MEDIA Comments turned off

“Very Fake News”? You Bet Trump’s indictment is still an understatement. February 20, 2017 Bruce Bawer

Posted By on February 20th, 2017

I moved to Europe in 1998, and it was just about that time that the New York Times went online in a serious way. I still remember sitting at an Amsterdam café one day at happy hour and having an American tourist say to me, with obvious wonder: “Did you know that you can read the New York Times online every day? The whole paper? For free?” For years thereafter, nytimes.com was the first site I went to every morning. It was, after all, the “newspaper of record.” And at the time, I was a regular contributor to it. In those days, hardly a month went by without my byline appearing in one section of the paper or another – the book review, the travel section, the op-ed page, Leisure & Arts, Week in Review. Even after I published my book on Islam, While Europe Slept, in 2006, and the phone calls and e-mails from the dozen or so Times editors I worked with mysteriously stopped coming all at once, I continued to peruse the Gray Lady while sipping my morning coffee.

Even as it became clearer and clearer that the powers that be at the Times had committed the paper to a see-no-evil position on Islam, I kept reading it, although it became increasingly maddening to do so. After a certain point I started trying to break free – but it was tough, like trying to kick heroin. A few weeks ago, unable to bear the daily onslaught of anti-Trump propaganda, I finally managed it: I stopped reading the New York Times. Hold the applause: I’m pretty sure that at some point I’ll fall off the wagon.

But for the moment it feels good. What makes it feel even better is that I’ve also been entirely CNN-free for several months now. Well, almost entirely. I’ve slipped up a couple of times. The other evening, having read and heard about the wall-to-wall Trump-hate now on display at CNN, I felt obliged to check it out. Sure enough, when I put on Don Lemon’s show in medias res, he and a panel of “experts” were discussing Trump’s latest actions and statements. Uniformly, their reactions to everything were a combination of fake outrage and chuckling condescension. In short, nothing had changed since the campaign. None of them had learned anything. None of them was thinking seriously about anything. They were all still in the same reflexive mode. Who would want to watch any of this, except to see a reflection of his or her own lockstep hatred?

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Bridges to Islam, or Interfaith Dialogue. Muslims know that Islam is not negotiable. Edward Cline

Posted By on February 20th, 2017

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2017/02/muslim-mania-and-other-insanities.html

The world is having a conniption fit seizure, “triggered” by Donald Trump. The main victim of this ongoing seizure is the MSM. Call it cultural and political epilepsy, it’s not pretty to look at. I am reminded of a childhood experience with witnessing these seizures.

In grade school, for a reason never explained to me or to anyone else, my class for years was burdened with a boy (Robert) who was not only mentally ill and deficient in how to perform every day actions (such as reading or tying his shoe laces), but was subject to unarticulated fits in class when he drooled, frothed at the mouth, and became violent, so violent that it would require all the strength of a nun (and the nuns in my school were mostly burly and hefty; one of them, the gargantuan Sister Barbarossa, could beat up a school foot ball player) to subdue him – Robert was as strong as a bull – but also need the help of the bigger boys to literally hold him down in his seat-desk until an ambulance showed up to take him away.

The episode that sticks in my mind now, however, is when he stood at the top of a small cliff that overlooked the neighboring school playground and began to throw rocks at us. Big rocks.

It was never revealed why Robert was even in the school and not in a facility that could treat and handle his condition. It was a Catholic, private school (Nativity Parish School) and cost money to send a child there; so doubtless he was enrolled there by state mandate, or because of some dangerous physician’s recommendation, and so someone else was paying the bill.

The behavior of the MSM towards President Trump and his surprising, “shock –to-the-system” election in November are so similar to Robert’s frequent and frightening outbursts that I couldn’t help but dwell on the parallels. In fact, it has been the MSM’s behavior that caused me to recall Robert.

Wikipedia writes:

Epileptic seizures are the result of excessive and abnormal nerve cell activity in thecortex of the brain…. The word epilepsy is from Ancient Greek: ἐπιλαμβάνειν ” to seize, possess, or afflict.”

Daniel Greenfield’s article “If We Don’t Let In Muslims To America They’ll Kill Us” of February 10th highlights the madness that has gripped the MSM and many politicians. His column title was taken directly from a statement by Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy:

Trump’s executive order is “going to get Americans killed,” Senator Murphy declared.

