Displaying posts published in

April 2022

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Our Inhumane Southern Border By Carine Hajjar

By on April 29th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/05/16/our-inhumane-southern-border/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_

Migrants and Americans suffer when the law is absent

Val Verde County, Texas

Star Ranch, half a mile from the Rio Grande, is a popular spot for border crossers to “surrender” and request asylum in the United States. The surrender I witness this morning is as remarkably unremarkable as all the others I have seen in a week of ride-alongs with law enforcement. A family from Colombia — mother, father, and young son — chat calmly with two adult male migrants as a Customs and Border Protection van pulls up. National Guardsmen lean on their vehicles and watch casually. The CBP officer will take the migrants to a processing center, where they will be assessed for asylum eligibility.

I ask the father what the family’s plan is for life in the United States. “Empezar de cero,” he replies: to start from zero. They remind me of Jorge, a Cuban migrant I met days before at an NGO in town. He wanted asylum to pursue “el sueño Americano,” the American dream. Jorge told me he planned to send money to his three kids at home. It is hard not to sympathize. Why not welcome people who want to work, to improve their lives? This is the motivation behind calls to lower the bar for asylum seekers and thereby create a more open, “humane” border.

Look a little further, though, and it becomes clear that the current system is not ready for that idea, no matter how well intentioned. Right now, a more open border is not only dysfunctional, it’s a danger.

Last month, Customs and Border Protection had 209,906 encounters — both expulsions and apprehensions — with migrants at the southern border. That number breaks a 22-year record.

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Woke Warriors By Rep.Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin-District 8)

By on April 29th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/05/16/woke-warriors/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

— Mr. Gallagher  is the ranking member of the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee and a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. As a U.S. Marine Corps officer, he served seven years on active duty, including two deployments to Iraq.

How DEI threatens the DOD

Wolf Warrior II, released in 2017, is the second-highest-grossing Chinese film of all time. Early in the movie, the hero, a former People’s Liberation Army special-ops soldier named Leng Feng, sums up the film’s main message: “The Americans are good for nothing.” Posters promoting the movie featured the tagline “Anyone who offends China, no matter how remote, must be exterminated.” In the climactic scene, an American mercenary named “Big Daddy” is about to kill Leng Feng. As Big Daddy attempts to jam a knife into Leng Feng’s throat, he gloats: “People like you will always be inferior to people like me. Get used to it. Get f***ing used to it.” Spoiler alert: Leng Feng improbably turns the tables, brutally stabbing Big Daddy to death with a bullet he wears as a necklace, the same bullet that Big Daddy used years before to kill Leng Feng’s fiancée.

The movie’s message may be familiar territory for those who have watched the diplomatic corps of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operate over the past few years. Responding to the call of General Secretary Xi Jinping to display more “fighting spirit” — and inspired by Leng Feng’s on-screen heroics — CCP officials have adopted a posture known as “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy. CCP Wolf Warriors aggressively confront and criticize China’s competitors abroad and promote CCP propaganda on American social-media platforms (to which Chinese citizens don’t have access). Both the Wolf Warriors and the Wolf Warrior movies are part of a broader effort to discredit democratic and liberal values globally and to demonstrate the superiority of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

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Welcome To Stagflation

By on April 29th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/04/29/welcome-to-stagflation/

When it comes to the economy, Democrats like to say it’s unfair to judge a president by his first year in office. Very well. President Biden is now in his second year and now we have the statistical verdict of his economic stewardship rendered by the first-quarter drop in GDP. Stagflation, anyone?

It may well be that the first quarter’s annual GDP growth of -1.4% marks not just the beginning of a period of low or no growth accompanied by inflation, but also the return to the stagflation that ruined the decade of the 1970s and helped destroy the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

And no, you can’t blame Donald Trump anymore for things that go wrong. The economic disasters piling up are now on the progressive Democrats’ tab. They broke it, they bought it.

Biden immediately spun the bad GDP news as due to “technical factors,” including a slowdown in government spending and a decline in net exports, which both contributed to the GDP drop.

“What you’re seeing is enormous growth in the country, that was affected by everything from COVID, and the COVID blockages that occurred along the way,” Biden said, after the Commerce Department delivered the bad news.

“No one is predicting a recession now, they are, some are predicting a recession in 2023. I’m concerned about it,” he said.

“But I know one thing, if our Republican friends are really interested in doing something about dealing with economic growth, they should help us continue to lower the deficit,” Biden added, saying he wants “a tax code that is actually one that works.”

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STILL WAITING — U.S. HOSPITALS FLOUT HEALTHCARE PRICE DISCLOSURE RULE

By on April 29th, 2022

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/investigation-hospitals-ignoring?s=r

Before he left office, President Donald Trump made good on his vision that hospitals should be transparent about the prices they charge patients for services.

