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Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Joseph Lieberman, 1942-2024 The former Democratic Senator from Connecticut was clear-headed about the need to deter and resist America’s enemies.

By on March 28th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-lieberman-dies-age-82-7488ccf3?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Joe Lieberman, who died Wednesday at age 82, was the kind of Democrat who can’t be found much these days, and there aren’t many like him in the Republican Party either. He was a foreign policy hawk who believed in the necessity of American military power and diplomacy to expand the zone of freedom in the world.

Lieberman rose in Connecticut politics as a moderate Democrat in a more moderate age. We first met him in 1988 when he ran for the Senate against the liberal Republican incumbent Lowell Weicker. He ran to Weicker’s right and won in an upset.

That set him on a 24-year Senate career notable for promoting pro-growth economic policies and a strong national defense, in addition to Democratic domestic priorities such as gay and abortion rights. He supported a low tax rate on capital gains, and his opposition to the “public option” was crucial to its removal from ObamaCare in 2010.

Lieberman was the rare Democratic office holder to criticize President Bill Clinton’s ethical misadventures in the 1990s, which made him a logical choice as a running mate in 2000 as Al Gore tried to move out of Mr. Clinton’s moral shadow. He was the first Jewish candidate on the national ticket of a major party.

As a Senator, Lieberman supported Presidents regardless of party in promoting U.S. interests abroad. He backed George H.W. Bush in the first Gulf War, in contrast to most other Democrats at the time, including then Sen. Joe Biden. The Vietnam syndrome was still prominent on the left, and the authorization to use force passed only 52-47.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Why I’m Saying No to NIH’s Racial Preferences I am of West African origin, but that shouldn’t matter in my application for a medical-research grant. By Kevin Jon Williams

By on March 28th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-im-saying-no-to-nihs-racial-preferences-medical-research-7f205c2c?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Williams is a physician, a professor of cardiovascular sciences at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine, and a visiting fellow at Do No Harm.

Do I deserve to jump the line? If I say yes, I may play a leading role in ending the scourge of atherosclerosis—also known as hardening of the arteries. If I play fair, I may lose the opportunity to save people around the world from heart attacks and strokes. I’m angry at the National Institutes of Health for putting me in this position. I’m even angrier it has done so in the name of racial equity.

My quandary comes down to whether I should “check the box” on an upcoming NIH grant application attesting to my recent African heritage. Since at least 2015, the NIH has asserted its belief in the intrinsic superiority of racially diverse research teams, all but stating that such diversity influences funding decisions. My family’s origins qualify me under the federal definition of African-American. Yet I feel it’s immoral and narcissistic to use race to gain an advantage over other applicants. All that should matter is the merit of my application and the body of my work, which is generally accepted as foundational in atherosclerosis research.

I discovered my African heritage as an adult, though I had wondered about it since elementary school. My father, Ferd Elton Williams, a professor of physics at the University of Delaware, was a Renaissance man who talked with his children about everything—except his background. His skin was dark and his black hair tightly curled, but he fooled everyone by saying that he was a small part American Indian. He hid his birth family even from our mother, revealing only after a decade of marriage and four children together that he had two siblings.

My siblings and I slowly gleaned additional information—that two of his four grandparents were members of an African Methodist Episcopal church, for instance—but the full truth long eluded us. I stumbled on it after taking a genetic test in 2011: Through my father, I am part Bantu, a major ethnolinguistic grouping in West, Central and Southern Africa.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

David Goldman:Two Adams, Two Foundings

By on March 28th, 2024

https://americanmind.org/features/national-conservatism-vs-american-conservatism/two-adams-two-foundings/

There’s no escaping the tensions inherent in National Conservatism, and in political life.

Charles Kesler’s indictment of the conflicting elements in National Conservatism—between religion and secular rationalism; tradition and Constitutionalism; nationalism in the sense of “shared inheritance as the essence of shared identity and common will” and America’s “exceptional” nationalism—is so compelling as to make any attempt at refutation pointless. I plead guilty on all counts, but with extenuating circumstances. I signed the National Conservatism manifesto in full awareness of its inconsistencies, and would do so again today.

