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Only in America are legal citizens labeled "racists" and "Nazis," but illegal aliens are called "Dreamers."Liberals say, "If confiscating all guns saves just one life, it's worth it." Well then, if deporting all illegals saves just one life, wouldn't that be worth it?
I can't understand how someone can proudly wave the flag of another country but consider it punishment to be sent back there.
Florida has had 119 hurricanes since 1850, but some people still insist the last one was due to climate change.
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Toughening it out at Tufts University.
Another bastion of liberal education rife with on campus anti-Semitism.
Only naive idiots spend $70,000/year to be subjected to an environment of hate.(See 1 below.)
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As Venezuela teeters is it only a matter of time before Iran implodes?(See 2 below.)
These two articles suggest the world is going to be involved in a religious war for decades to come. Unless the Christian and Judaic World unite and realize the sword of radical Islam and socialism is aimed at their collective throats, and they must unite against this scourge, or they will eventually be doomed.
History books and statutes and other historical items are reminders that when you no longer teach history and topple physical evidence of history you are engaged in your own self-destruction. This is what those benign sounding radical organizations are all about. They hide under the umbrella of a "liberal" sounding endeavor in order to burrow their way toward a more destructive goal. In the case of radical Islam it is the death of western civilization. In the matter of radical black causes it is the end of white political prominence
Wake up because your neck is on the block. (See 3 and 4 below.)
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I am re-posting two op eds that highlight what I have just said.
The first pertains to Stacey Abrams whose claims about unfair voting cost her the governorship. It has been factually challenged. Radical blacks have to make claims they have been prejudiced in order to spread belief about continuance of racial bias.
The second article deals with despicable acts from their past by high official Virginia politicians. The message warns about America's propensity to resort to supplanting adherence to the rule of law by street action.
Anarchy is the game of choice for radicals. A peaceful society is always vulnerable to the actions of the mob. By seizing on an unjust past act, and contemporising it, you can conjure up rabid feelings that serve as matches to inflame righting a wrong.
When Democrats go outside the rule of law to wrought change they are subverting our Constitution and acting in total contravention of what America is all about. This is why the Kavanaugh Hearings were a disgrace and a despicable blight on that thing called "due process."
Several Democrat members of that committee, whose behaviour was outrageous, are now seeking to be president. BEWARE of "Spartacus Booker" and "Haughty Hateful Harris!"
The third is not a re-posting, though it pertains to a re-peating theme.(See 5, 5a and 5b below)
Finally, one of the greatest dangers of all is the decline in the veracity of mass media reporting. Entertainment and corporate return on investment has become the driving force. Social media technology has also become an effective challenge further eroding the influence of the mass media. A free press is essential but it also has a responsibility to be factual and relatively unbiased. The mass media serves a vital role as our republic's ombudsman.
I rest my case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
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Dick
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1)
Posters with incendiary images, anti-Israel messages deface Tufts Hillel
Flyers depicting militarized pigs, including at least one with a caption calling for the destruction of “ISRAELI APARTHEID FORCES AND AMERIKKKAN [sic] PIGS WHICH FUND IT,” were discovered yesterday morning on the exterior of Granoff Family Hillel Center.
Over two dozen posters were found, according to Rabbi Naftali Brawer, Tufts Hillel’s Neubauer executive director and the campus Jewish chaplain, who saw the posters when he arrived at the center shortly before 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning. He contacted Tufts University Police Department after he and other Hillel staff members removed the posters from the building.
These posters come days after tweets by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn) sparked a national discussion over what constitutes anti-Semitism. On Sunday, Omar tweeted that American political leaders’ support of Israel is “all about the Benjamins.” Democratic House leadership condemned the tweets as anti-Semitic. On Monday, Omar tweeted that she “unequivocally apologize[s].”
The cartoons reproduced on the posters do not have explicitly anti-Semitic origins. Meant to disparage American military imperialism and the police state, the trio of political cartoons originated in the Oakland, Calif.-based Black Panther Party in the late 1960s, and were first published in the Party’s publication, “The Black Panther.”
But their targeted placement at Hillel shocked campus Jewish leaders as a direct affront to the Jewish community. Similar posters had not been found anywhere else on campus as of press time.
Anti-Semitic posters are pictured outside the Tufts Hillel Center. (Courtesy Naftali Brawer)
In an interview with the Daily, Brawer described how some of the signs were pasted on the Hillel windows facing inwards, as if to send a message “to those inside the building.”
“We were clearly targeted as a Jewish center,” he said.
The posters represent the latest in a string of anti-Semitic acts on American college campuses, Robert Trestan, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Boston office, said in an interview with the Daily.
Trestan explained that many instances of campus anti-Semitism have not taken place on or around Jewish institutions. Anti-Semitic symbols appeared in Lewis Hall in 2014 and on Packard Avenue in 2015.
Trestan called the posters at Tufts “unique” because of their placement on the Hillel building.
“I think what makes this one unique and particularly upsetting is that [the posters] targeted the Jewish community at Tufts,” he said. “The fliers were targeting the Jewish students at Tufts in the place where they feel safest and most welcome — the Hillel building.”
University officials did not explicitly label the posters as anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist on Tuesday.
In an email sent to the Tufts community shortly after 3:00 p.m., University President Anthony Monaco described the incident as an affront to campus culture.
