House Delays Vote on Infrastructure Bill as Democrats Feud
A liberal revolt left Democrats short of votes, but leaders insisted they would bring up the measure again on Friday, giving them more time to reach a deal on a separate climate and safety net bill.
IAEA: Iran reneges on agreement to let nuclear inspectors service monitoring equipment
The IAEA said Tehran violated an agreement reached on Sept. 12 to allow it to swap out memory cards and reset surveillance equipment at Iranian nuclear sites.
(September 27, 2021 / JNS) Iran broke an agreement to allow International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors to maintain monitoring equipment at Iranian nuclear sites, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said on Sunday.
IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi “stresses that Iran’s decision not to allow agency access to the TESA Karaj centrifuge component manufacturing workshop is contrary to the agreed terms of the joint statement issued on 12 September,” the IAEA said in a statement, Reuters reported.
Grossi met with the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Mohammad Eslami in Tehran on Sept. 12 where it was agreed to allow the IAEA to reset monitoring equipment and replace memory cards in surveillance equipment at Iranian nuclear sites.
Iran allowed IAEA inspectors to do so “at all necessary locations in Iran with the exception of the centrifuge component manufacturing workshop at the TESA Karaj complex,” Sunday’s IAEA statement said.
Iran’s envoy to IAEA Kazem Gharibabadi tweeted on Monday that the TESA Karaj complex doesn’t fall under the agreement.
“During the discussions in Tehran & Vienna, Iran indicated that since Tessa Karaj Complex is still under security and judicial investigations, equipment related to this Complex are not included for servicing,” he said.
“Therefore, DG’s [director-general’s] report on Sep 26 isn’t accurate and goes beyond the agreed terms,” of the Sept. 12 agreement, he said.
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With friends like Soros who needs enemies. We Jews have perfected the art of growing our own.
Soros’ Cash Helps ‘flip’ Evangelicals Away from Israel
By John Aman
He’s Jewish, but George Soros is no friend to Israel. The radical billionaire told the New York Times in 2006 he is “very critical of Israel.”
That’s an understatement. The Israeli government has blasted the deep-pocketed philanthropist and atheist for “funding organizations that defame the Jewish state.” And former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman says Soros has done “more to vilify the state of Israel … than almost any individual on the face of the earth.”
One of the world’s wealthiest men, Soros has used his philanthropy to steer the American Jewish community away from its traditional support for Israel. He helped launch J Street, a left-wing, Palestinian-friendly Jewish lobby now positioned as an alternative to the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), the long-recognized pro-Israel powerhouse.
And Soros is also using his wealth to distance evangelicals – long the leading pro-Israel constituency in the U.S. – from the Jewish state. For a decade, Soros has been giving six-figure grants to the Telos Group, which takes evangelical influencers on expense-paid tours to Israel and brings “Israeli and Palestinian leaders and activists” to speak in the U.S.
As I show in my new booklet, “Hijacked: How George Soros and Friends Exploit Your Church” (available from D. James Kennedy Ministries), Soros has been an “angel investor” for Telos. He gave it half of its start-up funding in its first three years, a total of $713,500. And Soros pumped another $1.6 million into Telos from 2012 to 2019.
The listed purpose for Soros’ largesse is “to educate U.S. leaders in faith communities … about the reality on the ground in Palestine/Israel.” In plain terms, that means cooling evangelical fervor for Israel.
“Telos Group purports to promote a ‘pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian and pro-peace’ agenda, but the problem is that this slogan has become a cover for broadcasting a lot of misinformation that invariably cuts against Israel,” Dexter Van Zile, Christian media analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) told JNS.org. “It’s part of a propaganda or cognitive war against Israel.”
Co-founded in 2009 by Todd Deatherage, an evangelical Christian, and Gregory Khalil, an American attorney of Palestinian descent, Telos has taken more than 110 groups to Israel, giving evangelical leaders a decidedly pro-Palestinian perspective. Telos tours have featured speakers like Mitri Raheb and Elias Chacour, severe critics of the Jewish state who dive into the deep end of the anti-Semitic pool.
Raheb, the former pastor of a Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, has advanced the contemptible theory that Jews have no historic association with the land of Israel. And Chacour, the former Melkite Catholic bishop of Galilee, “has frequently drawn comparisons between the state of Israel and Nazi Germany,” writes Tricia Miller, a senior analyst for CAMERA.
