FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

America Must Choose Between Two Different Paths on Iran By Lawrence J. Haas

Posted By on August 3rd, 2020

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-must-choose-between-two-different-paths-iran-165971

“I’m under no illusions about the Iranian regime, which has engaged in destabilizing behavior across the Middle East, brutally cracked down on protesters at home, and unjustly detained Americans,” Joe Biden wrote this past spring for Foreign Affairs. “But there is a smart way to counter the threat that Iran poses to our interests and a self-defeating way – and Trump has chosen the latter.”

On no major global challenge has Washington acted so inconsistently in recent years as the Islamic Republic, though that challenge has not changed in any fundamental way since the 1979 revolution brought a radical theocracy to power in Tehran. The Iranian regime, which is fueled by an expansionist ideology, continues to threaten the United States and its allies, seeks to acquire nuclear weaponry, is developing increasingly sophisticated ballistic missiles, sponsors terrorism, works directly and through proxies to destabilize regional governments, and brutally suppresses its own people.

Through every presidency since the tenure of Jimmy Carter, America’s strategic goal vis-à-vis Iran has been the same: to convince the regime to change course, mend its ways, and become a member in good standing of the rules-based global order. The question that has vexed every president has been whether to try and achieve that objective through pressure (in the form of sanctions and political opprobrium) or persuasion (through collaboration and aid).

Though Washington – across presidencies and even within some of them – has alternated between pressure and persuasion, the starkest change in direction came when Trump succeeded Obama, withdrew from the 2015 global nuclear agreement that Obama had engineered, and abandoned hopes of fostering warmer U.S.-Iranian ties through economic aid and a less hostile U.S. posture. Instead, over the past two years, Trump has imposed a “maximum pressure” campaign of heightened sanctions intended to force the regime to abandon its nuclear pursuits, regional mischief, and human-rights abuses.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Woke Colleges Are Assembly Lines for Political Conformity The Stakes Are Much Higher Than Most People Realize: Charles Lipson

Posted By on August 3rd, 2020

https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/woke-colleges-are-assembly-lines-conformity

Don’t be fooled by universities’ incessant chatter about “diversity.” Most are poster children for ideological conformity and proud of it. The faculty, students, and administrators know it. Indeed, many welcome it since their views are so obviously right and other views so obviously wrong. They believe discordant views are so objectionable that no one should express them publicly.

What views are now considered beyond the pale? They almost always involve ordinary political differences. We are not talking here about direct physical threats. Those are already illegal, and universities rightly deal with them. They don’t have to face neo-Nazi marches. Nor is anyone advocating such noxious ideas as genocide, slavery, or child molestation. Speech about those subjects might be legal, but virtually nobody is making the case for them. That is not what the fight for freedom of speech on campus is about. It is about the freedom to voice—or even hear—unpopular views on topics such as merit-based admissions, affirmative action, transgender competition in women’s sports, abortion, and support for Israel.

These are perfectly legitimate topics, and students ought to be free to hear different ideas about them. They are hotly contested topics in America’s body politic. That’s how democracies work. Not so on college campuses, where the “wrong views” are not just minority opinions. They are verboten, and so are the people who dare express them. Challenging this repressive conformity invites condemnation, severs friendships, and threatens careers. It is hardly surprising that few rise to challenge it.

Worse yet, university leaders seldom do. They have a fundamental responsibility to defend open discourse, and they have largely abdicated it. Shame on them. Instead of defending the free expression of unpopular views, they condemn them and flaunt their own virtue. That’s what Princeton’s president Christopher Eisgruber did when he attacked classics professor Joshua Katz, saying Katz had not exercised free speech “responsibly” when he allegedly gave a “false description” of a Black student group. Katz’s own department condemned him, too, though the university finally decided the professor would not be formally punished. They will save the ducking chair for another day.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

EILEEN TOPLANSKY-STATUES AND TYRANNY

Posted By on August 3rd, 2020

NO URL:

Virtue signaling comes from all quarters about which statues should be destroyed in this country.  Is there a difference between the ISIS wielding fanatics who decimated statues dating as far back as antiquity and the black-clad people who destroy in the name of radical leftwing ideology? Read on and digest the standard leftwing/Marxist imprimatur.

