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February 2020

The Agony of the Democrats Bernie Sanders is riding the intellectual currents that the party and its elites have nurtured.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/agony-of-the-democrats-11581723656?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Bernie Sanders’s victory in New Hampshire on top of his tie in Iowa makes him a favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination. Hard to believe, but in a winnable race against President Trump the opposition may nominate a socialist who wants the government to control energy production and health care, who wants nationwide rent control, and who calls America a “racist society from top to bottom.” No wonder Democrats like James Carville are in agony.

The Vermont revolutionary’s victory portends a long primary battle, unless Democratic voters elevate a single mainstream candidate who can challenge him. Mr. Sanders will get his 25% to 30% primary after primary, racking up delegates on his way to the convention. If other candidates keep dividing the other votes, he will be hard to stop, as Mr. Trump was for Republicans in 2016. Even if a single alternative emerges, Mr. Sanders won’t go down without a ferocious intra-party fight.

***

How did this happen? How did Mr. Sanders move from the socialist fringe to the brink of controlling the Democratic Party? The Senator’s dogged persistence across decades and especially the last four years is part of the explanation.

Yet Mr. Sanders wouldn’t be this close to the White House if not for the complicity of Democrats and the liberals who dominate the academy and media. Rather than fighting the ideas that animate him and his millennial voters, they have indulged and promoted them. They created the political environment in which he could prosper.

The State Department Lie That Won’t Die By Moshe Phillips

https://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/the-state-department-lie-that-w

In his State of the Union address last week, President Trump declared, “Recognizing that all past attempts [at Israeli-Palestinian peace] have failed, we must be determined and creative in order to stabilize the region and give millions of young people the chance to realize a better future.”

It was painful to see the president – whose policies have given all pro-Israel Americans reason to be grateful – mention the tired old fallacy that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is the cause of the region’s instability. Peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority will not stabilize the region. Nor will absence of peace between them destabilize it.

For years, Arab regimes and pro-Arab propagandists have energetically promoted the “linkage” argument. It serves two purposes. One is a variation on the old blame-the-Jews thesis. Trouble in the Gulf? Blame Israel. Unrest in North Africa? Blame Israel. Civil war somewhere in the Arab world? Blame Israel.

These are the arguments that were made for years by Israel critics on the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post, and it’s a way of distracting people from the real causes of those conflicts.

The other purpose of the original promoters of the linkage argument was frightening the West. It’s a threat. It warns that if the West doesn’t force Israel to agree to Palestinian demands, chaos and violence will erupt throughout the region, driving up oil prices or endangering American troops stationed there.

US Zionist group: UNHRC’s blacklist ‘echoes some of the darkest periods in Jewish history’ Herut North America warns Human Rights Council’s list of 112 companies operating in Judea and Samaria “must be called out as hateful and dangerous,” as it bolsters the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement.

https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/02/14/us-zionist-group-unhrcs-blacklist-echoes-some-of-the-darkest-periods-in-jewish-history/

A leading US-based Zionist group slammed the so-called “database” of international corporations doing business with Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria, released by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on Wednesday, saying the UN was playing into the hands of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement.

“The publishing of this so-called “blacklist” of companies doing business with Israeli communities in the Settlements is not designed to provide information it was only created to have a chilling effect on the ability of working Israeli families to earn a living and to support boycotters of Israel,” Herut North America’s National Director Moshe Phillips said in a statement released Thursday.

The database, released Wednesday after years of delays, listed 112 companies operating in Judea and Samaria that the UN human rights office said are complicit in rights violations by bolstering Israeli settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. It included major banks, construction companies, supermarkets and gas stations. But it also includes a number of global brands, including American firms Airbnb, General Mills and Motorola Solutions.

Israel denounced the list and accused the UN rights office of collaborating with the boycott movement in compiling the names.

NEW!! – – Judicial Watch Sues FBI For Seth Rich Documents After They Were Caught Lying to Courts Cristina Laila

www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/02/new-judicial-watch-sues-fbi-for-seth-rich-documents/?

Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch on Thursday announced it filed a lawsuit against the FBI for Seth Rich documents.

