NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

GOPers Order Blinken To Turn Over All Communications With Hunter Biden After Emails Show He Lied To Congress By: Shawn Fleetwood

Posted By on May 3rd, 2023

https://thefederalist.com/2023/05/02/gopers-order-blinken-to-turn-over-all-communications-with-hunter-biden-after-emails-show-he-lied-to-congress/

Following revelations that he allegedly lied under oath to Congress, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is facing calls from Senate Republicans to turn over communication records related to Hunter Biden and his shady business engagements.

On Monday, Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa sent a letter to Blinken demanding that he turn over any and all records “referring or relating to Hunter Biden, his business dealings, or his family’s business dealings” by May 15. The request comes as part of Senate Republicans’ investigation into the Biden family’s foreign business ventures.

In the letter, Johnson and Grassley document a series of emails revealing how Blinken seemingly lied under oath about his prior communications with Hunter. While testifying before Congress on Dec. 22, 2020, Blinken was asked if he had any means of correspondence —including phone calls, emails, or texts — with Hunter Biden during his time as President Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state, to which Blinken replied, “No.”

Emails from Hunter’s laptop, however, appear to contradict Blinken’s December 2020 testimony. As documented in the Johnson-Grassley letter, Hunter emailed Blinken at his personal email address on May 22, 2015, asking if the then-deputy secretary of state was available to meet.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Suspect in Texas Massacre Had Been Deported at Least Four Times By Rick Moran

Posted By on May 3rd, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/05/02/suspect-in-texas-massacre-had-been-deported-at-least-four-times-n1692037

The suspect wanted for the massacre of four adults and one child in Cleveland, Texas, had previously been arrested and deported at least four times, according to a source in Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The suspect was identified by ICE as Francisco Oropesa Perez-Torres. He was first removed by an immigration judge in March 2009, the ICE source told CNN on Monday.

“At an unknown time and location, Perez-Torres unlawfully reentered the United States, and was apprehended and removed several more times by ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in September 2009, January 2012, and July 2016,” the source said.

Oropesa Perez-Torres was asked to stop firing his rifle by his next-door neighbors several times. Despite at least 5 calls to 911, the situation escalated until Oropesa Perez-Torres opened fire.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Americans Reject DEI-Dominated ‘Wokeplace,’ Schools: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on May 3rd, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/05/03/americans-reject-dei-dominated-wokeplace-schools-ii-tipp-poll/

So why is it being imposed on all of us?

American businesses and higher-educational institutions have been swept up in the “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” trend, which bases hiring, pay and promotion decisions on such things as political beliefs, gender, race and sexual orientation. Do most Americans support this trend? The answer is a resounding “no,” the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

Looking at the recent historic shifts among American commercial and educational institutions when it comes to their employment, promotion and pay practices, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll asked Americans “which of the following factors are important when it comes to hiring, raises, and promotions in the workplace?”

The list for rewarding employees included: “political belief,” “race,” “gender,” “political orientation,” which together comprise some of the essential elements of workplaces and schools that operate under the “progressive” ideals of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) movement.

But the other possibilities listed were employment practices still found in some, but not all, modern American workplaces and schools. These include judging employees on “quality of work,” “productivity/performance,” and “attitude toward work.”

(Note: Respondents were encouraged to select all the responses they thought were important, so the numbers reflect relative support, not absolute support, and don’t total to 100%.)

So did Americans prefer the new “woke-place,” or the old “workplace”? How about higher education?

The answer: Voters showed a clear and decisive 3-to-1 preference overall for the tried-and-true over the trendy-and-untested when it came to workplace practices.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Vivek Ramaswamy Takes on the Fed The role of the central bank in our economy is a presidential-level issue.

Posted By on May 3rd, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vivek-ramaswamy-federal-reserve-monetary-policy-stable-dollar-presidential-race-2024-5b4abfaf?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Vivek Ramaswamy may be a longshot in his bid for the GOP presidential nomination, but the entrepreneur deserves credit for taking on issues that matter. His op-ed for these pages on Tuesday teed up reform of the Federal Reserve, a presidential-level issue that affects every American.

Most candidates haven’t done enough homework to talk about the Fed or monetary policy without looking foolish. And even for those who have, the conventional political wisdom is that the subjects are too complicated to grab public attention.

Yet that hasn’t always been true. Ronald Reagan campaigned on the need for a stable dollar, and the late Congressman Jack Kemp talked about making the dollar “as good as gold.” Those lines struck a populist chord as Americans faced the destructive inflation of the 1970s and the painful monetary tightening to defeat it in the 1980s. The U.S. is back at that same stand, with Washington having unleashed another inflation and the Fed now scrambling to beat it. Bank failures are one result.

