Wednesday, December 02, 2020



The Israelis Are Amazing — and So Is the Left

I always thought no one — including Israel — could pull off something as incredible as the July 4, 1976, raid on Entebbe, Uganda. To remind readers what happened that day: A week earlier, on June 27, two Palestinian and two German terrorists hijacked an Air France Tel Aviv to Paris flight with 248 passengers on board, which they diverted to Entebbe Airport in Uganda. At the airport, the hijackers and four additional terrorists, aided by Uganda’s Idi Amin regime, held the Israeli and other Jews, and allowed the 148 non-Jewish passengers to fly on to Paris. The terrorists announced that unless 53 Palestinian prisoners — 40 in Israel and 13 elsewhere — were released, the kidnapped Jews (and the Air France crew, all of whom heroically remained with the Jewish passengers) would be killed.

On July 4, the Israelis flew a disguised transport plane filled with Israeli commandos 2,500 miles from Israel to Entebbe. After refueling in Kenya, they landed in Entebbe, killed the terrorists and saved nearly every hostage — all in 53 minutes.

No one had seen anything quite like the raid on Entebbe, considered at the time to have achieved the impossible … until last week.

On Friday, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the Iranian scientist considered to be “the driving force behind Iran’s nuclear weapons program for two decades” (The New York Times) was assassinated in Iran. To appreciate how remarkable this operation was, consider this: Fakhrizadeh traveled a different route to work every day, traveled in a bulletproof car and was accompanied by three personnel carriers that transported heavily armed bodyguards.

The assassins had cut off electricity to the area surrounding the assassination and disabled all video cameras in the area. They exploded a car next to Fakhrizadeh’s car and had a remote-control machine gun fire at Fakhrizadeh. The entire operation took three minutes. None of the assassins were killed or even wounded. All 12 (the number of assassins, according to Javad Mogouyi, a documentary filmmaker for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps) got away.

Fakhrizadeh was the fifth Iranian nuclear scientist killed in the last 13 years. One must assume that most, if not all, of these assassinations, whether Israel was involved or not, were carried out by Iranians — which only shows how many Iranians loathe their liberty-suppressing, life-suppressing, women-suppressing, Islamo-fascist regime. Too bad Western countries and the Western media also don’t loathe the Iranian regime (what they loathe is labeling the Iranian regime “Islamo-fascist”).

One would think that every decent human being would welcome the elimination of a man whose life was dedicated to the annihilation of another country. There is, after all, no parallel in the world to the Iranian regime’s repeatedly stated goal of annihilating Israel. And Israel — to the consternation of European leaders, the United Nations and major American media — does whatever it takes to prevent itself from being annihilated.

John Brennan, the head of the CIA under President Barack Obama, strongly condemned the Fakhrizadeh assassination. Brennan, who has never abandoned the moral values he held when he was a communist, condemned the assassination as “a criminal act” and “highly reckless” and labeled it “murder” and “state-sponsored terrorism.” He asked Iran to “resist the urge” to retaliate and “wait for the return of responsible American leadership on the global stage.” In other words, wait until the Holocaust-denying, Islamo-fascist, America-hating, genocide-seeking Iranian regime is appeased by a Democrat in the White House — something guaranteed by, among other developments, Joe Biden’s appointment of Brennan’s former deputy director at the CIA, Avril Haines, as his director of national intelligence.

A United Nations spokesman said, “We condemn any assassination or extrajudicial killing.”

A spokesperson for the European Union called Fakhrizadeh’s killing “a criminal act” that “runs counter to the principle of respect for human rights the EU stands for.”

A New York Times opinion piece said the assassination “could strengthen hard-line factions in Iran arguing against a return to diplomacy.” This statement embodies the naivete of the world’s left, including liberals: that evil regimes are composed of “hard-line factions” and “moderate factions.” The author of the Times opinion piece, Barbara Slavin of the Atlantic Council, added that the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany should “issue a statement condemning the assassination as illegal under international law and damaging to the cause of nonproliferation. … It would be the ultimate tragedy if Israel’s aggression now led Iran to change its calculus and go for weapons.”