His administration proposed a rule that those prices must be posted online in real time for everyone to see.

If it was price disclosure at the grocery store or the gas station, it wouldn’t have been revolutionary. But, the hospitals went crazy!

In a recent study, 857 out of 1,000 hospitals audited weren’t complying — a full year after the Biden administration finalized the price transparency rule.
 
Hospitals are slow-walking price transparency. And we found that the Biden administration has yet to levy a single fine!

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DHS head Mayorkas spars with House GOP and blames Trump for border troubles by Virginia Aabram,

By on April 29th, 2022

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/dhs-head-mayorkas-spars-with-house-gop-and-blames-trump-for-border-troubles

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sparred with Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee over the crisis at the southern border, while he and the Democratic lawmakers blamed the Trump administration for his department’s troubles.

While the GOP members pressed Mayorkas on migration statistics at the Thursday oversight hearing, Democrats acknowledged that he “inherited something of a mess,” as Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, said.

“One of the greatest obstacles we have, Mr. Chairman, is to overcome the distrust that was sown by the prior administration,” Mayorkas told New York Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler. “Through its global policies, many still feel fearful, given what trauma they experienced and continue to experience.”

Nadler said that “the previous administration did all it could to break our immigration system” by enforcing family separation policies in which “children were literally kidnapped from their mothers and fathers with no plans to reunite them” and doing everything in its “power to block legal pathways.”

Mayorkas, in response to Lofgren’s lamentation of the state of the immigration system left by former President Donald Trump, agreed that “the prior administration decimated the legal immigration system, leaving U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that administers our nation’s legal immigration system, on the brink of bankruptcy.”

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Americans for Merit-Based Admissions Poll respondents say academic achievement matters more than race.

By on April 29th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-for-merit-based-admissions-pew-research-poll-ibram-x-kendi-11651181826?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Progressives are preoccupied with imposing racial preferences in education and hiring, but the American public wants these decisions to be based on merit. Witness the results of a new Pew Research Center poll.

The survey, conducted in March, asked more than 10,000 respondents what factors should matter for college admissions. In a landslide, respondents favored academic achievement over race and gender.

Ninety-three percent of respondents said high school grades should count toward college admission, with 61% saying they should be a major factor. Nearly four in 10 said standardized test scores should be a major factor, and 85% at least a minor factor.

Nearly three of four said race or ethnicity should not be a factor in admissions. That includes 59% of blacks, 68% of Hispanics, 63% of Asians and 62% of Democrats.

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Harvard, Slavery and Judaism What the story of Judah Monis tells us about America and the children of Israel. By Ira Stoll

By on April 29th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-slavery-and-judaism-slaveholder-judah-monis-hebrew-professor-founders-11651172214?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Mr. Stoll is managing editor of Education Next, based at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The first Jew at Harvard was a slaveholder. That’s the bombshell, so far as I can tell, buried in the appendix of the new report “Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery,” released by the university this week.

The report’s “list of human beings enslaved by prominent Harvard affiliates” includes the “enslaved persons” Cuffy and Cicely, owned by Judah Monis. Monis lived from 1683 to 1764 and was an instructor in Hebrew at Harvard College from 1722 to 1760. In researching this article, I discovered a third possible slave, “my Negro child Moreah,” mentioned in Monis’s 1760 will.

I first encountered Monis’s name more than a decade ago while working on a biography of the American revolutionary leader Samuel Adams. Part of the required curriculum for Harvard students from 1735 to 1755 was the study of Hebrew grammar from a textbook written by Monis. That might seem like an obscure detail, but it’s of historical significance because Harvard students in that era included Samuel Adams, his cousin and the future President John Adams, and their fellow signers of the Declaration of Independence John Hancock, Robert Treat Paine, William Williams, and William Ellery.

Monis had converted to Christianity from Judaism one month before joining the Harvard faculty. In a 2018 article for the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Jon D. Levenson writes that the conversion had been a condition of hiring. The baptism took place in Harvard Yard. “Although doubts about Monis’s sincerity in converting have long been raised, I am certain that he was absolutely sincere in his desire for a Harvard professorship,” Mr. Levenson writes.

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The Anti-Israel Past of NYT Jerusalem Bureau’s Latest Hire Alana Goodman

By on April 29th, 2022

https://freebeacon.com/media/the-anti-israel-past-of-nyt-jerusalem-bureaus-latest-hire/

The latest hire in the New York Times‘s Jerusalem Bureau doesn’t exactly have a history of scrupulous objectivity when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hiba Yazbek, a former intern for Israeli-bashing Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), called herself a victim of Israel’s “mental occupation” and said Palestinians are a “minority in our own land” in a 2020 speech.