“The derogatory images and symbolism in these posters were profoundly disturbing and hurtful to those targeted and to others in our community,” Monaco said at the time. “Our Jewish students, faculty, and staff, and all those who participate in Hillel programs, have my support as members of our community.”
He announced that the university would conduct an investigation into the matter.
Tufts’ Executive Director of Public Relations Patrick Collins confirmed in an email to the Daily that the Office of the President was not aware that at least one poster included an anti-Israel statement when he issued his initial statement on Tuesday.
“After President Monaco issued his statement to the community this afternoon, we became aware of additional information on one of the flyers that heightens our concern about this disturbing incident,” Collins said in an email to the Daily. “We will refer this additional information for further investigation.”
One of the posters found outside the Hillel Center. (Courtesy Naftali Brawer)
Brawer did not initially know that at least one of the posters called for the destruction of “Israeli Apartheid forces.” He only learned of, and subsequently confirmed this, after being informed by the Daily.
Some student leaders called the action anti-Semitic.
Tufts Friends of Israel (FOI) Co-President Ben Shapiro, a junior, and FOI’s Director of Outreach Annika Witt, a sophomore, said the posters were offensive and misguided.
“Holding Jews collectively responsible for the actions of the State of Israel is blatantly anti-Semitic, and is defined as such by the State Department and the Department of Education,” they said in a joint statement provided in an electronic message to the Daily.
“If we want to fight oppression and bigotry, especially on campus, we must call it what it is: anti-Semitism.”
Talia Inbar, regional co-chair of J Street U and former co-chair of the Tufts chapter, similarly condemned “manifestations of anti-Semitism and white supremacy on our campus.”
Inbar, a senior, echoed FOI’s statement that the actions of Israel cannot be held against all Jews. She also called the posters a distraction to serious dialogue.
“These posters are damaging to the Tufts community because they get in the way of the important and productive conversations and legitimate criticisms of Israeli policy,” she said in an electronic message to the Daily.
Freddie Birnbaum, student co-president of Hillel, stated that he had seen the anti-Israel poster on Tuesday morning. Speaking on his own behalf, he confirmed that some of the posters faced into the Hillel Center. He said they were deliberately targeting the Jewish community.
“While the content of the posters is directly related to Israel and anti-Zionist sentiment, the fact that they’re only targeting the Jewish community with the sentiments feels anti-Semitic to me,” Birnbaum, a junior, said.
Regardless of the intent and identities of those responsible, which remained unknown as of press time, Birnbaum said that the placement of the posters constitutes an act of anti-Semitism.
Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate also issued a response to the posters, urging the Tufts community to support marginalized communities on campus.
“This year, we have witnessed an uptick of incidents that target specific marginalized identities on campus, which is unacceptable and antithetical to the community we wish to foster at Tufts,” the TCU Senate Executive Board said in a statement posted to its Facebook page.
Another one of the posters found outside the center. (Courtesy Naftali Brawer)
Rabbi Tzvi Backman, director of the Rohr Chabad House serving Tufts, pushed back against the posters’ intent, which he described as an attempt to intimidate campus Jews.
Backman connected the posters to the resurgence of anti-Semitism in America.
“Although I believe we need to be aware of these increases and look for ways to mitigate [them], we have to not allow this to intimidate us in any way,” he said, referring to Tufts’ Jewish community. He called upon campus Jews to embrace their identity.
Brawer emphasized the impact of the incident.
“It’s been a really unsettling experience for everyone here at Hillel. It shows us that bigotry and hatred are sadly alive and well, even on a university campus. And that only causes us to redouble our efforts to be a place that celebrates diversity, difference and respectful dialogue,” he said. “That’s the Hillel way.”
Jessica Blough and Liza Harris contributed reporting to this article.
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2) Iran Trembles As Venezuela Starts To Teeter
By BENNY AVNI, Special to the Sun
They’re intently watching Venezuela in Iran. The revolutionary regimes in Tehran and Caracas are birds of a feather. True, one is Islamist green, the other socialist red, but in some ways they are as similar as that blue-gold dress in the viral Internet meme of a few years ago.
As the Islamic Republic celebrates its 40th anniversary this week, it faces growing internal dissent and external sanctions. Ditto for the Bolivarian Republic, born at the turn of the century and now broke and on the verge of collapse.
Venezuelans, with help from world capitals led by Washington, seem close to toppling the oppressive, corrupt regime that misrules them. Don’t be surprised if Iran follows a similar course. There, less visible but widespread protests continue to cast doubt on the mullahs’ grip on power.
In both cases, once-strong popular regime support has vanished. Tumbling oil prices and sanctions aside, corruption and mismanagement have transformed two of the world’s leading petroleum exporters into basket cases.
The mullahs, like Venezuela’s socialists, are more interested in exporting their revolution abroad than helping their people. Both run police states with sham elections that lend a veneer of democratic legitimacy. No wonder the two are such close friends.
The late Hugo Chávez saw the potential in a Caracas-Tehran alliance early on. He would pop up in Tehran often, merging the Latin-tinged “Yankee Go Home” with the Persian “Death to America” chants.
Daily direct flights between Caracas and Tehran were soon established. Tehran’s Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, and other Iranian operatives use Venezuela for money laundering. Iranian officials seeking to evade American sanctions can easily obtain Venezuelan passports.