The viral removals of monuments symbolizing racial terror are a corrective to a culture that valorizes violence and embeds false narratives about history into its landscapes. But to what end? The real work of dismantling monuments that embody white supremacy doesn’t end by toppling a few statues — but their withdrawal from the public realm is a long overdue start.

Addressing the fundamental problem of racism in our country will take more than erecting new monuments or toppling old statues. The system that installed statues of Confederate generals and violent police chiefs, and lovingly maintained and protected them, is the same system that built highways through black neighborhoods, invests more money in law enforcement than in schools, and created a surveillance state. These racist symbols are somehow more obvious than statues, yet more surreptitious. As Che Gossett said: ‘Tear down all the monuments to slavery, especially jails and prisons. Removing these visual emblems will be the ultimate accounting.’

For those who do not know, “Che Gossett is a trans femme writer, and archivist. They are currently an archivist at the Barnard Center for Research on Women and a doctoral candidate in trans/gender studies at Rutgers University. Gossett grew up in Massachusetts with their sibling, activist and filmmaker Tourmaline.”  Note  the leftwing use of the pronoun their even though only one person is being spoken about.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Kansas Should Go F— Itself Author Thomas Frank predicted the modern culture war, and he was right about Donald Trump, but don’t expect political leaders to pay attention to his new book about populism Matt Taibbi

Posted By on August 3rd, 2020

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/kansas-should-go-f-itself

The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism

Thomas Frank is one of America’s more skillful writers, an expert practitioner of a genre one might call historical journalism – ironic, because no recent media figure has been more negatively affected by historical change. Frank became a star during a time of intense curiosity about the reasons behind our worsening culture war, and now publishes a terrific book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, at a time when people are mostly done thinking about what divides us, gearing up to fight instead.

Frank published What’s the Matter with Kansas? in 2004, at the height of the George W. Bush presidency. The Iraq War was already looking like a disaster, but the Democratic Party was helpless to take advantage, a fact the opinion-shaping class on the coasts found puzzling. Blue-staters felt sure they’d conquered the electoral failure problem in the nineties, when a combination of Bill Clinton’s Arkansas twang, policy pandering (a middle-class tax cut!) and a heavy dose of unsubtle race politics (e.g. ending welfare “as we know it”) appeared to cut the heart out of the Republican “Southern strategy.”

Yet Clinton’s chosen successor Al Gore flopped, the party’s latest Kennedy wannabe, John Kerry, did worse, and by the mid-2000s, Bushian conservatism was culturally ascendant, despite obvious failures. Every gathering of self-described liberals back then devolved into the same sad-faced anthropological speculation about Republicans: “Why do they vote against their own interests?”

Frank, a Midwesterner and one of the last exemplars of a media tradition that saw staying in touch with the thinking of the general population as a virtue, was not puzzled. What’s the Matter with Kansas? was framed as an effort to answer that liberal cocktail-party conundrum – “How could anyone who’s ever worked for someone vote Republican?” was the version Frank described hearing – and the answer, at least on the surface, was appealing to coastal intellectuals.

POLITICS Comments turned off

An Invitation in the Mail for Election Fraud Washington state sent a ballot to my home—which is now in Texas.By Scott Hogenson

Posted By on August 3rd, 2020

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-invitation-in-the-mail-for-election-fraud-11596385418?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Uncertainties over Covid-19 have spurred significant interest in voting by mail. The process differs substantially from absentee voting, which requires a voter to file an application and creates a documented paper trail. Vote by mail is simpler: Ballots are printed and sent to registered voters, who complete and return them.

Consider Washington state. Vote by mail was required in 2011, so the government has had nearly a decade to refine the process. True to form, I received my Aug. 4 primary ballot several weeks ahead of the election date, leaving me ample time to consult my conscience and return my ballot.

The U.S. Postal Service appears to be operating fairly well. I still had plenty of time to vote because the USPS helpfully forwarded my ballot to my new address—in Texas.

