Bet this deplorable cowboy did not vote for Hillary.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/ dsq_jZiB1_U
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Who Trump will be, as president, is yet to be determined for several reasons.
a) First, it is evident, not being a politician, he has not been confronted with many Oval Office issues. Consequently, he may walk back what he said as he campaigned because he is hearing and absorbing a variety of views he never had to consider.
How far he carries "modification" bears watching but, at this early stage, I believe it relates more to his learning curve experience and demonstrates a degree of flexibility that will serve both him and our nation well..
b) Since the press is focused on taking everything Trump says and does and portraying them in a negative light the mass media will become less and less believable and reliable as they question whether Trump has any convictions etc.
Trump has the ability to tweet and though it might not be an orthodox method of communication it has become so and he seems a master at using it effectively.
c) Finally, since Trump enters The Oval Office as unorthodox it will take time to see how he defines himself and what he accomplishes and/or seeks to do and, I submit, that should become the better basis for judging him than what we read or hear from the mass media.
So far, Trump has put together a very interesting Cabinet. It is probably far more conservative than had been assumed and, perhaps, this will result in far more change than had been anticipated.
Until Trump actually moves, the pieces on the chess board, I believe it is wiser to observe than to conclude.
To date, the public's enthusiasm and confidence, along with the market, has risen and Trump has not allowed any grass to grow under his feet.
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"We are all Jews." A fascinating story of Christian morality and valor. (See 1 below.)
Meanwhile, if Obama was half the man he professes to be and others believe he is, when he looks in the mirror, he would have been far more vocal and offered far more leadership regarding the assassination of police, which has exploded during his tenure in office. Second, he would have been far more vocal regarding what is happening on America's campuses.
What we have heard is nary a peep, pathetic silence and thus no leadership. This from the Nobel Peace winner. Guess I am just a southern racist for pointing this out.
Meanwhile, our cousin has Ambassador status and serves as Israel's Consul General in Los Angeles. It is highly doubtful Sam could make his presentation and/or appear on a California Campus because Academia is no longer interested in facts. Students are being taught to resemble unions and think with their fists and mouths. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
(See 1a and 1b below.)
(See 1a and 1b below.)
This is where we are today and Obama has chosen not to speak out and set a better tone. He would rather spend his remaining days hiding from the truth and directing historians to a legacy that is as far from the truth as he is to the moon
His deception will not work because history and truth eventually meet. (See 1c and 1d below.)
Trump prepared to move quickly in locating our embassy in Jerusalem? (See 1e and 1f below.)
+++
Obviously my friend is suffering a form of voter distress as a result of Trump's victory.
Extremes exist on both sides of the political spectrum. The focus of this article suggests conservatives are engaged in their own form of PC and the author calls it "patriotic correctness."
After reading the article, I asked myself is it not normal for a particular society to have some cultural norms? If being patriotic is the equivalent of conservative PC'ism, if holding citizens to a respect for their nation's symbols is PC'ism and, as the author suggests, stifles free speech and behaviour, it seems to me he is engaged in nit picking and a tit for tat exercise for the purpose of responding to some mythical score.
The world has become ugly and more developed. Therefore, the ability of radicals to disrupt has become both easier and more threatening because we are dependent upon technology etc.
That said, Liberal PC'ism has proven to be a disaster and has been used to still voices, determine acceptable conduct and the list of selective restraints is endless. And who are those who promote what is acceptable. I submit, Orwell told us decades ago. They were the thought police, so I understand where the author of my friend's article is coming from but I mostly reject his thesis other than to acknowledge extremism in defense of extremism is a vice. (See 2 below.)
I have another dear Conservative friend and fellow memo reader who was a classmate of the incoming Sec. of Labor.
The Democrats are doing whatever they can to stiff Trump, as our incoming president, and they are also lining up to attack his Cabinet Nominees as unworthy.
I thought this observation by my friend, who is also a brilliant lawyer, would be interesting and enlightening. (See 2a below.)
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Hillary just cannot accept reality - she lost, because she lost, because she lost. Is, is, is. (See 3 and 3a below.)
====
I have been in Orlando withLynn baby sitting our grandchildren while our daughter spent 10 days in Israel. Lynn and Brian did all the heavy lifting and I gave moral support.
While I was away several things happened.
a) The Trump haters continued to seek ways to deny his legitimacy. Nothing new here. Just bad losers who got themselves so psyched by their own crap they spoofed themselves.
b) When he becomes president, by virtue of having won the electoral vote, they will continue to spout about how Putin and Russia stole the election, how Hillary won the numerical vote and will switch to attacking his appointees. Nothing new here as well. Just a continuance of poor loser behaviour. (See 4 below.)
c) The DOW continues to challenge 20,000 because investors are enthusuastic about Trump unleashing a pent up economic force that Obama squelched.
I would like to finish with some personal thoughts:
a) If McConnell has his way Trump's effort at a recovery will be escalator like because McConnell fears Trumpss spending and will delay approving legislation and thus, will slow the economy.
If Trump is given more of a free hand to do what he wants the economy will improve faster because he will increase our deficit through increased spending in the hope and belief tax revenue generated will more than offset the deficits incurred.
b) The Fed, as I have written many times before, was established in order for Congress to disregard it's fiscal responsibility. The deficit has reached such a high level The Fed has basically become irrelevant. The markets determine interest levels and The Fed is generally behind the curve.
c) The market is ahead of itself based on GDP growth and corporate earnings but investors are enthusuastic about Trump's plan to cut taxes, repatriate cash held overseas and reduce crippling regulations etc.. Thus expectations of a higher growth rate , re-employment of those seeking work and a rise in corporate earnings down the raod is driving the market.
I still favor finance related stocks, health care sector with emphasis on drugs stocks, the energy sector.
d) Aleppo is a human tragedy that should follow Obama to his grave. It is a fitting comment on what a pathetic president he has been.
+++
Dick
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1) An American sergeant in WWII risks his life ordering 1000 POWs to say they are all Jews.
On Monday, Nov. 28, 2016, the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous posthumously honored Master Sgt. Roddie Edmonds with its "Yehi Or" (Let There Be Light) Award.
American Jewish servicemen fighting Nazi troops during World War II faced even greater dangers than their non-Jewish comrades. If they fell into enemy hands, Germany didn’t treat them as ordinary POWs with the attendant rights demanded by the Geneva Conventions. Instead, Jewish prisoners were handled the way Germans handled all Jews: they were dispatched to death or slave labor camps, with little chance of survival. The American Army even advised its Jewish troops to destroy their dog tags and other identifying documents if captured by Nazi forces.
The group of over a thousand American soldiers were captured in late 1944 and early 1945 in the Battle of the Bulge and transported to the Stalag IXA POW camp near Ziegenhain, Germany. One of their first orders was to separate out the Jewish troops and present them to their German captors.
The German camp commander, Major Siegmann, delivered the order in English to the ranking American serviceman in the camp. This was Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, a stocky 24-year-old from Knoxville Tennessee. Remembered by his fellow troops from basic training as a gentle, unassuming soldier, Sgt. Edmonds might have seemed an unlikely candidate for the heroism he was about to display.
According to his son, Rev. Chris Edmonds, who has spent years speaking with witnesses and piecing together what happened that day on January 27, 1945, instead of ordering Jewish troops front and center, Sgt. Edmonds turned to his men and said, “We are not doing that, we are all falling out.”
Commanding all the Americans in the POW camp to stand at attention in front of their barracks, Sgt. Edmonds placed himself front and center. Lester Tanner, a Jewish soldier who served with Sgt. Edmonds, later recalled the scene: “I would estimate that there were more than 1,000 Americans standing in wide formation in front of the barracks, with Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds standing in front, with several senior non-coms beside him, of which I was one.”
