NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

MAGA Dog for Trump? by Lawrence Kadish

Posted By on September 16th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19974/trump-maga-dog

If he wants to return to the White House, Donald Trump needs a dog.

That is not an idle observation.

White House history suggests that those presidents who enjoyed canine company in the Oval Office were better able to connect with their national constituency. No surprise when you consider that some 65 million American households report that they own a dog. Demographers also find that, as of 2021, the United States had the most dogs in the world per capita, 274 dogs for every 1000 people.

Dogs cannot but make you laugh, compel you to embrace their unconditional love and loyalty, and allow you to be a better person by simply being in the presence of a wagging tail and a wet nose. A candidate with a dog at his side sends a message that they share a unique insight into these qualities celebrated by dog owners across the country.

The importance of dogs in the White House has long been recognized to the point that in 1999, a Presidential Pet Museum was opened. Its mission remains to preserve the artifacts and legacy of Presidential pooches along with other White House pets.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump never had a pet in the White House and he is the poorer for it. It is easily corrected.

George Washington set the precedent. He is reported to have had 20 dogs, and visited the kennels daily to ensure some quality time with the brood when not guiding the new nation through its multiple challenges.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Syria on the Verge of Collapse? by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi

Posted By on September 15th, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19973/syria-on-verge-of-collapse

The country’s southern province of al-Suwayda’, whose population primarily comes from the Druze minority, is currently witnessing protests on an unprecedented scale.

There has also been a definite paradigm shift in these protests: … Calls for the government to resign, for the departure of President Bashar al-Assad and a political transition are now stronger and more prevalent.

However much one might sympathise with the protests, they are probably unlikely to shift the situation in a significant way. The protestors, although immensely courageous, are too few, and have little leverage.

The current status quo means that Syria is effectively divided into three major zones: the majority of the country that is held by the Damascus-based government backed by Russia and Iran; the northeast held by the American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (the second largest zone of control); and parts of the northwest and north of the country on and near the border with Turkey, controlled by an assortment of insurgent factions that are backed by Turkey to varying degrees.

There is much debate about the causes of Syria’s economic downturn, but it seems clear that the decline can be attributed in significant part to the Syrian government’s economic isolation and its shortage of hard currency.

In the meantime, the Syrian government has no real solutions to its economic woes. It has been offering up measures such as increasing the salaries of state employees and military personnel while also raising the price for fuel.

Some impugn government corruption but consider criticism of Assad himself to be a red line: they seem to think that he is doing all he can to try to help the country — while being surrounded by corrupt officials.

It is nonetheless important to be realistic about what these protests can achieve. The protestors remain committed for now to sustaining a civil disobedience movement that is peaceful…. Moreover, the Syrian government is adopting a non-confrontational stance towards the protests. The government seems to have issued general directives to its security forces in the province to lie low and avoid opening fire or any repressive measures unless they are attacked.

There are really only two ways in which Assad can be brought down: either by being militarily overthrown (not being contemplated by any international power) or if the elites propping up his rule decide that his presidency is no longer worth preserving…[I]t seems that those closest to Assad who could bring about his removal from within are either largely unaffected by the situation or possibly even benefitting from it.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Fifth Circuit Rebukes FDA for Banning Ivermectin for Covid-19 By Jerome R. Corsi

Posted By on September 15th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/09/fifth_circuit_rebukes_fda_for_banning_ivermectin_for_covid19.html

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued a unanimous three-judge decision on September 1, 2023, holding that the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) overstepped its statutory authority by attempting to ban using ivermectin to treat COVID-19. In Apter v. Department of Health and Human Services, court concluded, “FDA is not a physician. It has authority to inform, announce, and apprise—but not to endorse, denounce, or advise.”

Writing for the three-judge panel, Circuit Judge Don R. Willett began the court’s opinion by citing the strident nature of the FDA’s opposition to ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment. Willett opened his opinion as follows:

“You are not a horse.”

