MEDIA Comments turned off

The Coordinated ‘War of Words’ Against Trump The latest surge of fake news from the establishment media axis. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on August 14th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271026/coordinated-war-words-against-trump-lloyd-billingsley

The goal was 100 but at this writing 70 news organizations, including major dailies such as the Miami Herald, Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Denver Post, have agreed to “produce independent opinion pieces about Trump’s attacks on the media.” Leading the campaign is Marjorie Pritchard, deputy editorial page editor of the Boston Globe.

“We are not the enemy of the people,” Pritchard told reporters, and as she tweeted, “This is not about being a Democrat. And this is not about being a Republican. This is about the importance of a free press, enshrined in the Constitution, something we should all get behind.” Even so, readers had cause to wonder if the “coordinated editorial campaign” was something of a non-event.

Coverage of President Trump in the establishment media remains approximately 90 percent negative, so the campaign would hardly signal a new direction. Readers might also wonder about the rallying cry.

President Trump has not tampered with the First Amendment and never said the media was the enemy of the people. He did tweet “It is the FAKE NEWS, which is a large percentage of the media, that is the enemy of the people!” Readers might take the coordinated campaign as another example.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Legacies of Robert Mueller’s Investigations By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on August 14th, 2018

Some 450 days ago we were treated to melodramatic announcements from the media about the start-up of Robert Mueller’s “dream” and “all-star” team.

Reporters gushed in the general hysteria of the times that Mueller would no doubt soon indict President Trump, some of his family, and almost anyone else in his campaign—and therefore end the Trump aberration.

Press puff pieces highlighted the résumés of his superstars—of Lisa Page (no comment needed), Peter Strzok (less than no comment needed), Jeannie Rhee (a former attorney for the Clinton Foundation, Ben Rhodes, and for a bit Hillary Clinton), Andrew Weissman (Clinton zealot, Obama and DNC donor, and the cheerleader to Sally Yates’s refusal to carry out a presidential order), Aaron Zebley (the former attorney for Clinton staffer Justin Cooper who set up the infamous Clinton home server and smashed to bits her mobile devices), and a host of other pros, who were all shortly to prove Trump-Russian “collusion.”

Although that Mueller mandate of collusion was never formally defined, much less explained as a criminal offense, the media salivated at the idea that Mueller’s whiz kids nonetheless were going to find it and no doubt thereby usher in impeachment.

Now we have gone from melodrama to bathos.

The supposed high drama of election sabotage has descended into leveraging Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen and then outsourcing him and his baggage to federal prosecutors. The FBI, having seized from his home and office his stealthily recorded and secret tapes of his own alleged lawyer-client conversations with Trump, now hope to find therein something, anything, untoward with which they can accuse and damage the president.

Paul Manafort is to be exposed for what most already knew he was, a high-flying wheeler-dealer and influence-peddler along the lines of his Clintonite doppelganger, Tony Podesta. Mueller’s team at some point presumably will embarrass Trump concerning his Cohen-arranged hush deals about an alleged fling a decade earlier with a playboy bunny.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

America Needs a Border Wall Like Houses Need Insulation How Trump’s wall will help keep heinous criminals out of America’s cities. Michael Cutler

Posted By on August 14th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271010/america-needs-border-wall-houses-need-insulation-michael-cutler

Readers familiar with my writing know of my fondness for analogies to break down the, sometimes complex and always frustrating issues on U.S. immigration. Today, I will use an analogy comparing the proposed border wall along the U.S./Mexican border to insulate America with the way that various forms of insulation are used in constructing buildings to save money and provide other benefits.

Properly constructed homes and buildings are weatherproofed and insulated to create barriers that keep out rain and to keep their interiors warm and cozy in the winter and cool in the summer.

Various strategies and materials are used to achieve these essential goals. Insulation is installed inside outer walls and in the spaces under the roofs of the houses while double-pane windows, storm doors, and weatherstripping are used to seal up other vulnerable areas.

These measures are costly to install, but over the life of the building, these measures more than pay for themselves. Depending on location, home heating and cooling costs can be significantly reduced when effective insulation prevents costly warm air from escaping from the house during the frigid days of winter, and by preventing hot air from leaking into our homes during the sweltering days of summer when the air conditioners are humming and devouring expensive electricity.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Keith Ellison Gets His #MeToo Moment The DNC deputy chair’s alleged pattern of abusing women. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on August 14th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271025/keith-ellison-gets-his-metoo-moment-daniel-greenfield

Until last week, Karen Monahan’s progressive credentials had been impeccable. But now the activist is one of two women who have accused one of the top figures on the left of physical and emotional abuse.

