Reviving My Father's Accomplishments Along With Others. American Universities Losing Prestige. Prophetic Disturbing Articles?

 

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Thank you for being an important part of our online program highlighting TK Thorne’s new book, “Behind the Magic Curtain.”

The program will be Monday night, June 21, at 7 pm central time/8 pm eastern time.

The proposed title of the program will be “Legends, Lessons, Legacies.”

It will focus on the role of the Birmingham Jewish community during the Civil Rights era with an emphasis on Abe Berkowitz, Rabbi Milton Grafman and Karl Friedman, the three Jewish leaders mentioned most frequently in TK’s book.

The program also will highlight the important role these three played in advocating for Israel and the impact they had on the Zionist movement in Birmingham and beyond.

The format will be:

Welcome, opening remarks, Larry Brook (Larry also will mention and thank our co-sponsor, the Atlanta Israel Coalition, and briefly highlight AIC’s work.)

“Behind the Magic Curtain” TK Thorne — reflections on the role of the Jewish community, and particularly on the three men. (She also will mention their Israel activities, which they were engaged in at roughly the same time.)

Audience questions for TK, moderated by Larry

Introduction of panel — Richard Friedman.

Panelists — Stephen Grafman, Richard Berkowitz, Tracy Friedman Stein. 

Possible comments from the editor of the Bham Times (our city’s African American paper) regarding the partnership with Southern Jewish Life 

Conclusion & fundraising appeal — Richard Friedman.

We especially thank our co-sponsor, the Atlanta Israel Coalition and its executive director Cheryl Dorchinsky, for her willingness to promote the program and manage the Zoom.

Richard Friedman

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Hunter Biden Could Be Charged As Federal Probe Brewing.

And:

American Universities Have Lost Their Prestige By Victor Davis Hanson

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I fear these articles will prove prophetic and if so not good for peace. Kerry has proven , time and again, the truth eludes his tongue. 