Or so the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) alerted millions of Americans via social media, midway through the COVID-19 pandemic. The agency had discerned that some people were treating their symptoms using the animal version of a drug called ivermectin. FDA decided to target the practice via the “horse” message—and others like it. The messaging traveled widely across legacy and online media. Left unmentioned in most of that messaging: ivermectin also comes in a human version. And while the human version of ivermectin is not FDA-approved to treat the coronavirus, some people were using it off-label for that purpose.

The case involved three physicians, Robert L. Apter, Mary Talley Bowden, and Paul E. Marik, each of whom jeopardized his or her professional career by prescribing ivermectin for COVID-19 in defiance of the FDA warnings. Apter and Bowden claim to have treated or consulted more than 9,000 COVID-19 patients, with each experiencing a 99 percent survival rate, despite regularly prescribing them ivermectin off-label as a treatment.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden and China-Appeasement “I want to see China succeed economically.” by Joseph Klein

Posted By on September 15th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-and-china-appeasement/

While Joe Biden was a U.S. senator from Delaware, he became one of the leading advocates for admitting China to the World Trade Organization and expanding trade between China and the United States. “The United States welcomes the emergence of a prosperous, integrated China on the global stage, because we expect this is going to be a China that plays by the rules,” then-Senator Biden declared in 2001 during his visit to China. While Joe Biden was serving as the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he helped enable China’s rapid economic ascent at America’s expense.

A decade later, while serving as vice president during the Obama administration, Joe Biden again spoke in favor of a rising China during a state visit in August 2011: “Let me be clear: I believed in 1979 and said so then, and I believe now that a rising China is a positive development not only for the people of China but for the United States and the world as a whole.”

Now Joe Biden is the president of the United States and the leader of the free world. Despite all the evidence of the Communist Chinese regime’s exploitation of its “rising” power to the detriment of the United States and its allies in the Asia-Pacific region, Biden remains a cheerleader for China’s economic wellbeing. He is as wrong-headed about the Communist Chinese regime today as he has been for his entire career in government.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

John Steinbeck and the Fall and Rise of Israel’s ‘Mount Hope’ How a 19th century massacre of Americans in Israel shaped a writer and changed two nations. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on September 15th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/john-steinbeck-and-the-fall-and-rise-of-israels-mount-hope/

In 1966, a year before the war that would fundamentally change the country and the region, John Steinbeck arrived.

“I want to see everything in Israel,” he told the press.

Outraged novels of class warfare like ‘Grapes of Wrath’ had once made the author a favorite of the leftist establishment, but Steinbeck had turned to other topics. He considered his life’s work to be ‘East of Eden’, a retelling of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel in California, which touched on his own dark family history that he had followed all the way back to Israel.

Steinbeck’s support for the Vietnam War had infuriated the literary establishment and even though he had won the Nobel Prize and his acceptance speech became one of the most famous of its kind, he continued to be dismissed as an outdated fossil. And the author, prone to an old school literary machismo, who never much liked parties and crowds, dismissed them.

After facing the establishment’s fury over the Vietnam War, Steinbeck was not worried about the leftist reaction to his visit to Israel. And he looked at Israel through the lens of a writer who had chronicled pioneers and messianists, but also a man who had come to see the world caught in a struggle between good and evil, the forces of democracy against those of Communism.

BOOKS Comments turned off

A Compendium of Everything Wrong With Barack Obama’s Legacy A new book reveals how – and why – our nation has been brought to its present dire straits. by Kenneth Levin

Posted By on September 15th, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-compendium-of-everything-wrong-with-barack-obamas-legacy-2/

Perhaps the greatest service of Barack Obama’s True Legacy, the recently published collection of penetrating essays on the Obama presidency by a number of knowledgeable and trenchant authors, edited by Jamie Glazov, is its contribution to collective memory.

President Obama’s assault on Americans’ constitutional rights and protections as well as on the nation’s constitutionally defined governmental institutions and their respective authority entailed myriad particulars.  It included undermining of First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and religious freedom.  It extended to usurpation of the legislative authority of Congress and disregard for the constitutional authority of the Supreme Court.