Born in Iran before the Islamic Revolution, she was adopted by American parents and not only identified as an Iranian-American, but also worked with the pro-regime National Iranian American Council (NIAC).

Keith Ellison was also a NIAC regular. He had spoken before the Iranian group and had received fundraising support from it. The first Muslim congressman from Minnesota, with a list of Islamist and leftist connections as long as his right arm, was a natural NIAC ally.

Monahan had also been an organizer with the Sierra Club and worked with the Environmental Justice Advocates of Minnesota (EJAM). Ellison was one of the founders of EJAM. Both Ellison and Monahan were leftists moving through the same claustrophobic maze of Minnesota leftist political organizations.

At some point after Ellison’s divorce from his wife, Kim Ellison, they began a relationship that lasted for years until it ended in 2016. Now, Karen Monahan is accusing Ellison of domestic abuse. Her tweets and statement allege that Ellison assaulted her, cheated on her and badly traumatized her.

BOOKS Comments turned off

V.S. Naipaul’s ‘Universal Civilization’ The ‘curmudgeon’ author and Nobelist believed that the pursuit of happiness will outlast all its rivals.By Tunku Varadarajan

Posted By on August 14th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/v-s-naipauls-universal-civilization-1534200168

V.S. Naipaul, who died Saturday at 85, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on Oct. 11, 2001, a month after al Qaeda’s attack on the American homeland. As many in the West were still struggling to fathom what drove Islamist fanatics to commit mass murder, it was reassuring to see the Nobel go to Naipaul, who had unapologetically insisted on the universality of Western beliefs.

In the days after 9/11, when a sense of spiritual decapitation briefly prevailed, a lecture Naipaul had delivered in 1990 at New York’s Manhattan Institute leapt back to life from the archives. I received it by email from a friend, read it hungrily, and passed it on to others I thought would be healed by it.

The lecture was titled “Our Universal Civilization,” and in it Naipaul tried to answer what he called some “very serious questions”: “Are we—are communities—only as strong as our beliefs? Is it enough for beliefs or an ethical view to be passionately held? Does the passion give validity to the ethics? Are beliefs or ethical views arbitrary, or do they represent something essential in the cultures where they flourish?”

In response, Naipaul extolled some of the social values al Qaeda had seemingly just attacked, among them “the pursuit of happiness” and “the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

Remembering Nobel Prize Winner V.S. Naipaul, A Brilliant Defender Of Humane ValuesBy Tony Daniel

Posted By on August 14th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/13/remembering-nobel-prize-winner-v-s-naipaul-a-brilliant-defender-of-humane-values/ With the death of the Nobel Prize winning author, we’ve lost a great writer who both valued civilization, and saw the world as it is, not how he wished it to be. There are no rose-colored glasses when reading a V.S. Naipaul book. It’s a yellowed, sere world he looks upon, and once you […]

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Kavanaugh Document Fight Grassley is following the precedents set by Democrats on Kagan.

Posted By on August 13th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-kavanaugh-document-fight-1534202892

The Senate Judiciary Committee announced Friday that confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will begin September 4, nearly two months after his nomination. That’s more than enough time for Senators to examine his voluminous public record, but Democrats are alleging a cover-up.

“We are seeing layer after layer of unprecedented secrecy in what is quickly becoming the least transparent nominations process in history,” declared Minority Leader Chuck Schumer last week.

We hear that communications are strained, if they exist at all, between the staffs of Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking committee Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who is holding her breath and stomping her feet in tune with Mr. Schumer. The California Democrat is running for re-election against a left-leaning Democrat who claims she’s not doing enough to resist all things Trump. She isn’t about to be outflanked on the left regarding Judge Kavanaugh.

In any event, Democrats are the ones demanding the unprecedented. Their latest complaint is that documents from Mr. Kavanaugh’s years in the White House counsel’s office are being vetted for release by William Burck, a former colleague in the George W. Bush White House. “Unless it was produced by the National Archives, every document you see from Judge Kavanaugh’s White House tenure was selectively chosen for release by his former deputy, Bill Burck. This is not an objective process,” said Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin.

BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘How Schools Work’ Review: The Worm in the Apple A former education secretary doesn’t pull his punches when it comes to teachers’ unions; still, the Obama administration didn’t take them on. Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews “How Schools Work” by Arne Duncan.

