WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Mullah Mischief in Latin America Venezuela becomes a forward base for Iran against the United States. Joseph Puder

Posted By on July 13th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/mullah-mischief-latin-america-joseph-puder/

Iran and its primary terror agent, Hezbollah, are a threat not only to the security of Israel and the Arab Gulf states — their tentacles stretch across the globe. In Latin America, Iran is building a strategic response against the United States with a protected base in Venezuela under President Nicolas Maduro. Iran’s build-up of long-range ballistic missiles, and the Russian supply of the lethal S-400 missile system to Iran, pose a serious threat to the security of the United States. These Russian missiles will eventually end up in Venezuela. Russia is poised to retaliate against the U.S. supply of missiles to Ukraine, by arming both Iran and Venezuela with the S-400 missile system.

With the Biden administration’s desperate quest for a nuclear deal with Iran, it is crucial now more than ever for Washington to include Iran’s long-range ballistic missile development onto the nuclear talks agenda among other forums. The Ayatollahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran may eventually drop their demand for lifting the U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), since they already have cleverly deceived the western powers by deliberately buying time to be weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for several bombs. Robert Malley, the U.S. envoy to the Vienna nuclear negotiations with Iran, recently warned that Iran can “make a nuclear bomb within a matter of weeks.”

Last March, the Biden administration flirted with lifting oil sanctions on Venezuela in order to temper surging oil prices. White House and State Department officials traveled to Caracas, Venezuela to meet with the anti-American President Maduro, the Venezuelan dictator. It seemed as if the Biden administration was willing to fund a ruthless dictator, who is serving Iran’s strategic interests in facilitating an IRGC forward military base against the U.S. At the same time, however, the Biden administration is unwilling to encourage investments in domestic energy production.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Americans See Jan. 6 Hearings As Politically Biased And Anti-Trump: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on July 13th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/13/americans-see-jan-6-hearings-as-politically-biased-and-anti-trump-ii-tipp-poll/

The Jan. 6 hearings mark the third major investigation into former President Donald Trump’s time in office. To many people, in particular Republicans, these investigations have looked suspiciously politicized, especially the most recent hearings. What’s surprising is that a large share of Democrats agree, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll results show.

Republicans have been front and center in criticizing the Jan. 6 hearings as little more than a political circus intended to besmirch Trump.

Even the makeup of the “bipartisan” committee has come in for ridicule, since the two GOP members of the nine-member panel were handpicked by the Democrats — contrary to the common practice of having a party select its own representatives. This wasn’t helped by the fact that the two GOP members, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, are both vociferous critics of Trump and voted for his impeachment.

But is the deck really stacked against the controversial former president? Republicans give a resounding “yes.” But most surprising of all, many, if not most, Democrats agree.

In the July 2022 online I&I/TIPP Poll, we asked 1,643 adults across the country whether they agreed with the following two statements:

“Some say that the Jan. 6 committee was handpicked and represents only Democrats’ points of view.”
“Some say that the Jan. 6 committee’s main aim is to ensure President Trump can’t run in 2024.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

‘Anonymous’ U.S. leaks divulging Israel’s secrets to Iran By Bob Unruh

Posted By on July 13th, 2022

https://thejewishvoice.com/2022/07/anonymous-u-s-leaks-divulging-israels-secrets-to-iran/

Someone in the Biden administration may be “leaking” details about Israel’s covert operations in order to try to persuade Iranian leaders to return to the failed Iran nuclear deal created – at a cost of billions of dollars – by Barack Obama.

President Donald Trump withdrew America from the deal, which purported to prevent the rogue regime in Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons but actually only delayed that, when he determined there was no benefit to the United States. Joe Biden has been trying to resurrect it.

Now Just the News is reporting just as Biden is preparing to travel to Israel and Saudi Arabia next week, that “anonymous U.S. officials” are “leaking information to the media details about alleged covert Israeli operations against Iran, from targeted killings to explosions at nuclear sites.”

Those leaks could, in fact, generate a number of complications, from retaliation by Iran to failed efforts to take out Iran’s threats.

“It’s a sign of extraordinary incompetence and unprofessionalism from Biden and his foreign policy team,” Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst who also served as a senior staffer on both the House Intelligence Committee and the National Security Council, told Just the News.

“It’s outrageous they would leak this kind of information.”

The “anonymous” reports have included those made recently to CNN about Israel increasing its covert attacks in Iran, the report said.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why Arabs Are Fed up With the Palestinians by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on July 13th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18694/arabs-fed-up-with-palestinians

The Palestinians can only blame themselves for antagonizing their Arab brothers and consequently losing the Arab money. The Palestinians have been spitting in the face of the Arab countries, while at the same time expecting these countries to continue funding them.

The Arabs are clearly not as naïve as the Americans and Europeans, who are continuing to pour millions of dollars annually on the Palestinians without conditions and without demanding accountability.

Had the Palestinians welcomed the many peace accords between Israel and the Arab states instead of condemning them and bad-mouthing the Arab leaders, they would have been in a much better situation today. They would have continued to receive financial aid from the Arabs and been able to use this money to build a better future for their children

The Arab countries have more urgent issues to deal with than the corrupt, thankless Palestinian leaders do. You can start with the welfare of their own people. The Palestinian leadership, by contrast, is happy to fail its people by indoctrinating generation after generation with bloodlust for Jews. When Palestinian society finds itself left in the global dust of progress, it can thank its leaders for bringing them to that sorry pass.

The Palestinians are disappointed: their Arab brothers have stopped providing them with financial aid. The truth is that most of the Arab countries long ago turned their backs on the Palestinians. They can only blame themselves for ruining their relations with the rest of the Arab world.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Living by the Race Card with Rajiv Sethi : Glenn Loury

Posted By on July 13th, 2022

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/living-by-the-race-card?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

In recent conversations, John McWhorter and I have noted that some of the less reputable initiatives put forward by progressive educators, administrators, and elected officials in the name of social justice seem to be losing traction. There is a concerted pushback among parents to reinstate blind admissions testing in elite public schools and banish CRT-type programs from K-12 education, among voters living in cities run by district attorneys who favor overly lax sentencing for felons, and among ordinary people who feel like their ordinary political views can no longer be uttered in polite society.

“Resistance” is one word that describes this trend. “Backlash” is another. In the following excerpt from my conversation with my friend the economist Rajiv Sethi, he worries that this backlash is harming people who did nothing to deserve the ire of those who are fed up with the progressive line on race. I have no doubt there are such innocent victims, and that is regrettable. But we shouldn’t be surprised that the backlash has its excesses; the progressive insistence on injecting race into seemingly every facet of public life is itself excessive. As I say below, you live by the race card, you die by the race card.

When our policy decisions and political movements are premised on the notion that we as human beings are reducible to our race, that our responsibilities and experiences begin and end in race, we are in deep, deep trouble. I hope that those who are resisting the progressive race hustle in the schools and on the ballot are successful, and that those defeats can ratchet down the atmosphere of division and grievance we’re living in now. If not, I fear the backlash will continue, and that a few wrongfully terminated teachers will be the least of our problems.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Hallelujah! I am woman hear me roar! Diane Bederman

Posted By on July 12th, 2022

https://dianebederman.com/hallelujah-i-am-woman-hear-me-roar/

Excerpts

Women, through time, have had this enormous power to decide who will live and who will die.  A great responsibility. The blessing and the curse. For it is woman who decides whose genes will carry on from the past to the future, for she is the carrier of creation and men have always known that, consciously or subconsciously.  Men need permission from women to pass on their genes. Sadly, there are men who will not grant the woman her right to choose.

And then came FEMINISM.

Today, being a woman has nothing to do with procreation, with creating life. Oh no! It has to do with the right to abort! What could be more important  than that?

The Supreme Court ruled on Roe Versus Wade and the feminists went crazy! I haven’t seen protests like this since the Summer of Love 2021 when riots, I mean peaceful protests, took place around America – because of the murder of George Floyd. The murder of one man by police. How dare they? Yet these same people are screaming for the right of women to kill the unborn; not just abort in the first 6 weeks, or even the first trimester – 12 weeks, but right up to BIRTH! And how dare anyone get in the way!  Those Supreme Court Justices! Well, these feminists will teach them a lesson. ShutDownDC offered $50 to people who harass any of the Justices who voted in the majority to overturn Roe v. Wade.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Does Joe Biden’s sojourn signal a return to the ‘old’ Middle East? Ruthie Blum

Posted By on July 12th, 2022

https://www.jns.org/opinion/does-joe-bidens-sojourn-signal-a-return-to-the-old-middle-east/

(July 12, 2022 / JNS) Former Israeli Prime Minister (and current opposition leader) Benjamin Netanyahu prefaced a public statement that he issued on Monday, ahead of U.S. President Joe Biden’s arrival in the country on Wednesday, with what some beholders might have misconstrued as a Freudian slip.

It’s uncommon for the savvy orator, who is usually as good at winging speeches as he is at reading carefully scripted ones, to make rhetorical gaffes. But in this case, the error was apt.

“The visit to Israel by President [Donald] Trump—or, rather, President Biden—is an important one,” he began. “It’s important not only because, as a friend of Israel’s, he is expressing the strong alliance between Israel and the United States, but also because from here, he is flying to Saudi Arabia.”

He then pointed out that Biden’s direct flight from Tel Aviv to Riyadh, like that of Trump from Saudi Arabia to Israel five years ago, illustrates the “huge change” in what has become an “actual new Middle East.”

Though he didn’t invoke late Israeli statesman Shimon Peres by name, the dig at the author of the above phrase was implicit: that the common “peace camp” wisdom—of the need for Palestinian statehood before progress can possibly be made with Israel’s Muslim-Arab neighbors—had been wrong all along.

The Trump-brokered Abraham Accords, which have seen blossoming warm relations between Israel, the Gulf States, Morocco and Sudan, with the cooperation of the Saudi king, constitute living proof.

The evidence hasn’t put a dent in the fantasies of Netanyahu’s and Trump’s detractors, however. Some consider the above treaties flawed for excluding the Palestinians.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Federalism Is The Key To Demonstrating The Disaster Of Green Central Planning July 11, 2022/ Francis Menton

Posted By on July 12th, 2022

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-7-11-federalism-is-the-way-to-demonstrate-the-disaster-of-green-central-planning

Central planning always fails, but the utopian visionaries implementing the plans cannot admit that they are at fault. A scapegoat must be found. As a leading example, when Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture led to mass starvation, the official blame was placed on “saboteurs” and “wreckers.”

Our current-day analog is the centrally-planned replacement of our very large, inexpensive and highly functional energy system, mostly based on fossil fuels, with the alternatives of intermittent wind and sun-based generation, as favored by incompetent government regulators who don’t understand how these things work or how much they will cost. Prices of energy to the consumer — from electricity to gasoline — are soaring; and reliability of supply is widely threatened.

All of which brings our President forth to blame the current price and supply issues in the energy markets on anything but his own administration’s intentional efforts to suppress the functional fossil fuel energy. One day the scapegoat is Vladimir Putin; another it is “companies running gas stations,” who stand accused of price gouging.

Unfortunately, a wide swath of the electorate is only too ready to believe that the failure of central planning is correctly blamed on the saboteurs or the wreckers or the price gougers or the Rooskies or whoever, rather than on the incompetent central planners. And the central planners can generally maintain their narrative, as long as they can impose their control widely enough to keep their subjects from becoming aware of successful alternatives.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden is the emperor with no clothes Charles Lipson

Posted By on July 12th, 2022

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/biden-emperor-with-no-clothes/

The emperor is naked. The public knows it, and they’re finally beginning to speak the obvious truth. The emperor, in this case, is the president. He took office with high hopes from voters and a promise to bring the country together. Those aspirations are dead. The public has lost confidence in Joe Biden — lost confidence that he can do the job, and lost confidence that he is even minimally competent. They certainly don’t think he has brought the country together (though they think Republicans share the blame for that).

This sour mood hurts more than the president. It hurts his entire party, and will be extremely hard to reverse.

Some decline in popularity is inevitable after a new president takes office. For Biden, however, the losses have been huge. They began as voters evaluated the president’s abrupt, incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan. They grew worse as inflation rose, and the president’s answer was to spend even more. The public never bought Biden’s attempt to blame these problems on Vladimir Putin, even though the Russian leader does bear some blame for higher gas prices: some blame, but not all. Inflation stretches well beyond the gas pump in any case, and fuel prices had begun rising well before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The sharp rise in gas prices is particularly damaging politically, for two reasons. First, the higher costs are passed through to other goods, which require transport. Second, consumers can see the shocking prices advertised every day on every street corner. They feel the pain directly when they fill up.

About half the rise in gas prices is attributable to Russia. The other half was a deliberate policy choice, supported by all national Democrats except Joe Manchin. The administration’s goal was to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels by making them more expensive.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

GOT TO LOVE HIM: RON DE SANTIS THE FUTURE FOR CONSERVATIVES

Posted By on July 12th, 2022

Ron DeSantis

@GovRonDeSantis

“We have taken action to protect the integrity of our elections by making ballot harvesting a felony, strengthening voter ID, eliminating drop boxes, and banning Zuckerbucks.”

ON EDUCATION:

Keep Schools Open and Reject Lockdowns
Educate, Don’t Indoctrinate
Ensure Parental Rights in Education and Keep Woke Gender Ideology Out of Schools
Support Robust Civics Education
Expand Workforce Development and Technical Education
Reject the use of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the Curriculum
Increase Teacher Pay
Continue Support for School Security and Mental Health Initiatives
Protect the Right of Parents to Petition School Boards and Districts for Redress of Grievances
Guarantee the Right of Parents to Curriculum Transparency