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September 2018

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Feinstein on Kavanaugh Accusation: ‘I Can’t Say Everything is Truthful’ By Jack Crowe

By on September 18th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dianne-feinstein-brett-kavanaugh-assault-accusation-veracity/

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California conceded Tuesday that she can’t attest to the veracity of Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were in high school.

“[Ford] is a woman that has been, I think, profoundly impacted. On this . . . I can’t say that everything is truthful. I don’t know,” Feinstein told reporters on Capitol Hill when asked if she believed the allegation.

Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, has been maligned by her Republican colleagues for failing to disclose the sexual-harassment accusation after initially being made aware of it via a letter from Ford in July.

Asked why she did not make her Judiciary Committee colleagues aware of the allegation at the beginning of Kavanaugh’s vetting process, Feinstein hesitated before citing Ford’s desire to remain anonymous.

“I don’t know; I’ll have to look back and see,” Feinstein told reporters before entering the Senate chamber, according to the New York Times. “The answer is that she asked that it be confidential,” she said upon exiting the chamber.

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Jeremy Corbyn’s Jewish Problem By Madeleine Kearns

By on September 18th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/jeremy-corbyn-labour-party-anti-semitism-crisis/

Corbyn is leading Labour toward anti-Semitism, and British Jews are right to be worried.

London — Brits just had their hottest recorded summer since 1976, and the political temperature is also turned up to full blast. Throughout the summer, civil wars have consumed both of Britain’s main political parties. While the Tories are now preoccupied with a looming Brexit decision and a potential leadership challenge, Jeremy Corbyn has become the focus of Labour’s all-consuming anti-Semitism row.

The Labour leader has for years now been dogged by a seemingly endless stream of scandals involving anti-Jewish bigotry. In 2009, he invited Islamist “friends from Hamas” to the House of Commons and said that the idea that the group “should be labelled as a terrorist organisation by the British government is really a big, big historical mistake.” In 2010, he hosted an event (also at the House of Commons) on Holocaust Memorial Day in which a Jewish Auschwitz survivor compared the Israeli government to the Nazi regime. In 2014, he attended a ceremony in Tunisia and reportedly laid a wreath on the grave of one the Black September terrorists who murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Before the Iranian state broadcaster, Press TV, was banned in January 2012, he reportedly accepted up to £20,000 for his appearances on the channel.

In 2016, amid mounting pressure from inside and outside Labour, Corbyn announced an independent inquiry into anti-Semitism and racism in the party. The report concluded that there was a toxic environment within the party. He later apologized for the “concerns and anxiety” caused by his past appearances “on platforms with people whose views I completely reject.” But these vague gestures struck many as empty, and a war for Labour’s very soul is now being fought between the party’s moderate old guard and its Corbynite radicals.

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Democrats, Kavanaugh, and ‘The End of Civilization’ By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on September 18th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-democrat-accusations-not-enough-evidence/

If they get away with this, the only decent people in politics will be decent progressives.

Judge Robert Bork used to tell a prescient and darkly humorous story about watching Clarence Thomas’s Senate confirmation hearings — etched in pre-hashtag history as the “Thomas–Hill hearings,” in homage to Anita Hill’s role as the Left’s heroic accuser.

At the time, Thomas was a judge of the same eminent D.C. Circuit federal appeals court on which Bork had served. As he viewed Thomas’s “high-tech lynching” in horror, Bork recalled, a friend of his, the iconic Irving Kristol, approached and asked him what was happening.

“The end of civilization,” the judge sadly quipped.

“Of course it is,” Kristol deadpanned. “But it’ll take a long time. Meanwhile, it’s still possible to live well.”

It was a poignant story coming from Bork. A scholar of great breadth, the late judge was a man from another time: a patriot who’d enlisted in the Marines at 17 during World War II and been called back to duty when the Korean War broke out, even as he embarked on a legendary life in the law. In 1987, four years before the Thomas–Hill hearings, the slide from civilization he so lamented — the slouch toward Gomorrah — had started when he himself was mugged by Senate Democrats. This libelous character assassination, derailing Bork’s nomination by President Reagan to the Supreme Court, had been led by Ted Kennedy.

Democrats and Women

Back in 1969, Senator Kennedy had recklessly caused the death of a young woman, not his wife, by driving her off a rickety bridge on Chappaquiddick Island as they sped away from a booze-soaked bacchanal. Kennedy managed to save himself by swimming to safety. He then abandoned the scene for hours, failing to alert police and rescue workers while Mary Jo Kopechne, submerged in the car, eventually drowned.

