AOC's candidate lays an egg and proves once again AOC is seen as one dumb cluck when she get's outside her district. That also says something about those in her district.
AOC’s “Influence” in Question After Her Endorsed Candidate Loses in NYC
(RightWing.org) – Going by the amount of attention she gets in the media, you’d think Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), AOC, was the most powerful and influential legislator in the US government. However, it seems her ego and influence have been exaggerated as a “progressive” mayoral candidate she endorsed has crashed and burned spectacularly.
New York City Democrats recently voted in the city’s mayoral primary. The Big Apple is AOC’s home ground, where she’s most popular, and if she’s going to have an impact anywhere, it should be there. So, when she endorsed Maya Wiley for the primary, there were high expectations for the progressive candidate.
Wiley, at first glance, ticked all the right boxes. A civil rights activist and woman of color, she’s solidly on the left of the Democratic Party and loudly supports the “defund the police” campaign. With AOC’s endorsement on top of all that, how could she go wrong? But when the time came to vote, she didn’t even make it to the second round. Instead, the city’s Democrats selected ex-police captain – and opponent of police defunding – Eric Adams.
There’s no doubt AOC is still very popular in her own district, but outside that – even in other parts of New York City – her word doesn’t seem to carry a lot of weight. That’s going to be reassuring for Republicans who’ve been wondering how far the loudmouthed congresswoman could go in politics. So far, it looks like, outside her own home ground, the answer is not very far.
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Sheriff D. Clarke says it best!
It's not the police who need to be retrained, it's the public. We have grown into a mouthy, mobile phone wielding, vulgar, uncivil society with no personal responsibility
and the attitude of 'it's the other person's fault', 'you owe me'. A society where children grow up with no boundaries or knowledge or concern for civil society and personal responsibility.
When an officer says "Put your hands up," then put your hands up! Don't reach for something in your pocket, your lap, your seat. There's plenty of reason for a police
officer to feel threatened, there have been multiple assaults and ambushes on police officers lately. Comply with requests from the officer, have your day in court. Don't mouth off, or fight, or refuse to comply... that escalates the situation.
Police officers are our sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. They're black, white, brown, all colours, all ethnicities, all faiths, male and
female, they are us. They see the worst side of humanity... the raped children, the bloody mangled bodies of traffic victims, the bruised and battered victims of domestic violence, homicide victims, body parts... day after day.
They work holidays while we have festive meals with our families. They miss school events with their kids, birthdays, anniversaries, all those special occasions that
we take for granted. They work in all types of weather, under dangerous conditions, for relatively low pay.
They have extensive training, but they are human. When there are numerous attacks on them, they become hyper vigilant for a reason, they have become targets. When a
police officer encounters any person... any person, whether at a traffic stop, a street confrontation, an arrest, whatever... that situation has the potential to become life threatening. You, Mr & Mrs/Miss Civilian, also have the responsibility of keeping
the situation from getting out of control.
Many law enforcement officers are Veterans. They've been in service to this nation most of their lives, whether on the battlefield or protecting us here at home. They
are the only thing that stands between us and anarchy in the streets.
If you want to protect your child, teach them respect.
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Media malpractice as a weapon of war
Corrupted journalism helps incite murderous hysteria against Israel and the west
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This week, Israel signed a deal for the immediate transfer to South Korea of 700,000 doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine which are due to expire at the end of this month. In exchange, South Korea will return the same amount of vaccines to Israel from a future order later this year.
This is a win-win deal. Israel has found a good use for vaccines surplus to its current requirements and which would otherwise shortly expire; South Korea is being helped to accelerate its vaccination program.
But there’s another significant feature of this arrangement. These 700,000 vaccines are part of the approximately 1 million unused doses that Israel was offering the Palestinian Authority last month. The PA abruptly cancelled that deal, claiming that the vaccines were too close to their expiration date at the end of June and July.
That was clearly untrue. There was plenty of time to use these doses to vaccinate thousands of Palestinians; the Israelis were using vaccines from the same batch on their own teenagers; and subsequent shipments would have had later expiry dates.
Yet the western mainstream media, which had previously accused Israel falsely of having a duty to vaccinate Palestinians which it was refusing to fulfil, didn’t acknowledge the spurious nature of the Palestinian objection to the Israeli offer.
And this week, that same media unaccountably failed to note that the South Korean enthusiasm for those same vaccine doses exposed the PA’s claim about the expiry date as nonsense. Instead, the media either ignored or doubled down on their own distortions.
