Millennials would not understand nor most of those born after 1980. This is very corny, It is called recognition of American Greatness. It hearkens back to when patriotism was acceptable. Everything relating to respect for the flag, accepting responsibility, love of country, willingness to accept and obey legitimate authority and the rule of law began to come apart starting in the '60's. The erosion process has accelerated and now most of these same Americans believe socialism is preferable to capitalism, open borders are preferable to vetting and illegal immigration is dignified and protected in sanctuaries. John Wayne 1970 Variety Show Celebrating America's History ...
And:
Did we have a Manchurian President? (See 1 below.)
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It is scare tactics time in liberal la la land and since they have less regard for "stare decisis' they beat this dead horse to intimidate. (See 2 below.)
In the matter of " tingle up the leg Chris," he is still trying to get his fellow liberal /radical Democrats to explain the difference between themselves and socialists. (See 2a below.)
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Iranian protesters need continue/co-ordinated support from without. (See 3 below.)
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Hysteria abounds on both sides of the political spectrum. Coherent arguments cannot be heard by closed minds or formed by mindless ones. (See 4 below.)
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Eating your own is both a nasty habit and self defeating but in the case of radical Democrat socialists and their assorted fascist friends- sup away! (See 5 below.)
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Payment to terrorists families to be deducted/withheld. (See 6 below.)
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More humor. (See 7 below.)
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Dick
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1)America really did have a Manchurian Candidate in the White House
After returning from a tour of some of the war zones in the Middle East — which ended with the Free Iran Gathering 2018 in Paris — I am struck by the realization that America really did have a Manchurian Candidate in The White House for eight years. If you look at the evidence, there really is no other conclusion. The calamitous consequences of the Obama presidency will be felt for the foreseeable future.
In the short year and a half that President Trump has been in office, he has put in place policy that has mitigated the damage that President Obama inflicted on our national security and on our allies. The speed with which Trump has been able to turn things around points to the diabolical depths the Obama administration went to in order to undermine our national strength and way of life. All Trump had to do was stop doing things that hurt America; America could then take care of itself. The results are plain as day. However, it will take decades for the Obama damage to be completely undone. The deviousness of the Obama sedition runs deep.
Think about it for a moment. If you wanted peace in the Middle East, why would you throw away the trillions of dollars spent, as well as the lives of thousands of American souls, by irresponsibly pulling out ALL American troops from Iraq? No matter your thoughts on starting the war, pulling out was an irresponsible thing to do. We still have troops in Germany, Korea and Japan, for God’s sake. Why? For stability, that’s why. As Colin Powell said, we broke it, now we own it. It was a given that instability would follow the force withdrawal. When you combine this act with the reality that Obama never really did try to defeat the Islamic State, what conclusion can you come up with? Trump defeated them in a few months. The conclusion is obvious: Obama really didn’t want to destroy them.
Why did Obama and Hillary take down Moammar Gadhafi, who had already given up his nuclear weapons? Was it to destabilize Libya, where ISIS could gain another foothold? Why did Obama help install the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt? What was the agenda behind the so-called Arab Spring?
However, the coup-de-grace of anti-American activity was the JCPOA, or, to say it another way, the agreement to give Iran everything it wanted, including nuclear weapons and money — lots of money — which it immediately used to further destabilize the region, and existentially threaten the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel. To take it a step further, why didn’t Obama support the opposition against the Mullahs in 2009 when there was an obvious chance for regime change in Iran? Why didn’t Obama confront Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons use? One of the main unanswered questions is what ties did Valerie Jarrett really have to the Iranian regime?
I won’t go into why Obama ran up more debt for the United States than all previous presidents combined. I won’t ask why he weakened our armed forces. I won’t ask why he used tyrannical policies, like using the agencies of the federal government to go after his political opposition. I won’t ask why he politicized our security apparatus in an attempt to frame President Trump.
What I will say is that there was a big fox in the hen house for eight long years. Eight long years for people like Brennan, Hillary, Kerry, Clapper, Comey and Jarrett to really hurt us regarding our safety and security.
Trump has a lot of house cleaning to do. Thank goodness he’s being quick about it.
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2) The Abortion Scare Campaign
Why Roe v. Wade and same-sex marriage are likely to survive after Kennedy.
