Displaying posts categorized under

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Iran and 9/11 The Islamic Republic played a little-known but unmistakable role in the biggest jihad attack on U.S. soil. by Robert Spencer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/iran-and-9-11/

As Steve Witkoff prepares to begin a new round of negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, it’s important to remember that the Islamic Republic has been at war with the U.S., as well as Israel, for years. In fact, Iran even played a role in 9/11.

On Dec. 22, 2011, U.S. District Judge George B. Daniels ruled in Havlish, et al. v. bin Laden, et al., that Iran and Hizballah were liable for damages to be paid to relatives of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 jihad attacks in New York and Washington, as both the Islamic Republic and its Lebanese proxy had actively aided al-Qaeda in planning and executing those attacks.

Daniels found that Iran and Hizballah had cooperated and collaborated with al-Qaeda before 9/11 and continued to do so after the attacks.

Before 9/11, Iran and Hizballah were implicated in efforts to train al-Qaeda members to blow up large buildings—resulting in the bombings of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000.

Former MOIS operative Abolghasem Mesbahi, a defector from Iran, testified that during the summer of 2001, he received messages from Iranian government officials regarding a plan for unconventional warfare against the U.S., entitled Shaitan dar Atash (“Satan in Flames”).

“Satan in Flames” was the elaborate plot to hijack three passenger jets, each packed full of people, and crash them into American landmarks: the World Trade Center, which jihadis took to be the center of American commerce; the Pentagon, the center of America’s military apparatus; and the White House.

Even After Trump’s Mideast Wins, Voters Remain Skeptical About Peace In Region: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/07/09/even-after-trumps-mideast-wins-voters-remain-skeptical-about-peace-in-region-ii-tipp-poll/

President Donald Trump’s bold move to take out Iran’s nuclear arms program and broker a ceasefire between Iran and Israel seems to have worked, at least so far. But while a large share of Americans believe the ceasefire won’t hold, the majority are taking a wait-and-see approach, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll indicates.

The online national I&I/TIPP Poll of 1,421 adults was taken from June 25-27, mere days after the June 22 U.S. military attack to cripple Iran’s nuclear facilities.

I&I/TIPP asked respondents the following question: “Do you believe the recent ceasefire between Israel and Iran will lead to lasting peace in the region?”

Among those taking the poll, the history of the Mideast, with repeated wars between Israel and its neighbors, weighed heavily: 43% said “No, fighting is likely to resume,” versus just 19% who said “Yes, the ceasefire is likely to hold.”

But the big winner wasn’t yay or nay, but rather “wait and see.” Because of the 57% who didn’t say “no,” in addition to the 19% answering “yes,” another 28% said it was “Too soon to tell,” while 10% answered “Not sure.” So, in short, a majority think it’s either a success or too early to know.

So, as has always been the case, in the Mideast uncertainty reigns and trouble always seems to loom on the horizon. And while the picture in the U.S. is further clouded by the usual partisan differences, that’s not really the case this time.

Democrats (14%), Republicans (29%) and independents (12%) are all underwhelmed by the prospects of a lasting peace between Israel and Iran. Pessimism reigns, with Democrats (51%), Republicans (34%) and independents (47%) all seeing it as more probable that war between those countries and possibly others will resume rather than end.

AI – A View from a Tech Ignoramus Sydney Williams

https://swtotd.blogspot.com

“The well-read individual is less likely to succumb to the siren call of Artificial Intelligence – at least to not forget that AI is a machine, an invention for the benefit of mankind, not an invention to replace, or substitute for, mankind.”

To borrow an expression, Artificial Intelligence is all the rage, especially Generative AI and large language models. Estimates of total investments in data centers, GPUs (graphics processing units), training centers and cloud-based applications will reach somewhere between $300 billion and $600 billion in 2025, or roughly half the total U.S. defense budget. One source suggests total data center power consumption for all of 2025 could reach 23 gigawatts, twice the total energy consumption of the Netherlands. The June 28-29, 2025 issue of The Wall Street Journal ran an article on how CEOs of “tech goliaths and heavy-weight venture capitalists are cozying up to a few dozen nerdy researchers,” as their specialized knowledge will be “key to cashing in on the artificial-intelligence revolution.” A few companies are offering pay packages for the highly skilled that can reach seven and eight figures.