Now the two regimes find themselves in the same boat.
True, Tehran isn’t as universally despised as Caracas is today. Europeans are so enamored of President Obama’s nuclear deal that they are deaf to human-rights violations — and blind to the Iranian terrorism and missile testing threatening their continent.
But European solicitude for Tehran can only go so far. European conglomerates once more shun the Islamic Republic under American pressure.
Some in Tehran’s ruling circles, including a former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, openly fret that the regime may collapse. Watching Nicolás Maduro’s regime flailing, Iranian officials must wonder if they are next.
President Trump is only heightening their fears. His administration has adeptly used pressure points in support of Venezuelan and Iranian regime opponents.
The Iranian dissidents confront a more uphill battle, to be sure. In Venezuela, “there’s still space for some opposition,” says Alireza Nader, president of the New Iran Foundation, a Washington-based group supporting dissidents. By contrast, he says, anti-regime Iranian leaders are instantly imprisoned, tortured, and often killed.
While the Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who was sworn in as interim president, enjoys support from democracies everywhere, Iranian opposition leaders inside the country are cut down. American-based figures, like Reza Shah, the son of the late shah, are popular inside — but they aren’t there.
That hasn’t stopped Secretary of State Pompeo from publicizing his one-on-one meeting this month with Masih Alinejad, a Brooklyn-based Iranian activist who campaigns against the mandatory hijab.
The State Department session created quite a stir inside the country, where Alinejad has a huge following. The regime renewed threats against her family and denounced her as a traitor and worse.
Talking to Mr. Pompeo, “I stressed the importance of free elections in Iran, where all candidates must be allowed to run, and all votes must be counted,” Ms. Alinejad tells me. She also asked Mr. Pompeo to amend the travel ban to target regime figures instead of ordinary Iranians.
In Venezuela, Ms. Alinejad observes, injustice festered, and after an illegitimate election, the streets erupted. Iran’s clerics — who so fear Ms. Alinejad and other Iranians yearning to end oppression — must tremble as they watch their old Caracas allies teeter.
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3)
The limits of American anti-Semitism
There’s good reason to be discouraged by the way Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib have gotten away with their slurs, but the response also proves that Jew-hatred won’t succeed in the United States.
Does Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) get to make this all go away with just an apology? That’s what many on the left and a lot of Democrats agree. Following a tongue-lashing from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her party’s leadership, Omar backed away from her latest anti-Semitic slur, in which she alleged that members of Congress backed Israel because of “the Benjamins” doled out by AIPAC.
Just as she did when she apologized from her 2012 tweet about Israel “hypnotizing the world,” Omar claimed ignorance of the fact that her slur was a classic anti-Semitic trope portraying Jews as a dark, sinister force manipulating gentile societies against their will. But by using the words “unequivocally apologize” in a statement in which she still stuck to her attack on the pro-Israel lobby’s influence (along with that of other lobbies), Omar seemed to have gotten off the hook as far as most of her fellow Democrats were concerned.
Any notion that she would be given the same treatment by her party that Republicans gave Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) for his embrace of white nationalism was clearly off the table. While King was belatedly stripped of his committee assignments after years of offending his colleagues, Omar will apparently retain her coveted spot on the House Foreign Relations Committee, just as her Rep. Rashida Tlaib (who last month resurrected the “dual loyalty” anti-Semitic trope against supporters of Israel) will keep hers on the House Financial Services Committee.
Nor did it stop Omar from praising and retweeting a thread about the malevolent role of pro-Israel money in American politics shortly after her allegedly contrite apology. Even more important, neither Omar nor Tlaib are backing down on their support for the anti-Semitic BDS movement, whose ultimate goal is the destruction of the only Jewish state on the planet.
Amid the furor over Omar’s tweet, Tlaib’s latest outrage was also largely swept under the rug by the mainstream media. We learned this week that Tlaib contributed an article to hatemonger Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam’s newspaper. Had a Republican done the same with a newspaper operated by David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis, the country would have united in calling for his expulsion from the House. But all we’ve heard from Democrats about this is crickets.
Just as repugnant is that the reaction from many on the left was not to criticize Omar, but to resurrect false charges that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is an anti-Semite because he criticized the three leading funders of the Democrats in a statement last fall. George Soros, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer all have Jewish origins. The fact that Steyer had a Jewish father was something unknown to most observers, including this writer, until political attacks on him were construed as anti-Semitic. But the notion that the Democrats’ leading sugar daddies who not fair game for criticism in the same way that the Koch brothers are demonized by liberals is absurd. Comparing McCarthy to Omar or Tlaib is both slander and a dishonest attempt to avoid the truth about genuine anti-Semites.
The same goes for the attempt to change the subject to the president’s various inappropriate statements anything more than a bad case of “whataboutism.” Trump is guilty of many instances of incitement against minorities. But the claim that he is an anti-Semite or has supported anti-Semitism is unsupported by the facts and contradicted by his ardent backing for Israel, and his close ties to Jewish friends and family.
Even if there is much to be discouraged about the way Omar and Tlaib appear to be retaining their status as political rock stars (alongside fellow leftist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), there is no reason for despair.