Some things in politics are predictable—a New Jersey tax increase, a “no” vote by Senator Rand Paul, and an abortion-rights scare campaign every time a Republican President makes a Supreme Court nomination. And sure enough, the predictions of doom for abortion and gay rights began within minutes of Anthony Kennedy’s resignation last week. These predictions are almost certainly wrong.
“Abortion will be illegal in twenty states in 18 months,” tweeted Jeffrey Toobin, the legal pundit, in a classic of cool, even-handed CNN analysis soon after the resignation news. Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer was almost as definitive. “Whomever the president picks, it is all too likely they’re going to overturn health-care protections and Roe v. Wade,” the 1973 abortion-rights decision, Mr. Schumer declared. “We don’t need to guess.”
The first thing to keep in mind is that this is what Democrats and their media allies always say. They said it in 1987 when Justice Kennedy was nominated. They said it in 1990 about David Souter, again about Clarence Thomas in 1991, John Roberts and Samuel Alito in 2005, and Neil Gorsuch in 2017. They even claimed the Chief Justice might overturn Roe because his wife is a Roman Catholic. Mrs. Roberts is still waiting to write her first opinion.
The liberal line is always that Roe hangs by a judicial thread, and one more conservative Justice will doom it. Yet Roe still stands after nearly five decades. Our guess is that this will be true even if President Trump nominates another Justice Gorsuch. The reason is the power of stare decisis, or precedent, and how conservatives view the role of the Court in supporting the credibility of the law.
Start with the Court’s Obergefell ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in 2015. The ruling was only 5-4 and Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion with a formidable dissent by Chief Justice Roberts.
Yet there’s almost no chance the Chief would reverse Obergefell now. Tens of thousands of gay couples have been married across the U.S. since the ruling. They have changed their lives based on it. Is the Court now going to tell those couples that states can declare their marriages void? Or that their property rights under marriage laws are no longer valid?
A key part of the Court’s stare decisis calculation is “reliance interests,” or how and how many people have come to rely on a precedent. Chief Justice Roberts cited reliance interests in his Wayfair dissent on state internet sales taxes this term, and its logic is even more compelling for same-sex marriage.
A different stare decisis logic applies to Roe, which was one of the Court’s worst rulings but is now 45 years old and embedded in American law. While abortion is still hotly debated, the Court has reinforced the right many times.
Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 superseded Roe with its “undue burden” test on states for imposing limits on abortion. In 2016 in Hellerstedt, the Court invoked that test to strike down a Texas law imposing stringent regulations on abortion clinics. In many other cases when the Court has upheld state restrictions, the core right was never challenged.
Our view, supported by more than a little reporting, is that even though they think Roe was wrongly decided, most of the current conservative Justices would shy from overturning it and handing abortion law entirely to the states. The exception is Justice Clarence Thomas, who has made his intentions clear.
Scientific advances have made abortions easy to obtain through medication in the early weeks of pregnancy, and making them illegal would create an enormous social uproar and invite an attack on the Court that Chief Justice Roberts in particular would not want. Judge Laurence Silberman of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals told us recently that his long-time friend and colleague Antonin Scalia told him before he died that even he would not have sought to overturn Roe today.
Ah, but didn’t five Justices only last week vote to overturn a 41-year-old First Amendment precedent on coerced speech on union fees? They did, but Abood had long ago become an outlier in the Court’s free-speech jurisprudence. It survived by a single vote even as the Court struck down other examples of speech coerced by governments.
The same cannot be said about the Court’s abortion precedents. A post-Kennedy Court is likely not to overturn Roe and its successors but it will probably uphold more state restrictions. This won’t please some social conservatives, but it would put U.S. law close to where American public opinion is—keeping abortion legal but making it rarer than it now is.
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Many on the left and right will disagree with this analysis for different reasons. Conservatives want to believe that Roe can still be repealed in toto, like Plessy v. Ferguson , and we admire their conviction. Liberals want to scare Americans to believe abortion rights are in peril so they can intimidate enough GOP Senators to defeat whoever Mr. Trump nominates to replace Justice Kennedy.
The headlines are already targeting GOP Senators Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Shelley Moore Capito, and abortion is the political cudgel. Ms. Collins said over the weekend that she won’t vote to confirm a nominee who shows “hostility” to Roe. She isn’t likely to face such a choice.
No one on Mr. Trump’s list of nominees will claim to want to overturn Roe—and not because they are lying. In their caution and deference to precedent, they will be showing proper conservative respect for the law and the reputation of the Court.
