Max gets cuter!
Why ruin a good fish.(See 1 and 1a below.)
And:
This is why the mass media is no longer respected and less and less relied upon and thus, less and less effective in molding opinions.
My son is of the view podcasting will replace much of the current mass media. and we will revert back to radio.
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Using climate to transfer wealth and ultimately to destroy American competitiveness is what is afoot:
https://www.americanthinker.co
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More insanity from the Democrats. (See 2 below.)
And:
From a dear friend and fellow memo reader: https://geopoliticalfutures.
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Israel votes today (Tuesday.) and appears BIBI won. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)
The Assault on the Supreme Court
The revival of smears against Kavanaugh is part of a campaign.
Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino, authors of "Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court” discuss the wider issues surrounding the 2018 media circus surrounding Brett Kavanaugh. Image: Win McNamee/Getty Images
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh will apparently receive continuing education in the politics of personal destruction, and this weekend came another round of rumor-mill accusations over his conduct in college. It’s important to understand that this assault on the Justice is part of the left’s larger campaign against the legitimacy of the current Supreme Court and an independent judiciary.
By now readers have seen Democrats running for President calling for Justice Kavanaugh to be impeached, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke. These Democrats know there is zero chance of a Republican Senate voting to remove Mr. Kavanaugh from office.
The attacks on Justice Kavanaugh are an attempt at intimidation to influence his opinions. But if Democrats fail in that, they want to portray conservative opinions of the current Court as illegitimate. Even Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota now says the Judiciary confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh was “a sham.” She knows better but so much for her self-styling as a “moderate.”
First a word about the latest smear. The allegations against Justice Kavanaugh arrived in a New York Times piece based on a forthcoming book. The news—this is a generous term—is about a lawyer named Max Stier who allegedly may have seen Justice Kavanaugh expose himself to a woman at a party while a student at Yale.
Except Mr. Stier wouldn’t speak publicly. An editors’ note appended after publication adds the previously omitted detail that the woman involved “declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident.” Oh.
The rest is largely a rehash of allegations from Deborah Ramirez, the subject of a New Yorker story during Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation ordeal last year. The point is to insinuate that Ms. Ramirez’s accusations were credible and not thoroughly investigated. This is a brazen rewriting of history.
Check out the 414-page report on the various allegations against Justice Kavanaugh by the Senate Judiciary Committee, then led by GOP Senator Chuck Grassley. The committee notes it contacted Ms. Ramirez’s legal team hours after the story broke. Ms. Ramirez’s attorney refused seven requests to provide supporting material.
“Despite the refusal of Ramirez’s legal team to assist the Committee in its investigation,” the Senate report notes, “Committee investigators attempted to investigate her claims to the greatest extent possible, and interviewed seven witnesses regarding the allegation.” In the end, the committee found “no verifiable evidence to support Ramirez’s allegations.”
The Times piece laments that the FBI in a supplemental background check didn’t interview a list of individuals supplied by Ms. Ramirez’s legal team who “may” have had corroborating evidence. But the FBI interviewed Ms. Ramirez, two alleged eyewitnesses and a friend of Ms. Ramirez’s from college, and also turned up no substantiating evidence. A third alleged eyewitness declined an interview.
This episode is part of the campaign that Democrats are running against the High Court now that it may have (we don’t yet really know) a center-right majority. This includes regular campaigns lecturing Chief Justice John Roberts about “legitimacy” whenever a case with political implications is heard.
We’ve reported on Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse ’s attempts to tar amicus briefs from sources he doesn’t like. Mr. Whitehouse and other Democrats recently filed an amicus brief threatening the Court with legislative changes if the Justices don’t follow their orders in a gun-control case. Presidential candidates vow to pack the Court with more Justices if they take power.
This is the most radical attack on the judiciary in decades. These aren’t crank voices like those posting “Impeach Earl Warren ” billboards in the 1950s. This campaign is led by the power center of the Democratic Party, including Members of the Judiciary Committee such as Ms. Harris who vet judicial nominations. Their attack on a core democratic institution is exactly what they claim President Trump is doing, but Mr. Trump is mostly bluster.
This assault on the judiciary is being carried out with conviction and malice, as the character assassination against Justice Kavanaugh shows. One motivation is that everything on the left’s new agenda, from the Green New Deal to a wealth tax, depends on favorable court rulings. The left is used to running the nation’s law schools and controlling the courts.
But the Senate has confirmed more than 150 judicial nominees since President Trump took office. And progressives would now rather attempt a hostile takeover of Article III courts than wait to win the old-fashioned way: at the ballot box.
The partisan relitigation of Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation is an embarrassment to the country, but it is useful in putting the 2020 election stakes in sharp relief. The future of the Supreme Court is on the ballot in Senate races as much as in the presidential race.
1a) New York Times Walks Back New Kavanaugh Sexual-Misconduct Accusation Mairead McArdle
Posted by Ruth KingPosted By on September 16th, 2019
The New York Times on Sunday was forced to walk back a new sexual misconduct allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, updating a bombshell article to clarify that the alleged victim has no memory of the incident.