Recall, Seth Rich was a DNC staffer who was murdered in the early morning hours of July 10, 2016.

Seth Rich’s murder has not been solved to this day.

After getting caught lying to the Courts and claiming there were no documents related to Seth Rich, emails between FBI lovers Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were uncovered.

Now the FBI is claiming these emails are redacted to protect the investigation they claim never happened.

“There is significant public interest in the Seth Rich murder and the FBI’s game-playing on document production in this case is inexcusable,” JW boss Tom Fitton said.

“There’s references to Seth Rich” in these Lisa Page/Peter Strzok documents, Fitton said.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange never reveals his sources, however he previously hinted Seth Rich may have been murdered for transmitting Hillary Clinton’s 2016 DNC emails to WikiLeaks.

Roger Stone’s sentence: How the judge will really decide to ‘lock him up’ Andrew McCarthy

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/483090-roger-stones-sentence-how-the-judge-will-really-decide-to-lock-him-up

Attorney General Bill Barr is undoubtedly right: The president’s ill-tempered tweets about pending criminal cases undermine the Justice Department’s mission. The rule of law depends not only on the reality but also the perception that prosecutorial decisions are driven by legal requirements and evidence, not political considerations.

For now, though, let’s table that and focus on what is actually at issue in the matter of Roger Stone’s sentencing.

The fact is, it was well within the legitimate power of the attorney general to countermand the Stone prosecutors’ submission to the court — i.e., to substitute a recommendation that the court impose a stiff but reasonable prison sentence on Stone, in place of the prosecutors’ suggestion of an excessive term.

More to the point, what we are witnessing in the media-Democrat commentariat is a manufactured controversy, reminiscent of their mau-mauing the president’s Ukraine indiscretion into an impeachable offense. Hence, the unhinged calls for Barr’s impeachment. The judge, not the Department of Justice (DOJ), will determine Stone’s sentence. The shrieking over DOJ’s Stone sentencing memos, topped by the theatrical resignation of the four prosecutors (who now want to be seen as stalwarts against politicized law enforcement after they conducted a patently politicized prosecution), is much ado about nothing.

Contrary to the misimpression so studiously peddled, Barr has not taken action that effectively slashes Stone’s potential sentence. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I have provided a broad overview of the controversy over the DOJ’s pre-sentencing submissions in the Stone case. Nevertheless, because the facts are a bit complicated and involve some legal esoterica, a simple point is being obscured: The only thing at issue in the two memoranda filed with the court by the DOJ is a non-binding recommendation about the sentence. It has no legal effect on the term that the judge will impose when Stone ultimately is sentenced, which currently is scheduled to happen on Feb. 20.

The Progressive Prosecutor Project How and why the nation’s crime busters are becoming criminal enablers By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-progressi

A newly minted district attorney for a major American city vows to establish an immigration unit. At first blush, that would seem entirely normal for a prosecutor’s office. Immigration laws require enforcement, and prosecutors are in the law-enforcement business.

But no—the new San Francisco DA actually has in mind an immigration defense unit. He wants to assign a staff of prosecutors to protect undocumented aliens—those who are either illegal and thus deportable to begin with, or for whom a criminal conviction could result in loss of lawful status and thus eventual deportation. The unit’s enforcement target would be not the law violators but the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who enforce federal laws, along with any local police and corrections officials who have the temerity to assist ICE in that endeavor. The prosecutors’ mission, in the words of their new boss, would be to “stand up to Trump on immigration”—the president having made signature issues of border security and the stepped-up deportation of aliens who flout the laws.

That kind of immigration unit is not something you’d expect to find in a district attorney’s office. But of course, neither would you expect, upon this new DA’s election, a victory party marked by ear-splitting chants of “F*ck POA!” The POA is the Police Officers Association.

