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January 2019

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What’s Wrong with Radio Free Europe and Voice of America? By Majid Mohammadi

By on January 23rd, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/whats_wrong_with_radio_free_europe_and_voice_of_america.html

Independence, fact-based news broadcast and report, and fair and balanced news and analysis. In Iran, Voice of America has failed in all three categories.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has a budget of more than 123 million dollars (2018), and its mission is to “report the news in 20 countries where a free press is banned by the government or not fully established.” It should “provide what many people cannot get locally: uncensored news, responsible discussion, and open debate.” Is this taxpayer money well spent in the last decade? Does this organization fulfill its mission? Unfortunately, the answer to both these questions is negative.

As an Iran expert who reviews Persian-language media every day, I want to report my take from the organization’s Persian section (Radio Farda). VOA Persian (under the same mother institution, BBG) is as disastrous as Radio Farda.

To explain the waste and politicians’ delusions regarding the efficiency of these two sections of the Congress-fnanced media system, I will focus on three criteria of free and professional media: 1) independence, 2) fact-based news broadcast and report, and 3) fair and balanced news and analysis. Radio Farda and VOA Persian have failed in all three categories.

Manipulated by Obama Admin

VOA and Radio Farda were more open to reporting human rights violations and providing criticism of Islamist points of view before the negotiations for the 5+1 nuclear deal. As Ben Rhodes has mentioned, the Obama team manipulated the media during the JCPOA negotiations. They were desperate to have a foreign policy legacy, and the Iran deal was their only chance. Similar to the administration, both VOA Persian and Radio Farda tried hard to appease the Islamist government and its loyalists abroad to make the deal happen. Before and during the negotiations, tens of Iranian experts abroad were put on their blacklists, and several shows were canceled; in that period, Iran’s lobbyists were regular guests on their programs. VOA put me on that blacklist; before that, I was a regular guest on their news and analysis programs. My fault was to compare ISIS and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Teddy Roosevelt Schools Nancy Pelosi on Being American By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on January 23rd, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/teddy_roosevelt_schools_nancy_pelosi_on_being_american.html

In April 1894, Theodore Roosevelt, who later became the 26th president of the United States, cogently and with amazing prescience wrote about true patriotism and loyalty to America. To read his words is to understand what is happening to our country.

In the latest encounter with balkanized groups in America, at a March for Life event, Catholic students were beset by a number of people. The vitriol was evident, proving that the latter do not, as Roosevelt stated, “wish to be broadly American and national[.]” This unabated “unwholesome parochial spirit” comes “at the expense of the great nation.” It is clear that this “provincial patriotism” or “inability to take a view of broad adhesion to the whole nation” is the first step to the unraveling of a nation.

Roosevelt noted that the “patriotism of the village … is bad, but the lack of all patriotism is even worse.” He worried that “in the future, patriotism will be regarded not as a virtue at all, but merely as a mental stage in the journey toward a state of feeling when our patriotism will include the whole human race and all the world.”

This is no longer a prediction, but a reality as progressives demand that we eliminate any national pride. Vicious beatings on people who don hats that read “Make America Great Again” bare the stark truth that the left wants to dismantle America’s exceptional values. Then there is the International Court of Justice, or World Court, which ruled on an Iranian request to order Washington to suspend U.S. sanctions against Tehran. In the sports arena, football players who benefit from the largesse of America kneel when the anthem is played as they allege problems but offer no solutions. Clearly, “home” and “country” no longer mean much to these men who throw footballs for a living.

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Democrats, Real and Fake By Karin McQuillan

By on January 23rd, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/democrats_real_and_fake.html

Democrats live in a morality play in which Republicans are the Bad people led by the evil wizard, President Trump. Liberals are mesmerized by this fantasy of America divided into good versus evil, with themselves starring as the heroes. They can’t seem to get enough of it. They love the plotline, that minorities are threatened with being ‘erased’ by microaggressions, that the globe is being destroyed by poisonous CO2, that American democracy is threatened by the would-be dictator and Russian collaborator, President Trump, and his hordes of drooling idiots and Nazi wannabes.

