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Elizabeth Warren refuses DNA test to prove Native Ameriican heritage By Marisa Schultz

Posted By on March 12th, 2018

WASHINGTON – Sen. Elizabeth Warren batted down calls for her to take a DNA test to prove her Native American heritage in an interview that aired Sunday.

“I know who I am. And never used it for anything. Never got any benefit from it anywhere,” Warren said of her ancestry on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The Massachusetts Democrat has been under increased pressure to provide evidence of ​her ​Native American roots, with President Trump repeatedly mocking her as “Pocahontas” as recently as Saturday.

An editorial this month in Massachusetts’s Berkshire Eagle urged Warren to buy a DNA test for $99 to resolve the issue once and for all.

“All the senator needs to do is spit into a tube, wait a few weeks and get her answer,” the paper said.

Asked whether she’d take an ancestry test, Warren said she wants to hold onto the folklore of her parents’ love story.

“My mother and daddy were born and raised in Oklahoma,” Warren said. “My daddy first saw my mother when they were both teenagers. He fell in love with this tall, quiet girl who played the piano. Head over heels. But his family was bitterly opposed to their relationship because she was part Native American. They eventually eloped.”

She said her parents survived the Great Depression and other hardships as they raised her and her three brothers.

“That’s the story that my brothers and I all learned from our mom and our dad, from our grandparents,” Warren said. “It’s a part of me and nobody’s going to take that part of me away.”

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Stormy Daniels and Ted Kennedy John Hinderaker

Posted By on March 12th, 2018

The Democrats are trying to make something out of Donald Trump’s alleged dalliance, twelve years ago, with porn performer Stormy Daniels. I wrote about it here. Frankly, I don’t think anyone cares.

But the story is interesting because it raises questions about what, in our era, constitutes a scandal. Trump’s long-ago romps with Daniels–assuming the stories are true–don’t qualify. There is one person, of course, who has a right to be outraged and probably is, but Melania doesn’t work for the Washington Post or the New York Times, and what she makes of the story is none of our business.

Worst case, Trump paid Stormy Daniels. But he didn’t kill her. That distinguishes him from the Liberal Lion of the Senate. If you want a scandal, and a cover-up that succeeded to a remarkable degree, look no further than Chappaquiddick. The Democratic Party conspired to cover up Ted Kennedy’s crime–manslaughter, in a particularly vile form–to preserve his political viability, at the cost of an innocent young woman’s life.

To this day, most people have no idea what the Chappaquiddick scandal was all about. That is how successful the Democrats’ cover-up has been. Most Americans assume that Kennedy was guilty of drunk driving and negligently causing the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. But the truth is much worse.

Several books have told the real story, but the movie Chappaquiddick may finally blow the lid off the Democrats’ cover-up. Based on the trailers, it apparently will tell the truth: that Ted Kennedy, after driving off a bridge into Poucha Pond, escaped from his car but made no attempt to save Miss Kopechne. That Kopechne didn’t drown, but eventually suffocated for lack of oxygen as she waited for Kennedy to rescue her. That Kopechne could have been saved if Kennedy had simply called the local rescue squad. That Kennedy was such a self-centered coward that he left Kopechne to die, concerned only for his own political future. That instead of calling for help, he walked back to the house where his party was still in progress. That when he arrived, he tried to convince his cousin Joe Gargan to say that he had been driving the car. That he never did call the police to report the accident, but rather spent the night trying to concoct an alibi. That the Democrats fixed the legal process so that Kennedy would pay no meaningful penalty for the death he callously caused. That Kennedy pretended to have been injured in the accident in order to excuse his cowardice, and wore a neck brace to Kopechne’s funeral to further that lie.

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Rex Murphy: The contemptible concept of ‘white privilege’ is just ugly, angry racism

Posted By on March 12th, 2018

Maxime Bernier is right: Identity politics dissolves community, reduces a country to subsets of clans, and obscures the diversity of individual lives

There is much to choose from this week, including the infantile wailing and moronic ignorance of social-justice hooligans driven crazy mad (Pavlovian response) by Jordan Peterson giving a lecture, by invitation, at Queen’s University. (Three cheers for Queen’s president and the law faculty for inviting Dr. Peterson.)

Then there is Justin Trudeau inviting the fanatically anti-Alberta-oil Bill Nye to Ottawa for a public chat on science, the highlight of which was the signal revelation of the centrality of breastfeeding to the scientific method — delivered by our PM. When baby wails and the milk flows, can Planck’s constant be far behind?

