NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The ‘Chekhov’s Gun’ of Political Intimidation Having brought onto stage the weapon of political intimidation, the Left intends to use it at every turn. Groups like Shutdown D.C. and Ruth Sent Us are just the latest examples. By Kyle Shideler

Posted By on July 13th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/12/the-chekhovs-gun-of-political-intimidation/

“If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter, it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
— Anton Chekhov

An attempt to accost Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh at Morton’s Steakhouse, a popular D.C. hangout, made national news last week. The move represented a mobile continuation of the tactic of targeting conservative justices outside their homes.

The targeting of Kavanaugh was led by antifa-aligned protest group Shutdown D.C., which has drawn attention in recent years for advocating the targeted protesting of political opponents. The group has since escalated by tweeting out a bounty for information about the location of conservative justices and posting flyers similarly offering money in exchange for facilitating harassment.

In response to the ongoing targeted abuse of judges, the head of security for the Supreme Court wrote a letter to Virginia and Maryland governors urging them to take action using existing state and local laws. Governors Larry Hogan and Glenn Youngkin (both Republicans) had previously written a joint letter to Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland asking the Department of Justice to enforce federal laws prohibiting the targeted intimidation of judges. Youngkin had also asked local county government officials to provide additional security for the homes of justices, but was given short shrift by the overwhelmingly Democratic county board of supervisors.

Meanwhile, Shutdown D.C. continues to operate openly and unapologetically.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Left’s obsession with transgenderism is barbaric By Patricia McCarthy

Posted By on July 13th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/07/the_lefts_obsession_with_transgenderism_is_barbaric.html

How to explain the Democrat party’s obsession with transgenderism, with shoving it down the throats of every American, from ages five and up?  

It’s inexplicable.  

Does every registered Democrat support confusing small children with gender identity indoctrination?  That can’t be true.  

But school districts across the country are using books about all manner of sexual issues, including pornography, topics way beyond the grasp of small children.  And they are using those books without parents’ knowledge.  When parents discover these books and object, they are threatened.  Grooming, a word that once applied to other cultures or the worst sadists, grooming young children for sex with adults, now applies to public schools in America with the full support of American Democrats in Congress.

No sentient person can legitimately, in good conscience, believe that the gender of an infant should be excluded from birth certificates or that it is fair for athletes born male to compete against girls because they identify as female. This is putting an end to women in sports. 

The Biden administration is particularly preoccupied with the “plight” of trans people, as if they are a significant proportion of the population.  They are not.  They are about 0.6% according to the CDC.  And for that 0.6%, people are cancelled, fired from their jobs, banned from Twitter, et al if they use a wrong pronoun or make a comment deemed transphobic.  It’s all surreal.  

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

America’s Retreat by 1,000 Small Steps by Peter Schweizer ******

Posted By on July 13th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18698/retreat-small-steps

Thanks to a Treasury Department “interpretation,” Americans can still own stock in companies that were placed on a blacklist by the Trump administration because of their direct ties to the Chinese military.

Thanks to the Biden administration, the “China Initiative” at the Department of Justice to crack down on Chinese attempts to acquire or steal American technology has been discontinued.

Thanks to the Biden administration’s “green energy” enthusiasm, tariffs on solar panels made by Asian countries who are assembling or repackaging solar panels made in China were removed.

The Biden administration has also signaled its intention to remove or lift other tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on Chinese products. It has also been friendlier toward Chinese companies such as Huawei and ByteDance (owner of TikTok) in recent weeks.

And all of this has been done with zero concessions from the Chinese government on any of the outstanding diplomatic, military, strategic, health or trade issues that so concern most Americans.

Because the Biden family has been so deeply involved and so vehemently denied their involvement with Chinese business, the next question is as inescapable as the first: Does the flow of money to the Biden family from China influence the foreign policy of the United States?

President Joe Biden has been lying about his knowledge and likely his involvement in his son’s business dealings since at least 2018.

That is the inescapable conclusion to draw from a short voicemail recording discovered on the laptop computer that belonged to his son, Hunter and reported by The Daily Mail and The New York Post recently.

It begins innocently enough. “Hey pal, it’s Dad,” Joe Biden begins. “It’s 8:15 on Wednesday night. If you get a chance, just give me a call. Nothing urgent. I just wanted to talk to you.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

New York City’s Assault on Self-Defense

Posted By on July 13th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/new-york-citys-assault-on-self-defense/

Alvin Bragg, one of the contemptible squad of George Soros-backed urban district attorneys who stormed into office vowing to radically rework the justice system, is proving as good as his word. New York City’s historic crime problem, which was under control as recently as three years ago, is continuing to get worse as the first-year New York County DA sends all of the wrong signals. His latest outrage is to charge a Manhattan bodega worker with murder after he defended himself against an attacker.