Major Siegmann strode up to Sgt. Edmonds. “They cannot all be Jews!”
Sgt. Edmonds replied to the commander, “We are all Jews.”
Enraged, Siegmann took out his pistol and threatened to shoot Sgt. Edmonds. Facing immediate death, Edmonds refused to back down and betray the Jews under his command.
“According to the Geneva Convention, we only have to give our name, rank and serial number,” Sgt. Edmonds replied, and recited them. “If you shoot me, you will have to shoot all of us and after the war you will be tried for war crimes.”
Paul Stern, a Jewish POW who was standing nearby, recalled those stirring words that saved his life. “Although 70 years have passed, I can still hear the words (Sgt. Edmonds) said to the German camp commander.”
After a moment, the Commandant turned and walked away.
Sgt. Roddie Edmond’s son estimates that his father’s actions saved the lives of over 200 American soldiers in the POW camp.
After the war, Roddie Edmonds never mentioned his heroism that day, nor later in the war, when, according to his son, he again told American POWs to resist German orders and not embark on a death march as Allied troops closed in. It was only after he died in 1985 at the age of 64 that his children began to slowly uncover their father’s remarkable wartime deeds.
When Roddie Edmonds’ daughter decided to make a video about her late father’s life for a college project, her mother showed her diaries he had kept in Stalag IXA. These contained some musings about daily life in the POW camp, but mostly contained the names and addresses of the troops in his care, which Edmonds had laboriously recorded.
Edmonds’ son, Chris, says he was blown away by what he read and stayed up that night searching these names on the Internet. The very first article he read gave him his first inkling that his father was a war hero. Searching for Lester Tanner, the soldier who’d stood side by side in formation with Roddie Edmonds, yielded an old article about Tanner, now a prominent New York attorney, selling his New York townhouse to Richard Nixon. The article contained a fascinating aside: Tanner mentioned that an American Sergeant, Roddie Edmonds, had saved his life and the life of other American Jewish servicemen during World War II.
Chris contacted Tanner, as well as several other witnesses, and slowly pieced together the story of his father’s wartime heroism. Thanks to his work, on December 2, 2015, Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds was honored by the State of Israel as “Righteous Among the Nations,” the first American serviceman so honored.
Chris Edmonds jokes that his father “must have had a superhero cape in his closet” but Roddie Edmonds’ dedication to his fellow men seems to have been a deep, fundamental value.
Avner Shalev, Chairman of Yad Vashem, points out that Sgt. Edmonds “seemed like an ordinary American soldier, but he had an extraordinary sense of responsibility and dedication to his fellow human beings.” His son concurs: “My father always had a strong sense of duty, of responsibility to his fellow human being, whoever they were…He was a man of great religious faith and an unwavering moral code and set of values to which he was completely dedicated.”
That moral code gave Sgt. Edmonds the strength to face death and risk his life to save others. It gave him the courage one cold morning to stand up to a POW Commandant who held the power of life and death in his hands and declare: “We are all Jews.”
1a)Colleges aren’t just politically correct — they’re anti-Semitic
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President-elect Donald Trump has not been shy about the “big problem in this country”: political correctness. Trump has blamed PC for the attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando (“They have put political correctness above common sense, above your safety and above all else,” he tweeted) and the rise of the militant group Islamic State. His voters agreed (indeed, it might even have been the reason for his victory).
Sick people who are dying are prevented from trying a medication that has not yet completed all the long years of tests required by federal regulations — even if the medication has been used for years in other countries without ill effects.
One by one, innumerable decisions have been taken out of the hands of those directly affected. This is not just something that has happened. It is a central part of the agenda of the political Left, even though they describe what they are doing in terms of the bad things they claim to be preventing and the good things they claim to be creating.
Minimum-wage laws are described as preventing workers from being “exploited” by employers who pay less than what third parties want them to pay. But would people accept wages that third parties don’t like if there were better alternatives available?
This is an issue that is very personal to me. When I left home at the age of 17, going out into the world as a black high-school dropout with very little experience and no skills, the minimum-wage law had been rendered meaningless by ten years of inflation since the law was passed. In other words, there was no minimum wage law in effect, for all practical purposes.
It was far easier for me to find jobs then than it is for teenage black high-school dropouts today. After the minimum wage was raised to keep up with inflation, for decades the unemployment rate for black male 17-year-olds never fell below triple what it was for me — and in some years their unemployment rate was as much as five times what it was when I was a teenager.
Yet many people on the left were able to feel good about themselves for having prevented “exploitation” — that is, wage rates less than what third parties would like to see. No employer in his right mind was going to pay me what third parties wanted paid, when I had nothing to contribute, except in the simplest jobs.
As for me, my options would have been welfare or crime, and welfare was a lot harder to get in those days. As it was, the ineffectiveness of the minimum-wage law at that time allowed me time to acquire job skills that would enable me to move on to successively better jobs — and eventually to complete my education. Most people who have minimum-wage jobs do not stay at those jobs for life. The turnover rate among people who are flipping hamburgers was found by one study to be so high that those who have such jobs on New Year’s Day are very unlikely to still be there at Christmas.
In short, the Left has been gambling with other people’s livelihoods — and the Left pays no price when that gamble fails.
It is the same story when the Left prevents dying people from getting medications that have been used for years in other countries, without dire effects, but have not yet gotten through the long maze of federal “safety” regulations in the U.S.
People have died from such “safety.” Police are dying from restrictions on them that keep criminals safe.
San Francisco is currently trying to impose more restrictions on the police, restrictions that will prevent them from shooting at a moving car, except under special conditions that they will have to think about when they have a split second to make a decision that can cost them their own lives. But the Left will pay no price.
One of the most zealous crusades of the Left has been to prevent law-abiding citizens from having guns, even though gun-control laws have little or no effect on criminals who violate laws in general. You can read through reams of rhetoric from gun-control advocates without encountering a single hard fact showing that gun-control laws reducing crime in general or murder in particular.
Such hard evidence as exists points in the opposite direction.
But the gun-control gamble with other people’s lives is undeterred. And the Left still pays no price when they are wrong.
1a)Colleges aren’t just politically correct — they’re anti-Semitic
Instead, some giddy demonstrators devolved into a pack of rabid haters.
“Death to Jews! Death to Jews!” members of the crowd shrieked.
This didn’t happen in Germany in the 1930s, nor was it a modern-day ISIS extravaganza. The hate
fest occurred last year at the Million Student March at Manhattan’s Hunter College, part of the City University of New York.
It was supposed to be an exercise in economic rage against the machine, taking place on campuses throughout the United States. But the Hunter event resembled a pogrom, with scared Jews slandered, scapegoated and made to fear for their physical safety.
Welcome to today’s colleges and universities, many of them venues in which Jew-bashing is not just tolerated, it’s tacitly encouraged by the frequent inaction and support of woefully politically correct administrators and radical leftist professors.
“This has metastasized into a cancer,” Charles Jacobs, special consultant on the fascinating new documentary film “Hate Spaces: The Politics of Intolerance,” tells me. The title evokes the “safe spaces” — rooms stocked with such stuff as crayons and videos of frolicking puppies — set up on campuses to shield students from “microaggressions,” or ideas considering too “triggering” for delicate flowers to contemplate.
But with all the nonsensical coddling of infantilized kiddies, few places of learning are free from threats, harassment and verbal and sometimes physical attacks on Jews. As my own Jewish daughter prepares to go to college next year, this frightens me to the core.