America smashes its moral compass and drags the world behind it

Obama repudiated UN Jew-bashing at Durban. Biden has embraced it

Melanie Phillips

For eight years, the administration of former President Barack Obama behaved as if the security needs of the State of Israel were such an irritating impediment to American foreign-policy aims that it had no compunction in brutally swatting them aside. As a result, the Obama years were very difficult for Israel. Appallingly, it looks as if the Biden years may be even worse. Much concern has already been expressed about President Joe Biden’s posture of appeasement towards Iran, along with other moves such as his withdrawal of support from Saudi Arabia and his decision to cut and run from Afghanistan. This has thrown some of the world’s most dangerous places into a state of even more dangerous flux. Until now, it was possible to believe that his administration was merely hopelessly naïve, appeasement-minded or delusional as a consequence of its utopian liberal ideology, and that Israel just happened to be particularly vulnerable to its correspondingly bone-headed blundering in the Middle East. Now, however, there is evidence that the administration is driven by actual malevolence towards both Israel and Zionism itself, which lowers it into a pit of infamy fouler even than Obama’s hostility and disdain. That evidence concerns the infamous 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance that was held in Durban, South Africa, a few days before the 9/11 attacks. This was an eye-watering, anti-Israel, anti-Jew hate-fest, whose sole purpose was to demonize and delegitimize Israel under the Orwellian banner of “human rights” and which erupted into openly Nazi-referenced antisemitism. The notorious, forged handbook of deranged Jew-hatred, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was distributed to attendees. Leaflets saying Hitler should have finished “his job” circulated, along with fliers depicting him asking “What if I had won?” and receiving the answer: “There would be NO Israel and NO Palestinian bloodshed.” Jewish participants feared for their safety as activists chanted “Zionism is racism, Israel is apartheid,” and “You have Palestinian blood on your hands.” The Jewish Centre in Durban was forced to close because of threats of violence. The conference’s NGO Forum attacked every Jewish organization in attendance and passed a resolution calling Israel “a racist apartheid state,” guilty of the “systematic perpetration of racist crimes including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing … and state terror against the Palestinian people”. The conference’s final declaration brought this verbal pogrom to its climax by listing only the Palestinians as “victims of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.” It thus singled out Israel alone as an instigator of those evils. The sheer lunacy of such a claim, identifying the Jewish state as so monstrous that it was in a category all of its own, placed that declaration itself squarely in the frame of classical antisemitism. In 2011, the United Nations organized a meeting to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Durban conference. The United States, along with thirteen other countries, boycotted it. In a strong statement, the Obama White House explained that this was because the meeting would reaffirm in its entirety the 2001 Durban Declaration and Programme of Action “which unfairly and unacceptably singled out Israel.” The United States, it said, “did not want to see the hateful and anti-Semitic displays of the 2001 Durban Conference commemorated”. Durban 2001 indelibly marked the moral collapse of the United Nations. It was the point at which the “anti-racist” and “human rights” movement turned itself into a propulsive motor for antisemitism, serving as the launching pad for the campaign of demonization, delegitimization and destruction of Israel that has continued ever since. The countries that in 2011 boycotted the Durban process held the line against this bigotry. That was then. Now, shockingly, the United States has obliterated that line. Last month, it reversed the Obama administration’s Durban position. Having just rejoined the UN Human Rights Council, America promoted a statement of commitment to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance linked to “recalling the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the Durban Declaration and Program of Action”. Obama had repudiated this declaration on the grounds of its unjust demonization of Israel and the “hateful and anti-Semitic displays” around its creation. The Biden administration has embraced it. Now there is to be a yet further attempt to re-weaponize Durban. In September, the United Nations plans to hold a 20th-anniversary meeting where the original declaration will be reconfirmed. As the blogger “Elder of Zion” has observed, given America’s endorsement of Durban at the Human Rights Council it’s entirely possible that the Biden administration will attend the September meeting — and thus associate the United States with what the Obama White House condemned as a commemoration of the “hateful and anti-Semitic displays of the 2001 Durban Conference”. Shocking as all this is, it makes perfect sense in light of the Democrats’ embrace of intersectionality and identity politics. Intersectionality holds that Jews and the State of Israel are “white privileged” oppressors (even though most Israeli Jews are brown-skinned, coming from regions of the Middle East). According to this dogma, Israel can’t be the victim of Iran or the Palestinian Arabs (although it indubitably is), and no people of colour can be anti-Semites (which some indubitably are). Proponents of intersectionality view only white people as a threat. This is now the view of the Biden administration. In his address on Wednesday night to Congress, Biden said, according to the prepared text on the White House website (when he actually delivered the speech he managed to mangle his words): “The most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today is from white supremacist terrorism.” He made similar remarks in February when he said white supremacists were “the most dangerous people in America,” calling them “demented”. But he doesn’t think those Palestinian preachers and officials who say things like the Jews are “thirsty for blood to please their god” or that the Jews were forced out of Europe in the past because of the threat posed by their “evil nature” are demented. He doesn’t think the Iranian leaders who deny the Holocaust, allege a Jewish conspiracy to replace Islam by western imperialism and claim Jews seek to dominate the entire world are demented. Instead, he treats the Iranians as rational actors with whom he wants to negotiate and into whose terrorist activities he intends to help funnel billions of dollars. And instead of acknowledging the Palestinians’ exterminatory antisemitism as demonstrating “racism, xenophobia and related intolerance,” he declares them to be the principal victims of such attitudes. When Britain’s Labour Party was in the grip of its hard-left, anti-Israel and antisemitism-promoting leader Jeremy Corbyn, there were Americans who took comfort in the belief that such a development couldn’t happen in their own country. In fact, the Biden administration is even more baleful. Whether Biden is too mentally fragile to grasp what he’s doing or whether he has made a cynical calculation of where his interests lie in today’s increasingly radical Democratic Party, it would seem that there’s a puppet of the hard left in the Oval Office. And it’s not just America and Israel which are likely to feel the impact of this. When the United States boycotted the 2011 Durban meeting, so did many other nations besides Israel. Now the reverse has happened. Every other nation that boycotted Durban 2011 signed the US-led Human Rights Council statement supporting the original Durban Declaration. The demonization of Israel has helped smash the cultural moral compass of the west. Now America is smashing its moral compass in politics, too — and as a result is dragging the rest of the so-called civilized world behind it, to the potential endangerment of all. Jewish News Syndicate And: Abraham Accords Could Be Next In Biden's Retreat-----------Former Israeli ambassadors say Kerry’s history of conflict with Israel lends weight to Iranian accusation Abraham Accords Could Be Next In Biden’s Retreat By BENNY AVNI, Special to the Sun As Washington retreats from prior conditions it has set to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal, Arab allies recalculate their approach to the Islamic Republic. Can reversal of the Abraham Accords be far behind?  “We are seeking to have good relations with Iran,” Riyadh’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said on Saudi TV this week. Huh? Until recently the Kingdom’s de-facto ruler was considered one of the region’s top hardliners on Iran. Now his emissaries are reported to meet in Baghdad with top American and Iranian officials. What changed? America. Washington’s attitude toward the Islamic Republic is obviously much softer than it was under President Trump. But now it seems to have softened even in the course of President Biden’s first 100 days. Gone is National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s vow to seek a “longer and stronger agreement.” Instead American negotiators in Vienna now toil to appease Tehran counterparts with the hope of merely returning to the original 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Yet another American condition for reinking the JCPOA is fast eroding. Washington said it would not remove sanctions before Tehran reverses all recent enrichment violations. That condition is now melting, even as Tehran is resolute, vowing to not move an inch before all sanctions are removed. To return to the deal, “the Biden administration is considering a near wholesale rollback of some of the most stringent Trump-era sanctions,” the Associated Press reported this week. Those, according to the AP, may include sanctions related to the Islamic Republic’s terrorism and other non-nuclear activities. “Considering” isn’t as futuristic as it sounds. One reason American-imposed sanctions hurt the Iranian regime so badly was that the international banking system is dominated by the greenback. When America threatened to block access to dollar-based commerce, potential sanction busters shunned trade with Iran. Now the mere talk of “wholesale rollback” effectively amounts to actual sanction removal. In February, South Korea sent $1 billion to Tehran from frozen funds previously held when banks dreaded dealing with Iran. The quicker such fears fade, the faster Iran dwindling coffers will replenish. So just as in John