2a) FLASHBACK: Chris Matthews Stumps Key Democrats When He Asks The Difference Between a Socialist and a Democrat
MSNBC host Chris Matthews is no Republican sympathizer, but he is not doing the Democratic Party any favors by making three of its key members squirm on live television with a simple question: What's the difference between a socialist and a Democrat?
Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.), Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), the third-ranking Democrat in the chamber, have gotten the Matthews treatment with that question, and each came off looking uncomfortable.
Schultz refused to distinguish the two in July, saying that the real debate in the race would be the contrasts between Republicans and Democrats. When Meet the Press host Chuck Todd offered her a reprieve a few days later, she still failed to answer the question.
Clinton, who is trying to counter a challenge from avowed socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) in what has become an embarrassingly close primary fight, was unnerved by the question this month, ultimately offering that she was not a socialist but a "progressive Democrat." She did not outline the differences.
Matthews posed the same question to Schumer on Tuesday as part of a preview for President Obama's State of the Union address. Schumer dodged, saying, "Oh, it depends how you define each one, doesn't it?"
It got more uncomfortable from there:
"Well, you do it," Matthews said with a fat grin.
"Well, I’m not going to get into it," Schumer said with an equally fat—though probably strained—grin.
Matthews didn’t drop the subject without a fight.
"You guys are well-schooled in political language and nomenclature. You’re quite capable of defining the difference between a socialist, self-described and a Democrat self-described. What is it?" Matthews asked.
Schumer responded that he had nothing bad to say about his socialist colleague Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.), but did not address the difference between a socialist and a Democrat.Matthews seemed to think this omission was telling.
"You’ve told me so much. Whenever I hear you not speak, it teaches me a great deal," Matthews said.
As Clinton and Sanders battle for the soul of the Democratic Party in 2016, the distinctions between liberals and far-left socialists seem to be blurring.
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3)
‘The Game Is Over:’ Behind the Ongoing Anti-Regime Protests in Iran
Analysis
By Kaveh Taheri
Iranian riot police confront protesters in Tehran. Photo: amadnews.org.
Protests against the ruling regime in Iran have now continued into July, with fresh demonstrations in the south and southwest of the country reported on Sunday night and Monday morning.
In fact, Iran has witnessed strikes and protests on a daily basis since December 2017. The first one took place in Mashhad, Iran’s second largest city by population, and the most religious. It is a city where Ayatollah Sayyid Ahmad Alamolhoda, “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative, and Ebrahim Raisi, President Hassan Rouhani’s rival in the last election, hold indisputable power.
Now thousands of Iranian citizens have once again held mass protests in the Grand Bazaar of Tehran and in other big cities such as Tabriz, Shiraz and Kermanshah.
The larger protests that sprouted in June are a spontaneous response to Iran’s grave economic crisis, rooted in regime corruption and mismanagement. The people are telling the regime, “Leave Syria, think of us,” “Nor Gaza, not Lebanon, my life is for Iran,” and “Death to Palestine.” In growing numbers, Iranians are confronting the regime’s squandering of the country’s wealth — including billions of dollars unlocked by the 2015 nuclear deal, the JCPOA — on its regional proxies. These include Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Islamic Jihad and others, whose aim is to destabilize the Middle East.
Meanwhile, Iran’s economy is on the verge of collapse. The regime faces huge problems like double-digit inflation, a decreasing GDP, a large volume of government debt, the historic lowest value of the Iranian rial to the US dollar, high unemployment, and a growing crime rate.
What kind of government do the protesters want? Demonstrators in some cities chanted “Reza Shah, bless your soul,” praising the last shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi. The most important slogan, however, was “Reformist, Conservative: the game is over,” showing dissatisfaction with the entire regime. The people want regime change and neither reformists nor conservatives are their choice.
Today in Iran, groups of workers, educators, clinic personnel, farmers, and drivers gather in anti-regime demonstrations protesting against government policies and to show their hatred of the system.
Rejection of the ruling ideology of the Velayat-e-Faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists) is reaching its highest point. Recently, tens of thousands of Iranian accounts on Twitter and other social media platforms posted one simple message: #IranRegimeChange.
Iranian cartoonist Reza Rish’s take on how Iran’s leaders see the protests.
Scattered showers cannot make a river overflow, however. No revolution in the world has been a result of a one day rally. The revolution against the Iranian regime needs planning, needs leadership and needs alliances. Most of all it needs time.
