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September 2021

New York Times Blames Powerful “Rabbis” for Crushing AOC’s Principles

Last week, the New York Times was the subject of uncomfortable attention for its coverage of a House of Representatives vote in favor of helping Israel procure more interceptors for its Iron Dome missile defense system.

In a piece that spent nearly as much time promoting the anti-Israeli arguments of the eight Democrats who voted against the bill as it did sharing the views of their 210 party colleagues who supported it during the September 23 vote, reporter Catie Edmonson also focused on one Member of Congress who voted “present.”

Along with most other members of the so-called “Squad” of like-minded legislators, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had initially voted against funding for the Iron Dome, which was put into heavy use last May to combat barrages of indiscriminate rockets fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel. A short while later, though, she changed her vote from the House floor.

Edmondson had ideas about why the vote was changed:

Minutes before the vote closed, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez tearfully huddled with her allies before switching her vote to “present.” The tableau underscored how wrenching the vote was for even outspoken progressives, who have been caught between their principles and the still powerful pro-Israel voices in their party, such as influential lobbyists and rabbis.

Yet again, the Times has published a blatantly antisemitic trope. Though they subsequently removed it from the online version, this ugly smear appeared in the print edition — and it has not been corrected.

It is because of coverage like this that CAMERA placed a billboardoutside the New York Times building criticizing the newspaper’s handling of antisemitism, and calling on publisher A.G. Sulzberger to right the ship.

Repulsive: John Kerry Accepts China’s Genocide to Get Climate Deal by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17801/china-climate-deal-genocide

The Beijing regime has, over the course of decades, attacked fundamental U.S. interests by, among other things, inciting violence on American streets, deliberately spreading COVID-19 beyond China’s borders to America and the rest of the world, exporting fentanyl to the U.S. despite agreements to the contrary, stealing U.S. technology and other intellectual property, rejecting the principle of freedom of navigation, threatening to grab territory from American allies, and proliferating nuclear weapons technology.

The critical question now is this: What, in addition to the human rights of China’s minorities, is the Biden administration willing to give up to get a climate deal with Beijing?

Democracies tend to deal with each other as Kerry evidently envisions, where cooperation on one issue can lead to warm relations and warm relations can lead to agreement in other areas.

Unfortunately, that is not the way communist states, especially China’s, operate. Kerry’s immediate predecessor as secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, found that out the hard way in February 2009…. China did not return Clinton’s gesture of cooperation. On the contrary, Beijing pressed the advantage and went on a bender. The following month, for instance, Chinese craft harassed the USNS Impeccable, an unarmed U.S. Navy reconnaissance vessel, in international waters in the South China Sea and even attacked it, trying to sever its towed sonar array.

China puts its brightest diplomats to work on human rights issues precisely because it knows it has no defense, especially now when Beijing is committing not only genocide but also other crimes against humanity. Mass rape, slavery, torture, and killing of minorities are impossible to justify. When the Biden administration does not talk about these crimes, it relieves great pressure on the Chinese regime.

Kerry is reinforcing that dangerous Chinese mindset by not talking about human rights. He is surrendering the most important leverage the United States has over China.

If you want to get Chinese communists to do something, you have to impose great costs. That gives them an incentive to do something to relieve the pain. Offers of cooperation never work for long. Unfortunately, Beijing believes signals of friendship show American weakness.

“Well, life is always full of tough choices in the relationship between nations,” said John Kerry, responding to Bloomberg’s David Weston on September 22. Weston had asked him, “What is the process by which one trades off climate against human rights?”

Democrats’ hyperbole is an attack on the U.S. language, history, sanity By Eric Utter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/democrats_hyperbole_is_an_attack_on_the_us_language_history_sanity.html

Maxine Waters, bastion of sanity that she is, recently called an image of a U.S. Border Control officer using his horse to try to prevent an illegal Haitian migrant from entering America a “whipping.” She also said it was “worse than what we witnessed in slavery.” Really? Why then are literally millions of non-Caucasian people desperately attempting to enter the country?

During the slavery era, the “Underground Railroad” was employed to bring escaped slaves to the North and out of bondage. Today, countless thousands of non-Caucasians are traveling into supposedly racist America. Are they all stupid? Masochists?

The American South of the mid-1800s didn’t need to build a wall to keep slaves out. It did everything it could to keep them in. Today, the U.S. desperately needs to complete a wall to keep people out. These facts alone prove the lie behind the “America is systemically racist hoax” being perpetrated by the utterly corrupt government-media-big tech-academia complex.   

Democrats now routinely employ unhinged, preposterous language in what should be a laughable attempt to smear all things Republican/Trumpian/traditional. It is as vile as it is ridiculous. Unfortunately, many people have been so dumbed down by government schools and the Democrat-owned corporate media that they can no longer tell the difference between bold-faced lies and the truth…or discern fantasy from reality.

