Monday, February 24, 2020




'Woke' Media Fail to Notice Historic Cabinet Appointment by Trump. Of Course They Did.

These days we're often regaled with news stories highlighting  firsts – "she's the first LGBTIQ++ Latinx to graduate from the Che Guevarra School of Global Warming who has devoted her life to petting same-sex kittens, tilling community gardens while simultaneously running Riverkeeper kayak trips for one-legged dogs found on the streets of Portland."

You get it.

So it was rather surprising to discover that mainstream news stories about the first openly gay White House Cabinet member – ever, ever – were left on the newsroom floor.

Rick Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, was just named to head the Department of National Intelligence by President Trump.

For those of you not into identity politics, we can understand why you cared not two cents about the state of Grenell's private life.  However, the media hypocrisy shouldn't go by without comment.

To CNN, Grenell was merely a "staunch loyalist," without mentioning this Trump first.

The Daily Beast was upset over something completely different. The naming of Grenell to DNI "blindsided" intelligence apparatchiks. The news site didn't mention the "first" involving Grenell, either.

The BBC highlighted: "Trump criticised for appointing loyalist"! How dare Trump appoint a loyalist to an intelligence agency whose previous leader under President Obama helped try to frame Trump as a "Russian asset"? Codswallop, I tell you!

Yes, the media will try to memory-hole this move as they did when George W. Bush named Miguel Estrada to the D.C. Circuit Court with the objective of putting him on track for the Supreme Court. Democrats couldn't abide having – while not technically first – a Latino put on the court by a Republican. His nomination languished for years. We got far-Left Sonia Sotomayor, "the wise Latina," instead.

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Liberals Oppose Equal Status for Faith-Based Organizations

Sens. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., must really miss the days of Barack Obama, when faith-based groups were treated like second-class citizens when it came to government programs.

Every time a member of President Donald Trump’s team rolls back a rule and levels the playing field, the two Northwest Democrats kick and scream. For people who talk about equality so much, Senate liberals sure don’t understand it.

Nothing really sums up the left better than the first line of their protest letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar: “We write to strongly oppose the Department of Health and Human Services’ proposed rule, ‘Ensuring Equal Treatment of Faith-Based Organizations.”

In other words, what they support is the unequal treatment of faith-based organizations—something the Obama administration had become quite good at. The pair of senators tries to argue that Trump’s policy reinstating religious freedom is actually a secret attack on it—a suggestion that would be funny if it weren’t so outrageous.

“The proposed rule—developed under the guise of religious liberty is actually … yet another step taken by President Trump to green-light federally-funded discrimination,” their letter claims.

No one is quite sure how, since the whole point of the regulation is to make sure every organization—religious or not—is treated the same.

What Obama’s team liked to do was burden religious groups with special reporting or referral requirements, creating ridiculous hoops that no secular organization had to jump through. Of course, the idea was to persuade faith-based groups it was too much trouble—or worse, too steep a compromise—to comply.

The new rule, just posted last month, guarantees that every qualified government organization has a seat at the table—no matter what they believe.

It appears by the words of Murray and Wyden not everyone believes in that kind of neutrality. They want religious groups to be disqualified from any government interaction before it starts.

“We demand the Department put the American people first and withdraw the proposed rule,” they write.

But putting the American people first means engaging all of the diverse options for health care, education, adoption, and disaster relief. If the Trump administration listened to those on the left, it would be jeopardizing billions of dollars in social services.

The Catholic Church spent roughly $97 billion in 2010 alone on health care networks, about $47 billion on colleges, and $4.6 billion on “national charitable activities. Does the government really want to pick up that slack? And, more importantly, where would the government find the resources to try?

Faith-based groups carry the load in this country for humanitarian work—feeding the hungry, clothing the needy, housing the poor. Do liberals really want to be responsible for elbowing out a sizable chunk of our drug rehabilitation programs, prison work, adoption placements, and foster care?

On top of that, HHS is actually bringing itself in line with the Supreme Court’s insistence that “The Free Exercise Clause ‘protect[s] religious observers against unequal treatment’ and subjects to the strictest scrutiny laws that target the religious for ‘special disabilities’ based on their ‘religious status.'”

Just because a group is operating in the government’s domain doesn’t mean it has to give up its convictions. Unfortunately, the vast majority of those on the left doesn’t agree.

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Trump’s plan is our hope, says Israeli President Reuven Rivlin

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin has supported US President ­Don­ald Trump’s controversial peace plan as creating hope for building trust between Israel and the ­Palestinians, as he arrives in Australia for an extensive state visit.

Mr Rivlin, in an interview with The Australian, said the Israeli­-Palestinian relationship was “a tragedy for us both” and Mr Trump’s controversial plan, widely seen to favour Israel, offered a chance to break the pattern of the past. “We have had enough of the cycle of violence … but we cannot hope for a better future if we continue to use the same approaches and tools that have failed time after time in previous rounds.”

Mr Rivlin will meet Scott Morrison, Governor-General David Hurley and the premiers of NSW and Victoria in his six-day visit. He is the third serving Israeli president to visit Australia.

He hailed the Australia-Israel friendship and the strong support given to Israel by the Morrison government, in particular at the UN: “Israel and Australia share values of democracy, equality and liberty, which are the foundations for our longstanding and strong relationship.”

The President lauded the long history of Australia’s connection with Israel. “Israelis remember with gratitude the bravery of Anzac forces, including the charge of the Australian Light Horse in the Battle of Beersheva in 1917, a critical turning point in the war,” he said.