Yazbek, who joined the Times as a news assistant last week, deleted similar comments she had posted on Twitter, as well as posts in which she condemned Israel for killing terrorists, according to the media watchdog group Honest Reporting.

Although Yazbek deleted a number of her politically charged posts, she still has a photo of her sitting next to squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) as her Twitter background. Another photo posted on Twitter shows Yazbek posing with Tlaib. Yazbek interned in 2019 for Tlaib—one of the most vocal anti-Israel members of Congress who has accused the Jewish state of “apartheid.”

The hire is likely to fuel concerns about Times reporting on the Middle East conflict, which pro-Israel watchdog groups claim is deeply skewed against the Jewish state. In 2019, the Times was forced to apologize after publishing an anti-Semitic cartoon that depicted then-Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog with a Star of David on his collar, leading a blind President Donald Trump who was drawn wearing a yarmulke.

The outlet also caught flak for publishing a glowing portrayal of Louis Farrakhan and a lengthy interview with Alice Walker that failed to mention their anti-Semitism in 2020. That same year, Times opinion editor Bari Weiss stepped down and said she had faced harassment from colleagues over her support for Israel.

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China and Russia’s ‘Space War’: Where Is The US? by Judith Bergman

By on April 28th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18451/china-russia-space-war

“Evidence of both nations’ intent to undercut the United States and allied leadership in the space domain can be seen in the growth of combined in-orbit assets of China and Russia, which grew approximately 70% in just two years.” — Kevin Ryder, senior analyst at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for space and counterspace, Air Force Magazine April 12, 2022.

Space has already become the scene of an ongoing “shadow war” in which China and Russia conduct attacks against U.S. satellites with lasers, radiofrequency jammers, and cyber-attacks every day, according to General David Thompson, the U.S. Space Force’s first vice chief of space operations.

“The threats are really growing and expanding every single day…. We’re really at a point now where there’s a whole host of ways that our space systems can be threatened…. Hostile action toward our space-based assets is not a question of ‘if,’ but instead, ‘when.'” — General David Thompson, Washington Post, November 30, 2021.

“Fifteen years after China’s ASAT strike, we still lack the ability to defeat an attack on our space systems or launch an offensive strike if circumstances warrant.” — US Air Force Gen. Kevin Chilton (Ret.), former commander of U.S. Strategic Command and Air Force Space Command, The Hill, April 12, 2022.

“The PLA [People’s Liberation Army] will continue to integrate space services… to erode the U.S. military’s information advantage.” — Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, February 2022.

“If deterrence were to fail, we would face an adversary that has integrated space into all aspects of their military operations…. Space provides the foundation of everything we do as a joint force, from delivering humanitarian assistance to combat on the ground, in the air, and at sea…. We cannot afford to lose space; without it we will fail.” — General John W. Raymond, U.S. Chief of Space Operations, Space Force News, April 5, 2022.

Space-based threats from China and Russia have grown exponentially in recent years, according to a new report on the issue by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), published April 12.

“Evidence of both nations’ intent to undercut the United States and allied leadership in the space domain can be seen in the growth of combined in-orbit assets of China and Russia, which grew approximately 70% in just two years,” noted Kevin Ryder, DIA senior analyst for space and counterspace. “This recent and continuing expansion follows a more than 200% increase between 2015 and 2018.”

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FREE SPEECH ALERT: DHS Setting up New ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ By Athena Thorne

By on April 28th, 2022

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2022/04/27/free-speech-alert-dhs-setting-up-new-disinformation-governance-board-n1593400

The ink isn’t even dry on Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter and make speech free again, and the authoritarians in the Biden administration are nakedly acting to lock down the flow of information. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is creating a new agency called the Disinformation Governance Board.

Politico is reporting:

DHS is standing up a new Disinformation Governance Board to coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia. Nina Jankowicz will head the board as executive director. She previously was a disinformation fellow at the Wilson Center, advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry as part of the Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship and oversaw Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute. (h/t Daniel Lippman)

Why would a DHS program focus solely on “irregular migration and Russia”? Are there no other threats to the homeland about which someone might mislead us? Or are these just the most politically dangerous narratives for the Left to lose control over?

DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revealed the creation of the new Ministry on Wednesday when speaking with the House Appropriations DHS Subcommittee, in a clip posted by the Post Millenial. When asked what the DHS is doing about an assertion that African Americans and Spanish-speaking Americans are being “heavily targeted” for disinformation, Mayorkas mentioned:

Our Undersecretary for Policy, Rob Silvers, is co-chair with our Principle Deputy General Council, Jennifer Daskal, in leading a just recently constituÿyted misinformation, disinformation governance board.

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