Category Archives: Politics – international

And No Hillary!

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From New Chum on a previous post: Big List of 170 Trump accomplishments in 340 days with the sub-head: “Most comprehensive compilation of 1st-year achievements”. There are 170 but will list only the first and last. You can read the rest yourself to become the most popular person at your New Year’s party tonight.

170. EPA reform: More than 700 people have left the Environmental Protection Agency since Trump took office, nearly a quarter of the way toward its goal of shrinking the agency to Reagan-administration levels. . . .

1. Technology: After his election, Trump met with top tech leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. According to Gates, it was “a good conversation about innovation, how it can help in health, education, the impact of foreign aid and energy, and a wide-ranging conversation about power of innovation.”

And while we’re at it, my best wishes to you all for the coming year.

Making Iran Great Again

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That’s from Drudge. This is from Instapundit.

CNN’S IRAN CORRESPONDENT: World Thinks That America Doesn’t Have A ‘Moral Leg To Stand On’ [VIDEO].

And as Ace notes, “This Is CNN: Oh, they did cover the Iran rallies. The pro-government Iran rallies, I mean.”

Meanwhile, as Stephen Miller writes at Fox News, “The New York Times simply described the protests as economic grievances, the same way Iranian state-run television described them,” adding:

How will the Obama Presidential Library wing look celebrating a nuclear deal with an oppressive Iranian regime that could possibly be deposed by security forces and the military joining with protesters, thirsty for democracy and a return to an Iran before the 1979 revolution?

More to the point, how will it look if the Trump administration, of all things, facilitates and encourages such change in Iran?

The prospect of this is not lost on the self-styled resistance and anti-Trump media, all too anxious to witness the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the Obama Library or hand a Nobel Prize to former Secretary of State John Kerry.

Overseeing the fall of an oppressive, hardline Iranian regime that sponsors terror all around the globe – followed by the rise of a democratic Iran not interested in aggression against its neighbors – would be a foreign policy victory for President Trump, one of the biggest for a president since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Take a bow, Valerie Jarrett and Ben Rhodes: In order to buy an extra 15 minutes for the charade of Obama’s Iran deal, you’ve reduced the DNC-MSM to shilling for the Iranian mullahs. I’ve heard vague reports they’re not entirely woke when it comes to LGBT issues and intersectional feminism, but I’m sure that’s all just rumors and hearsay.

What a difference a president makes!

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Compare and contrast the response of the American president to protests in Iran, with PDT’s response first.

US President Donald Trump has warned Iran that the “world is watching” after two days of protests against the country’s religious rulers.

Hundreds of people took to the streets in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city and one of the holiest places in Shia Islam, on Thursday.

The protests spread to Tehran and other cities on Friday, with police using water cannons in some cases to disperse the crowds.

Initially aimed against high prices, the anti-government protests quickly turned against the Islamic regime as a whole.

Police arrested 52 people. On Saturday, tens of thousands of government supporters marched in cities across Iran in a show of strength for the regime.

Many of the marchers carried banners in support of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

Many reports of peaceful protests by Iranian citizens fed up with regime’s corruption & its squandering of the nation’s wealth to fund terrorism abroad. Iranian govt should respect their people’s rights, including right to express themselves. The world is watching! 

Mr Trump tweeted in support of the anti-government protests.

“Many reports of peaceful protests by Iranian citizens fed up with regime’s corruption and its squandering of the nation’s wealth to fund terrorism abroad,” he wrote.

“Iranian govt should respect their people’s rights, including right to express themselves. The world is watching!”

And the US State Department condemned the arrest of peaceful protesters and urged “all nations to publicly support the Iranian people and their demands for basic rights and an end to corruption”.

Mr Trump has refused to re-certify a 2015 deal between Tehran and world powers that curbed Iran’s disputed nuclear programme in return for a lifting of most international sanctions.

The deal was one of the biggest achievements by President Hassan Rouhani, but has yet to bring the broad economic benefits.

State television said pro-government rallies were scheduled to be held in more than 1,200 cities and towns on Saturday.

