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January 2020

James O’Keefe is back, with a truly chilling look at a Bernie-supporter By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/james_okeefe_is_back_with_a_truly_chilling_look_at_a_bernie_supporter.html

Investigative journalist James O’Keefe sent his undercover agents to check out what’s going on with the Bernie Sanders campaign. On Tuesday, he dropped the first of what promises to be a series of videos focusing on the people working for Bernie.

The video, which is embedded below, is pretty shocking. Kyle Jurek, a Field Organizer for Bernie in Iowa, is a foul-mouthed man with a limited vocabulary. He revels in thoughts of riots, explosions, burnings, beatings, and gulags.

Jurek’s imagination doesn’t limit itself to what will happen in America if Bernie wins. Instead, he predicts the ultimate dystopia should Trump win re-election. For him, the 1968 Chicago Riots at the Democratic National Convention will serve as a small introduction to what Bernie supporters will unleash should their man lose.

It’s not just conservatives who earn Jurek’s wrath. In true Leftist fashion, he imagines a world in which Bernie’s political rivals on the same side of the Leftist aisle get their comeuppance. He’s no fan of the Clintons, for example, and makes the usual joke about the Clintons and suicides. He then adds, “We don’t gotta kill the Clintons. We’ll make them kill themselves. . . . Reign of Terror.” How very Soviet.

Will Trump’s Pentagon stand tall when atheists attack? By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/will_trumps_pentagon_stand_tall_when_atheists_attack.html

A formal blessing for the Space Force “official” Bible resulted in a squeal of outrage from a man who has dedicated his life to making sure that America’s troops, who are mostly Christian, have no easy access to God.

When the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution, 85% of the American population did not belong to the Church of England. Were they in England, they would have had to pay to support the Anglican church and would have been barred from universities or government employment. Things were easier in the colonies, with the hold the Church of England had over the population varying from one colony to the next. 

It was in this context that the Founders included in the First Amendment the language stating that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion….” The Founders were not banning religion from America or even from government. They were saying only that Congress could not set up a state church and demand that people belong to it or suffer the consequences.

This mandate did not affect the Founders’ belief that God and morality were inextricably intertwined with a free, functioning country. After all, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, to the extent that all people have inherent rights, they are inherent because a divine Creator endowed us with those rights. John Adams believed that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

And then there’s Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He is a fanatically anti-Christian atheist who has been on a crusade for years now to purge religion entirely from the United States Military. To Mikey, Christians in the military are a “well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces.”

Democrats are getting nervous as they realize their base is tuning them out By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/democrats_are_getting_nervous_as_they_realize_their_base_is_tuning_them_out.html

It’s fascinating to watch some of the smarter Democrats drag themselves out of their own Trump hatred long enough to realize that their party is in trouble at a very fundamental level. Such is the case with Peter Hamby, who wrote an article for Vanity Fair entitled, “‘Like, I’ll tune in when there’s two weeks left’: Why Trump has a huge advantage over dems with low-information voters.”

What Hamby is concerned about is the fact that the media are so excessively self-involved that they no longer know how to communicate information and ideas to the voters media types want to reach most: people who are not politically engaged on a day-to-day basis but must turn out to vote on November 3 if the Democrat candidate is to win.

Hamby notes that traveling reporters have nothing but disdain for those who spend their days sitting at their desks reading and reporting on Twitter:

[T]he stories and micro-scandals that obsess political and media insiders—often played out in episodic fashion on Twitter—matter little to voters who are too busy and too well-adjusted to follow every nanosecond of the political news cycle. It’s hard to overstate how salient this discontinuity will be in the current election year.

With medieval conditions in California, Gov. Newsom looks back to the old Poor Laws By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/with_medieval_conditions_in_california_gov_newsom_looks_back_to_the_old_poor_laws.html

California was once called “the Golden State.” It has a mellow climate, its agricultural industry was “the fruit basket of America,” San Francisco was “the City that knew how,” Los Angeles was the “City of Dreams,” and the Sierra mountain range, one of the most beautiful in the world, was a summer and winter pleasure paradise. That’s the California in which I grew up.