Democrats on the ramparts are fighting for all that is kind and fair. They want to end masculinity, to make women and nonbinary people safe. They want to end capitalism, because, as Pelosi said this January, you cannot have democracy if you have rich people. They want open borders, because whiteness is racist. They want to add two hundred million new Americans, and fast, because that is only kind.

These new Americans will be the right colors (not white), and always vote Democratic, ushering in a new millennium of Democrat rule. The evil monsters will be silenced and cast out of all important professions, social media, and the Thanksgiving table.

It’s hard to believe regular Americans — and that includes blacks and Hispanics — want this destructive nonsense and I don’t believe it. The key to Democrat loyalty is a single, very powerful emotion: Republicans are not like us.

The not like us may be based on race, or for white Democrats, on group identity. Their team has all the decent, smart people in the country. Who would switch to the evil, stupid team? Who would consider their ideas? Who would hire them? Who would talk to them?

The Democrat formula of success with minorities is very simple, very human. It is this: “They don’t like you. Vote for me.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Senate Leaders Agree on Possible Path to Reopening Government By Mairead McArdle

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/senate-leaders-agree-on-possible-path-to-reopening-government/

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and minority leader Chuck Schumer have agreed to a deal that could end the partial government shutdown, which entered its 32nd day Tuesday.

Under the deal, the Senate will vote Thursday on two bills intended to end the shutdown. One bill includes President Trump’s request for $5.7 billion to construct a wall at the southern border, and one would fund the government entities affected by the shutdown through February 8, kicking the fight down the road until then.

“People are saying isn’t there a way out of this mess, isn’t there a way to relieve the burden on the 800,000 federal workers not getting paid, isn’t there a way to get government services open first and debate what we should do for border security later?” Schumer said in announcing the deal. “Well, now there’s a way.”

About 800,000 federal workers are currently missing their paychecks as a result of the shutdown, which has broken the record for the longest in U.S. history.

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The Mueller Squirrel Cage Victor Davis Hanson

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/mueller-investigation-turns-law-upside-down/
Round and round the investigation goes. Where it stops…

Special Counsel Robert Mueller recently indicted yet another peripheral character in his Trump probe, Russian attorney Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, for alleged money laundering in a matter quite separate from Trump.

Like almost all of Mueller’s indictments of the past 20 months, the charges against Veselnitskaya had nothing to do with his original mandate of finding any possible Trump–Russia collusion. No matter; within minutes, Veselnitskaya’s name was injected into the media cycle as if the fact that she was Russian and connected to the name Mueller were de facto proof that Trump was guilty of something — if not collusion, something worse.

If Mueller was not a special counsel, and if he was not looking for anyone deemed useful to flip to find dirt on Donald Trump, then Veselnitskaya would have been just another daily Washington foreign influence-peddler being courted with impunity by her American influence-peddling and often equally suspect counterparts.

To date, in almost every one of his indictments of Americans, Mueller has gone after Trump staffers, often quite minor, for alleged crimes that either were committed well before Mueller began his investigations, or came as a result of plea bargaining in exchange for providing expected dirt on Trump, or were the result of government surveillance or the use of government informants, or all of that and more. And all that sensationalism, through leaks and insinuations, was packaged by the media as “bombshells” and “watersheds” and “turning points” ad nauseam for 20 months.

When Mueller indicted and obtained a confession from Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national-security adviser, it followed from an elaborate perjury ambush set up by the now fired, ethically conflicted, disgraced, and perhaps soon to be indicted deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe. McCabe sent the now fired, ethically conflicted, and disgraced agent Peter Strzok to interview Flynn — a process overseen by the now fired, ethically conflicted, and disgraced James Comey. And even then, Mueller seemed to be the beneficiary of leaks from someone in the Department of Justice who sent to the media elements of surveillance transcripts of Flynn’s conversations.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

John Kerry to Trump: ‘Resign’ By Mairead McArdle

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/john-kerry-to-trump-resign/

Former Secretary of State John Kerry had one word of advice for President Trump on Tuesday: “Resign.”

“He doesn’t take any of this seriously,” Kerry said at first when asked what his message would be if the president were siting in front of him. “He doesn’t have an ability to have that kind of conversation.”