Mr Rivlin expressed gratitude to Canberra for support in rejecting a Palestinian effort­ to bring charges of war crimes against the Israeli Defence Force at the International Criminal Court.

The Morrison government expressed the view that it did not recognise the Palestinian Authority as a state and therefore the PA did not have standing to bring such an action at the ICC. The US and a range of European nation­s took similar views.

Mr Rivlin said: “We deeply appreciat­e Australia’s stance. The IDF has a strong moral code and alleged breaches are taken seriously and investigated thoroughly. We must stand together to oppose the politicisation of the ICC and the abuse of international institutions to resolve political differences that should be address­ed in direct negotiations.”

The Israeli President had harsh words for Iran, saying Israel would not allow Tehran “to grow and to breed and to export terror, instability and threats to the state of Israel”.

He said Iran was the greatest threat to regional and global stab­ility today. “Its malign influence extends across our region, and around the world,” Mr Rivlin said.

He said Iran funded and direc­ted Hezbollah, and the Shia militias in Syria, and supported Hamas and Islamic Jihad across the Middle East. “Iran destabilises the region,” he said. “Its regime is publicly committed to our destruct­ion and is openly pursuing the realisation of its aims.”

Mr Rivlin said Israel’s enem­ies should understand the Jewish state had the capacity and ­obligation to defend its citizens, “and will not hesitate to do so if necessary”.

Israel goes to the polls for the third time in a year on March 2, because no leader has been able to form a governing coalition after the past two elections. The President will be required to deter­mine which leader gets the first chance to try to form a government, should no party or bloc win a majority in the Knessett, as is normal in ­Israeli politics.

Mr Rivlin described Israeli society as consisting of “four tribes”: religious Jews, ultra-Orthodox Jews, Arabs and secular citizens.

Although in pre-presidential life, as a Likud politician, he was regarded as a right-winger and a strong supporter of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, he has also been an outspoken champion of the rights and interests of Arab Israelis, and speaks fluent Arabic. “My father, a professor of Arabic­ at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, translated the Koran into Hebrew to create deeper understanding between us,” he said. “Our agreements with Egypt and Jordan, once our greatest enemies, have endured, bringing benefits to us all.”

Mr Rivlin also stressed the need, with the election looming, for the divergent groups within Israeli society to have a more fruitful dialogue with each other.

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Australia: The strange saga of Fireman Paul

Volunteer firefighters, like volunteer life savers, hold an almost sacred status in the Australian community and the hearts and minds of its citizens.

Nobody forces or even asks them to do what they do, nor do they gain any material reward. Instead they sacrifice their time and sometimes even their lives to save others. And they do it purely because they choose to.

Little wonder that they are so universally venerated and little wonder that they almost always awkwardly eschew it.

Even though they are the ones who are most literally on the ground and are almost always characterised as “down to earth” they are also seen to float above politics and personal pride. They are the closest we have to real-life superheroes.

It is for this reason that Rural Fire Service member Paul Parker’s expletive-laden spray against the Prime Minister was so shocking – despite also being pretty forgivable.

Parker was obviously a man under an enormous amount of stress – even as his own home was damaged by the bushfires that ravaged NSW he was out saving others, fighting the flames to the point of exhaustion. He is also obviously something of a character – a vital prerequisite for an unlimited bar tab.

But it is equally understandable that many of his comrades were angry and felt he had brought the unimpeachable status of volunteer firefighters into momentary disrepute.

It is, after all, a fiercely protected convention in Australia that uniformed personnel such as police and military officers are never seen to be remotely political or partisan. And so having a member of the RFS – which is arguably held in even higher regard – tell the Prime Minister to “get f***ed” is clearly pretty jarring.

But obviously not to everybody.

Through no fault of his own, Fireman Paul was instantly elevated to Messianic status by green-left social media warriors who seemed to see him as some kind of revolutionary hero. And then when he claimed this week to have been sacked by the RFS it was instantly seized as further proof he was a glorious martyr to the cause.

The only catch was that within 24 hours it emerged that the cause Paul Parker was fighting for wasn’t the Greens but One Nation.

As Nine’s political editor Chris Uhlmann so archly observed while posting a more fulsome interview with the man, the only politician Parker didn’t think should “get f***ed” was Pauline Hanson.

This, needless to say, caused a bit of cognitive dissonance with the hard left social media warriors who had ridden the #IStandWithFiremanPaul hashtag like drunken bar room cowboys on a broken mechanical bull.

Of course it had never occurred to any of them that Parker was attacking the PM from the opposite end of the political spectrum. It’s easy to forget that a conservative has enemies on both sides when you define a fascist as anyone who sits to the right of Fidel Castro.

As a result the groundswell of woke activist support for poor Fireman Paul has now disintegrated – so much for solidarity forever.

And yet the hard left unquestioningly flocked in their thousands to support him purely because he publicly swore at the PM only to just as quickly desert him when it emerged his politics didn’t match theirs. This tells you everything you need to know about both their intellect and their loyalty.

Again, for all their talk of solidarity, loyalty has never been the hard left’s strong point – just ask Comrade Trotsky.

For even the most passingly critical mind it was obvious from the outset that this story was crude, inconsistent and illogical and yet it was swallowed wholesale. No wonder it is so easy for the Hansons of this world to cry “fake news”. And no wonder the #IStandWithFiremanPaul movement sank beneath the waves quicker than a Swedish surfer.

All of this is just more evidence, were any needed, of the aching stupidity of so much of the social media commentariat and the tidal lunar idiocy of hashtag activism. All it took was a supporter of the far right to tell the PM to “get f***ed” and the far left just assumed he must be one of them. It’s hardly a Mensa-level entry threshold.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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