Kerry’s days as Secretary of State, America seems eager to lose any leverage to meet all of Tehran’s demands. Mr. Kerry has befriended the Iranian Foreign minister, Javad Zarif. According to a leaked recording of the ever-smiling Iranian diplomat’s hours-long chat with a regime buddy, he often talked to Mr. Kerry in the last four years. They even compared notes on Israeli military operations in the region. Yet, as the Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo reported this week, such purported friendship is limited to Americans in the mold of Mr. Kerry, not to their country. “I believe Iran and the US will never be friends as long as the Islamic Republic preserves its identity,” Mr. Zarif says in one previously unreported nugget from that taped chat. The recording exposes Mr. Zarif’s self-admitted political weakness and his government’s inability to confront figures in the military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Nevertheless, America continues to race toward a deal with Mr. Zarif’s underlings even as Iran’s June national elections fast approach. Poised to sweep that election, which is widely projected to be shunned by the vast majority of Iranians, the military escalates confrontations with America. Earlier this month the US Navy fired warning shots at IRGC vessels that habitually swarm and harass American ships in the Gulf. Naval muscle flexing aside, however, America seems eager to quickly resume the Obama-era diplomacy of showering Tehran’s regime with funds in order to cut down Mideast military activity. Meanwhile the Biden administration frowns on Saudi Arabia, scoring its human rights record even as it overlooks similar, and worse, Iranian violations. Worse, it threatens a cut in arms deliveries to Riyadh, highlighting the role of the Saudi Crown Prince, known as MbS, in waging the cruel war in Yemen (and overlooking Iranian-backed Houthis’ increased attacks on Saudi territory.) No wonder Riyadh appears eager to please its American ally and benefactor by making nice to Tehran. According to several reports, CIA Director William Burns secretly flew to Baghdad recently to meet with a top Iranian general, Ali Shamkhani. (Secretly because Washington officially shuns direct negotiations with Iran.) In the room, beside the two and Iraqi officials, was a Saudi representative, apparently negotiating an end to the Kingdom’s involvement in Yemen. The frantic diplomacy points in one direction: America is returning to President Obama’s attitude toward the Saudi-led Sunni Arabs, instructing them to “share the neighborhood” with the Iranian regime. Sensing where the desert wind is blowing, the Saudis signal readiness to join America’s frantic diplomacy. Meanwhile, remember: the Kingdom is yet to join the Abraham Accords but peace between Arab states and Israel would have been much weaker without tacit Saudi support. So “share the region” with an Iranian regime that vows to never tolerate the presence of a “Zionist regime” in the Mideast? Paradoxically, one way Riyadh can try to please Washington by appeasing Tehran while avoiding real harm to core Saudi interests is to publicly distance itself from the Abraham Accords. It would harm regional peace but, hey, at least some in Washington will applaud — even though these peace treaties are just about the only Trump-era policy Mr. Biden wouldn’t reverse. He even vows to deepen them. Twitter @bennyavni Finally: Former Israeli ambassadors say Kerry’s history of conflict with Israel lends weight to Iranian accusation The backlash over allegations that former Secretary of State John Kerry may have provided Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif inside information on Israeli military operations has sparked calls for an investigation. By Dmitriy Shapiro John Kerry, who serves as U.S. special presidential envoy for climate in the Biden administration and was secretary of state during the Obama administration, continues to face a backlash over allegations that he may have provided Iranian foreign minister and nuclear negotiator Mohammad Javad Zarif inside information on Israeli military operations. Three Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee wrote a joint letter the U.S. State Department inspector general on Wednesday to demand an investigation into whether Kerry did indeed provide information, as Zarif claimed in a recording provided to The New York Times, the details of which were published in a story on Sunday. In what was reported to be a conversation with an Iranian economist, Zarif claimed that Kerry told him that Israel had attacked 200 Iranian targets in Syria. “If this report is true, Secretary Kerry severely undermined the American-Israeli alliance to provide intelligence about one of our most trusted allies to the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism,” Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.) said in a news release. “John Kerry and Joe Biden have proven to be pro-Iranian before by championing the failed Iran nuclear deal, but this type of betrayal of a staunch ally is simply unconscionable. We need the inspector general to launch an immediate, impartial investigation to determine the validity of these claims,” according to Barr. He was joined in the letter by Reps. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) and Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), with both questioning whether Kerry should remain in his current position in the Biden administration. “The State Department must investigate the massively alarming allegations that John Kerry, in his capacity as Secretary of State, leaked information to Iran on covert Israeli military operations,” Zeldin said in the release. “If it’s proven that Kerry actively undermined one of America’s staunchest allies, he needs to resign from the Biden administration immediately and have his security clearance revoked.” Other prominent Republicans calling an investigation—or for Kerry’s resignation—include Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, among a growing list. Former Israeli Ambassador to the United States and former Knesset member Michael Oren said that while he had a good working relationship with Kerry during his tenure from 2009 to 2013, Kerry seemed to have an “unhealthy obsession” with Israel during his time in office. Oren cited Kerry’s speech in 2016 after failed Israel-Palestine peace negotiations, where he spent more than an hour lecturing Israel on its settlements while war was raging out of control in neighboring Syria.  “At the same time when Syrian [President] Bashar Assad was killing a half million of his own countrymen and the U.S. government refused to intervene, Kerry found time to give an hour-long speech condemning Israeli settlements,” said Oren. “What was going on north of [Israel] was the largest massacre in post-World War II history.” The speech was especially puzzling, Oren pointed out since Kerry blamed Israel alone for the failure of the peace talks. Oren said that he didn’t know whether Zarif was telling the truth in the recording, but it was well known during the negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal Kerry and Zarif had a close relationship, something that troubled Israel. “He made no attempts to disguise that,” said Oren. “And for Israelis, this was very disturbing. This was the representative of a government that was sworn to destroy us—actively seeking to destroy us. It wasn’t passive. It wasn’t just rhetoric. “That’s disturbing to the Israelis and should have been disturbing for Americans because this is a regime that oppresses gay people and free speech, and imprisons people and tortures people. I mean, it should have been more disturbing for a person, I think, of a liberal outlook such as John Kerry.” ‘You have two leaders, and one of them is lying’ Former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon said that he listened to the recording of Zarif and it sounded authentic, but one has to take into consideration the sophisticated propaganda of Iran. “I think it is a very serious allegation. It involves the closest ally of Israel and the worst enemy of Israel,” he said. “I really hope that it’s not true. But, you know, you have two leaders and one of them is lying. It’s either Zarif or Kerry.” Kerry denied the reports in a tweet on Monday. “I can tell you that this story and these allegations are unequivocally false,” he tweeted. “This never happened—either when I was Secretary of State or since.” Danon said Kerry was investing a lot of energy in creating the Iran nuclear deal and was trying to speak to all sides, so it was known that he kept in touch with Zarif, even after he left office. “It’s the U.S. policy to decide with who they are speaking and about what, but once it involves our security or our interests, that’s something we expect our allies to protect our interests the same way we protect U.S. interests,” explained Danon. If the allegations against Kerry are true, which he hopes they are not, it would be a problem. “One can argue how much it risked our lives or not, but I think it’s more than that,” said Danon. “It’s about what you are talking with whom when it comes to our interests.” But he added that the bond between Israel and the United States is stronger than mistakes made by any particular leader. While it remains unclear from the recording whether Kerry told Zarif the information before or after the details were already public knowledge, Oren said it wouldn’t matter, as Israel’s policy at the time was not to comment on its operations to prevent a situation where Assad would be obliged to respond militarily to Israel. What really upset Oren, he said, and Israeli officials during the Iran nuclear deal negotiations was the existence of secret backchannel negotiations between the United States and Iran through Oman. “These negotiations were conducted under the auspices of Kerry. … Israel was being assured repeatedly, every week, that no backchannel, no secret negotiation was going on with Iran when, in fact, there were,” he said. The existence of these negotiations became public in November 2013, a month after Oren was no longer ambassador. Oren said that the seriousness of what he called a “betrayal” was such that had he still been the ambassador, he would have seriously considered resigning. “The point is that Kerry presided over negotiations that were conducted behind Israel’s back on an issue vital to Israel’s security, if not its survival. And deliberately misled us about them,” he said. “We took it very seriously,” emphasized Oren. After all, he said, the United States is “our No. 1 ally,” and it was “negotiating behind our back with our No. 1 enemy.” Israeli settlements may be an issue, he said, but Iran is “a matter of national survival for this country.” +++++++++++++++++++++++

Kerry Secure? Who Is Biden? Our Sinking Navy. Improved Race Relations - Democrats Can't Admit. Is Eating Meat Now Racist?

Kerry is protected and thus secure because of Hunter Tapes?
https://thenationalpulse.com/analysis/why-joe-biden-cant-fire-john-kerry/

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Who is Biden?  We know a good bit about who Biden is because he has been around a long time. We know he has accomplished little as a politician, is a plagiarist and liar, has enriched himself, along with his family, at the public trough.  We know he has flipped and flopped when it comes to his racial views and we know he will say and do pretty much anything because he is shallow. We believe he is in questionable mental health and may not serve he entire term in office and is under significant pressure from the radical element of his Party.

What we do not know is who he is as President and these articles I am posting, I believe, help to identify/define him.

The Joe Biden Mystery Dance

If there’s a strategy, it’s to inherit a boom and survive the left.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

The U.S. liberation of Europe was a shambolic enterprise as all gargantuan novel efforts tend to be: “Swimming” tanks carried their crews straight to the bottom on D-Day; Eisenhower was at wit’s end over Allied bombing of friendly troops; in the war’s last months, the U.S. contended not just with the enemy but thousands of U.S. deserters engaged in pilfering and reselling American supplies.

The liberation was nonetheless successful because of a broad commitment in the American electorate and society to getting it done.

Eisenhower later as president would limit himself to realistic aims: an interstate highway system, the U2 program that allowed the U.S. to measure Soviet ICBM capabilities against the hysterical claims of Khrushchev and the Democrats.

Which brings us to Joe Biden. He speaks as if he has a mandate to do heroic things regardless of cost; hard to pick up amid the verbal grandiosity are the one or two realistic ones he perhaps hopes to accomplish. He might get a union-built electric-vehicle charging network, but the alleged problem of climate change would remain as unaffected as ever.

To govern is to choose, notes the journal Foreign Affairs, but “the administration of President Joe Biden often seems to believe that to govern . . . is to choose nearly everything.”

Uselessly, the press prefers to gobble up his rhetorical unrealities rather than diagnose them. A likely answer is that Mr. Biden sees his presidency nicely set up by the vaccine and an economy whose only possible direction is up; his first job is to make sure his party’s vitriolic left doesn’t spoil it for him. Deliberately, he may be playing for the midterms, when Republicans will be strengthened, the left will be weakened, and he will still be president and can choose his priorities more realistically.

It’s good to remember who Mr. Biden is. There was nothing in his 2020 campaign (from his basement), his nomination success (handed to him by his party’s black caucus), or his meager and coattail-less victory over the most vilified incumbent in a century that indicated he was meant to do big things.

His decades in the Senate reveal nothing like Ted Kennedy’s devotion to health care. His history on issues, for and against, adds up to little more than a record of ad hoc calculation. Famously, Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that Mr. Biden was “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.” It might be fairer to say Mr. Biden, from his sinecure in Delaware, had little need to think about issues beyond what position might serve him best between now and dinner-time.

In the old-school leftist magazine the Nation, Kimberly Phillips-Fein nails a truth. In desperation, progressive pundits in 2020 seized on Mr Biden’s family tragedies, starting with his young wife’s and daughter’s deaths in a car crash. His personal suffering and America’s in the pandemic would become one, and the remedy (surprise) would be every item on the progressive wish list, from banning fossil fuels to the full woke panoply on race, class and big business.

This probably sounded as good to Mr. Biden as anything he might come up with on his own or borrow from Neil Kinnock. And when I say pundits were desperate, I mean desperate. In raising the curtain on Wednesday’s speech to a joint session of Congress, CNN’s White House correspondent Stephen Collinson crowed: “The increasingly radical presidency of Joe Biden was built on a straightforward foundation: putting Covid-19 shots in arms and stimulus checks in the bank.”

Yep, he annexed Mr. Trump’s final year to Mr. Biden’s first 100 days.

Of course what strikes any non-suborned thinker is the sheer tininess of the FDR comparisons. The pandemic is a misfortune, but it’s not the Great Depression, a world war and the shadow of nuclear armageddon rolled into one. The huge sums pumped out by the Trump Treasury and Federal Reserve to prop up incomes, plus the basic soundness of the underlying economy (no devitalizing credit excesses), means Mr. Biden was primed to inherit a world-beating bottle-rocket of a recovery.

He blurted out an insight when he declared his late son, Beau, the “finest” of the Biden's. Even the mainstream press occasionally notices that his brothers, son, sister and other relatives have built careers around their Joe connection in a manner that the Delaware News Journal somewhat defensively notes is “hardly a new phenomenon in Washington.”

At bottom he’s a machine politician, which is not the worst thing you can say about anybody.

He’s also old, white and rubbed shoulders half a century ago with segregationists in Congress in a party where the most influential activists are ready to call anyone a racist at the drop of a hat. A good part of what you hear on Wednesday night about “transforming” society likely will be aimed not at you but at this 1% of his coalition, from a president whom nature and the times still teach us to expect mercifully little.

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Biden’s First 100 Days—and the Next 100
Voters like the president’s demeanor, and he can notch a win on infrastructure.
By William A. Galston

As Joe Biden heads toward the 100th day of his presidency and prepares to address the nation, he has reason to feel good about his time in office so far. His job approval is holding steady in the mid-50s, and he is getting high marks for his character, leadership and demeanor. The public supports his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, especially his vaccine rollout. He quickly passed his first major initiative, the American Rescue Plan. His aides appear to be working well together, and for the most part internal conflicts have been kept off the front pages.

Mr. Biden has also done well in another important dimension of the presidency—his role as party leader. Surveys have shown nearly unanimous support for him among Democrats. This isn’t surprising, because his statements and proposals have reflected the center of gravity in the Democratic Party. Cynics dismissed the results of last year’s post primary negotiations between progressives and the center left as a campaign truce that would give way to factional fighting after the election. Instead, these unity documents have turned out to be reliable predictors of the administration’s stances.

There is one conspicuous exception—the administration’s handling of refugees. Democrats criticized President Trump for lowering the annual cap on refugee admissions to 15,000. During his campaign, Mr. Biden promised to raise it to 125,000. After hesitating for several months, however, earlier this month he declined to increase it, provoking a backlash from his party that forced him to change course.

As the controversy unfolded, the press reported that the president had rebuffed a plea from Secretary of State Antony Blinken not to maintain Mr. Trump’s cap. This is a classic example of John F. Kennedy’s maxim that victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. No administration is exempt from public discord when officials want to distance themselves from unpopular policies.

As the president looks beyond his first big proposal to two others—the recent American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan, which reportedly will be released ahead of his national address—he faces a choice: Will he try to pass initiatives totaling more than $4 trillion with the votes of Democrats only, or will he accept the compromises needed to bring some Republicans on board?

Mr. Biden campaigned on a pledge to mend the divisions that have disfigured the legislative process and threatened the stability of governing institutions. Making good on this pledge would require him to move away from the center of his party toward the center of the country—a shift that would anger many on his left flank. The flap over refugee policy offered a foretaste. Many Democrats believe that the quest for compromise is a fool’s errand in an era of polarized politics.

President Biden appears to have a more optimistic view. Three weeks ago he signaled his openness to negotiations on the jobs plan. “Compromise is inevitable,” he declared. “Changes to my plan are certain.”

If Mr. Biden wants broad support, he will have to give ground on the scope of the bill and how to pay for it. Republicans have indicated a willingness to proceed with the portions of the bill they regard as infrastructure investments (broadband, roads, bridges), but not the others. None will accept the administration’s proposal to increase the corporate tax rate to 28%.

Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from the president’s home state of Delaware, has suggested dividing the jobs proposal into two bills. One would focus on infrastructure, the other on items such as housing and home healthcare. Democrats could work with Republicans to pass the first bill, and pass the latter through reconciliation if all Democrats support it.

Although it’s possible that some Republicans would back a more modest increase in the corporate tax rate, the bulk of the funding would have to come from other measures. As I argued last week, a multiyear commitment to improving tax collection could raise revenues by $1.5 trillion over the next decade. A broad-based minimum tax would ensure that every large corporation would pay something. User fees are off the table, because the president won’t break his pledge to increase taxes only on households making more than $400,000 annually.

Compromise is still possible. Both President Biden and Republicans must now decide whether they are prepared to take heat from their own ranks to pursue it.

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Joe Biden’s Art of the Non-Deal

Negotiating with the opposition, the left concluded, merely impedes achieving their policy goals.

By Daniel Henninger

At 100 days, 90% of Joe Biden’s presidency can be summed up in one sentence: Whatever Donald Trump did, do the opposite.

The reversals have come on taxes, energy, Iran, climate, regulation, the border, the police and press conferences.

And one more thing. Mr. Trump famously wrote “The Art of the Deal.” Joe Biden is perfecting the art of the non-deal.

A hallmark of Mr. Biden’s governing style so far is that the longtime member of the U.S. Senate hasn’t done a deal with anyone. On any given issue, he or the people who do most of the talking for him say they are willing to negotiate. But then they don’t. He’s issued more than 60 executive orders and memos already.

In February, 10 moderate Republican senators trooped into the Oval Office to seek a compromise with their old chum over his proposed $1.9 trillion “Covid relief” bill. They trooped out with nothing. A day later, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer began the Biden spending avalanche by using budget reconciliation rules.

