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Ruth King

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Jack Dorsey Chickens Out The Twitter CEO regrets eating a politically incorrect sandwich.

By on June 12th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/news/opinion

We live in intolerant times, and if you don’t believe it, consider that the CEO of Twitter this weekend was assailed, and than apologized, for eating at one of America’s most popular fast-food restaurant chains.

Jack Dorsey probably didn’t think twice when he tweeted Saturday that he had used his new Cash app to pay for a meal at Chick-fil-A. Perhaps he thought a chicken sandwich is merely a meal, but now he knows it’s also a political statement.

Chick-fil-A is run by CEO Dan Cathy, who has offended America’s progressive political guardians by publicly supporting the traditional religious definition of marriage as between a man and a woman.

Mr. Cathy, a Christian, was expressing his personal beliefs. His restaurants serve everyone, except on Sunday when they’re closed. But it is nonetheless now a sin against political orthodoxy to eat at Chick-fil-A, and Mr. Dorsey was immediately roasted on a Twitter spit for saying he had done so. Soledad O’Brien, the cable TV personality, tweeted that “This is an interesting company to boost during [LGBT] Pride month, @jack.” Others were nastier.

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A Victory for Voting Law A 5-4 Supreme Court majority saves the day for accurate voter rolls.

By on June 12th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-victory-for-voting-law-1528759554

A 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court on Monday upheld Ohio’s policy of clearing from registration rolls voters who don’t show up for several years. This is a victory for federalism and the plain reading of the law, notwithstanding howls that this is somehow about purging minority voters.

In Husted v. Randolph Institute, left-leaning groups challenged Ohio’s procedure for removing people from its voter rolls under the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which was intended to increase voter registration and protect the integrity of the ballot. More than 10% of Americans move every year, and 2.75 million are estimated to be registered in more than one state.

The federal law requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names” of voters who are ineligible “by reason of” death or change in residence. But it also prohibits states from removing registrants unless they fail to return a prepaid postage card ascertaining that they still live in the district. States also cannot remove people “solely” for failing to vote.

Within these limits states have wide latitude to cull their rolls to prevent fraud. Ohio sends postage cards to registered voters who haven’t voted for two years to verify that they still live at the same address. Those who don’t return cards or vote for four more years are removed from the rolls.

Liberals argued that the National Voter Registration Act says states can’t remove people “by reason of the person’s failure to vote.” But the law says that “nothing in [this prohibition] may be construed to prohibit a State from using” other procedures identified in the law including the failure to return a card.

Congress added in 2002 that “registrants who have not responded to a notice” and “have not voted in two consecutive general elections for Federal office shall be removed.” It’s hard to be clearer than that. As Justice Samuel Alito explained in his majority opinion, “no sensible person would read the Failure-to-Vote Clause as prohibiting what [other sections of the law] expressly allow.”

The four liberal Justices disagreed, though their real gripe is with Congress. Justice Stephen Breyer opined that Ohio’s process violates the law’s requirement that states make a “reasonable effort” to remove ineligible voters because failing to return a postage card doesn’t provide enough information to make such a judgment. But the federal law expressly endorses the postcard test.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor claimed the majority upholds a scheme that promotes the “disenfranchisement of minority and low-income voters,” but there’s no evidence that the law has been applied in a biased fashion.

Voter registration has become an emotive political issue on the left, and the four liberals are riding that political wave in wanting judges to define what is reasonable under the federal statute. Too bad they don’t have the law on their side.

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The FBI’s fractured fairytale By Sharyl Attkisson,

By on June 12th, 2018

http://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/391566-the-fbis-fractured-fairytale

Once upon a time, the FBI said some thugs planned to rob a bank in town. Thugs are always looking to rob banks. They try all the time. But at this particular time, the FBI was hyper-focused on potential bank robberies in this particular town.

The best way to prevent the robbery — which is the goal, after all — would be for the FBI to alert all the banks in town. “Be on high alert for suspicious activity,” the FBI could tell the banks. “Report anything suspicious to us. We don’t want you to get robbed.”
Instead, in this fractured fairytale, the FBI followed an oddly less effective, more time-consuming, costlier approach. It focused on just one bank. And, strangely, it picked the bank that was least likely to be robbed because nobody thought it would ever get elected president — excuse me, I mean, because it had almost no cash on hand. (Why would robbers want to rob the bank with no cash?)

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

If We’re Lucky, This Innovation Will Nuke Climate Change Scaremongering The Malthusians are never going to win.By David Harsanyi

By on June 12th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/08/scientific-discovery-will-nuke-climate-change-scaremongering/

A team of scientists at Harvard University and a company called Carbon Engineering announced this week that they’ve figured out a low-cost, industrial-scale method of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Needless to say, it sounds like an exciting technology, which would, as The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer notes, “transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change.”

To be fair, though, plenty of humans have argued that innovation, rather than widespread state-compelled behavior modification or top-down economic regimes like the ones the Left has proposed over the years, would eventually deal with climate change. This conviction was based on the historic propensity of those human beings to hatch advances in efficiency and technology when left to their own devices. They always do.