That is why factors such as international pressure upon Iran’s regime, and global public support for the Iranian protestors, Iranians are vital for gaining success. For many reasons, Iranians are on the streets to protest against this regime every day. The US withdrawal from the JCPOA in May added enormously to the pressure on the regime, but the sooner the rest of the world discontinues its dealings with the mullahs, the greater the chance for the victory of these protests.
Kaveh Taheri is an Iranian human rights activist and journalist. A former political prisoner, he fled from Iran to Turkey, where he now lives as a refugee.
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4)New York Post
The main political divide in the country right now isn’t over who should sit on the US Supreme Court or how illegal immigrants and their children should be treated. The real difference between liberals and conservatives is more basic: whether you think President Trump is dismantling democracy and leading us to the brink of an authoritarian era that will destroy all we hold dear.
If that sounds more like partisan hysteria than a coherent critique of Trump’s policies, it is. But you’d be wrong to dismiss a discussion about such fears.
The volume of protests against Trump and the routine way he and his administration are compared to 20th-century fascists and Nazis isn’t merely a function of disgust with his personality and Twitter account. Trump’s opponents are unable to separate his personality from the conventional conservative way he’s governed.
While liberals fantasize about Robert Mueller making the bad Trump dream go away, the country has carried on with a booming economy and, as the nonstop attacks on Trump from the mainstream media prove, with freedom of the press preserved.
But listen closely to the angry voices of the left and you’ll hear more than just disagreement on the issues. These days even some mainstream liberals truly appear to believe American liberty is hanging in the balance, and nothing short of active “resistance” is required in order to prevent the country from sliding into a fascist nightmare.
Part of this can be put down to the fact that Americans no longer all read, watch or listen to the same media, a trend that has been exacerbated by the rise of social media, allowing us to isolate ourselves from all opposing views.
That has fed not merely an inability to listen to the other side but a sense of despair about politics and society and a belief that opponents aren’t just wrong but have bad intentions. That explains both the over-the-top rhetoric as well as the breakdown of civility that allows otherwise decent people to justify insults and harassment of people whose only crime is to hold different political opinions.
But while conservatives may scoff at liberal nightmares, they also ought to sound vaguely familiar.
One of the best analyses of the 2016 campaign came from Michael Anton, whose article “The Flight 93 Election,” published in the Claremont Review, set off a furious debate. His thesis was that for many on the right, the election was a last chance to save the republic from certain doom.
Just like the passengers on United Flight 93 on 9/11, who were forced to charge the cockpit even though the odds of survival were small, many on the right believed the election of Hillary Clinton had to be prevented at all costs. That justified backing a man like Trump, so long as the liberal transformation of the courts and the rest of society championed by President Barack Obama was stalled.
Trump’s conservative judicial appointments and other policies have justified the faith of almost all Republicans and marginalized what’s left of the Never Trump remnant. The right’s fear that liberals will effectively eradicate religious freedom for conservatives is, at least for the moment, assuaged.
But for liberals, this is their “Flight 93” moment.
The debate about immigration has sunk to a contest in which all border-security measures are demonized to justify the apocalyptic rhetoric we’re hearing. And now a conventional ideological battle over control of the Supreme Court is being depicted as nothing less than Armageddon, as if preventing the confirmation of a fifth conservative justice is all that stands between us and “The Handmaid’s Tale” becoming reality.
The same hysteria is what lies behind the willingness of so many in the press to drop even the pretense of objectivity in favor of blatant anti-Trump and anti-GOP bias.
Think what you like about Trump, but it’s time for reasonable people to stop buying into the lunacy that the sky is falling and that we are living in the moral equivalent of the last days of the Weimar Republic. For all of our problems, the Flight 93 analogy is a dangerous fantasy.
Both sides need to step back from an all-consuming left/right culture war that’s doing far more damage to democracy than anything Trump or his opponents can do.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org and a contributor to National Review.
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5)
But man, have they ever come through of late! In the opening weeks of what far-left blogger and feminist priestess Rebecca Traister has termed the left's "summer of rage," they have turned on each other like starving rats, and I am so here for their latest freakshow. As bored as I was of listening to liberals throw unholy tantrums and shrieking about whatever weird conspiracy theory they'd cooked up to explain why President Donald Trump has mopped the floor with them since January 2017, I am riveted by watching them jockey for position to throw each other under the bus.