The opinion essay by Timesreporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly details their upcoming book “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation” and describes several sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh, including a previously unreported claim that the FBI did not investigate during the judge’s contentious confirmation process.
Kavanaugh’s high school classmate, Christine Blasey Ford, testified to Congress during his confirmation hearings that Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed and covered her mouth at a drunken house party when they were teenagers. Several other accusations surfaced against him during those weeks, including from a Yale classmate, Deborah Ramirez, who claimed that Kavanaugh had thrust his penis in her face at a drunken dormitory party, causing her to push it away and accidentally touch it.
The Times reporters detailed a previously unreported alleged incident similar to the Ramirez one. Another Yale classmate, Max Stier, who now heads a Washington nonprofit, told Congress and the FBI that he had witnessed Kavanaugh “with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.” The FBI did not investigate that allegation.
However, the paper updated the story later to say that the book “did not include one element of the book’s account” of the new incident.
“The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident,” the Times’ correction reads.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++The New York Times Opinion Twitter account also deleted and apologized for an “offensive” tweet on the Kavanaugh opinion essay.
2) Dufuss says he'll eliminate fossil fuel, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie pledge to ban all Fracking on their first day as President!
Well, let's think about this, since Trump (aka that despicable human being) has come into office, he has eliminated most of the restrictions on Fracking that Obama put in, he's approved pipelines and expanded Fracking on public lands.
The result is the U.S. is "energy independent" and actually exports LNG to Europe.
50% of our gas and oil comes from Fracking.
For those of you who haven't noticed, the Saudi Oil fields were just bombed by Iran, knocking out 50% of their capacity. Hmm, so let's just work this out Joe, Lizzy and Bernie (and the rest of the candidates) would eliminate 50% of our oil and gas production by banning Fracking. No problem, we'll just start importing oil again from Saudi Arabia -- oh wait, they just lost 50% of their export capacity. Still no problem; for those old enough to remember Jimmy Carter, we'll just put on a sweater and wait an hour in a gas line to fill up -- at $5+ a gallon.
But, hey, it's all about "climate change" right, if we don't eliminate fossil fuel by 2030 the world will end, the rising tide will inundate the low lands -- and flood islands like Martha's vineyard where Barack just bought a $15 million mansion -- you think he would have known better!
But you know, for the good of the world you need to "break some eggs" right? So if 200,000 or so energy workers loose their jobs, it for the "greater good", as Hillary pointed out "they can be retrained".
Okay, so there is one problem, wind and solar and hydro currently produce only 17% of the power we need,so we'll have to work real hard over the next 10 years to "paper" the Country with wind mills and solar panels to produce the other 83%, but we can do it right? Oh, also we won't use Nuclear power the "candidates" don't like it.
You get the picture, so I urge all my Democrat friends and the millennial air heads to get out and vote to get rid of Trump and save the planet; like Bill Mahar said "we need a recession to get rid of Trump -- although I'm pretty sure he meant before the Democrats took over, but he'll get his wish -- except it'll be a Depression.
Personally, I'm pulling for Lizzy, she reminds of my 9th history teacher.
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3)Party leaders generally become prime ministers by cobbling together a parliamentary majority with the help of smaller parties. In this case, a group of smaller right-wing parties expected to back Netanyahu seems to have captured 65 seats, enough to give him a 10-seat majority over the rival center-left bloc (the exact numbers could change as the remaining two percent of votes are tallied).
3)Party leaders generally become prime ministers by cobbling together a parliamentary majority with the help of smaller parties. In this case, a group of smaller right-wing parties expected to back Netanyahu seems to have captured 65 seats, enough to give him a 10-seat majority over the rival center-left bloc (the exact numbers could change as the remaining two percent of votes are tallied).
Netanyahu is now set to be the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history — even longer than David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, who’s often described as “Israel’s George Washington.” And the ramifications of his fifth term could be enormous, for both the health of Israeli democracy and the fate of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The prime minister is facing a pending criminal indictment on bribery and fraud charges by Israel’s attorney general that’s likely to come down later this year. And now that Netanyahu has all but secured a victory, it’s possible his coalition could pass legislation protecting him from prosecution while in office, in essence letting him get away with his alleged crimes for the time being.
What’s more, Netanyahu made a stunning last-minute campaign promise over the weekend to annex Jewish settlements in the West Bank if reelected — extending full Israeli sovereignty over settlements widely considered illegal under international law. If he follows through, it would be the most radical rejection of a negotiated two-state solution by any Israeli prime minister in modern history. It would also generate a massive crisis for Israel and the broader Middle East.
In sum, this is a very, very big deal.
Israel’s election results reveal why Netanyahu won
The story of Netanyahu’s victory is pretty simple: Israel is a center-right country, and Netanyahu rallied enough right-wing voters to defeat the center.
Since the collapse of the peace process in the early 2000s and the rise of the Hamas government in Gaza after Israel’s withdrawal from the territory, the Israeli public has drifted further and further toward skepticism about peace and the outside world.
