Doug Santo

Paul Mirengoff:

“…Did you know that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s former president, is on Twitter? It’s true.

On his Twitter account, Ahmadinejad describes himself as “Husband, Dad, Grandfather, University Professor, President, Mayor, Proud Iranian.” A better description would be “Jew hater, Holocaust denier, homophobe, serial human rights violator, and Death to America advocate.”

There’s a place on Twitter for a guy like that, but not for the Gay Patriot.

Is Ahmadinejad softening on America, though? This weekend, the following tweet appeared on his feed:

Watched highlights of the @UMichFootball and @MSU_Football great effort by both teams; as always a hard work ethic pays off.

‏But Ahmadinejad also tweeted favorably about the Black Panthers, a gang of thug revolutionaries from yesteryear. The “professor” wrote:

One of the main objectives of the #BlackPantherParty was feeding the hungry; which did not sit well with the #UnitedStatesGovernment.

Our government had nothing against feeding the hungry. What didn’t sit well was the Panthers’ murderous criminality and desire to overthrow the U.S. government through armed insurrection. No wonder Ahmadinejad has reached into the dustbin of history and praised the Black Panthers on Twitter (though an outfit like the Panthers would be quickly and violently suppressed in Ahmadinejad’s Iran).

“Death to America” still seems to be Ahmadinejad’s desire. But maybe he would exempt Michigan, or at least the Spartans and the Wolverines…”

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/10/twitter-yes-to-ahmadinejad-no-to-the-gay-patriot.php

“Can a bureaucracy bankrupt a business for its unpopular beliefs?”

Julie Kelly:

“…Just as Democrats try to woo suburban moms ahead of next month’s election, along comes Rep. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) to remind us how much the Left hates us.

Sinema is running against her Republican House colleague, Rep. Martha McSally, for the open seat vacated by retiring Arizona Senator Jeff Flake. The 42-year-old unmarried bisexual atheist lawyer with a Ph.D. in Justice Studies has some interesting views on life, as you might imagine.

She once wrote that capitalism poses a danger to Americans; she was an anti-war activist in the early 2000s—one of her protest groups distributed flyers portraying U.S. soldiers as skeletons with automatic rifles; she summoned witches to one anti-war stunt; and she mocks her own (adopted) home state as a “meth lab of democracy” whose residents are “crazy.”

Not exactly a winning campaign message when you’re running in Arizona.

But it’s her 2006 profane comments ridiculing stay-at-home moms that now pose a major problem for her party, and could very well cost her the election. Then-state representative Sinema questioned the feminist cred of women who don’t work outside the home and instead chose to care for their families. “These women who act like staying at home, leeching off their husbands or boyfriends, and just cashing the checks is some sort of feminism because they’re choosing to live that life,” Sinema said during an interview with a Scottsdale magazine. “That’s bullshit. I mean, what the f— are we really talking about here?…”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/22/kyrsten-sinema-reminds-us-that-democrats-hate-housewives

This is a clear message to China

“…The U.S. sailed two guided-missile warships through the Strait of Taiwan Monday, in what Taipei’s ministry of defense described as a routine passage through international waters.

Officials in Beijing have yet to comment on passage of the American destroyer and cruiser, but in the past the Chinese government has taken a hard line against Navy vessels transiting the waterway separating mainland China from Taiwan.

China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has vowed to conquer it by force, if necessary…”

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/10/22/two-navy-warships-transit-taiwan-strait/

“…President Trump has repeatedly called out Google, Facebook and Twitter for liberal bias. Two weeks until the midterms, it would appear he may have had a point.

Employees of the tech giants have given a total of $2.4 million to House and Senate candidates, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Of that, only $176,000 – just eight percent – went to Republicans.

By comparison, in the last midterms in 2014, Google, Facebook and Twitter workers gave a total of $838,000 to congressional candidates, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Of that, $679,000 went to Democrats and $259,000 went to Republicans.

In July, President Trump accused Twitter of “shadow banning” prominent Republicans. “Not good,” he tweeted. He also accused Google in a series of tweets in August of playing up negative articles about him in search results…”

https://www.foxnews.com/tech/google-facebook-and-twitter-staffs-splurge-on-democrats-ahead-of-midterms

He’s the average American in exaggerated form—blunt, simple, willing to fight, mistrustful of intellectuals

David Gelernter:

“…Every big U.S. election is interesting, but the coming midterms are fascinating for a reason most commentators forget to mention: The Democrats have no issues. The economy is booming and America’s international position is strong. In foreign affairs, the U.S. has remembered in the nick of time what Machiavelli advised princes five centuries ago: Don’t seek to be loved, seek to be feared.

The contrast with the Obama years must be painful for any honest leftist. For future generations, the Kavanaugh fight will stand as a marker of the Democratic Party’s intellectual bankruptcy, the flashing red light on the dashboard that says “Empty.” The left is beaten.

This has happened before, in the 1980s and ’90s and early 2000s, but then the financial crisis arrived to save liberalism from certain destruction. Today leftists pray that Robert Mueller will put on his Superman outfit and save them again.

For now, though, the left’s only issue is “We hate Trump.” This is an instructive hatred, because what the left hates about Donald Trump is precisely what it hates about America. The implications are important, and painful…”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-reason-they-hate-trump-1540148467?mod=hp_opin_pos1&fbclid=IwAR3p2dY69CNP1LE7mhLlB78dsSAopIbmXix-2rzhE6m3mKXNViMHY_ziQSc

Angelo Codevilla:

“…Partisan “dirty tricks” are unremarkable. But when networks within government and those who occupy society’s commanding heights play them against persons trying to unseat them, they constitute cold civil war against the voters, even coups d’etat. What can possibly answer such acts? And then what?