Fighting the power is proving elusive.
Hunter’s president and student leaders released a statement a day after the rally declaring they “strongly condemn anti-Semitic comments.” Oh, that’ll stop them.
But in a CUNY-commissioned report released in September, lawyers Barbara Jones and Paul Shechtman of Bracewell LLP essentially concluded that they were shocked — shocked! — to find that anti-Semitic words and deeds have befouled four of the system’s campuses. Then the kicker: “Much of what we have reported is protected speech.”
Imagine the public outcry if a report about attacks waged against Muslims, blacks, Latinos, women, gays, lesbians, transgenders or members of any other protected group were deemed “protected speech.”
The concerted assault on Jews and the American value of inclusion masquerades as anti-Israel activity. But the two faces of hate are one and the same.
According to the documentary, put out by the Americans for Peace and Tolerance organization, of which Jacobs is president, anti-Jewish unrest at Hunter and elsewhere is ginned up by well-funded organizations with missions to destroy Israel, particularly Students for Justice in Palestine.
The groups promote the sickening international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement — BDS. The aim is to stamp out trade with, and investments in, Israeli companies and to end cultural and academic exchanges with the Jewish state, the only country in the Middle East in which women enjoy equal rights and homosexuals don’t fear being thrown off tall buildings.
Two more examples:
A screening of a pro-Israel documentary this year at the University of California, Irvine, drew protesters who blocked the exit paths, chanted, “Long live the intifada,” and prompted attendees to fear for their safety and call campus police.
Mock “eviction notices” were slipped under dormitory room doors of more than 2,000 students believed to be Jewish at New York University in 2014 by members of a pro-Palestinian group, ordering them to leave.
The cruel prank has spread to at least a dozen other campuses.
“Hate Spaces” is executive-produced, directed and written by Ralph Avi Goldwasser, who 12 years ago helped create the doc “Columbia Unbecoming,” in which 14 students and graduates of Columbia University describe being intimidated by professors for expressing pro-Israel views.
“Since then, it’s only gotten worse,” Goldwasser tells me.
A 2013 workshop held at Yale University promoted “sensitivity,” even toward participants who’d indulged in or fantasized about such fetishes as bestiality. Yet what protections are afforded to those of the Jewish faith?
None.
Near the doc’s end, Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School professor emeritus, says, “We have to do more, we have to fight harder . . . because the facts are on our side, morality is on our side, history is on our side.”
I can only hope truth prevails.
1b)
Campus speakers are being shouted down more and more frequently, especially speakers sympathetic to Israel
Since 2014, there has been a disturbing surge in the number of invited campus speakers being repeatedly interrupted or actually prevented from delivering a public lecture. A startling number of these silencing efforts has been directed at Israelis or other speakers sympathetic to Israel who have run afoul of the growing anti-Israel movement on campuses.
1c)The most amazing part of this well written piece is the fact Maureen Dowd, a very liberal columnist from the New York Times wrote it!
Election Therapy From My
Basket of Deplorables
1b)
Students are silencing free speech
Campus speakers are being shouted down more and more frequently, especially speakers sympathetic to Israel
By Cary Nelson and David Greenberg
Since 2014, there has been a disturbing surge in the number of invited campus speakers being repeatedly interrupted or actually prevented from delivering a public lecture. A startling number of these silencing efforts has been directed at Israelis or other speakers sympathetic to Israel who have run afoul of the growing anti-Israel movement on campuses.
Behind this spike is an idea called “anti-normalization.” This concept, which anti-Israel organizations began vigorously promoting two years ago, holds that any activities that might “normalize” relations between Israelis and Palestinians — from children’s soccer leagues to collaborative environmental projects to university panel discussions with both sides represented — should be summarily rejected because they treat both parties as having legitimate grievances and aspirations. Joint projects are to be shunned unless they begin with the premise that Israel is the guilty party.
Shouting down speakers — including defenders of Israel — didn’t start with the adoption of anti-normalization. But in the past such episodes were regarded as exceptional and scandalous violations of academic freedom.
In one of the first of these episodes, in 2010, Michael Oren, a distinguished historian serving as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, tried to give a presentation at the University of California at Irvine, when pro-Palestinian students interrupted him with epithets and slogans. He was unable to utter more than a few portions of his remarks at a stretch, although he did ultimately finish the speech.
But that incident was widely condemned. Ten protesters were later found guilty of disrupting a speech and ordered to perform community service. Upholders of free-speech rights insisted that at an institution of higher learning, you don’t shout people down; a liberal education requires that all views be given a hearing. And when Mr. Oren’s critics countered that Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank placed its defenders beyond the protections of academic discourse, they found themselves in an impossible position. Free-speech principles, after all, are either universal or they become politicized and diminished, subject to the whim of those in power.
In recent years, however, anti-normalization has provided a new justification for singling out Israel’s supporters for silencing. For decades, Israel’s detractors struggled in vain to rebut the point that they were unfairly targeting a relatively liberal democracy while ignoring the far worse human rights violations of numerous state and non-state actors. Anti-normalization offered a convenient principle specific to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — one that could create a rhetorical escape hatch from questions of why, by this logic, defenders of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia or China didn’t also deserve to be silenced.
As anti-normalization spread as a tactic, it acquired a higher status. Advocates of BDS — the campaign to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel — began to grant this “principle” a quasi-theological character, lending its application to campus events an air of moral urgency and ethical superiority. By last year, BDS supporters had a transcendent reason to voice their contempt for academic freedom when they refused to participate in “normalizing” dialogue about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to block campus access to speakers deemed sympathetic to Israel.
As a result, such incidents proliferated. In October 2015, former Israeli Supreme Court chief justice Aharon Barak, noted for his support of Palestinian rights, had his own University of California-Irvine talk interrupted and curtailed. The following month, the world-renowned Israeli philosopher and New York University faculty member Moshe Halbertal had a University of Minnesota lecture disrupted. In February, Israeli Arab Bassem Eid was relentlessly heckled by BDS activists at the University of Chicago. In April, they blocked Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat from speaking at San Francisco State University.
In other cases, anti-normalization prompted people to prevent a speech simply because it was co-sponsored by a Jewish student group. At Brown University in March, the transgender activist Janet Mock canceled a speech after 160 anti-Israel students objected because the campus Hillel chapter was among the sponsors.
Anti-Israel speakers have also faced calls to have their invitations rescinded. In 2013, the University of Michigan withdrew an invitation to Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker, who has compared Israel to Nazi Germany. In 2011, the City University of New York withdrew an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner, a fierce critic of Israel, only to quickly reinstate it. These incidents, too, are completely unacceptable, but — significantly — they were one-offs, not the result of a policy espoused by an international campaign.
The growing practice of silencing pro-Israel speakers — of denying them the right to be treated as equals in campus debates — constitutes a dire threat to academic freedom. In our deeply polarized times, it is more important than ever that universities create opportunities for students and faculty to hear and engage with ideas they don’t share. Their leaders must defend more vocally than they have thus far the free-speech rights of all speakers on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They must do so now, before the shouting down of unpopular views becomes, for lack of a better word, normalized.
Cary Nelson is a English professor at the University of Illinois and an affiliated professor at the University of Haifa. David Greenberg is a professor of history at Rutgers University and the author of “Republic of Spin.” They are members of the Alliance for Academic Freedom and wrote this for The Washington Post.
1c)The most amazing part of this well written piece is the fact Maureen Dowd, a very liberal columnist from the New York Times wrote it!