Currently we are watching a kabuki performance over getting Republican buy-in to a compromise led by West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin on Mr. Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure bill. Mr. Biden’s earnest Republican negotiating partners should take the advice Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade gave the cops in “The Maltese Falcon”: “Wake up, Dundy, you’re being kidded.”

Bill Clinton redefined the meaning of “is.” Mr. Biden is redefining the meaning of everything—from infrastructure to debt to compromise.

Still, the belief endures in the American mind that a divided political order should be about compromise, so why has Mr. Biden turned serious negotiation into a nullity?

I think I have the answer to this riddle.

Mr. Biden has adopted a benign version of the antifa model of negotiation. That’s right, Antifa, the far-left anarchist movement.

The Antifa model turns on the explicit belief that by refusing to negotiate anything with anyone, eventually you will win. A web posting by the Antifa-related group CrimethInc.com the day of Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdict attributed his prosecution and those against the police in Baltimore to their unforgiving street tactics.

“You put yourself in a weaker bargaining position by spelling out from the beginning the least it would take to appease you,” wrote CrimethInc. “It’s smarter to appear implacable: So you want to come to terms? Make us an offer. In the meantime, we’ll be here blocking the freeway and setting things on fire.”

Mr. Biden won’t be lying down in any freeways, but for those offended by the comparison, consider some history.

It is an article of faith on the Democratic left that Barack Obama made a mistake early in his presidency by trying to negotiate with congressional Republicans, notably over the Affordable Care Act. Negotiating with the opposition, progressives concluded, merely impedes achieving their policy goals.

This idea didn’t originate in U.S. politics with Antifa or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It was discovered in the offices of university presidents that were occupied in the late 1960s by student protesters and their announced strategy of “nonnegotiable demands.”

Mr. Biden knows as well as anyone what the tumultuous era of nonnegotiable demands was about because he served in the Senate alongside one of the most notable figures of that period, California Republican S.I. Hayakawa.

Before his election to the Senate in 1976, Hayakawa was president of San Francisco State University, an institution gripped by student strikes and occupations in late 1968. In testimony to Congress, Hayakawa astutely summarized what happened then—and where we are now.

“I have said repeatedly that impatience with democratic processes is at the heart of student unrest,” Hayakawa testified. They replaced the “unglamorous aspect of democratic decision making” with a “list of nonnegotiable demands.”

Predicting our current moment, Hayakawa concluded: “The way things have gone of late, their system seems to be working too well to abandon it for traditional processes.”

He’s right. Why should the left—whether in the streets, in the corporate boardrooms or at the highest levels of America’s government—abandon a strategy of refusing to negotiate? It’s working. Everywhere today the opposition is being overrun or intimidated into silence.

  

Al Davis, the legendary owner of the Oakland Raiders, summed up the approach in three words: “Just win, baby.” That’s how Joe Biden sees his presidency. History will recognize his wins, as the media is doing now, and put any political traditions he rolled over to get them in the footnotes.

More interesting is what the American people are making of how Mr. Biden and the Democratic left have transformed their slim 2020 victory into a political bulldozer.

Mr. Biden is no street anarchist, but the political “change” confronting Americans after more than a year living with Covid—constant antipolice protests, migrants streaming across the southern border, D.C. statehood, blowing up the legislative filibuster, packing the Supreme Court and some $6 trillion in new federal spending—is a lot of nonnegotiable bulldozer.

Next year, Mr. Biden and the Democrats will have to negotiate all of this with the American voter.

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Biden’s Cradle-to-Grave Government
His latest $1.8 trillion plan rejects the old social contract of work for benefits.
By The Editorial Board

The progressive hits keep coming from the Biden Administration, and the latest is the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan introduced in broad strokes on Wednesday. It’s more accurate to call this the plan to make the middle class dependent on government from cradle to grave. The government will tell you sometime later, after you’re hooked to the state, how it will force you to pay for it.

We’d call the price tag breathtaking, but by now what’s another $2 trillion? Add $2 trillion or so each for the Covid and green energy (“infrastructure”) bills, and that’s $6 trillion of new spending in 100 days. That doesn’t include the regular federal budget of more than $4 trillion a year. No worries, mate, the Federal Reserve will monetize the debt.

But the cost, while staggering, isn’t the only or even the biggest problem. The destructive part is the way the plan seeks to insinuate government cash and the rules that go with it into all of the major decisions of family life. The goal is to expand the entitlement state to make Americans rely on government and the political class for everything they don’t already provide.

The White House talking points pitch this in the smothering love of the welfare state: “making care affordable”; free medical and family leave; “free education”; two years of “universal pre-school”; “invest in the care workforce.” Subsidies and millions of new care givers, all licensed and unionized, will nurture you through the challenge of earning a living and raising a family.

One question to ask is: Haven’t we tried this before? What is Head Start if not government pre-school education and child care? Weren’t school lunches and the Women, Infants and Children program supposed to prevent child hunger? Food stamps, welfare checks, child-care subsidies and a supplement to earned-income, plus public housing. Weren’t all of these programs and more from previous decades supposed to end poverty?

Why did the trillions of dollars spent on those programs fail? And if they didn’t work, why do we need more?

For the candid answer, listen to Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago Democrat who explained the political calculation this week to the Washington Post: “Once everyone’s in, all the parents want in. Then it’s not a poor person’s program or a poverty program. It’s an education program. . . . That to me, that is essential. It changes the center of gravity once it’s for everybody.”

So much for the “safety net” to prevent poverty. This is now about mainlining benefits to middle-class families so they become addicted to government—and to the Democratic Party that has become the promoting agent of government.