The Connecticut Democrat was joining a chorus of the clueless warning us that if we don’t let Muslims into America, they’ll join ISIS and kill us.

Singing their brains out in the same stupid chorus were Senator McCain and Senator Graham (“a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism”), Senator Ben Sasse (“the terrorist recruiters win by telling kids that America is banning Muslims”) and Senator Heitkamp (“confirms the lie terrorists tell their recruits: that America iswaging a war on Islam.”)….

Senator Cardin went one better by whining that keeping potential Islamic terrorists out, “promises to make the U.S. less safe and places our courageous servicemen and women in even greater danger as they fight against terrorism.” Just tell it to the Marines shot and killed by a Muslim immigrant at a Chattanooga recruiting station and Naval reserve center.

There’s only one problem with this hostage crisis theory of immigration. It’s insane.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Trump’s Immigration Executive Orders and the Constitution Thumbs up or thumbs down? Michael Cutler

Posted By on February 20th, 2017

President Trump has stated that he plans to modify and re-issue his executive order concerning his executive order to suspend the entry of aliens into the United States who are citizens of countries that have a nexus to terrorism and where the citizens of those countries cannot be properly vetted to prevent terrorists from entering the United States.

It will be interesting to see what the new executive order will contain. I am certain that Attorney General Jeff Sessions will be able to devise a “new and improved” executive order. However, I am still struggling to understand how the first order ran into any problems.

Those opposed to President Trump’s executive orders on immigration have freely and frequently invoked the claim that those executive orders are “unconstitutional.”

Although many politicians, pundits and journalists have made that claim on a string of news programs on the major networks, they have rarely, if ever, been challenged to explain how the President’s executive orders violate the Constitution.

Usually when making their fatuous claims about the “unconstitutionality” of the immigration executive orders, they cite the First Amendment of the Constitution and the issue of religious freedom.

What has been generally glossed over was the fact that the executive order did not mention any religion, let alone Islam. However, inasmuch the seven countries identified in the executive order as being “Muslim majority countries” the illusion was created that President Trump was attempting to bar the entry of Muslims into the United States.

What was also ignored by the media is that the list had been compiled by the Obama administration.

What has additionally been ignored is that in 1980 President Carter suspended the entry of citizens of Iran into the United States when our embassy at Tehran was seized.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How the Southern Poverty Law Center Faked an Islamophobia Crisis The Fake News media repeats a fake group’s lies. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on February 20th, 2017

Look out! It’s another fake Islamophobia crisis.

“Huge Growth in Anti-Muslim Hate Groups During 2016: SPLC Report,” wails NBC News. “Watchdog: Number of anti-Muslim hate groups tripled since 2015,” FOX News bleats. ABC News vomits up this word salad. “Trump cited in report finding increase in US hate groups for 2nd year in a row.”

The SPLC stands for the Southern Poverty Law Center: an organization with slightly less credibility than Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, and without the academic degree in greasepaint.

And you won’t believe the shameless way the SPLC faked its latest Islamophobia crisis.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s latest “hate group” sightings claims that the “number of anti-Muslim hate groups increased almost three-fold in 2016.”

That’s a lot of folds.

And there is both bad news and good news from its “Year in Hate and Extremism.”

First the good news.

Casa D’Ice Signs, the sign outside a bar in K-Mart Plaza in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, is no longer listed as a hate group. The sign outside the bar had been listed as a hate group by the SPLC for years. The owner of Casa D’Ice had been known for putting politically incorrect signs outside his bar. So the SPLC listed the “signs” as a hate group. (Even though there was only one sign.) Not the bar. That would have made too much sense.

Since then Casa D’Ice was sold and the SPLC has celebrated the defeat of another hate group. Even if the hate group was just a plastic sign outside a bar.

But the bad news, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is that anti-Muslim hate groups shot up from only 34 in 2015 to 101 in 2016.

What could possibly account for that growth? Statistical fakery so fake that a Vegas bookie would weep.

President Trump is on the cover of the SPLC’s latest Intelligence Report: a misnomer of a title from an organization whose intelligence gathering led it to list a bar sign as a hate group.

But there’s actually another phenomenon responsible for this startling rise reported by the SPLC.

