Hong Kong Freedom Demonstrators: The world needs to watch and support the effort of China’s citizens in Hong Kong in support of their pro-democracy movement. This peaceful effort challenges the Communist political system in China, but attempts to respect their historical position of having a special relationship on how to rule Hong Kong. Tiananmen Square demonstrated the brutal and repressive power some in the Communist party were willing to use in order to squash their citizens… lets hope it doesn’t happen again.
Read the pro-democracy demonstrators five demands below.
Stalin & Hitlers Secret Protocol: The deal… ”Hitler invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. Sixteen days later, so did Stalin, allegedly to “protect” the newly occupied “brothers of the same blood.” As revealed only after the war’s end, the dual move had been effectively sanctioned by a Secret Protocol accompanying the pact, which defined the borders of Soviet and German “spheres of interest” in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and parts of Romania.”
The victims of the pact knew better. But four more decades passed until at last, on Aug. 23, 1989, some two million people formed a human chain nearly 400 miles long across the Baltic republics to mark what came to be known as Black Ribbon Day. The Berlin Wall crumbled that Nov. 9. On Dec. 28, 1989, Pravda acknowledged that the Secret Protocol had been signed in 1939, and that it violated “the sovereignty and independence of a number of third-party countries.”
Millions of people were stuck behind the Iron Curtain which enslaved so many for so long. Freedom works! We should never forget.
Weekly News Review Summary:
How Congress May Increase Seniors’ Health Care Costs (by 60 Plus Chairman Jim Martin)
Currently, there’s a piece of legislation working its way through the halls of Congress that has the potential to alter the entire American health care system.
Harry Reid knocks 2020 field on immigration, healthcare
Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says the far-left positions of some Democratic presidential candidates are jeopardizing the party’s chances of beating President Trump in 2020.
In latest gaffe, Biden places King, Kennedy assassinations in ‘the late ’70s’
It was just the latest in a series of slip-ups for the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential frontrunner.
Watch our Weekly New Summary Video Here
-Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
Human Chain Across Hong Kong Expresses Solidarity and Determination, say Protesters
Protesters formed a human chain across Hong Kong Friday evening in a show of solidarity for the city’s pro-democracy protest movement that continues to gain traction almost three months after it began.
The action was planned to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the “Baltic Way,” a historically significant peaceful demonstration against Soviet occupation. On August 23, 1989, an estimated two million people formed a 600 kilometer (372 miles) long human chain across the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Starting from around 8 p.m. local time (8 a.m. ET), thousands of Hong Kong protesters began holding hands, forming chains along three subway lines to form the “Hong Kong Way.”
In a flyer shared over social media, protesters said it is not intended to disrupt traffic or the public but is “an iconic move that reinforces Hong Kong’s solidarity and determination in hope of making our voices heard on the international stage.”
Hong Kong Realism
The People’s Republic of China is having some trouble digesting Hong Kong, which is a good thing for all involved.
It is certainly beneficial to the former British colony, which since 1997 has subsisted nervously under Deng Xiaoping’s old formulation of “one country, two systems.” It’s good for Beijing as well: The Chinese economy has exploded in the past two decades, not by subjugating Hong Kong but by imitating its success. To abrogate the terms of Hong Kong’s reunification with the mainland would not just injure China’s current prosperity but slow down its goal of global competitiveness, if not dominance.
In the long term, however, can there be any doubt what the outcome will be? If Chinese President Xi Jinping were an ordinary politician, he would end Hong Kong’s mass demonstrations and random violence by scuttling the proposed extradition law that has inspired them and sacrifice his unpopular puppet governor, Carrie Lam.
Xi, however, is no ordinary politician but China’s newly certified maximum leader. In the world’s only hybrid communist-fascist state, with a history of periodic provincial uprisings, Xi knows that the slightest concessions to Hong Kong would not go unnoticed elsewhere in his kingdom.
All five demands must be fulfilled’: Thousands of Hong Kong anti-extradition law protesters rally in Sha Tin
Thousands have marched in Sha Tin, urging the Hong Kong government to meet their demands over the now-suspended extradition bill.
They called for a complete withdrawal of the bill, the withdrawal of the “riot” characterization of the June 12 protests, the unconditional release of all arrested protesters, the formation of an independent commission of inquiry into police behavior, as well as universal suffrage.
Every American Should Hope Trump Prevails Against China
The blow-by-blow of the bout between the world’s two economic heavyweights is easy to follow. The world’s stock markets gyrate in response to the trade news of the day; the U.S. dollar falls versus the Chinese yuan, and the president responds. Each new piece of macroeconomic data is interrogated until it mumbles something about tariffs. Even the Federal Reserve has weighed in.