Maureen Dowd:
Election Therapy From My
Basket of Deplorables
The election was a complete repudiation of Barack Obama: his fantasy world of political correctness, the politicization of the Justice Department and the I.R.S., an out-of-control E.P.A., his neutering of the military, his nonsupport of the police and his fixation on things like transgender bathrooms. Since he became president, his party has lost 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats and 14 governorships. The country had signaled strongly in the last two midterms that they were not happy. The Dems’ answer was to give them more of the same from a person they did not like or trust. Preaching — and pandering — with a message of inclusion, the Democrats have instead become a party where incivility and bad manners are taken for granted, rudeness is routine, religion is mocked and there is absolutely no respect for a differing opinion. This did not go down well in the Midwest, where Trump flipped three blue states and 44 electoral votes.
The rudeness reached its peak when Vice President-elect Mike Pence was booed by attendees of “Hamilton” and then pompously lectured by the cast. This may play well with the New York theater crowd but is considered boorish and unacceptable by those of us taught to respect the of fice of the president and vice president, if not the occupants. Here is a short primer for the young protesters. If your preferred candidate loses, there is no need for mass hysteria, canceled midterms, safe spaces, crying rooms or group primal screams. You might understand this better if you had not received participation trophies, undeserved grades to protect your feelings or even if you had a proper understanding of civics. The Democrats are now crying that Hillary had more popular votes. That can be her participation trophy.
If any of my sons had told me they were too distraught ov er a national election to take an exam, I would have brought them home the next day, fearful of the instruction they were receiving. Not one of the top 50 colleges mandate one semester of Western Civilization. Maybe they should rethink that.
Mr. Trump received over 62 million votes, not all of them cast by homophobes, Islamaphobes, racists, sexists, misogynists or any other “ists.” I would caution Trump deniers that all of the crying and whining is not good preparation for the coming storm. The liberal media, both print and electronic, has lost all credibility. I am reasonably sure that none of the mainstream print media had stories prepared for a Trump vi ctory. I watched the networks and cable stations in their midnight meltdown — embodied by Rachel Maddow explaining to viewers that they were not having a “terrible, terrible dream” and that they had not died and “gone to hell.”
The media’s criticism of Trump’s high-level picks as “not diverse enough” or “too white and male” — a day before he named two women and offered a cabinet position to an African-American — magnified this fact. Here is a final word to my Democratic friends. The election is over. There will not be a do-over. So let me bid farewell to Al Sharpton, Ben Rhodes and the Clintons. Note to Cher, Barbra, Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham: Your plane is waiting. And to Jon Stewart, who talked about moving to another planet: Your spaceship is waiting. To Bruce Springsteen, Jay Z, Beyoncé and Katy Perry, thanks for the free concerts. And finally, to all the foreign countries that contributed to the Clinton Foundation, there will not be a payoff or a rebate.
As Eddie Murphy so eloquently stated in the movie “48 Hrs.”: “There’s a new sheriff in town.” And he is going to be here
1d) OBAMA ERA IS OVER
1d) OBAMA ERA IS OVER
Obama and his supporters loved talking about history. His victory was historic. They were on the right side of history. History was an inevitable arc that bent their way.
The tidal force of demographics had made the old America irrelevant. Any progressive policy agenda was now possible because we were no longer America.
We Were Obamerica. A hip, happening place full of smiling gay couples, Muslim women in hijabs and transgender actors. We were all going to live in a New York City coffee house and work at Green Jobs and live in the post-national future.
The past was gone. We were falling into the gorgeous wonderful future of dot com instant deliveries and outsourced everything. We would become more tolerant and guilty. The future was Amazon and Disney.
It was hot and cold running social justice. The Bill of Rights was done. Ending the First and Second Amendments was just a clever campaign away. Narratives on news sites drove everything.
Presidents were elected by Saturday Night Live skits. John Oliver, John Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee were our journalists. Safe spaces were everywhere and you better watch your microaggressions, buddy.
No more coal would be mined. No more anything would be made. The end of men was here. The end of the dead white men of the literary canon. The end of white people. The end of binary gender and marriage. The end of reason. The end of art. The end of 2 + 2 equaling 4. This was Common Core time.
It was time to pardon an endless line of drug dealers. To kill cops and praise criminals. To be forced to buy worthless health insurance for wealth redistribution to those who voted their way to wealth.
This was Obama’s America. And there was no going back. We were rushing through endless goal posts of social transformation. The military fell. Then the police.
Now it looks as quaint as anything from the 50s, the 70s or the 80s. A brief moment of foolishness that already appears odd and awkward. And then one day nostalgic. It wasn’t the future. It’s already the past. It’s history.
Scalia died. Hillary Clinton was bound to win. And she would define the Supreme Court. Downticket races would give her a friendly Senate. And then perhaps the House.
But there is no right side of history. There is only the side we choose.
The Obama era was permanent. It was history. Now it is history.
Its shocking ascendancy has been paired with an equally shocking descent. The Obama era is done. It’s gone. It’s over. It was wiped from the pages of history in one night that left Congress and the White House in Republican hands.
It would have been bad enough if Jeb Bush had succeeded Obama. That would have been inconvenient, but not a repudiation. Instead Obama’s legacy was dashed to pieces. His frantic efforts to campaign for Hillary did no good.
The public did not vocally reject him. What they did was in its own way even worse. They brushed past him. They sidelined him. They gave him passable approval ratings while dismissing his biggest accomplishments. They forgot him. They made it clear that he did not matter.
And that is in its own way far more brutal and wounding. They didn’t just destroy the Obama era. Instead they dismissed it as if it never existed.
Obama didn’t make history after all. He wasn’t a teleprompter demi-god standing athwart of history. He was Carter and Ford. He was there to be forgotten.
He didn’t change the world. He wasn’t the messiah. He was merely mortal. Just another politician who will sag and age. Who will, in the end, be photographed like Bill Clinton, lonely and lost in a world that has passed him by.
The Obama era ends not with a bang, but with a whimper. With a national consensus that maybe he didn’t really matter so much after all. And those to whom he mattered the most were his enemies determined to undo everything he did.
Obama once thought that he belonged to the ages. Now he belongs in the rubbish bin.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
1e) Trump poised to relocate embassy to Jerusalem 'fairly quickly'
By Carol Morello & Ruth Eglash T
Every four years, presidential candidates routinely signal their support for moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Then, after they're sworn into office, they balk when faced with the potential ramifications.
Moving the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is a “very big priority” for President-elect Donald Trump, said top aide and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway on Monday. According to a report by Israeli media, the Trump team is already scouting sites in Jerusalem for the new building.
“That is very big priority for this president-elect, Donald Trump,” Conway told radio host Hugh Hewitt in an interview on Trump’s White House transition.
“He made it very clear during the campaign, and as president-elect, I’ve heard him repeat it several times privately, if not publicly.”
Trump had promised to make the controversial move several times during his presidential campaign, exciting Israeli leaders who anticipate an America which recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Long-standing US policy observed by every president since Bill Clinton calls for deferring the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, which would initiate the relocation of the embassy, every six months. President Barack Obama vetoed the move for the last time earlier in the month. The next time the bill comes up for consideration, Trump will be in office.
Conway noted that the move was important to Trump because it helps America’s “great friend” Israel and represents the wishes of many voters, including Evangelicals Christians.
“It is something that our friend Israel, a great friend in the Middle East, would appreciate and something that a lot of Jewish-Americans have expressed their preference for,” Conway said.
Along with other domestic issues, Trump’s agenda “is also about a strong Middle East and about protecting Israel,” she continued. “Evangelical Christians always have Israel at the top of their list when you ask what’s most important to them.”