The current California isn’t quite so nice. The climate is still lovely, but the agricultural industry has been struggling because of environmental concerns over the Delta Smelt, a small fish.

Regularly occurring droughts, which are part of California’s natural cycle, are proving devastating, mostly because California has refused to upgrade its water system in the last 60 years, even as the population almost doubled. The new plan is to limit people to 55 gallons a day, which gives them a choice on many days between cleaning their clothes or cleaning themselves.

Punishing taxes and regulations routinely drive businesses (aka employers) out of the state.

A Selective Opponent of ‘Settlers’ Human Rights Watch’s Sara Leah Whitson has one standard for Israel, another for Armenia. By Eugene Kontorovich

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-selective-opponent-of-settlers-11579046287?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director for Human Rights Watch, speaks in Doha, Qatar, June 12, 2012. Photo: Stringer/REUTERS

Hypocritical attacks on Israel are common, but Sarah Leah Whitson takes them to a new level. As Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch, she is one of the sharpest critics of the Jewish state’s presence in the West Bank, promoting boycotts and international prosecution for the supposed crimes of occupation and settlement. Yet elsewhere Ms. Whitson strongly supports settlements in occupied territories—suggesting that she and her colleagues don’t take their own legal claims against Israel seriously.

The settlements Ms. Whitson supports are in Nagorno-Karabakh, an area that was within the borders of post-Soviet Azerbaijan until 1994, when Armenia occupied the region after a protracted war. Since then, the Armenian leadership in Yerevan has actively encouraged the movement of settlers into the area. Many Armenians regard Karabakh as their historic homeland. But the United Nations, international courts and the U.S. all consider it occupied Azeri territory.

Little Women Goes to War “Woke” critics express outrage that men stay away from a movie with little to offer them. Kay S. Hymowitz

https://www.city-journal.org/little-women

You might think that when a film you love is nominated for an Oscar for best picture, best adapted screenplay, best actress, and best supporting actress it would be a time for champagne, but in the case of Little Women, it’s been sour grapes all around.  The film received six nominations in total, but its many avid admirers were still furious: Greta Gerwig, the film’s director, was not nominated for best director, proof that misogyny reigns in Hollywood.

Even before it opened, the film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel had taken on heavy sociological and political significance.  Amy Pascal, the movie’s producer, had tweeted that men were not attending screenings of the Greta Gerwig–directed movie due to “unconscious bias” against women. Another Hollywood feminist VIP, Melissa Silverstein, jumped in: “I think it’s total, fully conscious sexism and shameful. The female story is just as universal as the male story.” The media were off and running: “Little Women has a Little Man problem,” Vanity Fair announced. “Men Are Dismissing Little Women: What a Surprise,” was the snarky title of a New York Times column.

Actually, the reasons that men (and a fair number of women like myself) don’t share in the widespread euphoria over the film couldn’t be more mundane. For one thing, the movie is based on a children’s book—to be precise, a book for girls. Thomas Niles, Alcott’s editor at Roberts Brothers, asked her to write a “girls’ book.” And that’s exactly what she set out to do. She wasn’t keen on the idea, but she needed the money. “I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this kind of thing,” she complained in her diary in the spring of 1868. “Never liked girls; never knew many besides my sisters.” When Niles reported to Alcott that his niece had found the early pages enthralling, Alcott, who remained unenthusiastic about the project, conceded: “As it is for them, they are the best critics.” No surprise, then, that grown men aren’t crowding theaters to see the latest movie version of a nineteenth-century girls’ book.

John Bolton’s Testimony Would Not Be The Smoking Gun Democrats Need By David Marcus

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/14/john-boltons-testimony-would-not-be-the-smoking-gun-democrats-need/

You have to give credit to congressional Democrats for one thing: They are an extremely hopeful bunch. After years of Russia investigations aimed at toppling Donald Trump, they came away with what Grandmother would have called “bupkis.” But, not daunted, they quickly latched onto a whistleblower report about a phone call with Ukraine, and launched an up tempo effort, one last-ditch attempt to take the president down.

