MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Catcher Was a Spy: Moe Berg Led a Life Worth a Better Biopic Than This By Kyle Smith

Posted By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/movie-review-the-catcher-was-a-spy-moe-berg-biopic/The writing and directing are flat, and Paul Rudd is miscast as the curious, multifaceted Moe Berg.

The major-league baseball catcher Moe Berg had a lengthy if undistinguished career on the diamond: 15 seasons, including five with the Chicago White Sox and five more in the rival hosiery of the Boston team. But it was his off-field hobby that earned him the honor of a 1994 biography by Nicholas Dawidoff and a new film adaptation, both entitled The Catcher Was a Spy.

Tinker, Tailor, Catcher, Spy? Movies telling yarns about the dark arts of espionage are notoriously difficult to pull off, being cerebral and internal, which is why most spy movies are simply action movies with some intel jargon thrown in. That isn’t really an option when dramatizing the case of Berg, though the movie tries to James Bond-ify him with, for instance, a ludicrous early scene in which the veteran, nearly washed-up ballplayer (Paul Rudd) beats a rookie teammate into strawberry jelly because the younger man is snooping on him. In life, unlike in spy movies, you’re not actually entitled to assault someone for observing you in a public place, and the scene has the further fault of showing the elusive, pensive Berg acting completely out of character.

Berg’s life proved well worth a biography, full of incident and intrigue and unanswered questions, but it isn’t obvious that there is a movie in here, given the lack of any overtly cinematic accomplishments on his résumé. A bit desperate for filler, the movie at one point resorts to showing Berg starring in a pickup game of baseball amongst G.I.s. As he was an actual professional baseball player, though, albeit one with a career .243 batting average, it’s hardly surprising that he can knock the hide off a baseball that’s being served up to him by a non-athlete.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

America’s Withdrawal from the UNHRC Is a Win for Human-Rights Promotion By Jimmy Quinn

Posted By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/americas-united-nations-human-rights-council-withdrawal/

There’s more to be gained at the U.N. by sidelining dictators through structural reform than by abetting their treachery through acquiescence.

On Tuesday, Nikki Haley, keeping her promise to “take names” at the U.N., announced America’s withdrawal from the U.N. Human Rights Council — “a protector of human rights abusers and a cesspool of political bias” — beside Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Objections abounded. Human Rights Watch complained that the withdrawal represents a “one-dimensional human rights policy in which the US defends Israeli abuses from criticism above all else.” Kremlin officials crowed that the U.S. had “inflicted a powerful blow to its human rights reputation.” Amnesty International secretary-general Salil Shetty said that the decision demonstrated a “complete disregard for the fundamental rights and freedoms the U.S. claims to uphold.”

Once again, Haley was right and her critics were wrong. America’s withdrawal from the UNHRC is a boon for human-rights promotion and a win for multilateral diplomacy that actually falls far afield of the Trump doctrine’s hard-edged unilateralism and apparent disregard for values-based diplomacy. The move constitutes a redoubling of America’s commitment to its fundamental ideals and the rules-based international order.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Thirty Years On, How Well Do Global Warming Predictions Stand Up? James Hansen issued dire warnings in the summer of 1988. Today earth is only modestly warmer. By Pat Michaels and Ryan Maue

Posted By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/thirty-years-on-how-well-do-global-warming-predictions-stand-up-1529623442

James E. Hansen wiped sweat from his brow. Outside it was a record-high 98 degrees on June 23, 1988, as the NASA scientist testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources during a prolonged heat wave, which he decided to cast as a climate event of cosmic significance. He expressed to the senators his “high degree of confidence” in “a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.”

With that testimony and an accompanying paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Mr. Hansen lit the bonfire of the greenhouse vanities, igniting a world-wide debate that continues today about the energy structure of the entire planet. President Obama’s environmental policies were predicated on similar models of rapid, high-cost warming. But the 30th anniversary of Mr. Hansen’s predictions affords an opportunity to see how well his forecasts have done—and to reconsider environmental policy accordingly.

