President Trump reversed the last minute policy declaration by the Obama Administration and, in my opinion, is fixing years of confused and contradictory policy on Israel. Israel is an important ally and friend to the U.S.

Caroline B. Glick:

“…Monday will long be remembered as a turning point in Middle East history. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s statement Monday that Israeli settlements are not illegal per se is the most significant shift in US Middle East policy in the past generation. Jerusalem’s status as Israel’s capital has been a matter of US law since 1996.

There was little interest in Washington in recent years in pressuring Israel to withdraw from the Golan Heights. But the issue of the legality of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), has been the defining issue of much of the international discourse on Israel for a generation.

In the vast majority of cases, the discourse has revolved around the widely held allegation – with no basis in actual law – that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria are illegal.

This allegation has served as the justification for a continuous barrage of condemnations of Israel in the international arena and for anti-Israel legal verdicts in international courts including the International Court of Justice at the Hague in 2004 and the European Court of Justice last week…”

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Victor Davis Hanson on Max Boot:

“…Max Boot recently wrote that my arguments against the impeachment inquiry are prima facie proof of why the Democrats should, in fact, impeach Trump: “If even the great historian Victor Davis Hanson can’t make a single convincing argument against impeachment, I am forced to conclude that no such argument exists.”

In fact, I made 10 such arguments, all of which Boot attempted, but has failed, to refute. In this context, Boot’s intellectual erosion as a historian and analyst is a valuable warning of stage-four Trump Derangement Syndrome. I offer that diagnosis with regret given I once knew and liked Boot. But his commentary over the last three years has become sadly unhinged.

Most recently Boot declared—and then quickly retracted it only in embarrassment after popular outrage—that chief ISIS mass-murdering psychopathic Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did not kill himself in cowardly fashion as Trump had described: “The assertion that Baghdadi died as a coward was, in any case, contradicted by the fact that rather than be captured, he blew himself up.”

When Baghdadi was cornered by American forces, he chose to murder three innocent children rather than surrender—consistent with his entire venomous career of ordering the beheading, burning, and mutilating of innocent captives from a safe distance. The murder of defenseless children is cowardly.

No one should know better the horrific crimes of a mass-murdering Josef Stalin than the Russian-born Boot. Stalin’s purges, orchestrated famines, gulags, show trials, liquidation of the officer class, and atrocities during World War II perhaps accounted for over 20 million Russian deaths. So how could Boot write, “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump”? Twenty million dead souls don’t quite match Boot’s hatred of Trump.

After the former Republican Boot saw Trump elected, by defeating his own particular favored Republican primary candidate, and Hillary Clinton, he seemed a bit embittered: “For the health of our republic, I think we need to destroy the Republican Party.”…”

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Obama Warns Democratic Candidates that Voters ‘Don’t Want to See Crazy Stuff’ From Them

Martha Stewart Says She Raises Her Own Chickens to Combat Climate Change: ‘I’m Not Polluting the Universe’

California Is Spending $2.4 Million to Build the World’s Largest Permanent Installation of Climate Change-Themed Art

 

Paul Mirengoff:

“…A foreign correspondent I used to know liked to say that a good test for national decline is the smell of urine. In declining countries, one frequently smells it.

Americans in certain jurisdictions can expect to smell more urine soon. Left-wing prosecutors, some financed by George Soros, will be decriminalizing urination in public.

This is one of a several “quality of life” crimes the left wants to stop prosecuting. Some prosecutors also want theft below a certain dollar amount to go largely unpunished.

The theory behind this decriminalization effort is that poor people and members of certain minority groups commit a disproportionate number of these crimes. But it’s also the case that poor people and members of the same minority groups are disproportionately victimized by many of them.

They can expect to be smelling the urine first…”

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DAVID CATRON:

“…Anyone following the increasingly desperate Democratic impeachment effort will by now be aware that they have exchanged the term “quid pro quo” for “bribery” and “extortion.” They rebranded President Trump’s alleged offenses, according to a Washington Post report, after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee conducted a number of focus groups to test their messaging. The use of a marketing tool for something so serious confirms that, for the Democrats, impeachment is just another election strategy they hope will get traction if they dumb down the narrative. This betrays breathtaking contempt for the nation’s institutions as well as the voters.

That the new Democratic messaging strategy originated with their low regard for the intelligence of the electorate was made plain by Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) on NBC’s Meet the Press. Chuck Todd asked the congressman why they had stopped using “quid pro quo” and Hines replied, “Number one, when you’re trying to persuade the American people of something that is really pretty simple … it’s probably best not to use Latin words to explain it.… We’ve got to get off this ‘quid pro quo’ thing because it’s complicated.” In reality, it isn’t complicated at all, and the Latin term isn’t why the voters are unenthusiastic about impeachment. They know what the Democrats are up to and they don’t trust them…”

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Britain’s ‘first gay dads’ split after one starts dating daughter’s ex

This is the twenty first century

Obama Granted Clemency to Terrorists and Traitors, But We’re Supposed to be Angry at Trump’s Pardons

Khamenei blames counter-revolution, enemies for ‘sabotage’ in Iran gasoline price protests.

PG&E may shut off power Wednesday to 180,000 homes, businesses

Worth watching. He is great. Text of the speech here

Kurt Schlichter:

“…Well, not no one. People in Washington care. After all, Donald Trump’s real crime is not deferring to the same D.C. geniuses who were so relentlessly awful that they caused us to elect Donald Trump in the first place. The meme is going around that “I hired Donald Trump to fire people like you,” and boy – is it ever on point. That the president – yeah, he’s our president and he’s going to keep being our president for five more long years – refuses to submit to the bureaucrats of the ruling caste on foreign policy is not a bug. It’s a feature – the feature that closed the sale.

See, our ruling class is utter garbage, as the televised circus on the Potomac proved. But no one goes to circuses anymore…”

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Rasmussen Reports:

“…Fifty-three percent (53%) of Likely U.S. Voters think most reporters are trying to help impeach President Trump when they write or talk about the impeachment effort. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that just 32% believe most reporters are simply interested in reporting the news in an unbiased manner. Eight percent (8%) say most are trying to block Trump’s impeachment…

…Voters are mad at Trump and his political opponents, but they’re angriest at the media these days.

Distrust of political news reporting remains at a record high, with just over half of voters now convinced that most in the media are out to get Trump. By contrast, 48% thought most reporters were trying to help Obama pass his agenda…”

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