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February 2017

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Mike Pence Says U.S. Backs NATO but Urges Europe to Boost Military Spending Comments aim to reassure Europe on U.S. commitment to NATO By Anton Troianovski and Julian E. Barnes

By on February 18th, 2017

MUNICH—Vice President Mike Pence said the U.S. would be unwavering in its commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but demanded that Europe step up its military spending, marking one of the Trump administration’s most full-throated efforts yet to reassure nervous partners.

Mr. Pence, speaking at the Munich Security Conference to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and scores of other leaders and senior officials from around the world, said he was bringing to Europe a message from President Donald Trump about the importance of the trans-Atlantic bond. He promised Europe that the U.S. would be “your greatest ally.”

“We will stand with Europe,” Mr. Pence said.

It was the broadest speech on foreign policy that a member of the Trump administration has delivered abroad. Mr. Pence also promised the U.S. would continue to “hold Russia accountable” for its military intervention in Ukraine. But Mr. Pence didn’t address many of European allies’ broader concerns, particularly on how the new administration views the European Union.

Ms. Merkel, speaking before him, refrained from criticizing Mr. Trump directly but delivered a defense of multilateral institutions, including NATO, the United Nations and the EU. She said Germany would continue increasing its military spending until it reaches 2% of gross domestic product, as NATO calls for. But she cautioned against believing that “security is only ensured by raising one’s defense spending.”

“Security is ensured just as much by increasing one’s development spending,” Ms. Merkel said, and promised Germany would increase its development budget, as well.

Mr. Pence promised the U.S. would continue to support its contribution to the NATO deterrent force in Poland and the Baltic states. And he said the Trump administration would boost its military spending to strengthen its forces, and better protect NATO allies.

“Peace only comes through strength,” Mr. Pence said. “President Trump believes we must be strong in our military might.”

But he was careful to add that Mr. Trump was clear that the alliance would be weakened if European allies didn’t do their part by increasing spending.

Mr. Pence speech is part of a barrage of speeches by top administration officials aimed at reassuring allies, rattled by Mr. Trump’s comments that NATO was obsolete.

In his remarks, Mr. Pence spoke of the shared values of Europe and the U.S. and the common commitment to fighting global terrorism following the Sept. 11 attacks. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Scott Pruitt’s Back-to-Basics Agenda for the EPA The new administrator plans to follow his statutory mandate—clean air and water—and to respect states’ rights. By Kimberley A. Strassel

By on February 18th, 2017

Republican presidents tend to nominate one of two types of administrator to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. The first is the centrist—think Christie Todd Whitman (2001-03)—who might be equally at home in a Democratic administration. The other is the fierce conservative—think Anne Gorsuch (1981-83)—who views the agency in a hostile light.

Scott Pruitt, whom the Senate confirmed Friday, 52-46, doesn’t fit either mold. His focus is neither expanding nor reducing regulation. “There is no reason why EPA’s role should ebb or flow based on a particular administration, or a particular administrator,” he says. “Agencies exist to administer the law. Congress passes statutes, and those statutes are very clear on the job EPA has to do. We’re going to do that job.” You might call him an EPA originalist.

Not that environmentalists and Democrats saw it that way. His was one of President Trump’s most contentious cabinet nominations. Opponents objected that as Oklahoma’s attorney general Mr. Pruitt had sued the EPA at least 14 times. Detractors labeled him a “climate denier” and an oil-and-gas shill, intent on gutting the agency and destroying the planet. For his confirmation hearing, Mr. Pruitt sat through six theatrical hours of questions and submitted more than 1,000 written responses.

When Mr. Pruitt sat down Thursday for his first interview since his November nomination, he spent most of the time waxing enthusiastic about all the good his agency can accomplish once he refocuses it on its statutorily defined mission: working cooperatively with the states to improve water and air quality.

“We’ve made extraordinary progress on the environment over the decades, and that’s something we should celebrate,” he says. “But there is real work to be done.” What kind of work? Hitting air-quality targets, for one: “Under current measurements, some 40% of the country is still in nonattainment.” There’s also toxic waste to clean up: “We’ve got 1,300 Superfund sites and some of them have been on the list for more than three decades.”
Such work is where Washington can make a real difference. “These are issues that go directly to the health of our citizens that should be the absolute focus of this agency,” Mr. Pruitt says. “This president is a fixer, he’s an action-oriented leader, and a refocused EPA is in a great position to get results.”

