The Dangers of Islamism
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It is still "Doofus's" to lose. (See 1 below.)
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Some interesting op ed's:
Israel's Good and Bad New Realities Victor Davis Hanson, National Review
China’s Most Indebted Firm Is Too Big to Fail Nisha Gopalan, Bloomberg
Coming Soon to a Battlefield: Robots That Can Kill Zachary Fryer-Biggs, The Atlantic
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Zito op ed. (See 4 below.) For family personal reasons she had to cancel her presentation in Savannah Sunday, Oct 27 and Monday, Oct. 28. She promised she will come at a later date and I will re-invite. Hope this caused no inconvenience.
And:
More from fellow memo readers:
"Dick –
I always like your postings ( I don’t often reply because you move too fast for me).
The cartoons don’t make them great, for which the content is abundantly sufficient -- but the cartoons show the value and necessity of sense of humor in these parlous times.
What a treat!
Many thanks!
-- S------"
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Friends have asked what will I do to protect myself from Dorian. If things begin to intensify? I could go to Atlanta and stand behind Stacey Abrams.
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My number 3 daughter, Lisa, lives in Chicago and is an excellent editor. She did the editing on the book below.
FROM MINISKIRT TO HIJAB
A Girl in Revolutionary Iran
By Jacqueline Saper
240 pp. Potomac Books / University of Nebraska Press. 2019.
Jacqueline Saper, named after Jacqueline Kennedy, was born in Tehran to Iranian and British parents. At eighteen she witnessed the civil unrest of the 1979 Iranian revolution and continued to live in the Islamic Republic during its most volatile times, including the Iran-Iraq War. In a deeply intimate and personal story, Saper recounts her privileged childhood in pre-revolutionary Iran and how she gradually became aware of the paradoxes of her life and community—primarily the disparate religions and cultures. In 1979 under the Ayatollah regime, Iran became increasingly unfamiliar and hostile to Saper. Seemingly overnight she went from living a carefree life of wearing miniskirts and attending high school to listening to fanatic diatribes, forced to wear the hijab, and hiding in the basement as Iraqi bombs fell over the city. She eventually fled to the United States in 1987 with her husband and children after, in part, witnessing her six-year-old daughter's indoctrination into radical Islamic politics at school. At the heart of Saper's story is a harrowing and instructive tale of how extremist ideologies seized a Westernized, affluent country and transformed it into a fundamentalist Islamic society.
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Oh my, Omar! But nothing will happen. (See 3 below.)
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Oh my, Omar! But nothing will happen. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)
For me, the striking thing is how little the race changed over the summer. Since late May, Biden’s support has never gone below 26 percent — his nadir after getting sliced and diced by Harris in the first debate — and no other candidate has climbed as high as 19 percent.
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1)
Robinson: Despite Biden’s ‘gaffes,’ the race remains his to lose
Many Democratic voters, intent on defeating Trump, still see Joe as their best hope in November.
By Eugene Robinson The Washington Post
The big news in the Democratic presidential race is that not much has changed since Joe Biden jumped in.
To be sure, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has steadily gained ground, according to polls. California Sen. Kamala Harris rose sharply after the first debate but then gradually slid back into single-digit-land. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has held onto his sizable base, while Mayor Pete Buttigieg has kept most of the support he won in his impressive spring debut.
But national and state polling shows that the basic shape of the race has remained the same. Biden has a solid lead and nobody else is particularly close.
In the Real Clear Politics national poll averages last Friday, Biden was at 28.9 percent — nearly 12 points clear of his nearest rival, Sanders, who had 17.1 percent support. Warren was right in there at 16.5 percent, and then there was a gap between her and Harris, who had 7 percent, and Buttigieg, at 4.6 percent.
That’s your top tier, at least for now. Next behind Buttigieg is entrepreneur Andrew Yang, at 2.5 percent, followed by New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke at 2.4 percent each. Everybody else, to be honest, has support that amounts to a rounding error.For me, the striking thing is how little the race changed over the summer. Since late May, Biden’s support has never gone below 26 percent — his nadir after getting sliced and diced by Harris in the first debate — and no other candidate has climbed as high as 19 percent.
