Max does not know how to frown.
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The Jewish New Year Begins Sunday evening (Rosh Hashanah). The theory is God has already decided who will live, who will die and in what manner. You have 10 days to temper your fate. (Yom Kippur .This is the day you are supposed to fast.)
I suspect,because I am a conservative, have nothing but contempt for the likes of the Nadler, Schiff and Schumer types, I am going to hell. That said, I am going to restrain sending daily memos not because I believe it will change my fate but out of respect to my fellow Jews.
I have always believed my own conduct is a reflection on the community .
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PC'ism has already had a serious impact on logic and reason as well as harming/weakening the American Character If allowed to continue it could completely destroy us. (See 1 and 1a below - a repeat posting)
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Democrats not only want to impeach Trump but also would like to cripple future presidents from conducting foreign, and possibly even domestic, policy. Obviously, Trump Haters remain in key positions in our vast intelligence apparatus Listening to president conversations,in order to blow whistles based on some whim or biased opinion, should not be taken likely.
Secondly, presidents should care about how allies spend funding from America. It is their responsibility to make sure there is no corruption on the part of recipient nations.
Third, Trump released the Ukraine conversation so he did not impede it's publication.
Fourth, that Trump wanted information on an opponent who, obviously, allowed his son to become a highly paid director of a major company in a nation when the father was also the vice president of our country does raise serious questions and should be reviewed. Then when the father boasts about getting someone fired who was investigating his son and denies he even discussed the matter, while both were on a flight that took many hours, really takes an idiot to believe the father's denial.
As Kim Strassel pointed out in her Friday Column, the Democrats first tried to hang Trump with rope from the Mueller Investigation and when that did not work the Ukraine telephone conversation became another gift from God.
Apparently, the whistle blower was assisted in his report by adversary lawyers- AKA Steele Dossier payment by a law firm close to Hillary and the DNC.
Then, of course, we have the constant Democrat drum beat effort to impeach Trump from day one because their candidate blew her chance by insulting coal miners , arrogantly calling potential voters deplorables and finally assuming voters in certain states would automatically vote for her because of who she was.
Democrats not only want to impeach Trump but also would like to cripple future presidents from conducting foreign, and possibly even domestic, policy. Obviously, Trump Haters remain in key positions in our vast intelligence apparatus Listening to president conversations,in order to blow whistles based on some whim or biased opinion, should not be taken likely.
Secondly, presidents should care about how allies spend funding from America. It is their responsibility to make sure there is no corruption on the part of recipient nations.
Apparently, Democrats believe American voters are so gullible, and their brains so fried, they will overlook the hypocrisy and lies by the likes of Schumer, Nadler, Pelosi and Schiff et al. It would appear the Trump Haters fear Trump might win in 2020 and thus, they do not trust the system and WE THE PEOPLE. These are the same radicals who want to take our guns, keep our borders open, and tag everyone with racial accusations when their insane ideas and programs are challenged and you know the rest.
Pelosi looks like a female matador who is being gored by the 4 "female bulls" she allowed to take over her party and thus, she fears calling for impeaching Trump but accepts allowing his slower death by a thousand cuts.
The Democrat Party has become the Party of Impeachment, character assassination, lies, hypocrisy, deceit and contempt for our Constitution and capitalistic economic system. America is not perfect but freedom and our sense of right and wrong has allowed us to correct mistakes we have made. No other nation has done more for more. Ironically, those who hate America refuse to move to the very countries they seek to make America become like. They propose Americans embrace Venezuelan socialism yet, seem blind to that nation's collapse. Obviously, they oppose Trump's desire to Make America Great Again but have nothing compelling to offer by way of a rational alternative.
Trump has made his mistakes, he has proved to be a diamond in the rough president but he also has dedicated himself to floating the boat so all Americans benefit from his policies. He has done so against odds unlike any president has faced in my lifetime. He deserves better than the poison the"enemies of America" have chosen to dish out and if they continue along their current path of hatred the odds favor his re-election.
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Dick
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1)
Is regulation of anti-Semitism on campus censorship?
Trump’s education department may withhold federal grants to Middle East studies departments that promote anti-Semitism. Why aren’t Jews cheering?