That, he adds, marks a change in direction from his predecessor at the EPA, Gina McCarthy. “This past administration didn’t bother with statutes,” he says. “They displaced Congress, disregarded the law, and in general said they would act in their own way. That now ends.”

Mr. Pruitt says he expects to quickly withdraw both the Clean Power Plan (President Obama’s premier climate regulation) and the 2015 Waters of the United States rule (which asserts EPA power over every creek, pond or prairie pothole with a “significant nexus” to a “navigable waterway”). “There’s a very simple reason why this needs to happen: Because the courts have seriously called into question the legality of those rules,” Mr. Pruitt says. He would know, since his state was a party to the lawsuits that led to both the Supreme Court’s stay of the Clean Power Plan and an appeals court’s hold on the water rule.

Will the EPA regulate carbon dioxide? Mr. Pruitt says he won’t prejudge the question. “There will be a rule-making process to withdraw those rules, and that will kick off a process,” he says. “And part of that process is a very careful review of a fundamental question: Does EPA even possess the tools, under the Clean Air Act, to address this? It’s a fair question to ask if we do, or whether there in fact needs to be a congressional response to the climate issue.” Some might remember that even President Obama believed the executive branch needed express congressional authorization to regulate CO 2 —that is, until Congress said “no” and Mr. Obama turbocharged the EPA. CONTINUE AT SITE

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

At Dalton: Liberal mom clique forces school to cancel skating party at Trump rink By Carl Campanile

By on February 18th, 2017

An elite Upper East Side private school’s annual ice-skating party at Trump Wollman Rink in Central Park had to be canceled after parents refused to send their kids in protest of the president, sources said.

The Parents Association at The Dalton School sent a letter Thursday announcing the “Dalton on Ice” event was scrapped, saying “it would not be financially prudent” because of “significantly lower attendance.”

Dalton’s PA president, LaMae DeJongh, declined to comment — but sources said the low attendance was due to rampant anti-Trump sentiment at the elite prep school, which boasts alumni such as CNN’s Anderson Cooper.

“I think it is completely insane,” said one Dalton parent who disagrees with the protest. “Like him or not, it feels like a strange place for New Yorkers to protest. And sad that kids now have no skating party.”

Trump renovated the rink in 1986 after the city fumbled the job for six years.

Another Dalton parent said a clique of Upper East Side “liberal moms” upset with Trump pressured the headmaster to call off the event, a source said.

Trump Wollman Rink had no immediate comment, and Headmaster ­Ellen Stein could not be reached for comment.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Haley’s Comet See note please

By on February 18th, 2017

Editorial of The New York Sun | February 16, 2017
My only cavil is that Jeane Kirkpatrick abstained on a vote for UN resolution 487 which condemned Israel’s attack on the Osyrak reactor, entitled Iraq to sue for compensation, and urged Israel to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards. That was another really low moment in the UN….rsk

A star is born is our reaction to the first press briefing by President Trump’s new ambassador at the United Nations. The ex-governor of South Carolina was ridiculed by the Left when the president first sent her nomination up to the Hill, owing to her alleged lack of foreign policy chops. She certainly rang the wake up gong for that crowd this morning, after emerging from her first Security Council monthly meeting devoted to the Middle East. Tough as nails but with a smile and a layer of Southern charm.

The ambassador had just come from the regular monthly Security Council on Middle East issues. She said it was her first such meeting, and “it was a bit strange.” The Security Council, she said, is supposed to discuss how to maintain international peace and security. But the meeting, she said, was not about Hezbollah’s illegal buildup of rockets in Lebanon, it was not about the money and weapons Iran provides to terrorists, it was not how we defeat ISIS, it was not how we hold Beshar al-Assad accountable for the slaughter of thousands of civilians.

“No,” she said, “instead the meeting focused on criticizing Israel, the one true democracy in the Middle East. I am new around here, but I understand that’s how the Council has operated month after month for decades. I am here to say the United States will not turn a blind eye to this anymore. I am here to underscore to the ironclad support of the United States for Israel. I am here to emphasize that the United States is determined to stand up to the U.N.’s anti-Israel bias.”

The ambassador made clear that the Trump administration will not support the kind of resolution from which the Obama administration’s ambassador — Samantha Power — shamefully abstained, though Mrs. Haley was too polite to name the humiliated Ms. Power. “The outrageously biased resolutions from the Security Council and the General Assembly only make peace harder to attain by discouraging one of the parties from going to the negotiating table.”