Ms. Kopechne did not live to see “Me Too.” That “movement,” in which the Left is front and center, was not forged until long after leftists had raised the notoriously lecherous Kennedy to “Lion of the Senate” status. Indeed, it was not forged until 20 years after Democrats, prominently including women’s-rights advocates, closed ranks around President Bill Clinton, Kennedy’s equally lascivious political ally.

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An Eleventh-Hour Ambush By The Editors

By on September 18th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-sexual-assault-accusation-eleventh-hour-ambush/

Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation has, like that of Clarence Thomas before him, been thrown into chaos with an eleventh-hour allegation of sexual misconduct. Christine Blasey Ford, now a California professor of psychology, told the Washington Post over the weekend that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a high-school party in the 1980s. According to Ford, Kavanaugh and his Georgetown Prep classmate Mark Judge, both drunk, threw her in a room before Kavanaugh tried to take her clothes off and force himself on her. She says she escaped, hid in a bathroom, and left the party. He strenuously denies the allegation, as does Judge.

This is obviously a serious charge, but the evidence so far provided leaves us with grave doubts. She tells the Post she kept it a secret for years, meaning there is no contemporaneous evidence to support her account. She is unable to say exactly where or when the party was held, only that she believes it happened in the summer of 1982 somewhere in Montgomery County. She can’t recall how she got home afterward and her lawyer now says there was a fifth guest at the party who was not counted in Ford’s initial account. With so many missing details, her claims are impossible to independently evaluate.

That Ford’s memory of something that supposedly happened 36 years ago is fuzzy does not, in itself, disprove her story. But the stakes are high enough to require corroborating evidence. As our David French points out, the only evidence she has marshaled so far reveals a contradiction. Ford says she told her therapist about the incident in 2012, and she provided the Post with portions of her therapist’s notes. Though they describe an attempted rape, they do not name Kavanaugh or Judge, instead referring to four perpetrators “from an elitist boys’ school” who went on to high-ranking positions in D.C. Ford attributes the discrepancy to an error on her therapist’s part, and her husband says her description of the incident has remained consistent since 2012. Suffice it to say this is far from dispositive proof.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

ISIS ‘Dressing Up Like Women’ in Battle for Deir ez-Zor Territory By Bridget Johnson

By on September 18th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/isis-dressing-up-like-women-in-battle-for-deir-ez-zor-territory/

ISIS is “trying hard to preserve their remaining space” in Syria “by using tactics like burning tires, using innocent civilians as human shields, and dressing up like women,” the spokesman for Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve said today.

Speaking via video from Baghdad, Col. Sean Ryan noted that the Syrian Democratic Forces — the multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian coalition of Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians and other minority groups who have recaptured most of ISIS’ formerly held caliphate in the country — launched this month the third phase of Operation Roundup, a ground offensive to clear out stubborn ISIS pockets in the Middle Euphrates River Valley.

Phase two of the operation ran from June to September.

“Hajin and the surrounding villages are the last remaining territory acquired by ISIS in the coalition’s area of responsibility, and the victory by the Syrian Democratic Forces there will mean that ISIS no longer holds territory,” he said. ISIS fighters remain scattered throughout surrounding areas, though, and outside of the coalition’s area of responsibility.

The U.S. is “confident that the SDF will prevail” in Hajin, Ryan said. The coalition estimates there are about 1,500 to 2,000 ISIS fighters in the city.

“In both Iraq and Syria, the success of our partner forces is creating stability in areas that have not seen peace since the arrival of ISIS more than five years ago. Lives are being rebuilt again because the ISF and the SDF are providing the necessary security for residents to go back home, rebuild their lives and again hope for their future,” he continued. “However, the truth is military stabilization efforts are not enough. Security creates the space for rebuilding. Residents only gain hope for the future when their children can go to school free from harm, women go buy basic necessities in local shops, and when they can go to their jobs that allow them to support their families. Ultimately, the military cannot fight its way to stability.”