“Experts” like these make a pronounced impact on high-profile evangelicals. Lynne Hybels, co-founder of the influential megachurch Willow Creek Community Church, has taken over 100 Willow Creek staffers and leaders on Telos tours to “Israel/Palestine,” the Telos Group’s loaded term for the Jewish state and the disputed Palestinian territories. Hybels has disparaged Israel for its “occupation of the West Bank and the continuing blockade of Gaza,” which she calls “a violation of human rights” – accusations that echo Palestinian talking points.
Likewise, Relevant magazine founder Cameron Strang offered his readers a heavily slanted picture of “Israel/Palestine” in his “Blessed Are the Peacemakers” 2014 cover story, published after his Telos-guided visit to the Holy Land. Strang’s account gave readers – without comment or correction – this bit of blatant misinformation from PLO leader Hanan Ashrawi: “Palestinians are the descendants of the early Christians. We are probably the straightest line to original Christianity.”
This would be news, no doubt, to the apostles – all Jewish – who struggled at first with the idea of gentile followers of Jesus. It also shoehorns the Palestinians into the first century despite their invention as a people in the late 1960s.
Google’s “Ngram Viewer,” which maps the appearance of unique terms in books from 1800 to the present, documents the Palestinians’ late arrival. A search for “Palestinian state” or “Palestinian people” turns up almost no hits before the late 1960s, when the number shoots upward.
But it’s not just evangelical elites who sour on Israel after Soros-funded Telos tours. The rank-and-file do, too. A 2017 excursion left Katie Kallam, the daughter of an evangelical pastor, disenchanted with the Jewish state. “I didn’t realize how much of our defense budget goes to Israel,” Kellam told Jewish Currents. “It was jarring to learn how complicit I am as an American.”
Of course, Israel is the lone democracy in the Middle East, a pro-Western state and strong U.S. ally. It’s also surrounded by enemies who want it destroyed. But reasons like that for aiding Israel may not be heard on Telos tours.
Perhaps that’s why Telos Group co-founder Todd Deatherage told Jewish Currents it’s “easy to almost flip people” from sympathy for Israel to sympathy for Palestinians.
Telos, which leverages evangelical celebrities to reach into the evangelical community, may be eroding support for Israel among younger evangelicals. A recent survey registered a 42% drop since 2018 in support for Israel among evangelicals aged 18-29. Some say the drop is not that steep, but it’s still cause for alarm.
George Soros might consider it a return on investment. Dubbed “one of Israel’s most dangerous and powerful enemies in the Western world,” Soros is at least getting his money’s worth.
John Aman is Director of Communications at D. James Kennedy Ministries and author of the new booklet, “Hijacked: How George Soros and Friends Exploit Your Church,” a print companion to the new D. James Kennedy Ministries documentary, “How the Left is Stealing Your Church.”
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When the FBI can prevent something and does not, it is engaged in politics of the worst kind:
As scores of Proud Boys made their way, chanting and shouting, toward the Capitol on Jan. 6, one member of the far-right group was busy texting a real-time account of the march to his handler at the F.B.I. |
He provided the bureau with an inside glimpse of the action, according to confidential records obtained by The New York Times. |
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It can be difficult to know who is lying and who is telling the truth. We also have to be realistic...is Biden lying or can he not remember? Either way, he’s proven time and again that he’s unfit to lead.
General McKenzie helps to shed some light during the Senate hearing. The president was advised and the president chose not to take the recommendations.
Fighting for Freedom,
Lawrence Cooper
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One of my favorite thinker/writers is Dov Fischer in addition to Kim Strassel , Victor Davis Hanson and, of course Charles Krauthammer, but he no longer is with us and what a tragedy.
Rabbi Dov Fischer, Esq., a high-stakes litigation attorney of more than twenty-five years and an adjunct professor of law of more than fifteen years, is rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California. His legal career has included serving as Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, clerking for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and then litigating at three of America’s most prominent law firms: JonesDay, Akin Gump, and Baker & Hostetler. In his rabbinical career, Rabbi Fischer has served several terms on the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America, is Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, has been Vice President of Zionist Organization of America, and has served on regional boards of the American Jewish Committee, B’nai Brith Hillel, and several others. His writings on contemporary political issues have appeared over the years in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Jerusalem Post, National Review, American Greatness, The Weekly Standard, and in Jewish media in American and in Israel. A winner of an American Jurisprudence Award in Professional Legal Ethics, Rabbi Fischer also is the author of two books, including General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine, which covered the Israeli General’s 1980s landmark libel suit.
