that the corporation’s voting machines were “fixed” and misreported the vote count in some precincts of the 2020 presidential election.

In other words, Dominion walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars on the accusation that some raving guests and a few Fox journalists insinuated, falsely, that the machines had thrown the election to Joe Biden.

Yet no one argues that such post facto accusations influenced the election. The postelection dispute instead was over whether a news organization was responsible for all that its hundreds of guests and hosts say that proved later to be not substantiated, false, or defamatory.

Fox settled with Dominion reportedly to avoid messy revelations of its internal texts and to stop the hemorrhaging of its brand.

But by doing so, the network may have inadvertently set a dubious standard that any speculative opinion, voiced in public media, however nutty and later proven to be inaccurate, will be actionable.

If that is the standard, we are going to see a lot more costly lawsuits.

Compare Dominion’s writ with the twin “Russian collusion” and “Russian disinformation” hoaxes.

Lots of journalists and guests on network news, cable, public broadcasting, and internet news sites ran daily with the utter lie that the concocted Christopher Steele dossier was accurate.

Four years later, they were still claiming that Donald Trump had won the 2016 election only by enlisting the aid of the Russians—as an “asset” and puppet of Vladimir Putin.

All that was demonstrably untrue.

No one on these news shows ever produced any information validating the dossier, much less offered apologies to those whose lives they ruined, as in the case of Lt. General Michael Flynn and Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page.

The steady two-year drumbeat of media and DNC-fabricated untruths neutered the first two years of the Trump Administration.

Robert Mueller’s $40 million, 22-month special counsel “investigation” leaked wild and lurid rumors of Trump indictments to come, and yet ultimately found no proof of collusion.

No matter. The agendas of the Democratic Party’s collaboration with the media were fulfilled. The Trump Administration was wounded, forced on defense to reply to countless new fabrications, and smeared to the point of caricature.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Steven Spielberg Slams Woke Edits to Hollywood Classics, Including His Own By Stephen Green

Posted By on April 27th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/04/26/steven-spielberg-slams-woke-edits-to-hollywood-classics-including-his-own-n1690392

“I never should have done that,” to E.T. The Extraterrestrial, Oscar-winning movie director Steven Spielberg told the Time 100 summit earlier this week. He was referring to politically correct digital edits he made for the movie’s 20th anniversary re-release.

In one of the original edit’s most chilling moments, kids are seen making their escape with E.T. on bicycles, pursued by armed federal agents with an interest in the alien creature. Back in 2002, Spielberg used digital effects to replace agents’ pistols and rifles with harmless — and silly-looking — walkie-talkies. A scene of genuine drama was turned into a mood-destroying giggle in order to please “modern sensibilities.” That’s a move Spielberg now regrets, and more recent home video releases have the original scenes restored.

“No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are either voluntarily or being forced to peer through,” Spielberg explained.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joe Biden Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things-The Longer He’s In Office The Worse Off We’ll Be

Posted By on April 27th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/27/joe-biden-is-why-we-cant-have-nice-things/

In one of the most memorable presidential debate moments, Ronald Reagan asked voters if they were better off in 1980 than they were when Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976. The obvious answer was, for most, a resounding “no.” Whoever runs against the Democratic nominee next year needs to bring back that question, because it’s a certainty that in the fall of 2024, we’ll still be worse off than we were in pre-pandemic 2020.

And for that, we can thank, or rather blame, Joe Biden.

In a poll taken earlier this year, 41% of Americans said they were financially worse off than they were two years earlier when Biden took office, the highest number in “ABC News/Washington Post polls dating back 37 years.” Only 16% said they were better off, the lowest number since 2009, when only 8% said their financial situations were better.

At roughly the same time in Donald Trump’s term, only 13% said they were worse off than when he became president while a quarter said their finances had improved.

An America struggling under Biden is not a new development. In a survey conducted in the spring of 2022, 52% said they were worse off than a year earlier; 39% said they expected to be worse off in one year than they were when they were asked the question in June.

Last year’s New York Times|Momentive Poll further discovered that “The number of people who expect periods of widespread unemployment or depression to occur in the next five years has risen to 71%, another new high,” while 41% said “now is a bad time to make large purchases.” This was “up from 36% in April and slightly” exceeded “the 39% that number reached in April 2020 at the start of the COVID pandemic.” 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The College Board’s Secret Apology Private emails show it wasn’t honest about Ron DeSantis and African-American Studies.

Posted By on April 27th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-board-african-american-studies-ap-course-ron-desantis-florida-emails-817262f4?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Gov. Ron DeSantis is credited with forcing a rewrite of a new high-school AP class in African-American Studies, after Florida balked at such lesson topics as “Black Queer Studies.” Denying pressure, the College Board said the revisions were pedagogical: “This course has been shaped only by the input of experts and long-standing AP principles and practices.”

Yet its own faculty advisers privately castigated this as dishonest spin, according to emails we obtained via open-records laws. “I have patiently and quietly watched the ubiquitous interviews and media assertions that AP would not make changes at the behest of any group beyond professors, teachers, and students,” wrote Nishani Frazier, a University of Kansas professor who sits on the AP course’s development committee. “If this is so, which student, professor, or teacher suggested adding black conservatives to the course over Combahee River Collective?”