This was Obama’s: Obama Stands Firm on Restrained Response to Iran Protests.

Obama said nothing about the crisis in public on Sunday, although a spokesman said he discussed Iran with foreign policy advisers in the Oval Office for more than 30 minutes. He later went golfing in Virginia. On Monday, the president had two public events, but was not expected to comment on Iran during at least one of them.

Restrained as in do absolutely nothing in any way to assist those who are trying to free themselves from an Islamist theocracy.

AND THIS FROM POWERLINE:

Senator Tom Cotton urged support for the protesters:

Referring to the “billions in sanctions relief the Islamic republic secured through the nuclear deal”, Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton wrote on his Twitter account, the ayatollahs still can’t provide for the basic needs of their own people-perhaps because they’ve funneled so much of that money into their campaign of regional aggression in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen”.

Senator Cotton has also insisted, “The protests in Mashhad show that a regime driven by such a hateful ideology cannot maintain broad popular support forever, and we should support the Iranian people who are willing to risk their lives to speak out against it.”

We certainly should, and the Trump administration has. Via InstaPundit, this is the strong statement released by the State Department’s spokeswoman:

We remember 2009, when Barack Obama, hell-bent on a fanciful alliance with the mullahs, shamefully betrayed the Iranians who rose up, expecting to be supported by us. The Trump administration’s response is of course a welcome contrast. But one wonders: why are Iranians rebelling now? Certainly they have economic grievances, but are these really new? What has happened, recently, to explain the current uprising?

I wonder whether the Iranian rebellion has been incited, at least in part, by a conviction that there finally is an administration in Washington prepared to support them, at least morally and perhaps materially. Why would Iranians think that? No doubt they have paid close attention to President Trump’s willingness to stand up to their oppressors. And perhaps Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital sent a signal that there has been a changing of the guard in Washington.

This is pure speculation, but maybe the fact that we now have a president who is pro-United States and pro-freedom, instead of anti-United States and pro-mullahs/Muslim Brotherhood, etc., has inspired Iranians to march for liberation. It will be interesting to see how events play out in the days to come.

Maybe weather really is climate after all

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Now updated with the above video from 1977.

I fear we are looking at a breath of sanity in the midst of madness, but enjoy it while you can.

Trump mocks global warming in tweet

President Trump mocked the idea of global warming in a tweet Thursday, making one of his first (if not the first) such public comments on the topic since entering the White House almost a year ago.

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In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!

4:01 PM – 28 Dec 2017

Why it matters: Trump has tweeted in the past that he thinks global warming is a hoax, but that was in 2012 and he has not focused on the topic much at all in his Twitter activity as president. This tweet shows he’s still openly mocking mainstream climate change science, even without directly questioning it.

Fast facts: Most scientists agree human activity, primarily through the burning of fossil fuels, has been the primary contributor to Earth’s aggregate temperature going up this past century. That does not mean, though, that freezing cold weather, like the East Coast is experiencing right now, won’t happen in the future in many parts of the world. Climate change science is much more complicated than that, but citing cold weather is still a favorite line of politicians and others who doubt climate change is happening. Sen. James Inhofe, Republican from Oklahoma, threw a snowball on the Senate floor in February 2015 to mock global warming.

One level deeper: Trump’s tweet was also mocking the Paris climate deal, a global accord virtually every country in the world except the United States supports. It calls on countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but as it stands the commitments wouldn’t cut emissions to the levels most scientists say is needed. America’s commitment under President Obama was actually relatively moderate — up to 28% cut in such emissions by 2025 based on 2005 levels, but the Trump administration pointed to conservative groups’ studies showing it could cripple the U.S. industrial economy while other countries, notably China, were called on to do less.

Between the lines: The Trump administration released without political influence a statutorily required reportearlier this year confirming in great depth that human activity is driving climate change. Trump’s tweets get a lot of attention, but make sure to also watch what the administration does or doesn’t do on this issue.

The bottom line: Words matter, and so do the president’s tweets. His perspective on this issue is influencing his most ardent followers, a new poll suggests. A survey released in October from George Mason University found that just 21% of conservative Republicans think global warming is mostly human-caused, a decrease of nine points since earlier this year.

