Displaying posts published in

May 2019

The GOP’s commitment to electing talented women can help party retake the House see noteBy Rep. Carol Miller (R-W.Va.)

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/444173-the-gops-commitment-to-electing-talented-women-can-help-party

West Virginia’s other Representatives are Republican and up for re-election in 2020 as is Rep. Miller who is in her first term. The Senators are Joe Manchin a Democrat and really good and independent person, who is up for reelection in 2024 and Shelley Capito a Republican who will be an incumbent candidate in 2020…..rsk

As the 2020 campaign season starts up, a narrative that many in the media like to discuss is a supposed problem within the Republican party with electing women. As the only new female Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, in my experience, that couldn’t be further from the truth. During my campaign, I received support from many people. I met terrific, dynamic Republican women around the country who shared my goals – to make our country a better place to live, work, and raise a family, now and for generations to come.

The one story that has not been written, is that so many talented Republican female candidates faced unprecedented opposition in order to keep us out of Congress. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent to increase the barriers for Republican women to serve their country in the U.S. House of Representatives was very calculated and effective. It was disappointing and destructive. As liberal groups replenish their coffers to once again target Republican women, the media continues to attack and undermine those working hardest and making a real difference to elect Republican women – groups like Winning for Women. Despite the constant negativity, we remain optimistic and undeterred.

Pompeo and Bolton tensions escalate as Iran debate intensifies The Secretary of State has bridled at the seasoned national security adviser’s grip on the policy process, but is more in sync with the president they serve. By Eliana Johnson

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/05/17/bolton-pompeo-trump-iran-1329833

Rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran are also magnifying strains among President Donald Trump’s top foreign policy advisers: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton.Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against the mullahs in Tehran has exacerbated fissures between the two men over the tight control Bolton has tried to exert over the national security decision-making process — and introduced new ones over the direction of U.S. policy.

Pompeo and his special representative for Iran, Brian Hook, have indicated that the administration’s goal in squeezing Iran is renewed negotiations with Iranian regime, according to two sources familiar with their thinking — something Trump has expressed a desire to do. But Bolton is a deep skeptic of the value of negotiating with adversaries who, before joining the White House, called publicly for regime change in Tehran.

While Pompeo has worked to carry out the president’s foreign policy directives, Bolton has done more to try to shape them — at times contradicting the president, as when he walked back Trump’s call for a rapid U.S. troop withdrawal from Syria.

The Hard Politics of U.S.-China Trade Talks: Charles Lipson

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/05/17/the_hard_politics_of_us-china_trade_talks_140352.html

Since neither side benefits from a trade war, why are both sides threatening one?The answer is straightforward. Although both sides could benefit from a deal, one side could benefit more — a lot more — depending on the final terms.Two key issues dominate the current stalemate. The first is how many of China’s mercantilist practices will be rolled back. These include tariffs on imports from America, required partnerships with Chinese firms, forced transfers of intellectual property, and sometimes outright theft of trade secrets. The second is whether the terms are precise, enforceable, and undertaken as formal commitments by China’s highest-level institutions.China’s problem is that its economy depends on these unfair practices, and communist leaders benefit from them, politically and financially. Some, like widespread theft of Western intellectual property, help lots of local companies. Others, like the coercion of foreign firms to accept local partners, help the party most because it picks the winners. As with any patronage system, the winners are politically connected firms that share the largess with their benefactors. (Economists call this “rent-extraction” politics.)Chinese political leaders are understandably reluctant to alter these sweet arrangements. They wouldn’t change them at all without significant outside pressure, which is exactly what the U.S. is exerting. Since Beijing has to make some kind of deal, it would prefer informal commitments, the vaguer the better. Later, China could edge away from them, hoping the U.S. would not retaliate.

Why Palestinians Oppose Economic Prosperity by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14236/palestinians-oppose-economic-prosperity

To advance his goal, Ashraf Jabari recently announced the establishment of a new party that calls for focusing on economic prosperity for Palestinians. The Reform and Development Party seeks to solve the economic problems of the Palestinians, particularly high unemployment, he said. “We have an army of university graduates who are unemployed. We’ve reached a situation where a young [Palestinian] man holding a Master’s degree in law has to work as a street vendor because he can’t find work.”

Instead of giving Jabari a chance to carry out his initiative, Palestinians have waged a massive smear campaign against him, with many denouncing him as a “traitor” and “collaborator” with Israel and Jews. Some Palestinians have even gone as far as calling for his arrest or execution.

The upcoming peace plan, according to various reports, talks about giving the Palestinians billions of dollars and raising money for them from wealthy Arab countries. Yet, as Jabari’s case makes clear, the Palestinians are less invested in gaining economic stability than they are in hating Israel.