In addition, Obama compromised the rule of law and protection of rights more broadly.  He ignored the findings of lower federal courts.  He subverted federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, and other departments of the federal government, to illegal politicization and lawless attacks on perceived political enemies.  He promoted federal intrusion in and subversion of state and local law enforcement, also in the service of political ends.

The collective impact of Obama’s abuses of power, the “transformation” of America that he so often promised, was the creation of a less democratic, post-constitutional, authoritarian nation.  Consistent with his pursuit of this transformed America, Obama, throughout his presidency, lent his support to and openly advocated for groups and individuals, domestic and foreign, associated with anti-American, anti-democratic, authoritarian ideologies, particularly of the pro-communist and Islamist variety.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is Civic Decline an Existential Threat?John O. McGinnis

Posted By on September 15th, 2023

https://lawliberty.org/is-civic-decline-an-existential-threat/

Several factors combine to make our discordant times more perilous than most of those in America’s past.

The United States is going through one of the most politically divisive times in its history. Karl Rove, the Republican strategist, reminded us last month that sharp and seemingly intractable disagreements are the familiar grist of our national experience. Americans faced them around the election of 1800, in the leadup to the Civil War, in the Gilded Age, around the New Deal, and in the tumultuous 1960s. Yet we resolved all but one of those periods peacefully and emerged from these conflicts on a continued trajectory of ever-greater prosperity and global dominance.

Rove tells a hopeful tale, but past results are no guarantee of future performance. Four new factors combine to make our times more perilous than most past flareups of disunion. First, never have we had an educational establishment so hostile to the story of American exceptionalism, and as a result, never have the young been so willing to think America was bad from the beginning. Second, our cross-political associations have radically declined and with them the bonds that draw Americans together across partisan divides. Instead, we sort ourselves by geography and employment into blue and red bubbles. Third, traditional religious belief has dissipated. People still worship but ever more at the altar of politics. These comprehensive ideological views may give meaning to citizens’ lives but they make compromise hard. And fourth, the stakes (with the exception of those around the Civil War) are generally higher. Government is bigger and thus its control brings greater rewards. Even more importantly, many people claim—sometimes with not implausible reasons—that humanity faces existential crises, like those from climate change and AI. It is hard to feel goodwill to opponents who you think are bent on destroying the human race.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Post-Postmodern America-Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 15th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/09/14/post-postmodern-america/

When the progressive woke revolution took over traditional America, matters soon reached the level of the ridiculous.

Take the following examples of woke craziness and hypocrisy, perhaps last best witnessed during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

The Biden administration from its outset wished to neuter immigration law. It sought to alter radically the demography of the U.S. by stopping the border wall and allowing into the United States anyone who could walk across the southern border.

Over seven million did just that. Meanwhile, Biden ignored the role of the Mexican cartels in causing nearly 100,000 ANNUAL American fentanyl deaths.

Then border states finally wised up.

They grasped that the entire open-borders, “new Democratic majority” leftwing braggadocio was predicated on its hypocritical architects staying as far away as possible from their new constituents.

So cash strapped border states started busing their illegal aliens to sanctuary blue-state jurisdictions.

Almost immediately, once magnanimous liberals, whether in Martha’s Vineyard, Chicago, or Manhattan, stopped virtue-signaling their support for open borders.

Instead, soon they went berserk over the influx.

So now an embarrassed Biden administration still wishes illegal aliens to keep coming but to stay far away from their advocates—by forcing them to remain in Texas.

That means the president has redefined the US. border. It rests now apparently north of Texas, as Biden cedes sovereignty to Mexico.

Precivilizational greens in California prefer blowing up dams to building them.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Bidenomics’ = ‘Bidenflation’

Posted By on September 15th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/09/15/bidenomics-bidenflation/

We can imagine the White House summer meeting as President Joe Biden’s handlers, whoever they might be, desperately tried to figure out how boost his flagging favorability ratings among voters. Some genius, no doubt, shouted out “Bidenomics!” as just the ticket to repair his tattered reputation. They rolled it out and, well, Americans still aren’t buying it.