“Incredibly,” Mrs. Haley said, “the U.N. department of political affairs has an entire division devoted entirely to Palestinian affairs. Imagine that. There is no division devoted to illegal missile launches form North Korea. There is no division devoted to the world’s number one state sponsor of terror, Iran. The prejudiced approach to Israeli-Palestinian issues does the peace process no favors, and it bears no relationship to the reality of the world around us. The double standards are breathtaking.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Internal Secession and the Road to Ruin: Two Countries by Fred Reed

By on February 18th, 2017

Trump did not cause the deep division in the country. It caused him. There are two very different Americas. I suspect that the half of the country that voted for Trump, that voted with wild enthusiasm, that roared at huge rallies, was not so much voting for Trump as against the other America. It was just that they had never had a chance before. The two countries have little in common and do not belong on the same geography.

Whether Trump proves to be the catastrophic buffoon he apparently aspires to be, the current protests illuminate a stark difference between his supporters and Hillary’s. The chasm is far deeper than just politics, embracing culture, taste, manners and morals. The groups are distinct and incompatible.

The difference begins with manners. Throughout the campaign Trump’s partisans forgathered in huge rallies, applauded, calmly went home, and later voted. At the same time we saw on Clinton’s behalf mobs of ill-bred, worse mannered, loutish, perennial adolescents blocking highways, shutting down rallies, engaging in vandalism and physically attacking supporters of Trump. Cars were destroyed, fires set, ATMs smashed. Black Lives Matter, always ghetto predators, were worst, but low-grade college students and their equally dismal professors joined in. They were obscene, infantile.

And naive: They apparently believe that they harm Trump though of course their behavior drives people in the other direction. I am no fan of Donald , but I look the foregoing and think Anything else.

The desire to shock of the eternally pubescent. Smirk, smirk, look at me, smirk, smirk.

We saw Ashley Judd, apparently an actress, addressing the “Women’s March.”

“I am not as nasty as racism, fraud, conflict of interest, homophobia, sexual assault, transphobia, white supremacy, misogyny, ignorance, white privilege. I’m not as nasty as using little girls like Pokemon before their bodies have even developed. I am not as nasty as your own daughter being your favorite sex symbol, like your wet dreams infused with your own genes.”

The astonishing thing is not that some foul-mouthed twit came up with such cloacal gush, but that the “Women’s March” sponsored her, did not eject or even censure her.

Can you imagine any of Trump’s middle-American supporters accusing Obama of lusting for incest with his daughters? The two camps are different peoples. Half of the country seems culturally dominated from the ghetto. The other half embodies standards of behavior that have usually been thought congruent with civil society. While Trump himself is crass, making menstrual jibes on the air at Megyn Kelly for example, his supporters are not.

Any number of arguments can be adduced against Trump but so much of the outpouring of hostility, even from the intelligent, lacks thought. Thisaphobe, thataphobe, Nazi, misogynist. Putin’s Bitch. Most seem not to know what the words mean, or care.

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EDUCATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The student Left’s culture of intolerance is creating a new generation of conservatives Charlie Peters

By on February 18th, 2017

Student demands for censorship get a lot of coverage. Spiked Online’s Free Speech University Rankings, now in its third annual edition, argues that there is a “crisis of free speech on campus”.

By analysing the censorious policies and actions that have taken place on British campuses, Spiked concluded that 63.5 per cent of universities actively censor speech and 30.5 per cent stifle speech through excessive regulation. You can barely go a few days without encountering a new op-ed covering censorship on campus.

Maajid Nawaz describes the students demanding censorship as members of the “regressive left”. Milo Yiannopoulos calls them “snowflakes”.With all of this book-burning and platform-denying madness sweeping up much of the media’s interest in campus culture, the gradual rise of another group of students has gone under-reported. British and American millennials and post-millennials – also known as ‘Gen Z’ – are warming to conservatism.

To understand why this is happening, it is important to consider the vast changes that have taken place in Western student politics over the last fifty years.

Students were once in favour of free speech. In the mid-1960s, students of the University of California, Berkeley undertook a mass-movement for free speech. Under the leadership of Leftist heroes like Jack Weinberg, Bettina Aptheker and Jackie Goldberg, students demanded that the university administration retracted their on-campus ban of political activities. They demanded their freedom of speech. Mario Savio delivered what is generally recognised as the iconic speech of the University of California, Berkeley’s (UCB) free speech movement. Here is the speech’s most powerful section:

“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”

Savio’s speech helped push the movement towards success. Berkeley students won their full rights. Students, now liberated from the “machine” of university censorship, were able to create the anti-Vietnam student movement, another famous campus protest.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