Our family moved from Washington state to suburban Dallas in mid-June, but I have been invited to participate in Washington state’s August elections. So has my wife. Given that we aren’t residents of Washington, we won’t vote there. That would be fraudulent. I could probably get away with it, but the little angel on my shoulder shouted down the little devil on the other.

Therein lies but one of a cavalcade of problems with vote by mail.

HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Man Who Conquered Polio-Jonas Salk and American Hero By Clifton Rodgers

Posted By on August 3rd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/02/the-man-who-conquered-polio/

EXCERPTS

Jonas Salk never patented his vaccine or earned any money from his discovery, preferring it to be distributed as widely as possible. When asked who owned the patent to the polio vaccine, Salk answered, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

In the news, there were endless historical accounts of the horrors of prior epidemics. I was not old enough to remember the Black Plague or the Spanish Flu. Asian Flu, Swine Flu, SARS and Ebola were terrible, but they hadn’t shut down the world. Suddenly, the “bring out your dead” scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” wasn’t funny anymore.

I was old enough, however, to recall the terrors of polio. I remembered how proud the people of Pittsburgh were that they had been part of the making of the vaccine. 

In his 2010 novel—Nemesis—Philip Roth describes the fear of polio that swept through his childhood neighborhood in Newark during the summer of 1944. “Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us,” Roth wrote.

The disease terrified the nation. The lives of millions of Americans were disrupted. Many of the victims were left paralyzed—or dead. 

When—or if—an effective vaccine could be developed was an open question. Sound familiar?

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Rebels Without a Pause-Salvatore Babones

Posted By on August 3rd, 2020

EXCERPT- FROM AUSTRALIA-https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/07-08/rebels-without-a-pause/

Global news coverage of the riots, looting and arson that spread across America portrayed the “protests” as a righteous response to racially-tinged police brutality. Murder is murder, and the video footage of police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd is chilling indeed. Concerned bystanders repeatedly asked, then yelled at the police to stop. Floyd already had his hands cuffed behind his back, and there were at least four armed officers on the scene, so it’s unlikely that he could have posed any threat. Chauvin awaits the verdict of a jury of his peers.

Meanwhile America faces the jury of the press corps, which has fallen in love with the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, an attractive young millennial who in looks, speech and politics resembles nothing so much as an American Justin Trudeau. He is a Democrat—the top five candidates in the city’s Australian-style transferable preference voting system were all Democrats—who campaigned on a platform of (wait for it) police reform. Frey wanted to hire an additional 400 officers in a bid to reshape the force. The coronavirus put paid to that.

In America’s mirror-image political colour scheme, Minneapolis is the bluest of blue cities in a consistently blue state. It is represented in Congress by the Somali-American former refugee Ilhan Omar. After going heavily for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Party primaries, Minnesota (the state of which Minneapolis is the capital) voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in the ensuing presidential election. If the Derek Chauvin riots (it seems unfair to associate them with the apparently peaceable George Floyd) are a product of the divided America we hear so much about, it’s an America divided between African-Americans and the Democrats who govern them.

Nearly all the cities that have been hit hard by riots and looting are long-time bastions of the Democratic Party. Yet when the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Joe “you ain’t black” Biden, said in a teary-eyed video plea that George Floyd was a victim of America’s “original sin” of “systemic racism”, the media lapped it up. Biden’s written follow-up statement condemning looting and rioting was less well reported. Not that he called it “looting” or “rioting”. He wrote that “protest” was “an utterly American response” to injustice, but that “burning down communities” and “violence that endangers lives” were not. One out of three ain’t bad.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Ilana Mercer :A ‘Victims of Communism Day’ Is Long Overdue As suggested by Ilya Somin of The Volokh Conspiracy

Posted By on August 3rd, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/02/a-victims-of-communism-day-is-long-overdue/

The fact that socialists and Communists are still voted into power with swagger; the fact that this creed’s savage foot soldiers—Black Lives Matter and Antifa—are cast as pacifists, seekers of equity and justice demonstrates that Communists, despite their murderous past, “belong to the camp of democratic progress” in the eyes of the world whereas the Right is forever open to suspicions of unforgiven fascist and Nazi sympathies.

