Displaying posts published in

February 2019

Schiffting to Phase 2 of Collusion Conspiracy theorists look for something new, anticipating a Mueller letdown. Kimberley Strassel

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schiffting-to-phase-2-of-collusion-11550794762

There’s been no more reliable regurgitator of fantastical Trump-Russia collusion theories than Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff. So when the House Intelligence Committee chairman sits down to describe a “new phase” of the Trump investigation, pay attention. These are the fever swamps into which we will descend after Robert Mueller’s probe.

The collusionists need a “new phase” as signs grow that the special counsel won’t help realize their reveries of a Donald Trump takedown. They had said Mr. Mueller would provide all the answers. Now that it seems they won’t like his answers, Democrats and media insist that any report will likely prove “anticlimactic” and “inconclusive.” “This is merely the end of Chapter 1,” said Renato Mariotti, a CNN legal “analyst.”Mr. Schiff turned this week to a dependable scribe—the Washington Post’s David Ignatius—to lay out the next chapter of the penny dreadful. Mr. Ignatius was the original conduit for the leak about former national security adviser Mike Flynn’s conversations with a Russian ambassador, and the far-fetched claims that Mr. Flynn had violated the Logan Act of 1799.

Mr. Schiff has now dictated to Mr. Ignatius a whole new collusion theory. Forget Carter Page, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos—whoever. The real Trump-Russia canoodling rests in “Trump’s finances.” The future president was “doing business with Russia” and “seeking Kremlin help.”So, no apologies. No acknowledgment that Mr. Schiff & Co. for years have pushed fake stories that accused innocent men and women of being Russian agents. No relieved hope that the country might finally put this behind us. Just a smooth transition—using Russia as a hook—into Mr. Trump’s finances.

Mueller who?What’s mind-boggling is that reporters would continue to take Mr. Schiff seriously, given his extraordinary record of incorrect and misleading pronouncements. This is the man who, on March 22, 2017, helped launch full-blown hysteria when he said on “Meet the Press” that his committee already had the goods on Trump-Russia collusion.CONTINUE AT SITE

Right from wrong: when bubble-dwellers go too far By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-wrong-when-bubble-dwellers-go-too-far-581442

At a press conference in Tel Aviv on Tuesday, Israel Resilience Party leader Benny Gantz made the kind of blooper that only someone living in an insulated bubble is capable of.
Announcing his party’s final list for the April 9 Knesset elections, Gantz launched an attack on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that can best be described as an own goal. The assault was so outrageous that it caused even many of Netanyahu’s harshest critics to flinch at its stupidity, and spurred Israeli public relations powerhouse Rani Rahav to tweet that whoever wrote Gantz’s tirade ought to “resign immediately and take responsibility for the damaging speech that no Israeli wanted to hear.”

Indeed, rather than go after Netanyahu’s policies and performance in office – which is what a contender against an incumbent normally does – the former IDF chief of staff ridiculed the PM for not having illustrious enough military credentials – oh, and for being too American.

“When I lay in the muddy trenches with my soldiers on frozen winter nights,” Gantz said, “you, Benjamin Netanyahu, left Israel to learn English and practice it at luxurious cocktail parties. On the days when I commanded the Shaldag Unit in life-threatening operations in enemy states, you, Benjamin Netanyahu, worked your way bravely and with determination between the makeup rooms of TV studios. While I trained generations of commanders and fighters, you took acting lessons in a New York studio. And during the nights of tension and stress, when I fell asleep in my uniform and boots, you, Benjamin Netanyahu, had world’s most respected tailors taking your measurements, and returned safely to your bed in your prestigious hotel.”

Paul Collits : Green Misconceptions

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet

If you believe the Australian Conservation Foundation — always a stretch, admittedly — one woman in three plans to spurn childbearing lest Gaia take offence at the patter of those additional little feet. While the West elevates fashionable inanity, Hungary shows the way.

A LIKELY very biased survey of self-selectors undertaken by the Australian Conservation Foundation has found that a large chunk of women (up to a third) are considering not having children because of climate change. Yes, really.

This finding is, of course, of little surprise on reflection. The ACF, once a serious and benign organisation chaired by that old “radical Tory” Sir Garfield Barwick, has not unexpectedly drifted leftwards and greenwards over time. It is now dripping with post-1989 environmentalism and is inhabited by the virtue-signalling woke types who not only demand “we all do our bit” to save the earth, but lobby actively for transformative social change and diminished freedom for the non-woke. The means used by ACF-type groups to effect social change include tradition-shaming, infiltration of organisations not normally on-side, social media mis-truthing and bullying, infecting young minds through curriculum change, and all the other familiar tools of Left activism.

There are only two surprises with this ACF survey. One, that it has taken them so long to get onto this. And two, that it is only a third of women (members) bent on remaining barren. In view of the left’s now blatant, Margaret Sanger-inspired march towards infanticide in the US and elsewhere (Victoria, Queensland), getting women to merely avoid having children rather than having them killed as they approach birth might be regarded as progress. The particular new front and new ideology under examination here might usefully be termed “fertility change”.

