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Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned.And the dumber the more outrage.(See 1 below.)
I constantly hear if we had more women in government America would be a better place. We now have more women in government and I am not sure that has proven to be the case. The ones I have listed below are mostly radical Democrats in their views, mostly socialists in their economic convictions, predominantly angry and often quite stupid in their public commentary., ie. 'pass it to know what's in it.'
Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosio, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria, Ocasio-Cortez,
Mazie Hirono, Maxine Waters and
Sheila Jackson Lee (See 1a below.)I am not suggesting that there are not plenty of comparable stupid men from whom these women have possibly learned such as Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, Peter King, Jeff Flake et al.
The fact is, more and more unqualified people believe they are qualified to serve in office because the dumber and more emotional voters become the lower become the barriers of entry. Certainly Obama was one of the least qualified in terms of executive and/or political accomplishments and experience. Reagan, G.W Bush, Carter and Clinton at least were governors, Kennedy was a Senator, Ford a V President, Nixon a Senator. Even Trump had executive experience and dealt with some of the most corrupt organizations in our nation outside of DC. No doubt Bush 41 was probably among the most accomplished prior to becoming President.
Now those seeking the presidency seem to believe they can handle the job because they are interviewed on TV by reporters and media types who are dumber than salt. I truly worry for our nation.
I am reading "The Accidental President" by A.J.Baime. It is the story of Harry Truman's first 4 months in office and the author writes "that changed the world." Truman never went to college but was a prodigious reader, knew history and had worked at a variety of jobs that prepared him for the presidency. He was not a community organizer. He was a common man, had tremendous self-doubts but had led men in battle, was liked, truthful, could make a decision and then get a good night's sleep. He grew on you.
Truman was no Obama.
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California has become the home of the homeless. (See 2 below.)
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Pompeo buries Europe in their own ashes. (See 3 below.)
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Reports indicate Merkel telling European nation's not to move their embassies to Jerusalem.
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Dick
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1) Maxine Wants Revenge
"La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froide" (“revenge is a dish best served cold”) is an oft-cited proverb from Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, published in 1782. A good line in a book or play, but a mentality that should have no place in the business of public policy. Such is not the case.
Last month an elected representative publicly stated that revenge is a part of her motivation and agenda when Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) told a constituent gathering in Los Angeles that she is “going to do to you what you did to us.” The “you” Waters was referring to are players in the mortgage and banking industry. The odd twist here is that Waters is planning revenge on institutions for doing what she herself instructed them to do.
Waters, who was easily re-elected in the 2018 midterms with nearly 76% of votes cast, represents California’s 43rd congressional district which includes much of south-central Los Angeles. She appears poised to chair the House Financial Services Committee when Democrats assume control of the House of Representatives in January.
In a speech at The Proud Bird, a historic restaurant in L.A., Waters made clear her intentions upon assuming the chairmanship:
"I have not forgotten you foreclosed on our houses. I have not forgotten that you undermined our community. I have not forgotten that you sold us those exotic products, had us sign on the line for junk and for mess we could not afford. …What am I going to do you? What I’m going to do you is fair, I’m going to do to you what you did to us!”A sitting House representative threatening U.S. businesses with retribution is remarkable enough, but retribution for what?
Apart from the dismissal of personal responsibility inherent in the idea that people were somehow forced into purchasing something they couldn’t afford, of note here is how the situation came about in the first place; how citizens of Waters’ community found themselves able to qualify for mortgages that were beyond their financial means. Making such loans is not in a lending institution’s best interests, so why would one do it? The institutions did it because Maxine Waters, among others, forced them to.
At the time Waters heaped praise upon banks and lending institutions for allowing people to sign on the line for loans they could not afford, saying in a September 2003 hearing of the House Committee on Financial Services:
"Mr. Chairman, we do not have a crisis at Freddie Mac, and in particular at Fannie Mae, under the outstanding leadership of Mr. Frank Raines. Everything in the 1992 act has worked just fine. In fact, the GSEs have exceeded their housing goals. What we need to do today is to focus on the regulator, and this must be done in a manner so as not to impede their affordable housing mission, a mission that has seen innovation flourish from desktop underwriting to 100 percent loans.”
In later comments during the hearing, Waters made clear the true mission for Fannie and Freddie that Democrats had in mind, which was finding ways to get minorities into mortgaged houses even if they could not meet qualification requirements for standard loans, such as the ability to bring a down payment to the closing transaction or to borrow an amount in excess of typical underwriting limits.
“Since the inception of goals from 1993 to 2002, loans to African-Americans increased 219 percent and loans to Hispanics increased 244 percent, while loans to non-minorities increased 62 percent. Additionally, in 2001, 43.1 percent of Fannie Mae’s single-family business served low-and moderate-income borrowers….”
Congressional and public records alike show that at the time Waters was a staunch opponent of anything resembling more oversight of lenders or lending practices; thus, more and more loans were made to those least able to pay them back and most likely to default on them.