“Our nationalism has always been exceptional,” Kesler observes, “featuring more individualism, more pluralism, more freedom, and more statesmanlike deliberation and prudence than is typical. We think of ourselves as a founded nation; most nations don’t think they have or need such a clear, conscious, and principled beginning.” I would go even further: The supposed “shared inheritance” of the European nations is less the result of sedimentary accretion of traditions stretching back into the mists of time, than an ossified remnant of an earlier founding. I wrote in my review of Yoram Hazony’s 2022 book Conservatism: A Re-Discovery that “the nation as it came into existence after the ruin of the Roman Empire was not—as Hazony seems to imply—a spontaneous agglomeration of families, tribes, and clans for purposes of self-defense. On the contrary, it was a project of the Catholic Church, which sought to civilize the Visigoth barbarians who conquered Spain and the Merovingians and later Carolingian rulers of France.”

Kesler draws a bright line between Europe’s ethnocentric nationalism and America’s concept of citizenship—rightly so. The nationalism of the 19th century was a Romantic attempt to reinvigorate the nations of Europe by reinventing the Middle Ages after Napoleon leveled the Old Regime. It was a new founding rather than a continuation of ancient and accretive traditions, and it prepared the slippery slope that led to the World Wars of the 20th century. Europe’s atavistic nationalism was not a revival of tradition but a perverse innovation. Sometimes empire is better. The Austro-Hungarian Empire provided governance far superior to the plethora of nationalisms sponsored by the Versailles Treaty.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

The New Racism is Poisoning America By Janet Levy

By on March 28th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/the_new_racism_is_poisoning_america.html

The idea that past racism can be undone with more racism is ludicrous.  Affirmative action, established in the 1960s, emphasized equality of opportunity.  But it has transmogrified — through the politics of DEI, sexual orientation, and gender identity — into a new form of racism emphasizing equality of outcome.

Unconstitutional quotas deny college admissions and government jobs to whites and non-black, non-Latino, non-Native groups.  The worst is the recent invasion of healthcare by DEI-driven policies.  Belonging to a DEI-privileged group outweighs need.  White patients may have to wait longer than blacks or Hispanics for cardiac care or kidney transplants.  All in the name of “health equity” and righting past wrongs done to those groups.

This column will examine four recent lawsuits—among the many—against such policies. It will also show how a retribution-focused movement to embed racial preferences in medical treatment has gained traction over the last few years in the healthcare industry.

The first case is from Montana, where in 1991, the 52nd legislature enacted and codified House Bill 424 (originally House Joint Resolution 28) as Montana § 2-15-108, MCA. The law aimed to “take positive action to attain gender balance and proportional representation of minorities” in state boards, commissions, committees, and councils. Bias was alleged to cause the imbalance.

In September 2023, two vacancies opened for the 12-member Board of Medical Examiners, but the governor has been unable to make appointments since the appointments must adhere to DEI.  Do No Harm, an organization representing physicians and healthcare workers countering DEI in medicine, has filed a suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Montana (Helena Division), saying Montana § 2-15-108 violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Biden Administration’s Terrorist Pier in Gaza: The Trojan Horse For Terrorists to Take Over the Region by Bassam Tawil

By on March 27th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20520/gaza-pier-qatar

Placing Qatar — rather than, say, the United Arab Emirates — in charge of the Gaza pier entrenches a terrorist-sponsoring Trojan Horse at Hamas’s beck and call. Qatar will use the pier to supply Hamas with more money and more powerful weapons. The port will also undoubtedly be used to smuggle Islamist jihadis from all around the world into the Gaza Strip to launch more massacres against Israelis.

Qatar has a long history of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist offshoots, but also Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hezbollah and the Al Nusra Front.

If Qatar really wants an end to the Israel-Hamas war, all it has to do is order its Hamas puppets immediately and unconditionally to release all the Israelis kidnapped by Hamas terrorists October 7 and held hostage in the Gaza Strip. Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal, who are based in Doha, would not be able to refuse. Qatar is their lifeline.

The Qataris, however, are evidently in no rush to pressure Hamas: Qatar is clearly facing no pressure from the Biden administration. On the contrary, the Biden administration just agreed to extended Qatar’s ability to host America’s Al-Udeid Air Base, the headquarters of CENTCOM, for another ten years – for nothing in return.

“Congress must weigh in and cancel the 10-year extension of the military base in Qatar… The U.S. should seize assets tied to individuals and entities in Qatar for supporting terrorist groups, especially those tied to Iran, a state sponsor of terrorism…. It’s time to put Doha on notice that they are jeopardizing their relationship with the U.S. by providing material support to designated terrorist groups. Qatar is clearly acting like a state sponsor of terror and should not be allowed to use the U.S. banking system to bypass existing, though not enforced, sanctions on funding Iran and its terrorist proxies.” — Former US intelligence officer Michael Pregent, The Hill, January 22, 2024.

The US should definitely start withdrawing from Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar.

