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March 2021

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The Biden Administration is Determined to Undo Trump’s Most Important Achievement A disturbing glance at Biden’s boosting of Palestinian oppressive, jihadist institutions. Hugh Fitzgerald

By on March 29th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/biden-administration-determined-undo-trumps-most-hugh-fitzgerald/

The Biden Administration is determined to undo the most important achievement of the Trump administration, that is, its support for Israel’s rights under the Palestine Mandate and U.N. Resolution 242, and for the Abraham Accords, and its refusal to any longer tolerate the PPalestinian Authority’s Pay-For-Slay Program, or the antisemitism in its schoolbooks. “Internal Biden memo said to back 2-state solution along 1967 lines,” by Jacob Magid, Times of Israel, March 17, 2021:

…The US paid hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the PA’s creditors, such as the Israeli state utility companies from which the Palestinians purchase water and electricity. They paid for training for the PA’s security forces and numerous infrastructure projects.

What did the U.S. get for its hundreds of millions of dollars in annual aid to the PA? Did the PA agree to negotiate with Israel? No, it hasn’t done so for years. Did it cease its support for terrorism? Not at all. The PA continues to spend about $350 million each year for its “Pay-For-Slay” program. The Taylor Force Act prohibits any American aid from going to the PA as long as it continues to support the Pay-For-Slay program. How does the Biden Administration plan, in its insensate desire to again shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to the PA, to get around the Taylor Force Act?

Washington also gave hundreds of millions a year in funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency — known as UNRWA — which is in charge of administering the daily needs of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and their descendants across the Middle East.

The memo, which was passed along to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, highlights UNRWA in particular as one of the organizations the Biden administration plans to back in order to aid the Palestinians….

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden: A Captive to His Handlers Profiles in presidential puppetry. Lloyd Billingsley

By on March 29th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/lloyd-lloyd-billingsley/

“Like FDR in his waning days, Joe Biden is a pathetic puppet of the Democrats’ Harry Hopkins squad. These leftist Green New Dealers want Biden to give America’s adversaries everything they want, asking little or nothing in return. Joe Biden is running for president in 2024, when he’ll be 82. So far he’s performing well as the nation’s undertaker-in-chief.”

“The perception of you that got you elected as a moral, decent man is the reason a lot of immigrants are coming to this country and are trusting you with unaccompanied minors.”

That was PBS White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor at Joe Biden’s March 25 press conference. The event was really a worship service, conducted by house hagiographers and lacking only mandatory timed applause. Still, the proceedings did prove informative in a different way.

Biden needed a cheat sheet and marked photos of approved reporters. The Delaware Democrat is utterly captive to his handlers, a condition previously showcased by America’s 32nd president.

Many Americans, and people around the world, still believe Franklin Delano Roosevelt was fully able-bodied and a tower of strength during World War II. In 1985, Hugh Gregory Gallagher challenged that perception in FDR’s Splendid Deception: The moving story of Roosevelt’s massive disability – and the intense efforts to conceal it from the public.

In 1920, FDR was the Democrat candidate for vice president under James Cox. The next year, he suffered an attack of polio, and as Gallagher notes, FDR was “anxious that press should not know how severely paralyzed he had become.” FDR associate Louis Howe “constantly misled reporters” and worked out “a scheme to transfer Roosevelt without reporters discovering just how ill he really was.”

As Gallagher recalled, “FDR had made it a rule, during his first campaign for governor, that photographers were not to take pictures of him looking crippled or helpless.” During his entire career, reporters obeyed with startling fidelity.

Not a single newsreel showed President Roosevelt being lifted, carried or pushed in his chair.

If a photographer broke the rules, the Secret Service would seize the camera and expose the film.  The Secret Service built ramps for the president, sometimes raising an entire street to the level of the building entrance with wooden trestles and scaffolding. These extensive measures allowed the FDR to appear to “walk” from his car into a building without undue effort.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Biden’s Lie-Filled Press Conference He called on “correspondents” too deferential to challenge him. Joseph Klein

By on March 29th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/bidens-lie-filled-press-conference-joseph-klein/

President Joe Biden’s March 25th press conference was his first since taking office. He lied so often during the hour or so he spoke and fielded questions that even the New York Times had to take notice.