Many American Jews are worried that what’s happening on the left is a sign that the Democrats may be on the verge of going the way of Britain’s Labour Party, which has been captured by anti-Semitic far-leftists. While it’s fair to compare the stands of Omar and Tlaib to Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose hatred for Israel has helped transform his party into a bastion of anti-Semitism, the notion that the Democrats are anywhere close to being in such a position is simply untrue.
It’s one thing to be unsatisfied with the strength of the response to these freshmen representatives from fellow Democrats who don’t wish to be distracted from their war on Trump. But what happened after Omar’s latest tweet illustrates that as much as Democratic leaders fear their left-wing base, that didn’t stop them from issuing a stern condemnation of the Minnesota congresswoman.
The main takeaway from this incident ought to be that as much as there is a growing constituency for hatred of Israel, there are also clear limits as to how far its advocates can go without be held accountable.
There should be no doubt that this outbreak of hatred won’t be stopped until those like Omar and Tlaib are isolated by their colleagues. But the stand of Pelosi and many other Democrats proves that left-wing Israel-haters aren’t succeeding in demonizing or isolating friends of the Jewish state. Indeed, a broad cross-section of Democrats and a united Republican Party denounced Omar. Her only defenders were marginal figures on the far-left.
Anti-Semitism has never succeeded in the United States in the past or as it has elsewhere in our own day. Israel is still broadly popular, and anti-Semites remain outliers rather than, as in Britain, poised on the brink of national power. Jew-haters remain a threat but they remain far from their goal of power. As much as we may lament that Omar and Tlaib are barely getting their wrists slapped, we shouldn’t confuse their ability to survive with political success. The United States remains a place where Jews needn’t fear displaying their love for Israel or their faith in the public square, and there is no reason to think that will change.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS—Jewish News Syndicate.
4) Netanyahu off to Warsaw for summit on Middle East and Iran
By HERB KEINON
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to fly to Warsaw Tuesday night to take part in a US-Polish sponsored conference on Mideast peace and security expected to focus largely on Iran that will include representatives from at least 10 Arab states.
Netanyahu is the only head of government scheduled to attend, with the other 60 states sending representatives at the ministerial or deputy ministerial level.
US Vice President Mike Pence will also attend, and is scheduled to meet with Netanyahu on Thursday. The prime minister is also scheduled to meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The Prime Minister's Office has not announced whether he will meet any of the representatives of the Arab countries scheduled to attend.
Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz announced earlier this week that the list of Middle East countries, in addition to Israel, sending representatives include Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Tunisia.
The Palestinian Authority turned down an invitation, and called on other Arab countries not to attend, arguing that the real goal of the parley is promote normalization between Israel and the Arab countries – something the PA opposes until an agreement is reached with Israel on the basis of a two-state solution along the 1967 lines, with east Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.
Czaputowicz said “a dozen or so countries have not replied to our invitation while a few decided not to come.” He did not name the countries who declined the invitation, but among the states noticeably absent in the list he gave were Qatar, Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria and Turkey.
On Thursday, the central day of the conference, the leaders of Turkey and Iran will be meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi to discuss the situation in Syria.
Czaputowicz said that all 28 EU countries will be represented at the Warsaw conference.
Pompeo announced the meeting in January during a visit to Bahrain, and said at the time that it will “focus on Middle East stability and peace and freedom and security here in this region, and that includes an important element of making sure that Iran is not a destabilizing influence.”
Since then, however, the anti-Iranian aspect of the meeting has been downplayed, in favor of a focus on peace and security issues in the Middle East.
Nevertheless Netanyahu, when he discussed the meeting Sunday at the weekly cabinet meetings, said “the first issue on the agenda is Iran – how to continue preventing it from entrenching in Syria, how to thwart its aggression in the region and, above all, how to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.”
Even though the Palestinian Authority is not sending a representative, the Israeli-Palestinian issue is expected to be discussed among the participants, as Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, and Jason Greenblatt, the president’s special representative for international negotiations, are scheduled to attend. The two are expected to roll out Trump’s long-awaited Mideast peace blueprint sometime after the April 9 Israeli elections, and reportedly will update participants at the meeting on the plan.
Netanyahu is not scheduled to meet with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki during this visit. The Polish prime minister, along with his other Visegrad counterparts from Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, will be coming to Jerusalem next week for a summit of the Visegrad countries.
Israeli-Polish ties were badly strained last year over Polish legislation – later amended - that would have made it a crime to assert that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust.
On Thursday, Netanyahu is scheduled to go the Ghetto Heroes Monument at the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto which commemorates the 1943 ghetto uprising. He is also scheduled to visit the Museum of the History of Polish Jews also at the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto.
Netanyahu is the only head of government scheduled to attend, with the other 60 states sending representatives at the ministerial or deputy ministerial level.
US Vice President Mike Pence will also attend, and is scheduled to meet with Netanyahu on Thursday. The prime minister is also scheduled to meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The Prime Minister's Office has not announced whether he will meet any of the representatives of the Arab countries scheduled to attend.
Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz announced earlier this week that the list of Middle East countries, in addition to Israel, sending representatives include Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Tunisia.
The Palestinian Authority turned down an invitation, and called on other Arab countries not to attend, arguing that the real goal of the parley is promote normalization between Israel and the Arab countries – something the PA opposes until an agreement is reached with Israel on the basis of a two-state solution along the 1967 lines, with east Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.