Last week, a hitherto-unknown communist named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez yanked the rug out from under longtime congressman — and Nancy Pelosi sock puppet — Joe Crowley (D-Not for long). And Crowley isn't some background benchwarmer from some hippie-infested Oregon backwater or gun violence-plagued free-fire zone in urban Baltimore. Crowley is the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives. Moreover, Ocasio-Cortez isn't some Democrat super-pac-backed lecture circuit darling. She's a communist bartender. A 28-year-old communist bartender. In the space of a week, Miss Ocasio-Cortez has jumped from undereducated neophyte to the new face of the Democrat Party; a fact which doubtless galls Madame Pelosi as much as a Botox® shortage. And God love the girl; in a district in which Republicans are about as popular as the plague, she's probably going to win. The next generation of the party of Hillary Clinton is younger than Hillary's own kid, and wants every American to taste the sweet fruit of socialism. Of course, that would be a metaphorical taste, since the grocery stores in socialist nations ran out of fruit a couple of years ago.
Bookending the "new" left with Ocasio-Cortez, is Congressperson Maxine Waters (LOL-Californistan). Don't let her advanced years fool you. Our gal Max might look like a raisin in a James Brown wig next to the vivacious Ocasio-Cortez, but she can rock her own pair of crazypants. After exhorting liberals to go full stormtrooper whenever they encounter enemies of the collective, she followed up with some fanciful tales about death threats, and then turned both barrels on her party's hierarchy. This past weekend, the old girl took dead aim at both Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-Wherever There's a Camera), telling MSNBC's resident racist Joy Ann Reid that her party's bigwigs "will do anything that they think is necessary to protect their leadership."
Time was, you were allowed to be a fairly moderate Democrat. They even permitted the occasional pro-life politician into their ranks, as long as the pol would pull the "yes" lever on whatever tax scam or welfare giveaway they came up with. Now, they're even going after Senator Bernie Sanders (Crazy Old Man - VT). Everyone's favorite grumpy old socialist just two short years ago, Bernie's refusal to endorse abolishing the ICE has him looking at the business end of the same ideologues who squealed like fangirls for him when he challenged Hillary for the title.
One of my best friends, and a smart cat in his own right, has long maintained that the Democrats, when starving for a win, inevitably start eating their own. Based on their current diet, I'd say he's right. I'd also say: Dig in, Democrats!
— Ben Crystal
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6) Israeli MPs thank PMW as Israel passes law to deduct terror money from the PA
MP Avi Dichter, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee:
"Palestinian Media Watch provided us with authentic data that enabled productive and professional deliberations, nuances that are very difficult to achieve without precise data"
MP Elazar Stern:
"I want to thank... [PMW Director] Itamar Marcus ... and everyone who has pushed and accompanied this committee for a long time"
The two Israeli MPs who sponsored the law each thanked PMW during the parliamentary voting session, noting the unique importance of PMW's input and documentation.
Prior to the vote, MP Avi Dichter, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee said:
"The Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee received much help in its deliberations, from the families of terror victims and those wounded by terror attacks who came to the discussions and shared their views with us, and with them were people from Palestinian Media Watch who provided us with authentic data that enabled productive and professional deliberations, nuances that are very difficult to achieve without precise data."
[Israeli Parliament website, July 2, 2018]
Following the vote and the passage of the law, MP Elazar Stern said:
"I want to thank... [PMW Director] Itamar Marcus ... and everyone who has pushed and accompanied this committee for a long time."
The new law
According to the new law, the Israeli Defense Ministry each year will calculate how much the PA has spent to pay terrorist prisoners and families of so-called "Martyrs", and this will be deducted from the money Israel collects in taxes on behalf of the PA. In 2018 the PA has budgeted 1.2 billion shekels for these terror reward payments (approx. $350 million). The money Israel deducts will be frozen and held indefinitely. Should the Defense Ministry report that the PA did not pay terrorist salaries or allowances to families of "Martyrs" for a full year, the Israeli government would have the option of giving all or part of the frozen money to the PA.
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7)
"Yes, coach", replied the little boy. "
“Do you understand that what matters is whether we win or lose together as
The little boy nodded in the affirmative.
"So," the coach continued, "I'm sure you know, when an out is called, you
Again, the little boy nodded in the affirmative.
The coach continued, "And when I take you out of the game so that another
"No, coach."
"Good", said the coach. "Now go over there and explain all that to your
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