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Norway Fetes Young Muslim Refugee Writer for Trashing Norway By Bruce Bawer

By on September 18th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/norway-fetes-young-muslim-refugee-writer-for-trashing-norway/

I only met him in person once, many years ago. We met for beers in downtown Oslo. We didn’t agree on everything: among other things, he had an irrational hostility toward the United States, which I put down, in part at least, to the fact that he had never set foot in the U.S. and that his English was surprisingly poor (we spoke in Norwegian), so that his image of my country was shaped largely by the mainstream Scandinavian media and by various sources in his native tongue, Arabic. But never mind. What mattered was that he loved freedom, hated jihadist Islam, and was brave enough to say so. His name was Walid al-Kubaisi. Educated as a civil engineer at the University of Baghdad, he came to Norway as a political refugee in 1981 and died this past July at the age of sixty.

Walid came to Norway at a time when the Muslim population of Norway was tiny and the Norwegian cultural elite was still willing to lend a respectful ear to a severe criticism of Islam by someone who had grown up as an adherent of the faith. Kubaisi was nothing if not critical. He condemned the hijab. He recognized Tariq Ramadan as a two-faced snake who was out to Islamize Europe. He saw through the dissimulations of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2010, after a number of other Norwegians with Muslim backgrounds had begun to make high-profile careers for themselves as politicians and commentators, he warned that despite their images as democracy-loving bridge-builders, several of the most prominent of them were nothing more or less than Trojan horses for jihadism.

Well, Walid is dead now — and those Trojan horses are still alive. And while there don’t seem to be any new Walids on the horizon — the Norwegian media are no longer as open to such voices as they they used to be — there are plenty of new Trojan horses. One of them is a hijab-wearing young woman named Sumaya Jirde Ali. Born in 1997, she came to Norway from Somalia at age six. Two years ago, she stepped onto the national stage with an opinion piece in Aftenposten. She had just been in London, and was impressed by the “diversity” on display there. By contrast, she charged, Norway is way behind. “During the last few decades Norway has become more multicultural,” she wrote. “Why is it that in 2016, there aren’t more non-ethnic Norwegians in advertisements, movies, magazines, and in government agencies?” She maintained that “for integration to work, it must go both ways. It’s not enough for immigrants to adapt.”

No, there was nothing new about it. By 2016, her argument was an embarrassing cliché, a platitude. But in 21st century Norway, the cultural elite eats this sort of thing up, at least if it’s under the byline of a teenage girl in a hijab. If Sumaya had written a piece about how grateful she was to have been brought up in a free and prosperous Norway rather than in her native Somalia, would Aftenposten even have published it? No, too sappy. And anti-African! What if she’d submitted an article critical of female genital mutilation in her community? Or honor killing? No, that’s old hat. But her familiar whining about insufficient Muslim visibility in today’s Norway was right up their alley. CONTINUE AT SITE

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The End of Education By David Solway

By on September 18th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-end-of-education/

The 19th century legacy of Horace Mann and his influence on public school education is still being debated. His intentions were noble and his argument for civics and citizen-making as a function of democratic schooling had much to recommend it. But opening the public schools to government control has proven to be a Pandora’s Box of incurable ills. There can be little doubt that its latest manifestation, Common Core, is nothing short of a recipe for the uniform and partisan dumbing down of the current generation.

A figure no less significant and undeniably harmful in his widespread influence on public education is the Leftist social thinker John Dewey, especially in Democracy and Education. It has taken a hundred years to ruin American education, dating from Dewey’s so-called child-centered and “progressive” revolution in American public pedagogy in the early 1920s, through the turbulent 1960s during which empowered student radicals took over the universities, on to the self-esteem movement that flattered the student into believing that self-love was more crucial than self-improvement, to the present moment in which both public and university education has traded honest teaching, academic rigor and merit-based instruction for social justice, politically correct groupthink, anti-white and anti-Western passions, feminist madness and left-wing partisanship.

In The End of Education, published some twenty years ago, Neil Postman mounts a multi-pronged attack on the failures of the education machine, dethroning the idols of “Economic Utility, Consumership, and Technology.” One may or may not agree with his argument, which appears somewhat dated in the present environment. But he is certainly on target in exploding the fetish of “Tribalism and Separatism” as gods in the pantheon of Multiculturalism. He cites Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s 1991 tour de force The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (a must-read), which partially skewers “our reversion to undiluted tribalism” and the ulcer of identity politics. Following Mann, Postman’s main point is that teachers and students need “a narrative to provide profound meaning to their lessons.” Unfortunately, the narrative currently in play is “a terrible story” advancing the “frightening” thesis that “evil inheres in white people … of European origin [and] Goodness inheres in nonwhites,” among many other reductions of our Judeo-Christian heritage. What is called “emancipatory knowledge” — an alias for Social Justice gospel — must replace “Eurocentric knowledge.”