The SPLC decided to count 45 chapters of Act for America as separate groups.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Rand Paul Takes on Warmongering Bully John McCain By Michael Walsh

Posted By on February 20th, 2017

It seems that the worst person in American public life — an elderly gentleman who simply refuses to get off the stage, especially now that he’s back in the good graces of his liberal admirers in the media — is up to his old tricks. On a visit to Munich this weekend, John McCain criticized President Trump, praised German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and generally trampled all over the old adage that politics ends at the water’s edge.

But then, McCain has never let niceties like manners, party loyalty, or just plain human decency knock him off his largely imaginary moral high horse. Regrettably returned to office last year by the foolish voters of Arizona, McCain has another six years of stabbing his ostensible allies in the back while busily trying to drag the United States into another purposeless war with just about any country you can think of. It would take Sigmund Freud to figure out McCain’s particular pathology, a combination of arrogance, privilege, guilt and political impotence that ill serves the country he claims to love.

Finally, one of his colleagues in the Senate has had the guts to call him out:

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Sunday warned against taking seriously comments his Senate colleague John McCain of Arizona made on Saturday, in which the Arizona lawmaker compared President Trump’s actions toward the press to “how dictators get started.”

“The thing is, I don’t agree with his analysis and applying that to the president,” Paul told Jon Karl, guest host of ABC’s “This Week.” “Everything that [McCain] says about the president is colored by his own personal dispute he’s got running with President Trump and it should be taken with a grain of salt, because John McCain’s the guy that’s advocated for war everywhere. He would bankrupt the nation.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Peter Smith Trump Must Change, They Say. Really?

Posted By on February 20th, 2017

Chaos reigns in the White House, according to the mainstream press. Well, it may be that the new administration isn’t yet a ‘fine-tuned machine’, but it is getting runs on the board nevertheless. That explains why journalists are doing what they do best — peddling misrepresentations and outright lies
I watched most of Donald Trump’s latest press conference. He is a performer par excellence; batting away the ‘fake news’ media. What a refreshing change from the soporific, long-winded tedium of Obama answering dorothy dixers from a fawning media.

He knew what they would say, and he told the media throng as much. You’ll say I was “ranting and raving,” he predicted. Sure enough, no doubt taking a lead from the Democratic Party’s propaganda headquarters, aka CNN, the word “unhinged” became the word of choice. Take my word for it. He wasn’t a bit unhinged. He was measured and good humoured, as you see if you view the video embedded below

If you want ‘unhinged’ watch Nancy Pelosi explaining the origin of the word ‘scapegoat’, which came out of a counterfeit tweet posing as one from General Flynn. She obviously thought that lots of Spanish-speaking illegal voters would be unfamiliar with the word.

Trump is, of course, spot on. For the most part, the MSM in America is effectively part of the Democratic Party. You gotta treat your political enemy as your political enemy. Maybe if (now embittered) John McCain or (nice guy, turned nasty, turned nice again Mitt Romney) had not cowered when confronted by the gnashing enmity of the Fourth Estate they might have won the top job. Who could forget Romney’s craven Candy Crowley moment? Voters didn’t.

At one point Trump said that he hadn’t seen such hate as is directed at him by parts of the media. This prompted a CNN reporter to preamble his question by saying that they didn’t hate him. But they do! I have seen it personally; for example, on CNN panel discussions. Their desire for him to fail is palpable and in the most miserable of fashions possible. Wanting someone to fail miserably is the best definition of hate I can come up with.

But what gets me most are not the left-wing media hacks (i.e., most of the media), they are beyond disdain, but putative conservative commentators advising Trump not to be so thin-skinned; to be more presidential. It reminds me of that joke about bad-boy English footballer George Best. George is discovered by a reporter in a fancy hotel bedroom with a half-naked model, quaffing a bottle of champagne. Where did it all go wrong, George, the reporter asks?

Donald Trump won against the odds and all expectations. It has never been satisfactorily explained to me why he should change a winning formula. He actually stands there, accepts all questions, and speaks his mind. Part of the mess that we are in is precisely because political leaders are now practiced in the art of not giving straight answers. They are particularly practiced in hiding their underlying belief system. So practiced, that I suspect some have reached a stage where they no longer have any underlying beliefs to guide them, or even know what such beliefs are.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Charter Schools Are No Panacea By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on February 20th, 2017

Now that Betsy DeVos has been selected as secretary of education, it is important to consider the issue of charter schools in a reasoned and logical fashion.

Parents should have the ability to choose the school they deem best for their children. But how will this actually occur? Will students from an inner-city school opt to go to a wealthier school district, where scores are higher and education more intense? Will they be bused if they live too far? Who will be paying the taxes for the additional teaching staff and materials to accommodate the students?