One more thing: The semantics around climate change, or global warming, are almost as divisive as the science itself. Global warming was the default term up until the last decade or so, when climate change became more popular among those urging action to cut greenhouse gas emissions. That shift was partly to respond to comments like Trump made Thursday by clarifying that a higher global aggregate temperature does not mean the entire planet would be getting universally warmer.

And for interest, you can follow the entire twitter conversation here. It’s an astonishing thread.

中国领导层不会如此轻易放弃与以色列的关系

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We visited the Jewish district of Shanghai when we were in China last year. My most indelible memory was of the refugee who arrived penniless, had to sell his shoes to earn enough to eat and then sat at home until spring when he could go out to work so that he could buy a new pair of shoes. But he lived to tell the tale, unlike millions of others. A tour of the Shanghai Old Jewish Quarter is worth a visit although almost certainly of most interest to Jewish people:

Old Jewish Quarter in Shanghai is often called the Noah’s Ark of Orient since it had once been the refuge for the Jewish. 30,000 Jews had fled during the Second World War and had come to Shanghai. The locals helped the displaced people and they soon create a distinct community of their own with sports leagues, cemeteries, synagogues, stores, cafes, bakeries and theaters. Some of these older Jewish sites are kept in good condition even today.

As for the picture above, it comes from this: Trump’s Recognition of Jerusalem: The View from Beijing. Here’s the wash up:

Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital will have little impact on Israeli-Chinese relations. The official Chinese view is that Israel is not, after all, at fault for what happened – Trump is. In addition, the Chinese president, who stated during the last conference of the ruling party as well as on other occasions that China must focus on development and modernization, sees Israel as a primary source of innovation that could aid his country. The large Chinese investments in the Israeli high-tech industry indicate that Xi and the rest of the Chinese leadership will not abandon their relations with Israel so easily.

The bit in black is translated above, I hope accurately, by Google Translator.

An answer to the nihilist lunatics in our midst

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People will always disagree over politics since we all have different values and different personal policy agendas. But those who are #NeverTrump and #AntiTrump have no values or agenda items worth even mention. They are nihilist lunatics none of whom has ever been able to make a case for why shouldn’t someone think Donald Trump become President. You don’t have to like everything he does to see that his election as President represents a coherent set of principles that can be supported by reasonable people, whether on foreign, domestic or economic policy. Not that any of them will listen to anyone else with an open mind, but there has always been a pro-Trump case which is getting more obvious by the day. This is Conrad Black on Trump’s Whirlwind Year which should be read from end to end. Here’s a bit just for fun.

This last year, after the year of his nomination and election, has been the second round of Donald Trump’s war to crush and expel the American political establishment. This year he has won over the congressional Republican party, which had almost entirely opposed him, to toil in the enactment of his program. Together they have achieved the greatest tax reform and reduction in over 30 years, largely emasculated Obamacare, put a rod on the backs of those states that elect incompetents like Jerry Brown and the Cuomos and lay the resulting state income taxes off on the whole country, repatriated trillions of dollars of corporate profit, exonerated over half the people from personal income taxes, reduced the return of 80 percent of taxpayers to a postcard, and produced conditions for 4 percent GDP growth next year. The Obama apologetics that a flatlined economy with a shrunken work force and a burgeoning multitude of Medicaid-sedated idleness was the new normal has been debunked; it is the abnormal recent past.

Scandal fatigue

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There are so many scandals associated with the Democrats and Barack Obama it is wearying to try to keep up. This is yet another, taken from Instapundit.

THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: A deafening media silence on the Obama-Hezbollah scandal.

Politico published a jaw-dropping, meticulously sourced investigative piece this week detailing how the Obama administration had secretly undermined US law-enforcement agency efforts to shut down an international drug-trafficking ring run by the terror group Hezbollah. The effort was part of a wider push by the administration to placate Iran and ensure the signing of the nuclear deal.