“We’re sending back the vast majority of the families that are coming,” Biden claimed, referring to families of migrants illegally crossing or seeking to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

“False,” declared the New York Times. “Federal officials recorded about 19,000 encounters with families at the southwestern border in February. Of those, about 7,900 families, or 42 percent, were expelled, far short of a majority.” The Times also cited an Axios report that the expulsion rate was 13 percent during the previous week.

Biden claimed that former President Donald Trump eliminated the funding for aid to the Central American countries that Biden had helped put together as the Obama administration’s vice president. The purpose of the aid, Biden said, was to get at the root causes of why migrants were leaving those countries. “What did Trump do? He eliminated that funding,” Biden said. “He didn’t use it.”

“False,” declared the New York Times again. “President Donald J.Trump did not completely eliminate the aid that Mr. Biden cited,” the New York Times explained. The Times’ fact-checker pointed out that aid to Central America was set by Congress at $505.9 million in the 2021 fiscal year (which began during Trump’s term) and that the aid that Trump temporarily suspended in April 2019 was restored in October 2019.

The New York Times also said that Biden had “exaggerated” when he claimed that Trump had “shut down the number of beds available.” Calling this an exaggeration was too kind. Biden was lying once again. The Times’ fact-checker noted that the monthly bed capacity grew to over 16,000 by December 2018, and that by Trump’s “last full month in office, in December 2020, monthly bed capacity was more than 13,000.” There were some reductions during the pandemic to comply with coronavirus protocols while Trump was in office – health precautions that the Biden administration is throwing to the wind as it tries to cope with the huge surge of illegal unaccompanied minors that its open border policy has invited.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Bipartisan Senate Bill You Haven’t Heard About By Bill Scher

By on March 29th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/29/the_bipartisan_senate_bill_you_havent_heard_about_145490.html

Two weeks ago, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin told his colleagues in a floor speech, “It’s time to change the Senate rules and stop holding this Senate hostage.”

Last Thursday, the Senate voted on a bill to push back the application deadline for the Paycheck Protection Program — the low-interest loan program helping small businesses survive the pandemic — from March 31 to May 31. The bill passed 92-7, and is headed to President Biden’s desk.

If the Senate were actually being held hostage, this measure would not have passed. Admittedly, the bill does not qualify as sweeping legislation. Its passage does not immediately pave the way for the Democrats’ ambitious legislative proposals such as expanding voting rights, investing trillions in infrastructure, addressing climate change, raising the minimum wage or establishing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers.

But the PPP extension is more than naming a post office. With the loan program scheduled to expire on Wednesday, blocking an extension would have left 190,000 businesses with pending applications in the cold.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Study: Media Reported Only Bad COVID News (Until Trump Lost)

By on March 29th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/29/report-media-reported-only-bad-covid-news-until-trump-lost/

A study published by the prestigious National Bureau of Economic Research finds that coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic by the domestic press was overwhelmingly negative. More negative than the international press. More negative than the local press. And more negative than the science. But then a funny thing happened after President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid.

Researchers at Dartmouth College and Brown University did a content analysis of tens of thousands of COVID-19 news stories to look at the levels of negativity. What they found was that 87% of the stories published by the top 15 news sources in the country were negative in tone. That compares with 50% of international news sources, and 64% for scientific journals. They also found the mainstream media were 25 percentage points more likely to be negative than more general U.S news sources.

What’s more, this overwhelming negativity included even “areas with positive developments, including school re-openings and vaccine trials.” And, the researchers determined, the mainstream media coverage was “unresponsive to changing trends in new COVID-19 cases.”

In other words, the national press in the U.S. was putting a negative spin on everything COVID-related. (The study is titled “Why Is All COVID News Bad News?”)