When pressed, however, the former top diplomat said, “Resign,” to laughter and applause from the audience at a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Trump had planned to attend the forum, but canceled the trip because of the partial government shutdown.

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P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Anatomist of Racial Inequality: An Interview with Glenn Loury written by Christian Alejandro Gonzalez

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/01/22/anatomist-

Glenn Loury has the ability, occasionally displayed by great writers, of articulating his opponents’ arguments fairly while simultaneously exaggerating their claims ever so slightly in order to hint at their fundamental unsoundness. In our interview, he provides an example. Asked whether he believes African Americans should be encouraged to take pride in being citizens of the United States, he offers this characterization of the view espoused by many on the anti-racist Left:

America’s overrated. America is a bandit, a gangster nation. America is run by war criminals. American capitalism is rapacious. America is nothing but hypocrites. They dropped the bomb on Hiroshima; they exterminated the Native Americans and they enslaved the Africans. White supremacy rules here. Why should I want to fight and die for such a country? I don’t want to fight and die for it; I don’t even want to stand while the anthem is being played for it!

Such a view, dominant though it may be in America’s discourse on racial inequality, is for Loury nothing more than a “posture,” or at best a “pout.” It is neither productive nor reflective of the reality of African American life in 2019, Loury argues, and it functions more as a rhetorical trick than as a coherent plan of action for improving blacks’ prospects. Against any sort of reflexive anti-Americanism, Loury is unafraid to urge “a kind of patriotism aimed at African Americans.” He knows, though, that such urgings are probably futile, especially given his social environment: Loury has taught at Brown University for over a decade, an institution where pleas for American patriotism are likely to be summarily dismissed. So why does he insist on making them?

Part of it, he says, is a matter of personal integrity; he believes that adopting a pro-American attitude is the right thing to do. And what does having integrity mean if not saying what one believes to be correct? But another reason why Loury extols the virtue of a benign kind of nationalism can be discerned in a question he frequently asks himself: What are his duties as an African American intellectual? He reflects on this question often in his podcast, The Glenn Show, as well as in his writing (he has written four books on race), and he seems to have reached the following conclusions. As an intellectual, his duties, at least in theory, are spelled out in the very definition of that term: Following careful study, he must publicly express himself with clarity, purpose, and authority. But as a black intellectual, his duty is to discuss unpalatable truths about the black experience—and perhaps chief among these unpalatable truths is that white supremacy, however grotesque it may have been in past eras, is no longer the primary obstacle to black advancement.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Mainstream Media and the Shameless Manipulation of Women

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://thegermanyeye.com/mainstream-media-and-the-shameless-manipulation-of-women-3472

Over a year ago, Donald Trump was elected as the latest US president, in a surprise result which hit the mainstream media (MSM) hard. The problem was that the biggest media players in the US, and indeed worldwide, had nearly completely (and mostly unofficially) endorsed his competitor, Hillary Clinton. The MSM suddenly was faced with the unpalatable truth, that they had failed to adequately influence the outcome of the US presidential election, despite their gargantuan efforts to the contrary. The somewhat surprising result was that the public thought for themselves and the MSM was left with the knowledge that its potential to manipulate public perception on important issues was not as great as it had hoped or thought.

A consequence of this, is that it shone light on the media’s attempt to manipulate democracy to push their ideological position, which usually aligns with their financially advantageous goals.

In an age where newspaper circulation is down and alternative media influence is up, newspapers need to maintain a business model which is realistic and profitable, while retaining their dwindling relevancy. They achieve this mostly through advertising – and they are increasingly desperate to increase their online advertising revenue as hard copy sales take a hit. Companies pay newspapers to advertise their products so as to reach their target demographic. Interestingly, many people fail to realise that most companies’ preferred target demographic is women. Worldwide, 80% of all purchases are made by women. Let that fact sink in for a moment. Men may make more money than women, by working longer hours, engaged in more dangerous careers and entering professions which are more difficult but pay better, such as engineering – but women still spend more money than men do. If you want to sell your product, even if that product is aimed at men, you also target women, as they usually control the purse strings in relationships and the family unit. So when advertisers want to sell something, they know their best chance of capitilising their return on advertising investment (ROI), is to reach out to the main decision maker in financial matters, which is usually women.