Posted By on August 13th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-schools-work-review-the-worm-in-the-apple-1534201715?mod=cx_picks&cx_navSource=cx_picks&cx_tag=contextual&cx_artPos=1#cxrecs_s

Political memoirs are rarely tear-jerkers, but Arne Duncan’s look back at his time as secretary of education under Barack Obama may make school reformers want to cry. It’s not so much that Mr. Duncan, who served from 2009 to 2015 after a stint as head of the Chicago public schools, was bad at his job or in any way unprepared for its challenges. In fact, as “How Schools Work” makes clear, he understood a great deal about the problems plaguing American education. But that very understanding makes his cabinet tenure—recounted here alongside other tales from his public life—feel like a painful missed opportunity.

Mr. Duncan’s theme is that our education system is built on lies. He tells the story of volunteering, while he was in college, at his mother’s after-school tutoring program in Chicago, where she helped neighborhood kids with their schoolwork. His principal charge was a young African-American named Calvin, a rising high-school senior who had more than enough basketball talent to play for a Division I team. Mr. Duncan assumed that Calvin, a solid B-student from an intact, hard-working family, just needed some help studying for the ACT ahead of applying for college—until the first day that Mr. Duncan sat down with him and realized that he was reading at the level of a second-grader. Despite a summer of hard work, Calvin wasn’t going anywhere.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Milwaukee’s Public School Barricade The bureaucracy defies a state law on selling vacant buildings

Posted By on August 13th, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/milwaukees-public-school-barricade-1534203534

Teachers’ unions and their liberal allies are desperately trying to preserve the failing public school status quo. Witness how the Milwaukee Public School (MPS) system is defying a state mandate to sell vacant property to charter and private schools.

Milwaukee’s public schools are a mess. Merely 62% of students graduate from high school in four years, and proficiency rates are 15% in math and just over 20% in English. Families are escaping to charter and private schools, which has resulted in 11,000 vacant seats and a budget shortfall that’s expected to swell to $130 million within five years.

We wrote in 2015 about how MPS blocked charter and private school purchases of empty school buildings, which prevented high-performing schools like St. Marcus Lutheran from expanding. The state legislature then passed a law ordering the city and school district to sell vacant public school buildings.

Well, what do you know, the district still hasn’t sold a single vacant building to other schools despite 13 letters of interest from private and charter operators for 11 vacant buildings, according to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. Following protests from the teachers’ union, a local zoning board denied a bid by Right Step, a private school for children expelled from Milwaukee public schools. The city hasn’t even classified many unused buildings as “vacant.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

After Helsinki: A Coup in the Making Srdja Trifkovic

Posted By on August 13th, 2018

https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2018/September/43/9/magazine/article/10845200

President Donald Trump’s meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and their joint press conference in Helsinki on July 16 have ignited an ongoing paroxysm of rage and hysteria in the U.S. media. Morbid Russophobia and Putin-hate are déjà-vu, but the outpouring of vitriol against Trump has been raised to an entirely new level. The deplorable vulgarian of yore has morphed into a metaphysical incarnation of evil, an “enemy of the people” par excellence. Orwell’s “two minutes of hatred” has become a continuous, 24/7 orgy.

The roll call of attackers reads like a Who’s Who of the U.S. Deep State. The list of their hyperbolic adjectives (including “sellout,” “traitor,” “Putin’s pussycat,” etc.) is familiar to the curious, starting with Barack Obama’s CIA chief John Brennan (“high crimes and misdemeanors”). The outraged were particularly incited by Trump’s refusal to parrot the “Russiagate” narrative, falsely presented as the result of an “intelligence community consensus.”

Trump’s refusal was justified, on factual as well as political and moral grounds. No evidence of any kind exists to prove Russian meddling in the presidential election, or thereafter. It never will be found, for the simple reason that both Podesta’s and DNC emails were leaked, not hacked. The meddling myth is just a tool the Deep State has used since late 2016 to torpedo Trump’s attempt at détente with Moscow. Its operatives saw this attempt, with reason, as a threat to the maintenance of the duopolistic, neolib-neocon system of full-spectrum global dominance.

Just three weeks after the Helsinki summit, it is tricky to discern its implications and likely consequences, but three themes seem clear.

First and foremost, nothing of substance has been settled. It is of course possible and desirable to make a fair and enduring deal with Russia on all contentious issues (Ukraine, Syria, cyberspace, terrorism, trade, etc.). In operational terms, the biggest problem for Trump is not how to keep his supporters loyal; it is how to ensure that his own bureaucratic machine will obey and apply his vision, regardless of what Putin and he may yet agree to next fall. A chronically disloyal civil-service apparatus—especially at the Department of State and the CIA, but also at Defense—overwhelmingly subscribes to the Weltanschauung of Trump’s haters and detractors.