Mr. Hansen’s testimony described three possible scenarios for the future of carbon dioxide emissions. He called Scenario A “business as usual,” as it maintained the accelerating emissions growth typical of the 1970s and ’80s. This scenario predicted the earth would warm 1 degree Celsius by 2018. Scenario B set emissions lower, rising at the same rate today as in 1988. Mr. Hansen called this outcome the “most plausible,” and predicted it would lead to about 0.7 degree of warming by this year. He added a final projection, Scenario C, which he deemed highly unlikely: constant emissions beginning in 2000. In that forecast, temperatures would rise a few tenths of a degree before flatlining after 2000.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Columnist Charles Krauthammer Dies at 68 Conservative columnist had been told he had weeks to live By Lukas I. Alpert

Posted By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pulitzer-prize-winning-columnist-charles-krauthammer-dies-at-68-

Charles Krauthammer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist whose incisive critiques made him an influential voice in Washington for decades, died Thursday. He was 68.

Mr. Krauthammer had said earlier this month that he was battling an aggressive form of cancer and his doctors told him he had weeks to live.

A Harvard-educated psychiatrist, Mr. Krauthammer was paralyzed below the neck in a freak diving accident in his 20s while in medical school. He used a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

After practicing medicine for a few years, he moved to Washington to direct planning in psychiatric research during the Carter administration and became a speech writer for Walter Mondale.

He then began contributing articles and political commentary to the New Republic, where he would eventually become a full-time writer and editor. In 1984, he won a National Magazine Award and began writing a regular column for the Washington Post. The column later was nationally syndicated.

“This is a hugely sad day for me, and I know in that I’m no different than so many Post readers,” said Fred Hiatt, the Washington Post’s editorial page editor, on Thursday. “For decades Charles has written a column of unparalleled principle and integrity, not to mention humor and intellectual virtuosity. There will be no replacing him.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A screaming rabid radical, employed by the Department of Justice By Monica Showalter

Posted By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/a_screaming_rabid_radical_employed_by_the_department_of_justice.html

A far-left mob claimed a public relations victory this week, surrounding and screaming at Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as she dined in a Mexican restaurant, eventually driving her out. The news stories featuring the screamers drew hundreds and hundreds of stories in the press. But what was really notable was who was doing it – the lowlife division of the Deep State: an openly far-left activist actually employed by the U.S. Department of Justice. Daily Caller had the story:

One of the activists who chased Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen out of a Mexican restaurant Tuesday night over the Trump administration’s immigration policies is an employee of the Department of Justice, The Daily Caller News Foundation has confirmed.

Members of the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America crashed Nielsen’s meal with a demonstration full of chants and other outbursts.

One of those participants, Allison Hrabar, actually works for the Trump administration — as a paralegal in the DOJ.

“Kirstjen Nielsen, you’re a villain, locking up immigrant children,” activists can be heard saying in a video.

Now, you expect someone working at the Department of Justice to be an even-tempered person, someone concerned about fairness to all, whether on the right or the left, someone who actually believes in the law, and not someone who would politicize government, as Hugo Chavez did. Whoops, forgot – both Hugo Chavez and the activist involved in this protest, Allison Hrabar, are socialists, meaning, party over state, along with the end justifies the means.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Max Blumenthal Channels Leni Riefenstahl and Celebrates Hamas: Andrew Harrod

Posted By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/06/max-blumenthal-channels-leni-riefenstahl-the-triumph-of-hamas

“Can any parallels be made then to Nazism and Judaism?” asked a questioner in a conference room packed with about 100 people at the June 9 screening of Killing Gaza at Washington, DC’s rabidly anti-Israel Jerusalem Fund. This shockingly absurd query typified the atmosphere surrounding the latest screed against Israel produced by “gonzo journalist” Max Blumenthal and his equally deranged colleague Dan Cohen.

“Judeo-Nazi” analogies are nothing new for the Jerusalem Fund presenters Blumenthal and Cohen. Cohen has previously described how their film about Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge military campaign against Hamas terrorists in Gaza “was inspired by” a past “bracing portrait of the Nazi death camps.” Blumenthal has similarly written that the film chronicles “Israel’s wholesale criminality” and “sadistic Israeli violence.”