And default they have, which brings the story full circle to last month when Waters vowed revenge on those banks and lenders that have “done this” to her constituent communities. Sadly, many in those communities believe it. They believe the reason they lost their homes is because when they fell behind on payments and were foreclosed upon, it was because those big banks forced them to take out a loan they couldn’t afford -- without realizing that their congressional representative forced those banks to lend them the money in the first place.
As for Waters’ accusation of banking having done this “to us,” at last check there have been no foreclosure proceedings brought against her $4.69 million, 8-bedroom, 5-bathroom, 6,100-square-foot West Hollywood mansion.
1a) Palestinians 'Peoplehood' Based on a Big Lie
By Eli E.Hertz
Rashida Tlaib recently became the first Palestinian-American woman elected to the U.S Congress. She has announced her support of BDS, the movement that boycotts Israel, and is planning to bring a congressional delegation of freshman lawmakers to the West Bank. Before the trip, members of her delegation should review history.
The Palestinian claim that they are an ancient and indigenous people fails to stand up to historic scrutiny. Most Palestinian Arabs were newcomers to British Mandate Palestine. Until the 1967 Six-Day War made it expedient for Arabs to create a Palestinian peoplehood, local Arabs simply considered themselves part of the 'great Arab nation' or 'southern Syrians.'
Palestinian Arabs cast themselves as a native people in "Palestine" - like the Aborigines in Australia or Native Americans in America. They portray the Jews as European imperialists and colonizers. This is simply untrue.
Until the Jews began returning to the Land of Israel in increasing numbers from the late 19th century to the turn of the 20th, the area called Palestine was a God-forsaken backwash that belonged to the Ottoman Empire, based in Turkey. The land's fragile ecology had been laid waste in the wake of the Arabs' 7th-century conquest. In 1799, the population was at its lowest and estimated to be no more than 250,000 to 300,000 inhabitants in all the land.
The collapse of the agricultural system with the influx of nomadic tribes after the Arab conquest that created malarial swamps and denuded the ancient terrace system eroding the soil, was coupled by a tyrannous regime, a crippling tax system and absentee landowners that further decimated the population. Much of the indigenous population had long since migrated or disappeared. Very few Jews or Arabs lived in the region before the arrival of the first Zionists in the 1880s and most of those that did lived in abject poverty.
Most Arabs living west of the Jordan River in Israel, the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza are newcomers who came from surrounding Arab lands after the turn of the 20th century because they were attracted to the relative economic prosperity brought about by the Zionist Movement and the British in the 1920s and 1930s.
This is substantiated by eyewitness reports of a deserted country - including 18th-century reports from the British archaeologist Thomas Shaw, French author and historian Count Constantine Volney (Travels through Syria and Egypt, 1798); the mid-19th-century writings of Alphonse de Lamartine (Recollections of the East, 1835); Mark Twain (Innocents Abroad, 1867); and reports from the British Consul in Jerusalem (1857) that were sent back to London.
Family names of many Palestinians attest to their non-Palestinian origins. Just as Jews bear names like Berliner, Warsaw and Toledano, modern phone books in the Territories are filled with families named Elmisri (Egyptian), Chalabi (Syrian), Mugrabi (North Africa). Even George Habash - the arch-terrorist and head of Black September - bears a name with origins in Abyssinia or Ethiopia, Habash in both Arabic and Hebrew.
Palestinian nationality is an entity defined by its opposition to Zionism, and not its national aspirations. What unites Palestinians has been their opposition to Jewish nationalism and the desire to stamp it out, not aspirations for their own state. Local patriotic feelings are generated only when a non-Islamic entity takes charge - such as Israel did after the 1967 Six-Day War. It dissipates under Arab rule, no matter how distant or despotic.
A Palestinian identity did not exist until an opposing force created it - primarily anti-Zionism. Opposition to a non-Muslim nationalism on what local Arabs, and the entire Arab world, view as their own turf, was the only expression of 'Palestinian peoplehood.'
The Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, a charismatic religious leader and radical anti-Zionist was the moving force behind opposition to Jewish immigration in the 1920s and 1930s. The two-pronged approach of the "Diplomacy of Rejection" (of Zionism) and the violence the Mufti incited occurred at the same time Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq became countries in the post-Ottoman reshuffling of territories established by the British and the French under the League of Nation's mandate system.
The small educated class among the Arabs of Palestine was more politically aware than the rest of Arab society, with the inklings of a separate national identity. However, for decades, the primary frame of reference for most local Arabs was the clan or tribe, religion and sect, and village of origin. If Arabs in Palestine defined themselves politically, it was as "southern Syrians." Under Ottoman rule, Syria referred to a region much larger than the Syrian Arab Republic of today, with borders established by France and England in 1920.
Syrian maps in the 21st century still co-opt most of Greater Syria, including Israel. The Grand Mufti Al-Husseini's aspirations slowly shifted from pan-Arabism - the dream of uniting all Arabs into one polity, whereby Arabs in Palestine would unite with their brethren in Syria - to winning a separate Palestinian entity, with himself at the helm.