Czaputowicz said “a dozen or so countries have not replied to our invitation while a few decided not to come.” He did not name the countries who declined the invitation, but among the states noticeably absent in the list he gave were Qatar, Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria and Turkey.
On Thursday, the central day of the conference, the leaders of Turkey and Iran will be meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi to discuss the situation in Syria.
Czaputowicz said that all 28 EU countries will be represented at the Warsaw conference.
Pompeo announced the meeting in January during a visit to Bahrain, and said at the time that it will “focus on Middle East stability and peace and freedom and security here in this region, and that includes an important element of making sure that Iran is not a destabilizing influence.”
Since then, however, the anti-Iranian aspect of the meeting has been downplayed, in favor of a focus on peace and security issues in the Middle East.
Nevertheless Netanyahu, when he discussed the meeting Sunday at the weekly cabinet meetings, said “the first issue on the agenda is Iran – how to continue preventing it from entrenching in Syria, how to thwart its aggression in the region and, above all, how to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.”
Even though the Palestinian Authority is not sending a representative, the Israeli-Palestinian issue is expected to be discussed among the participants, as Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, and Jason Greenblatt, the president’s special representative for international negotiations, are scheduled to attend. The two are expected to roll out Trump’s long-awaited Mideast peace blueprint sometime after the April 9 Israeli elections, and reportedly will update participants at the meeting on the plan.
Netanyahu is not scheduled to meet with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki during this visit. The Polish prime minister, along with his other Visegrad counterparts from Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, will be coming to Jerusalem next week for a summit of the Visegrad countries.
Israeli-Polish ties were badly strained last year over Polish legislation – later amended - that would have made it a crime to assert that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust.
On Thursday, Netanyahu is scheduled to go the Ghetto Heroes Monument at the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto which commemorates the 1943 ghetto uprising. He is also scheduled to visit the Museum of the History of Polish Jews also at the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto.
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5) Stacey Abrams' False Claims About Election Integrity
By Hans von Spakovsky
Editor's note: This piece is coauthored by Caleb Morrison, a Spring 2019 member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.
In her response on behalf of Democrats to the State of the Union address, Stacey Abrams employed more of the over-the-top rhetoric that has come to characterize political opposition in the age of Trump.
After laying out her grievances against the president and offering few concrete policies, Abrams's speech pivoted to a harangue intended to perpetuate the liberal and media-driven myth that there is an epidemic of voter suppression going on in this country.
While Abrams said she "acknowledge[d] the results of the 2018 election" in Georgia, in which she lost the governor's race by over 50,000 votes, she then claimed "efforts to undermine" the right to vote are ongoing.Abrams has continued to blame "voter suppression" for her loss, saying the gubernatorial election was "stolen from Georgians." The website for the advocacy group that Abrams heads, Fair Fight, says: "We know that the 2018 elections in Georgia were rife with mismanagement and irregularities."
A close look at the actual facts is in order.
Abrams claimed that officials are "making it harder to register and stay on the [voter] rolls." However, Georgia was in full compliance with requirements of the National Voter Registration Act, which made it easy to register by mail, at the DMV, state public assistance offices, and at numerous other agencies and locations throughout the state.
It never has been easier to register to vote in Georgia. In fact, by the time of the election that Abrams lost three months ago, the state had 6,935,816 registered voters, the most in Georgia's entire history.
Turnout rates kept pace with the rise in registration. Abrams's own website cites an article from ABC News that said minority voters in Georgia's governor race made up 40 percent of total turnout. And in an all-time high for the state, 3 of every 4 of those minority voters were black.
This is an astonishing turnout, given that the 2017 census estimate for Georgia shows that blacks make up 32.5 percent of the population, and Hispanics make up 9.6 percent. Those percentages include residents under 18, non-citizens, and other individuals who are ineligible to vote.In fact, minority turnout in 2018 surpassed minority turnout in 2014 by four percentage points. Abrams' Fair Fight group also cites a statistic that shows she received the most Democrat votes of any candidate in Georgia in nearly a decade. No one was kept out of the polls-Abrams just couldn't convince enough Georgians to vote for her, a truth she doesn't want to admit.
As for making it "harder" to stay on the voter registration rolls, Georgia uses a verification tool to check the accuracy of its rolls that is fully compliant with the National Voter Registration Act, something that also is required by the Help America Vote Act. Ohio's use of a similar process was approved by the U.S. Supreme Court last year in the case of Husted v. Philip Randolph Institute.
In Georgia, registered voters receive an identity/address confirmation notice if they don't vote for three years or the Postal Service indicates they have moved. If they fail to return this notice, they are marked as "inactive" on the registration list.Voters are removed from the voter rolls only if they fail to vote in two more general elections after the notice was sent out. And voters listed as "inactive" are still able to vote if they show up at their polling place; anyone improperly removed is still able to vote with a provisional ballot.
Abrams and her cohorts also complained that Georgia was "discriminating" by investigating voter registration applicants whose submitted information did not match that in other state databases. But there was nothing nefarious about verifying the accuracy of registration information.
If someone registered to vote at an address that was completely different from the address listed on his or her driver's license, Abrams's position means she would want the state to ignore this discrepancy, no questions asked. That makes no sense.