Blumenthal and Cohen have discussed Killing Gaza on Christopher Hedges’ On Contact talk show on RT, the Russian state-funded television channel thatregistered in 2017 under America’s Foreign Agent Registration Act. Like many other American leftists, he has found a home at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda mouthpiece, where RT newscasters like the 9/11 TrutherAbby Martin go to extreme lengths to vilify Israel and its use of “Hitler’s methods.” RT’s Israel-hatred befits Hedges, who wrote in a review of Killing Gaza that “toxic racism and militarism infect Israeli society.”

Cohen told host Hedges that Gaza is a “man-made intentional hell for what Israel considers non-humans” and made false allegations about Israel depriving Gaza of water. In contrast, Israel has over the years almost doubled the amount of water supplied to the Palestinian territories under the 1993 Oslo Accords and hasworked to improve Gaza’s desalinization and water treatment capabilities. Hedges concurred that the film supposedly documented common canards about “one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters,” notwithstanding Gaza’scommercial development and obesity public health problems.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

“Immigration” Sydney M. Williams

Posted By on June 21st, 2018

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

No human with an ounce of compassion wants to see children separated from their parents. The bond, especially between a mother who bore and gave birth to a child, is unbreakable. Yet, plying heart strings will not resolve the problem we have with illegals (or smugglers claiming to be parents) who seek asylum, or have chosen to by-pass the legal immigration process and have crossed without papers into our country, by way of an unsecured border.

As everyone knows, border guards have only four choices when families are caught at the border, attempting to cross illegally, without proper authorization: Violators can be sent back into Mexico, which was one step the Obama Administration took. The entire family can be released into our country, pending a hearing to which they would voluntarily have to return, another choice the Obama Administration made. (Statistics suggest that 80% of those who disappear into the nether reaches of the country do not show up for scheduled hearings.)Three, the entire family (including the children)can be incarcerated, pending a hearing. And four, the parents can be incarcerated, pending a hearing, while the children are housed separately from their parents. The first choice commits the family to extreme hardship, as Mexico has no interest in taking them in. They must return, unescorted, to their country of origin. The second encourages the illegal entry into our country of not only asylum seekers but potential terrorists and those who choose not to play by the rules. The third would be cruelest to the children. The fourth, the option chosen by the Trump Administration[1](and distasteful to all, including Mr. Trump), highlights the need for comprehensive immigration reform – something both Parties in Congress, the author of our laws, has studiously avoided. Mr. Trump has been blamed, but the real culprit is Congress. Especially cynical are the misanthropists in the media and Washington who let crocodile tears detract from their failed policies

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The IG Report Should End Mueller’s Obstruction Investigation By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on June 21st, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/mueller-investigation-obstruction-ig-report-should-end/

The same logic that spared FBI and Justice Department officials harsher treatment in Michael Horowitz’s report should inoculate the president.

While generally cautious about criticizing Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the Clinton-emails investigation, Trump supporters have taken aim at its chief logical flaw: Although key investigators harbored anti-Trump and pro-Clinton bias, and even made statements indicating an intention to act on that bias, the IG did not find that this bias was the proximate cause of any particular investigative decision.

This conclusion is easy to rebut; I did so myself in a column last week. Yet, the Trump camp should also be embracing it. Why? Because if this is the Justice Department’s position, then Special Counsel Robert Mueller has no business investigating the president for obstruction.

The IG’s rationale has been vulnerable to attack because of the way it has been distorted by FBI director Christopher Wray and congressional Democrats. They blithely assert that the IG found no bias in the FBI’s decision-making. That claim insults our intelligence.