Thanks to the Biden administration — which is also pressuring Israel not to eliminate the remaining Hamas terrorist battalions in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah — Qatar and its Hamas pawns are having the last laugh. In light of the Biden administration’s decision to turn itself into an ally of terrorists and their supporters, such as Hamas and Qatar – instead of strengthening US relations with Israel and its allies in the Gulf who are fighting terrorism — it is a very long last laugh, indeed.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

What if the U.S. Helps Hamas Win? The path Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer have chosen means the end of any hope of peace. By Bernard-Henri Lévy

By on March 27th, 2024

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-if-the-us-helps-hamas-win-schumer-biden-mideast-war-israel-gaza-1a6aa3c6?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Let’s imagine that Israel yields to the pressure. Pushed by an American president already under fire from a segment of the electorate that objects to his support for a “genocidal” state, Israel refrains from entering Rafah to finish off Hamas’s four surviving battalions. Israel agrees to the general cease-fire of indeterminate duration that the U.S. administration seems to push amid increasingly virulent antisemitism.

The idea that Washington unconditionally supports Israel is a longstanding myth. While the U.S. often vetoes anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations Security Council, the one that passed Monday was far from the first exception. Recall Resolution 1701 (2006) to halt Israel’s Lebanon offensive at the Litani River—thus sparing what remained of the Hezbollah units.

So the supposition that the U.S. pushes Israel into capitulating isn’t implausible. It is the path forward that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who styles himself the Jewish state’s shomer, or protector, has chosen. It isn’t hard to picture an Israel that is sermonized, impeded and prevented from dealing with Hamas the way the U.S. dealt with Al-Qaeda and ISIS a few years back—an Israel forced into defeat.

If that came to pass, what would happen? Hamas would declare victory—on the verge of defeat, then the next minute revived. These criminals against humanity would emerge from their tunnels triumphant after playing with the lives not only of the 250 Israelis captured on Oct. 7, but also of their own citizens, whom they transformed into human shields.

The Arab street would view Hamas terrorists as resistance fighters. In Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—nations that signed the Abraham Accords or were leaning toward doing so—Hamas’s prestige would be enhanced. In the West Bank as in Gaza, Hamas would quickly eclipse the corrupt and ineffective Palestinian Authority, whose image would pale next to the twin aura of martyrdom and endurance in which Hamas would cloak itself.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

The Worst Cold War Documentary Ever Made, Part 2 Noah Rothman

By on March 27th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-worst-cold-war-documentary-ever-made-part-2/

I jumped the gun near the end of my review of the first three episodes of Netflix’s documentary series Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. As I wrote in “The Worst Cold War Documentary Ever Made,” the series did not address the Korean War, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the Berlin Crisis of 1958, a brief Chinese–Taiwanese war, or the global communist guerrilla insurgency. But the series’ coverage of the 1950s did not end with episode three, as I suspected it had. The series pivoted in episode four to the so-called missile gap and Fidel Castro’s 1959 Cuban revolution, introducing both phenomena to establish the backdrop against which the Cuban Missile Crisis took place. Unfortunately, the film did so only to promote further the narrative that it had established in its first three episodes, which are organized around the notion that the United States was the foremost belligerent in the Cold War.

“The Russians were not on a crash program to build missiles,” the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg said of the discovery unlocked by the launch of America’s first spy satellites. The Soviets were “not trying to be superior,” which meant that they “weren’t trying to dominate the world militarily.” Nefariously enough, American policymakers declined to internalize the conclusion that was so intuitive to Ellsberg. That was motivated reasoning designed to perpetuate the “fraudulent belief” that the Soviets represented a military threat to the West only because it was “very profitable.”

With this, Turning Point’s audience is treated to a Marxian theory of everything that explains the Cold War as an outgrowth of the fact that the American economy was “increasingly oriented around defense, and security, and nuclear weapons,” in the author Audra Wolfe’s formulation. “It’s sort of in everyone’s interests to keep building toward this world-ending moment because it’s good business,” the journalist Garrett Graff posits. Indeed, the arms race was a game, and “both sides played it,” said author Scott Anderson, by which he meant Democrats and Republicans, not the Americans and the Soviets.

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HOMELAND SECURITY, IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Coming Terrorist Attack on U.S. Soil, Part III Peter Kirsanow

By on March 27th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-coming-terrorist-attack-on-u-s-soil-part-iii/

The disaster at the southern border continues to grow. Border Patrol recorded an astonishing 250,000 encounters with illegal immigrants in December. This figure includes thousands of single, military-age men from China, Russia, and Iran.