As far as President Donald Trump’s liberal critics are concerned, this is just the latest instance of his administration’s hostility to free speech. The Department of Education announced earlier this month that it had ordered the Middle East studies department run jointly by Duke University and the University of North Carolina to revamp the curriculum it was offering students. If the schools’ consortium that runs the program doesn’t comply, it will lose the federal grant money it gets under Title VI of the 1964 Higher Education Act.
As far as most academics are concerned, the government’s unprecedented intervention in course material is an outrage and infringement on academic freedom. Yet what really riled up the critics are the reasons for the demand. The Department of Education said the course offering of the consortium advanced an agenda that glorified Islam and ignored other faiths in the Mideast. The program also promoted BDS activities, including a conference that was tainted by anti-Semitic rhetoric on the part of speakers.
Yet rather than being portrayed as a necessary action in which the administration sought to prevent taxpayer dollars from being used to promote a skewed view of the world and promote hate, the Department of Education’s letter has received scathing coverage from outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as academic publications. Even more bizarrely, a column in the Forward denounced the government effort as not merely Islamophobic, but reminiscent of Nazi regime’s censorship of German scholars.
What can explain this kind of grossly inflammatory language, as well as the massive pushback against this move?
In the current divisive political atmosphere, anything that the Trump administration does—whether good, bad or indifferent—is always going to be shoehorned into a narrative in which its work is denounced as evidence of criminal behavior and/or authoritarianism by its liberal and Democratic critics. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has been a particular target of scorn from the “resistance.” Kenneth Marcus, the head of the department’s civil-rights bureau, has gotten similar treatment. The Times snidely referred to him in an article on the North Carolina controversy as someone “who has made a career of pro-Israel advocacy,” which is an interesting way to refer to someone whose career has been focused on fighting anti-Semitism.
But the real problem is that the government’s action is based on the recognition that Middle East studies in the United States has become a safe space for anti-Israel and anti-Semitic coursework and programming masquerading as scholarship. Within these departments, support for anti-Zionism and anti-Semitic BDS campaigns has become a form of orthodoxy that teachers and students dare not challenge. This was brilliantly exposed by Martin Kramer in his 2001 book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, and the situation has only grown worse since then.
Yet is it the government’s business to police this lamentable situation?
Small government conservatives, as well as libertarians and liberals, might be inclined to answer “no.” The last thing anyone should want is for federal bureaucrats vetting or censoring academic offerings. Yet, if there is to be federal department of education dispensing money to schools throughout the country, why shouldn’t it monitor how funds are being spent?
The federal government is quite vigilant about policing the use of grant money when it comes to possible discriminatory conduct or practices. The same is true for a host of other issues relating to federal preferences about a wide array of conduct and agendas. Why then would monitoring anti-Semitism be the one topic on which Washington should stay mum? It is widely understood that anything that smacks of condoning racism or prejudice against other minorities would result in the loss of federal grants. But anti-Semitism operating under the veil of Middle East studies has had impunity.
That has been the way the Department of Education and the federal government have treated instances of anti-Semitism up until 2017. For instance, the Obama administration ignored many anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses during its eight years in office and dismissed calls (from people like Marcus) for it to use the threat of loss of federal funding to force those responsible to act. It was only after DeVos and Marcus were appointed to their posts by Trump that the Department of Education began to take an active interest in the way hatred of Jews has found a home on some campuses and especially within departments focused on the Middle East.
These departments, like the one operated by Duke and UNC, are free to go on teaching the history of the Middle East in a manner that treats the presence of Christians and Jews there as illegitimate, or to promote BDS and other forms of anti-Semitism. They have a choice. If they don’t want federal criticism, all they have to do is to give up the money they get from the federal government or any other entity that seeks to uphold the standards of decency one would not think has to be imposed on such elite institutions. Indeed, there are plenty of Middle East governments, such as that of Qatar, whose Muslim Brotherhood-run foundation is happy to dispense money to American institutions while promoting a very different agenda than that of the administration.
But if they do so, they can’t pretend that they are responsible scholars or anything other than promoters of hate.
What Trump’s Department of Education has done is neither Islamophobic nor an unconscionable interference in academia worthy of an authoritarian regime. It’s merely upholding the values and principles that liberal academics claim to support.