Polls in the key early primary and caucus states tell the same story. The Real Clear Politics average shows Biden with a solid lead in Iowa, a slim lead in New Hampshire, and huge leads in both Nevada and South Carolina. If those numbers hold and he wins all four of those states, it’s pretty much game over.
You know all the caveats. It’s still early. Every time Biden opens his mouth there’s the chance of self-immolation. Sanders gets overlooked, perhaps because the novelty from 2016 has worn off, but he remains in second place. Warren’s rise really has been remarkable, and she has a formidable-looking ground game in Iowa, where that’s a real factor. Harris caught fire once and could do it again. Buttigieg is there — along with others — if Biden falters.
But despite relentless coverage of Biden’s “gaffes” — a word used only by political writers — he remains the clear front-runner. Some commentators say that’s because people who don’t follow politics for a living haven’t started paying attention, but I disagree. I believe most Democratic primary voters are intensely focused on picking the right candidate to defeat President Trump and end our long national nightmare. I just think voters are making up their own minds about what’s important in Biden’s performance and what’s not.
At 76, Biden has to show that he’s still sharp and vigorous enough to vanquish Trump and then serve four years in the most demanding job in the world. In the first debate, he seemed old, tired, at times befuddled. Since then, in my view, he has been much better; though questions remain.
If Democrats choose Biden, they will have a nominee who can get carried away while telling stories, who can mix up names and dates, who can be a font of malapropisms. His top-tier rivals speak in crisper, more well-formed sentences; heck, Buttigieg speaks in whole polished paragraphs. But as voters decide who’s best to beat Trump and repair the damage he’s done to the nation, I believe they want more than eloquence. I think they’re looking for “electability,” whatever that means; they’re looking for a fighter who won’t back down; and they’re looking for leadership.
The next debate, on Sept. 12 — with the 10 leading candidates all onstage at once — will be the most important to date, and potentially the most pivotal of the campaign.
It will be the first opportunity to see Biden flanked by his nearest competitors, Sanders and Warren, with Harris and Buttigieg not far from center stage. Any of them could steal the show. Booker, O’Rourke, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, or even novice politician Yang might have a breakthrough evening.
But it also could be that the third debate does what the first two did: make the poll numbers fluctuate but not fundamentally change the shape of the race. Until someone manages to get within shouting distance of Biden in the polls, objectively this race is his to lose.
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2)
Cancel culture isn't real life — yet
By Salena Zito
CLEAR SPRING, Maryland — It’s 7 a.m. at the McDonald’s drive-thru just off U.S. 40 as a cheery, freckle-faced server emerges from the side door to deliver an order to a car pulled up to a parking spot in a waiting area.
“Heeeere’s your Egg McMuffin, young lady,” she announces with a broad smile.
For the next half-hour, a flurry of travelers and regulars grab a quick bite on the run or settle in with friends to trade their thoughts on the Blazers, the local high school football team, and their new coach. The weather and various aches, ailments, and community small talk also fill the fast-food restaurant.
Often, when people think about McDonald's ownership, they picture a big corporation located miles from their restaurants, with CEOs disconnected from the communities they serve and the people that work for them. But the truth is most of the restaurants that sit under the golden arches are franchises owned by people like Stan Neal, who owns this McDonald's along with 20 others in Maryland and West Virginia.
Neal got his start as a 15-year-old flipping burgers at a Hagerstown franchise nearby. He has not only stayed rooted to his community, he gives back to it through donations to the local school, scholarship monies, and free meals to the needy. When he owned a motel, he gave out free rooms a few years ago when a historic flood hit the area.
Neal and the thousands of McDonald's franchise owners across the country are not the kind of big corporate bosses pictured by activists and critics. This complicates the increasingly hysterical and increasingly frequent boycotts of corporations perceived to have violated some woke dogma.