Political scientists have documented strong evidence that rocket attacks and suicide bombings lead to increased vote shares for right-wing parties, suggesting that the unending Palestinian conflict has led to a complete collapse of support for Israel’s left-wing peace camp.
Labor, the center-left party that dominated Israeli politics for the country’s first 50 years of existence, hasn’t won an election since 1999. The preliminary results have them winning a dismal six seats this time around.
Netanyahu’s past 10 years in office, and especially the past four, are both a consequence and a cause of this right-wing drift.
Since 2009, the prime minister has become more and more right-wing in a bid to protect his flank from other right-wing challengers, a strategy that’s both substantively dangerous and politically effective.
Under the prime minister’s leadership, policies that would not have been considered in the past — like the annexation of part of the West Bank or a law defining Israel as a “Jewish” nation-state in a fashion that excludes the country’s sizable Arab minority — have either been proposed or enacted.
The leading opposition to Netanyahu this time around wasn’t a leftist party, but rather a new centrist party, Blue and White (named for the colors of the Israeli flag). Led by Benny Gantz, a retired general and former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, the party aimed to dodge the kind of weak-on-security attacks that Netanyahu had long deployed against left-wing rivals.
Gantz ran a campaign that focused heavily on his security credentials and staffed the top tier of his party with other ex-military men. But his tough-guy positioning evidently wasn’t compelling enough to overcome Netanyahu and his Likud party’s appeal.
Netanyahu’s campaign focused on his long record of guiding Israel through conflict and security crises, but also on his close relationships with right-wing, nationalist leaders like Brazilian President Jair Bolsanaro and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Of these global Netanyahu friends, one was especially important: President Donald Trump. Not only is the US Israel’s closest ally, but under Trump, the US both moved its embassy to Jerusalem and, just before the election, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights — both unprecedented moves that were big wins for Netanyahu.
Likud’s strong performance was buoyed by the success of a number of smaller religious and conservative parties, including one party — United Right — that includes one faction so far-right and anti-Arab that observers have characterized it as “fascist.”
Netanyahu also benefited from what looks like a collapse in turnout among Israel’s Arab minority, who were vital to the hopes of the broader left. It’s hard to say yet why this happened, but it’s worth noting that Likud activists tried to smuggle in cameras to document alleged “election fraud” by Arab voters on the day of the vote. Hadash Ta’al, the leading Arab party, saw it as an attempt to menace their voters and deter them from voting — one that may have been effective, especially coming on the heels of a campaign that relentlessly marginalized Arab voters.
“The anti-Arab tone has been a constant backdrop to the election campaign and even Netanyahu’s opponents are afraid to challenge it,” writes Anshel Pfeffer, a columnist and reporter at Israel’s left-wing Haaretz newspaper.
Israel’s election results appear set. So what happens now?
First, Netanyahu needs to figure out exactly which parties he’s going to include in his coalition.
He could reach out to Gantz to try to form a more centrist national unity coalition, but his post-election comments suggest he won’t do that. Instead, he seems likely to work with almost exclusively right-wing parties to build a hard-right majority. The exact setup of this government will be decided in the coming month or so.
After that’s all sorted out, the most immediate issue will be the looming indictment. Netanyahu is expected to try to build support for a proposed law that would immunize him from prosecution while in office. If he fails and the indictment comes down this summer as expected, his coalition could very well fracture under the pressure — leading to a new Likud prime minister or potentially new elections.
Netanyahu’s electoral victory, in other words, doesn’t mean he’s out of the woods yet.
“This is one station in a journey Netanyahu is going to go through in the next few months,” says Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. “The real game is about the indictment: whether he gets immunity from it, whether he can survive indictment and keep the coalition going even while on trial — those are the real questions.”
The second big question is about Netanyahu’s promise to begin annexing West Bank settlements.
It’s hard to overstate how significant this move would be if Netanyahu follows through with it. Israel would be asserting permanent control over land that most countries believe belongs to the Palestinians. It would immediately cause a rupture in Israel’s relations with many countries around the world, potentially even Arab dictatorships that have been quietly working with Israel against Iran.
And for the Palestinians, it would be catastrophic.
“Such a move would likely signal the death knell of the two-state solution and move Israel closer to a formal apartheid reality on the ground,” says Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at Brookings.
The fate of these two big issues, indictment immunity and West Bank annexation, could also be linked. It’s conceivable that Netanyahu could trade annexation for immunity: offer hard-right parties a guarantee that annexation will happen if they vote to pass an immunity bill.
If that happens, it would be a double disaster for Israel: Not only would the prime minister be shielding himself from facing justice for the foreseeable future, undermining a basic tenet of democratic accountability, he’d also be moving toward turning what’s supposed to be a temporary occupation of Palestinian land into permanent seizure.
This would be a move toward authoritarianism and apartheid.
It’s not yet clear if that dire scenario will come to pass. But Netanyahu’s victory means the threat to both Israeli democracy and Palestinian freedom is higher than ever.
Alexia Underwood contributed reporting to this piece.
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