Bodegas — small grocery stores strongly associated with hard-working immigrants — can be dangerous places, particularly at night, and police can be slow to respond. Yet the city has for decades made it almost impossible to obtain a license to legally carry a firearm. Jose Alba, a 61-year-old U.S. citizen who emigrated from the Dominican Republic and works at the Blue Moon store on upper Broadway in Harlem, had a knife behind the counter, and was forced to use it against Austin Simon, 35. Simon entered the store in a rage after Simon’s girlfriend tried to buy a bag of chips with an EBT card and the card was declined. As shown in surveillance radio, Simon stormed behind the register and attacked Alba. Alba then stabbed Simon at least five times, fatally, at which point the girlfriend attacked and stabbed the bodega worker. (She hasn’t been charged at all.)

Alba clearly acted in self-defense and should have been charged with nothing. Moreover, Simon was a career criminal who had at least eight prior arrests on such charges as assault and robbery, and was on parole for assaulting a police officer. Yet Bragg brought the harshest imaginable charge against Alba, second-degree murder, and initially held him on an excessive bail of $250,000, which was reduced to $50,000 after a community outcry. Bodega workers and the New York Post have taken up Alba’s case as a cause celèbre, and because there is no recall mechanism in the state to threaten Bragg’s job, Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin has renewed his vows to simply remove Bragg from office on grounds, by now well-supported, that Bragg is not applying the law. Even a (failed) Democratic candidate for governor and member of Congress, Representative Tom Suozzi, has supported this unusual maneuver. 

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Search For A New MIT President: The Key Considerations Tom Hafer and Henry I. Miller

Posted By on July 13th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/13/the-search-for-a-new-mit-president-the-key-considerations/

The incumbent president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. L. Rafael Reif, will step down at the end of 2022, and a search committee has been formed to name his replacement. What qualities should his successor have, we wondered?

To answer that, we must first ask: What is MIT’s history, and what should it be now? We, two alumni who graduated decades ago, remember MIT as a mecca of cutting-edge science and technology. Two of the professors who taught us were Nobel laureates; and others boasted achievements like being the pioneer of strobe photography; another was the “father of molecular medicine,” for having discovered the mutation that causes sickle-cell anemia; and several had worked on the Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bombs that ended World War II. Students could often work for these professors, in addition to getting a rigorous world-class technical education. (And we do mean rigorous.) Perhaps most critical of all, we learned problem-solving, an integral part of our coursework from day one, and of our lives post-graduation.

MIT should also be a place where intellectual ferment routinely takes place, where new and different ideas are welcomed and debated openly, and where every person is treated equally based on his or her abilities, achievements, and effort. Unfortunately, MIT has drifted away from this ethic. It is imperative that the new president address this.

What are the symptoms of this drift? The most obvious is an internal poll of MIT faculty taken in fall of 2021. In that poll, well over 50% of faculty answered yes to the question, “Do you feel on an everyday basis that your voice, or the voices of your colleagues are constrained at MIT?”

The responses to another question were even more chilling: “Are you worried given the current atmosphere in society that your voice or your colleagues’ voices are increasingly in jeopardy?“  More than 77% answered “Yes.” If even 10% of your faculty answers either of these questions affirmatively, you have a problem. The fact that over half did so indicates an emergency. And yet the current administration sputters on as if nothing is wrong and, in fact, doubles down on demanding and enforcing “wokeness” and political correctness.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Media Berates J.K. Rowling for Complaining About Trans Video Calling For Her Death Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on July 13th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/07/media-berates-jk-rowling-complaining-about-trans-daniel-greenfield/

Every now and then the media rolls out another hit piece on J.K. Rowling for the unfathomable crime of objecting to the erasure of women. The latest hit piece comes out of Politico, which decided to take a break from breathlessly reporting on J6 and stories planted by the Biden administration to go after the Harry Potter author.

One excerpt though really stands out.

“While Rowling’s critics haven’t held back in their attacks, the Harry Potter author hasn’t hesitated from responding in kind — at least when it involves punching down.”

Punching down, an illegitimate woke concept that claims political standing and perceptions of power, not standards, determine the legitimacy of behavior, is quite something to apply to death threats.

However, in April, Rowling responded to an amateur music video with lyrics “J.K. hope you fit in a hearse” by tweeting a public complaint — eliciting a howl of protest from the original poster (whose video was taken down by Twitter).

“The most powerful TERF in the world (billionaire, lives in castle, 14.1M followers) sent a mob after me (broke, lives with mom, 1.1k followers),” tweeted Faye Fadem, the bedroom producer behind the video and a trans man. “She made a conscious choice to target me because she felt threatened by a young trans woman expressing herself. If u want to come in here and say ‘but u did death threat’ I’m an artist with 0 power expressing myself.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Mullah Mischief in Latin America Venezuela becomes a forward base for Iran against the United States. Joseph Puder

Posted By on July 13th, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/mullah-mischief-latin-america-joseph-puder/

Iran and its primary terror agent, Hezbollah, are a threat not only to the security of Israel and the Arab Gulf states — their tentacles stretch across the globe. In Latin America, Iran is building a strategic response against the United States with a protected base in Venezuela under President Nicolas Maduro. Iran’s build-up of long-range ballistic missiles, and the Russian supply of the lethal S-400 missile system to Iran, pose a serious threat to the security of the United States. These Russian missiles will eventually end up in Venezuela. Russia is poised to retaliate against the U.S. supply of missiles to Ukraine, by arming both Iran and Venezuela with the S-400 missile system.