Following on the heels of Conway’s comments, Israel’s Channel 2 reported on Monday evening that Trump’s transition team has already begun the planning stages of moving the embassy, including scouting locations in the capital.
According to the report, the Trump camp is already working with Israel’s Foreign Ministry on the matter, with officials checking on the availability of a certain plot of land in the Talpiot neighborhood which the US government purchased in 2014.
The land, which hosts the Immigrant Absorption Ministry-leased Diplomat Hotel, home to about 500 elderly immigrants from the Soviet Union, is adjacent to the existing US Consulate compound but would only become available in 2020, according to officials, the Times of Israel reported.
1e) Trump poised to relocate embassy to Jerusalem 'fairly quickly'
By Carol Morello & Ruth Eglash TEvery four years, presidential candidates routinely signal their support for moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Then, after they're sworn into office, they balk when faced with the potential ramifications.
Comments from Trump aides and the mayor of Jerusalem, though, suggest that Trump could be poised to discard yet another diplomatic axiom and relocate the embassy "fairly quickly" after he enters the White House. That move would be highly political, effectively meaning that the United States was recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, which it has refused to do for decades out of concern about provoking Palestinians who want part of the city to become their own capital.
"They are serious about this," Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat said Tuesday after returning from a trip to the United States, where he met with transition aides whom he declined to identify. "I am optimistic that this will happen sooner rather than later."
The question of Jerusalem's status is the most sensitive and complicated issue in the long-running conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. It is fraught with political, religious and nationalist implications that potentially could create an uproar throughout the Middle East and the world's 1.5 billion Muslims.
Trump will have an opportunity to decide the fate of the U.S. diplomatic mission on June 1, at the expiration of another six-month waiver President Barack Obama signed to the Jerusalem Embassy Act passed by Congress in 1995 mandating that the embassy be moved by 1999.
About a week after the election, Jason Greenblatt, a real estate lawyer and Trump adviser, told Israel's Army radio that Trump was "going to do it." That confidence was reinforced Monday when Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway said moving the embassy was a "very big priority" for Trump.
Meir Turgeman, the head of the Jerusalem building and planning committee in the Jerusalem City Council, said on Israeli radio this week that the transition team contacted Barkat asking for help finding an appropriate property.
"Everything is on the table; they are still checking things out," said Barkat in an interview Tuesday.
"The decision was already approved by Congress, and it is the right thing to do to recognize Jerusalem. It's been the capital of the Jewish people for 3,000 years," said Barkat, who is a friend of Trump son-in-law Jarad Kushner.
But because Jerusalem's final status can be used as a bargaining chip, diplomats have advised presidents against giving it up outside the context of a peace deal.
"It's hard to argue you could harm an already-comatose peace process, but you don't want to make matters worse," said Aaron David Miller, a former State Department official who advised Republican and Democratic administrations on the Middle East. "And you do want to maintain the hope and illusion that under some circumstances, a two-state solution is possible. By forcing the issue upfront as an immediate act of the Trump administration, you're essentially burying that possibility.
1f)Trump Team Scouting Jerusalem Locations for US Embassy.
“Thus saith Hashem: I return unto zion and will dwell in the midst of Yerushalayim; and Yerushalayim shall be called the city of truth; and the mountain of Hashem of hosts the holy mountain.” Zechariah 8:3 (The Israel Bible™)
The American Consulate General in Talpiot, Jerusalem. One of the possible locations for the new embassy would be adjacent to the consulate compound. (Google Earth)
“That is very big priority for this president-elect, Donald Trump,” Conway told radio host Hugh Hewitt in an interview on Trump’s White House transition.
“He made it very clear during the campaign, and as president-elect, I’ve heard him repeat it several times privately, if not publicly.”
Trump had promised to make the controversial move several times during his presidential campaign, exciting Israeli leaders who anticipate an America which recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Long-standing US policy observed by every president since Bill Clinton calls for deferring the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, which would initiate the relocation of the embassy, every six months. President Barack Obama vetoed the move for the last time earlier in the month. The next time the bill comes up for consideration, Trump will be in office.
Conway noted that the move was important to Trump because it helps America’s “great friend” Israel and represents the wishes of many voters, including Evangelicals Christians.
“It is something that our friend Israel, a great friend in the Middle East, would appreciate and something that a lot of Jewish-Americans have expressed their preference for,” Conway said.
Along with other domestic issues, Trump’s agenda “is also about a strong Middle East and about protecting Israel,” she continued. “Evangelical Christians always have Israel at the top of their list when you ask what’s most important to them.”
Following on the heels of Conway’s comments, Israel’s Channel 2 reported on Monday evening that Trump’s transition team has already begun the planning stages of moving the embassy, including scouting locations in the capital.
According to the report, the Trump camp is already working with Israel’s Foreign Ministry on the matter, with officials checking on the availability of a certain plot of land in the Talpiot neighborhood which the US government purchased in 2014.
The land, which hosts the Immigrant Absorption Ministry-leased Diplomat Hotel, home to about 500 elderly immigrants from the Soviet Union, is adjacent to the existing US Consulate compound but would only become available in 2020, according to officials, the Times of Israel reported.
2)The right has its own
version of political correctness. It’s just as stifling.
version of political correctness. It’s just as stifling.
Conservatives use “patriotic correctness” to regulate
speech, behavior and acceptable opinions.speech,
behavior and acceptable opinions.
President-elect Donald Trump has not been shy about the “big problem in this country”: political correctness. Trump has blamed PC for the attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando (“They have put political correctness above common sense, above your safety and above all else,” he tweeted) and the rise of the militant group Islamic State. His voters agreed (indeed, it might even have been the reason for his victory).
It’s not just him. Political correctness has become a major bugaboo of the right in the past decade, a rallying cry against all that has gone wrong with liberalism and America. Conservative writers fill volumes complaining how political correctness stifles free expression and promotes bunk social theories about “power structures” based on patriarchy, race and mass victim hood. Forbes charged that it “stifles freedom of speech.” The Daily Caller has gone so far as to claim that political correctness “kills Americans.”
But conservatives have their own, nationalist version of PC, their own set of rules regulating speech, behavior and acceptable opinions. I call it “patriotic correctness.” It’s a full-throated, un-nuanced, uncompromising defense of American nationalism, history and cherry-picked ideals. Central to its thesis is the belief that nothing in America can’t be fixed by more patriotism enforced by public shaming, boycotts and policies to cut out foreign and non-American influences.
Insufficient displays of patriotism among the patriotically correct can result in exclusion from public life and ruined careers. It also restricts honest criticism of failed public policies, diverting blame for things like the war in Iraq to those Americans who didn’t support the war effort enough.
For example, in the aftermath of 9/11 and the run-up to the Iraq War, David Frum labeled dissenters as anti-American. Jonah Goldberg wrote that opponents of the war “can only get passionate about the perfidy of our own president.” Conservative gadfly Robert “Buzz” Patterson went further, calling much of the Democratic Party, Hollywood, big media, college campuses and many other organizations “traitors.” The French government’s opposition to the invasion of Iraq prompted Congress to rename French fries as “freedom fries” in congressional cafeterias, a 21st-century liberty cabbage. When the Dixie Chicks opposed the Iraq War, many stations pulled the group’s music from the air so as not to “trigger” listeners. Fans destroyed Dixie Chicks albums in grotesque public demonstrations. The radio became a safe space.