“People want to make a statement by boycotting corporations because of the political views of the ownership,” said Tom Maraffa, professor emeritus at Youngstown State University.
“In the case of fast-food companies, often the local restaurant which would be the subject of the boycott is a franchisee who may have held the franchise years before the current political climate and may even have political views that differ from those corporate
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3)
3)
ILHAN OMAR FEELS THE HEAT
By Jim Hayek
Of all the scandals in which Ilhan Omar is enmeshed, one might think the Daily Mail’s revelation this past July of her affair with political consultant Tim Mynett would be the least of them. The news last week of Beth Mynett’s divorce filing, however, has begun to disillusion a Somali community that has taken Omar at face value. Not cool — not cool at all, and it has thrown Omar off her game.
Omar’s denial of the affair is a lie that is both obvious and bald-faced. She has therefore run from the tabloid newspapers and the local media as they have sought to report on the scandal. See, for example, Emily Bowden’s New York Post article and accompanying video “Ilhan Omar dodges questions from The Post about alleged affair.”
For Omar, offense has always proved the best defense. In this scandal she has run out of plays.
The scandal has pushed the incredible panoply of scandals we have covered in depth on Power Line into the background: the identity fraud, the marriage fraud, the immigration fraud, the tax fraud.
In the past three weeks I have circled back to interview sources whom I have found to be highly reliable in the Omar saga. They open a window onto the scandals from the perspective of Ahmed Hirsi, her long-time partner and the father of her three children. According to sources, Hirsi is telling friends:
• that he will not go to jail for Omar;
that while Omar did indeed marry her brother (Ahmed Elmi) for fraudulent purposes, Hirsi did not know at the time that she had married Elmi;
• that Omar is threatening Hirsi he would be in trouble along with her if the truth were to come out;
• that Omar has asked him to state publicly that all is well with their marriage even though it is completely done and finished; and
• that in fact they are living apart and have been divorced under Islamic law (although they remain legally married).
Having humiliated Ahmed Hirsi by her affair with Tim Mynett, Omar now wants Hirsi to perform public relations services for her to suppress the scandal. That is cold.
Hirsi has maintained his silence through all the scandals so far. One may infer that there is a good reason why Hirsi has never spoken up on Omar’s behalf in any of these scandals. Hirsi’s knowledge of Omar’s conduct is knowledge of her wrongdoing.
Rather than respond in substance to questions based on the known facts and evidence, Omar has wildly accused us and others of bigotry. Among the others she has now implicitly accused of bigotry is the Star Tribune, which has treated Omar almost entirely as a hometown hero. This is how Omar rolled in the Star Tribune page-one story of June 23 on the state campaign finance board findings that gave new life to the scandals we have pursued:
Omar’s reticence is consistent with near total silence she has maintained for three years amid questions raised through public records picked over by conservative opinion journalists intent on proving that she committed immigration fraud. Those attacks, she once tweeted, are the provenance of “fake journalists on bigoted blogs.”
Omar spokesman Jeremy Slevin issued a statement Friday [June 21] asserting that the questions about her personal life are illegitimate:
“Since before she was elected to office, Ilhan has been the subject of conspiracy theories and false accusations about her personal life. Emboldened by a president who openly treats immigrants, refugees and Muslims as invaders, these attacks often stem from the presumption that Ilhan — like others who share those identities — is somehow illegitimate or not fully American.
“Ilhan has shared more than most public officials ever do about the details of her personal life — even when it is personally painful,” he continued. “Whether by colluding with right-wing outlets to go after Muslim elected officials or hounding family members, legitimate media outlets have a responsibility not to fan the flames of hate. Continuing to do so is not only demeaning to Ilhan, but to her entire family.”
When it comes to the Star Tribune, Omar is an ingrate as well as a liar.
Beyond her accusations of bigotry, her false denials, and her non-response responses, Omar’s lies have been the order of the day for three years running. Her act is getting old and wearing thin. One wonders how long she can keep the lid on.
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