As well: Jaspal Atwal, failed Sikh assassin, holding what he ludicrously called a press conference. The only takeaway: his lawyer is scarier, though not necessarily more competent.

More fertile than them all however was the brisk, chippy, and entitled Twitter blast levelled by Liberal MP and person of colour, Celina Caesar-Chavannes (Whitby, Ont.), at Conservative MP Maxime Bernier (Beauce, Que.).

Bernier had criticized an earlier tweet by Ahmed Hussen in which the Immigration Minister said the federal budget was historic for “racialized Canadians.”

Bernier said he deplored that tweet’s “awful jargon,” the pitch to “racialized” Canadians, and put out a plea for “colour blindness,” character over skin colour. His critics, Bernier said, implied (he was) a racist because “I want to live in a society where everyone is treated equally and not defined by their race.”

The parliamentary pigeons were duly agitated. Instanter, Caesar-Chavannes fired off her Twitter blast:

“… please tell this highly privileged man that the ultimate goal of fighting discrimination is equity & justice and not, as he states … to create a colour-blind society.”

That wasn’t going to boil the kettle, so there followed another, more imperious swipe: “@MaximeBernier … colour blindness as a defence actually contributes to racism. Please check your privilege and be quiet.”

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Doomsday Climate Scenarios Are a Joke One study says world GDP will drop 20% by 2100, but Iceland and Mongolia will be rich beyond imagining. Oren Cass

Posted By on March 12th, 2018

Debates over climate change are filled with dire estimates of its cost. This many trillions of dollars of damage, that large a share of gross domestic product destroyed, so-and-so many lives lost, etc. Where do such figures come from? Mostly from laughably bad economics.

This has nothing to do with the soundness of climate science. The games begin when economists get their hands on scientific projections and try to translate temperatures into human impacts. They conduct statistical analyses of the effects that small year-to-year temperature variations have on things like mortality and economic growth, and try to extrapolate to the effect of very large, slow shifts in underlying climate. This creates absurd estimates that ignore human society’s capacity for adaptation. This is the latest iteration of the same mistake environmental catastrophists seem insistent on making in every generation.

The best illustration lies deep in a 2015 paper published in Nature by professors from Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. They found that warm countries tended to experience lower economic growth in abnormally warm years, while cold countries experienced higher growth in such years. Applying that relationship to a much warmer world of the future, they concluded that unmitigated climate change would likely reduce global GDP by more than 20% from what it otherwise would reach by century’s end.

That is roughly an order of magnitude higher than prior estimates, and it has received widespread media attention. But it is as preposterous as it is stunning.

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Cures Welcome at FDA The agency opens its thinking on Alzheimer’s to innovative methods.

Posted By on March 12th, 2018

Few conditions are as wrenching as the destruction of memory known as Alzheimer’s, and few diseases have so eluded drug companies and researchers looking for a cure. So it’s welcome news that the Food and Drug Administration is inviting more innovation, and more broadly revamping the agency’s review process.

FDA recently updated its scientific thinking on early Alzheimer’s, along with other neurological conditions, and this matters because such draft guidance informs industry and academic efforts. One reality of Alzheimer’s is that the disease may “progress invisibly for years,” as Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in the announcement, and by the time clinical symptoms arrive a patient may have lost significant function.

One important change is that FDA says it’s open to considering a novel drug for early stages that can affect cognition, or measures of a person’s thinking or memory. FDA previously said a drug had to deliver on two endpoints: cognition and function, and the latter involves an ability to perform tasks. FDA’s guidance also includes a discussion on biomarkers, which are measurable substances that offer clues to the presence or progress of a disease.

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Tyranny of Shaming American Race Wars as Seen by an Immigrant by Nonie Darwish

Posted By on March 11th, 2018

The bias of many Americans against American values has blinded them from seeing the reasons we immigrants went through hell to come to this country. Many Americans believe that those who criticize the culture from which we escaped must be “Islamophobic.” They seem not to understand why we never again want to see what we have gone through so much to escape from.

Such attacks on the white majority in Americans are, bluntly, racist. It is a shame that so many Americans are unable or refuse to see what many immigrants see: that it was under this white majority that millions of oppressed people — of all colors and creeds — from around the world were rescued from tyranny, Sharia law, slavery, discrimination, Islamism and a miserable existence under corrupt, war-torn and famine-stricken nations. Instead, many seem to want to bring all that here.