As noted by the media watchdog CAMERA UK, the BBC News website report about the Israel-South Korea deal once again promoted the false PA claim that the doses had been too close to expiration.
As CAMERA UK previously pointed out, the BBC had repeatedly distorted its reporting of this issue. Despite the fact that the 1995 Oslo agreement gave the Palestinians responsibility for their own health care, the BBC had wrongly described this responsibility as merely an Israeli claim. After a complaint, it “clarified” the Oslo point on its website — yet one day later, it muddied the same point yet again.
Worse still has been the media’s failure to own up to the collapse of another big lie they perpetrated during the recent hostilities in the Gaza Strip. This was the falsehood that the Israel Defence Forces were killing a huge number of Gaza’s civilians, including a high proportion of children.
Given that Israel made around 1,500 bombing sorties into Gaza, the density of the Gazan population and the fact that Hamas sited its missiles in and around civilian buildings, such a huge bombardment by any other country’s military would have killed thousands of civilians.
In fact, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry, a total of 256 Gazans were killed.
The updated casualty figures from Israel’s Meir Amit Terrorism and Information Centre, which puts the Gaza death toll at 236, reveal that nearly half of those killed were Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad combatants whom it has identified by name.
Moreover, 680 of the Palestinian rockets fired at Israel fell inside Gaza, killing at least 21 people — 10 men, two women and nine children.
Yet the mainstream western media have ignored these figures. They have thus ignored the big story that the proportion of civilians killed by Israel was, in fact, astoundingly small—far lower than any other country’s military would ever achieve.
Nor has the media acknowledged that in demonizing Israel falsely as wanton child-killers they were simply recycling Hamas propaganda.
This media malevolence against Israel is expressed not only through sins of journalistic commission but also the omission of reports about Palestinian oppression. Last month, PA security forces arrested and allegedly beat to death the outspoken Palestinian critic Nizar Banat, which sparked widespread Palestinian protests.
But there had been a crackdown on dissidents before Banat’s death, with dozens of Palestinians rounded up by Palestinian security forces following Mahmoud Abbas’s decision to call off the PA election because he feared he would lose to Hamas.
On the Gatestone site, the Israeli-Arab journalist Khaled abu Toameh writes that until Banat’s death the western mainstream media almost entirely ignored this Palestinian crackdown — because, he says, the media couldn’t blame Israel for the harassment, intimidation and torture of Palestinians.
Had the western media and NGOs paid attention to these Palestinian abuses, says abu Toameh, Banat might still be alive and activists protesting his death might not have been beaten.
The effect of the invidious role played by the mainstream media in helping foment murderous rage against Israel and the Jewish people, while sanitising the behaviour of the Palestinians, is incalculable.
Not only has this turned many people in Britain, America and elsewhere against Israel (including a growing proportion of the Jewish diaspora), but it also fuels murderous Arab and Muslim hysteria against Israel and the west.
One of the most appalling examples was the news item in the year 2000 transmitted on the French TV station France 2, which purported to show the death of a Palestinian child, Mohammed al Durah, under a hail of Israeli bullets in Gaza.
The iconic image of the child clinging to his father until his apparently lifeless body slumped down fuelled Muslim and Arab rage which led to countless murders of Jews and Israelis. Osama bin Laden mentioned the child’s death in a “warning” to President George Bush after 9/11, while on the horrific video of al Qaeda’s beheading in 2002 of the American Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl the image could be seen in the background.
In fact, the al Durah event was staged in order to dupe the western media. As an observer at a libel hearing related to that news item, I was present in a Paris courtroom at which hitherto suppressed France 2 footage of the incident was finally screened.
After the commentary pronounced he was dead, we saw the boy lift his head and peep through his fingers. He wasn’t dead at all.
Indeed, the whole thing was a set-up, with Palestinians who were supposedly injured under relentless Israeli fire being loaded on to stretchers and into ambulances — but with not one of them showing any wound or injury at all.
The person who did most to bring the al Durah “Pallywood” lie to public attention, Professor Richard Landes, has written about the western media’s “lethal war journalism,” which he defines as reporting as news a foreign belligerent’s war propaganda.
As he says, this seemingly unbreakable pattern of media behaviour has given birth to one of the most grotesque and inhumane strategies in the history of asymmetrical war: to provoke the enemy to attack in order to maximise your own civilian casualties, thus exploiting the compassion of outsiders to get them to hate your enemy as badly as you do.