The number of individuals on the terror watch list crossing the border has increased 2,500 percent during the Biden administration. In fiscal year 2023 more than 35,000 individuals with criminal records were arrested at the southern border, a tenfold increase since the beginning of Biden’s term (the actual figures are likely far larger since the reported numbers don’t include “gotaways,” conventionally estimated to constitute 50 percent of the total number of individuals entering the country illegally).

NORAD recently reported detecting more than a thousand unmanned-aerial-vehicle incursions along the border per month.

These alarming figures seem to have little impact on DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who regularly appears bored or distracted at congressional hearings concerning the border. His nonchalance is shared by many open-borders advocates, some of whom casually note that none of the individuals on the terror watch list who’ve crossed the border have committed a terrorist act on U.S. soil. Yet. This is what passes for reasoned analysis from open-borders elites.

Perhaps they calculate (or hope) that a terrorist attack won’t occur in their city; terrorists, after all, traditionally prefer high-profile targets. But not always. The terror might be magnified if the attack occurred in a place where people feel relatively safe — a minor-league baseball game in Wichita, a parade in Dubuque, a fair in Salem.

Or perhaps the elites calculate that terrorists entering the country today won’t execute their plans until the next administration. Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) would exclusively blame a Trump administration for anything that occurs on or after 12:01 p.m. on January 20, 2025, even if the attack were planned and executed solely by individuals who crossed the border during the Biden administration.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Plague That Besets Our Schools Is Extensive Armpit licking, condoms, transgenderism, and socialism are on full display. By Larry Sand

By on March 27th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/27/the-plague-that-besets-our-schools-is-extensive/

The year, now a quarter old, reveals that the country’s rapid slide into educational purgatory is moving apace. Leading off the grossness parade is a school in Oklahoma where students lick and suck the armpits and toes of their fellow students in the name of charity. (This may garner a shrug in San Francisco, but Oklahoma?!)

While no district personnel were directly involved, video footage from Deer Creek High School in Edmond, OK, showed mid-teens participating in and watching the disgusting events unfold.

Getting caught with their pants down—so to speak—the school leaders assured us that no staff or faculty were involved in the cringeworthy event. But then the school became upbeat about the happenings. It celebrated the fact that the licker/suckers raised $152,000 for charity, asserting, “We would like to thank all of the patrons, businesses, and sponsors who contributed to the success of this year’s Wonderful Week of Fundraising.”

In other pervy news, Elk Grove, CA, parents discovered in January that a 3rd-grade teacher was inviting all the 3rd through 6th-grade classes to a new LGBTQ club he was starting. The “UBU Club” was for “boys who crush on boys” and “girls who crush on girls,” but anyone could come, the kids were told. Yet, most tellingly, parents weren’t notified about the club.

Also, in California, a bill introduced in January is now going through the legislative process. If passed, it will require that public high schools notify students where they can get free condoms on campus and allow schools to distribute condoms during sex education classes for middle and high school students.

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ANTI-SEMITISM, EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard’s Federal Funds at Risk over Anti-Semitism Investigation By Eric Lendrum

By on March 27th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/26/harvards-federal-funds-at-risk-over-anti-semitism-investigation/

Harvard University could lose over $500 million in federal funding after it has been accused of obstructing a congressional probe into anti-Semitism on campus.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the threat was made by Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which is leading the investigation into allegations of systemic anti-Semitism at Harvard and other elite universities in the United States. In the aftermath of the October 7th attacks on Israel, there have been numerous riots, protests, and other instances of anti-Semitic rhetoric, committed overwhelmingly by college-aged agitators and sometimes taking place on campus. Jewish students have been increasingly harassed by anti-Israel activists in the months since the war began.

Harvard received $625 million in federal funds alone in the year 2021, making up 67% of its total sponsored revenue. The Ivy League school could be at risk of losing all of this money after it has stonewalled the committee’s efforts to further investigate the nature of such anti-Semitism on campus, as well as possible lenience on the administration’s part towards the anti-Israel forces.

“The ultimate thing is obviously, trying to hold back some of their money if they’re just not going to make the students safe,” said Foxx in an interview. “That’s always an option for us.”

In February, the committee issued a subpoena for Harvard regarding documents that detailed the university’s handling of anti-Semitism. The university has been slow in handing over documents, including sending numerous documents that were heavily redacted.

“It’s hard to know whether it’s arrogance, ineptness, or indifference that is guiding Harvard,” Foxx continued. “They know the investigation is not going away.”

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