If the industrial-scale de-carbonization stabilizes temperatures — and it now seems inevitable that it’ll be a big part of the solution — the Malthusian notions that dominate the modern Left will once again lose out to capitalistic innovation. This was inevitable when Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon were betting on resource scarcity, Al Gore was producing chilling Oscar-winning science-fiction films, and contemporary Chicken Littles were telling us the human race was doomed.

“This opens up the possibility that we could stabilize the climate for affordable amounts of money without changing the entire energy system or changing everyone’s behavior,” Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told The Atlantic.

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MY SAY: CLUELESS IN GAZA

By on June 11th, 2018

Gaza was surrendered to the Arabs in 2005. The lush and productive farms which provided produce to millions of people,, state of the art irrigation technology, and modern and updated gardening tools and equipment were purchased for the local Arabs by two Jewish American philanthropists. In response to “independence” all farms, homes and equipment were trashed and rendered useless as soon as the Israelis vacated. Furthermore, rockets were launched into Israeli population centers. And Gaza was taken over by terrorists who drove the population into chaos, shortages and dismal conditions.

As Andrew Bostom reminds me it was ever thus. For 12 centuries since its Muslim conquest conditions have been brutal. In “Land of Dust”-Palestine at the Turn of a Century” by the late Middle East Scholar Saul S.Friedman, the author describes Gaza:

“Gaza itself, the city of Samson’s torment, proved to be a place of straggling and mean appearance, where 35,000 residents lived in the meanest and most sordid way……The people lived in squalid hovels….their veiled women drew water from brackish wells. And many of the adult males supported themselves by theft or smuggling to the bazaars of Jerusalem.”

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Germany’s Migrant Rape Crisis: “Failure of the State” by Soeren Kern

By on June 11th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12494/germany-migrants-rape-feldman

“Susanna is dead. Maria from Freiburg; Mia from Kandel; Mireille from Flensburg; and now Susanna from Mainz….” — Alice Weidel, co-leader AfD party.

“Susanna’s death is not a blind stroke of fate. Susanna’s death is the result of many years of organized irresponsibility and the scandalous failure of our asylum and immigration policies. Susanna is victim of an out-of-control leftwing multicultural ideology that stops at nothing to impose its sense of moral superiority.” — Alice Weidel, co-leader AfD party.

“On the day of Susanna’s murder, you [Merkel] testified in parliament that you have handled the migrant crisis responsibly. Do you dare to repeat that claim to Susanna’s parents?” — Alice Weidel, co-leader AfD party.

The rape and murder of a 14-year-old Jewish girl by a failed Iraqi asylum seeker has cast a renewed spotlight on Germany’s migrant rape crisis, which has continued unabated for years amid official complicity and public apathy.

Thousands of women and children have been raped or sexually assaulted in Germany since Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed into the country more than one million mostly male migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

The latest crime, entirely preventable, is uniquely reprehensible in that it highlights in one act the many insidious consequences of Germany’s open-door migration policy — including the failure to vet those allowed into the country and the practice of releasing migrant criminals back onto German streets instead of incarcerating or deporting them.

The crime also exposes the gross negligence of Germany’s political class, which appears to be more concerned with preserving multiculturalism and the rights of predatory migrants than protecting German women and children from them.

Police say that Ali Bashar, a 20-year-old Iraqi Kurd, raped Susanna Maria Feldman, strangled her and then dumped her body in a wooded area alongside railroad tracks on the outskirts of Wiesbaden. Bashar then fled to Iraq on false identity papers.

Feldman had been missing from her home in Mainz since May 22. Her mother filed a missing person report on May 23. Police, however, did not even begin to search for the girl until more than a week later, when an unnamed 13-year-old boy, a migrant living in the same refugee shelter as Bashar, contacted the police. Feldman’s body was finally recovered on June 6.

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The Closing of the Cultural Mind? by Giulio Meotti

By on June 11th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12373/arab-culture-literature

In France, recently, a group of intellectuals published a manifesto asking the Islamic world to eliminate anti-Semitic verses from the Koran. The initiative followed the murder of an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, Mireille Knoll.

The Turkish Council of Higher Education responded with a moratorium on establishing additional departments of French studies in Turkey.

There are no guarantees that curiosity, self-doubt and free speech will create a more liberal society. But closed-mindedness and censorship, in the Middle East, Europe or anywhere, are not likely to, either.

In the West, books and documentaries have been cancelled. In France, recently, a group of intellectuals published a manifesto asking the Islamic world to eliminate anti-Semitic verses from the Koran. The initiative followed the murder of an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor, Mireille Knoll. The Turkish Council of Higher Education responded with a moratorium on establishing additional departments of French studies in Turkey. For years, under the presidency of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish culture has been closing in on itself. “Going into a Turkish bookstore is like walking into a psychiatric ward,” according to the British journalist Gareth Jenkins in The New Yorker. Turkey sentenced journalists and writers to prison, and put publishers of foreign novels, such as its most famous translator, Necmiye Alpay, on trial. The problem, however, may not be just Turkish, but, as the author Robert R. Reilly called it, “the closing of the Muslim mind”.