Given the staggering scale and lethal outcome of this western journalistic corruption, it is astonishing that the Jewish world, both in Israel and the diaspora, doesn’t subject it to any systematic challenge.
The BBC is the most influential news source in the world. In 2004, a senior BBC journalist, Malcolm Balen, completed a 20,000 word report after examining thousands of hours of BBC coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following complaints of anti-Israel bias. The report has never been published, with the BBC spending almost £333,000 (more than $450,000) in legal costs to conceal it.
Since then, the inflammatory incitement against Israel by the BBC, TheNew York Times and much of the rest of the mainstream media has got far worse. Yet with some heroic exceptions, this relentless onslaught has been received with near silence by Jewish community leaders.
This media malpractice is not a marginal issue. It is a weapon of war. And it’s time for a proper counterattack.
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Minneapolis
Minneapolis was once known for its innovative and progressive policy solutions. It produced national political leaders such as Hubert H. Humphrey and Walter Mondale. In the past year, however, Minneapolis has become better known as a badly managed city adrift in politically correct mob rule. How did this once-great city fall so far so fast?
In 2009, Minneapolis adopted ranked-choice voting, then an untested method of electing city officials. It was sold to voters as a way to increase voter participation and improve the tone of political campaigns. In fact, it has had little positive effect on campaigns and their messaging, and voter turnout remains low. The corrosive effect of ranked-choice voting on democratic legitimacy is partly to blame for Minneapolis’s current dire condition.
In Minneapolis’s 2017 mayoral election (which was the third using ranked choice) voter turnout was only 43%. The victor in that 16-way race was Jacob Frey, who prevailed after six rounds of counting that took 24 hours to complete. He became mayor despite being the first choice of only 25% of voters.
Mr. Frey’s most notable first-term achievement was doing nothing last May while rioters burned and looted more than 1,300 buildings, causing an estimated $500 million of damage. He implied that destroying the city was a justifiable social-justice action. When a police precinct was burned to the ground, he showed no special concern. He did make time for a live television interview on MSNBC.
Minneapolis has become a city adrift, run by weak leaders like Mr. Frey. The best any of them can do is keep the mob at bay—and sometimes not even that. On June 27 a crowd that included members of Black Lives Matter and Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar, surrounded a City Council member’s car and held her captive until she signed a paper with a list of their demands.
Public confidence in elections matters. When voters develop doubts about election integrity, they begin to question whether public officials are wielding power legitimately. Ranked-choice voting remains a solution in search of a problem, as a new Freedom Foundation of Minnesota report explains. It replaces the traditional plurality voting system to which most Americans are accustomed with a scheme that denies voters informed choice without ensuring that every vote counts. Ranked choice creates needless complexity that makes voting less, not more, accessible.
Despite what advocates say, ranked-choice voting doesn’t combat voter apathy—competitive races that engage a broad swath of the electorate do. If advocates truly want greater voter engagement and turnout, they would allow nonpartisan municipal elections to occur during midterm election years, when federal and (in most places) state offices are also contested.
New York is the latest city to learn the hard way how bad ranked-choice voting can be. It took 15 days for a winner to emerge in the city’s Democratic primary for mayor. New Yorkers have also learned that ranked-choice voting actually reduces voter confidence and satisfaction—even as both are already extremely low.
In a 2017 study, political scientist Lindsay Nielson found that ranked-choice voting has “no positive impact on voters’ confidence in elections and the democratic progress.” Overall, Ms. Nielson’s survey respondents “were not any more likely to prefer RCV elections to plurality or majoritarian elections, and, overall, most voters do not prefer to vote in RCV elections and do not think that they result in fair election outcomes.”
After 11 years, most Minneapolis voters don’t have a great handle on how ranked-choice voting works. Progressive political power brokers seem to be the only ones informed about its mechanics and why it’s supposedly preferential to the one-person, one-vote system that worked well for so long. Advocates never mention the most disturbing fact about ranked-choice voting—sometimes your vote doesn’t count in determining the winner. Under ranked-choice voting candidates are eliminated in rounds. The votes of eliminated candidates are redistributed according to the voter’s ranked preferences. Ballots on which only one candidate is ranked first are pushed aside when that candidate is eliminated. In the New York Democratic mayoral primary nearly 140,000 ballots ended up being declared “inactive,” about 15% of the total.
“In the end, it is all about political power, not about what is best for the American people and preserving our great republic,” according to a 2019 Heritage Foundation report. “So-called reformers want to change process rules so they can manipulate election outcomes to obtain power.”