For this, it is denounced by Jewish publications and groups, like the Anti-Defamation League, that claim to defend the community from anti-Semitism and are now silent when they should be speaking up in defense of the administration. Whatever you may think of Trump or DeVos, the Jewish community should be standing with the administration on this issue. The failure to do so is nothing short of a disgrace.
1a)
The death of American citizenship
By Victor Davis Hanson
The American founders institutionalized the best of a long Western tradition of representative government with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. These contracts outlined the rare privileges and responsibilities of new American citizens.
Yet the concept of citizenship is being assaulted on the premodern side by the legal blending of mere residency with citizenship.
Estimates of the number of undocumented American residents range from 11 million to more than 20 million. The undocumented are becoming legally indistinguishable from citizens and enjoy exemption from federal immigration law in some 500 sanctuary jurisdictions. An illegal resident of California will pay substantially less tuition at a California public university than a U.S. citizen of another state.
Multiculturalism has reduced the idea of e pluribus unum to a regressive tribalism. Americans often seem to owe their first allegiance to those who look like they do. Citizens cannot even agree over once-hallowed and shared national holidays such as Christmas, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July.
It is eerie how such current American retribalization resembles the collapse of Rome, as Goths, Huns and Vandals all squabbled among one another for what was left of 1,200 years of Roman citizenship -- eager to destroy what they could neither create nor emulate.
Citizenship has always been protected by the middle classes -- on the idea that they are more independent and self-reliant than the poor, but can stand up to the influence and power of the elite.
Yet until recently, we had seen a decade of stagnant wages and entire regions ossified by outsourcing, offshoring and unfair global trade. Historically, with the demise of the middle class so follows the end of constitutional government.
But citizenship also faces a quite different and even greater postmodern threat.
Many of our coastal elites see nothing much exceptional in America, past and present. They prefer the culture and values of the European Union without worrying that the EU's progressive utopian promises have been wrecked by open borders, economically stultifying regulations, and unapologetic and anti-democratic efforts to curb free expression and local autonomy.
Often, such "citizen of the world" mentalities fuel shame over the origins and traditions of America. Transnational organizations and accords on climate, criminal justice and human rights are seen as superior to their American counterparts.
A new progressive iconoclasm seeks to destroy statues, rename streets and buildings, and wipe away art that does not reflect more global values.
Does voting -- the bedrock right of the democratic citizen -- matter that much anymore? In California, tens of thousands of votes were "harvested" by paid campaign operatives. There was also abuse in state agencies in sending out voter registration forms to those who were not legally entitled to vote.
Lone activist federal judges frequently overturn legislation and referenda they find contrary to their own political take on legal theory -- without worry that the votes of millions are canceled in a nanosecond.
Meanwhile, the proverbial "swamp" of the bureaucratic, administrative and regulatory state is so vast and unaccountable that a few clerks can harass entrepreneurs, issue edicts with the force of legislation that ruins lives, or indict, regulate or audit a targeted individual into legal bankruptcy.
In recent years, we have seen a cake maker, a video maker, and a national security adviser so hounded by federal bureaucrats that they either were nearly bankrupted, ended up in jail or were reduced to penury through legal costs.
We still have a Bill of Rights, but many of our constitutional protections are being rendered impotent. If a rural family cannot find ammunition at the local Walmart or gun store due to organized boycotts and threats to such establishments, then the constitutional right to bear arms is not always exercisable in a practical sense.
Brett Kavanaugh was nominated, audited and confirmed by the Senate as a Supreme Court justice. But if the New York Times and cable news can relentlessly charge without proof that nearly 40 years ago he was a teenage sexual pervert, then a distinguished judge can be rendered impotent without legal impeachment.
If a student cannot safely express opposition to abortion on demand, question the global warming narrative, or object to safe spaces, trigger warnings and race-based theme houses on campuses, does it matter that there is in theory still a First Amendment?
We are unwinding at both ends. Tribalism, the erosion of the middle class and de facto open borders are turning Americans into mere residents of a particular North American region between Mexico and Canada.
Yet even more dangerously, thanks to the fiats of unelected bureaucrats and officials, along with the social media lynch mobs who boycott, harass and shame us, our constitutional rights are now increasingly optional. They mostly hinge on whether we are judged worthy by an unelected, politically correct and morally righteous elite.
In theory, American citizenship remains the same; in reality, it is disappearing fast.
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