https://spectator.org/system-cheats-conservatives/
Why Conservatives Legitimately Feel the System Cheats Us | The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Dov Fischer
We rarely hear or read of the way conservatives feel cheated by the System. We read of “Systemic Racism” — a lie, a Big Lie — and we are fed a never-ending dose of complaints by Nancy Pelosi, The Squad and their ilk of this unfairness or that unfairness. They expect criminals to be coddled. The police to be defunded. Bail to be ended as a system for assuring that accused criminals return to court. They expect ICE to be deconstructed, the border to be opened without restraint, illegals to be afforded Constitutional rights, taxes to be raised on those who work hardest to generate this country’s wealth, risk-taking to be punished, $3.5 trillion more borrowed from China to pay for social programs that never work, and energy exploration to be suppressed so that we again would become dependent on the dirty oil from the Arab Muslim tyrannical and anti-American sheikdoms.
We live in a Bizarro World, an upside-down universe where, when we read or turn on the news to watch mainstream news sources — ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post — we expect to hear and read sanity but instead get pummeled with craziness and irrationality. None of it makes sense, but “everyone” who seems to be “in the know” says and repeats it, leaving us wondering whether our television speakers are working properly, whether we are missing something so obvious. So we turn to publications like this one, and to opinion columns like this one, to assess whether we really are all alone.
We are not alone. We are in the tens of millions, really more than 200 million at least, given the 174 million — and more — of us over age 18 who lawfully cast ballots last November, plus those under 18 who think like us, plus those who failed to cast ballots and then complained the next day over results in which they were AWOL. We know for a fact that at least 200 million of us think this way — despite years and decades that amount to scores of years of continuous Left monopoly over information and opinion. The Courts have not fairly reflected the national majority consensus for at least three quarters of a century, as Democrat liberals and progressives rightfully have placed their judges on the federal benches but Republicans, other than Trump, have failed to do so as reliably for 80 years. Eisenhower beat the Democrat twice, but he gave us federal judges like Earl Warren and William Brennan. Nixon tried to give us Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell but ended up giving us Harry Blackmun. Gerald Ford gave us John Paul Stevens. Yes, Ronald Ragan gave us Antonin Scalia, but he also gave us Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy. A batting average of .333 gets you into baseball’s Hall of Fame — but destroys America. George H.W. Bush gave us Clarence Thomas but also David Souter. George W. Bush gave us John Roberts and almost Harriet Miers.
We were entitled when it was our turn to have the same conservative consistency that Democrats have enjoyed from Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ruth Ginsburg. When a contract would come before them early in their careers, for a judicial determination of breach, they surely always would be fair. Either there had been an offer, acceptance, consideration, breach — or not. Same with a banana slip-and-fall: either the accused tortfeasor bore a duty of care, breached, a breach that was both the actual cause and the proximate (foreseeable) cause, and caused damage — or not. But, years later, when politically tinged cases come before judges like those, the briefing and oral argument is pointless. We all know how the Kagans, Sotomayors, and Ginsburgs will (or did) rule on one thousand out of one thousand such cases. And, to a degree, that is fair because that is how they honestly see the thing. Thus, the System presumes that fairness balances out ultimately because some of them will get appointed during Democrat Left administrations, while others will get appointed by Republican conservatives. Yet the reality is that the System fails because, except for Trump who batted 3-for-3 because he is Trump, the others all compromised where their opponents across the aisle never would. Nixon caved on Carswell and Haynsworth. Reagan also caved.
If Roe v. Wade rankles, know that the justices who voted in favor of abortion on demand included Justices William Brennan (Eisenhower appointee), Blackmun (Nixon appointee), and Lewis Powell (Nixon). Also the moderately conservative Warren Burger (Nixon). The vote was 7-2. Had Nixon and Eisenhower done their jobs the way Trump did, vetting and showing backbone as when Trump stood by Brett Kavanaugh in the face of withering perjury, hypocrisy (Kamala Harris lecturing him on sexual morality?), and character assassination, that 7-2 would have been 6-3 or 5-4 the other way. And so it has gone on Affirmative Action, on Gay Marriage, and on so much else. Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court’s gay-marriage landmark case, went 5-4. No surprise how Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Breyer voted. And honestly — no quibble because they were appointed by Democrats, fair and square, to advance a left-wing shift in American culture and morals. But Kennedy had been named by a twice-elected Ronald Reagan, who had beaten a Jimmy Carter and then a Walter Mondale with a promise to restore conservatism. It was the Reagan appointee who changed American mores. In “Affirmative Action,” Brennan, Blackmun, and Powell made those race quotas a legal part of American life. That is, the System failed because Republican presidents got intimidated when Democrats “borked” their nominees, while Democrats knew Republicans would be too genteel to reciprocate. And that is why the Left wants to blow up the Supreme Court now — because, thanks to Trump’s trio, they never have experienced in their lifetimes an honest Supreme Court breakdown reflecting the voters’ presidential choices.