Minneapolis has learned a painful lesson about the connection between democratic legitimacy and public order. Let’s hope it isn’t too late to turn things around. Scrapping ranked-choice voting would be a step in the right direction.
Mr. Weber, a Republican, served as a U.S. representative from Minnesota, 1981-93. Ms. Meeks is president and CEO of the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, where Mr. Weber is a board member
Hunter Biden’s Secret Art Sale
You won’t believe what the White House thinks is an ethical solution.
President Biden has modeled his spending agenda on the Great Society and New Deal. Now he wants to take antitrust policy back to the early 20th century. Or at least that’s how it looks from his executive order on Friday to regulate competition and impose more government control over the private economy.
“In the early 1900s, Teddy Roosevelt’s Administration broke up the trusts controlling the economy—Standard Oil, J.P. Morgan’s railroads, and others—giving the little guy a fighting chance,” his summary states. Mr. Biden now wants to use regulation to break up Big Tech, finance, agriculture and healthcare companies, among others.
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At least two parts of his order are encouraging. He directs Health and Human Services to let hearing aids be sold over the counter, which would offset federal rules that make the devices more expensive than necessary. He also encourages the Federal Trade Commission to ban unnecessary occupational licensing, which is long overdue. These are the government barriers to entry that stymie entrepreneurs, often minorities, in services like hair-braiding or plumbing.
These are deregulatory actions, but the rest of his order is about enhancing government power. Courts for more than a century have applied antitrust law based on the “rule of reason.” Scholars and judges across the political spectrum, including Phillip Areeda and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, have shifted antitrust focus from market concentration to economic analysis and consumer welfare.
The new Brandeisians in the Biden Administration led by the National Economic Council’s Tim Wu (godfather of net neutrality) and FTC chair Lina Khan want to replace the rule of reason with the rule of politics. Mr. Biden’s order includes 72 directives that mostly aim to shackle businesses.
Consider railroads. Government regulation of railroad rates was among the great failures of the 20th century. It reduced private investment and service and drove many carriers into bankruptcy. Congress abandoned it in 1980, but Mr. Biden wants to revive it. His order summary says there are only seven Class I freight railroads compared to 33 four decades ago. Yet freight prices have dropped 44% since 1981. Mr. Biden wants to force railroads to hand over freight traffic to competitors, which would reduce private investment and shipping efficiencies.
He also instructs the Federal Communications Commission to restore the Obama -era “net neutrality” rules that regulated broadband providers like railroads. Investment fell after the FCC imposed net neutrality, then surged after the Trump FCC liberated carriers. Broadband last year cost 20.2% less and was 15.7% faster than in 2015.
One reason is fierce competition. Democrats opposed the T-Mobile-Sprint merger in 2018, but it has boosted wireless competition and investment. The tie-up shows how business consolidation can improve consumer welfare. Economies of scale can reduce prices. Size also gives businesses more leverage to negotiate lower prices with suppliers.
Prescription drug prices have fallen 2% since 2018 as the Food and Drug Administration has approved more generics and second-line therapies. Competition is working. But Mr. Biden nonetheless orders Health and Human Services to “issue a comprehensive plan within 45 days to combat high prescription drug prices and price gouging.” Translation: Government price controls, which will reduce innovation and investment in new treatments.
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It’s no coincidence that consolidation has been greatest in the two industries that have experienced the biggest increase in regulation over the last decade—finance since Dodd-Frank and healthcare since ObamaCare.
Bigger businesses can more easily absorb regulatory costs. After ObamaCare limited insurer profits, Aetna and Cigna merged with more remunerative pharmaceutical benefit managers. Medicaid expansion and low government reimbursement rates have driven hospitals to consolidate to augment their pricing leverage with insurers.
ObamaCare’s “accountable care organizations” gave hospitals an incentive to acquire physician practices. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, primary-care-practice market concentration in metropolitan areas increased 29% between 2010 and 2016. Bigger government makes big business bigger.
Mr. Biden especially has Big Tech in his bull’s eye. His order decrees “greater scrutiny of mergers, especially by dominant internet platforms.” But many tech acquisitions increase competition and benefit consumers. Amazon’s purchase of PillPack drove retail pharmacies to offer free prescription drug shipments.
Specific Big Tech behavior, such as Google’s digital ad practices, may deserve antitrust scrutiny. But breaking up companies merely because of their size will take years to litigate with uncertain consequences and could help foreign companies more than consumers.
That was the hard-earned antitrust lesson of the 20th century, and it appears Mr. Biden wants to doom us to repeat it.
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