The Roots of Our Partisan Divide Christopher Caldwell

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/roots-partisan-divide/?utm_campaign=imprimis&amp%3Butm_source=housefile&

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on January 28, 2020, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation lecture series.
American society today is divided by party and by ideology in a way it has perhaps not been since the Civil War. I have just published a book that, among other things, suggests why this is. It is called The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. It runs from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the election of Donald J. Trump. You can get a good idea of the drift of the narrative from its chapter titles: 1963, Race, Sex, War, Debt, Diversity, Winners, and Losers.
I can end part of the suspense right now—Democrats are the winners. Their party won the 1960s—they gained money, power, and prestige. The GOP is the party of the people who lost those things.
One of the strands of this story involves the Vietnam War. The antiquated way the Army was mustered in the 1960s wound up creating a class system. What I’m referring to here is the so-called student deferment. In the old days, university-level education was rare. At the start of the First World War, only one in 30 American men was in a college or university, so student deferments were not culturally significant. By the time of Vietnam, almost half of American men were in a college or university, and student deferment remained in effect until well into the war. So if you were rich enough to study art history, you went to Woodstock and made love. If you worked in a garage, you went to Da Nang and made war. This produced a class division that many of the college-educated mistook for a moral division, particularly once we lost the war. The rich saw themselves as having avoided service in Vietnam not because they were more privileged or—heaven forbid—less brave, but because they were more decent.
Another strand of the story involves women. Today, there are two cultures of American womanhood—the culture of married women and the culture of single women. If you poll them on political issues, they tend to differ diametrically. It was feminism that produced this rupture. For women during the Kennedy administration, by contrast, there was one culture of femininity, and it united women from cradle to grave: Ninety percent of married women and 87 percent of unmarried women believed there was such a thing as “women’s intuition.” Only 16 percent of married women and only 15 percent of unmarried women thought it was excusable in some circumstances to have an extramarital affair. Ninety-nine percent of women, when asked the ideal age for marriage, said it was sometime before age 27. None answered “never.”
But it is a third strand of the story, running all the way down to our day, that is most important for explaining our partisan polarization. It concerns how the civil rights laws of the 1960s, and particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, divided the country. They did so by giving birth to what was, in effect, a second constitution, which would eventually cause Americans to peel off into two different and incompatible constitutional cultures. This became obvious only over time. It happened so slowly that many people did not notice.

‘I have lost four years of my life’: the desperate migrants stuck in squalid Libyan camps Around 650,000 migrants live in Libya, according to the UN, with around 2,000 in barely sanitary ‘detention centres’

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/13/have-lost-four-years-life-desperate-migrants-stuck-squalid-libyan/

When Osas Akahomoen set out from Nigeria in search of work in Europe in 2016, he imagined his qualifications as a welder would help him find a decent job and a living wage somewhere in Europe. 

Instead, he embarked on an odyssey of suffering that would see him kidnapped and ransomed twice, abandoned to die by people smugglers in the Sahara desert, and finally held incommunicado in a barely sanitary ‘detention centre’ in Libya without functioning toilets. 

“There’s no toothbrushes, no running water, there’s lice everywhere. At least in Nigeria I can have a shave. I can brush my teeth,” he said in an interview in the Libyan detention compound where he is being held. “I just want to go back to Nigeria. And I wouldn’t advise anyone else to do what I did. I have lost four years of my life.”

Mr Akahomoen, a thoughtful twenty-eight year old from Nigeria’s Edo province, has been through an extraordinary ordeal. But among the inmates of Libya’s migrant detention centres, it is not out of the ordinary. 

More than 40,000 would-be migrants to Europe have been intercepted at sea since Italy began paying and equipping the Libyan coastguard to do so in 2017.

But the fate of those detained has caused outrage. Last month, the European Union’s commissioner for Human Rights called on Italy to suspend the arrangement because of “serious human rights violations.” 

“Humanitarian rhetoric doesn’t justify continued support to the Coast Guard when Italy knows people apprehended at sea will be returned to arbitrary detention and abuse,” said Judith Sunderland, associate Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch, in a statement calling for Italy to suspend the program.

Oil-rich but sparsely populated, Libya has long been a destination for immigration. Under Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, there were as many as two million migrants workers living and working here, sending remittances back to families across Africa and the Middle East. 

