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February 2020

Boris Johnson’s Climate-Change Dilemma By Madeleine Kearns

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/boris-johnsons-climate-change-dilemma/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=third

This November, the United Nations’s climate-change summit — rivetingly titled “COP26” — will happen in Glasgow, Scotland, the British government has announced. Given that polls now indicate a clear majority for Scottish independence north of the border, it’s a good idea to try to strengthen the union by uniting against a common enemy.

The BBC reports:

A ban on selling new petrol, diesel or hybrid cars in the UK will be brought forward from 2040 to 2035 at the latest, under government plans.

The change comes after experts said 2040 would be too late if the UK wants to achieve its target of emitting virtually zero carbon by 2050.

Boris Johnson unveiled the policy as part of a launch event for a United Nations climate summit in November.

He said 2020 would be a “defining year of climate action” for the planet.

The only trouble is that Johnson, who previously described the effect of global warming as the planet being swaddled in “a tea cosy,” has been accused of a lack of seriousness.

 

The prime minister “doesn’t really get climate change,” said Claire Perry O’Neill, the former Tory energy minister, who was recently sacked as the conference president. Conveniently for Johnson, most of his pledges — e.g. banning new petrol and diesel cars by 2035 — are scheduled for when he will no longer be in office.

The Art of Warping Elections Obama Paved the Way By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/the-art-of-warping-elections/

N o sooner were Democrats’ Trump-Russia collusion charges debunked than they began to claim that Trump will do again in 2020 what Robert Mueller found he did not do in 2016: rig the election.

After 22 months, nearly 500 subpoenas, and somewhere around $35 million in costs, special counsel Robert Mueller’s much praised progressive “all-star” team of lawyers and investigators found no evidence that Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians. Trump did not warp the 2016 election, and so he had not unfairly defeated the supposed sure-winner Hillary Clinton. But again those who have investigated and attacked Trump nonstop probably are seeking to do in 2020 what they falsely accused Trump of doing in 2016.

Mueller’s failure to find any collusion evidence was not for want of the dream team’s “bombshell” and “walls are closing in” leaks to CNN and MSNBC talking heads, over the course of 88 weeks. Almost daily we heard ad nauseam that Trump was soon to be indicted, convicted, removed, or summarily dispatched.

If anyone should have found “collusion,” it was certainly the Mueller zealots, then de facto ramrodded by current MSNBC partisan “legal” analyst Andrew Weissmann. (How odd that John Brennan, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, and Andrew Weissmann leak to MSNBC and CNN and then, in the out-phase of their perpetually revolving-door careers, end up rewarded by their receptacles as paid TV analysts).

In the end, the “hunter-killer team” imploded.

Corona and the Chinese ambassador’s Holocaust chutzpah Dai Yuming was being a true loyal Communist diplomat, spewing strategic propaganda with a purpose, part of which is to deflect from some inconvenient truths. Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/corona-and-the-chinese-ambassadors-holocaust-chutzpah/

China’s acting ambassador to Israel came under well-deserved fire this week for invoking the Nazi genocide of the Jews to criticize Jerusalem’s preventive measures against the spread of the coronavirus.

At a press conference in Tel Aviv on Sunday, Dai Yuming said that he felt “bad and sad” over the “errors to limit or even ban entries of Chinese citizens” into Israel “because it actually recalled me the old days, the old stories that happened in World War II, the Holocaust. Many Jewish were refused when they tried to seek assistance. Only very, very few countries opened their doors. One of them is China. I hope Israel will never close their door to the Chinese. In the darkest days of the Jewish people, we didn’t close the door on them. I hope Israel will not close the door on the Chinese.”

Dai’s comments could not have been more outrageous.

The outcry that they unleashed in the press and on social media spurred the Chinese embassy in Israel to express regret. In a statement issued to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Beijing’s diplomatic mission basically claimed that its representative’s words had been misconstrued.

“[W]e would like to clarify that there was no intention whatsoever to compare the dark days of the Holocaust with the current situation and the efforts taken by the Israeli government to protect its citizens,” the statement read. “We would like to apologize if someone understood our message the wrong way.”

Democracy works — Dems vote for “None of the Above” in Iowa by David Goldman

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/democracy-works-dems-vote-for-none-of-the-above-in-iowa/#comments

Terry Jones of Monty Python passed on last month, but his spirit was present at the Iowa Caucuses last night as “none of the above” emerged as the apparent winner. The combined efforts of the comedy writers of Tinseltown couldn’t have produced a sillier outcome. A technical glitch delayed the delegate count, but the contingent in this case reveals the necessary: The Democrats don’t have a clue whom they want as a presidential candidate, because the Democratic Party has become a suppurating stew of contending resentments. Do they want a recycled Communist to soak the successful and distribute the spoils to self-defined losers in the form of student-loan forgiveness or subsidized health care or a job-killing minimum wage? Do they want an eco-gender icon who flatters the faddish predilections of young urban professionals? Do they want a feminist standard-bearer with an aggressive redistributionist agenda? Do they want an African-American candidate to embody the rejection of “white privilege” and correct the supposed original sin of slavery? Or do they want an aged, empty vessel whose only qualifiication is a past association with a Democratic Party that once upon a time won elections?