To the left around the world, Israel is the villain here, not Iran.

Upon returning to France, Michel Bacos, the heroic captain of the Air France plane hijacked to Entebbe, who refused the opportunity to return to France and insisted on remaining with the kidnapped Jews, “was reprimanded by his superiors at Air France and temporarily suspended from duty” (The Jerusalem Post, Aug. 3, 2006). Such are the values of our European allies.

Red States Could Have Upper Hand in Possible Biden Presidency

By Rick Manning

The final outcome of the presidential and Senate majority fight remain in doubt, but no matter how things turn out, Americans will be much better educated about the importance and primacy of the states over many aspects of governance.

On many matters, states have a much more significant role than the federal government. Election law is just one example where the federal courts seem to be bending over backwards in deference to the states, but another that was discovered during the first four years of the Trump administration is enforcement of federal immigration policy, and there has long been an argument over whether the federal government has any real enforcement power over education, transportation, land and housing policies.

This is stunning. Since Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency almost 90 years ago, we’ve seen a steady stream of power away from state capitols and local governments toward the administrative state in Washington, D.C.

In one of the ironic twists, the United States Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling that the federal government could not withhold appropriated law enforcement dollars from states that refused to enforce federal immigration policy. Because this case is precedent setting, it is of mounting importance. In California v. the United States, the far-left Attorney General of California actually argued,

“The Constitution “‘confers upon Congress the power to regulate individuals, not States.’” Murphy v. Nat’l Collegiate Athletic Ass’n, __ U.S. __, 138 S. Ct. 1461, 1476 (2018) (quoting New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144, 166 (1992)). Under the Tenth Amendment and the structure of the Constitution, the federal government may not compel state officials to enforce or administer a federal regulatory program. See Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898, 935 (1997). Similarly, it may not require state legislatures to affirmatively adopt federally preferred policies, see New York, 505 U.S. at 161-162, or prohibit them from enacting legislation of their own choosing, see Murphy, 138 S. Ct. at 1477-1478.”

Assuming that the Supreme Court will apply the same regard to conservative states as they have given the state of California, these states can resist a potential Biden administration’s encroachment on their state policies. And they will have the Attorney General of California to thank! He obtained the Court’s implicit agreement that the federal government cannot force states to enforce or administer a federal regulatory program.

Apply that rule to just one of the Obama/Biden administration policies that a possible Biden presidency would likely resurrect, the Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation, which allowed HUD to effectively have veto power over local zoning decisions that federal bureaucrats determined had a disparate impact on racial desegregation if a locality had accepted Community Redevelopment Grant funds.

If the Trump Justice Department could not withhold federal funds from California for its refusal to assist in enforcement of immigration laws, then it seems logical that HUD cannot take over local zoning, using the denial of federal grants as a cudgel. (NOTE: Even with this assumption, just to be safe, no locality should apply for or accept a federal redevelopment grant and Congress should take steps to make certain that when given, they are unfettered by federal government strings.)

The choice to let stand the lower court ruling in the California case matters immensely. Should Joe Biden become President and the state of Georgia not provide Senate Democrats a majority in their run-off election on January 5, Biden’s only path to enforce his socialist vision will be through regulatory action.

With the GOP controlling the legislative and governor’s offices in twenty-four states and with full control of the legislative branch in thirty-one states in 2021, almost half the states could opt-out or outright reject the most egregious federal policies, effectively neutering Biden on domestic policy.

To strengthen their legal hands, it might be wise for GOP-controlled states with common interests in land, environmental, education, judicial or housing policies to band together in compacts for the purposes of asserting their Tenth Amendment right to resist federal policies which the state of California so helpfully asserted and won when it came to federal immigration enforcement.

And by the Court’s ending the ability of the federal government to deny states funding who refuse to assist enforcement of regulatory edicts, the power to coerce state compliance is largely stripped away.

Of course, this is predicated on the assumption that the Supreme Court will treat issues brought forward by GOP-led states seeking to stop the growth of federal government power as they did to California in its attempt to aid and abet criminal aliens from deportation.