Sharp Rise in Coronavirus Cases Raises Questions About Outbreak’s Peak Epidemiologists, officials and investors may need to recalibrate projections for the trajectory of a pathogen that remains little understood By Wenxin Fan and Natasha Khan in Hong Kong and Chao Deng in Wuhan, China

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sharp-rise-in-coronavirus-cases-raises-questions-about-outbreaks-peak-11581617783

New cases of the coronavirus rose sharply after Chinese authorities changed the criteria for diagnosing the illness, raising questions about how soon the outbreak will peak.

On Thursday, health officials in Hubei province, the epicenter of the infections, announced the largest one-day jump in cases—14,840 on Wednesday, about nine times the number of new cases a day earlier. Epidemiologists, government officials and investors might now need to recalibrate their projections for the trajectory of a virus that remains little understood.

In recent days, investors had pushed U.S. stocks to records as Chinese officials touted gains in the fight against the fast-spreading illness that has gripped central China for the past month, fixing their attention on one number—a drop in the growth rate of new infections—that suggested the virus was running out of steam.

Such a dramatic surge in cases as announced Thursday is likely a one-off. It reflects the shift in how Hubei province authorities are classifying patients as having clinically confirmed infections after they are diagnosed by a doctor, such as through an X-ray, rather than just counting those patients who have positive laboratory identification of the virus.

The new practice isn’t a standard way to diagnose the presence of a specific virus.

“This does not represent a significant change in trajectory of the outbreak,” said Michael Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program. He called the jump in cases “an after-fact of reporting.”

Dr. Ryan said the move would allow authorities to do more public-health investigations, such as by tracking down patients’ contacts, which are needed to contain the outbreak.

Italy: Salvini Facing Show Trial for “Kidnapping” Migrants by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15597/italy-salvini-show-trial

In September, Sicilian prosecutor Carmelo Zuccaro said that the kidnapping accusations against Salvini were “groundless” and recommended that he be acquitted of all charges. The Court of Ministers, however, overruled Zuccaro, who is now, paradoxically, required to proceed with prosecuting Salvini, even though he has already found him to be innocent.

The charges against Salvini appear to be part of a political vendetta against him as well as his opposition to mass migration. Case in point: Although the decision to prevent those onboard the Gregoretti from disembarking in July 2019 was made by Salvini in close coordination with senior members of the Italian government, only Salvini is facing prosecution.

“No contrary position was taken by the Prime Minister Conte…. This makes the hypothesis of individual action by Minister Salvini completely improbable.” — Senator Erika Stefani, Lega Party, presenting documents showing that other ministers were deeply involved in discussions over the Gregoretti.

“If I have to go to court, I will explain to the judges that defending the borders of my country and protecting citizens was my duty and, serenely, I will go to that courtroom to represent millions of Italians, because I simply did what they asked me to do: to control who enters and who leaves Italy.” — Former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini in a tweet, February 12, 2020.

Like Trump, Salvini’s legal troubles are fuelling his approval ratings…. Surveys indicate that if Italy held elections now, Lega would win a majority together with its conservative allies.

The Italian Senate has voted to strip former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini of parliamentary immunity so that he can face kidnapping charges for refusing to allow migrants to disembark from a ship at a port in Sicily.

If Salvini, who leads the anti-mass-migration party, Lega (League), is found guilty, he faces a ban on holding political office and up to 15 years in prison. He has said that he acted in Italy’s national interest and that the charges against him are politically motivated, aimed at silencing criticism of the country’s open-door migration policy.

Under Italian law, ministers enjoy immunity for actions taken while in office — unless the Senate votes to lift that protection. On February 12, the Italian Senate voted 152-76 in favor of lifting Salvini’s immunity, after a parliamentary committee on January 21 recommended the action.

In December, the Court of Ministers in Catania, Sicily, ruled that Salvini should be indicted for “aggravated kidnapping” for depriving 131 migrants onboard the Gregoretti coastguard ship of their liberty by refusing to allow them to disembark. The incident, which occurred over a four-day period in July 2019, was part of Salvini’s “closed ports” policy against illegal immigration and an attempt to force EU member states to share the burden of mass migration.