The Little Café That Almost Could By Jack Cashill

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/the_little_caf_that_almost_cou

A Kansas City café defies county health authorities with unfortunate results.

A recent story out of Kansas City, the town in which I live, suggests just how eager the Left is to control our lives, right down to the food we eat. The story involves a friendly hole-in-the-wall café whose brave proprietor had had enough.

A little background is in order. In 2008, I somehow emerged as the public face of the opposition to a ballot measure that called for a ban on smoking in bars and restaurants in Kansas City. What made this unusual, and what made me an effective spokesman, was that I never smoked. Well, not that effective—my side lost the election, narrowly.

My side, as I saw it, was not pro-smoking, but pro-freedom. I argued that no law prevented entrepreneurs from banning smoking in their establishments, and no law forced anyone to eat or drink at a place where others smoked. Indeed, once I saw the election results, I half-regretted not having opened a non-smoking restaurant of my own.

Unfortunately, freedom is a much scarcer commodity today than in 2008. Back then, health officials used their bully pulpit to persuade citizens. These officials had one set of solid facts on their side, namely that smoking is dangerous, and one set of dubious assertions, namely that second-hand smoke is a health hazard. In 2008, citizens were allowed to weigh the evidence.

In 2020, although all the evidence was dubious, we were allowed to weigh nothing. There were no petitions to sign about coronavirus restrictions, no ballots to cast. Even if there had been a vote, a tightly controlled media, local and national, actively censored information that conflicted with an official orthodoxy that changed from week to week.

The Property Instinct and the Utter Futility of Socialism Robert E.Wright

https://www.aier.org/article/the-property-instinct-and-the-utter-futility-of-socialism/

If you are like me, you regularly interact with people who remain unphased by America’s recent giant strides towards authoritarian socialism, of an economy run largely by, and for, state actors and their corporate minions. Those who bother to engage the problem at all eventually exclaim something like “Well, no society has ever tried ideal socialism,” by which they mean a system that truly redistributes wealth according to everyone’s needs.

A new book from Chapman University law and economics professor Bart Wilson entitled The Property Species nowhere mentions communism, Marx, or socialism but nevertheless provides a powerfully cogent explanation for why socialism, especially “ideal” socialism, can never work — it’s inhuman because it doesn’t account for humanity’s property instinct.

Classical liberal comebacks to the ideal socialism canard tend to focus on the reasons why socialism cannot possibly succeed. Check out Don Boudreaux’s “The Inevitable Failure of Socialism” for many powerful economic reasons that socialism, even “ideal” socialism, cannot increase the living standards of the masses as quickly as market economies can.

To disparage socialism is not, of course, to embrace the status quo. Our overly powerful governments regularly enrich one party at the expense of others. Corporate welfare is particularly galling, if not well enough understood by the general public, but so too is its enabler, the grabbing hand of government. America can reduce rent seeking without going full bore socialist, which has always proven itself just another system for extracting rents from the masses for the benefits of elites. But the human property instinct renders even “ideal” socialism impossible.

The Symptoms of Our Insanity What explains these insanities that are insults to the American people’s intelligence? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/26/the-symptoms-of-our-insanity/

Think for a minute.  

When did we become a nation of socialist AOCs wearing “Tax the Rich” dresses to $35,000-a-ticket celebrity galas, without mandatory masks, while being served by masked servants—a now tired script from the Obama birthday bash crowd to the grandees at the Emmys?  

When did we discover that we must listen to oppressed billionaire Oprah from her $90 million Montecito estate commiserating with a billionaire Lebron or royal Meghan Markle about the racist white establishment? Is there anyone in the recent Washington intelligence and investigatory hierarchy who has not lied or feigned loss of memory under oath—a low bar that nevertheless excludes, among others, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Robert Mueller, or Peter Strzok? 

Did anyone just five years ago believe the following could possibly happen in America—and invoke almost no popular outrage from a somnolent public? 

Item: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, does not deny that: 1) he deliberately aborted the legal chain of operational command—that is, violated the law—by recalibrating established protocols for using nuclear weapons in times of crisis. And he says his interventions were based on his own diagnoses (after prompting from opposition leader, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) that the commander-in-chief was crazy, and thus could be circumvented.  

And 2), in freelancing style, Milley, on more than one occasion, called the top figure of the Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army, General Li Zuocheng. He reportedly announced that his own country was currently in crisis (experiencing “messy” democracy), reassuring the Chinese that if he, Milley, the newfound autokrator, sensed there was any chance of hostile and aggressive action on the part of his own country, then on his own initiative he would tip off the Chinese in advance. And far from resigning or being fired for his Strangelovian efforts, Milley would then be hailed as a hero by the popular media and progressive civil libertarians. In other words, for the Left, it is as if Burt Lancaster’s movie character, Air Force General James Mattoon Scott, was the real hero of Seven Days in May. 