The report documents a surfeit of political animus. Chapter Twelve, in which the IG marshals text messages and other recorded communications between investigators, is breathtaking. The report does not say that the investigators’ manifest loathing of Trump, their expressed intent to derail his presidential bid, and their desire to bring about his impeachment were irrelevant. It says that (a) because there were legitimate policy considerations that could have informed every one of their investigative decisions, and (b) because, as a matter of law, the FBI and Justice Department have broad discretion to make such judgment calls, (c) it is not the IG’s place to second-guess those decisions.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

No, Americans Who Want Border Security Aren’t Anti-Immigrant After accounting for taxes illegal immigrants pay, we’re still supporting them to the tune of some $123 billion. Don’t we need that money for the opioid crisis, infrastructure, and aircraft carriers?By Donna Carol Voss

Posted By on June 21st, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/21/no-americans-want-border-wall-arent-anti-immigrant/

A recent Quinnipiac poll confirms what most of us already know: Republicans favor a border wall, Democrats don’t. In April, 81 percent of Republicans favored a wall, while only 4 percent of Democrats did.

In the eyes of the Left, this makes Republicans “the bad guys.” They are portrayed as a stain on our national character — “That’s not who we are” — and a shameful blight on our heritage — “We’re a nation of immigrants.” Worst of all, they are portrayed as anti-immigrant.

But they’re not. They’re anti-illegal immigration, and there’s a big difference. It isn’t personal.

Any decent person’s heart breaks at the plight of Central American parents worried sick that MS-13 will recruit their children, if they aren’t killed by violence first. (Read up on what happens to unaccompanied minors once they get here, however. Out of 214 recent MS-13 gang arrests, 30 percent had crossed the border illegally as unaccompanied minors.)

Drug cartels in Mexico feed on broken families, poverty, and hopelessness, aided by rife government corruption and an astronomical murder rate (25,340 in 2017). We want to rescue as many of these people as we can, but there’s a limit to how many can join our country every year. We have a right to control who gets in, for our own survival.

It is not anti-immigrant to want to block illegal aliens from pouring into our country. Even if every single one were a squeaky clean Mother Teresa, the sheer fact of their presence robs citizens and legal residents of something precious. Some of the calculus is economic, some isn’t.
Illegal Immigrants Are a Big Net Economic Loss

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Peter Smith : Wrongheaded About ‘Rights’

Posted By on June 21st, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/06/wrongheaded-rights/

To maintain our right not to be assaulted and perhaps killed we all, as individuals — men and, yes, women — must keep our wits about us. This is such a straightforward proposition it shouldn’t need to be explained, least of all to the Premier of a state whose courts regularly turn monsters loose.

I don’t want to comment directly on the horrific and tragic rape and murder of Eurydice Dixon in a Melbourne park in the early hours last Wednesday. It is so sad and beyond anything that words can convey. I want to comment first on the Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and second on women’s (so-called) rights.

Andrews is quite clearly stupid beyond the normal degree of stupidity that is increasingly evident among the political class. Among other inanities he reportedly broadcast this message to women:

“Go out with friends at night. Or don’t. Go about your day exactly as you intend, on your terms. Because women don’t need to change their behaviour. Men do.”

Apparently, “his comments have been met with a wave of approval online, with many women thanking him for his remarks.” They are simply deluded. He, on the other hand, is not only deluded but, much worse, recklessly irresponsible with the lives of others.

I am a father of two daughters. I can’t imagine ever advising them to go out alone where they liked and when they liked? That would be a form of abuse. No-one should be advised to be careless of their circumstances – least of all young women. The Victoria Police were right to advise women to be careful of their circumstances. This is one of the reported tweets, critical of the Victorian police, no doubt typical of many:

“Frankly I think Victoria Police should apologise for their victim-blaming and completely useless ‘advice’ following the murder of Eurydice Dixon. Don’t tell us to be more careful. Tell men they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law if they choose to commit a crime!”

I don’t want to be too damning of this sentiment. It comes from an emotional and passionate place. But it is silly, and the premier of a state has a duty to steer the conversation towards a measured place. He has abjectly failed in that duty. And to say that men have to “change” is bordering on the deranged. Men do not commit atrocities on women. Monsters do. Men protect women from monsters. That’s their job and most try to do it as they are able and as circumstances allow.