For Palestinians, the financial aid is a cynical attempt to lure them away from their struggle against Israel — and no Palestinian leader has the stomach to face the threats that Jabari is currently confronting. So, far from any “deal of the century,” the Palestinian leaders long ago struck a dirty deal of their own: they put their stock in Israel-hatred rather than in their own people.

In most normal societies, a businessman who seeks to improve the living conditions of his people by boosting the economy and creating job opportunities for the unemployed — including a host of jobless university graduates — is treated with respect. The Palestinians, however, do not seem to belong to those societies.Ashraf Jabari is a 45-year-old businessman from the West Bank city of Hebron. A member of a large Palestinian clan in the city, Jabari believes in economic cooperation and peaceful coexistence with his Jewish neighbors, including settlers living in the West Bank.

Democrats Rally Round Their Anti-Semites By Karin McQuillan

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/16/democrats-rally-round-their-anti-semites/

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and the Democratic Party leadership defending her indefensible comments on the Holocaust are now promoting the Big Lie about Arabs as innocent victims of World War II. Nazism was widely popular among Palestinians, who played a key role in the Holocaust. Adolf Eichmann himself went to Cairo to train the Muslim Brotherhood in anti-Semitic propaganda, military sabotage, and terrorism—launching the modern jihadi movement in the process. Without Arab Nazism, 6 million Jews would not have been murdered.

This is a history Americans should know, since it is a war we are still fighting today.

Tlaib and her colleague, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), are not on America’s side in this battle. Nor, it seems, is the Democratic Party.

Before Hitler adopted the Muslim Brotherhood, its Islamist message focused on the sexual decadence of the West, the evil of treating women as equals, and calls to reject modernity. This got them exactly nowhere, languishing with a membership of 800 cranks. With Nazi funding and training, the Brotherhood adopted the Third Reich’s obsession with anti-Semitism. Hitler’s message was fused with the Koran’s anti-Semitic teachings into a toxic mix. The Muslim Brothers grew a thousand-fold during the war, emerging triumphant with 1 million members. Thus the jihadi movement was born. The history of the Middle East was changed forever.

Muslim Ilhan Omar, Stalinist Angela Davis Exchange Love Vows The regime idolized by these women jailed and tortured 35,150 Cuban women for political crimes. Humberto Fontova

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273764/muslim-ilhan-omar-stalinist-angela-davis-exchange-humberto-fontova

“One of my idols!…I can’t tell you how enormously inspiring you have been to me throughout my life…We collectively must make sure that we are dismantling all systems of oppression…we’re the party of love, the party of compassion.” (Ilhan Omar expressing her lifelong adoration for Angela Davis, lifelong devotee of a system that conquered, enslaved, tortured and murdered many more human beings than Hitler’s Nazis.)

“It is about time that we stepped up to defend those who represent our political vision on the front lines of struggle. I feel particularly motivated to join this amazing group.” (Lifelong Stalinist and former FBI most-wanted terrorist Angela Davis at “Black Women in Defense of Ilhan Omar” rally last week in Washington D.C.)

The rally by black women in defense of a black woman was put together by a black woman who devoted much of her life to championing the jailer and torturer of the most black and women political prisoners in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere. A specialty of the regime championed by the black woman who organized Black Women in Defense of Ilhan Omar is torturing and jailing women who are black.

Angela Davis, though a 60’s radical icon with songs penned in her honor by John Lennon and the Rolling Stones (“Sweet Black Angel”) is no hippy dippy, brain-fried dingbat or flaky fellow traveler. As mentioned, she’s a lifelong, diehard Stalinist who twice ran for U.S. Vice President on the official Communist Party ticket. For decades she was a gen-you-wine “card-carrying commie,” in other words.

Time for Iran to Face a Reckoning The mullahs can only be stopped by means of “the mailed fist.” Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273761/time-iran-face-reckoning-bruce-thornton

While the media obsess over chimeras like the president’s obstruction of justice for nonexistent crimes, and AG Barr’s impeachment for obeying the law, a collision between the U.S. and Iran is brewing in the Middle East. The question now is whether Iran will finally face the reckoning it has invited and deserved for 42 years, or the latest crisis will peter out into U.S. saber-rattling and empty threats.

Donald Trump has made a good start at ending our nearly half-century appeasement of a regime that has declared war on the U.S. and backed it up by murdering Americans and working to create nuclear weapons that would make even more difficult, or even prohibitive, the price of punishing them for their aggression.