Democratic voters don’t want any of these. No doubt the Iowa Democrats will release results eventually, although challenges and recriminations may persist for a while. But the actual vote, whatever it is, will show a degree of fragmentation among Democratic voters never seen since the party’s founding. The radical vote is big enough to block Biden, a shadow of the crafty, nasty politician who crushed Paul Ryan in the 2012 vice-presidential debates, a pathetic figure who says what his handlers made him memorize when you pull the string at the back of his neck. Bernie Sanders, the one candidate who came into the primaries with a national reputation and a field organization, lacks the credibility to unite the radicals, and Elizabeth Warren is too shrill, too extreme and too crazy to do anything but siphon votes away from Sanders. The black candidates have withdrawn from the race. Pete Buttigieg may emerge in front of the pack because he’s everyone’s second choice.

Elitist Bill Kristol Becomes a Democrat Celebration! He no longer belongs with us. Rabbi Aryeh Spero

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/elitist-bill-kristol-becomes-democrat-rabbi-aryeh-spero/

Here is the announcement that so-called neo-con Bill Kristol has just found solace in the arms of the saintly Democrats: Bill Kristol @Bill Kristol: “Not presumably forever, not perhaps for a day after Nov. 3, 2020…. But for the time being one has to say: We are all Democrats now.”

So, Bill Kristol is now identifying with and preferring the Democrat Party, which promotes the dangerous socialist dystopia; has 120 congressional members endorsing CAIR; is trending in an anti-Israel trajectory; refuses to condemn anti-Semitism in and of itself; accepts ANTIFA; attacks the traditional family and race-baits constantly; condemned our take-out of the foremost jihadist terrorist Soleimani; supports the Iran Deal and the $billions funding the mullahs; pushes for open and unprotected borders; and violated all the bedrock laws of due process in order to nullify the will of the electorate and destroy a President.

Someone lamented that Kristol has a good mind. So, what!; he seems to lack character and has used his mind for the last three years to severely damage our institutions, America itself, and has been a major engine in putting this country through Hell. Good minds are a dime a dozen, but are frightening when used to scheme and plot destruction. Kristol never knew when to stop the destruction he was causing this country.

Is Trump’s Unorthodoxy Becoming Orthodox? Victor Davis Hanson ·

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/68329-is-trumps-unorthodoxy-becoming-orthodox-2020-02-04

When candidate Donald Trump campaigned on calling China to account for its trade piracy, observers thought he was either crazy or dangerous.

Conventional Washington wisdom had assumed that an ascendant Beijing was almost preordained to world hegemony. Trump’s tariffs and polarization of China were considered about the worst thing an American president could do.

The accepted bipartisan strategy was to accommodate, not oppose, China’s growing power. The hope was that its newfound wealth and global influence would liberalize the ruling communist government.

Four years later, only a naif believes that. Instead, there is an emerging consensus that China’s cutthroat violations of international norms were long ago overdue for an accounting.

China’s re-education camps, its Orwellian internal surveillance, its crackdown on Hong Kong democracy activists and its secrecy about the deadly coronavirus outbreak have all convinced the world that China has now become a dangerous international outlier.

Trump courted moderate Arab nations in forming an anti-Iranian coalition opposed to Iran’s terrorist and nuclear agendas. His policies utterly reversed the Obama administration’s estrangement from Israel and outreach to Tehran.

Like David McCullough, Americans’ Ignorance Of History Should Keep Us Up At Night By Eric Rozenman

https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/04/like-david-mccullough-americans-ignorance-of-history-should-keep-us-up-at-night/

In academia, including teacher education, an illiberal secular fundamentalism severs connections between schools and religion, morality, and knowledge.

David McCullough, the well-known historian, couldn’t sleep. Of course, people in their 80s often experience some form of insomnia, his doctor, Thomas H. Lee, told him. But the pea under McCullough’s mattress was metaphorical, not physical.

The author of Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies of presidents John Adams and Harry S. Truman, among other highly praised works, tossed and turned. Why? Because public figures don’t know American history, don’t understand that despite uncertainties and challenges, “Things worked out — because individuals behaved in certain ways with integrity and resilience. They figured out how to work with other people, and they tried to do the right things.”

So wrote Lee, with his patient’s permission, in a Wall Street Journal commentary nearly two years ago. By the time McCullough spoke at the Library of Congress’ National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., last Labor Day weekend, his anxiety about historical ignorance had expanded from our leaders to the whole country.

McCullough’s main topic was his latest book, “The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought American Ideals West.” But he confessed that he worried American history isn’t taught much anymore, that subject matter in general does not receive proper attention.

App made by Clinton campaign veterans’ firm is behind Iowa caucuses debacle By Jeff Bercovici, Melanie Mason

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-02-04/clinton-campaign-vets-behind-2020-iowa-caucus-app-snafu

On a tense, chaotic night, with the eyes of the nation trained on the Iowa caucuses, that state’s Democratic Party was counting on a slick new smartphone app to make everything go smoothly.

The app was coded by a tech firm run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, one of them a former Google engineer. It was designed to meet new requirements instituted after that year’s contentious Iowa caucuses, in which Clinton narrowly edged out Bernie Sanders. To provide more transparency this time around, the state party promised to report not just the final results but voters’ initial and second choices as well.

With so much more data to tabulate than in previous years, party leaders feared that the established system of reporting numbers by phone would be too slow. A proposal for a “tele-caucus” system enabling virtual voting was rejected as too vulnerable to hacking. An app that could instantaneously relay the numbers as soon as precinct chairs input them, developed by Democratic Party loyalists, looked like the perfect solution.

It turned out to be a crushing failure.

Throughout the long, long night, precinct chairs found themselves unable to make the app work properly. Some never figured out how to download or install it in the first place. Those who tried to report their results via a backup phone line found themselves on hold, sometimes for more than an hour.

Results from Monday’s caucuses could not be transmitted to Iowa party headquarters, and state Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price blamed the problem on a coding error. “While our plan is to release results as soon as possible today, our ultimate goal is to ensure that the integrity and accuracy of the process continues to be upheld,” he said in a statement Tuesday morning.

The Anti-Islamist Muslim Challenging Ilhan Omar by Abigail R. Esman

https://www.investigativeproject.org/8287/the-anti-islamist-muslim-challenging-ilhan-omar

All that journalist Dalia al-Aqidi was asking for was a brief interview, one-on-one, to air on a TV station in the Middle East. She was, after all, one of the region’s best-known and most accomplished international reporters. But then-newly-elected Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar refused even to respond to her request.

Now al-Aqidi, an Iraqi refugee who has lived in the United States since 1988, is challenging Omar to represent Minnesota’s 5th Congressional district.

The decision to run for office didn’t come easily to the 51-year-old al-Aqidi. But “after Omar was elected, her activities and her statements – it offended me as an American, as a Muslim, and it offended me as an immigrant, and that made me concentrate on her activities,” she explained in a recent Skype interview. Omar’s non-response to her interview request, though, was what ultimately set her on her current path. “After that I said, ‘I don’t want to interview her. I’m going to talk to her district, and talk to her people.'”

In the process, she found that although Omar is herself a Somali refugee, many of her constituents, and particularly those in the Somali community, felt much the way al-Aqidi did. “Ilhan Omar is trying to give a false picture of what immigrants want,” al-Aqidi says. “People now think Somalis come to the U.S. to sit and get handouts, and come for free this and free that – it’s not true at all. [So] now a large percentage of her own Somali community can’t stand her anymore, because they see the damage she is doing to them.”

Joe Biden: Ukraine and Burisma’s Sugar Daddy Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/03/joe-biden-ukraine-and-burismas-sugar-daddy/

No one has challenged the former vice president to account for the billions in U.S. tax dollars he pumped into Ukraine for his own personal and political gain. How did Biden’s involvement gild his largely disastrous foreign policy legacy before his latest run for president?

If Joe Biden fails to win the White House this year, perhaps he can run for president of Ukraine. After all, Ukrainians owe him—big time.

As the White House’s point man in Ukraine during Barack Obama’s second term, Biden acted more like he owned the place: threatening to withhold aid, forcing government officials to be fired, forming special agencies to portray himself as a fighter of international government corruption.

“No one in the U.S. government has wielded more influence over Ukraine than Vice President Joe Biden,” according to a profile on Biden in Foreign Policy magazine a few weeks before the 2016 presidential election. “Ukraine’s government has relied heavily on its direct channel to the U.S. vice president, and Biden’s departure will leave a gaping hole.”

For three years, capitalizing on the country’s political upheaval and armed with congressional authorization to lead yet another nation-building exercise, the vice president drove the gravy train between Washington and Kyiv. That train, laden with goodies courtesy of unsuspecting American taxpayers, got heavier as Obama’s presidency drew to a close. Ukrainian officials were so worried about losing Biden and gaining Donald Trump that they engaged in their own election chicanery in 2016.

While Biden’s son, Hunter, is the main target of the president’s defenders and some of the more fair-minded journalists, the senior Biden also deserves plenty of scrutiny for the billions in American tax dollars he doled out to a nation rife with corruption, political unrest, and no mechanism to account for how those funds would be spent. President Trump has been impeached for briefly delaying appropriated funds to Ukraine last year, yet Biden has faced no questions on the campaign trail about his key role in directing huge sums of U.S. aid to Ukraine when he was vice president.