There is no question that much good will come from AI, like keeping truckers awake on long-haul trips, performing medical procedures, making warehouses more efficient, speeding up assembly lines, providing stock portfolio selections, or editing essays such as the ones I write. AI will generate content for publishers and news outlets, and make more efficient accountants, lawyers and financial advisors. It may prevent accidents on the freeway. However in the short term, like with any new technology, jobs will be lost. But in the longer term, also as with past technological advancements, new jobs will be created, for the economy is dynamic and new markets will be uncovered. And we cannot ignore that while AI may be able to write a Shakespearean-like sonnet or paint a Picasso-like canvas, AI will never be Shakespeare or Picasso.

If I were sixty years younger – even without a talent for linear algebra and probability theory – I would be thinking of how to use AI in my job, home and every-day life – as a tool, not as a substitute for creativity or intuition, as long as it did my bidding and did not lead me. In full disclosure, I do not use AI, as I don’t want it to influence how I think or what I write. There are people who believe that AI is not just a tool, people like Yuval Noah Harari, professor of History at Hebrew University and author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, who see AI “as an agent, in the sense that it can make decisions independent of us.”

Can Our Cities Be Saved From The Left’s Death Grip?

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/07/08/can-our-cities-be-saved-from-the-lefts-death-grip/

All the attention being thrown at New York’s mayoral primary race, won by socialist Zohran Mamdani, raises broader questions that deserve answers. Why do voters keep electing Democrats responsible for so much urban decline and decay? What will break the left’s stranglehold on our once great cities? Is the situation simply hopeless?

Of the nation’s largest 20 cities, only two have Republican mayors – Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. Republicans hold the mayorships of just 25 of the 100 largest cities. And that number is down from 30 in 2020.
More mysterious is the paradox that, despite the fact that blame for empty stores, rising crime, and the exodus of people rests squarely on the shoulders of Democrats in most of these cities, voters rarely hand control over to Republicans.

Look at the history of the 10 largest cities and despair.

Los Angeles has had one Republican mayor since 1961. New York has had one and a half since 1969 (Michael Bloomberg had been a lifelong Democrat, but ran as a Republican in 2001 and 2005, and then left the GOP midway through his second term).

Chicago has been electing Democratic mayors since 1931, and Houston since 1982.

Phoenix has elected Democrats for 20 years (a Republican was twice appointed as an interim mayor).

In Philadelphia, the last time a Republican was mayor was in 1948, and it’s been 24 years since San Antonio voters picked a GOP candidate for the city’s top office.

The other three of the top 10 cities – Dallas, San Diego, and Jacksonville – have been notable exceptions, with each having a fair share of mayors from both political parties.

The Frightening Dream House of Zoran Mamdani Zoran Mamdani built his dream on radical chic—but now that he’s winning, he’s scrambling to bury the blueprint. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/07/the-frightening-dream-house-of-zoran-mamdani/

After his first-place win in the New York City mayoral primaries, Zoran Mamdani is furiously denying everything that he once glibly thought was cutting-edge and cool.

So, like a good postmodern relativist, Mamdani now claims he didn’t really mean that violence was merely a “construct.”

I suppose Mamdani asked Jewish New Yorkers—the target of 44 percent of all hate crimes in the city—and discovered that their concussions and blood were all too real.

As a good soldier in the ranks of Black Lives Matter, Mamdani now insists he did not trash the police and advocate defunding them. Neither did he really, really mean to claim falsely he was African-American when he applied to college nor did really, really mean to do a video mocking the Jewish holiday of Hannukah.

Mamdani once thought it was cool to boast about defunding the police when he was an edgy, rising, left-wing community activist.

But then it was smarter to play it down as a candidate. And now it is essential to lie and deny it as a front-runner.

As a good communist, Mamdani echoed Karl Marx by bragging about his ultimate agenda: “the end goal of seizing the means of production.”

But whose “means of production” would Mamdani start seizing?

Trump Tower? Tesla dealerships? Amazon warehouses?

Mamdani warns us, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires, frankly.”

Then, please tell us, how would you get rid of them?

Confiscate their money? Tax them at a 99 percent rate?

Maybe dox them and let the public handle the rest?

Mamdani brags he would “globalize the intifada.”

Given that most define the intifada (“shaking off”) as the two violent Palestinian waves of terrorism against Israel, what then does Mamdani mean by globalizing it?