So, in their desperate quest to maintain profit margins, newspapers need to deliver the female demographic to potential advertisers. Doing so gives good ROI to the advertisers and makes strong business sense to the publisher.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Drumbeat of the Mob by Mark Steyn

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://www.steynonline.com/9148/the-drumbeat-of-the-mob

Guest-hosting for Rush on Friday, I mentioned the strange need of the right to virtue-signal to their detractors – as in the stampede of Congressional Republicans to distance themselves from their colleague Steve King over an infelicitous interview with The New York Times. Democrats never do this; Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam declare that the Jews are pushing defective marijuana on black men in order to turn them gay – which would appear to be a prima facie slur on at least four Democrat constituencies: blacks, gays, Jews and potheads. Yet Clinton, Obama et al speak not a word against Calypso Louie.

There was another conservative virtue-signaling stampede over the weekend. A short video from the Lincoln Memorial went “viral” (notwithstanding its ubiquity, I’m keeping the word in scare-quotes because, like any other virus, this one should be contained): it purported to show a group of Catholic schoolboys in MAGA hats harassing an elderly Native American drummer. The lads were instantly identified as students from Covington Catholic High School, which I’d never heard of but is clearly the kind of tony white-privilege joint where they book Brett Kavanaugh to spike the punch at the gang-rape prom. So naturally social media instantly convicted them and moved on to the usual doxing and death threats. The school itself leapt to dissociate itself from its own pupils and threatened to expel them.

Midst the present fevers, my advice and practice is that, when the media are in lockstep on a particular “narrative”, proceed with caution and, if you must join the great thundering herd of independent minds, tag along at the tail end out of sight. A genuinely conservative temperament should be wary of crying “Me too!” and scampering after the media-Democrat-cultMarx bandwagon – if only because, regardless of the wrongs and rights, no true conservative should assist in furthering the nano-second due process of trial by social media, through which whole lives are destroyed by the reflex twitching drive-thru jury of Twitter. “Sentence first – verdict afterwards,” said Alice’s Queen. Hang him high – and we’ll figure out later what, if anything, he’s guilty of. That’s about as deeply unconservative a proposition as one could find. The cure is worse than whatever disease (racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia) it claims to be healing.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump Notwithstanding, U.S. Deploys Only Words Against Missiles By Angelo Codevilla

By on January 22nd, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/21/trump-

Official Washington has refused to defend America against ballistic missiles, especially from Russia and China, while spending some $300 billion pretending to be trying. For a half century, it has dissembled its intention with techno-speak. On January 17, however, President Trump released the Pentagon’s long internally disputed Missile Defense Review (MDR) with words that might be summed up as, “This time, for sure!”

Said Trump: “First, we will prioritize the defense of the American people above all else.” Wow. Goodbye Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger. Strike one.

And then: “The United States cannot simply build more of the same, or make only incremental improvements.” Strike two.

Finally: “My upcoming budget will invest in a space-based missile defense layer . . . Regardless of the missile type or the geographic origins of the attack, we will ensure that enemy missiles find no sanctuary on Earth or in the skies above.” Home run!

Most media accounts, and Democrats, took Trump at his word. But whoever fights his way through the MDR’s 8,000 words of bureaucratese, written by people who failed freshman composition, will find no fundamental changes in current policy. It’s a fair bet Trump did not read it.

Tinkering With a Horse-and-Buggy System
The most fundamental of questions—the one that McNamara and Kissinger “settled” with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty before most people reading this were born—is that the U.S government should not even try to defend America against Russian and Chinese missiles, but it may try defending against “theater” threats. The Trump MDR reaffirms their settlement: “While the United States relies on deterrence to protect against large and technically sophisticated Russian and Chinese intercontinental ballistic missile threats to the U.S. homeland, U.S. active missile defense can and must outpace existing and potential rogue state offensive missile capabilities.” Color that no change.

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