These people, including longstanding officials of the FBI and CIA, are related to one another intellectually, morally, professionally, socially, financially, politically, maritally, and extramaritally. Their activities to stop the anti-establishment candidate, and president—in this case, Trump—have spanned the public and private realms, and involved contacts in Britain and Australia. They enjoy The Washington Post’s, The New York Times’, the Associated Press’s, CBS’, NBC’s, ABC’s, and CNN’s unquestioning megaphone effect to the rest of the media.

The Democratic Party’ opposition “research,” for which the wife of a senior FBI official was partly responsible, was cross-validated by the FBI and became the substance of a counterintelligence warrant for surveilling the Trump campaign. After Trump’s victory, the intelligence agencies’ agencies’ summits continued their political and socially partisan alliance as “resistance” against the elected President. Even before inauguration, the Times and the Post published what the highest intelligence officials said were the agencies’ conclusion (no evidence, just conclusions) based on highly classified information, that Trump had “colluded” with Russia to steal the election.

When the surveillance and the investigation turned up nothing, intelligence and Justice Department officials played peek-a-boo with snatches of classified information behind transparently bogus claims of national security, and tried to catch him in perjury traps and other “procedural violations.” With the Media’s help, they created headlines and hampered Trump from governing. Two years later, the agencies continue to fight Congress’s demand that the classified bases for the allegations be made public. . . . What matters a lot is that our ruling class does not deal and will never again deal with their opponents as fellow citizens. Theirs was a quintessentially revolutionary act, after which there is no stepping back…”

https://americanmind.org/essays/our-revolutions-logic

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An “academics only” approach to skill development has failed; it’s time to consider apprenticeship programs as well.

“…The 2016 election heightened the nation’s awareness of the economic woes of many American workers, especially blue-collar workers lacking a college degree. Wage stagnation, while worsened by the slow recovery from the Great Recession, is not a new trend. Men’s long-term earnings have stagnated with each passing cohort from those entering the workforce in 1967 to those entering in 1983. (Women’s earnings increased 59 percent over the period, but from a low base.) Another concern about declining opportunities in America is the erosion of middle-class jobs due to some still debated combination of outsourcing and automation.

Commentators and political factions blame these labor market problems on everything from bad trade deals, to declines in manufacturing jobs, to corporate greed, to outsourcing, to an uncompetitive tax and regulatory environment, to lax immigration policy. But there is another contributing factor that receives less attention: the weaknesses of secondary, postsecondary, and job-training systems in preparing students for well-paid jobs and rewarding careers.

U.S. researchers too often equate “skills” with years of schooling, completion of degrees, or scores on tests of math and verbal capabilities. In their well-known book, The Race Between Education and Technology, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz argue that increases in educational attainment have been too slow to yield healthy economic growth and reduce wage inequality. This view of skills is one driver of the expansion of higher education spending over recent decades. In 2014, the United States spent $27,900 per full-time equivalent student in postsecondary education, 81 percent more than the OECD average of $16,400…”

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/10/17/the-virtue-of-aprenticeship/

I think the disgrace that was the Kavanaugh hearings made many people take notice.

“…Nearly two thirds of registered voters showed a high level of interest in the election—the highest ever recorded in a midterm election since the Journal/NBC poll began asking the question in 2006.

“It’s a barnburner,” Bill McInturff, a GOP pollster who conducted the survey with Democrat Fred Yang, said of the surge of voter interest. “There’s a switch that’s been flipped…They are engaging in the campaign and the process.”…”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/interest-in-midterms-surges-boosting-trump-approval-rating-

1540126920

I have few policy agreements with Glenn Greenwald, but he is a man of character and integrity. We have much more in common than we have differences. This is true for most Americans.

Make no mistake the recent military events with Switzerland, talk of the end of Swiss neutrality and joining NATO, joint operations like that in the image below with Norway, all these things are an aggressive message to Russia that despite Russian belligerence, The US is a powerful and committed foe that occupies your western frontier and has many small nation-state allies in the region. 

Are Colleges Turning Out Our Most Self-Absorbed and Fragile Generation?

Answer:  Yes

“…Senator Warren is the main offender of the moment, a significantly-whiter-than-the-average-white-woman white woman who has for years been masquerading as a Native American, telling transparent bumfodder stories about how her parents had to elope because her mother was part Cherokee and part Delaware, an obvious attempt to claim some of that victimhood juice secondhand. She allowed herself to be advertised as a woman of color by Harvard, happy in the coincidence that “her major professional advances — to the University of Pennsylvania and then to Harvard — came after she began formally identifying as Native American, a distant descendant of Cherokee and Delaware tribes,” as the Boston Globe put it.

(She is a woman of color: Pantone 11-0602.)

Warren, previously a mostly obscure academic and an author of dopey self-help books — The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan — needed a little extra kick to stand out from the crowd of sanctimonious white ladies who rest like a dollop of low-fat sour cream atop the nation’s educational institutions. And so she went all in on her fictitious Indian ancestry: You’ll remember the recipe for “Pow-Wow Chow” and other “Indian” dishes plagiarized from the New York Times…”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/the-blackface-party/?fbclid=IwAR0glPGHdYr9F0ZrO6ljoWzWgV

Looks like trouble for republicans in governor races. Click over and read the whole thing.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/

governers-races-campaigns-state-by-state-analysis/