Ted Kept His Cool, While Tucker was a Sucker Twelve days, no U.S. casualties, Iran’s nuclear threat neutralized—and Tucker Carlson is still busy losing arguments to Ted Cruz. By Arthur Schaper

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/06/ted-kept-his-cool-while-tucker-was-a-sucker/

The war between Israel and Iran lasted twelve days.

Instead of a broad coalition of Arab states trying to push the Jewish state into the sea, one Islamic Republic (read: dictatorship) faced Israel, isolated from all other Muslim nations. Syria wouldn’t help, and Iranian proxies Hezbollah and the Houthis couldn’t since Israel wiped them out already.

Following targeted bombing campaigns, the nuclear Iran that pundits feared is no longer. The Iranian people are rising in the streets, bolder than ever before. Some even celebrated Israeli (and American) strikes on the Ayatollah’s nuclear facilities, watching the explosions from their homes.

However, one self-important commentator was fretting about the United States being dragged into another Middle Eastern conflict if Trump acted against Iran:

Tucker Carlson.

His doom and gloom bordered on hysterical.

Homes for hipsters From Zohran Mamdani to the YIMBYs, the leading figures in the housing debate have little to offer most Americans. Joel Kotkin

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/07/05/homes-for-hipsters/

More than his good looks, charm and great social-media game, the biggest reason that Zohran Mamdani may become New York’s next mayor grows from his focus on the city’s affordability crisis, most of which is tied to high housing prices.

Mamdani’s ‘cost of living’ campaign – offering rent control, free buses, childcare and city-owned supermarkets – seems to some leftist pundits a potential road back to power, under the guise of the burgeoning YIMBY (‘yes in my backyard’) movement that seeks to lower rental prices through massive housing construction.

Although Mamdani claims his focus on affordability appeals to working-class voters who shifted to Donald Trump, his core constituency lies elsewhere – with relatively affluent, young, single and childless professionals. For them, rent control is a true blessing, although they may not need free buses or want city-financed grocery stores, unless they resemble Whole Foods.

Housing, of course, is not just a New York issue. It also has a particular resonance for younger Americans. A Harvard poll of 18- to 29-year-olds this year ranked housing as the third-most-important issue overall, after inflation and healthcare. The educated hipster class – Mamdani’s base – understandably worries about the fact that in New York, you need a $135,000-a-year salary to afford a decent place, without it eating up most of your paycheque.

On a national basis, Mamdani’s win could prove a critical boost to the YIMBYs. From their origins in California, they have always been an odd agglomeration, originally financed by Bay Area tech and real-estate elites, while also embraced by more predictable leftist advocates of rent control, heavy subsidies and public housing. As YIMBY policies – like rezoning and densification – have either failed to solve the problem, or failed to gain traction with the public, more draconian socialist approaches seem to be gaining currency.

The YIMBYs are at least right about one thing: the lack of new housing is a profound national failure. Homebuilders constructed a million fewer homes – including units – in 2024 than in 1972, when there were 130million fewer Americans. One estimate puts the US housing market short by an estimated 4.5 million homes.

But if YIMBYs have diagnosed a key problem, their solutions – wherever imposed – have tended to make things worse. High-density development, often seen as the alternative to urban sprawl, does not solve the problem of higher urban land costs and higher construction fees.

Making Patriots in an Unpatriotic Age Even as elites sneer at patriotism, small-town ceremonies and Walter Berns’s Making Patriots remind us that liberty cannot endure without love of country. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/06/making-patriots-in-an-unpatriotic-age/

Like many people in my neighborhood, I had an American flag ready to display when the nation’s big, beautiful birthday rolled around on Friday. I live in a small New England neighborhood where July 4 is a big deal. The 20-odd children who live here form an honor guard that parades briefly and lays a wreath at the foot of a tiny war monument. We raise the flag, recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and then a respected local addresses us after we sing the National Anthem. The ACLU hasn’t got wind of our activities yet, so we even engaged a friendly cleric to perform a benediction.

By contemporary standards, this exhibition of patriotic sentiment seems quaint. But I have always found the event moving and thought-provoking. It reminds me of how lucky I am to be an American, and it leads me to reflect on the extraordinary political genius that forged American liberty and made it, as Lincoln said in a fraught moment in 1862, “the last, best hope of earth.”

This year, preparing for the holiday festivities, I dusted off my copy of Making Patriots by the late political philosopher Walter Berns (1919–2015). I am glad I did. This brief, eloquent book is a beautiful tribute to patriotism, lately a much-besieged civic virtue (though Donald Trump is doing yeoman’s work to rescue it). Berns begins by noting that although Lincoln’s words are even more obviously true today than before, the patriotism that Lincoln commended (and which he knew was necessary to guarantee liberty) no longer enjoys widespread public support, at least among this country’s elites.