Just as the System has failed conservatives in the federal Courts, it has failed everywhere else. Under any fair legal system, Hillary Clinton now would be in prison for spoliating evidence and — possibly — for suborning perjury. Like Gravity — that is the law. That is why Martha Stewart went to prison; it wasn’t because of a bad recipe or a tablecloth she had not ironed. Those destroyed emails, that bleached server was not just about politics and yoga and Chelsea’s wedding dress. It is forbidden in the most serious way to destroy evidence. We attorneys all learn early in law school never to believe that stuff on TV and in the movies about “making evidence disappear” because you go to prison together with your client if you destroy evidence in a criminal proceeding. But Hillary uniquely got away with it, just as the various Trump-ordered “federal investigation” probes ultimately let her get away with it. She never will pay the price for her crime except in the abstract sense — and, yes, it is something — that she was certain she is oh-so-much smarter and more capable than are both Obama and Trump, yet lost to both of them so convincingly that she will go to her grave never coming to terms with how she lost and lost and lost. And, in the end, what difference does it make?
As for Special Counsel Durham — Bull Durham.
There is an unfairness in that Facebook and Twitter and the whole Silicon Valley social media monopoly turned out to be a cartel in leftist hands, with clearly leftist agendas of promoting leftist information and literally suppressing conservative views. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was a private company that ultimately got regulated. Same with AT&T. In time, sooner or later, the Department of Justice is going to bust these Leftist Social Media monopolies, but it must await a day and time when the same restrictive monopolies do to the Left what they now do to conservative opinion and reasonable thought. And we know that is not fair because they have become utilities that should be regulated now.
And, for goodness sakes, the border. The idea that a person born in America automatically is an American citizen — no matter what — not only is unfair but never was the law. I personally have litigated a multi-million-dollar international health insurance case where a side issue was that a Mexican woman, pretty much nine months pregnant, essentially did the equivalent of a football “quarterback sneak,” basically just lunging across the border as her baby was coming out. The baby was declared an American citizen, and she did not even have to choose whether to go for a two-point conversion. The mockery at the border where the Illegals — and we’re not allowed to call them that? — get stopped, arrested, released with a court date, and end up in Minnesota’s Somali community voting for Ilhan Omar but never return for their court date, or end up in Georgia or North Carolina or Virginia where they replace the conservative majority, is unfair. It is not lawful, and there is no fair theory under which they get away with it. But they do get away with it, and the media to which we look for truth and guidance — ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post — plays the game with them. And the Republicans for forty years — not only McCain and endless Bushes but also Reagan — let them get away with it, legalizing it and assuring new waves to follow.
This Systemic Cheating, Systemic Unfairness grates at our souls. The cheating, the suppression of legitimate views, the manipulation of a reasonable system to pack the Senate with two new states that are not states and never were imagined as states when the Democrats were satisfied with their majorities, the talk of blowing up the judiciary and adding as many new judges as needed to change majorities — with contemptuous certainty that the other side will prove too weak and spineless to do the same when their next turn comes (and it will); making a mockery of language as the children of Illegals are called “Dreamers” while our children, what, lack dreams of their own to get into colleges honestly? The expansion of government handouts to able-bodied loafers and economic parasites who are told “These are not ‘handouts’ but ‘Entitlements’ because, for doing nothing to earn any of it, you are entitled to all of it.”
These are horrible things. They are not “entitled.” Not to my car. Not to my keyboard. Not to my two loaves of Shabbat challah. And, for goodness sakes, not to my earned income that the government expects me to pay in increased taxes to fund such “entitlements” so that Illegals and their Dreamers can supplant my lawfully situated children’s places in state university admissions decisions, even as my kids score a hundred points higher than they on college entrance exams — and as my taxes pay for those college seats, those professors, those course books, the bricks in those walls, and the electricity that powers the places on days when California is not browned-out by Green Energy efficiency.
The System is very unfair and cheats us. If you believe that, don’t forget that at least 200 million other Americans just recently said the same exact thing, cast their ballots that way. And if there is a tie vote, count me on your side to break it. In Yiddish, there is an expression — also the title of a book by Judge Judy: “Don’t Pee on My Leg and Tell Me It’s Raining.” ‘Nuff said.y absolute favorites along with Hanson and of course Krauthammer but he is no longer with us and what a tragic shame.
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