RUTHIE BLUM: A BEAR HUG FOR ALL THE MULLAHS TO SEE

By on February 17th, 2017

The strong reactions elicited by Wednesday’s joint press conference held by U.S. President Donald ‎Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are warranted, but mostly for the wrong ‎reason.‎

One commentator after another has been highlighting and debating about the supposedly major ‎about-face in American foreign policy vis-a-vis the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that was being announced ‎from the podium.‎

‎”So I’m looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like,” Trump said, ‎alongside a beaming Netanyahu. “I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with ‎either one. I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two. But ‎honestly, if Bibi [Prime Minister Netanyahu] and if the Palestinians — if Israel and the Palestinians are ‎happy, I’m happy with the one they like the best.”‎

As soon as the two leaders left the stage, pundits and politicians in America, Israel and the Palestinian ‎Authority began weighing in frantically on the significance of that statement, reporting on it as though ‎Trump had declared the United States was no longer supporting a key pillar of its Mideast policy.‎

Well, everyone can and should relax, because nothing whatsoever has changed on the ground. ‎Whichever way one slices it, the reality remains the same: The Palestinian leadership is not seeking ‎statehood alongside Israel, but resistance against Jewish statehood. PA President Mahmoud Abbas ‎and his henchmen in Ramallah, as well as the Hamas rulers in Gaza – with a particularly bloodthirsty ‎new chief there who has said his organization should emulate the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist ‎group Hezbollah – make no bones about demanding that any territory they claim to be their own be ‎void of all Jews.‎

Nor did Trump disavow the two-state solution; he simply said that it is up to the Israelis and ‎Palestinians to decide how to proceed. In other words, he was completely repudiating former ‎President Barack Obama’s strong-arm approach. More importantly, he was doing so while proudly ‎showing appreciation — and even affection — for Netanyahu.‎

And herein lies the seismic shift that is causing such a stir. ‎

For the past eight years, the White House and State Department have operated on the basis of an ‎ideologically dim view of Western greatness and power. Obama made no secret of this in Europe, prior ‎to his inauguration, where he stated outright that no countries are better than others. Shortly after ‎taking the reins, he began to court the radical elements of the Muslim-Arab world, abandoning the ‎moderates in order to appease their jailers. And his very first phone call was to Abbas.‎

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: AT LEAST ARISTOPHANES HAD A SENSE OF HUMOR

By on February 17th, 2017

So, it now appears that those who identify as women (please note how politically correct I am genderally speaking) are planning another big demonstration/protest named A Day Without Women.

Anna L. Stark writes about it: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/02/a_day_without_women.html

How dull and how silly and pointless.

In 411 BC the playwright Aristophanes had a far more original and hilarious idea. He wrote “Lysistrate” a comedy about a woman’s mission to end the Peloponnesian War by denying all the men and warriors sex.

Lysistrata plans a tribunal of all the Greek women to discuss her plan. When they assemble she disdains the weakness of women and convinces them to swear an oath that they will withhold sex from their husbands until both sides sign a treaty of peace. The sex drive finally has an effect and Lysistrata frees the women and men to resume doing what comes naturally.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=imgres&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwje9pv9jJfSAhVFTSYKHfelDm8QjRwIBw&url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Brides_for_Seven_Brothers_(musical)&psig=AFQjCNFlejgvPjcZAmCCOPdl9ZsdFiUSsw&ust=1487419878155713

Now there is an idea. By the way the story was adapted into a fabulous musical movie in 1954 with Jane Powell and Howard Keel and sensational choreography by Michael Kidd which includes raising a barn.
Script by Lawrence Kasha and David Landay, music by Gene de Paul, Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, and lyrics by Johnny Mercer, Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn. There was also a TV series in 1982.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Scandinavia: The West’s Citadel of anti-Semitism by Giulio Meotti

By on February 17th, 2017

Hate for Israel has become a real obsession in Scandinavia, which revived the glorious partnership between the liberal “useful idiots” — the ones concerned about equality and minorities — and the Islamists, the ones concerned about submission and killing “infidels”.

Despite the fact that Jews in Norway are only 0.003 percent of the total population, Oslo is now world’s capital of European anti-Semitism. Norwegian newspapers are full of classic anti-Semitic tropes.

A festival in Oslo also rejected a documentary, “The Other Dreamers,” about the lives of disabled children, simply because it was Israeli. “We support the academic and cultural boycott of Israel,” wrote Ketil Magnussen, the founder of the festival.

The same racism exists in Sweden. Dagens Nyheter, the most sophisticated Swedish newspaper, published a violently anti-Semitic op-ed entitled, “It is allowed to hate the Jews”.