Pedophilia and Politics by Linda Goudsmit

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/28689/pedophilia-and-politics

 goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

In an important recap of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) revelations, journalist Margaret Flavin reports on an audit of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as discussed in a recent interview with Vice President JD Vance. Flavin’s article, “Vice President Vance Underscores Reports of Massive Waste and Corruption in Foreign Aid (Video),” posted on Gateway Pundit, June 29, 2025. The results of the audit reveal that only 12% of the money allocated to USAID for aid arrives at its destination! How is this possible?

Vance explains the corruption:

“So, we send $100,000 to this group to buy food for poor kids in Africa, okay.”

“And what actually happens is it’s not $100,000 that go to the food for the poor kids in Africa. The NGO, the non-government organization that gets that money, contracts it out to somebody else, and then they subcontract it. So, there’s like three or four middlemen.”

“Marco Rubio, who’s the Secretary of State, he’s a very good friend. What he told me is that his best estimate, after he had his team look at it, is that 88 cents of every dollar was actually being collected by middlemen.”

“So, every dollar we were spending, humanitarian assistance, 12 cents, was actually making it to people who needed it.

In fiscal year 2023, USAID distributed $7 billion of American taxpayer monies worldwide, and less than $1 billion was actually distributed to the needy. This confirms the waste, fraud, and abuse that Elon Musk’s DOGE team discovered. Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded with his March 10, 2025, announcement that 83% of USAID programs, a whopping 5200 contracts, many were cancelled saving tens of billions of American taxpayer dollars. The 1,000 remaining programs will be managed under the State Department.

Marco Rubio’s March 10, 2025 tweet:

After a 6-week review, we are officially cancelling 83% of the programs at USAID.

The 5200 contracts that are now cancelled spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States.

In consultation with Congress, we intend for the remaining 18% of programs we are keeping (approximately 1,000) to now be administered more effectively under the State Department.

Thank you to DOGE and our hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform.

So, who are the big losers in the crackdown on USAID, and what programs and policies that harmed or did not serve the national interest were they funding?

What Happened to Loving America? As pride in America plummets, especially among the young, it’s clear we haven’t just failed to teach history—we’ve failed to teach why the nation is worth loving at all. By Stephen Soukup

https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/05/what-happened-to-loving-america/

Just in time for Independence Day, Gallup released polling results showing that a remarkable number of Americans are losing faith in their country and what it represents. Unsurprisingly—given who controls the levers of power in the federal government—Republicans are more proud to be Americans this year than last, while Democrats are significantly less so. What’s troubling, however, is that pride in the nation has fallen considerably among political independents and has fallen, over time, among all age groups of respondents. Most disturbingly, only 58% of American Millennials and a scant 41% of Generation Z-ers are proud of their country. “Notably,” as Gallup puts it, “more Gen Z Democrats say they have little or no pride in being an American (32%) than say they are extremely or very proud.”

Some observers, including some who are very smart and very well plugged in, have suggested that a big part of the problem here is that American kids simply aren’t taught today what makes this country so great. Instead, kids are taught more about the nation’s weaknesses than its strengths, more about its failures than its far more numerous successes. These observers ponder the question asked by President Reagan in his farewell address—“Are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world?”—and they answer, “Clearly, we are not.”

There’s not much to dispute here. This conclusion is almost inarguably correct. The American education system, at all levels, is woefully derelict in its teaching of history, American history in particular. What young children are taught about this nation’s past focuses largely on the negative, while overlooking most of the positive aspects.

Unfortunately, there’s much more to it than just that. The lack of education about America’s rich and amazing history is a small part of a much larger problem. It is more a symptom than the illness itself.

Pride in one’s country—or “patriotism”—is more than just a “feeling.” It is more than a mere emotional response to the power a nation wields or the victories it accumulates. Rather, patriotism is a virtue, which is to say that it is a good and productive reflex, a positive behavior, but it is something that itself must be taught, must be teased out of “the little human animal.” It is not enough merely to teach history. We must also teach the appropriate way to respond to that history. Among other things, patriotism is the means by which we come to know what is important and valuable, and moral in our community. And it must begin, therefore, with a common understanding of what is important and valuable and moral in our community.