Democrats are enamored of this principle of “universality” because it has worked to sustain the popularity of Social Security and Medicare, despite their failing finances. But those programs promise benefits in return for work across a lifetime. The Biden New Deal isn’t a deal at all. Most of its programs are free handouts on the model of the 1960s Great Society.

The new pre-school entitlement will go to all families, as would free community college. The tax-credit expansion to $3,600 per child in the Covid bill, which Mr. Biden wants to make permanent, is on top of the other welfare subsidies. The Biden plan also makes permanent an expansion of ObamaCare subsidies for more affluent adults, eliminating the subsidy cap that was 400% of poverty. A new paid family leave entitlement will be an incentive for companies to drop leave benefits that already cover most workers.

All of this adds up to healthy guaranteed annual income largely untied to the social contract that requires work, which is the real path to independence and self-respect.

The White House is also less than honest about how it will pay for all this. Its short answer is that more taxes on the wealthy and more IRS audits are enough. But that doesn’t come close.

The permanent child-tax credit expansion would cost $1.6 trillion over 10 years, according to our friends at Cornerstone Macro. The White House says it only costs $420 billion, but that’s because it only includes four years through 2025. The new entitlements ramp up slowly but explode in the later years, while the tax increases are immediate and won’t raise the revenue they expect.

That’s especially true of the increase in the top tax rate on capital gains to 43.4%, which would lose money by all historical experience. The White House tries to get around this by eliminating the step-up basis for paying capital gains at death, meaning an heir would pay the tax based on accrued value over a lifetime. This is a back door addition to the current death tax rate of 40%.

The White House also predicts that unleashing thousands of new IRS agents will find $700 billion in unpaid tax bills. But this prediction is based in part on old IRS data, before the 2017 tax reform that removed many tax loopholes, especially in the corporate tax code. The only benefit of the IRS audit army is that its $700 billion bogey replaces what would be another tax increase.

The new taxes are destructive, but their impact will take time to be felt as the post-pandemic economy soars. The GOP shouldn’t ignore the taxes and spending. But a more potent political target may be the bill’s tripling down on a welfare state that disdains the dignity of work and seeks to make Americans the wards of government.

Peter Kreeft (Prof. of Philosophy at Boston College) once wrote, “We are condemned to live in an age of experts. Where have all of the wise men gone.” – paraphrased

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More regarding our deficient Navy  and it's inability to successfully defend the varying assigned tasks and responsibilities.

America’s Naval Strategy Is at Sea

The Pentagon hasn’t spelled out how it would win a maritime war against China.

By Seth Cropsey

The U.S. Navy is at sea, figuratively as well as literally. It has 101 ships deployed around the world—the same number as during the Cold War—yet the entire fleet is only 297 vessels strong. That’s about half the Reagan-era level of nearly 600. The consequences of maintaining current global commitments with a shrunken fleet include long deployments—some sailors spend close to a year at sea—as well as more maintenance and less time for training.

The figurative sense in which the Navy is at sea is more important and more dangerous. The fleet doesn’t have enough ships to meet global commitments, even as the U.S. faces growing naval competition from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Each of these potential adversaries possesses missiles and aircraft whose sole purpose is to keep U.S. naval f

Were hostilities to break out between China and the U.S., the conflict would be a naval one. It would test the U.S. ability to move naval and amphibious forces across the 7,000-mile Pacific moat in time to assist American allies and partners, deny China’s use of the shipping lanes between it and the Middle East, and operate effectively to command the South China, East China and Yellow seas. The Chinese Navy would be a formidable foe. It has long-range missiles, a nascent aircraft-carrier force and increasingly modern ships and weapons of all categories, as well as cyber and space capabilities.

Simply building more U.S. ships and submarines wouldn’t be enough to meet the challenge. Strategic thinking and a change in fleet design and tactics will be necessary. In the 1930s, the Navy and Marine Corps identified Japan as a likely future enemy and developed—and practiced—the ideas of naval aviation and island-hopping that eventually won the Pacific War.

On Dec. 17 then-Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite released a document billed as a “tri-service maritime strategy.” Signed by the chiefs of the Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard, “Advantage at Sea” correctly identifies China as a “pressing, long-term threat” and calls for traditional—and important—actions such as integrated operations, allied participation, modernization and sea control. But it isn’t a maritime strategy. It offers no suggestions about how to win a naval war against China.

Nothing prevents the Pentagon from articulating a strategy. During the Cold War, the U.S. Maritime Strategy told everyone from Congress to the Kremlin that in the event of war the U.S. Navy would target the enemy’s ballistic-missile submarine bastions and divert Soviet concentration from the central front in Germany by striking its oceanic flanks from the northern seas to the Mediterranean to the Pacific. The Navy used the strategy’s stated goals to argue for the funds to build an enlarged fleet, the cold-water training needed to prepare for conflict in northern seas, and the composition of aircraft carriers’ air wings.

No similar strategy exists today, partly because the Navy hasn’t made it a priority to produce one and partly because turf battles have impeded the interbranch cooperation necessary to make it happen. In a May 1954 article in Proceedings, the U.S. Naval Institute’s magazine, Samuel Huntington argued that the military services must have a “strategic concept,” which he described as “a description of how, when and where the military expects to protect the nation. . . . If a military service does not possess such a concept, it becomes purposeless.” Nothing has changed. Legislation passed in the 1980s placed greater emphasis on coordination between the military services. It didn’t absolve the military services of their obligation to articulate a strategy.

China has a straightforward strategy: Keep the U.S. Navy from using its formidable capabilities to support allies and disrupt the regional—and eventually global—hegemony that China’s rulers seek. The U.S. Navy is caught up in all the derivative issues that a clear strategy would address such as budgets, training, ship numbers and fleet composition. We have no maritime strategy for a conflict that would be waged at sea. There is no more important issue facing the American military.

