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August 2020

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Watch for Election Meddling by Iran and Other Adversaries of America by Majid Rafizadeh

By on August 29th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16403/us-election-interference

Tehran used that influx of revenues to expand its influence throughout the region and beyond, including in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, Venezuela and the tri-border area of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. The expansion campaign proved to be immensely successful.

A recent statement issued by William Evanina, director of the US National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC), warned the American public that other countries are using “covert and overt influence measures” to sway the vote. The Iranian regime is named one of three countries, alongside Russia and China, about which the NCSC is particularly concerned.

The American public needs to be extremely vigilant of the attempts by adversaries of the US to interfere in the upcoming election to manipulate the public vote in favor of the candidate who they think will be most malleable in agreeing to their demands.

When it comes to what policies should be pursued towards the ruling mullahs of Iran, the difference between the former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald J. Trump is striking.

The Trump administration has been in favor of the “maximum pressure” policy, cutting the flow of funds to the Iranian regime and its proxies, reducing Tehran’s oil exports, and isolating the regime in the region and globally. Now, the Iranian regime is facing an unprecedented level of pressure, which, if it continues, can threaten the ruling mullahs’ hold on power. As a result of this maximum pressure policy, the Iranian leaders have cut their funding to their allies, militia and terror groups.

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BOOKS, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

A Tyranny Perpetual and Universal? Is the leftist dream now within reach? If President Trump loses, we will find out. By Michael Anton

By on August 29th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/28/a-tyranny-perpetual-and-universal/

After “Is 2020 another ‘Flight 93 election?’” the question I most often hear is “What happens if Trump loses?” 

The answer to the first question, unfortunately, is yes, but more so.

The tl;dr summary of the answer to the second is: much more of the same. More of all the trends, policies, and practices that revolutionized American life in the 1960s, that enrich the ruling class and its foot soldiers at middle America’s expense, erode our natural and constitutionally guaranteed rights and liberties, degrade our culture and its people, and dishonor our heritage and history. The war on those who self-identify as Americans, and only as Americans, who love their country despite its flaws—who are certain in their bones that its strengths and glories vastly outweigh its historic and present shortcomings—waged by those who hate America and Americans, who want to destroy the former and crush the latter, will go on.

Two important questions are whether that war will intensify or abate and whether it might abate overtly but intensify covertly. Those questions will be explored in what follows.

First, though, a necessary caveat. A tiresome, sophistic, bad-faith, and inevitable rejoinder to my argument will go something like this: “Trump is the president; therefore, you guys are in charge; this ‘ruling class’ of whom you speak includes him, and you. So you’re lying and contradicting yourself when you criticize an alleged ‘ruling class’ running the country in ways you don’t like.”

No. The only accurate statement in the above summary is “Trump is the president.” And thank God for that; we’d be much worse off if he weren’t.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Today’s College Classroom Is a Therapy Session The tough guys are gone. Instructors are expected to foster ‘safe,’ ‘nurturing,’ ‘antiracist’ spaces. By Joseph Epstein

By on August 29th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/todays-college-classroom-is-a-therapy-session-11598654387?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Now retired after having taught 30 years in the English department at Northwestern University, I continue to receive announcements from the school. One not long ago carried the heading “Seven Honored with Teaching Award.” I read it wondering if these models of superior teaching might in some way illuminate the question of whether the value of in-person education is worth the risk of coronavirus exposure.

What I learned is that, of Northwestern’s seven 2020 McCormick Teaching and Alumnae Award recipients, a majority are so “welcoming” and “supportive,” so ready “to foster inclusive and anti-racist learning spaces.” One of the recipients seeks to integrate “methodological rigor, impactful engagement, and human sensitivity” into every aspect of her teaching. A student says of another awardee that the “nurturing and supportive environment” of his classes much improved his learning. The department chair(man? woman?) of yet another of the award winners says that her “classrooms are a rare phenomenon: a safe and nurturing forum for learning and debate. . . .” If this sort of thing goes on at universities, it must be redoubled in high schools and elementary schools.

Reading about these award-winning teachers makes one wonder if teaching has become the pedagogical equivalent of psychotherapy. Ought teaching to be primarily about building self-esteem in students, “nurturing” and above all making them feel “safe?” And what do you suppose an “inclusive and anti-racist learning space” looks like?

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

An Evening Stroll With Black Lives Matter Protesters harass and threaten White House convention attendees on the streets of Washington, D.C.

By on August 29th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-evening-stroll-with-black-lives-matter-11598655533?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Democrats seem to be figuring out that they made a political blunder by failing to condemn urban violence at their virtual convention last week. Then came the riots in Kenosha, Wis., in Minneapolis again, and elsewhere, and Joe Biden finally criticized the violence and looting in a video on Wednesday.

He may have to do more after the GOP convention drew a sharp line between peaceful protest and violence. And he may have to go even further than that after the video scenes of harassment on the streets of Washington, D.C., that went viral on Thursday night and Friday.

Black Lives Matter protesters outside the White House cursed and threatened people walking to their hotels after they attended the President’s nomination acceptance speech on the South Lawn. One man with gray hair was sucker-punched and fell to the ground. A middle-aged couple was cursed for blocks by a woman wearing a mask covering her head and a crowd that jostled and threatened them.

Florida Rep. Brian Mast, who walks slowly with prosthetic legs, was surrounded and screamed at again and again to answer, “What do you feel about police killing black people?” When he calmly replied that killing anyone is wrong and everyone deserves due process, they screamed at him more loudly. Mr. Mast lost his legs while serving with special forces in Afghanistan as a bomb disposal expert.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Cuomo Gets a Nursing Home Inspection A Justice Department probe will examine New York’s Covid-19 deaths.

By on August 29th, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuomo-gets-a-nursing-home-inspection-11598655585?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has resisted inquiries by the press and his own Democratic Legislature into how his policy of returning Covid-19 patients to nursing homes contributed to an untold number of elderly deaths. But New Yorkers may finally get an honest accounting thanks to the Trump Justice Department.

Justice on Wednesday sent letters to Mr. Cuomo and the governors of Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Jersey requesting virus data from their nursing homes. DOJ says it wants to determine whether the states’ orders “requiring admission of COVID-19 patients to nursing homes is responsible for the deaths of nursing home residents.”

To recap: Mr. Cuomo decreed on March 25 that “no resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to [a nursing home]” because of a virus diagnosis. And he prohibited homes “from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested” for the virus before admission. The other governors issued similar orders.

They were understandably worried that hospitals would be overwhelmed, so they pushed to discharge elderly patients as soon as they were medically stable. But as it turned out, 15% of New York hospital beds and 10% of its intensive-care units remained unoccupied at the Covid-19 peak. Other states also had spare capacity.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Judge Rules 50,000 Iowa Absentee Ballot Applications Invalid By Rick Moran

By on August 29th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/election/rick-moran/2020/08/28/judge-rules-50000-iowa-absentee-ballot-applications-invalid-n862502

A state judge has invalidated more than 50,000 absentee ballot application forms sent to voters in Linn County, Iowa, the second-largest county in the state.

The county auditor’s office almost completely filled out the ballot applications, despite the secretary of state’s directions that only the election date be included. The auditor’s actions may have also been against a state law that forbids government workers from filling out the forms.

Judge Ian Thornhill agreed with the Trump campaign, which had sued the county over the ballot applications.

CNN:

 The judge sided with the Trump campaign and the Republican Party, which filed a lawsuit this month seeking to discard the absentee ballot request forms. The Trump campaign argued the forms should have been blank except for the election date and type, per the Iowa secretary of state’s directions. Local officials in Linn County, which is home to Cedar Rapids, ignored those directions and sent out the applications with more information anyway.

“It is implausible to conclude that near total completion of an absentee ballot application by the auditor is authorized under Iowa law where the legislature has specifically forbidden government officials from partially completing the same document,” Judge Ian Thornhill wrote in a Thursday ruling.

“Not every county can afford the prepopulated request forms,” the judge also noted.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A tempest in a Tiburon teapot is a microcosm of the war on police By Andrea Widburg

By on August 29th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/a_tempest_in_a_tiburon_teapot_is_a_microcosm_of_the_war_on_police.html

A store owner’s interaction with a respectful police officer ought to have been over quickly but is now another act in the left’s grievance theater.

Mostly lily-white Tiburon, in Marin County, is being roiled by a black store owner’s claim that a police officer racially harassed him. In advance of a town hall to discuss the matter, town officials have released footage from the officer’s video camera. It is illuminating, to say the least, and shows the breakdown in civil order when people no longer respect a community’s police officers.

As a starting point, you need to understand that the small town of Tiburon, which is one of the wealthiest communities in America, is also one of the most tightly policed. The police make sure that the residents and businesses are safe and sound.

The historic downtown is filled with pricy boutiques for residents and tourists alike. One of those pricy little boutiques is a store called Yema, owned by Yema Khalif and Hawi Awash, a husband and wife partnership. He’s from Kenya; she’s from Ethiopia. Both are black.

At around 1:00 a.m., on August 21, the entire downtown was shut down, except for Yema, where the owners and an employee were working late. When an officer knocked on the door to check that everything was okay, Yema answered it but refused to provide any information about who he was or why he was in the store. From the first, he was incredibly rude and defensive in response to very polite questioning:

Look at this whole thing from the officer’s perspective: In a business community that shuts down at 9 p.m., he sees unusual activity in a store. The person who opens the door refuses to provide any information. That instant hostility alone arouses suspicion. For all that the officer knew, the people in the store were robbers, or there was a hostage situation. After all, an owner would usually be grateful to know that the police were looking out for his business.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The savage immaturity of the left and their proxies in the streets By Patricia McCarthy

By on August 29th, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/the_savage_immaturity_of_the_left_and_their_proxies_in_the_streets.html

Everyone, even Democrats, can agree that the DNC convention was an embarrassing bust, a poorly produced concoction of vapidity, anger and wrath.  They overdid the “let’s make everyone afraid of covid” bit, no audiences, masks on everyone even when alone on a stage.  It was a joke perpetrated by people who, to the core of their beings, think the American people are really stupid.  

This core belief, that they can stupefy and manipulate us all, is why they produced a ridiculous covid-fearful four-night convention so boring no one watched it… because it was unwatchable.  John Kerry? Bill Clinton?  John Kasich?  Bernie Sanders?   Who on this planet cares about anything these corruptocrats have to say?  No one, not even the current crop of apoplectic Trump haters, especially those among the media.  The entire endeavor was a joke born of the left’s contempt for middle America.  They actually think that by making common cause with Antifa and Black Lives Matter, they can win.  

Now that we’ve seen and reveled in the joyous tone of the RNC convention, the abyss between the two parties is writ gloriously large.  The left is angry and rattled because they’ve lost their grip on the power that they’ve always taken for granted, even when there was a Republican in the White House.  

They are not running the show, Trump is, and his attempt to drain the swamp is making inroads, despite all their treasonous efforts to destroy the man and his presidency.  The ferocity of their hate for Trump has led them to reveal their inner souls and it is not a pretty picture.  They are an ugly bunch. The termagant Nancy Pelosi charges that Trump and his supporters are “enemies of the state”!  How is that for projection?  

Now she is advising Biden not to debate Trump.  Of course, she is; like everyone else, she knows Biden is cognitively unable to debate the President.  Pelosi and her partners in crimes against America have done incalculable damage to this country, to their own cities, and to the Constitution itself.  If Biden were to win, who would be running the country?  Certainly not no-show-Joe.  Joe is done, over.  He belongs at home with a caregiver.  

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Daniel McCarthy Donald Trump Politics US Politics Trump redefines the race Trump is using Biden’s inertia and lack of a positive agenda to define the Democrat Daniel McCarthy

By on August 29th, 2020

https://spectator.us/trump-redefines-race-republican-national-convention/

Helplessness and passivity were the defining themes of the Democratic convention last week. The American people are unable to overcome COVID-19 and an even more all-pervasive racial guilt without the right man in the White House — the nation is weak, and truth be told its would-be savior, Joe Biden, is not strong. But he is nice. The convention emphasized not Biden’s 47-year record in government, but his family and the tragedies it has suffered. Even in building up the nominee, suffering was the dominant trope. Americans must huddle together, and somehow by huddling around Joe Biden everything will be all right.

This passivity was perhaps an inevitable byproduct of the rationale behind the Biden candidacy. Is he the best Democrat around? No — he’s obviously less of a leader than Bill Clinton or Barack Obama or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton, who along with Obama trounced Biden in the 2008 primaries. Biden is nobody’s first choice for president. But the logic of his campaign is that he doesn’t have to be anybody’s first choice, he just has to be unobjectionable. Trump is supposed to defeat himself, or else COVID-19 will defeat him. Biden doesn’t have to win, in any active sense. He just has to accept office when the coronavirus and the media has defeated Donald Trump. (Note how no one in the pundit class who blames Trump for the ravages of the virus has a bad word to say about Andrew Cuomo or Phil Murphy, Democratic governors whose states have had proportionally the most coronavirus deaths. If politicians are responsible for such deaths, why does the press only blame politicians from one party? Well, you know.)

For the Democratic strategy to work, for Biden to win by inertia, President Trump and the Republicans would have to play along. But this week they didn’t: the GOP convention tore up the media narrative and wrote a new script, one focusing on the violence raging in cities run by Democrats. But Trump and his party went beyond that: they made a detailed, policy-based argument that the past three years have been years of accomplishment. The President and his surrogates boasted of replacing NAFTA with USMCA, passing criminal-justice reform, getting a significant tax cut through Congress (though this didn’t receive as much attention as usual for a GOP convention), destroying Isis, and killing Qasem Soleimani, along with many less widely heralded achievements in foreign policy and regulatory reform. Beyond the individual policies, Trump and the GOP also pointed to their success in changing the terms of debate for both parties, and for the whole country, about China, trade and American industry. And they recommitted themselves to ending endless foreign wars in the Middle East and to strengthening border security.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Operation Not Forgotten: U.S. Marshals Find 39 Missing Kids and Rescue 15 From Sex Trafficking in Atlanta By Megan Fox

By on August 29th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2020/08/27/operation-not-forgotte

The U.S. Marshals Service put out a press release on Thursday announcing the recovery of 39 missing kids, some of whom were rescued from sex traffickers in Atlanta and Macon during Operation Not Forgotten in the state of Georgia.

“Operation Not Forgotten” resulted in the rescue of 26 children, the safe location of 13 children and the arrest of nine criminal associates. Additionally, investigators cleared 26 arrest warrants and filed additional charges for alleged crimes related to sex trafficking, parental kidnapping, registered sex offender violations, drugs and weapons possession, and custodial interference. The 26 warrants cleared included 19 arrest warrants for a total of nine individuals arrested, some of whom had multiple warrants.

“When we track down fugitives, it’s a good feeling to know that we’re putting the bad guy behind bars. But that sense of accomplishment is nothing compared to finding a missing child,” said Darby Kirby, chief of the Missing Child Unit. “It’s hard to put into words what we feel when we rescue a missing child, but I can tell you that this operation has impacted every single one of us out here. We are working to protect them and get them the help they need.”

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