More recently, 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat and then knelt for the national anthem to protest police brutality. Tomi Lahren, host of “Final Thoughts,” gave an incoherent rant about soldiers dying for Kaepernick’s right to speak so, therefore, he should shut up and stand for the national anthem. Some fans even burned their Kaepernick jerseys in protest. Others said Kaepernick should “get the hell out” if he doesn’t love America. Myths of an NFL rule mandating standing for the anthem, even though no such rule actually exists, were spread to justify the outrage and point to a double standard of enforcement whereby the NFL condones protests against America but players get fined if they wear different-color shoelaces. In such a narrative, patriots are the victims of an elite liberal power structure.
Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) tweeted that “Kaepernick should think about the service members risking their lives to protect his freedom to be both rich and unpatriotic.” Kaepernick’s microaggression even offended liberal Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who said the protest was “dumb and disrespectful,” words she later retracted.
Believing in American exceptionalism means that anything less than chest-thumping jingoism is capitulation. Unionized public employees who can’t be fired are bad at their jobs and are more interested in increasing their own power than fulfilling their public duties — except if they are police or Border Patrol officers, who are unselfishly devoted to their jobs. The crime rate is high and rising, so when facts show that criminality has declined substantially over the decades, the patriotically correct respond with appeals to the bubbled feelings of the common man.
One of the biggest critics of patriotic correctness is National Review writer Jim Geraghty. He responded to outrage over Jeb Bush and his wife, Columba, speaking Spanish at home by writing, “What business is it of yours?” and said there is “something bafflingly insecure about our culture if we genuinely feel threatened by foreign languages spoken in the private sphere of the family home.”
Complaining about political correctness is patriotically correct. The patriotically correct must use the non-word “illegals,” or “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien” to describe foreigners who broke our immigration laws. Dissenters support “open borders” or “shamnesty” for 30 million illegal alien invaders. The punishment is deportation because “we’re a nation of laws” and they didn’t “get in line,” even though no such line actually exists. Just remember that they are never anti-immigration, only anti-illegal immigration, even when they want to cut legal immigration.
Black Lives Matter is racist because it implies that black lives are more important than other lives, but Blue Lives Matter doesn’t imply that cops’ lives are more important than the rest of ours. Banning Islam or Muslim immigration is a necessary security measure, but homosexuals should not be allowed to get married because it infringes on religious liberty. Transgender people could access women’s restrooms for perverted purposes, but Donald Trump walking in on nude underage girls in dressing rooms before a beauty pageant is just “media bias.”
Terrorism is an “existential threat,” even though the chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is about 1 in 3.2 million a year. Saying the words “radical Islam” when describing terrorism is an important incantation necessary to defeat that threat. When Chobani yogurt founder Hamdi Ulukaya decides to employ refugees in his factories, it’s because of his ties to “globalist corporate figures.” Waving a Mexican flag on U.S. soil means you hate America, but waving a Confederate flag just means you’re proud of your heritage. The phrase “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” needs a trigger warning.
Blaming the liberal or mainstream media and “media bias” is the patriotically correct version of blaming the corporations or capitalism. The patriotically correct notion that they “would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University” because the former have “common sense” and the “intellectual elites” don’t know anything, despite all the evidence to the contrary, can be sustained only in a total bubble. Poor white Americans are the victims of economic dislocation and globalization beyond their control, while poor blacks and Hispanics are poor because of their failed cultures. The patriotically correct are triggered when they hear strangers speaking in a language other than English. Does that remind you of the PC duty to publicly shame those who use unacceptable language to describe race, gender or whatever other identity is the victim du jour?
The patriotically correct rightly ridicule PC “safe spaces” but promptly retreat to Breitbart or talk radio, where they can have mutually reinforcing homogeneous temper tantrums while complaining about the lack of intellectual diversity on the left. There is no such thing as too much national security, but it’s liberals who want to coddle Americans with a “nanny state.” Those who disagree with the patriotically correct are animated by anti-Americanism, are post-American, or deserve any other of a long list of clunky and vague labels that signal virtue to other members of the patriotic in-group.
Every group has implicit rules against certain opinions, actions and language as well as enforcement mechanisms — and the patriotically correct are no exception. But they are different because they are near-uniformly unaware of how they are hewing to a code of speech and conduct similar to the PC lefties they claim to oppose. The modern form of political correctness on college campuses and the media is social tyranny with manners, while patriotic correctness is tyranny without the manners, and its adherents do not hesitate to use the law to advance their goals. If we have a term to describe this new phenomenon — I nominate patriotic correctness.
2a) Andy Puzder was my law school classmate at Washington University from 1977-1979. We were both older than the class, but I was a little older than Andy. We tied for the highest grade in Restitution, one of the most difficult courses, taught by the lowest-grading teacher in the school, something one never forgets (or stops bragging about). A few years later, he joined my law firm and we became law partners.
While we were partners, Andy, a devout pro-life Catholic, worked with William Webster, the MO Attorney General, to write an abortion law that could be upheld by the Supreme Court. The law limited state funding for abortions. When the law was challenged in Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services, Andy took it all the way to the Supreme Court and won. He did all this pro bono.
It was during the time that he was working on Webster that Andy met and impressed Carl Karcher, the founder of Carl’s Jr. who was funding a lot of the anti-abortion legal battles. CKE is privately owned. Karcher attended mass daily throughout his life and funded many conservative and religious causes. He also owned, or had a controlling or influential interest in, a host of other businesses including Fidelity National Financial Services. Eventually, Karcher recruited Andy and the rest is history. Andy sent legal work to our St. Louis firm because he could get it done faster, better, and cheaper there than by California lawyers. Eventually, he recruited a number of our brightest partners.
Andy is a brilliant, hard-working, sensible and honorable devout family man. His wife was a paralegal in our firm. After their marriage, while having a baby every other year or so, she finished college and law school and became a very successful winery owner and entrepreneur in her own right. And like Melania Trump, she’s gorgeous. I think he’ll do a great job as Secretary of Labor!
J---
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++3)
Speech Slams
‘FAKE NEWS’ Gets
CRUSHED by her
own MASSIVE
HYPOCRISY
Hillary Clinton just gave just her second public post-election speech, this time to Congress to honor retiring Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.
After complimenting the retiring senator, Clinton couldn’t resist the opportunity to toss out yet another excuse for her November election defeat to Donald Trump – you guessed it – the “Epidemic” of “Fake News.” Oh, THE IRONY!
Clinton called on Congress to stop the “epidemic of malicious fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year” because it is, unlike – apparently – things like Islamic extremism, a “danger to the nation.”
Likely referring to Edgar Welch’s firing of an AR-15 rifle inside Washington pizzeria Comet Ping Pong on Sunday in response to a fake news story about Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, running a child sex ring there, Clinton said, “It’s now clear that so-called fake news can have real-world consequences.”
“It’s a danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly,” Clinton said. “Bipartisan legislation is making its way through Congress to boost the government’s response to foreign propaganda and Silicon Valley is starting to grapple with the challenge and threat of fake news.”
3a)
Despite this, Obama has chosen to make the probe the top priority of US intelligence agencies.
He urged them to finish their investigation before he leaves office. And, according to his deputy press secretary Eric Schultz, he aims to publicize as many the findings as he can.
Friday afternoon, Schultz said, “We’re going to make public as much as we can. As you can imagine, something like this might include sensitive and even classified information. When that report is submitted, we’re going to take a look. We want to brief Congress and the relevant stakeholders, possibly state directors.”
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden responded positively to Schultz’s statement. “This is good news,” he said. “Declassifying and releasing information about the Russian government and the US election, and doing so quickly, must be a priority.”
But why disclose the findings of an inconclusive investigation? There is only one reason to do so: to delegitimize the election results and so make the Trump administration radioactive for Democrats.