This verification process is so reasonable and common sensical that Barack Obama's Justice Department pre-cleared it in 2010 as nondiscriminatory, when Georgia was still covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. That section required Georgia to get the approval of the Justice Department before it could implement any new voting law or procedure.
In any event, none of these registrants would have been prevented from voting because all voters, even those who aren't on the registration list, are allowed to vote through the provisional balloting process.
Despite these safeguards, Georgia suspended the "exact match" requirement prior to the 2018 election after liberal advocacy groups sued to prevent the state from taking any steps to check the accuracy of voter registration information. Apparently, those groups want inaccurate, error-filled voter rolls.
In 2014, then-Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp opened online voter registration for the first time in state history. To make registration even easier, Kemp also launched a smartphone registration app.
If Kemp, now governor after defeating Abrams, is a vote suppressor as she claims, he is surely one of the most inept ones in history.
One of the biggest surprises of the Abrams response to the State of the Union address was her talking about how in the "battle for our democracy," it is "eligible citizens" who should "have a say in the vision they want for our country."
Why? Because that is in sharp contrast to her endorsement of non-citizen voting in her statement on the PBS show "Firing Line" that she "wouldn't oppose" non-citizen voting in local elections.
In a campaign speech, Abrams claimed that the "blue wave" of Democrat voters would be comprised of both the "documented and undocumented." Undocumented is the politically correct, liberal term for illegal aliens.
Abrams' propagation of the voter suppression myth used to condemn the efforts of states to safeguard elections does a disservice to our democratic system.
In her remarks last Tuesday night, Abrams said "the foundation of our moral leadership around the globe is free and fair elections." While that is true, the false claims that she and other liberals have made about election reforms intended to fix security vulnerabilities are what damage perceptions of America's voting system.
We need to support election officials in the lawful performance of their sworn duties. It is time to unite behind a vision of American voting as free, fair, and secure.5a)The Intersectional Road to Perdition
By Victor Davis Hanson
Who is the greatest victim of them all? Leave it to the mob to pick the 'winner.'From The Ox-Bow Incident to To Kill a Mockingbird, novelists warned of the American propensity to become mob-like and often lethally so. Our Puritan roots, when coupled to elements of Athenian-style democracy, can on occasion vary wildly between dangerous bias and equally mindless self-righteousness.
Update those traditions within the modern bane of electronically charged instantaneous social media, identity politics, the decline of journalism, and vicarious virtue-signaling, and we increasingly suffer psychodramas like the Virginia fraternity mess, the Duke Lacrosse fiasco, the Kavanaugh hearings, and the Covington nightmare.
In such cases, predictable constructs often set afire the new mob.
"Vulnerable" women or minorities or both are juxtaposed against young white males who have the scent of traditionalism, conservatism, or "privilege." I say "psychodramas," because the point is never to assess guilt or innocence or to establish some set of objective standards by which to condemn or exempt the accused. No, the aim is to vent outrage - the quicker, the more
venomous, and the more public, the more advantageous either in a careerist or psychological sense.
The result is that there are now no rules in the Roman arena of feeding the accused to the carnivores - except two. If the progressive cause can be advanced, then necessary, one-time adjustments can call off the mob. And, two, given the complex hierarchy of victim hood and the relative degrees of perceived progressive correctness, it is sometimes difficult to sort out who should be rescued from, and who served up to, the famished lions.
When Virginia governor Ralph Northam endorsed a proposed new state abortion bill and methodically explained the ethical and legal mechanics of how to kill an already-delivered infant, progressives shrugged. To the extent that any were not delighted, it was because they worried that Northam had foolishly given away their game by dispassionately contextualizing infanticide, which, after all, is the logical end to all abortion-on-demand .
Northam had essentially redefined murder by insisting that a
mother had a right to euthanize her child, a U.S. citizen with
constitutionally protected rights, after the infant had left her body.)
But then Nemesis struck. Two old photos showed up in Northam's 1984 yearbook entry from medical school. He was then 25, hardly a 17-year-old preppie like Brett Kavanaugh. The photo was of two youths dressed up respectively in blackface and a Klan outfit. In a nanosecond, Northam went from being a welcome, but clumsy abortion advocate to a rank political liability. He then went the full Mark Sanford route, with a bizarre series of denials, admissions, contradictions, and self-confessions that sealed his fate - or sort of did.
If the electronic mob had wounded Northam, his own lunacy would seem to have bled him out. That Justin Fairfax, his lieutenant governor, was African American and a seasoned Democratic operative should have made it all too easy to slice off the suddenly smelly Northam albatross from the collective Democratic neck and likewise turn attention away from the progressive endorsement of infanticide.
Republicans enjoyed the drama mostly in silence, given that Northam had hypocritically accused his Republican gubernatorial opponent, Ed Gillespie, of being a racist, and that he'd posed as a postmodern Southern progressive by virtue-signaling his disgust toward Confederate statues. Northam's hypocrisy surely gives credence to the theory that one of the attractions of loud and public progressive outrage is that public damnation of sin gives one psychological permission to occasionally indulge in it.
But then there was another hitch.
