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September 2020

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The Magnetic Genius Behind the Branding of the Abraham Accords By Bryan Preston

By on September 16th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2020/09/16/the-magnetic-genius-behind-the-branding-of-the-abraham-accords-n935335

On Tuesday in a White House ceremony, President Donald Trump made history. The United States, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates signed the Abraham Accords. Bahrain has also joined the Accords.In Jerusalem, this beautiful display of flags lit up the night to mark the historic occasion.

Seeing the flags of Arab countries projected alongside the Israeli flag on the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem to mark a new peace agreement was all but unthinkable a month ago. It’s history in the making, whether the so-called mainstream media acknowledges it or not.

If this had happened during the Obama administration, you can be sure this moment would deserve multiple special reports and hour-long specials on cable news. It would be hailed up there along with the moment Obama promised the seas would stop rising.

The Abraham Accords is the crowning achievement of the Trump administration’s foreign policy efforts to date. It is a real peace that will bring enormous benefits for the region and for Americans. Real peace means less war, obviously, and in the American context that means a greatly reduced possibility of having to send our sons and daughters off to fight in the Middle East again as we have so many times before.

This could only have happened in the context of President Trump making certain sure moves to change the context in which negotiations could take place; notably consistently and vocally backing Israel, ending the disastrous Obama capitulation to Iran, and building up America’s domestic energy industry. Those moves together strengthened America, exposed the folly of the former administration and its weak-kneed dealings with Iran, and changed the economic picture at home and around the world.

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Russian Bounties Story Turns Out to Be Trash Journalism By Dan McLaughlin

By on September 16th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/the-russian-bounties-story-turns-out-to-be-trash-journalism/

How many times will people have to fall for this before they learn?

H onestly opposing Donald Trump should be easy. There is much to choose from in the president’s personality, character, public words, and public conduct, and many scandals and policy decisions to pick from. Yet somehow, Democrats and the media keep on betting heavily on stories that turn out, on closer inspection, to range from unproven to grossly exaggerated to outright fabrications. There’s no Postal Service conspiracy to vanish mailboxes and sabotage the election. Just yesterday, I noted the gulf between claims that ICE is mass-sterilizing immigrant women and the actual complaint, which raises secondhand alarms about a single doctor at a single facility. And now, we see the collapse of the “Russian bounties paid to the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan” story.

New York Times reporters Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt, Michael Schwirtz, and Mujib Mashal broke the heavily hyped story in late June: “Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says”:

American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter. The United States concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.  [Emphasis added]

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Cancel Culture Comes to Medicine By Joel M. Zinberg

By on September 16th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/scott-atlas-attacked-for-joining-white-house-covid-19-task-force/

Dr. Scott Atlas is under attack from former Stanford colleagues for joining the Trump administration’s COVID task force.

Cancel culture has come to medicine. Dr. Scott Atlas, who was chairman of neuroradiology at Stanford’s medical school until 2012 and more recently a senior fellow at the university’s Hoover Institution, has been singled out for professional erasure by 98 of his former Stanford medical, epidemiological, and health-policy colleagues because he had the temerity to join President Trump’s coronavirus task force and advocate rational measures for safely reopening the economy. Their criticisms are unfair, yet typical of today’s political and academic climate.

Atlas’s one-time colleagues published an open letter to other medical-school faculty accusing him of “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science” that “run counter to established science.” The letter — written on Stanford Medicine letterhead that falsely suggests the imprimatur of the medical school — does not cite any publications or specific statements by Dr. Atlas and does not specify exactly what “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science” he allegedly made. But it insinuates that his “failure to follow the science — or deliberately misrepresenting the science — will lead to immense avoidable harm.”

The letter lists five statements supported by “the preponderance of data” and implies that Atlas disagrees with them. The first says that face masks, social distancing, and handwashing reduce the spread of Covid-19. The authors do not cite anywhere where Atlas made claims to the contrary. A recent New York Times article claiming Atlas doubts the efficacy of mask wearing miscites an interview with Fox’s Tucker Carlson in which Atlas actually said people need not wear masks when they are alone but should wear masks when around others and unable to socially distance.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Study: Up To 95 Percent Of 2020 U.S. Riots Are Linked To Black Lives Matter By Joy Pullmann

By on September 16th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/16/study-up-to-95-percent-of-2020-u-s-riots-are-linked-to-black-lives-matter/

A report accompanying the data project, however, reads like an upscale attempt to blame the police for criminals’ decision to steal, kill, and destroy.

Contrary to corporate media narratives, up to 95 percent of this summer’s riots are linked to Black Lives Matter activism, according to data collected by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). The data also show that nearly 6 percent — or more than 1 in 20 — of U.S. protests between May 26 and Sept. 5 involved rioting, looting, and similar violence, including 47 fatalities.

ACLED is a nonprofit organization that tracks conflict across the globe. Its U.S. project that collected the summer protest data is supported by Princeton University. The project’s spreadsheet collating tens of thousands of data points documents 12,045 incidents of U.S. civil unrest from May 26, 2020 to Sept. 5, 2020. May 26 is the day after George Floyd’s death in police custody with enough fentanyl in his system to have died of an overdose if police had never touched him.

Of the 633 incidents coded as riots, 88 percent are recorded as involving Black Lives Matter activists. Data for 51 incidents lack information about the perpetrators’ identities. BLM activists were involved in 95 percent of the riots for which there is information about the perpetrators’ affiliation.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Nobel Peace Prize:Donald Trump and Barack Obama: Diane Bederman

By on September 16th, 2020

https://dianebederman.com/the-nobel-peace-prizedonald-trump-and-barack-obama/

In 2009 Barack Hussein Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize – not for anything he had done but because he had been elected. He won for being black. Well, the first Black American President. Well, not really black: he is bi-racial; mom was white, dad was black. Well, not really. Dad wasn’t black as in a Black American; he was from Kenya. But why let details get in the way of a heart-warming story?

Wonder what the Nobel people would say looking back at their choice. Did Barack Obama bring peace, anywhere?

Let’s look at the Middle East.

Obama referred to ISIS terrorists as the JV team. Nothing to worry about here. Was this the team that abducted James Foley, an American journalist, in Syria in 2012 and then murdered him in 2014?

Would this be the same team that burned Jordanian pilot First Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh in the Syrian city of Raqqa and posted by the Islamic State on Feb. 3, 2015?

Seems the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a group that loves to share their Junior Varsity abilities in videos, also murdered 16 men by drowning them in a cage, decapitating them with explosives and firing a rocket-propelled grenade into a car in Iraq in 2015. Lovely.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump: Getting Things Done More Important than Being ‘Presidential’ Charles Spiering

By on September 16th, 2020

http://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/09/15/trump-getting-things-done-more-important/

President Donald Trump defended his abrasive style of leadership at an ABC News town hall on Tuesday, arguing that it is more important to get things done.

“I’m fighting a lot of forces,” Trump said. Sometimes you don’t have time to be totally, as you would say, ‘presidential.’ You have to get things done.   

The president commented during an ABC News town hall on Tuesday night in Philadelphia where one voter asked whether he would act differently to inspire a more unified country if he won a second term.

“I’m fighting a battle. It’s a big battlefield, and I have a lot of forces against me,” Trump replied. “I have the media, which I call the fake news because a lot of it is fake.”

The president argued that the results of his first term spoke for themselves — passing tax cuts, improving care for veterans, rebuilding the military, creating Space Force, and appointing hundreds of federal judges as well as two Supreme Court justices.

“Honestly, we move very fast, and I have to get rid of people fast because they’re not doing their job,” Trump said, defending the number of officials who have resigned or been fired from his administration. 

The president said that he could be more presidential but pointed to the results. 

“The fact is, being presidential is easier than what I have to do, but I get things done,” Trump said.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

Falling for the Biggest Hoax in History Alicia Colon

By on September 16th, 2020

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/09/_falling_for_the_biggest_hoax_in_history.html

It will probably take months if not years for the truth of the Covid-19 pandemic to emerge, but when it does will any politician take responsibility for the lies and disinformation or the damage this hoax caused this great nation? I don’t think so, but what it did prove was what happens when the Democrats are in charge. They may not be in the White House but it is the House that wields the power over legislation and our money.  Couple this power with the useful idiots in the mainstream media to promote the widespread hysteria, and we then had the total capitulation of a frightened nation that accepted an unprecedented total lockdown of its existence. Shame on us.

If the fourth estate had done its job or had any integrity left, it would have reported the actual figures of the coronavirus’ impact instead of what would generate the most fear. So what is the truth? Why did hospitals and doctors count practically all deaths, even motorcycle accidents and cancer deaths, as Covid-19 deaths? Could it be because of extra government funding for these cases?

The CDC released a very controversial report that the actual death rate due to the Covid-19 alone was miniscule compared to what was reported in the mainstream news. Reuters is listing 194,147 as covid deaths as of September 14, 2020.

In an August article by Leslie Eastman in Legal Insurrection.com, a chart was posted with CDC figures:

“To begin with, it doesn’t mean that the virus killed only about 9700 Americans. The data demonstrates that unless there is another underlying health condition, most people infected have very little chance of dying. This is especially true of young people who fall prey to the pathogen.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Donald Trump’s lonely victory in the Middle East:David Goldman

By on September 16th, 2020

https://asiatimes.com/middle-east/

The US president has trampled over the conventional wisdom of the whole foreign policy establishment
 
Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan, an old adage says. An exception is the peace agreement among Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, likely to be followed by several other Arab states. Added to this is Kosovo’s decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem in the context of normalized relations with Israel, the first Muslim-majority country to do so.

America’s boisterous president trampled over the conventional wisdom of the whole foreign policy establishment in the United States as well as Europe, and in both the “left” and “right” wings of American policymaking. The Europeans and most of the Democratic Party insisted that a resolution of the Palestinian statehood issue was a precondition for peace, while the Bush-McCain-Romney wing of the Republican party insisted that American influence required massive military deployment in the region.

How wrong they were, and how right Trump was. The neo-conservative, interventionist wing of the Republican Party has been wrong-footed as much as his Democratic opponents.

When Trump announced the withdrawal of the tiny contingent of American troops in Syria in September 2019, a paroxysm of protest went through the Republican foreign policy Establishment. Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned shortly afterwards. Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies called Trump’s decision “a complete debacle.” The Hudson Institute’s Michael  Doran, a former National Security Council official, declared that Washington had no choice but to back Turkey in Syria. Michael Makovsky of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs complained that “Israel now faces more pressure and threats from Iran.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Strzok Interviews Reveal FBI’s Disgrace Adam Mill

By on September 16th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/15/strzok-interviews-reveal-fbis-disgrace/

Can constitutional democracy continue to coexist with a lawless secret police that targets innocent people?

By his smartly dressed appearance, one would never know Peter Strzok wasn’t still a senior FBI agent. He looked to be straight out of central casting as he began his “Meet the Press” interview on Sunday with this book-promoting slander, “I think it is clear, I believed at the time in 2016, and I continue to believe, that Donald Trump is compromised by the Russians. And when I say that, I mean that they hold leverage over him that makes him incapable of placing the national interests, the national security ahead of his own.”

Nothing is more sleazy and corrupt than a current or former FBI agent implicitly claiming to have access to secret evidence of a target’s guilt when the time to produce such evidence has long since passed.

Imagine that you’ve just weathered four years of an FBI investigation during which the press consistently published character-assassinating falsehoods attributed to “people familiar with the investigation.” Your enemies, who personally hate you, launch the investigative team with unlimited manpower and money and staff it with political opponents. Federal agents entrap your allies in process crimes, coerce a plea by threatening a man’s family, repeatedly deceive a court to conduct intrusive surveillance, steal thousands of emails without a warrant, and deliberately prolong the investigation despite knowing from day one that you are innocent. 

When the day finally comes for the persecutors either to put up or shut up, they do neither, publishing a slanted report full of smears without ever giving you the chance to rebut the charges in court. 

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

It’s Official: Trump Unleashed A Middle-Class Boom That Benefited Women, Minorities Most

By on September 16th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/09/15/its-official-trump-unleashed-a-middle-class-boom-that-benefited-women-minorities-most/

Not that you’d ever know it from the media blackout, but households have seen the biggest jump in real median income in at least 52 years. The poverty rate is lower than it’s been since at least 1959, the annual Census report on income and poverty shows.

These are incredible achievements that would be leading every newspaper and TV news program if they had happened under a Democratic president. The absence press coverage is even more astounding when you consider that the gains were among lower-income families, women, blacks and Hispanics.

In other words, every constituent group that Democrats claim that they represent.

Here’s the rundown:

Median household income reaches all-time high: In 2019, median household income shot up 6.8%, the biggest annual increase since at least 1967. To understand how impressive this is, consider that the next biggest increase was 5% in 2015, which came after five years of declines. (When Barack Obama left office, median household income was essentially where it was back in 2000.) From 1967 to 2018, the average annual increase was a mere 0.6%.

Lower-income families gained the most. Despite the endless chants about how President Donald Trump’s policies benefited only the rich, the truth is that lower-income families made the biggest gains in his first three years in office.

The bottom fifth of households saw their incomes climb 10% under Trump. Those in the next fifth saw incomes rise more than 9%.

The top 5% of households saw their share of total income drop.

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