There are mixed reviews about the success of charter schools. They hinge on the dichotomy between charter schools and district schools. David P. Magnani, who was the Senate chair of the Education Committee in Massachusetts, reminds readers that “most have forgotten that charter schools were created to serve as ‘laboratories of change,’ disseminating new ideas, not as competitors to existing district schools. To date, very little, if any, of this ‘dissemination’ agenda has been achieved, largely because neither charter nor district schools have any mandate and few resources, incentives or the regulatory environment for such dissemination.” In fact, Magnani maintains that “charter schools have increased inequality overall, contrary to initial intent.” He cites a 2009 UCLA study that confirms this finding. Moreover, in “suburban districts, charter schools hurt district schools in another way: by leaving children with the most severe physical or intellectual disabilities as district responsibilities.”

For those who would argue about the economics of charter schools, Magnani maintains that “in spite of temporary reimbursements from the commonwealth, over time, the district actually loses money for each student it sends to a charter school. This is because the average cost-per-student leaves the district and ‘follows the child,’ but the marginal district ‘savings’ are less than the amount the district is required to send to the charter school.”

But let us set aside the economic concerns for a moment. How have charter schools fared concerning the educational attainment of their students?

First and foremost, it is critical to understand the vital connection between parental interest and school achievement. Parental engagement has always produced more engaged students because the child has a back-up system that promotes student academic success. Moreover, as E.D. Hirsch has noted, “a systemic failure to teach all children the knowledge they need in order to understand what the next grade has to offer is the major source of avoidable injustice in our schools. … It is impossible for a teacher to reach all children when some of them lack the necessary building blocks of learning.”

In her 2016 piece, Kate Zernike of the New York Times writes that “Detroit now has a bigger share of students in charters than any American city except New Orleans, which turned almost all its schools into charters after Hurricane Katrina. But half the charters perform only as well, or worse than, Detroit’s traditional public schools.”

John Oliver at Business Insider asserts that “[s]ome charters are “so flawed, … that they don’t make it through the year. The most flawed are in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Charters have also had problems with misuse of funds, as they are supposed to be nonprofit but certain groups aim to make a profit, and there’s been lackadaisical attendance monitoring for online charters.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Science Journalism is Going Full Leftist By Robert Arvay

Posted By on February 20th, 2017

We on the right have grown to expect bias in political journalism — but most of us probably thought that science literature would always be objective, and exempt from radical leftist opinion. If so, then our thoughts were mistaken.

Every once in a while, I receive emailed articles from science journals, for example, Scientific American. Most of these are of interest to science junkies like myself — but a disturbing and growing number of them have less to do with science than with left-wing political propaganda. Much of it is unashamedly anti-Trump. It seems (sarcasm here) that by questioning the (questionable) evidence of global warming, President Trump is seeking to inundate the entire world with rising oceans. In reality, thousands of government grants are at risk, billions of dollars of them, unless the scientists receiving the money can prove that global warming is manmade, and that human effort can reverse it.

Of course, the scientists can prove no such thing, which is why their journal articles increasingly give the impression of “hair-on-fire” panic.

More recently, I am beginning to notice an even more sinister trend, one which hints at anti-Semitism. In an article at Space.com, a site oriented toward NASA news, the authors seem to twist and turn through verbal contortions, straining to avoid any mention of the word, “Israel,” even though the science news therein was discovered by studying ancient Jewish records.

The article describes the geography of the featured discovery as being that of “Judah, an ancient kingdom situated around what is now Jerusalem.” This seems like an awful lot of words to substitute for the word, “Israel.”

The article credits Israeli scientist [quote], “Erez Ben-Yosef, an archaeologist at Tel Aviv University,” with analyzing much of the information, but yet again, avoids mentioning that he is an Israeli scientist. In other articles, I find no shortage of phrases such as, a French scientist, or a scientist at Britain’s Oxford University, and so forth.

It is perhaps possible that I am being a bit overly sensitive in my appraisal of this one article, but I noticed its omissions largely because the piece fits the mold of many other science articles I have read over the past year, articles which in my view are ever more politically oriented toward leftist opinions.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

One State or Two States? By Ted Belman

Posted By on February 20th, 2017

President Trump told Prime Minister Netanyahu in their joint press conference on Wednesday, he “likes the one both parties like.” He also said on another occasion that he wasn’t going to pressure Israel to make a deal.