From the 1920s, rejection of Jewish nationalism, attempts to prevent the establishment of a Jewish homeland by violence, and rejection of any form of Jewish political power, including any plans to share stewardship with Arabs, crystallized into the expression of Palestinianism. No other positive definition of an Arab-Palestinian people has surfaced.
Under the Mandate, local Arabs also refused to establish an 'Arab Agency' to develop the Arab sector, parallel to the Jewish Agency that directed development of the Jewish sector. In fact, the so-called patriotism of indigenous Muslims has flourished only when non-Muslim entities (the Crusaders, the British, and the Jews) have taken charge of the Holy Land. When political control returns to Muslim hands, the ardent patriotism of the Arabs of Palestine magically wanes, no matter how distant or how despotic the government. One Turkish pasha who ruled Acco (Acre) between 1775 and 1804 was labeled Al Jazzar, The Butcher, by locals.
Why hasn't Arab representative government ever been established in Palestine, either in 1948 or during the next 19 years of Arab rule? Because other Arabs co-opted the Palestinian cause as a rallying point that would advance the concept that the territory was up for grabs. "The Arab invasion of Palestine was not a means for achieving an independent Palestine, but rather the result of a lack of consensus on the part of the Arab states regarding such independence," summed up one historian. Adherents to a separate Palestinian identity were a mute minority on the West Bank and Gaza during the 19 years of Jordanian and Egyptian rule - until Israel took control from the Jordanians and the Egyptians in 1967. Suddenly a separate Palestinian peoplehood appeared and claimed it deserved nationhood - and 21 other Arab states went along with it.
Palestinianism in and of itself lacks any substance of its own. Arab society on the West Bank and Gaza suffers from deep social cleavages created by a host of rivalries based on divergent geographic, historical, geographical, sociological and familial allegiances. What glues Palestinians together is a carefully nurtured hatred of Israel and the rejection of Jewish nationhood.
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2)
California Homeless Population Surges Nearly 14% in Single Year
Homelessness in California is growing worse according to the most recent federal data.
The state’s homeless population jumped 13.7 percent between 2016 and 2017, according to data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the San Jose Mercury News reported. That means that on an average night, about 134,000 Californians do not have a home.
The increase comes on top of a rise in homelessness that made California responsible for about 25 percent of the homeless people in America as of 2017, The New York Times reported.
Much of the increase has been in and around Los Angeles, where about 55,000 people are homeless on an average day, a 75 percent increase over the past six years, the Los Angeles Times reported. Add in some key suburbs and the figure jumps to 58,000 homeless, more than 40 percent of the overall homeless population of the state.
One LA official said the issue is not that the city cannot help those who are homeless find shelters; it is that the number of homeless keeps growing because of housing costs.
“We are moving more homeless families and adults into housing,” said Phil Ansell, director of the Los Angeles County Homeless Initiative. “What we have less control over is the inflow: people who simply are unable to pay the rent.”
That’s because California has what many call a housing crisis.
“We now know that there is a very close connection between housing costs and homelessness,” said Margot Kushel, director of the University of California San Francisco Center for Vulnerable Populations.
Housing costs across the state are rising.
The Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley said the cost of building a 100-unit affordable housing project was about $425,000 per unit in 2016, up from $265,000 per unit in 2000.
As costs for homes rise, rental prices increase as well.
Even though San Francisco has a median income of $82,900, people who make up to 120 percent of that amount still face problems meeting the rent, according to the San Francisco Planning Commission.
Steven Greenhut, the Western region director for R Street Institute, a Washington-based think tank, said regulation has hurt the problem, not fixed it, according to the National Catholic Register.
“We’ve screwed up the whole housing market through all these regulations,” Greenhut said.
For example, building fees can add 6 percent to 18 percent to the cost of a home, while new solar panel rules increase the price of a house by $10,000.
To fight the increase in homelessness, some communities have turned to taxation.
In San Francisco, voters approved a tax on businesses that its advocates hope will bring in $300 million that can be used to help the homeless, NBC reported.
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3) Pompeo Calls Out European Weakness
In a speach to European leaders, Mike Pompeo called out Europe’s abdication in the face of rising threats such as Iran, China and Russia.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brought the Trump administration’s voice to a gathering of European leaders, offering a stinging criticism of the European order’s capitulation to rogue nations such as Iran, China, and Russia.Pompeo, addressing a gathering of NATO leaders on Tuesday, offered a sobering rebuke of the international treaty group, telling the crowd the Trump administration will not stand down in the face of rising threats from a host of rogue regimes.Criticizing the rise of anti-Israel bias and complacency in the face of growing threats from countries such as Iran, Pompeo championed President Donald Trump’s foreign policy vision.“This U.S. leadership allowed us to enjoy the greatest human flourishing in modern history. We won the Cold War. We won the peace. We reunited Germany,” Pompeo said. “This is the type of leadership that President Trump is boldly reasserting.”
Will Europe finally reclaim its responsibility in this ever more dangerous world?
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