Once a pall of suspicion is cast over the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency by the outgoing Democratic White House, no self-respecting Democrat with a survival instinct will be willing to cooperate with the Trump administration.
It is no coincidence that Obama ordered the probe hot on the heels of Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s failed recount bid. The purpose of Stein’s recount, for which she raised more money than she raised for her entire presidential campaign, was identical to the purpose of the probe. There was no chance that the recounts in the Rust Belt states that swerved toward Republicans and sealed Trump’s victory would change the election results. The point of the recount, like the espionage probe and the “fake news” meme, is to keep the faithful believing.
They may not have Congress. They may not have the White House. But by God, they are going to make the other guys choke on their victory.
This has become the purpose of the Left, not only in the US but throughout the Western world over the past decade or so. As their promised panaceas to their nations’ problems have failed one by one, in country after country, leftist politicians, ideologues, financiers and activists have kept their movements going not by offering alternative policies that might actually work or by suggesting that they work with their political and ideological opponents for the betterment of their countries. They have kept their faithful in the tent by feeding them a steady diet of hatred for the other side.
This is how things work in Israel.
Long gone are the days when leftists argued passionately about their ideal of land for peace, a passion which informed their actions for a generation.
After the peace process with the PLO was exposed as a jihad, after unilateral withdrawals brought war from Lebanon and Gaza, the Left knows that its policies will never win the public to its side.
So it has moved on to the politics of personal and social destruction.
The most blatant aspect of this continuous campaign of destruction and delegitimization is the Left’s campaign against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his wife Sara and, increasingly, their children.
Consider the ongoing criminal probe into Mrs.Netanyahu’s management of the prime minister’s residence.
A week and a half ago, Channel 2 broadcast alleged protocols from Sara Netanyahu’s 12-hour investigation by the national fraud division. According to the broadcast protocols, Mrs. Netanyahu was upbraided by investigators demanding to know why she told caterers that her dinner guests were foreigners rather than Israelis and why she claimed more people were coming to dinner than actually came.
She was grilled about a thousand shekel bonus paid to a worker at the prime minister’s residence who helped her take care of her aging father when his nurse was on her day off.
Even the reporters sitting in the television studio couldn’t believe what they were hearing. How is it possible that Mrs. Netanyahu was interrogated for 12 hours about schnitzels? The answer is clear enough. The purpose of the constant investigations of Mrs. Netanyahu is twofold.
First, they are aimed at demonizing the Netanyahu family as corrupt. It doesn’t matter what Netanyahu did or didn’t do. It doesn’t matter that the investigation appears to be entirely frivolous.
The point of the investigation isn’t to put Sara Netanyahu in jail. It is to tar her and her good-for-nothing husband as corrupt.
The second purpose of the prolonged chicken-dinner investigation was to make it impossible for Netanyahu to function. How can any husband work while his wife is being interrogated by the national fraud division? At around the same time that Mrs. Netanyahu was being interrogated about “schnitzel-gate,” the media were broadcasting daily headlines about an alleged corruption scandal related to Netanyahu’s decision five years ago to approve the acquisition of three more submarines from Germany. The media alleged – in stories blasted across page 1 headlines in the major papers and opening the nightly news broadcasts night after night – that Netanyahu’s decision to approve the submarine purchase was motivated by the fact that his personal attorney, and cousin, David Shimron, represented one of the German companies involved in the sale.
It took less than a week for the allegations to fall apart. But that doesn’t mean the story is over.
Just as Obama decided to use his last weeks in office to discredit Trump’s victory despite the FBI’s rejection of the allegation that Russia had a hand in it, so the Israeli Left uses the baseless allegations of corruption against Netanyahu and his family to incite its members to continue to view him as illegitimate.
Sunday night the Erel Margalit, the multimillionaire venture capitalist turned Labor MK turned populist rabble rouser, joined forces with Eldad Yaniv, Ehud Barak’s former spin master who has reinvented himself as a populist man of the people.
The two posted an online video calling for the public to join them in demanding that Netanyahu be investigated.Yaniv and Margalit took the red headlines related to the German submarine purchase and peppered them with photos of Netanyahu smoking a cigar and laughing with his sons and wife, and living the good life with a friend on the beach. They alleged that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit is the Netanyahu family’s consigliere and that Police Inspector General Roni Elshech is in his pocket.
Yaniv and Margalit brought no substantive claims.
Their montage was pure vilification. They argued irrationally that high food prices are caused by the submarine purchase.
3a)
The Left's never-ending war
By Caroline B. Glick
The push among the American Left to discredit the results of last month’s presidential election entered a new phase last Friday with the White House’s announcement that outgoing US President Barack Obama has ordered US intelligence agencies to review evidence of Russian hacking in last month’s elections on behalf of President-elect Donald Trump.
The investigation itself is unlikely to lead to any conclusive results. The FBI, which is responsible for carrying out this sort of investigation, saw no evidence that Russian hacking was aimed specifically at assisting Trump’s campaign against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
The investigation itself is unlikely to lead to any conclusive results. The FBI, which is responsible for carrying out this sort of investigation, saw no evidence that Russian hacking was aimed specifically at assisting Trump’s campaign against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
He urged them to finish their investigation before he leaves office. And, according to his deputy press secretary Eric Schultz, he aims to publicize as many the findings as he can.
Friday afternoon, Schultz said, “We’re going to make public as much as we can. As you can imagine, something like this might include sensitive and even classified information. When that report is submitted, we’re going to take a look. We want to brief Congress and the relevant stakeholders, possibly state directors.”
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden responded positively to Schultz’s statement. “This is good news,” he said. “Declassifying and releasing information about the Russian government and the US election, and doing so quickly, must be a priority.”
But why disclose the findings of an inconclusive investigation? There is only one reason to do so: to delegitimize the election results and so make the Trump administration radioactive for Democrats.
Once a pall of suspicion is cast over the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency by the outgoing Democratic White House, no self-respecting Democrat with a survival instinct will be willing to cooperate with the Trump administration.
It is no coincidence that Obama ordered the probe hot on the heels of Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s failed recount bid. The purpose of Stein’s recount, for which she raised more money than she raised for her entire presidential campaign, was identical to the purpose of the probe. There was no chance that the recounts in the Rust Belt states that swerved toward Republicans and sealed Trump’s victory would change the election results. The point of the recount, like the espionage probe and the “fake news” meme, is to keep the faithful believing.
They may not have Congress. They may not have the White House. But by God, they are going to make the other guys choke on their victory.
This has become the purpose of the Left, not only in the US but throughout the Western world over the past decade or so. As their promised panaceas to their nations’ problems have failed one by one, in country after country, leftist politicians, ideologues, financiers and activists have kept their movements going not by offering alternative policies that might actually work or by suggesting that they work with their political and ideological opponents for the betterment of their countries. They have kept their faithful in the tent by feeding them a steady diet of hatred for the other side.
This is how things work in Israel.
Long gone are the days when leftists argued passionately about their ideal of land for peace, a passion which informed their actions for a generation.
After the peace process with the PLO was exposed as a jihad, after unilateral withdrawals brought war from Lebanon and Gaza, the Left knows that its policies will never win the public to its side.
So it has moved on to the politics of personal and social destruction.
The most blatant aspect of this continuous campaign of destruction and delegitimization is the Left’s campaign against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his wife Sara and, increasingly, their children.
Consider the ongoing criminal probe into Mrs.Netanyahu’s management of the prime minister’s residence.
A week and a half ago, Channel 2 broadcast alleged protocols from Sara Netanyahu’s 12-hour investigation by the national fraud division. According to the broadcast protocols, Mrs. Netanyahu was upbraided by investigators demanding to know why she told caterers that her dinner guests were foreigners rather than Israelis and why she claimed more people were coming to dinner than actually came.