If anything, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression—that “800-page compendium of the crimes of communist regimes worldwide”—treads too lightly when it comes to qualitative comparisons between the Nazi and the “Marxist-Leninist phenomenon.”

On the quantitative front, “Nazism, at an estimated 25 million dead,” turned out to be distinctly less murderous than Communism, whose “grand total of victims, variously estimated at between 85 million and 100 million murdered, is the most colossal case of political carnage in history.”

Qualitatively, the “‘class genocide’ of Communism” is certainly comparable to the “‘race genocide’ of Nazism.” In its reach and methods, moreover, nothing compares to communism’s continual, ongoing invention of new classes of “enemies of the people” to liquidate. “Mass violence against the population was a deliberate policy of the new revolutionary order; and its scope and inhumanity far exceeded anything in the national past.”

The Jewish people have carried out “the solemn obligation to keep the memory of its martyrs alive in the conscience of the world.” The civilized world has internalized the methods and meaning of the “Final Solution.” As The Black Book observes approvingly, “Hitler and Nazism are now a constant presence in Western print and on Western television.”

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Larry Elder’s ‘Uncle Tom’: The little movie that could By Andrea Widburg *****

Posted By on August 3rd, 2020

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/larry_elders_uncle_tom_the_little_movie_that_could.html

Did you know that there’s a documentary called Uncle Tom that IMDB ranks as one of America’s top documentaries? Released only six weeks ago, it’s currently the sixth-highest rated documentary on IMDB, with over 2,000 viewers giving it an extraordinary 9.5-star rating. The movie also doubled Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine opening box office revenue. Nevertheless, not a single mainstream news or entertainment media film critic has acknowledged it. I spoke with Mr. Elder to learn more about the movie and the media’s passive-aggressive efforts to ignore it into extinction.

One would think that, when a nationally-known radio and TV personality, who is also a best-selling author and columnist, writes and produces a documentary about blacks in America, the media would be all over it. That doesn’t happen, though, if he challenges the mainstream narrative that the Democrat party is American blacks’ only friend.

Uncle Tom’s use of historical footage, contemporary political events, and interviews with black conservatives both well known and unknown exposes viewers to the reality that’s unacceptable to the monolithic Democrat media: Since 1856, Republican Party policies allowed American blacks to thrive, while Democrat party policies consistently harmed them.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians’ Chief Negotiator or Chief Liar? by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on August 3rd, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16302/saeb-erekat-lies

Saeb Erekat’s continued lies and fabrications about Israel promote anti-Semitism and embolden terrorists.

As a veteran negotiator, it would be a good idea for him to use his experience to persuade the Hamas terrorists to release the remains of the two soldiers instead of waging a propaganda campaign on behalf of a terrorist who woke up one morning and decided to kill Jews.

With negotiators like Erekat, one can understand why the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has been stalled for so many years.

Ahmed Erekat, a 26-year-old Palestinian from the village of Abu Dis, south of Jerusalem, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers on June 23 after ramming his car into an Israeli military checkpoint. One soldier was lightly wounded in the attack.

Footage released by the Israeli authorities leaves no room for doubt that Erekat was on a mission to kill soldiers. The footage shows Erekat deliberately turning his car as he waited in line, driving directly at the soldiers, hitting one female soldier and then crashing into a guard booth. Erekat then got out of the vehicle and started walking towards the soldiers, who fired a number of bullets at him, killing him instantly.

Such terrorist attacks are not uncommon in the West Bank, where Palestinian terrorists have carried out dozens of car-rammings against Israeli soldiers and civilians in the past few years.

This attack, however, caught the attention of the international media because the terrorist happens to be a relative of Saeb Erekat, the former Palestinian chief negotiator with Israel who currently serves as secretary general of the PLO.

Since the car-ramming, Saeb Erekat has been waging a campaign of incitement and lies against Israel. He has accused it of “cold-blooded murder” and now of the “extrajudicial execution” of his cousin.

The senior PLO official is deliberately ignoring the video that clearly shows his cousin using his car in an attempt to kill Israeli soldiers. He is also, perhaps not surprisingly, ignoring the testimonies of the soldiers his cousin tried to kill.