Ms. Frazier continued: “We all know this is a blatant lie. In fact, the major changes which occurred came from my unit—and not once did AP speak with me about these changes. Instead, it rammed through revisions, pretended course transformation was business as usual, and then further added insult to injury by attempting to gaslight the public with faux innocence.” The course was “edited behind our backs,” she wrote. “What is unsaid is the failure of AP to recognize both its own institutional racism and how its own lies and capitulation precipitated the creation of a monster of its own making.”

Another professor on the curriculum committee, David Embrick of the University of Connecticut, apparently forwarded Ms. Frazier’s cri de coeur to a sociology professor at Trinity College. “Yikes…Nishani is right here,” Mr. Embrick said. The sociologist’s reaction: “Dude, College Board is f— over y’all.”

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

‘Deep Financial System’ Fueling BDS Movement, New Report Says

Posted By on April 27th, 2023

https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/04/26/deep-financial-system-fueling-bds-movement-new-report-says/

A growing alignment of large philanthropic organizations with the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign is fueling the movement’s growth on American college campuses, a new report released on Wednesday by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a Manhattan based nonprofit promoting intellectual freedom and reform of American higher education, argues.

“Beyond campus student activism agitating for divestment measures for student governments, and behind the professional organizing that trains student activist organizations, lies a network of legal and financial support that empowers the campus BDS movement to function,” Dr. Ian Oxnevad, a NAS senior research fellow, writes in The Company They Keep: Organizational and Economic Dynamics of the BDS Movement. “The BDS movement relies upon a deep financial system of progressively oriented businesses and nonprofit foundations devoted to a broad array of social justice causes.”

Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP), a left-wing anti-Israel organization which promotes the BDS movement, has received $480,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic foundation whose endowment is valued at $1.27 billion, since 2017, the report said, and the Tides Research Fund, a sponsor of Black Lives Matter, has given the group $75,000 since 2019. Between 2014 and 2015 alone, JVP brought in over half a million dollars in grants. Additionally, Palestine Legal, a lawfare group founded in 2012 to support campus BDS groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), is the beneficiary of generous funding from Tides Foundation, a pioneer of activist investment that has given over $1.5 million to anti-Israel initiatives, according to figures included in the report.

Yet, despite the growth of the BDS movement on American campuses over the past decade, the report cites data showing that BDS resolutions proposed in student governments have a 66 percent failure. “With large studies already indicating a limited campus effectiveness of BDS, the question remains regarding how such attempted resolutions take place,” the report says. Such failures, however, have not undermined the ability of pro-BDS activists to wield an immense effect on campus culture. By linking the cause to other left-wing initiatives, it continued, they set the parameters of how students perceive Jewish students, Jewish life organizations, and programs like the Taglit-Birthright Israel program.

The 124 page report includes three case studies on Columbia University, Ohio State University, and University of California-Riverside, assessing the various successes and failures of pro-BDS activists, students and professors at American universities and college campuses. It also chronicles the history of the BDS movement, describing its place within the wider story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and “a larger ecosystem of progressive political organizations,” as well as its alleged connection to Palestinian terrorism.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Biden’s promotion of electric cars could be in for a big surprise By Monica Showalter

Posted By on April 26th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/bidens_promotion_of_electic_cars_could_be_in_for_a_big_surprise.html

Anything the Bidenites can do, the radical leftists running Chile can do better.

Which takes us from the world of Sam Brinton managing U.S. nuclear waste in the states, to (hold muh’ pisco), Chile nationalizing its lithium mines and bringing in a purple-haired feminist activist social-worker academic to regulate their activities instead.

Get a load of Chile’s new “Seremi,” or, secretary of the regional ministry, for the mighty mining province of Antofagasta, Macarena Barramuno, who’s been named for that job in Chile’s desert north.

Antofagasta is home to Chile’s gargantuan lithium mining reserves, the world’s second-largest, whose extraction is used create batteries for Joe Biden’s much-promoted electric cars.

A Google Translate of an item that ran in local PiTV Noticias Calama in neighboring Atacama reads (I left the translation imperfect):

MACARENA BARRAMUÑO ASSUMES AS NEW MINING SEREMI IN ANTOFAGASTA

The social worker took over today, replacing Ruth Rodriguez, who declined to assume the position due to problems.

During the morning, Macarena Barramuño González, a social worker by profession and Master of Development studies specialization of Gender, from the University of Melbourne, took over as the new Mining Seremi for the Antofagasta region, who has developed her career mainly in community management designing , coordinating, and directing initiatives with the purpose of transforming and improving communities.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Another conservative Supreme Court justice under attack By Rajan Laad

Posted By on April 26th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/another_conservative_supreme_court_justice_under_attack.html

Earlier this month, ProPublica attempted to smear Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, implying in its reporting that he was compromised due to his friendship with real estate mogul and billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow based on the holidays the Thomas family spent with the Crow family.

It led many Democrats who themselves have engaged in ethically questionable behavior to besmirch Thomas.

The high priestess of liberal hypocrisy, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a.k.a. AOC, who is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for possible violation of congressional rules for accepting impermissible gifts, is one of the loudest advocates of branding Thomas as corrupt and demanding his impeachment.

The mainstream news media, which is a P.R. wing of the Democrats, amplified the chaos.

The target now is Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Just yesterday, Politico carried a hit piece with a provocative headline: “Law firm head bought Gorsuch-owned property.”