Mr. Ramaswamy’s helpful contribution was to trace the Fed’s monetary mistakes back to the central bank’s loss of focus on keeping the dollar and exchange rates stable. That was the lesson Paul Volcker and other central bankers took away from the inflation of the 1970s, and their focus on stable prices led to more than a decade of healthy disinflation. It was called “the great moderation.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The US-Israel nexus transcends politics and geo-strategy

Posted By on May 3rd, 2023

https://bit.ly/44ehk9M

Notwithstanding the 75-year-old systematic – and sometimes brutal – pressure on Israel by the US State Department and almost all US presidents, US-Israel commercial and defense cooperation has surged to dramatic heights.

*The mutually-beneficial US-Israel cooperation has been consistent with US economic and defense interests and with the US mindset about Israel. Unlike the US mindset on most other countries, the mindset on Israel is a bottom-top phenomenon. Thus, US policy toward Israel is a derivative of the worldview of the American constituency, which is generally followed by elected officials in the US House and Senate and acknowledged by the White House.  

*The US constituency’s perspective of the Jewish State has been impacted by Israel’s unwavering democracy, reliability and unique technological, intelligence and military capabilities. Moreover, the worldview of most constituents has been influenced by the historic, religious, ethical and moral roots of US culture and civic life, which were heavily influenced by British and French philosophers as well as by Biblical sources, as documented by the legacy of the Founding Fathers, who established the Federalist system of governance and authored the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.  

*While the attachment of the US population to the Biblically-driven legacy of the Founding Fathers has gradually eroded, it still impacts the worldview of most Americans, as evidenced by the political discourse, which frequently features Biblical quotes.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

How anti-Semitic tropes crept back into the mainstream The Guardian is just the latest outlet to publish dodgy cartoons of Jews. Frank Furedi

Posted By on May 2nd, 2023

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/05/02/how-anti-semitic-tropes-crept-back-into-the-mainstream/

The Guardian has apologised for its cartoon of former BBC chairman Richard Sharp, which has been widely condemned for containing anti-Semitic tropes. Martin Rowson’s cartoon depicted Sharp with an impossibly large nose, clutching a box marked ‘Goldman Sachs’, containing a puppet of UK prime minister Rishi Sunak and what appears to be money. It essentially painted Sharp as a grasping Jewish puppet-master.

At the weekend, the Guardian removed the cartoon from its website and issued a mealy mouthed apology. It was the kind of apology that was clearly scripted by in-house legal advisers. The cartoon, the Guardian said, ‘did not meet our editorial standards’. The newspaper made clear it ‘apologises to Mr Sharp, to the Jewish community and to anyone offended’, but it has not explicitly acknowledged that the cartoon features anti-Semitic tropes. As for Martin Rowson, he tweeted to say that he ‘screwed up pretty badly’. He later published a lengthy apology / explanation on his website. ‘This is on me, even if accidentally or, more precisely, thoughtlessly’, he wrote.

What I find most disturbing about this affair is not so much the sight of yet another grotesque depiction of a Jewish person, or the use of classic anti-Semitic tropes. Rather, it is the casual manner in which such incidents are treated. You could easily get the impression that the cartoon is really no big deal. The Guardian seems to think that a perfunctory half-apology will be enough to put things right. Rowson, while effusive in his apology, has only really admitted to being careless.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The China influence puzzle The CCP is trying to subvert our schools. Confucius Institutes are just the beginning Peter Wood

Posted By on May 2nd, 2023

https://thespectator.com/topic/china-influence-puzzle-confucius-institutes-ccp/

A“Chinese puzzle” in its classic version is a game where you must fit a variety of ill-assorted boxes inside other boxes. The term came to mean any intricate problem, especially one in which what looks like the way forward leads only to new obstacles.

These days, in which we are warned not to use ethnonyms for fear of giving offense, it might be safer to say something like “brainteaser.” But the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to manipulate American society genuinely deserve the old term.

The news this past week adds a few curious details to those efforts. Details first; explanations to follow.

Professor Charles Lieber, former chairman of Harvard’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department, had been facing a possible sentence of twenty-six years in federal prison for actions related to his involvement with a CCP program. A federal jury found him guilty on all felony charges, but the prosecution oddly reduced its recommendation to ninety days. On April 26, Judge Rya W. Zobel handed down a sentence of two days in prison
According to the New York Times, at the beginning of 2022, the FBI had more than 2,000 open investigations dealing with Chinese theft of US information and technology. The Biden administration promptly shut them all down
The Department of Defense announced in March that it would grant waivers to colleges that wish to host Chinese influence operations. The 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) prohibited the disbursement of federal defense dollars to all colleges that host these Chinese operations. The new rule essentially voids the law
A bill has been introduced in Congress, the “Transparency in College Foreign Payments Act,” that would require the disclosure by universities of the name of the foreign government and its agency that provides funding to and the name of specific campus recipients of this funding. The key person in the House is Congressman Jim Banks who serves on the new House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the US and the Chinese Communist Party