The ready and waiting Fairfax was "found" to have his own skeleton - namely, that 15 years ago he had been intimate with a fellow progressive at the 2004 Democratic Convention, in what he now calls a consensual hookup. The alleged victim, however, Professor Vanessa Tyson, now insists that their long-ago
encounter had escalated into a traumatic assault. The accuser even had taken the trouble of earlier contacting the Washington Post to apprise them that a young and charismatic Fairfax was in fact a veritable rapist.
The Post then apparently dropped the "she must be believed" self-righteous credo that was so prevalent during the Kavanaugh fiasco. Instead, it declined to publish or investigate Tyson's story, despite her disturbing accusations that Fairfax had used his superior strength to coerce her to give him oral sex. Then another alleged victim emerged, with an even more serious accusation of a long-ago assault by Fairfax.
So, according to #MeToo logic, two victims now had to be believed (especially given the absence of any perceived political or ideological agendas). This dilemma forced the larger question of what to do with the career of a progressive African-American governor in waiting - suddenly no longer so useful in replacing the now embarrassingly progressive pariah white Southern governor (who may have helped leak but certainly enjoyed his subordinate's quandary, and who suddenly was cowardly fobbing his own racial insensitivity off onto the supposedly collective pathologies of his state).
In intersectional terms, the Left faced a dilemma. On legal grounds, in theory, Fairfax faced the greater sin of sexual assault and rape (even if no longer prosecutable). On politically correct grounds, the two white officials faced the greater exposure, given their race and their idiotic, youthful, and racialist buffoonery. Would progressives demand the resignation from the African-American man - the only one of the three who is non-white? Would they establish that old but as yet quite unproven accusation of criminality trump old yet quite demonstrable charges of racialism?
During the Kavanaugh hearing, progressives had insisted on two new standards of jurisprudence: 1) All women alleging assault must be believed, even in the absence of any corroborating evidence or witnesses to the alleged crime, and even when we're confronted with factual inconsistencies in the accuser's charges; and 2) there is no such thing as a statute of limitations to such complaints, much less concern that at the time of the distant assault, authorities were never alerted.
No progressive can easily adjudicate all the competing and mitigating intersections. During the recent media storms, Northam was initially seen as an admirable radical pro-abortionist feminist; he was key to keeping once red Virginia a newly blue state. But soon he proved not just clumsy in contextualizing his distant past; he also seems to have an even more complex history of racialism. For example, Northam, for mysterious reasons, was dubbed "coon man" by his school chums. And he further claims that he once
put on black "shoe polish" to emulate Michael Jackson (who ironically usually wore white makeup so as not to resemble the hue of Northam's black shoe polish).
As for Fairfax, should be hoisted on his own #MeToo progressive petard of a he-said-she-said accusation of 15 years prior?
His first accuser is also African American, and an academic progressive apparently eager to fill out Fairfax's résumé once he became a public figure, in the heroic manner of fellow California academic Christine Blasey Ford. When told of her claims, Fairfax reportedly shouted to his associates "F*** that bitch" - a most regressive reaction.
Progressives during the Watergate era also warned us that it is never the crime that sinks public figures, but the cover-up or contextualization. This has never been truer than in Northam's confused, conflicting narratives and in Fairfax's obscene invective, which only added credibility to Tyson's portrait of a hot-tempered sexist prone to objectify women as mere playthings. Fairfax instantly went from being one of the aggrieved collective victims of Northam's racism to a culpable victimizer of minority women.
But wait again, the tragicomedy has another twist. Third in line to the governorship, Attorney General Mark R. Herring, saw fellow Democrat Northam twisting in the wind, and he too jumped into the fray to flash his virtue signals of outrage about Northam's youthful racism. Poor Herring; he pontificated too soon, both before the anticipated successor Fairfax was himself accused of crimes from 15 years ago, and before it was leaked or admitted that Herring himself had dressed up in blackface when, at 19, he attended a party outfitted in costume as an African-American rapper.
The New York Times was especially dumbfounded at the intersectional trifecta and strained the English vocabulary of euphemism to downplay Herring's youthful sin. In a headline, the paper initially wrote, "Virginia Attorney General Says He Also Dressed in Dark Makeup," carefully avoiding the term "blackface." We haven't seen such linguistic gymnastics since the Times invented the term "white Hispanic" for half-Peruvian George Zimmerman, in an effort to make his lethal encounter with Trayvon Martin into a white-black morality play, a confrontation between a white aggressor and a black victim rather than a brawl between two minority youths.
As Governor Northam, Lieutenant Governor Fairfax, and Attorney General Herring stood off in a spaghetti-Western trial, unsure who would finish off whom, progressives scrambled to adjudicate the various intersectional crimes and thus prevent the fourth-ranking state official, Virginia house speaker Kirk Cox, a Republican, from climbing over the political corpses to the governorship.
What do we learn from the entire sordid tale?
Get used to far more of this.
America is a multi-ethnic, multiracial society in which victimization leads to career dividends, attention, and psychological rewards. Yet intersectionality hinges on the various indecipherable strata of identity politics - especially when no one knows which DNA strand or ancestral narratives trump others. Add the 1960s left-wing legacies of promiscuity, sexual discovery, and let-it-all-hang-out, get-with-it, -all-is-groovy New Ageism, now mixed with 21st-century Victorian progressive prudery - and the result is a weird new hipster profile in sackcloth, as randy and as gross as Woodstock and yet as condemnatory as the Anti-Sex League of Orwell's 1984.