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Electorate Makeup Will Be Key to Midterm Outcome By Adele Malpass

By on September 18th, 2018

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/09/18/electorate_makeup_will_be_key_to_midterm_outcome_138090.html

With the last primary of the 2018 midterm cycle over, it’s now official: The general election has begun. With 50 days to go, who are midterm voters?

“A midterm voter is little bit older, a little bit whiter and more educated” than a presidential election voter, said Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball Report. While this demographic is usually a positive for Republicans, he cautioned that “educated voters are becoming more Democratic with each election.”

Midterms tend to be low-turnout affairs. In presidential elections, somewhere between 60 to 70 percent of registered voters typically go to the ballot box, whereas in a midterm the number hovers around 40 percent. The drop-off is pronounced among millennials and minority voters.

Millennials are enthusiastic about issues but unreliable on Election Day, particularly in midterms. In the 2016 presidential election, 19 percent of the electorate was millennial voters, while only 13 percent of that group made it to the polls in the 2014 midterms. Similar trends are present among black and Hispanic voters.

In primaries, the top priority for candidates is to attract party loyalists, who are generally more partisan. But in a general election, candidates need to appeal to a wider audience by capturing centrist voters. Exit polling from the 2014 elections show that about 40 percent of the voters identified their ideology as moderate whereas 23 percent identified as liberal and 37 percent as conservative. In 2014, independent voters supported Republicans by 54 percent to 42 percent, and Republicans picked up 13 seats in the House. In 2016, independent voters supported Donald Trump by 46 percent to 42 percent, a margin that likely provided the difference in his victory. In tight elections, independents are often the voting bloc most crucial to victory.

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With Christine Blasey Ford, the Democrats have descended to new lows in politicising justice They tried the same thing when they wheeled out Anita Hill during the hearings on Clarence Thomas Roger Kimball

By on September 18th, 2018

https://spectator.us/2018/09/christine-blasey-ford-democrats-kavanaugh/

The difficulty in trying to assess the behaviour of Democrats these days is thinking sufficiently low. When I wrote about Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in these virtual pages a couple of weeks ago, I predicted grandstanding from Cory ‘Spartacus’ Booker and Kamala Harris. I did not think low enough to suspect that the Democrats would help orchestrate a series of embarrassing outbursts from the NeverKavanaugh Left, but so it happened.

Nor did I expect the Democrats to orchestrate a last-minute allegation of sexual abuse dating from 35 years ago when Kavanaugh was 17 and in high school. As all the world now knows, that happened too.

Christine Blasey Ford, a leftie psychology prof at Palo Alto University, claims that Kavanaugh and a high school friend, both drunk, accosted her at a party and dragged her into a bedroom. Kavanaugh, she claims in a Washington Post interview, ‘pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers.’ She tried to scream, but, she said, Kavanaugh ‘put his hand over her mouth.’

When Kavanaugh’s friend (since identified as the writer Mark Judge) jumped onto the bed, they all tumbled off and she made her escape.

Ford appears to be a delicate plant. She claims that the alleged incident ‘derailed’ her life for ‘four or five years,’ contributing to ‘anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms,’ and made it impossible for her to have ‘healthy relationships with men.’

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Time for sunshine on Trump-Russia investigation By Mark Penn

By on September 18th, 2018

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/407153-time-for-sunshine-on-trump-russia-investigation

Democrats are squawking about President Trump’s order to release the material used by the FBI and the Justice Department to initiate the investigation of his campaign. These minority committee chairs, soon likely to be in the majority, claim it’s unfair, an abuse of power, one-sided.

Since when have these “Guardians of Our Republic” ever been against the release of more information from our government? Obviously, only when such release might put a dent in the Russia cloud that they have deliberately perpetuated regardless of the drip, drip, drip of evidence implicating high-ranking FBI, CIA and Justice officials in wrongdoing.

This investigation of the Trump campaign, his administration, family and associates has gone on for more than two years without any serious evidence supporting the Russia-Trump collusion theory. And, increasingly, it looks like there never was any real evidence to support the launching of the largest investigation of an administration in history. It’s the only known investigation ever by an outgoing party of the incoming officials of the other party. It was whipped up by opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, former British spy Christopher Steele and partisans in the Obama administration, creating a vast echo chamber with information that was never substantiated in any material way and, on the face of it, was preposterous. (No one ever offered Trump campaign adviser Carter Page $19 billion for anything.)

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