Now swap out “Trump” for “Obama” and “Russia” for “Iran” and imagine the eruption these revelations would generate. Because, by any conceivable journalistic standard, this scandal should’ve triggered widespread coverage and been plastered on front pages across the country. By any historic standard, the scandal should elicit outrage regarding the corrosion of governing norms from pundits and editorial boards.

Yet, as it turns out, there’s an exceptionally good chance most of your neighbors and colleagues haven’t heard anything about it.

Days after the news broke, in fact, neither NBC News, ABC News nor CBS News — whose shows can boast a collective 20 million viewers — had been able to find the time to relay the story to its sizeable audiences. Other than Fox News, cable news largely ignored the revelations, as well.

Most major newspapers, which have been sanctimoniously patting themselves on the back for the past year, couldn’t shoehorn into their pages a story about potential collusion between the former president and a terror-supporting state.

Democracy dies in darkness.

It is almost as wearying to deal with all the leftists one knows and discusses politics with who have never heard of any of the stories we are all perfectly aware of. This is not that they discount them, but that they have never heard of almost any of them at all.

Help solve a mystery

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As anyone who has read my views over the years would know, Malcolm has never been my cup of tea, but when it came to the election last year, I was all in for the Libs. After the by-election yesterday, he will now lead the Libs into the next election and I am good with that. Surround even a very faulty Prime Minister with the right sort of party and things can work out. In politics, you pick the side you prefer and hope for the best. Perfection in everything is not to be expected. You are lucky to get a 51-49 for most of what is up for grabs, and often enough you are choosing 40-60 in preference to 30-70.

But this time I am coming back to a question I raised yesterday in an oblique sort of way. This is what I ask for an answer to. I know there are #NeverTrumpers and #AntiTrumpers out there but what exactly could they have expected to have occurred instead had Hillary or someone else been elected? To me it remains a mystery. What were they looking for and why is Donald Trump not at least about as good as one could have hoped for in an American president at the present time, with the political and media ebbs and flows being what they are?

ONE OF THE ANSWER FROM THE COMMENTS: This was from Peter which is how I look at things but not how everyone does.

“What were they looking for……….”

To be honest I am sure they do not know themselves. The Left has become seriously detached from reality. Reality is not a part of their design or to out it another way reality is not a part of their personal reality. They are into symbolism, rhetoric, political correctness, ideology and narratives. They wanted Hillary to be President for much the same reason they wanted Obama. He was a black man and that was enough. Therefore he could do no wrong even though clearly he was one of the worst Presidents ever and she is a woman and a symbol and therefore could do no wrong even if she turned out (as I am sure she would) to have been the most corrupt President ever.

Trump on the other hand was old, male and white. That is all they needed to know about him and was enough to condemn him in this time of insanity and hatred of western civilization. One small example. Hillary and Obama set the middle east on fire. Then they fiddled while it burned. Trump came to power, and in his first year in office was responsible for wiping out ISIS. The Left must hate that as nothing better personifies the failure of their ideologies and the hopelessness of Obama and Clinton.

My sentiments almost to the “t”. Truth to tell as far as I can work it out, for the left it’s tribal and all anti-this and anti-that. What they are for, other than fantasy, I am unable to tell. I cannot talk policy with such people since they never tell me the route to what they wish to achieve even when the can find the words to tell me what outcomes they seek. They just want things that are completely contrary to human nature as it has always been and ever will be.

It’s a new economic world coming

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From Drudge:

 

You don’t get all that much credit for an economic upturn since life is never perfect even if everyone has a job, specially if everyone has to work to earn a living. But it will create wealth since the tax cuts are also coming with spending restraint (of a kind) and the removal of regulations at a rate of 22 gone for every new one introduced.

I know there are #NeverTrumpers out there but what exactly they could have expected to have occurred instead that was better remains a mystery. And speaking of which, here is a rhetorical question that needs no answer: Why Does the Media Not Report That ISIS Was Defeated in Iraq and Its Capital City of Raqqa in Syria Has Been Captured by US-Allied Troops? As he says, I would imagine for much the same reason the media is silent on the economy.