The rules of sexual congress are being radically redefined among the elite as requiring veritable contractual agreements along every step of each encounter. When it comes to destroying careers, there is no statute of limitations, and no need for due process, cross-examination, or factual evidence.
Once a society establishes a system of rewards and punishments that favor accusation and force-multiply it through enhancements of race and gender, then fairness and truth become secondary considerations. Much less valued are notions of human frailty and atonement. Truth becomes a narrative of a particular class of victim, to be adjudicated in mob-like and often electronic arenas, without much attention to testimony, evidence, or witnesses.
Intersectional progressives strangely had assumed that in these sensational cases they would always have Manichean scenarios: white boys bad, a Native American "elder" good. In the Covington case, they never quite anticipated, as they discarded due process, that the supposed victims could be gross and
conniving victimizing predators.
Yet duplicity, careerism, and self-interest are human pathologies, not restricted to only one gender or certain races.
Indeed, human lapses really do (or especially) cross intersectional boundaries: an Elizabeth Warren caught yet again in a lie when more evidence emerges about her past cynical cultural appropriation of a Native American identity for careerist advancement; the late-night ethical progressive megaphone Jimmy Kimmel, suddenly snagged by an old tape in which he dresses up in blackface to do an abjectly racist caricature of NBA star Karl Malone; found racialist statements from a younger Joe Biden (adding to his ample corpus of race-based "gaffes") from nearly a half-century ago suggesting that he believed racial segregation had its merits; African-American comedian Kevin Hart dis-invited as Oscar host due to the reemergence of some of his old anti-gay jokes; the progressive attack-dog Joy Behar, reducing to a whimpering puppy when admitting to her own bout of blackface (oddly made worse by her editorializing that when she wore blackface she, presto, became a "beautiful African-American woman," as if you cannot keep a stunning white woman down).
And so on and on intersectional identity politics progresses down its pathway to nihilism.
5b) Ilhan Omar Rages Anti-Semitism; Pelosi Whimpers ‘Apologize’
President Donald Trump called on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar to resign over her “terrible” anti-Semitic comments, calling her (latest) “apology” lame; House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi should do the same for sweeping Omar’s comments under the table with her equally lame tweet, “In our conversation today, Congresswoman Omar and I agreed that we must use this moment to move forward as we reject anti-Semitism in all forms.”
The tweet was accompanied by a statement by Pelosi and the leadership of the Democratic Party that termed Omar’s comments “deeply offensive” and “hurtful” and called on her to “immediately apologize.”
Yet nowhere in the statement is any mention of censure or acknowledgement of where these sentiments come from, as if an apology makes such deep-seated prejudices all better.
It’s a lame and failed strategy from a woman who is fast losing her grip on the Democratic Party she once commanded. Pelosi knows her days and the days of “moderate” Democrats are numbered. The rising stars in the party are the Far Left, Socialist and anti-Israel anti-Semites.
The proof of Pelosi’s failed strategy to reign in Omar is the fact that Omar keeps spewing similarly vile anti-Semitic remarks. Yes, she is pressured to apologize for them – if you call her latest words an apology: “Listening and learning, but standing strong.”
Notice in her “apology,” Omar even manages to claim victimhood for herself: “We have to always be willing to…think through criticism, just as I expect people to hear me when others attack me for my identity.”
That Omar’s apologies mean nothing is further evidenced by the fact that Omar is planning to deliver the keynote speech at a fundraiser for Islamic Relief USA, an organization heavily linked to Islamist terror financing.
Originally headlining the event with Omar was notorious anti-Semite Yousef Abdallah, who has been documented as
- Calling Jews “stinking”
- Sharing a “very beautiful story” about “martyrs” who provide guns to “kill more than 20 Jews” and “fire rockets at Tel Aviv”
- Liking a comment on Facebook that called on God to wreak “revenge on the damned rapists Zionists…Shake the Earth beneath their feet and destroy them as you destroyed the peoples of Ād, Thamud and Lot.”
Within hours of The Jerusalem Post breaking the story about Omar and Abdallah’s joint appearance, Omar’s PR team must have gone into high gear. The event’s marketing materials and online invitations were changed, editing out Abdallah from the program.
Yet the fact remains that Omar will still be speaking for an organization that, among other documented terror connections:
- The Swedish government says is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood
- The Tunisian government is investigating for possible funding of jihadists on the Libyan border
- Congress, the FBI and the IRS are investigating for terror connections
Politicians rarely make spontaneous decisions. They plan their moves carefully for maximum media coverage, appeal to constituents and, as is the case with members of the House of Representatives who face elections every two years, with a constant eye on fundraising.
As one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress – and as the first Somali one — Omar had the opportunity to present herself as a shining example of her community. Instead, she has continually – one could say compulsively — exposed the ugly side of some Muslim communities that view Jews “as notorious conspirators not worth trusting, even not worth treating with human dignity.”
For those who would argue that Omar is being scrutinized and held to a different standard because of her faith, origin and gender, one need only imagine the consequences to a white, male, Christian congressman who spewed on social media the worst racist stereotypes against, say, the black or Hispanic community.
He wouldn’t be in Congress for long. The fact that Omar might be does not bode well for the Democratic Party or the future of America.
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