For woke women, taking one for the team in relation to climate change dovetails nicely with the ultimate feminist act of not having children. A win-win, you might say. Green feminism. The defiant act of turning oneself (like men have done for centuries) into a wage slave while creating an entire new industry, viz. outsourced domestic services, naturally supported by both the child-bearing and non-child bearing taxpayer, has taken on an entirely new significance, post the mass discovery of global warming in the 1980s.

Survival at the White House By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/03/11/survival-at-the-white-house/

–This essay is adapted from Mr. Hanson’s new book, The Case for Trump, which Basic Books will publish in March.

The administrative state took aim at Trump, but it has not been able to destroy him

No one in Washington called Donald J. Trump a “god” (as journalist Evan Thomas in 2009 had suggested of Obama) when he arrived in January 2017. No one felt nerve impulses in his leg when Trump talked, as journalist Chris Matthews once remarked had happened to him after hearing an Obama speech. And no newsman or pundit cared how crisply creased were Trump’s pants, at least in the manner that New York Times columnist David Brooks had once praised Obama’s sartorial preciseness. Instead, Trump was greeted by the Washington media and intellectual establishment as if he were the first beast in the Book of Revelation, who arose “out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.”

Besides the Washington press and pundit corps, Donald Trump faced a third and more formidable opponent: the culture of permanent and senior employees of the federal and state governments, and the political appointees in Washington who revolve in and out from business, think tanks, lobbying firms, universities, and the media. Or as the legal scholar of the administrative state Philip Hamburger put it: “Although the United States remains a republic, administrative power creates within it a very different sort of government. The result is a state within the state — an administrative state within the Constitution’s United States.”

Since the U.S. post-war era, the growth of American state and federal government has been enormous. By 2017, there were nearly 3 million civilian federal workers, and another 1.3 million Americans in the uniformed military. Over 22 million local, state, and federal workers had made government the largest employment sector.

The insidious power of the unelected administrative state is easy to understand. After all, it governs the most powerful aspects of modern American life: taxes, surveillance, criminal-justice proceedings, national security, and regulation. The nightmares of any independent trucker or small-business person are being audited by the IRS, having communications surveilled, or being investigated by a government regulator or prosecutor.

A Sublime Christian Masterpiece of a Film By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/the-tree-of-life-masterpiece-film-director-terrence-malick/

Set aside your devices and diversions for two hours, and you’ll see something wonderful.

‘There are two ways through life — the way of nature and the way of grace,” remarks the saintly mother at the outset of The Tree of Life, one of the most awe-inspiring films of the 21st century. She continues:

Grace doesn’t try please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked, accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself, get others to please it. . . . It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it and love is smiling through all things.

I wonder what the TV Guide capsule of Terrence Malick’s inspired, autobiographical meditation on a Christian existence might say. How about: “Three members of a midcentury Texas family deal with an unbearable loss over the course of years. Also, there are dinosaurs.” Malick makes some daring, strange, brilliant choices whose connections reveal themselves only gradually and obliquely.

Starting with an epigraph from Job (“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?”), Malick meditates on a family much like his own, shifting among the perspectives of Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt), a strict and sometimes brutish disciplinarian; his wife (Jessica Chastain), an angel in a housedress; and Jack, one of their three sons (played by Hunter McCracken as a boy and Sean Penn as an adult). Malick wends his way through the interior monologues of these three as they reflect on their lives together in the 1950s, their responses to a catastrophic event, and the mystery of consciousness.

Indict the ‘ISIS Bride’ By Andrew C. McCarthy

She may not push the citizenship issue if she faces prison time here.

I had a column in the New York Post yesterday morning about the so-called “ISIS bride,” Hoda Muthana, who is detained in a Syrian refugee camp and now pleading to come back home to her family in Alabama. I argued that, despite the fact that she has treasonously waged war against our country, she had a right to be readmitted if she tried to enter because she was — according to the facts available at the time — a natural-born American citizen.

Now Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has announced that Muthana will not be allowed to reenter the U.S. because she is not an American citizen: While born in America, she was the daughter of a diplomat and thus not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. As the secretary put it in his statement, “Ms. Hoda Muthana is not a U.S. citizen and will not be admitted into the United States. She does not have any legal basis, no valid U.S. passport, no right to a passport, nor any visa to travel to the United States.”

This conclusion is disputed by Muthana’s family and allies, and they may have a case. I would strongly urge the Justice Department to file an indictment against Muthana for treason, material support to terrorism, and any other readily provable offenses. She is less likely to press the issues of citizenship and right to enter if she understands that she faces prosecution and, very likely, lengthy imprisonment if she succeeds in coming here.

But it’s worth taking a closer look at the citizenship question itself. To my mind, the concept of citizenship implies not just the benefits of being a full-fledged member of the body politic, but also a duty of fealty to the nation. In a rational world, then, a citizen who made war against the United States would be stripped of citizenship.