Milley has also become the Zelig or Forrest Gump of our times. He turns up at almost all our recent military melodramas and disasters. Milley appears variously in the photo-op/federal troops/tear-gas spoof, the virtue-signaled rumored resignation, the talking referent in anonymously sourced books, puff-piece op-eds, and backgrounder quotes, the Inspector Javert of “white rage,” the student of How To Be An Antiracist, the Afghanistan progress reassurer, the “righteous” drone striker, the adjudicator between January 6 “coups” and 120 days of “penny packet protests” costing $2 billion-dollars in riot and arson destruction and 28 deaths, the Article 88 violator, the reductio ad Hitlerum promulgator, and the underappreciated but rumored polymath bibliophile.  

The “Safety Net”: The Goal Should Be To Minimize The Number Of People Depending On It Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2021-9-24-the-safety-net-the-goal-should-be-to-minimize-the-number-of-people-depending-on-it

This post is about a situation where the correct public policy approach should be obvious to everyone, but the perverse incentives of government as usual push in exactly the wrong direction.

The issue is how many people should receive benefits, and in what amounts, from government “safety net” programs. From all I can find, there appears to be near-universal support for at least some level of government “safety net” for the poor. After all, no one wants to see fellow citizens starving for lack of food, or dying for lack of medical attention to a curable health condition, and so forth. And can we really count on private charity to fully provide for all the situations of genuine need among the population? Thus the result: Although the details vary greatly, every country with an advanced economy has an extensive system of “need”-based distributions of benefits to those designated as needy. But how many and which people should receive benefits, and how much?

In practice, the number of beneficiaries and level of generosity of a social safety net are inherently unstable. As soon as such a safety net comes into existence, there must inevitably be a line drawn between those who qualify for the benefits and distributions and those who do not. There will always be some elements of arbitrariness in the line-drawing; and the difference in “neediness” between the least-needy person who qualifies for benefits and the most-needy person who does not qualify may be so small as to be imperceptible. So shouldn’t the benefits then be expanded to include the next guy up the ladder? And how about the next guy after that?

An even worse problem than the fineness of the necessary distinctions is the arbitrariness. No matter how carefully eligibility criteria may be crafted, I submit that there will inevitably be many less needy people who qualify for and receive government safety-net benefits, while objectively more needy people fail to qualify. As one obvious example, some people with no income or significant assets at all may nonetheless be able to draw on substantial family resources (from parents, siblings, children, or more distant relatives) in times of need, while others may have just enough income or assets to fail to qualify but no family back-up of any kind. I personally know multiple twenty-somethings with well-off parents who nevertheless qualify for and use the Medicaid and food stamp programs. You probably do too. Hey, nobody said that parental income is part of the eligibility criteria!

Muslim Passenger Screaming ‘Allah’ Tries to Storm Cockpit of JetBlue Flight Out of Boston By Robert Spencer

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/09/25/muslim-passenger-screaming-allah-tries-to-storm-cockpit-of-jetblue-flight-out-of-boston-n1481352

JetBlue Flight 261 was heading out of Boston for San Juan, Puerto Rico, Wednesday night when, according to an FBI affidavit, “an unruly passenger” had to be “physically restrained by flight crew members in response to a physical altercation during the passenger’s attempt to gain access to the flight deck.”

A little over an hour before the flight reached San Juan, the passenger, Khalil El Dahr, “attempted to make a telephone call and became angry about the call’s unsuccess.” This must have been a supremely important phone call, for a few minutes later, El Dahr “pulled himself out of his seat and rushed toward the flight deck yelling to be shot in the Spanish language.”

At that point, a flight attendant (FA) “physically redirected El Dahr into the area in front of the front row before the galley.” However, in a spectacular instance of poor judgment, bad timing, or both, “as the JetBlue FA had El Dahr corralled in the area before the galley on the right side of the plane, a flight crew officer opened the cockpit door.”

El Dahr saw his chance: He “observed the door open and then grabbed the JetBlue FA by their collar and tie with one hand while using his other hand to grab the overhead compartment to gain leverage to kick. As the JetBlue FA was kicked in chest, El Dahr yelled for the flight crew officer to shoot him. While El Dahr was yelling, he was still holding the JetBlue FA by their tie. This resulted in the tie tightening and ultimately prevented the JetBlue FA from breathing. In response, the JetBlue FA released El Dahr to loosen the tie to prevent from being choked and incapacitated. The JetBlue FA was then able to loosen the tie and grab hold of El Dahr to prevent him from successfully breaching the galley area and gaining access to the flight deck.”

El Dahr fought fiercely even when restrained: “When the second JetBlue FA responded to the front of the plane, they observed El Dahr grab the first JetBlue FA by the tie and punch them in the chest. The second JetBlue FA then assisted to get El Dahr restrained. One of the restraints used was a pair of flex cuffs provided by an off-duty FA on board the flight. The flex cuffs were applied to El Dahr’s wrists, but El Dahr resisted so much that El Dahr was able to break the cuffs and free himself. After, a second pair was fastened along with at least four seat belt extenders to secure El Dahr to a seat in the back of the plane.”

FBI Narrative About the Jan. 6th Capitol ‘Insurrection’ Is IMPLODING By Victoria Taft

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/09/26/fbi-narrative-about-the-jan-6th-capitol-insurrection-is-imploding-n1481476

An explosive report over the weekend claims to show that two alleged Capitol riot participants were actually government informants. The New York Times reported Saturday that “records, and information from two people familiar with the matter, suggest that federal law enforcement had a far greater visibility into the assault on the Capitol, even as it was taking place, than was previously known.”

The revelations in theTimes reveal that there was no conspiracy on the part of the Proud Boys to storm the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, as alleged by the Department of Justice.

It’s already known that the Proud Boys leader, Enrique Tarrio, had been an FBI informant. The Times report concentrates on yet another FBI informant in the right-leaning group who reportedly warned his handler in real-time that some bad stuff was going on at the Capitol.

Recommended: Is It Any Wonder Americans Mistrust the Intelligence Community When They Pull Stunts Like This?

Though several Proud Boys are charged with a conspiracy, this latest informant maintains that there was never any plan by the group to violently storm the Capitol and, indeed, there’s evidence to back that claim.

Indeed, the paper concludes the obvious: that “the new information is likely to complicate the government’s efforts to prove the high-profile conspiracy charges it has brought against several members of the Proud Boys.”

Huh. You don’t say?

Fall Guys Column: Now is the autumn of Democratic discontent Matthew Continetti

https://freebeacon.com/columns/fall-guys/

President Joe Biden practically begged a group of moderate Democrats visiting him in the Oval Office Wednesday to say how much money they are willing to spend on the massive “Build Back Better” reconciliation bill making its way through Congress. According to Politico‘s Playbook, he didn’t get an answer.

The 11 moderates, including Senator Joe Manchin and congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, insisted that Democrats agree first on how much revenue they will raise in taxes before settling on a price tag on a bill that would transform energy, health care, higher education, pre-K, and paid leave. A disappointed Biden assigned the moderates homework: Come up with something that will stop Progressive House members from killing the separate, $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package that already has passed the Senate and is scheduled for a September 27 House vote.

Best of luck. In another meeting Wednesday, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, pulled a Wendy Sherman and broke into tears while pleading that the reconciliation bill include an immigration amnesty (the Senate parliamentarian has said it can’t). Jayapal urged Biden to delay Monday’s vote or be prepared for Progressives to nix the infrastructure deal. Biden didn’t give in, but he did leave open the possibility that the vote won’t take place on September 27 as planned.

Yet any postponement would create new problems for the White House. House moderates have pledged to sink the reconciliation bill if they don’t get to vote for infrastructure first. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can afford to lose only three votes. And the Senate is tied, with Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema still cagey about what they want to do. And oh, by the way, Congress needs to fund the government before September 30 and raise the debt ceiling before mid-October. Is your head hurting yet?

Democrats have run smack into political reality, and it isn’t pretty. They spent months convincing themselves that a presidential election decided by 42,000 votes in three states, a tied Senate, and a 220-212 House (with 3 vacancies) is the same as FDR’s and LBJ’s supermajorities. Now they are just figuring out that the coalition that put them into office doesn’t agree on much of anything besides the idea that Donald Trump shouldn’t be in the White House.

Now the autumn of 2021 is turning into a reckoning for a Democratic Party that wanted to leverage a squeaker election into fundamental change. Like their predecessors in 1993 and in 2009, frontline House Democrats have to decide whether supporting a liberal agenda is worse for their careers than denying a president of their own party a legislative win. Either way, they lose.

Chance, guile, and missteps put the Democrats in this position. They hardly could believe their luck when Trump’s sour grapes cost the GOP two winnable seats in Georgia and handed Vice President Harris the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. What they forgot was that full control of government is a mixed blessing: Your partisans expect the sun, moon, and stars, while independents have no one else to blame when things go wrong. A Republican Senate might have given Biden a foil, and a reason to govern as the centrist he pretended to be during the campaign. Instead, he has no wiggle room. Thanks, Trump.