Since Jimmy Carter’s timid, feckless response to the 1979 American embassy hostage crisis, we have signaled to the mullahs that we will not exact a cost for their aggression. And this failure has been a bipartisan effort. When in 1983 Iranian proxies murdered 241 of our military personnel in Beirut, the Reagan administration pulled out even as the French and the Israelis strafed and bombed “Little Tehran,” the terrorist camps set up in the Beqaa Valley by Tehran, which nurtured the attackers. Since then Iran has been implicated in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and periodically taken hostage American citizens and sailors. In Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran’s Quds Force, the regime’s shock troops of global terror, have facilitated and participated in the murder of our soldiers. And it has continued to train and financially support terrorist gangs like Hezbollah and Hamas.

And a Little Child Shall Lead Them Why the Left puts children at the forefront of its agendas. Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273767/and-little-child-shall-lead-them-mark-tapson

In this recent video clip from a news channel’s interview with 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, it is clear that the young girl has no special insight to offer, only canned platitudes (“If everyone does something, huge changes can happen”). And yet the older male interviewer fawns over his teenage subject as if she is a credible, informed expert and a wise Cassandra whose dire warning we ignore at our peril. He does so not in spite of her youth, but precisely because of it. Why? Because the leftist media, and the left generally, love propping up gullible, politically indoctrinated children as authoritative mouthpieces to promote their agendas.

Swedish schoolgirl Thunberg attracted worldwide media attention at age 15 for her activism against weather, and is now the deadly serious face of the left’s climate change hysteria. Recently nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, Thunberg is following in the carbon footprints of environmental activist Xiuhtezcatl Roske-Martinez who, at the age of 15, entreated the United Nations General Assembly in 2015 to take action against purportedly human-caused climate change.

After the Parkland school shooting in Florida on Valentine’s Day, 2018, student activists David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez (pictured above), 17 and 18 respectively at the time, were ubiquitous in the media coverage about the atrocity – not because their thoughts on the incident were any more insightful than those of any of their fellow students, but because of their forceful calls for stricter gun control and their eagerness to demonize the hated National Rifle Association.

Right from wrong: Bringing Iran to its knees By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-wrong-Bringing-Iran-to-its-knees-589934

On January 12, 2016, a year before US President Donald Trump entered the Oval Office, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) seized American patrol boats that had entered Iranian territorial waters in the Persian Gulf. Although the US sailors explained that they had drifted into the area by mistake, their IRGC captors spent the next 15 hours terrorizing and humiliating them at gunpoint.

Footage shot by the IRGC showed the 10 sailors – nine men and one woman – on their knees with their hands behind their heads, while their documents, electronic devices and weapons were being confiscated. Under interrogation by the Iranian thugs, nine of the sailors reportedly spilled sensitive data about their ships and gave their abductors their cellphone and computer passwords. For this “violation of the naval code of conduct” they would subsequently be investigated, and two of them would be relieved of their command.

The response on part of the powers-that-be in Washington was to spend nearly an entire day trying to persuade Tehran that the incident had occurred due to a mechanical or navigational error, and therefore the sailors should be let free. To this end, then-US Secretary of State John Kerry phoned his counterpart, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, during the day and throughout the night to plead for the Americans’ release.

By morning, Zarif was exhausted in general, and weary of listening to Kerry’s voice in particular. Since the act of bringing the “Great Satan” literally and figuratively to its knees had been milked enough in the meantime, and filmed for future propaganda purposes, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator was able, finally, to liberate the crew and catch some sorely needed sleep.

Peaceful-Coexistence in the Middle East? Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

https://bit.ly/2LYX0p4

“The Middle East and North Africa have a well-deserved reputation for being a region plagued by war and conflict. Every decade since the end of WW2 has seen at least one interstate conflict; it has also witnessed 25 types of intrastate war, including insurgencies, civil wars and protracted terrorism. In the same timeframe, 2.3 million citizens have died as a result of political violence – 40% of the global total of battle-related deaths, although the region accounts for 5% of the world’s population…. 25 of these [intrastate] conflicts have claimed 1.5 million victims – 64% of the region’s total war deaths…. ” (Florence Gaub, Deputy Director, European Union Institute for Security Studies, October, 2017).

Middle East inter and intra-Arab/Muslim conflicts – some of them 1,400 year old – have been largely intractable, defying Western conventional wisdom, which has been dominated by the well-meaning pursuit of peaceful-coexistence, conflict-resolution, democracy and improved standard of living.

According to Dr. Daniel Pipes and Prof. Gunnar Heinsohn, some 11 million Muslims have been killed in wars from 1948-2007, only 35,000 of them in Arab-Israel wars – 0.3%!

According to Dr. Daniel Pipes and Prof. Gunnar Heinsohn, some 11 million Muslims have been killed in wars from 1948-2007, only 35,000 of them in Arab-Israel wars – 0.3%!Middle East inter and intra-Arab/Muslim conflicts – which preceded the 1948 establishment of Israel – have exposed the oversimplification of conventional Western wisdom, which has approached the Arab-Israeli conflict as if it were “the Middle East conflict.”