Mr. Cropsey is director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for American Seapower. He served as a naval officer and was a deputy undersecretary of the Navy in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

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Riley tells us what we intuitively know. Democrats must keep repeating race relations are worse because that false and hypocritical narrative remains their road to retaining power. Division among the races  and to hell with America is their cynical objective goal.  

Riley also gives statistics on what I have preached for years.  Growth in intermarriage will help solve most racial issues because minimally speaking  all want the same , ie. security, earn a living, support one's family.

Race Relations in America Are Better Than Ever

Obsessed with theories of ‘systemic racism’ and ‘unconscious bias,’ the media ignores good news.

By Jason L. Riley

You wouldn’t know it from recent headlines, but there’s good news about race in the U.S. today. The pessimism peddled on the left by pundits and elected officials is in the service of an ideological agenda, and it’s probably doing more real harm to race relations than any actual racism.

A big part of the problem is that the political press has never come to grips with Donald Trump’s election in 2016. The media didn’t anticipate it, refused to accept it, and have been willfully misinterpreting the reasons for it. Their preferred narrative is that racists, sexists and xenophobes put Mr. Trump in the White House, thus demonstrating that hatred and bigotry in the U.S. are ascendant. But is it true?

First, it’s worth clarifying (yet again) that former supporters of Barack Obama, not white nationalists, were the voters responsible for Mr. Trump’s election. Only occasionally did the establishment media acknowledge this in its reporting. “It’s clear that large numbers of white, working-class voters shifted from the Democrats to Mr. Trump,” reads a New York Times dispatch from 2017. “He flipped millions of white working-class Obama supporters to his side. The voter file data makes it impossible to avoid this conclusion.”

If journalists haven’t avoided this conclusion entirely, they’ve spent far more time pushing an alternative explanation that cites supposed racial retrenchment in the U.S. as the main driver of Mr. Trump’s political success. The fruits of this effort are laid bare by political scientist Eric Kaufmann in a compelling new report from the Manhattan Institute. Using survey data, Mr. Kaufmann notes that racial attitudes have been trending toward more tolerance for well over half a century, even as black politicians (Mr. Obama, Kamala Harris ), professional polemicists (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi ) and major media organs (the New York Times’s “1619 Project”) continue to insist otherwise.
According to Mr. Kaufmann, “at a time when measures of racist attitudes and behavior have never been more positive, pessimism about racism and race relations has increased in America.” Terms like “systemic racism” and “unconscious bias” are increasingly common, but white racist views have been in steady decline, whether with regard to having black co-workers, classmates or neighbors.

Intermarriage trend lines also undermine the notion that racial bigotry in America is a growing problem. “Approval of black-white intermarriage rose among whites from around 4% in 1958 to 45% in 1995 and 84% in 2013,” Mr. Kaufmann writes. “In 2017, fewer than 10% of whites in a major Pew survey said that interracial marriage was a ‘bad thing,’ ” and the “actual share of intermarried newlyweds rose from 3% in 1967 to 17% in 2015.” In fact, intermarriages involving Asians, Hispanics and Jews have all risen sharply over the decades, yet progressive intellectuals want to lecture the rest of us on how to be “antiracist.”

What explains the wide perception of racial retrogression at a time when surveys show that racial attitudes and behaviors have never been better? Mr. Kaufmann cites ideology, partisanship and the media’s ability “to frame events and social trends.” The political left has a stake in overstating both the existence and effects of racism so that it can advocate for more and bigger programs to combat it. And the media has long been willing to do the left’s ideological bidding. Social media allows for wide publicity of statistically rare incidents that are in reality getting even rarer, giving the impression that isolated and infrequent events “happen all the time.”

This research goes a long way toward explaining last summer’s street protests and why the nation was on pins and needles last week while awaiting the George Floyd verdict. The media has fed the public a story line about race and policing that serves the interests of activists and liberal politicians but that cannot be supported by facts and data.

Fatal encounters between police officers and black suspects are always unfortunate and sometimes tragic, but they’re also exceedingly rare. Nor is it rational to conclude, without supporting evidence, that these encounters are driven by racial animus. As Mr. Kaufmann notes, “police killings of African-Americans declined by 60%-80% from the late 1960s to the early 2000s and have remained at this level ever since.” According to a Washington Post database, police shot and killed 999 people in 2019, including 424 whites and 252 blacks. Twelve of the black victims were unarmed, versus 26 of the white victims. In a country where annual arrests number more than 10 million, if those black death totals constitute an “epidemic” of police use of lethal force against blacks, then the word has lost all meaning.

It’s becoming clearer by the day that journalism’s cavalier disregard for providing the necessary context in its coverage of racial controversies, and the willingness of so many in the media to play down or ignore the truth about America’s racial progress, is not simply wrong but also dangerous.

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 Let it burn baby! https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/04/29/should-we-just-let-it-burn-n2588663

And: Provide a fire for eating meat? Is this to racist? https://teapartyorg.ning.com/forum/now-eating-meat-is-racist-when-does-it-stop

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A solution to Critical Race Garbage: (highlight, copy , transfer to top and open)

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/04/28/nyc-father-moves-daughter-to-florida-to-escape-critical-race-theory-curriculum-n1443199

Finally:

CNN would have prospered in Adolph 'land: 

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/04/29/did-you-catch-what-cnns-chief-political-analyst-said-about-biden-warp-speed-an-n2588709

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Salena interviews Mitch:

My interview with Mitch McConnell from the Bluegrass State

By Salena Zito

Click here for the full story.

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 By Salena Zito