But the economics of the U.S.-China trade dispute will never tell its full story. Sooner or later, the current U.S.-China trade conflict will be resolved, and either the U.S. or China will be seen as the winner, in terms of direct economic consequences.
The trade dispute, though, is now about much more than economics—it’s testing whether a democratically elected government can prevail in the face of the authoritarian government of the world’s most populous country. And everyone who values democracy or human rights should hope that, one way or another, the United States ultimately prevails in that struggle.
How Trump can improve on 2016 victory
As an incumbent, history would suggest President Trump should improve on his 2016 victory — but how he does so is another matter. Perceived divisiveness and low approval ratings appear capable of eliminating Trump’s incumbency advantage, so showing his path to 2020 success is more important than usual. He has two great 2020 opportunities: one with conservatives and one with moderates, thanks to Democrats.
Since 1916, elected incumbents have averaged a 3.4 percent increase in their popular vote margin when seeking a second term. This uptick from initial election to reelection has propelled incumbents to an 11-3 record in second term attempts. So strong is this incumbent advantage that among winners, only President Obama saw his vote percentage fall. Among those who lost reelection, each had an economic contraction within a year of reelection.
However, if ever there was an incumbent apparently poised to undo incumbency’s advantage, it is Trump. Even with a strong economy, his approval ratings have persistently hovered below break-even. Virtually since taking office, his strong opposition has consistently surpassed his strong support.
For these reasons, it is more important to understand how Trump could improve over his 2016 total, than to simply cite past presidential precedents.
There are two great 2020 opportunities for Trump — one Trump has earned and another likely gifted by Democrats.
Three Real Problems Republicans Need to Address to Win in 2020
As we head deeper into the 2020 election cycle, Republican activists and leaders face serious challenges if we are to put conservative solutions into action to strengthen our country at home and freedom abroad.
With media coverage and social media attention driven by the sensational, it’s easy to get sidetracked by “clickbaity” issues and personalities that pull our attention away from the real problems we as a party need to address.
First, here is a list of personalities that for the big picture may be fun to talk about but do not matter: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rep. Ihlan Omar (D-Minn.), Jeffrey Epstein and related conspiracy theories, “The Clintons,” former special counsel Robert Mueller, former FBI Director James Comey, Julian Assange and Roger Stone. Chances are, if you are a Republican activist, candidate or elected official, one or more of these names is lurking somewhere in your Facebook or Twitter news feed right now.
And not one of them matter.
By contrast, here are three that do matter. Spoiler alert: They are more complicated, strategic and impactful, while probably less fun to talk about, than the first list. Here is where Republican brain power and attention needs to be directed — not to spin these problems away, but to solve them.
10 Declassified Russia Collusion Revelations That Could Rock Washington This Fall
Behind the scenes, some major events were set in motion last autumn that could soon change the tenor in Washington, at least as it relates to the debunked Russia collusion narrative that distracted America for nearly three years.
It was in September 2018 that President Trump told my Hill.TV colleague Buck Sexton and me that he would order the release of all classified documents showing what the FBI, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and other U.S. intelligence agencies may have done wrong in the Russia probe.
About the same time, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, under then-Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), voted unanimously to send 53 nonpublic transcripts of witnesses in its Russia review to the director of national intelligence (DNI) for declassification. The transcripts were officially delivered in November.
Now, nearly a year later, neither release has happened.
Donald Trump Cancels Federal Student Debt for Wounded Warriors
President Donald Trump signed a memorandum effectively canceling federal student debt loans for America’s wounded warriors on Wednesday.
“Veterans who have made such enormous sacrifices for our country should not be asked to pay any more, rather it is America who owes our heroes a supreme debt of gratitude,” he said.
The president spoke to the AMVETS Convention in Kentucky on Wednesday, announcing his decision and signing the document.
The Green New Deal: Less About Climate, More About Control
If someone asked you to describe the Green New Deal, what would you say?
According to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., it’s a “bold idea” that would “create millions of good-paying jobs” and help “rebuild communities in rural America that have been devastated.”
Oh, you thought the Green New Deal was all about fighting climate change? Well, think again. Turns out it’s a green-glossed Trojan horse designed to increase government control over the economy.
Just ask Saikat Chakrabarti, chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., the author of the deal. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Chakrabarti said. “We really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
Just how much change would the Green New Deal bring to the economy? Put simply, it would bring it to its knees.
Does ‘Dark Money’ Apply to Only One Side of the Political Equation?
Little question that the epithet “dark money” is a pejorative to describe “hidden” financial support, usually in large quantities, for political causes and/or candidates.
But why is “dark money” almost always applied to conservative or pro-business or Republican entities? How do most outlets in the mainstream news media (MSM) and the political “reform” industry handle evidence of dark money that supports liberal/progressive or Democratic Party causes?
Crickets.
The data showing the prevalence of pro-liberal/Democratic dark money is hiding in plain sight, but reformers and the MSM look the other way rather than report and debate it.
For instance, the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, Common Cause of Michigan, and the League of Women Voters of Michigan have for many years been heavily subsidized by the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation. That’s the Foundation on whose board of directors Barack Obama once served, pre-presidency, back in his community organizing days. Each of these organizations has developed a niche as part of its Joyce-funded political “reform” collaborative.
Let’s focus on the Michigan Campaign Finance Network (MCFN), which researches political money and crusades about the dangers of “dark” money, yet reports very little about the influence of dark money behind Voters Not Politicians (VNP) in the the latter’s 2018 campaign to amend the Michigan Constitution to “reform” Congressional and legislative redistricting.
The End of America’s 30-Year Engagement with China?
Will the demonstrations in Hong Kong come to be seen as the end of a 30-year period, beginning with the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, of the American-Chinese economic engagement and entanglement christened “Chimerica” by historian Niall Ferguson?
Quite possibly, and without regard to what happens in Hong Kong. President Trump’s on-and-off tariff threats to China have shown his willingness to upend U.S.-China economic ties. Unlike his predecessors, he regards imports from China as harmful. In his view, they provide cheap clothes and toys to American consumers, but they also have destroyed more American manufacturing jobs than expected.
In any case, China’s economic growth has been flagging, and its work force has essentially stopped growing. Post-Tiananmen annual growth, unparalleled in history, ranged from 8% to 14% from 1991 to 2013, but has tailed off, probably below the official 6% level.
China’s Strategy Against Trump and America: Trade War, Huawei, 5G—Gen. Robert Spalding
In the US China trade war, what’s behind the Chinese communist party’s (CCP’s) strategy, with Liu He walking away from the trade talks at the last minute? What’s the real relationship between Chinese telecom giant Huawei, and the CCP’s quest for global 5G dominance? And how is this all a much, much bigger issue than just trade?
This is American Thought Leaders and I’m Jan Jekielek.
Today we sit down with General Robert Spalding, who was a Brigadier General in the US Air Force, chief China strategist for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, and a Senior Strategic Planner for the White House, at the National Security Council. Now, he’s a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Policy Roundtable: The Future of Conservative Foreign Policy
The Trump era has triggered an intense, yet useful discussion on the political right and center-right about the proper direction of American foreign policy. Conservatives within the United States — like Americans generally — have oscillated between realist and idealist interpretations of world affairs, just as they have between military intervention and non-intervention, always trying to find the right balance. But American conservatives have also made these choices in their own characteristic ways.
In particular, a recurring tension has long existed between placing emphasis on national versus international priorities. Conservative nationalists have tended to stress U.S. sovereignty,1 while conservative internationalists have tended to stress the need for U.S. strategic engagement overseas.2 These two emphases are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and at times have been compatible. But the 2016 Trump presidential campaign had the effect of highlighting the differences, rather than the commonalities, and, at least at the level of elite opinion, these differences have yet to subside.
There is a wide range of opinion among conservative foreign policy experts over the wisdom of President Donald Trump’s international approach. Nor do these opinions always fall along predictable factional lines. For example, there are GOP foreign policy realists who believe Trump’s international direction to be mostly sound, and GOP foreign policy realists who disagree.3 There are neoconservatives who largely support the president’s approach, and neoconservatives who do not.4 There are anti-interventionists who like the president’s basic direction, and anti-interventionists who don’t.
Moreover, some of these differences go straight to the heart of the matter. Indeed, the entire history of the U.S. conservative intellectual movement, beginning in the 1950s, has in a way been a series of attempted purges, redefinitions, or excommunications of one view or another that were considered as being outside the permissible bounds.6 As it turns out, however, the great majority of conservative GOP voters say they support the Trump administration’s foreign policy approach.7 This raises an interesting question: Can the intellectuals excommunicate the voters? Probably not.
Guns Prevent Thousands of Crimes Every Day, Research Shows
It never fails. A split-second after a mass shooting occurs, grandstanders and ideologues issue statements demanding new gun controls—even if the laws already on the books failed or the laws they want would have made no difference. Case in point: the tragic incidents in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, in early August 2019.
The message is clear: Guns cause violence. Tax them, take them, ban them, regulate them. Do something, maybe anything! Such knee-jerk, emotional responses are dangerous, writes Charles W. Cooke in National Review, “for when a nation sets up a direct pipeline between its emotions and its laws, it does not keep its liberty for long.”
Guns Don’t Kill People, They Save Them
Liberty isn’t the only thing likely to be lost when gun laws are passed to appease emotions over reason, evidence, logic, and rights. Lives will most assuredly be lost, too. Lots of them.
Hitler and Stalin Weren’t Such Strange Bedfellows
Known officially as the Treaty of Non-Aggression Between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Hitler-Stalin pact—signed 80 years ago Friday—stunned the world. Some said that by uniting implacable ideological foes it had turned isms into wasms.
That wasn’t quite right. As German negotiator Karl Schnurre had observed the month before, “despite all the differences in their respective worldviews, there is one common element in the ideologies of Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union: opposition to the capitalist democracies. Neither we nor Italy have anything in common with the capitalist West. Therefore it seems to us rather unnatural that a socialist state would stand on the side of the Western democracies.” Since capitalist democracy was their common enemy, why not pool resources?
Hitler and Stalin had demonized each other over several years, but they also had interlocking interests. Hitler wanted to invade Poland without fear of war on two fronts, so he had to neutralize the Soviets. He also needed access to Russia’s natural resources. Stalin coveted German industrial and weapons technology. To his cadre, he explained that he could destroy Germany later, after Hitler had assisted him in destroying the most “reactionary” imperialist capitalist countries, England and France. Though some balked, most communists world-wide acquiesced. Even the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm later acknowledged he’d had “no reservations” about it at the time.
The Founders Were Flawed. The Nation Is Imperfect. The Constitution Is Still a ‘Glorious Liberty Document.’
As part of its ambitious “1619” inquiry into the legacy of slavery, The New York Times revives false 19th century revisionist history about the American founding.
Across the map of the United States, the borders of Tennessee, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona draw a distinct line. It’s the 36º30′ line, a remnant of the boundary between free and slave states drawn in 1820. It is a scar across the belly of America, and a vivid symbol of the ways in which slavery still touches nearly every facet of American history.
That pervasive legacy is the subject of a series of articles in The New York Times titled “The 1619 Project.” To cover the history of slavery and its modern effects is certainly a worthy goal, and much of the Project achieves that goal effectively. Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s portrait of the Louisiana sugar industry, for instance, vividly covers a region that its victims considered the worst of all of slavery’s forms. Even better is Nikole Hannah-Jones’s celebration of black-led political movements. She is certainly correct that “without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different” and “might not be a democracy at all.”
Where the 1619 articles go wrong is in a persistent and off-key theme: an effort to prove that slavery “is the country’s very origin,” that slavery is the source of “nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,” and that, in Hannah-Jones’s words, the founders “used” “racist ideology” “at the nation’s founding.” In this, the Times steps beyond history and into political polemic—one based on a falsehood and that in an essential way, repudiates the work of countless people of all races, including those Hannah-Jones celebrates, who have believed that what makes America “exceptional” is the proposition that all men are created equal. For one thing, the idea that, in Hannah-Jones’ words, the “white men” who wrote the Declaration of Independence “did not believe” its words applied to black people is simply false. John Adams, James Madison, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and others said at the time that the doctrine of equality rendered slavery anathema. True, Jefferson also wrote the infamous passages suggesting that “the blacks…are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind,” but he thought even that was irrelevant to the question of slavery’s immorality. “Whatever be their degree of talent,” Jefferson wrote, “it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.”
The Perils of Trading Social Interaction for Social Media
I often say that what happens on Twitter isn’t a reflection of American life in the real world.
The facts mostly back that up. Last month, a Pew survey showed only 22% of U.S. adults say they use Twitter. Twitter users skew younger, identified more as Democrats, are more educated, and have more money than the other 78% who don’t use it.
Experiences back that up as well. Halfway through a 16-state backroads trip across the country, I’ve had many people — both conservative and liberal — tell me that if they use Twitter, they don’t use the social media platform in the way we assume they do.
The Amazing Bible Timeline with World History
Unique Circular Format – more in less space. How does all this information fit on a 37″ x 45″ poster – compared to the 15 or 20 feet of a straight timeline? The timeline features a compact circular format and works like a clock. Start with Adam at the top. Christ’s birth divides the circle in half. Time and events march on the timeline up to our current decade. Each pie-shaped piece covers a century.
Study Bible and World History together with this attractive, color-coded wall chart. Perfect for church, an office, a school room or framed on your wall.
Very cool info, I ordered it.