We watched American freedoms as a dream: to be able to smile back at a man who opened the door for you without accusations of being a loose woman for smiling. To be able to wear what you want, go out when you want, work or get an education or not, and venture to hope one day to live under a system that respects monogamy and equal rights for women and minorities. Yes, it is the American culture where whites are the majority, no problem with that, that made our dreams come true. Despite its shortcomings no other country in the world offers its citizens the chance to be whatever they would like. We might never get back what we already have.

Every day we hear on television, “We need an honest discussion about race in this country”.

Many well-meaning Americans, however, may have had enough of this endless, empty and dysfunctional discussion of race. To an outsider, Americans seem obsessed with race; and the discussion always deteriorates to shouting, insulting, blaming, finger-pointing, distorting reality and removing any hope of taking responsibility for oneself. The goal of the discussion always seems to be to try to claim that “I am holier than thou.”

We immigrants, on the other hand, the minute we land in the US, we feel the political struggle for our vote.

The day I got my citizenship and went out to register to vote, some people in the room told me to register as a Democrat because the Democrats would protect my rights from the racist establishment and give me “stuff.” Many of the people who had come with me did register that way, but I found the urging alarming. I grew up under a socialist, totalitarian system under the leadership of President Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt — a nanny state that also gives you “stuff’.” What many Americans do not realize is that the free stuff can be too expensive

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Will Putin Ever Leave? Could He if He Wanted? A Stalin biographer contemplates Russia’s weakness today, which makes its current ruler such a threat to the West. By Tunku Varadarajan

Posted By on March 11th, 2018

Russia votes on March 18 in a presidential election that is, let’s agree, lacking in any competitive tension. In fact, says Stephen Kotkin, Vladimir Putin’s re-election is “preordained, a superfluous, if vivid, additional signal of Russia’s debilitating stagnation.”

Few Americans understand Russia better than Mr. Kotkin, who late last year published “ Stalin : Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941,” the second of an intended three-volume biography of the Soviet dictator Mr. Kotkin describes as “the person in world history who accumulated more power than anyone else.”

President Putin, by comparison, is a dictatorial lightweight. “We wouldn’t want to equate Putin with Stalin,” Mr. Kotkin says. The Soviet Union—which Stalin ruled for three hair-raising decades, until his death in 1953—had “one-sixth of the world’s land mass under its control, plus satellites in Eastern Europe and Northeast Asia.” There were also communist parties in scores of countries, which did Russia’s bidding. “We talk about how Russia interferes in our elections today,” says Mr. Kotkin, “but Stalin had a substantial Communist Party in France, and in Italy, inside the Parliament. And when Stalin gave instructions to them, they followed his orders.”

The Soviet economy, at its peak in the 1980s, reached about a third of the size of the U.S. economy. Russia’s economy today, Mr. Kotkin points out, “is one-15th the size of America’s. Russia is very weak, and getting weaker.” Not long ago, Russia was the eighth-largest economy in the world. Today, Mr. Kotkin says, “you’re lucky to get it at 12th or 13th, depending on how you measure things. Another two terms of Putin, and Russia will be out of the top 20.”

But don’t be reassured by Russia’s feebleness. Mr. Kotkin says this weakness is what makes Mr. Putin such a threat to the West. CONTINUE AT SITE

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MARK STEYN ON THE OSCARS

Posted By on March 11th, 2018

“Charmless and unlikeable” seems to be the consensus, and not just re me on “Tucker”. We’ll get to that in a moment. But first a couple of observations from our comment sections that I thought deserved a wider airing:

~An Arizona member of The Mark Steyn Club notes what he calls the “most revolting, hubris-laden” quip from Jimmy Kimmel’s Oscar monologue:

The world is watching us. We need to set an example, and the truth is if we are successful here, if we can work together to stop sexual harassment in the workplace, if we can do that, women will only have to deal with harassment all the time at every other place they go.

As our Club member added:

In other words, everybody else is every bit as bad as we used to be, but we’ve cleaned up our act and you haven’t. Truly odious.