The result of this exertion did include a vote to impeach Trump, but did not attract a single GOP vote. This is also almost certain to the result in the senate trial as well. But wait! Now former National Security Adviser John Bolton has agreed to testify if called, and the Democrats are racing toward Lucy again, confident this time she won’t move the football.

The excitement from Democrats comes from the fact that Bolton in the past few months has sent a few mysterious tweets and said through lawyers that he does have information that did not come up in impeachment. Bolton may well have new information, but the idea that he is going walk into the Senate chamber if subpoenaed with a smoking gun is pure wish casting.

The crux of the dispute between Democrats and Republicans over the Trump administration’s action to delay funding to Ukraine is not over whether it happened, but whether the president was acting within his authority. It is almost inconceivable that Bolton could provide any evidence that would change that basic dynamic.

Taiwan’s Presidential Election Highlights the Failure of China’s Aggressive Foreign Meddling By Helen Raleigh See note please

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/china-taiwan-relations-tsai-ing-wen-reelection-highlights-failure-china-foreign-meddling/

Finally! After the betrayal of Nixon/Kissinger/ Carter by recognizing Communist China’s “One China” policy Taiwan is breaking free and gaining the approval of America…..rsk

President Tsai Ing-wen’s landslide reelection victory is a huge blow to Beijing’s ambitions.

On Saturday, Taiwan’s first female president, Tsai Ing-wen of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive party (DPP), won re-election in a landslide victory that dealt a decisive blow to Beijing’s aggressive efforts to dictate Taiwanese politics.

The first thing to note about Tsai’s victory is that it had a lot to do with the ongoing unrest in Hong Kong. At the beginning of 2019, Tsai had an approval rating in the low 20s. The pro-reunification Nationalist Party (KMT) had won 2018’s local elections, handing the DPP a huge defeat on the strength of voters’ economic concerns. Many Taiwanese weren’t pleased with an economy slowed by Beijing’s coercive measures. China’s autocratic head of state, Xi Jinping, sees Tsai’s pro-independence political stand as the ultimate threat to his aim of reunification with Taiwan and had decided to use China’s economic power to teach her a lesson. Beijing had issued a travel ban in 2018 forbidding mainland tourists from traveling to the island. Since tourism is one of the biggest industries in Taiwan, the ban was projected to result in 700,000 fewer mainland tourists in just six months, costing Taiwan a staggering $900.5 million. Voters backed the KMT later the same year, and Tsai was forced to resign from her position as DPP chair. With a dangerously low approval rating and no political momentum to speak of, Tsai looked to be as good as dead politically this time last year.

How Communist Ideology Infiltrated America’s Security Agencies & Fueled Spygate—Diana West VIDEO

How Communist Ideology Infiltrated America’s Security Agencies & Fueled Spygate—Diana West

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=41&v=xZhDlf7sOaE&feature=emb_logo

Third Republican Senator Endorses War Powers Resolution, Leaving Dems Just Shy of Majority By Zachary Evans

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/third-republican-senator-endorses-war-powers-resolution-leaving-dems-just-shy-of-majority/

Senator Todd Young (R., Ind.) announced on Tuesday that he would support a resolution to curb President Trump’s power to make war on Iran without Congressional authorization.

Young is the third Republican Senator to support the resolution, which was authored by Senator Tim Kaine (D., Va.). Democrats will need four Republicans to vote for the resolution in order to gain the majority required to pass it.

Kaine tweaked the original resolution to make it more palatable for Republicans, eliminating a section that Republicans and some Democrats deemed too critical of President Trump.

“I will be supporting, shall we call it, Kaine 2.0., the newer Kaine language, should I have an opportunity to vote on it,” Young said in comments reported by The Hill.

Senators Rand Paul (R., Ky.) and Mike Lee (R., Utah) have both previously expressed support for the War Powers resolution. Paul and Lee confirmed their support after a classified briefing on the U.S. airstrike that killed senior Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani.