Month: February 2019

Dan Shapiro, who served as President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Israel from 2011 to 2017, called on fellow Democrats to denounce the anti-Israel and antisemitic views of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) on Monday morning.

In a series of tweets, Shapiro revealed that there had been an ongoing effort by other Democrats to reach out to Omar in the hope that she would broaden her “extreme view” of Israel. These efforts, he said, had failed.

1. @IlhanMN‘s outrageous comments equating politicians’ support for Israel with being bought off by American Jewish money are a vile anti-Semitic trope. They need to be condemned by all in our party.

— Dan Shapiro (@DanielBShapiro) February 11, 2019

2. Some of us remained uncomfortably quiet after her BDS flip-flop &other offensive remarks because we were aware of efforts to work with her: by colleagues, party leaders, her local Jewish community in MN. She indicated to them she had other policy priorities, not Is/Pal issues.

— Dan Shapiro (@DanielBShapiro) February 11, 2019

3. But these efforts have failed. Her support for BDS is apparently her essence: blaming Israel alone for the conflict, absolving Palestinians of all responsibility, delegitimizing Israel’s very existence, &accusing its supporters of shallow motives &manipulation by Jewish money.

— Dan Shapiro (@DanielBShapiro) February 11, 2019

4.Her approach indicates she doesn’t want to be a consensus builder or understand others’ views. She wants to push her extreme view, embarrassing her Democratic colleagues who inevitably are asked to respond. She’s made herself a lightning rod. It will isolate her. And it should.

— Dan Shapiro (@DanielBShapiro) February 11, 2019

5. There’s plenty of room to differ w/Israeli policy, settlement expansion, the drift away from two-states, etc. Criticism of Israel’s actions is not, by definition, anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. It should also take account of Israel’s legitimate security concerns & many threats.

— Dan Shapiro (@DanielBShapiro) February 11, 2019

6. Supporting Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations for statehood &sympathy for their current hardships are mainstream &eminently reasonable. Any honest assessment would also take account of their leaders’ responsibility for terror, incitement, &rejecting any legitimacy of Israel.

— Dan Shapiro (@DanielBShapiro) February 11, 2019

7. Omar has many colleagues who’ve modeled how to strike this balance for years: supporting Israel’s security &legitimacy &close US-Isr ties, supporting 2 states for 2 peoples, criticizing each side when warranted, differing with/Trump’s approach that helps entrench the conflict.

— Dan Shapiro (@DanielBShapiro) February 11, 2019

8. Had she come to DC, shown sympathy and empathy for Israelis and Palestinians, learned to assign responsibility in appropriate measure to both sides, considered the totality of US interests in the region, maybe taken a trip to learn, she could have had real influence.

— Dan Shapiro (@DanielBShapiro) February 11, 2019

9. She could have avoided delegitimizing those who disagree with her as being in the thrall of campaign contributions, instead of acting on their own & their constituents’ beliefs. Had she done so, she could have also educated a lot of people to consider views they may not have.

— Dan Shapiro (@DanielBShapiro) February 11, 2019

10. Now, instead, she’ll have much of DC, many in her own party, much of the Jewish community, &plenty of others turning against her. She did that. She chose that. She had little influence on Dem party positions on Israel/Palestine before. Thankfully, now she’ll have even less.

— Dan Shapiro (@DanielBShapiro) February 11, 2019

11. No one is trying to silence her. She can advocate any policy she wants. And if she’ll listen, we should keep the door open. Meanwhile, those who strongly disagree with her views and find them ill-informed, offensive, and even anti-Semitic also have to speak up. We must. End.

— Dan Shapiro (@DanielBShapiro) February 11, 2019

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is facing growing calls to rescind Omar’s appointment to the House Foreign Affairs Committee — a position Omar indicated last month was her first choice of committee assignment.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

For years, Democrats have fallen over themselves to defend Latin American communist dictatorships.  Who can forget Rep. Maxine Waters’s apology to the Castro regime for the U.S. on her pilgrimage to Cuba or Rep. Jim McGovern’s secret collaborations with Colombia’s Marxist FARC terrorists or New York mayor Bill de Blasio’s “help” to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas or Sen. Bernie Sanders’s open praise for Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela?  And don’t forget Joe Kennedy’s Dial Joe-4-Oil, which was a gusher of propaganda praise for Venezuela’s oppressive socialist regime. 

They’ve always gotten away with it.  Until now.

They suddenly are realizing that the Maduro-lovers and Trump-resisters in their ranks, who happen to be some of their biggest “it” girls with the loudest voices — Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, and some others — who have supported Venezuela’s detested Maduro regime in recent weeks, as well as old dinosaurs such as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who was all worried about the U.S. invading Venezuela, and Silent Ted Deutch representing south Florida…are all kissing the purple swing state of Florida goodbye for the Democrats in 2020.

The New York Times reports this development as alarming for Democrats:

Venezuela, not Cuba, now dominates Miami’s political conversation.  A television anchor not long ago ended a somber segment with a promise to keep praying for the troubled South American country.  Venezuelans in the city have gathered for demonstrations to coincide with protests back home.  Even the Miami-Dade County Commission, a local body with no control over foreign policy, voted unanimously to recognize the opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president.

The shift has been coming on gradually for years, but it has accelerated in recent weeks as Venezuela has sunk further into crisis and its leftist president, Nicolás Maduro, has clung defiantly to power.  The showdown in Caracas is reshaping Latino politics in South Florida, home to the highest concentration of Venezuelans in the United States.

The change is not a mere demographic curiosity.  In Florida, where major elections have repeatedly been decided by tiny margins, an inflection point around Venezuela’s leadership could help define a generation of Venezuelan-American voters, who number in the tens of thousands in this state.  President Trump is pushing Mr. Maduro to step aside, and if he succeeds, Democrats fear it could transform Venezuelan-Americans into loyal Republicans, much like Cuban-Americans.

It’s an amazing own-goal of political stupidity.  They saw Venezuela as a chit with which to beat Trump and loudly touted socialism (Venezuelans already know how that works) and forgot that there are living, breathing Venezuelans and Venezuelan-Americans over in Florida, who have a lot of Latino friends there.  Some of those three million Venezuelans who have fled socialism have, surprise, ended up in Florida.  The consequences of that are going to be big for Democrats.

What politician of any smarts couldn’t see that happening?  In Omar’s case, I think Russian sponsorship is worth looking at, but the others just don’t seem to think about these strategic things at all.  To ditzes such as Ocasio-Cortez and Gabbard, Venezuela is a cartoon drawing on a map involving only Venezuelans, who, to them, are foreigners far, far away, instead of a place very much present throughout south Florida and all Florida, actually, and with a strong enough presence to swing the vote.  The Times mentioned that the other Latinos in Florida tend to support them — Colombians, Nicaraguans, Bolivians, Puerto Ricans, Argentines, and of course Cubans.  These people are a critical mass in Florida, and they know the deal in Caracas.

President Trump could see that and made a smart alliance with GOP senator Marco Rubio, a former GOP rival, and the pair of them worked as a tag team with Venezuelan-Americans, likely advising them on how to play the Maduro card to get rid of Maduro.  Maduro is on his way out due to that master squeeze from the U.S., with Venezuelans cheering (over in Caracas, they are actually cheering Trump) along with almost all of Latin America and Europe.  Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, and Gabbard are going to be left with their Maduro endorsements and no Maduro to speak of in coming weeks.  More important, they lose their fellow Democrats the huge swing state of Florida.  What a shiner.

Image credit: Zakipedia via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

For years, Democrats have fallen over themselves to defend Latin American communist dictatorships.  Who can forget Rep. Maxine Waters’s apology to the Castro regime for the U.S. on her pilgrimage to Cuba or Rep. Jim McGovern’s secret collaborations with Colombia’s Marxist FARC terrorists or New York mayor Bill de Blasio’s “help” to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas or Sen. Bernie Sanders’s open praise for Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela?  And don’t forget Joe Kennedy’s Dial Joe-4-Oil, which was a gusher of propaganda praise for Venezuela’s oppressive socialist regime. 

They’ve always gotten away with it.  Until now.

They suddenly are realizing that the Maduro-lovers and Trump-resisters in their ranks, who happen to be some of their biggest “it” girls with the loudest voices — Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, and some others — who have supported Venezuela’s detested Maduro regime in recent weeks, as well as old dinosaurs such as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who was all worried about the U.S. invading Venezuela, and Silent Ted Deutch representing south Florida…are all kissing the purple swing state of Florida goodbye for the Democrats in 2020.

The New York Times reports this development as alarming for Democrats:

Venezuela, not Cuba, now dominates Miami’s political conversation.  A television anchor not long ago ended a somber segment with a promise to keep praying for the troubled South American country.  Venezuelans in the city have gathered for demonstrations to coincide with protests back home.  Even the Miami-Dade County Commission, a local body with no control over foreign policy, voted unanimously to recognize the opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s interim president.

The shift has been coming on gradually for years, but it has accelerated in recent weeks as Venezuela has sunk further into crisis and its leftist president, Nicolás Maduro, has clung defiantly to power.  The showdown in Caracas is reshaping Latino politics in South Florida, home to the highest concentration of Venezuelans in the United States.

The change is not a mere demographic curiosity.  In Florida, where major elections have repeatedly been decided by tiny margins, an inflection point around Venezuela’s leadership could help define a generation of Venezuelan-American voters, who number in the tens of thousands in this state.  President Trump is pushing Mr. Maduro to step aside, and if he succeeds, Democrats fear it could transform Venezuelan-Americans into loyal Republicans, much like Cuban-Americans.

It’s an amazing own-goal of political stupidity.  They saw Venezuela as a chit with which to beat Trump and loudly touted socialism (Venezuelans already know how that works) and forgot that there are living, breathing Venezuelans and Venezuelan-Americans over in Florida, who have a lot of Latino friends there.  Some of those three million Venezuelans who have fled socialism have, surprise, ended up in Florida.  The consequences of that are going to be big for Democrats.

What politician of any smarts couldn’t see that happening?  In Omar’s case, I think Russian sponsorship is worth looking at, but the others just don’t seem to think about these strategic things at all.  To ditzes such as Ocasio-Cortez and Gabbard, Venezuela is a cartoon drawing on a map involving only Venezuelans, who, to them, are foreigners far, far away, instead of a place very much present throughout south Florida and all Florida, actually, and with a strong enough presence to swing the vote.  The Times mentioned that the other Latinos in Florida tend to support them — Colombians, Nicaraguans, Bolivians, Puerto Ricans, Argentines, and of course Cubans.  These people are a critical mass in Florida, and they know the deal in Caracas.

President Trump could see that and made a smart alliance with GOP senator Marco Rubio, a former GOP rival, and the pair of them worked as a tag team with Venezuelan-Americans, likely advising them on how to play the Maduro card to get rid of Maduro.  Maduro is on his way out due to that master squeeze from the U.S., with Venezuelans cheering (over in Caracas, they are actually cheering Trump) along with almost all of Latin America and Europe.  Omar, Ocasio-Cortez, and Gabbard are going to be left with their Maduro endorsements and no Maduro to speak of in coming weeks.  More important, they lose their fellow Democrats the huge swing state of Florida.  What a shiner.

Image credit: Zakipedia via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

If there’s any hot topic on the left this electoral cycle, it’s socialism.

Between Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Green New Deal — which is essentially an agglomeration of socialist policies, not all of which have anything to do with “saving the environment” — and independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, another self-described socialist currently ensconced in second place in the 2020 Democrat polls, there’s been plenty of play regarding the idea that socialism is the Next Big Thing.

In fact, it’s gotten to the point where, when President Donald Trump said during the State of the Union that “America will never be a socialist country,” he wasn’t talking about a threat from a reconstituted Soviet Union but a shift toward the socialism in America. And, wonder of wonders, the Democrats called this divisive without actually defining what socialism was.

“It is a society coming together to increase the standard of living of our seniors,” declared Democrat Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, when asked about socialism on CNN after the president’s speec. “And that is pretty much the definition. And the president is attacking it.”

Merkley, it’s worth noting, has been one of the higher-profile co-signers of the Green New Deal. Like many of the new utopians, they believe that they’re moving toward a future in which government would guarantee equality in plenty.

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In an opinion piece for Fox News, author Ying Ma — whose family fled communist China during the 1980s — said her experience leads her to believe is the kind of thinking that leads to equality in misery.

“The Democratic Party’s lurch to socialism led to a presidential rebuke at the State of the Union on Tuesday night,” she wrote in the Saturday piece.

“From Sen. Bernie Sanders’s call for ‘Medicare-for-all,’ to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal of a ‘Green New Deal,’ to Democratic presidential hopefuls’ hankering for stiff tax hikes, prominent members of the Democratic Party seem unwilling to miss any opportunity to advocate for greater government control of the economy.

“Yet as Democrats justify grandiose proposals by decrying income inequality, many of us who immigrated to the United States from socialist countries see great irony,” she continued. “After all, unending income equality is what drove us to leave our native lands in the first place.”

Ma’s family fled China in the 1980s in the aftermath of the disastrous programs of Mao Zedong. She describes growing up in China’s third-largest city, Guangzhou: “Everyone in my city was equal in having no running hot water, no modern toilet facilities, no refrigerator, no washer, no dryer, and no color television.

“Imagine a world without Whole Foods, Safeway and Walmart, or the plethora of products stocked on their shelves,” she wrote. “Imagine no Vitamin Water, no Gatorade, no Starbucks, no Panera Bread, no candy bars and no sea salt potato chips. Now imagine instead being allotted food stamps from the government, indicating how much your family can eat.”

China may have backed off of some of Mao’s more onerous policies, but that didn’t mean the country was any less of a command economy. The government, Ma wrote, still decided where you were to live and work, as well as what you’d buy and for what price.

“After decades of totalitarian rule and grand socialist experiments, China had a meager per capita GDP of less than $200 in 1980. By comparison, America’s was $12,500 that year,” Ma continued.

“Around that time, China decided enough misery was enough. It embarked on historic economic reforms and opened up the country to the world. Liberalization introduced market prices, allowed for the return to household farming from collectivization, created Special Economic Zones in coastal areas that attracted foreign investment and promoted exports, exposed state-owned factory production to profit incentives, and opened up the market to private firms and entities.”

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You’re probably familiar with what happened next. China is nowhere near as free or as prosperous as the West, but the privations of the 1980s are far behind them.

“Over the past 40 years, China became the second largest economy in the world,” Ma wrote. “However, don’t for a minute forget the lesson that still applies: When the state runs the economy and its citizens’ lives, there will be plenty of equality in scarcity, poverty and hopelessness.

“Today, this is a lesson that prominent Democrats seem eager to forget,” she continued. “Less than 30 years after the former Soviet Union collapsed and the United States emerged victorious from the Cold War, Americans increasingly find it necessary to debate the shortcomings and evils of socialism all over again.”

Given her background, it might be no surprise that Ma is a firm Trump supporter. Check her 2016 interview with Megyn Kelly, then of Fox News, where she explains her reasons.

But, with apologies to Sinclair Lewis, the worst elements of socialism can’t happen here, right?

Well, let’s consider the baby steps that the left wants to take.

Sen. Sanders’ “Medicare for all” plan will cost well over $30 trillion, and that’s a very conservative estimate. As for the Green New Deal, the U.K. Guardian noted that “(i)n supporting documents staffer(s) acknowledge the investment required would be ‘massive,’” which is still an understatement.

Ocasio-Cortez herself has been fond of comparing the kind of mobilization necessary for the plan to what the United States experienced in World War II, during which we turned our industrial might into a command economy in order to beat a concerted enemy. In this case, we would assume the same stance based on a profoundly vague environmental/social agenda.

“It was left up to President Trump to declare on Tuesday night: ‘Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence – and not government coercion, domination and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,’” Ma concluded.

“It is crazy that the leader of the free world had to state this. It is crazier still that he will have to deliver an even more robust defense of democratic capitalism in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. Hopefully, the Democrats’ vision of economic equality will not prevail.”

The sad thing is that we don’t particularly realize just how close it really is to succeeding.

Liberals all love the idea of equality in plenty. What they invariably end up getting is a funhouse mirror version of that vision, one where the only equality is shared misery. Just ask Venezuela.

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 Broward County, FL election head Brenda Snipes is back in the news, as a former candidate who ran against Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the 2016 Democratic primary wondered aloud in a tweet why the Department of Justice never prosecuted her for illegally destroying paper ballots from the race.

Tim Canova got only 43% of the vote in that primary, but he challenged the results in court. While the case was being decided, Canova requested that Broward County hand over the thousands of paper ballots that had been cast. When Brenda Snipes’ office refused, he sued – only to find out later that Snipes had destroyed the ballots in direct violation of federal law and Florida state law.

Sun-Sentinel:

“Canova, who was checking for voting irregularities in the race, sought to look at the paper ballots in March 2017 and took Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes to court three months later when her office hadn’t fulfilled his request. Snipes approved the destruction of the ballots in September, signing a certification that said no court cases involving the ballots were pending. Snipes called the action a “mistake” during testimony she gave in the case, saying the boxes were mislabeled and there was “nothing on my part that was intentional” about destroying the contested ballots.”

Big League Politics reported, ”On May 11, 2018, the Florida Circuit Court granted Plaintiff Canova summary judgment, and found that Snipes had violated numerous state and federal statutes, including laws punishable as felonies with up to five years in prison. The Court’s ruling made clear that Snipes’ destruction of ballots was illegal on several separate counts.”

It doesn’t matter if the destruction of the ballots were intentional or not. But both the county and the feds refused to prosecute. Why?

 Assistant United States Attorney for the US Attorney’s Office is none other than Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s brother, Steven. And Canova found out from the local district attorney, who was considering prosecuting Snipes, who was involved in the decision not to prosecute Snipes:

I’ve been told it was Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy AG, along with his assistant Steven Wasserman no doubt, who stopped a Federal investigation into Broward’s illegal destruction of all ballots cast in our 2016 primary against Debbie What’sHerRig Schultz.

.
https://t.co/9WNEd5JL9a

— Tim Canova (@Tim_Canova) February 6, 2019

Familiar partisans in the Justice Department.

Needless to say, the fact that Rosenstein was directly involved with the strongly partisan activities documented by the FISA memo makes it unsurprising that he would interfere on behalf of associates of Hillary Clinton.

Setting the possibility that Wasserman-Schultz’s brother may also have been involved in protecting Snipes from prosecution aside for the moment, Canova’s allegations raise a myriad of new questions, including: who benefits from protecting Snipes?

Undeniably, the most obvious answer is Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the alleged beneficiary of Snipes’s illegal ballot destruction. Similarly, one wonders what connection such a decision may have with the DOJ’s refusal to prosecute the Awan scandal, a move from which Debbie Wasserman-Schultz also directly benefited.

In light of this, we are led to ask: Who benefits from shielding Debbie Wasserman-Schultz from the blowback of multiple national scandals? What would induce the DOJ to prop up such an embarrassment?

Snipes’ malfeasance in the 2018 election can now be seen in an entirely different light. Either she is the most incompetent election official in America or she manipulates elections for partisan reasons using the power of her office.

It doesn’t matter that Canova had no chance of overturning the results of the 2016 primary. Snipes acted illegally and both local and federal authorities turned a blind eye to it. The whole matter stinks of partisan manipulation – which only serves to buttress the case that the permanent bureaucracy at the Justice Department is hopelessly corrupt.

 

 

 Broward County, FL election head Brenda Snipes is back in the news, as a former candidate who ran against Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the 2016 Democratic primary wondered aloud in a tweet why the Department of Justice never prosecuted her for illegally destroying paper ballots from the race.

Tim Canova got only 43% of the vote in that primary, but he challenged the results in court. While the case was being decided, Canova requested that Broward County hand over the thousands of paper ballots that had been cast. When Brenda Snipes’ office refused, he sued – only to find out later that Snipes had destroyed the ballots in direct violation of federal law and Florida state law.

Sun-Sentinel:

“Canova, who was checking for voting irregularities in the race, sought to look at the paper ballots in March 2017 and took Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes to court three months later when her office hadn’t fulfilled his request. Snipes approved the destruction of the ballots in September, signing a certification that said no court cases involving the ballots were pending. Snipes called the action a “mistake” during testimony she gave in the case, saying the boxes were mislabeled and there was “nothing on my part that was intentional” about destroying the contested ballots.”

Big League Politics reported, ”On May 11, 2018, the Florida Circuit Court granted Plaintiff Canova summary judgment, and found that Snipes had violated numerous state and federal statutes, including laws punishable as felonies with up to five years in prison. The Court’s ruling made clear that Snipes’ destruction of ballots was illegal on several separate counts.”

It doesn’t matter if the destruction of the ballots were intentional or not. But both the county and the feds refused to prosecute. Why?

 Assistant United States Attorney for the US Attorney’s Office is none other than Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s brother, Steven. And Canova found out from the local district attorney, who was considering prosecuting Snipes, who was involved in the decision not to prosecute Snipes:

I’ve been told it was Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy AG, along with his assistant Steven Wasserman no doubt, who stopped a Federal investigation into Broward’s illegal destruction of all ballots cast in our 2016 primary against Debbie What’sHerRig Schultz.

.
https://t.co/9WNEd5JL9a

— Tim Canova (@Tim_Canova) February 6, 2019

Familiar partisans in the Justice Department.

Needless to say, the fact that Rosenstein was directly involved with the strongly partisan activities documented by the FISA memo makes it unsurprising that he would interfere on behalf of associates of Hillary Clinton.

Setting the possibility that Wasserman-Schultz’s brother may also have been involved in protecting Snipes from prosecution aside for the moment, Canova’s allegations raise a myriad of new questions, including: who benefits from protecting Snipes?

Undeniably, the most obvious answer is Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the alleged beneficiary of Snipes’s illegal ballot destruction. Similarly, one wonders what connection such a decision may have with the DOJ’s refusal to prosecute the Awan scandal, a move from which Debbie Wasserman-Schultz also directly benefited.

In light of this, we are led to ask: Who benefits from shielding Debbie Wasserman-Schultz from the blowback of multiple national scandals? What would induce the DOJ to prop up such an embarrassment?

Snipes’ malfeasance in the 2018 election can now be seen in an entirely different light. Either she is the most incompetent election official in America or she manipulates elections for partisan reasons using the power of her office.

It doesn’t matter that Canova had no chance of overturning the results of the 2016 primary. Snipes acted illegally and both local and federal authorities turned a blind eye to it. The whole matter stinks of partisan manipulation – which only serves to buttress the case that the permanent bureaucracy at the Justice Department is hopelessly corrupt.