Those 14 top news sources tracked by the researchers, by the way, included only two that might be considered conservative – Fox News and the New York Post.

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Piles of People: New Photos Show What Biden Is Trying to Hide at the Border Katie Pavlich

By on March 29th, 2021

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/03/26/piles-of-people-cruz-releases-photos-from-inside-border-facilities-n2586972

Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz has released new and never seen before photos from inside an overcrowded Customs and Border Protection facility in Donna, Texas. These are the types of facilities the Biden administration has banned media from entering or touring. 

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Watch Out for a Vaccine Patent Heist The left wants Biden to force drug companies to give away their IP.

By on March 29th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/watch-out-for-a-vaccine-patent-heist-11616959785?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Pharmaceutical companies have come to the world’s rescue with Covid-19 vaccines, but these days no good deed by business goes unpunished. The Biden Administration is now under pressure to support a political campaign to break vaccine patents.

India and South Africa last fall petitioned the World Trade Organization to suspend intellectual property protections on Covid vaccines and treatments, which they say is necessary to expand global access. Fifty-five other countries plus an army of nonprofiits and labor unions have joined the attempted heist.

“Multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies continue to prioritize profits by protecting their monopolies,” Bernie Sanders says. Adds Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro : “We need to make the public policy choices both in the U.S. and at the WTO that puts patients first.”

***Patent-breakers are presenting a false choice between protecting intellectual property and public health. Breaking patents won’t accelerate vaccine production or distribution to poor countries. Pharmaceutical companies are ramping up manufacturing as fast as they can, including in low-income countries.

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BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘Minds Wide Shut’ Review: Dogma, Division and Distrust Can an academic world aiming for moral purity be redirected to the spirit of inquiry and toleration?By Michael S. Roth

By on March 29th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/minds-wide-shut-review-dogma-division-and-distrust-11616795028?mod=opinion_major_pos12

Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us” is a plea for moderate, open-minded liberalism in an age of self-righteous certainty. Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro are professors of literature and economics, respectively, at Northwestern University, where Mr. Schapiro is also the president. The two have taught and written together, and this book is a sequel to their “Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn From the Humanities.” That, too, was a plea to take the blinders off, especially aimed at economists who often tend not to pay much attention to fields other than their own.

Messrs. Morson and Schapiro are academics who have spent a good deal of their lives on university campuses, and they know that things ain’t like they used to be. Their works return us to well-trodden paths of moderation and conversation, bidding us stay back from the slippery slopes that lead to dangerous dogmatisms. In this volume, literature professors are frequently taken to task, either for not realizing the greatness of the books they are privileged to teach or because they aim for moral purity and theoretical certainty.

Minds Wide Shut

By Gary Saul Morson & Morton Schapiro
Princeton, 307 pages, $29.95

Messrs. Morson and Schapiro are worried not only about the fate of parochial academic disciplines; they are concerned about the development of a culture that undermines the possibility of democratic disagreement. “We need to cultivate the skills of self-questioning, recognizing our own limitations, and attentive listening to those who differ,” they write, “all of which are necessary for respectful, productive dialogue.” The authors claim that too many faculty, students and citizens today believe in theories or take moral stances that claim to provide complete certainty about a vast domain of human experience. This commitment creates new fundamentalisms, making open-minded learning all but impossible. The fundamentalist spirit eliminates the consideration of important questions because it doesn’t tolerate the possibility that in some matters ambiguity or partial answers are the best we can do. Certainty shuts one’s mind.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Victor Davis Hanson: China’s contempt for US – they seek global hegemony and this is how we’re helping them China’s defiant provocations are not just verbal

By on March 28th, 2021

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/china-contempt-usglobal-hegemony-victor-davis-hanson

Two weeks ago in Anchorage, Alaska, Chinese diplomats dressed down Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan. Both seem stunned by the broadsides.  