The importance of his remarks is that the object of the exercise for the US is to make a deal rather than to create a Palestinian state. The push back on this has been substantial, not only from the EU and the UN but also from some officials in the State Department.

To deflect some of the criticism, the Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the UN, framed it this way, “We absolutely support the two-state solution but we are thinking out of the box as well.”

“The solution to what will bring peace in the Middle East is going to come from the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority,” Haley said. “The United States is just there to support the process.”

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates have been working together with Israel to confront their common enemy, Iran. Both Netanyahu and Trump want to build on this and formalize it. They hope that as part of building this alliance, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates will soften their demands on Israel regarding the solution to the Arab/Israeli conflict or perhaps enter a peace agreement with Israel without reference to the conflict.

DEBKAfile reports: “…these sentiments reflected agreement in principle between Trump and Netanyahu to seek an Israeli peace accord with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates as the lead-in to negotiations for an accord with the Palestinians. Egypt, Jordan and Turkey with whom Israel already has normal relations would jump in later. This deal fits in with the US plan reported more than once on these pages for a regional peace between the Sunni Arab nations and the Jewish State.”

At the press conference, Trump also said,

“This is one more reason why I reject unfair and one-sided actions against Israel at the United Nations — just treated Israel, in my opinion, very, very unfairly — or other international forums, as well as boycotts that target Israel.”

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Democracy, Capitalism and Morality A free world isn’t a perfect world, but it’s better than any alternative. By Michael Novak (R.I.P.)

Posted By on February 20th, 2017

(This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 27, 1994. Michael Novak died Friday at 83.)

Democracy, Winston Churchill once said, is a bad system of government, except when compared to all the others. Much the same might be said of capitalism. It is not a system much celebrated by the poets, the philosophers or the priests. From time to time, it has seemed romantic to the young; but not very often. Capitalism is a system that commends itself best to the middle aged, after they have gained some experience of the way history treats the plans of men.

My own field of inquiry is theology and philosophy. From the perspective of these fields, I would not want it to be thought that any system is the Kingdom of God on Earth. Capitalism isn’t. Democracy isn’t. The two combined are not. The best that can be said for them (and it is quite enough) is that, in combination, capitalism, democracy, and pluralism are more protective of the rights, opportunities, and conscience of ordinary citizens (all citizens) than any known alternative.

Better than the Third World economies, and better than the socialist economies, capitalism makes it possible for the vast majority of the poor to break out of the prison of poverty; to find opportunity; to discover full scope for their own personal economic initiative; and to rise into the middle class and higher.

Sound evidence for this proposition is found in the migration patterns of the poor of the world. From which countries do they emigrate, and to which countries do they go? Overwhelmingly they flee from socialist and Third World countries, and they line up at the doors of the capitalist countries.

A second way of bringing sound evidence to light is to ask virtually any audience, in almost any capitalist country, how many generations back in family history they have to go before they reach poverty. For the vast majority of us in the U.S. we need go back no farther than the generation of our parents or grandparents. In 1900, a very large plurality of Americans lived in poverty, barely above the level of subsistence. Most of our families today are described as affluent. Capitalist systems have raised up the poor in family memory.

The second great argument on behalf of capitalism is that it is a necessary condition for the success of democracy—a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition. The instances of Greece, Portugal, Spain, Chile (after Pinochet), South Korea and others allow us to predict that once a capitalist system has generated a sufficiently large and successful middle class, the pressures for turning toward democracy become very strong. This is because successful entrepreneurs speedily recognize that they are smarter and more able than the generals and the commissars. They begin demanding self-government.

As has been recognized since ancient times, the middle class is the seedbed of the republican spirit. Capitalism tends toward democracy as the free economy tends toward the free polity. In both cases, the rule of law is crucial. In both, limited government is crucial. In both, the protection of the rights of individuals and minorities is crucial. While capitalism and democracy do not necessarily go together, particularly in the world of theory, in the actual world of concrete historical events, both their moving dynamism and their instincts for survival lead them toward a mutual embrace.

On this basis, one can predict that as the entrepreneurial spirit grows in China, particularly in its southern provinces, we can expect to see an ever stronger tide in favor of democratic institutions begin to make itself felt. The free economy will unleash forces that propel China toward the free polity.