Does Sweden’s Foreign Minister Margot Wallström really mean that to defeat Islamic aggression, Israel must surrender? The Palestinians’ situation is indeed desperate, but as they have had full autonomy for decades, their desperate situation is caused by their own corrupt leaders who appear deliberately to keep their people in misery try to blame it on Israel, in the same way that people maim children to make them “better” beggars.

The Nazi daily Der Stürmer could not have drawn it better.

On January 12, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten published an article about Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and his senior adviser: “The Jew Kushner reportedly pushed for David M. Friedman as the new ambassador to Israel”, Aftenposten wrote. The newspaper had later to apologize for calling Kushner “the Jew”.

A few weeks earlier, the city council of Trondheim, Norway’s third-largest city, passed a motion calling on its residents to boycott Israeli goods — a city aspiring to be “Israel-free”. Then it was the turn of another Norwegian city, Tromso, population 72,000, whose city council approved a similar motion. More than 40% of Norwegians are already boycotting Israeli products or are in favor of doing so, according to a poll.

What hell is happening in Scandinavia, whose countries, Norway and Sweden, are bastions of political correctness, champions of multiculturalism and, according to the Global Peace Index, the most “peaceful” countries in the world? “The most successful society the world has ever known”, however, as The Guardian labelled Sweden, has a dark side: Israel-slandering and anti-Semitism.

Sweden and Norway are manipulating public opinion in the way immortalized by George Orwell in his novel “1984” as the “Two Minutes Hate”. These countries have seen the creation of a public opinion according to which Israel is a merciless enemy of humanity that ought to be dismantled forthwith.

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Sweden’s Fatuous Feminists They’re tigresses when confronting Trump, but meek in the face of real misogyny. February 17, 2017 Bruce Bawer

By on February 17th, 2017

So here’s twenty-first-century Western feminism in a nutshell. Earlier this month, after the White House released a photograph of Donald Trump signing a presidential order in the presence of several male appointees, Isabella Lovin, the Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden, put out a picture of herself signing a climate-change law in the company of other top female officials. Plainly, the photo was meant as a defiant statement of proud womanhood in the face of the world’s leading threat to female equality and dignity – the new man in the Oval Office. Indeed, the current Swedish government, in which the cabinet consists of twelve men and twelve women, has proclaimed itself to be “the world’s first feminist government.” Buzzfeed’s article about this triumphant moment carried the headline: “Did The Swedish Government Just Epically Troll Donald Trump With This All-Woman Photo?”

But what a difference a couple of weeks can make. The other day a four-man, eleven-woman Swedish delegation traveled to Tehran to ink a trade deal with the mullahs. Throughout the visit, the women, led by Trade Minister Ann Linde, wore hijabs, plus long, shapeless coats obviously selected for maximum “modesty.” One photograph, which shows the female members of the Swedish delegation striding past Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, is wonderfully illuminating: in their postures, in their facial expressions, these women’s defiance in response to big, bad, evil Trump is nowhere in evidence. They’re all wearing dark pants. The woman whose face we can see the best is the very picture of meekness and obeisance. The look on her face might well be that of a humble, pious, provincial nun about to be introduced to the Pope. Her right hand is on her chest, a signal that Rouhani need not worry that she might try to shake his hand. Another picture shows Linde herself clearly bowing to an Iranian official. The “world’s first feminist government,” which “epically troll[ed]” Trump, thus effectively communicated to Iran – and the entire Muslim world – a message of submission that could hardly have been improved upon. UN Watch quite rightly dubbed it a “walk of shame.”

In Sweden, of course, every properly brought up man or woman knows that it’s virtuous to thumb your nose at the U.S. president and equally virtuous to bow and scrape to terrorism-supporting imams. But a picture says a thousand words, and the images of those female officials sporting hijabs in Iran proved to be too much even for a lot of otherwise hardy Swedish stomachs. The leader of the Liberal Party worried aloud that the pictures would empower “conservative forces in our suburbs” (in other words, religious Muslims). Linde offered the “excuse” that the hijabs worn by her delegation were actually designed in Sweden. Get it? While signing a trade deal, they were modeling Swedish products intended for use by docile females! As Norway’s document.no website commented: “We see the contours of a new Swedish export success: Feminist government facilitates the export of hijabs to Iran.” (By the way, it turns out that when a female Norway official, Ingvil Smines Tybring-Gjedde, was scheduled to visit Iran in December and was told she’d have to wear a hijab, she refused – and canceled the trip.)

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