On Thursday, Biden’s people pushed him out once again to flog the nearly dead Bidenomics horse. At an appearance in Maryland touted by the administration as a “major” economic address, Biden told voters that his agenda is about “investing in America and investing in Americans,” and referred to Republican plans to reduce federal spending and lower taxes as “MAGAnomics.”

So far, such rah-rah, pro-Bidenomics rhetoric hasn’t convinced voters.

A recent CNN-SSRS poll, for instance, found that 58% of Americans say that Bidenomics has made the economy worse, up from 50% last year. This, despite a relentless tide of positive press in the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, a just-released Rasmussen Reports poll finds 52% saying the economy has become “worse” under Biden, versus 31% who say it’s improved. And our own recent I&I/TIPP Poll found a similar 51% who disagreed with Biden’s statement that his policies were “turning things around.”

Americans have good reason to be pessimistic. Recent headlines, mostly all about the ravages of inflation, and almost all within the last week, tell you why they’re not buying what Biden has to sell:

Bidenomics In Action: 16.7% Bidenflation — The Chickens Come Home To Roost, Hurting Americans (TIPP Insights)
Biden’s Food Inflation Record: Grocery Prices Up 19.6% (Breitbart)
Bidenomics strikes again: Real household income suffers biggest drop since Great Recession (Washington Examiner)
Credit card and car loan defaults hit 10-year high as inflation squeezes families (New York Post)
5 states’ residents got richer, but 17 states’ got poorer, new Census data shows (The Hill)
Inflation rises for second straight month in August on higher gas costs (USA Today)
Wholesale inflation surges more than expected in August (Fox News)
Inflation is weighing down Americans. Many trust Trump, more than Biden, to fix it (USA Today)
In a bad omen for inflation, US oil prices top $90 a barrel for the first time this year (CNN)

It seems there are lots of inflationary “bad omens” these days. At the heart of it all is what we might just as well call “Bidenflation.”

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

The Biden Administration and the Threat of Another Attack on America Rachel Ehrenfeld

Posted By on September 15th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/columns/rachel-ehrenfeld/2023/09/13/the-biden-administration-and-the-threat-of-another-attack-on-america-n1726858

On Sept. 11, 2001, at 8:45 a.m., I was on the phone with the European Wall Street Journal editor. We were discussing my op-ed on what, at that time, the editor described as an exotic subject: financing terrorism. The paper planned to run it the next day. 

The TV’s regular morning chatter in the background suddenly changed, and a frightened voice announced that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, disrupting our conversation. I rushed to my window, which had a clear view of downtown Manhattan and the World Trade Center, and saw smoke rising in the distance, quickly turning into thick, black clouds engulfing the Twin Towers. Soon, the sky turned black, and the buildings disappeared altogether.

I called the editor back — it was still possible to get a connection to Europe — and after describing the horrors I was witnessing I suggested a new lead for the op-ed. I knew instinctively that this was no accident but a terror attack.

My op-ed, “Evil’s Unwitting Helper,” appeared on the morning of Sept. 12, 2001. I wrote that “terrorism does not happen in a political vacuum. The policies pursued by Western nations impact directly on both the means available to terrorists and the motivations driving their evil agendas. It is imperative that we assess what has gone wrong and begin to set those policies right.”

This disaster was the reason for my writing the book “Funding Evil, How Terrorism is Financed — and How to Stop It,” which detailed the many ways used to fund terrorism and demanded to stop the paymasters who make terrorists’ activities possible so that the horror of September 11 never happen again.

It took some time for the U.S. government to confirm that al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist organizations have been raising money through charitable organizations, fundraising in mosques, and revenues from legal businesses such as used-cars sales, honey manufacturing, clothing stores, groceries, and mining, as well as and illegal businesses, such as drugs, arms, and human trafficking, to mention but a few. Today, as before, they are often still beneficiaries of states that provide money, arms, training camps, and haven.