With the Biden administration’s desperate quest for a nuclear deal with Iran, it is crucial now more than ever for Washington to include Iran’s long-range ballistic missile development onto the nuclear talks agenda among other forums. The Ayatollahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran may eventually drop their demand for lifting the U.S. sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), since they already have cleverly deceived the western powers by deliberately buying time to be weeks away from having enough enriched uranium for several bombs. Robert Malley, the U.S. envoy to the Vienna nuclear negotiations with Iran, recently warned that Iran can “make a nuclear bomb within a matter of weeks.”

Last March, the Biden administration flirted with lifting oil sanctions on Venezuela in order to temper surging oil prices. White House and State Department officials traveled to Caracas, Venezuela to meet with the anti-American President Maduro, the Venezuelan dictator. It seemed as if the Biden administration was willing to fund a ruthless dictator, who is serving Iran’s strategic interests in facilitating an IRGC forward military base against the U.S. At the same time, however, the Biden administration is unwilling to encourage investments in domestic energy production.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Americans See Jan. 6 Hearings As Politically Biased And Anti-Trump: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

Posted By on July 13th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/13/americans-see-jan-6-hearings-as-politically-biased-and-anti-trump-ii-tipp-poll/

The Jan. 6 hearings mark the third major investigation into former President Donald Trump’s time in office. To many people, in particular Republicans, these investigations have looked suspiciously politicized, especially the most recent hearings. What’s surprising is that a large share of Democrats agree, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll results show.

Republicans have been front and center in criticizing the Jan. 6 hearings as little more than a political circus intended to besmirch Trump.

Even the makeup of the “bipartisan” committee has come in for ridicule, since the two GOP members of the nine-member panel were handpicked by the Democrats — contrary to the common practice of having a party select its own representatives. This wasn’t helped by the fact that the two GOP members, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, are both vociferous critics of Trump and voted for his impeachment.

But is the deck really stacked against the controversial former president? Republicans give a resounding “yes.” But most surprising of all, many, if not most, Democrats agree.

In the July 2022 online I&I/TIPP Poll, we asked 1,643 adults across the country whether they agreed with the following two statements:

“Some say that the Jan. 6 committee was handpicked and represents only Democrats’ points of view.”
“Some say that the Jan. 6 committee’s main aim is to ensure President Trump can’t run in 2024.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

‘Anonymous’ U.S. leaks divulging Israel’s secrets to Iran By Bob Unruh

Posted By on July 13th, 2022

https://thejewishvoice.com/2022/07/anonymous-u-s-leaks-divulging-israels-secrets-to-iran/

Someone in the Biden administration may be “leaking” details about Israel’s covert operations in order to try to persuade Iranian leaders to return to the failed Iran nuclear deal created – at a cost of billions of dollars – by Barack Obama.

President Donald Trump withdrew America from the deal, which purported to prevent the rogue regime in Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons but actually only delayed that, when he determined there was no benefit to the United States. Joe Biden has been trying to resurrect it.

Now Just the News is reporting just as Biden is preparing to travel to Israel and Saudi Arabia next week, that “anonymous U.S. officials” are “leaking information to the media details about alleged covert Israeli operations against Iran, from targeted killings to explosions at nuclear sites.”

Those leaks could, in fact, generate a number of complications, from retaliation by Iran to failed efforts to take out Iran’s threats.

“It’s a sign of extraordinary incompetence and unprofessionalism from Biden and his foreign policy team,” Fred Fleitz, a former CIA analyst who also served as a senior staffer on both the House Intelligence Committee and the National Security Council, told Just the News.

“It’s outrageous they would leak this kind of information.”

The “anonymous” reports have included those made recently to CNN about Israel increasing its covert attacks in Iran, the report said.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why Arabs Are Fed up With the Palestinians by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on July 13th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18694/arabs-fed-up-with-palestinians

The Palestinians can only blame themselves for antagonizing their Arab brothers and consequently losing the Arab money. The Palestinians have been spitting in the face of the Arab countries, while at the same time expecting these countries to continue funding them.

The Arabs are clearly not as naïve as the Americans and Europeans, who are continuing to pour millions of dollars annually on the Palestinians without conditions and without demanding accountability.

Had the Palestinians welcomed the many peace accords between Israel and the Arab states instead of condemning them and bad-mouthing the Arab leaders, they would have been in a much better situation today. They would have continued to receive financial aid from the Arabs and been able to use this money to build a better future for their children

The Arab countries have more urgent issues to deal with than the corrupt, thankless Palestinian leaders do. You can start with the welfare of their own people. The Palestinian leadership, by contrast, is happy to fail its people by indoctrinating generation after generation with bloodlust for Jews. When Palestinian society finds itself left in the global dust of progress, it can thank its leaders for bringing them to that sorry pass.

The Palestinians are disappointed: their Arab brothers have stopped providing them with financial aid. The truth is that most of the Arab countries long ago turned their backs on the Palestinians. They can only blame themselves for ruining their relations with the rest of the Arab world.