A new report for the Atlantic Council written by Hossam Abouzahr, the founder of the Living Arabic Project, details the dramatic cultural change in the Arab world:

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Wheelchair Bound Jewish Man w/MS Blocks Terrorist Rally in London Daniel Greenfield

By on June 11th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/270418/wheelchair-bound-jewish-man-wms-blocks-terrorist-daniel-greenfield

The scene is Al Quds Day, the usual pro-terror rally in London. And one man and one woman took a stand. Here’s the whole story.

The flag of Hezbollah has again been openly marched through the streets of London this afternoon – but only after prominent lawyer Mark Lewis delayed the event by blocking the road in his wheelchair.

More than 1,000 people rallied beneath the gun-emblazoned flag of the Lebanese terrorist group outside the Saudi Embassy, hearing speakers including Rev Stephen Sizer, who once shared a social media post pointing the finger at Israel for 9/11…

But by that time they hadn’t even yet set off, the one-man stand by Lewis, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, contributing to the delay.

Lewis told Jewish News: “It wasn’t just me. My other half Mandy Blumenthal stayed with me. I knew that I couldn’t stand up and be counted but I could sit down.”

“These people were supporting terrorists. We had to object and not give them a free pass. These are our streets. The Government were allowing them a free rein, we had to stop them. I thought I’d challenge the Police to see if they had a legal basis to stop me exercising my freedom to protest. They said they had an order blocking the street. I asked to see it. They looked flummoxed.” …

The call for action was echoed by ZF chair Paul Charney, while director Arieh Miller, pointing across the road, stressed “that is not a victimless flag”.

Names of victims of Hezbollah terror in Israel and elsewhere were held aloft on placards.

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Don’t Repeat the “Peace Plan” Futility It’s time once again for Trump’s boldness, not for business as usual. Bruce Thornton

By on June 11th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270406/dont-repeat-peace-plan-futility-bruce-thornton

This month President Trump will unveil his plan for ending the seven decades of conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. Like his predecessors, the author of the Art of the Deal seemingly can’t resist the chance to close the biggest foreign policy deal since the end of World War II. But he should resist chasing this diplomatic unicorn, and instead use the conflict as an opportunity for putting to rest the foreign-policy paradigm that has skewed and distorted our relations with allies and adversaries alike.

That paradigm holds that all conflicts between states and peoples can be resolved through the give-and-take of negotiations in which each side gives something up in a process founded on “mutual respect,” as the hoary cliché has it. Because peoples don’t understand their own best interests, the paradigm goes, they stumble into disorder and violence, a process exacerbated by poverty, lack of education, religious superstition, historical crimes like colonialism, and irrational traditions, all perpetuated by illiberal and autocratic regimes. Clear away those impediments, promote economic development, replace faith with science, create institutions that promote political freedom, and educate people in rational thought, and warring peoples will find that a negotiated settlement of differences can give them what they really want––peace, freedom, and prosperity.

The colossal delusion at the heart of this paradigm is the assumption that all people everywhere want what we in the West have created: peaceful coexistence and prosperity founded on technological development, and a greater understanding of human nature based on science rather than the superstitions of faith or tradition. But that assumption is reductive and contrary to the evidence of history, which teaches us over and over that peoples are moved by conflicting “passions and interests,” as James Madison put it. And the fiercest of these “passions and interests” are those about creed: the ultimate answers to humanity’s deepest yearning, which is to live in a way that obeys our Creator in this world and unites us with Him in the next.

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Geert Wilders Puts the Political Elites On Notice The people are rising up. Can the elites put the genie back in the bottle? Robert Spencer

By on June 11th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270416/geert-wilders-puts-political-elites-notice-robert-spencer

Geert Wilders spoke at a massive rally for Tommy Robinson on Saturday. 20,000 people came out to call for Tommy’s release, and Wilders took the opportunity to put the political elites of Britain and continental Europe on notice.

“Our governments,” Wilders declared, “sold us out with mass immigration. With Islamization. With open borders. We are almost foreigners in our own lands. And if we complain about it, they call us racists and Islamophobes. But I say, no more! And what do you say? No more! And that’s right: enough is enough. We will not be gagged anymore. No more tyranny.”

It was extraordinary that the British authorities allowed Wilders into the country at all. Several years ago he was banned from entering the country, but although the ban was reversed on appeal, the British government recently banned Martin Sellner, Brittany Pettibone, Lauren Southern and Lutz Bachmann from entering, all for the crime of opposing jihad terror and Sharia oppression, and thereby made it clear that it is more authoritarian and unwilling to uphold the freedom of speech than ever – at least when it comes to criticism of Islam, Muslim rape gangs, and mass Muslim migration.

Even worse, the bannings of Sellner, Pettibone, Southern, and Bachmann were just part of a long pattern. Pamela Geller and I were banned from entering Britain in 2013, apparently for life, also for the crime of telling the truth about Islam and jihad. Meanwhile, Britain has a steadily lengthening record of admitting jihad preachers without a moment of hesitation. Syed Muzaffar Shah Qadri’s preaching of hatred and jihad violence was so hardline that he was banned from preaching in Pakistan, but the UK Home Office welcomed him into Britain.

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