Not since newly elected President John Kennedy was humiliated at the Vienna summit in June 1961 by USSR strongman Nikita Khrushchev have American diplomats been so roughly manhandled by a Communist government.   

China’s defiant provocations are not just verbal. Nor are they aimed only at our high officials. 

New York University students at a satellite campus in Shanghai were manhandled and jailed by Chinese authorities in two separate incidents earlier this month. Some U.S. diplomats in China were recently subjected to anal swab testing for COVID-19 – supposedly “in error.” 

These examples of humiliation and harassment could be multiplied. China has engaged in the insidious and systematic theft of U.S. patents and copyrights. It brazenly violates trade agreements, manipulates its currency, dumps products below cost on world markets, engages in cyberwarfare, expropriates Western technology, and stonewalls accurate information on the origins of COVID-19.  

If China gives out money, it believes it owns the recipient. In the last five years, New York University has received some $47 million in gifts from China. The U.S. Department of Education recently cited Stanford University for failing to report more than $64 million in donations from Chinese sources since 2010. It’s no surprise that China recently sent a visiting researcher to Stanford who turned out to be connected with the Chinese military.  

Hollywood claims that it is woke. But a recent study revealed that some directors had selected lighter-skinned actors, bowing to the preferences of Chinese movie-goers and the lucrative Chinese film market, slated to become the world’s largest in 2021.  

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BOOKS Comments turned off

THE MORAL SOCIETY BY RACHAEL KOHN *****

By on March 28th, 2021

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/03/the-moral-society/

This book, Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, by one of the contemporary world’s most accomplished proponents of religion, ethics and philosophy, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who died on November 7, 2020, is both ambitious in scope and richly rewarding on a topic that in the third millennium could not be more fraught.

Morality is a word that had almost vanished from the lingua franca of the swinging 1960s when Jonathan Sacks, then a student at Cambridge, enrolled in his first course on the Moral Sciences. By then the idea of morality as an objective reality was considered a quaint remnant of a previous era and the young Sacks was left bewildered by the prevailing mood of unbridled personal freedom that championed “feelings” over responsibilities. Linked with religion in the popular mind, morality already had had the stuffing kicked out of it by the cult anarchist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who proclaimed, “God is dead … We have killed him … Do we not hear the noise of the gravediggers burying God?” On April 8, 1966, Time Magazine was less subtle: on a black front cover glared the question, “Is God Dead?”

To the man who would become the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom for twenty-two years, knighted for his inter-faith work in 2005, a member of the House of Lords in 2009, and a prolific author of books on the essential role of religion in public life, we can presume the answer was a resounding No. But the surrounding culture reverberated with Nietzsche’s conviction that the Judeo-Christian era was at an end, along with its moral heritage. The French postmodernists, following Descartes’s radical scepticism, declared morality to be a matter of interpretation, leaving us with the relativisation of values. In America, the “Me Generation” put personal satisfaction and self-actualisation—the “I”—at the centre of existence, leaving the “We” of shared community values, commitments and responsibilities on a one-way descent to oblivion.

Sacks cautions that his book, which was fated to be his last, is not a work of cultural pessimism. However, in chapter after chapter, citing a now formidable corpus of literature on the decline of Western civilisation, he outlines the signposts of that cultural descent, beginning with the “outsourcing” of moral responsibility to government bodies in highly secularised democracies, to the monetisation of “happiness” in cultures driven by consumerism in an amoral free-market economy. No longer personally responsible for one’s neighbours, the individual is set adrift. Social capital diminishes and brings in its wake an epidemic of frantic materialism and profound loneliness. Self-medication and suicide rates spike in an attempt to assuage the malaise, but even the 2.41 billion active users of Facebook (as of June 2019) cannot stem the tide. “Unsocial media” actually feeds the condition of anomie (the loss of communal structures and shared values), by removing individuals from the face-to-face encounters that test those values on which society depends. The French Jewish sociologist Emile Durkheim, who came to similar conclusions in the late nineteenth century when commenting on the social dislocations of the newly industrialised cities, remains relevant.

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