Who knows, stranger things have happened, after all, the media would have us believe that more than 80 million people voted for a guy on November 3, who hid in his basement out of fear of getting sick rather than actually running for the office.

California megachurches rebrand as ‘family friendly strip clubs’ to protest state’s Covid-19 restrictions

Two megachurches decided to open Sunday services with some safe-for-work joke stripteases, in a cheeky protest against California’s closing down of churches due to the Covid-19 pandemic, while letting strip clubs stay open.
Before the start of Sunday’s sermon, pastors at two churches opened with short burlesque dance routines, taking off their jackets and even throwing their ties into the cheering audience.

“Strip clubs (Not Churches) are exempt from the Covid lockdowns, and are deemed essential by our governor!” said senior pastor of Awaken Church Jurgen Matthesius on Instagram. “So we decided we are NOW Awaken family friendly strip club!” he quipped.

The pastor then rolled with the joke, clarifying, “we strip the devil of his hold, power & authority over people’s lives!”

With God working in mysterious ways, a similar bit was performed by pastor Rob McCoy at Godspeak Calvary Chapel. “This is insane!” McCoy later said of unequal rules set for churches and strip clubs in the state. “Cannot America see the hypocrisy and the stupidity of all this?” he asked, calling the rules “tyranny.”

The tongue-in-cheek stripteasees at the Awaken Church and Godspeak Calvary Chapel came after the San Diego Superior Court’s November 6 decision, which allowed for strip clubs to reopen while churches remained closed.

California Christians have been up in arms about the ban on in-person church services for months. “There is a desperate need for the church with the brokenness within our community,” senior pastor Matthesius told Good Morning San Diego earlier this month.

'F*** Thanksgiving!': Antifa Topples Statues of George Washington, Veterans to Fight 'Colonization'

While most Americans were eating turkey and stuffing at whatever kind of socially-distanced gathering their state government would allow, “peaceful protesters” — who never spread the coronavirus, apparently — toppled statues and spray-painted anti-Thanksgiving messages to celebrate the holiday. Vandals targeted statues of President William McKinley in Chicago, a veterans monument in Portland, an Abraham Lincoln statue in Spokane, Wash., and two statues in Minneapolis: one of George Washington and another celebrating pioneers.

“Stop colinization [sic]. End Thanksgiving. F**k 12,” vandals spray-painted on the plinth of the Washington statue in Washburn Fair Oaks Park in Minneapolis. The vandals targeted the statue either late on Wednesday night or early on Thanksgiving morning.

A group organizing under the Pan-Indigenous People’s Liberation (PIPL) network took credit for the vandalism, which they said was part of a “national decolonial day of action.”

A few miles away from the Washington statue, vandals also targeted a large granite monument to pioneers in the city’s B.F. Nelson Park. Vandals spray-painted the messages, “no thanks,” “no more genocide,” decolonize,” and “land back” on the statue, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported.

“Land back” seemingly refers to The LANDBACK campaign, a Native American movement supposedly fighting “white supremacy.” The campaign calls for the dismantling of the “white supremacy structures” supposedly responsible for removing Native Americans from their lands, including the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service; for the defunding of “white supremacy” in the forms of the police, the military-industrial complex, Border Patrol, and ICE; a “return” of “all public lands back into Indigenous hands”; and a policy of “consent.”

This iconoclasm is nothing new. While it began with Confederate monuments, this summer vandals progressed to targeting America’s heroes, such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. Then came Mahatma Gandhi, Union General Ulysses S. Grant, black Union soldiers, and freed slave Frederick Douglass. Vandals even attacked a monument to 9/11 firefighters and painted a statue of Jesus black.

However, targeting patriotic symbols just before Thanksgiving seems particularly disgusting.

Early on Wednesday morning, police prevented vandals from toppling a statue of President William McKinley in a Chicago park. The vandals tethered a rope to a police car and spray-painted the statue with the words “Land Back,” NBC 5 Chicago reported. Activists have condemned McKinley, who served as president from 1897 to his death in 1901, as a racist because he championed westward expansion.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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