She was grilled about a thousand shekel bonus paid to a worker at the prime minister’s residence who helped her take care of her aging father when his nurse was on her day off.
Even the reporters sitting in the television studio couldn’t believe what they were hearing. How is it possible that Mrs. Netanyahu was interrogated for 12 hours about schnitzels? The answer is clear enough. The purpose of the constant investigations of Mrs. Netanyahu is twofold.
First, they are aimed at demonizing the Netanyahu family as corrupt. It doesn’t matter what Netanyahu did or didn’t do. It doesn’t matter that the investigation appears to be entirely frivolous.
The point of the investigation isn’t to put Sara Netanyahu in jail. It is to tar her and her good-for-nothing husband as corrupt.
The second purpose of the prolonged chicken-dinner investigation was to make it impossible for Netanyahu to function. How can any husband work while his wife is being interrogated by the national fraud division? At around the same time that Mrs. Netanyahu was being interrogated about “schnitzel-gate,” the media were broadcasting daily headlines about an alleged corruption scandal related to Netanyahu’s decision five years ago to approve the acquisition of three more submarines from Germany. The media alleged – in stories blasted across page 1 headlines in the major papers and opening the nightly news broadcasts night after night – that Netanyahu’s decision to approve the submarine purchase was motivated by the fact that his personal attorney, and cousin, David Shimron, represented one of the German companies involved in the sale.
It took less than a week for the allegations to fall apart. But that doesn’t mean the story is over.
Just as Obama decided to use his last weeks in office to discredit Trump’s victory despite the FBI’s rejection of the allegation that Russia had a hand in it, so the Israeli Left uses the baseless allegations of corruption against Netanyahu and his family to incite its members to continue to view him as illegitimate.
Sunday night the Erel Margalit, the multimillionaire venture capitalist turned Labor MK turned populist rabble rouser, joined forces with Eldad Yaniv, Ehud Barak’s former spin master who has reinvented himself as a populist man of the people.
The two posted an online video calling for the public to join them in demanding that Netanyahu be investigated.Yaniv and Margalit took the red headlines related to the German submarine purchase and peppered them with photos of Netanyahu smoking a cigar and laughing with his sons and wife, and living the good life with a friend on the beach. They alleged that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit is the Netanyahu family’s consigliere and that Police Inspector General Roni Elshech is in his pocket.
Yaniv and Margalit brought no substantive claims.
Their montage was pure vilification. They argued irrationally that high food prices are caused by the submarine purchase.
The purpose of the film is obvious. Bereft of an attractive platform to sell the public, they are selling the only thing they have left to rally their ever dwindling base: hatred.
Since last month’s US election, a minority of Democrats have called for their party to moderate its policies. Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan ran a failed bid against Rep. Nancy Pelosi to serve as Democratic minority chairman in the House of Representatives arguing just that case.
Ryan’s loss, like Obama’s espionage probe makes clear that the Democrats will not consider a more moderate course. The majority has no intention of changing its positions. Rather, they intend to keep their adherents on a war footing so that they won’t have the opportunity to even consider a course correction.
By veering from the recount to fake news allegations to the Russian hacking story, the radicals who control the Democratic Party keeps their activists on a war footing. The faithful are given no opportunity to reflect even for a moment on the substantive issues that formed the heart of the presidential race.
The glum conclusion from all of this is clear enough. With their policies rejected by voters, the purpose of the Left isn’t to govern. It is to render their societies ungovernable.
Since last month’s US election, a minority of Democrats have called for their party to moderate its policies. Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan ran a failed bid against Rep. Nancy Pelosi to serve as Democratic minority chairman in the House of Representatives arguing just that case.
Ryan’s loss, like Obama’s espionage probe makes clear that the Democrats will not consider a more moderate course. The majority has no intention of changing its positions. Rather, they intend to keep their adherents on a war footing so that they won’t have the opportunity to even consider a course correction.
By veering from the recount to fake news allegations to the Russian hacking story, the radicals who control the Democratic Party keeps their activists on a war footing. The faithful are given no opportunity to reflect even for a moment on the substantive issues that formed the heart of the presidential race.
The glum conclusion from all of this is clear enough. With their policies rejected by voters, the purpose of the Left isn’t to govern. It is to render their societies ungovernable.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
4)The Left Pays No Price When Its Gambles Prove Costly
From health care to gun control, the Left takes control out of people’s hands and bets that they know best.
Sometimes life forces us to make decisions, even when we don’t have enough information to know how the decision will turn out. The risks may be even greater when people make decisions for other people. Yet there are some who are not only willing, but eager, to take decisions away from those who are directly affected.
Something as personal as what doctor we want to go to has been taken out of our hands by Obamacare. What job offer, at what pay rate, someone wants to accept has been taken out of their hands by minimum-wage laws.Sick people who are dying are prevented from trying a medication that has not yet completed all the long years of tests required by federal regulations — even if the medication has been used for years in other countries without ill effects.
One by one, innumerable decisions have been taken out of the hands of those directly affected. This is not just something that has happened. It is a central part of the agenda of the political Left, even though they describe what they are doing in terms of the bad things they claim to be preventing and the good things they claim to be creating.
Minimum-wage laws are described as preventing workers from being “exploited” by employers who pay less than what third parties want them to pay. But would people accept wages that third parties don’t like if there were better alternatives available?
This is an issue that is very personal to me. When I left home at the age of 17, going out into the world as a black high-school dropout with very little experience and no skills, the minimum-wage law had been rendered meaningless by ten years of inflation since the law was passed. In other words, there was no minimum wage law in effect, for all practical purposes.
It was far easier for me to find jobs then than it is for teenage black high-school dropouts today. After the minimum wage was raised to keep up with inflation, for decades the unemployment rate for black male 17-year-olds never fell below triple what it was for me — and in some years their unemployment rate was as much as five times what it was when I was a teenager.
Yet many people on the left were able to feel good about themselves for having prevented “exploitation” — that is, wage rates less than what third parties would like to see. No employer in his right mind was going to pay me what third parties wanted paid, when I had nothing to contribute, except in the simplest jobs.
As for me, my options would have been welfare or crime, and welfare was a lot harder to get in those days. As it was, the ineffectiveness of the minimum-wage law at that time allowed me time to acquire job skills that would enable me to move on to successively better jobs — and eventually to complete my education. Most people who have minimum-wage jobs do not stay at those jobs for life. The turnover rate among people who are flipping hamburgers was found by one study to be so high that those who have such jobs on New Year’s Day are very unlikely to still be there at Christmas.
In short, the Left has been gambling with other people’s livelihoods — and the Left pays no price when that gamble fails.
It is the same story when the Left prevents dying people from getting medications that have been used for years in other countries, without dire effects, but have not yet gotten through the long maze of federal “safety” regulations in the U.S.
People have died from such “safety.” Police are dying from restrictions on them that keep criminals safe.
San Francisco is currently trying to impose more restrictions on the police, restrictions that will prevent them from shooting at a moving car, except under special conditions that they will have to think about when they have a split second to make a decision that can cost them their own lives. But the Left will pay no price.
One of the most zealous crusades of the Left has been to prevent law-abiding citizens from having guns, even though gun-control laws have little or no effect on criminals who violate laws in general. You can read through reams of rhetoric from gun-control advocates without encountering a single hard fact showing that gun-control laws reducing crime in general or murder in particular.
Such hard evidence as exists points in the opposite direction.
But the gun-control gamble with other people’s lives is undeterred. And the Left still pays no price when they are wrong.
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