TAU develops blood test to detect genetic disorders in early pregnancy By Eytan Halon

https://www.jpost.com/Jpost-Tech/Business-and-Innovation/TAU-develops-blood-test-to-detect-genetic-disorders-in-early-pregnancy-581252

The research, led by Prof. Noam Shomron of the university’s Sackler School of Medicine, was published Wednesday in the Genome Research journal.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a new blood test to detect genetic disorders in fetuses as early as 11 weeks into pregnancy.The simple blood test enables doctors to diagnose genetic disorders
caused by minuscule impairments in the fetal genome by sequencing small amounts of DNA in the mother’s and the father’s blood.

A computer algorithm processes the sequencing results to produce a “map” of the fetal genome, identifying countless mutations with atleast 99% accuracy, depending on the mutation type.

FLASHBACK: Comey’s FBI Embraced American ISIS Terrorist, Helped Him Get DOJ Job By Patrick Poole

https://pjmedia.com/homeland-security/flashback-comeys-fbi-embraced-american-isis-terrorist-helped-him-get-justice-department-job/

One of the biggest questions for Western governments that has played out in recent days in the American media is what to do with Western ISIS recruits who are now in the custody of U.S.-backed forces as the Islamic State’s geographical military presence collapses into nothing.

At least one previous case involving disgraced former FBI Director James Comey — where the FBI under his direction welcomed back an American ISIS terrorist from Syria and gave him a job working with the Justice Department — may be an example of how *not* to handle such cases.

The American media are now rallying around the plight of Alabama ISIS bride Hoda Muthana, who left the U.S. for Syria to marry an ISIS fighter in 2014.

The script that Muthana and her attorneys appear to be following is the case of Brooklyn ISIS terrorist Mohimanul Alam Bhuiya, who joined the terror group in Syria in June 2014 and defected back to the U.S. with FBI assistance later that same year.

Bhuiya was charged with material support for terrorism upon his return and faced 25 years in prison, but a federal judge last June sentenced him to supervised release with no jail time thanks to the intervention and recommendation of his Justice Department co-workers.

According to the Wall Street Journal, he now works with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn. CONTINUE AT SITE

Vandals Attack Wrong Statue of General Lee — Deface World War II Hero, Not Confederate By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/trending/vandals-attack-wrong-statue-of-general-lee-deface-world-war-ii-hero-not-confederate/

William C. Lee led black paratroopers in fighting the Nazis.

Earlier this week, vandals targeted the statue of General William C. Lee, the commander of the 101st Airborne Division in World War II — a unit made famous by the show Band of Brothers. Following a spate of vandalism targeting statues of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, this seems a disgusting case of mistaken identity.

“I think it was a big mistake,” Mark Johnson, the curator of the General William C. Lee Airborne Museum in Dunn, N.C., told ABC 7 News. “Why would you do something like this? It really just irritates people.”

Police told the local outlet that a suspect doused the statue in an unidentified flammable liquid and set it on fire.

Johnson said he was familiar with the spate of vandalism directed against Robert E. Lee statues but never suspected a case of mistaken identity would direct people to his museum’s statue.

“Never even thought it would affect us in any way at all,” he said. “This is a hometown grown boy here that turned out to be an international hero of World War II so to come and try to destroy his statue is just an insult to everybody.”

The curator suggested the vandals wanted to make a statement about slavery and racism and were sorely mistaken.

The New York Times’s Islamic Flimflam Man By Bruce Bawer

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-new-york-timess-islamic-flimflam-man/

On February 18, in keeping with its apparent goal of remaining America’s most reliable source of pro-Islamic propaganda, the New York Times ran yet another op-ed by Mustafa Akyol, who seems to be replacing Tariq Ramadan (who is currently in jail awaiting trial for raping two women) not only as the Times’s house dissembler on Islam (since 2013, he has held the title of contributing opinion writer) but, more broadly, as the leading personification of “modern Islam” or “moderate Islam” in the West.

Last November, the Times published a piece by Akyol entitled “True Islam Does Not Kill Blasphemers.” Anyone who is even a patchy awareness of Islam knows just how dishonest a claim this is; as Robert Spencer dryly observed at the time, “if Akyol denied the death penalty for blasphemy in any Sharia state, he could end up being executed for blasphemy himself.”

In keeping with his practice of blatantly lying about his faith and its adherents, Akyol’s latest Times piece was headlined “The Creeping Liberalism in American Islam.” It began as follows:

Since 9/11, a recurrent theme in the far-right circles of America has been “creeping Shariah.” It reflects the fear that Islamic law will silently spread through the land of freedom to ultimately overtake it — to put all women in burqas and all adulterers to death.

Implicit here is that such concerns are outrageous and that only an extremist – a member of the “far right” – would profess them. Never mind that as the number of Muslims in Western Europe has proliferated, so have burkas. Never mind that it’s a core tenet of Islam that adulterers – like blasphemers – must be put to death. Akyol continues:

In this scenario, American Muslims, who make up only 1 percent of the population, will pursue this grand scheme because they are here not for freedom and opportunity, but to form a fifth column in it, as Steve Bannon seriously claimed in 2016. CONTINUE AT SITE