What’s going on? Let me back up several steps.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

China, Russia And Iran Rush To Fill The American Leadership Void Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on May 2nd, 2023

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

A bizarre series of new and/or deepened relationships around the world — often including countries that had long been at odds or at war — has emerged in the past twelve months. Take a deep breath and look around: China-Saudi Arabia, China-Iran, Israel-China, Tesla-China, China-Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Brazil/Venezuela/Cuba-China. Saudi Arabia-Syria, Saudi Arabia-Israel, Iran-Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia-Palestinian Authority, Iran-Iraq, Russia-Iran, Iran-Venezuela/Cuba/Nicaragua, Russia-Israel, Japan-South Korea, Japan-Russia.

Every single one and the consequences they produce are the result of the clear withdrawal of the United States as the lynchpin of relations and alliances on the world stage (with the exception of pouring billions of dollars’ worth of weapons into Ukraine). The Biden administration has created a vacuum in the Middle East, South America and Africa. Into every vacuum pours … well … nothing good.

Side Story: Israel’s experience with territorial vacuums can be seen clearly in Lebanon. Withdrawing from southern Lebanon to the UN line in 2000 was supposed to lead to more peaceful bilateral relations since Israel no longer controlled Lebanese territory. However, the Christian forces of the South Lebanese Army (SLA) weren’t enough to hold the space, and Iranian proxy Hezbollah filled the vacuum. Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 removed the IDF. With no IDF and no Israeli citizens in the Strip, Iranian proxy Hamas filled the vacuum. Israel remains in Judea and Samaria by right but also because it is clear that the PA cannot hold the territory in the absence of the hand of the IDF.

The US plays on a bigger stage.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

America’s Transgender Craze By Robert Weissberg

Posted By on May 2nd, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/americas_transgender_craze_.html

Future historians may look back on 2023 as Peak Trans Women insanity. The highly publicized boycott of Bud Light beer over Anheuser-Busch’s choice to feature the trans “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney may have garnered the most publicity, but it is only a small part of this craze. This prominence is particularly visible in the fashion industry, where leading brands such as Chanel, Versace, and Victoria’s Secret now showcase biological men dressed as glamorous women. Even Sports Illustrated, a magazine targeting sports-minded men, once portrayed the transgender model, Leyna Bloom, on its cover. Thirty-sex transgendered women are currently earning a living as fashion models.

While portraying trans women in glossy magazines may attract more notice, more consequential is how biological males are replacing women in sports. It’s hard to know the numbers here, and some estimates put the figures on the low side (e.g., a 100 or so at the college level, five for K-12 ), but the impact extends beyond the raw numbers since biological men frequently dominate and thus deprive biological girls of financial rewards such as college scholarships or trophies.  A gay-oriented website summarizes this pattern with the headline,  “These 20 trans women have won national or international competitions or championships.” Who can forget the mediocre male swimmer Lia Thomas winning swimming championships as a female? Meanwhile, a trans weightlifter competed as a woman in the Olympics. A transgendered athlete recently defeated 14,000 female competitors in the London Marathon.

Far less publicized is that state prisons now contain 5000 men who identify as women while some 1300 are inmates of federal prisons.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ireland is on the verge of enacting the most draconian anti-speech law in the West By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on May 2nd, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/ireland_is_on_the_verge_of_enacting_the_most_draconian_antispeech_law_in_the_west.html

Ireland, a country that long chafed under England’s repressive governance, is about to become very repressive itself. It’s about to put into effect a speech bill so repressive that anyone who even receives a text that runs afoul of the law could be arrested if he does not immediately delete and disavow the text. This is where the Western world, once the bastion of intellectual liberty, has ended.

The law, entitled “Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022,” passed through the legislature in February, with only 4 representatives out of 160 voting against it. Most in the public weren’t even aware of the bill and, if they’d thought about it, they probably would have congratulated themselves on being a nice country in which “hate” speech is barred.

It was only when an Irish conservative commentator, Keith Woods, who was reinstated on Twitter thanks to Elon Musk’s commitment to free speech, that word got out:

It’s a little hard to tell from that snippet exactly what’s going on, so let me fill in a few blanks. First, the bill has all sorts of sections and subsections for different speech offenses. They all revolve around silencing anything but positive speech about people with “protected characteristics.” Those characteristics are race, “colour,” nationalist, religion, national or ethnic origin, descent, gender, sex characteristics, sexual orientation, or disability.” “Gender,” the bill explains, includes the whole nonsensical panoply of gender identity.