It’s also not true. The most famous (and Oscared) movie producer of the last thirty years has been credibly accused of rape by at least thirteen women and of sexual assault by dozens more. I’m somewhat astonished to find that, in the course of my not terribly glamorous life, I’ve met at least eight of them. It’s quite something to have encountered, in various countries across the decades, eight women all physically attacked by the same man. And those actresses who refused to put out and managed to escape from the room had their careers vaporized – as happened to Mira Sorvino and Rosanna Arquette.

This is Hollywood. Harvey Weinstein co-opted dozens of his colleagues, from executive vice-presidents to lowly interns, to assist as part of their normal business routine in the management of his appetites, whether through laundering payouts or procuring erectile-dysfunction medication. This was an open secret, acknowledged and accepted by everyone from secretaries to Meryl Streep.

But, pace Kimmel, it’s an aspect of the movie business that has no real equivalent in, say, the accountancy business or the feed-store business.

Hollywood is worse. But their sense of their moral superiority is so indestructible that Jimmy Kimmel couldn’t resist lecturing the world that, even as the veil is lifted and the bathrobe cord is unknotted, they’re still better than you – and always will be.

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The Insidious Obama Administration By Julie Kelly

Posted By on March 11th, 2018

This week delivered two bits of very bad news for the Obama Administration: Top Republican lawmakers formally requested the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the Justice Department’s conduct in 2016 and 2017, and long-withheld documents related to the Operation Fast and Furious scandal will finally be released to Congress.

It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bunch.

The public behavior by several Obama officials since Donald Trump’s election has been shameful and shameless. It would be easy to write it off as sour grapes, to treat them like a sad group of ex-wives grumbling about why they got dumped. But their actions are more insidious—and unprecedented—than that. Bitter about their unexpected defeat in November 2016 and terrified that their Trump-Russia conspiracy scheme will be exposed in full by Congress, Obama loyalists have been working overtime to discredit the president, smear Republican lawmakers, and keep the focus on Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign.

Just days after Trump won the election, Josh Earnest, Obama’s press secretary, openly began to question the legitimacy of Trump’s victory and peddled Trump-Russia conspiracy tales to an eager, Trump-hating press corps. Obama holdover Sally Yates refused to enforce Trump’s travel ban in her position as acting Attorney General. (She is now emerging as a central figure in the case against Michael Flynn.)

Loretta Lynch, Obama’s last attorney general, recorded a video advocating violence to resist the new administration, comparing it to other great American struggles. “It has been people, individuals, who have banded together, who simply saw what needed to be done, who have made the difference,” Lynch said. “They’ve marched. They’ve bled. Yes, some of them have died. This is hard. Every good thing is.”

Former FBI director James Comey, who was fired by Trump in May 2017, routinely tweets cryptic—if not childish—political messages aimed at the president and Congress while defending the agency whose credibility he helped degrade:
James Comey
✔ @Comey
All should appreciate the FBI speaking up. I wish more of our leaders would. But take heart: American history shows that, in the long run, weasels and liars never hold the field, so long as good people stand up. Not a lot of schools or streets named for Joe McCarthy.

And ol’ Uncle Joe Biden told CNN’s Chris Cuomo last month that Trump is a “joke.”

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On Trade, Trump Is Acting in the Best Interest of the USA By Howard Richman, Jesse Richman, and Raymond Richman

Posted By on March 11th, 2018

On Thursday, President Trump, surrounded by steel workers in the Oval Office, signed a memo imposing tariffs on steel (25%) and aluminum (10%) that are imported to the United States.

He carved out two exceptions to the tariffs:

Canada and Mexico would be temporarily exempted from the tariffs, pending the outcome of the ongoing renegotiation of NAFTA. The U.S. will likely insist that products imported tariff-free into the U.S. use steel produced within NAFTA.
He directed USTR (U.S. trade representative) Robert C. Lighthizer to negotiate with those military allies that want to be excluded from the tariffs, but such exclusions would require trade reciprocity. The Trump administration is expert at using economic leverage to produce negotiated outcomes that benefit the United States.

This announcement marks a victory for the trade deficit hawks in President Trump’s inner circle of economic advisers, including Wilbur Ross, Trump’s secretary of commerce, and University of California at Irvine economics professor Peter Navarro, who was recently elevated to the ranks of the president’s top-level advisers.

The economic recovery being produced by President Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation is at stake. During the fourth quarter of 2017, real GDP grew at a 2.5% clip, which is good compared to growth rates during the Obama years, but it could have been much better. Here are the contributions to growth during the fourth quarter: