Hell Must Be Empty

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker 

In New York City, the bad guys have long understood an unwritten rule: you don’t hit a cop.  In the past, doing so put you at the top of the NYPD’s to-do list and ensured that you would not be free on the streets for long.  When 30,000 officers are tasked with securing a metropolis of nine million residents, the impenetrability of the “thin blue line” is a matter of life and death.  When video emerged of a group of illegal aliens wrestling two cops to the ground near Times Square and beating them with fists and feet, that thin blue line got thinner.  When news broke that the offenders were released without bail and that a left-wing “charity” had likely given them a free ride to California, the blue line all but disappeared.  

By looking the other way as criminal invaders attack the people charged with protecting the city, NYC mayor Eric Adams and district attorney Alvin Bragg not only betray their duties to those who risk their lives every day for others’ safety, but also prove their complicity with those who wage war against citizens of the United States.  Before he disappeared without a care in the world, one of the foreign nationals apprehended for the attack left Manhattan Criminal Court with two middle fingers extended into the air and a broad smile across his face.  It was an “F you” to all Americans from a man who should never have been allowed to illegally enter the United States in the first place.  At the same time, it sure felt as if Adams, Bragg, Biden, Mayorkas, and all the other open-borders advocates and politicians were really the ones flipping off desperate American citizens whose decades-long pleas for secure borders have been entirely ignored.  

Ever since Obama’s presidency, Democrats have demonized police officers and lionized criminals.  They lied about “hands up, don’t shoot”; maligned cops as Klan members with badges; and instigated race riots throughout the country.  They excused criminal behavior, cut bail requirements, reduced felonies to misdemeanors, and celebrated unethical prosecutors who have used their powers to lock up police officers for spurious charges while treating violent crime as some kind of race-based civil right.

Barack Obama and Eric Holder (the corrupt attorney general who regularly abused the law to protect friends and target political enemies) set the country down a dangerous path, where criminal gangs are psychologically empowered to target law enforcement officers for assassination and municipal politicians are so desperate to prove their soft-on-crime bona fides that they release violent criminals from jail in order to make room for unjustly indicted cops.  The end result has been that police officers are retiring in droves and refraining from any proactive policing that might put them in the crosshairs of one of George Soros’s cop-hating district attorneys.  Just as the “woke” U.S. military is struggling to recruit warriors willing to take commands from deranged men in skirts who would rather fight “climate change” and “white supremacy,” municipal police forces are struggling to refill their ranks with good cops willing to protect and serve their communities, when two-bit, backstabbing politicians endanger their lives and threaten to send them to prison.

Democrats’ attacks on police officers and coddling of criminals are part and parcel of their larger war against the American people.  In this day and age — when the Marxist destroyers have risen to the heights of institutional and financial power — they barely disguise their hatred for the United States or their contempt for regular Americans.  Every insane policy initiative — such as the choice to provide illegal aliens with thousands of dollars of free stuff each month and a get-out-of-jail-free card for sucker-punching cops — can be understood if seen through the lens of a simple question: does the policy damage American society?  If so, then Democrat politicians, Uniparty co-conspirators in the swamp, and the Marxist globalists who seek money and power from America’s demise are all on board.  It’s why the Department of Homeland (in)Security specializes in aiding and abetting terrorism-linked cartels, human-traffickers, and drug-smugglers in their criminal enterprises across our borders.  It’s why corrupt D.C. politicians send working Americans’ tax dollars to un-American international institutions such as the United Nations that use those dollars to fund the manufactured migration of tens of millions of foreigners from all over the world into the United States.  In effect, the federal government steals from the incomes of struggling Americans so that it can pay for violent criminals (and foreign soldiers and murderous terrorists) to break our laws, victimize American communities, and gang-stomp police officers.  The sick SOBs actually make Americans pay for the foreign invasion from which they suffer.

Forget “two-tiered justice.”  This is just plain old evil disguised as politics.  Only in a nation under attack from demonic forces would J6 political hostages be imprisoned for exercising their First Amendment rights at the U.S. Capitol when a congressional staffer can make gay porn videos in a Senate hearing room without any risk of ever being charged for a crime.  Only in a nation suffering from the widespread proliferation of evil would the Department of (in)Justice seek decades-long prison sentences for peacefully protesting Americans who dare to speak out against abortion, while federal agents routinely look the other way as “unknown assailants” vandalize and firebomb the buildings of Christian churches, pro-life organizations, and politically conservative groups.  Only in a nation whose government chooses to embrace evil and reject godliness could a Christian veteran be charged for the “hate crime” of destroying a demonic shrine celebrating Satan.  When adherence to moral conscience is criminalized and the protection of flagrant sin becomes government’s chief concern, there can be no doubt that evil has risen from the shadows and seized control of the State.  When Christians are punished for their convictions and Satan has more friends in political office, it is clear that America’s institutions are rotting from the inside.

Once that decay begins, it is difficult to save the host without first severing the cancer from the body.  It is why government-engineered injustices now occur with almost daily regularity.  Consider a few of the startling news stories of just the last few weeks.  A group of international scientists is calling for a global moratorium on COVID “vaccines” because a peer-reviewed study concludes, “For every life saved, there were nearly 14 times more deaths caused by the modified mRNA injections.”  Meanwhile, there is now documentary evidence that the CDC intentionally covered up risks from the experimental, yet largely mandated, treatments — particularly the risk of myocarditis.  Switching to the growing evidence of 2020 election fraud, unearthed documents confirm that the FBI and Michigan authorities were notified of “alarming” witness accounts attesting to “ballot fraud in Detroit.”  How was that situation resolved?  The FBI buried its head in the sand, and Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel charged sixteen Republican alternate electors with felony fraud crimes.  Not wanting Michigan’s rampant election-rigging and political persecution to get all the glory, PBS (the Marxist news organization that Americans are forced to support with taxes) confirmed that Congress’s partisan January 6 Committee was never anything more than shameless political theater meant to tilt the 2022 midterms toward the Democrat party.  Finally, in international news, even though the Biden administration has been forced to temper its support for a U.N. agency implicated in the October 7 attack on Israel, nobody is surprised that the U.N.’s terrorists have still been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.  

Lies beget evil, and evil begets more lies.  One thing is certain: Hell must be empty, because all the devils are ruling right here.

X22, On the Fringe, and more- February 6

 

We Better Not See a Single Republican Vote for This Border Security Monstrosity

posted by Matt Vespa at TownhallVIP 

The only good news about the Senate’s border deal is that it’s dead on arrival. House Speaker Mike Johnson delivered the eulogy for the legislation that reads like a comedy act in some parts. This bill is the culmination of three months of work on the Hill, and it was total trash. It does nothing to secure the border, and it’s littered with promises, like finishing the border wall, which won’t kick in until the next administration. With the immigration crisis reaching Chernobyl-like levels of urgency concerning impending disaster, no Republican should vote for this bill, even with them knowing its outcome already. There must be united Republican opposition to this monstrosity, and GOP lawmakers who back it should be targeted for primary challenges. 

Yes, it’s that bad. We don’t have time to play the usual games of gamesmanship regarding rejecting multiple bills, which ends with Congress coming to some equally terrible agreement weeks or months later. The southern border has been in constant chaos since Grandpa Badfinger—to quote Kurt Schlichter—took office. Joe Biden has refused to rise to the occasion (probably because he would fall), take ownership of the immigration crisis and re-sign every Donald Trump-era executive order that kept the border at its most secure in years. 

Biden claims he can’t do anything until Ukraine gets a goodie bag again, which is laughably untrue. The executive has broad powers on border enforcement—it’s a constitutional duty. That also rehashes another reason why Republicans should trash this bill: it’s a foreign aid package disguised as a border security bill. 

At $118 billion, only around $20 billion is for border security, which is nothing. $14 billion goes to Israel, and $60 billion is allocated to Ukraine. Does the bill make it easier to reject asylum cases and deport others? Sure, but for every decent measure, there are five that keep the immigration crisis a constant political irritant. That’s by design. We’ll be fronting the bill for legal representation for all migrants caught at the border who are under 13. All children of H-1B visas will be granted permanent residency—protections from deportation for this group usually expire at 21. It adds 250,000 new immigration visas over five years. It rolls out a version of the Afghan Adjustment Act that places all the refugees we transported out of that terrorist haven on a pathway to citizenship. These people are unvetted. 

Meanwhile, Democratic senators, like gold bar Bob Menendez, likened the bill to a wish list from the Trump administration because there are some border enforcement measures, though all of them ineffective due to the provisions that are meant to form the backbone of the Democrats’ long-term immigration initiative: mass amnesty. 

So, yes, folks on both sides hate the bill. And it’s not going to pass, but Republicans should never trust or deal with an administration and party whose sole goals are mass amnesty, a pathway to citizenship, and open borders. Democrats have no vested interest in having a secure border with a regimented, merit-brd immigration system. Their political lifeblood has allowed them to increase their representation on the Hill via new congressional districts through the census for over a generation. Fill the country to the brim with illegals, increase the population, carve out new House seats, and find elected representation that’s of the same racial or ethnic background. 

Shame on Senator Mitch McConnell, Senator James Lankford, and other Republicans who thought this would receive a warm reception from br voters. Are they that out of touch? This inability to resolve the crisis is typical swamp creature nonsense, one that’s indicative of the political class that also doesn’t want to solve the border issues, seeing illegals as either new voters or an endless supply of cheap labor. 

It’s why someone like Trump can enter the political scene and win a presidential election. 

Is Biden Malicious, Incompetent, or Conniving? ~ VDH

Things are so strange, so surreal, so nihilistic in contemporary America that the chaos can only be deliberate. Chance, incompetence, and accident could not alone explain the series of disasters.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

What Excites Biden?

Things are becoming so strange, so surreal, so nihilistic in contemporary America that the chaos can only be deliberate. Chance, incompetence, and accident could not alone explain the series of disasters we now daily witness that are nearly destroying the country.

When the ailing and non-compos-mentis president now speaks, he rarely becomes excited about Iranian or terrorist provocations. Biden seems restrained even at Russia’s outlawry in Ukraine. The atrocities of Hamas now earn only measured objections from Biden. He does not seem too angered by the collapse of the border. Nor do the deaths of 100,000 Americans to imported fentanyl earn a loud trademark Biden scream.

No, what earns his unchecked ire, often expressed in shouts and hysterical tones, are Donald Trump and his supporters. Most recently, out of nowhere, Biden resurrected the old and proven falsehood that Trump had libeled the Normandy dead as losers and suckers. He then compounded that libel by claiming Trump’s supposed dismissal of the heroic dead was a grievous family insult to his own late son, who did not die either in combat or while in uniform but in 2015, tragically, from brain cancer.

During these anti-Trump fits, Biden wakes up and his face tightens up. He begins screaming, in uncharacteristic, animated fashion, anytime he can smear half the nation’s voters as “semi-fascists” and “ultra-MAGA” extremists. In private, he swears that Trump is a “f—ing asshole” and “sick f—k.” If only Biden substituted “cartel” or “Iran” or “Hamas” for “Trump” or “MAGA.” we might see an animate president.

A Borderless Nation

Meanwhile, a mob of illegal aliens recently tried to kick and stomp sprawled New York peace officers into senselessness—felonies that would earn any such violent citizen a decade or more on Rikers Island.

Yet somehow, only a few were arrested. Stranger still, all of them were immediately let go without bail—as if freeing wolves to prey further upon sheep.

Upon release, a few smirked and flipped their middle fingers to bystanders. Apparently, they wished to show Americans that they are violent, crude, unrepentant, and exempt. And thus they tell us that their newfound hosts are fools for letting the likes of themselves in.

And why not, given the attackers bussed with impunity to California—the land of free everything if only one qualifies as illegally residing in the U.S.

These grotesque bullies are part of the eight-million illegal aliens who pranced across the southern border without background checks—all taking Biden up on his 2019 encouragement to “surge” the border with impunity.

Many brandish their cartel affiliations. Some pay for their transit by smuggling cartel fentanyl, which contributes to 100,000 American overdose deaths per year. Others sport lengthy criminal records. All seemed to have been welcomed out of their countries by conniving Latin American governments and mysteriously invited into our country by our derelict president.

The Death of the Law

There is a continuing pattern here. Sometime around late 2020, Americans woke up in a country they no longer recognized. That summer, tens of thousands of rioters had looted, burned, killed, maimed, and assaulted for four months with veritable impunity. Leftwing mayors and governors dubbed the violence as “largely peaceful” demonstrations or a “summer of love.”

The 2020 legacy of defunding the police and exempting criminals on the basis of their race or ideology is that each week now videos circulate of massive looting, smash-and-grab epidemics, and deadly car-jackings in our major cities. No one cares much about the small business owners who are ruined.

Who laments for the poor who lose their last shopping outlet? Does the Biden administration worry over the terrified employees who are ordered to stand back or the occasional security officer totem instructed to stand down?

Instead, we are to empathize with the thief, the assaulter, the rapist, and the carjacker—at least in the sense that he does not deserve punishment for the mayhem he caused, given we, not he, are supposedly the true guilty parties. A lot of innocent and defenseless people have been assaulted and killed since 2020 as the wage of that toxic theory.

So the subtext of all these violent acts is exemption based on perceived correct race, ideology, or membership in the supposed victim/oppressed binary. The perpetrators are either not arrested, let out the same day as arrested, never charged, or never convicted. And the result is a growing distrust of the law and a cynicism that there is little law anymore, just statutes used against political undesirables.

If, for just one month, the Biden justice department used the same resources and budget it has spent the last three years rounding up bystanders at the January 6 riot and instead prosecuted, convicted, and jailed these big-city violent assailants, then the crime epidemic could be solved.

The Implosion of the University

As a general rule, in 2024, the more “prestigious” our universities, and the more they prided themselves as elite or Ivy-League, the more likely there were racially segregated dorms and graduations, a virtual anti-Semitic hounding of Jewish students, grade inflation, watered-down courses, and pro-Hamas terrorist demonstrations.

For nearly a hundred years, universities told us that the SAT or ACT admittance exam was critical in determining their admissions. It was sold as a way to confirm the potential and preparation necessary to perform at a level demanded by these elite schools. The tests were praised as a meritocratic tool to determine talent by honing grade point averages and allowing opportunity to those without money and contacts. Then suddenly, in 2021, these tests were mostly junked.

That dismissal of standardized tests was a de facto admission that:

1) Universities had been admittedly wrong for a century that standardized admissions tests had any value in determining the degree of student preparation needed to complete a rigorous Ivy League class load.

or 2) in the interest of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the university would now be free to admit students who could not meet their prior unrealistic or unnecessary standards and instead would accommodate new students by suddenly inflating grades, introducing easier classes, or diminishing required course work.

Of course, the university admits to neither of these realities. It compounds the deception and fraud by claiming new generations of students are more competitive and gifted than ever and will leave with degrees that guarantee employers rigorously trained graduates. Time will soon tell.

The End of Deterrence

The same nihilism characterizes our foreign policy.

Our worst enemies could not have planned a more disastrous and humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan than the Biden administration’s August 2021 scamper. We simply, without an afterthought, abandoned billions of dollars of sophisticated weapons to Taliban terrorists.

We left behind a $1 billion new embassy and a remodeled Air Force base. We bragged about taking out terrorists with a “righteous strike” that wiped out an entire friendly Afghan family, while 13 American service personnel were blown up trying to secure a non-securable escape route.

Then followed the mysterious laxity as a Chinese spy balloon lazily traversed the U.S. with impunity. Next was the radical drop-off in military recruitment. If one wished to ensure that the one group that serves—and dies—in combat units at twice its demographics would exit the military en masse, prompting an enlistment crisis, the Pentagon could not have done a better job.

The top brass all but accused its white male recruits of being prone to toxic white supremacy, only to form a task force to root it out—and then discover such rage and hatred never existed in the first place.

It nonetheless drummed out 8,400 veterans for not receiving the mRNA vaccinations, many of whom had naturally acquired immunity and real doubts about the efficacy or safety of the inoculations. And, finally, the Pentagon made it known that prior standards of recruitment, promotion, and evaluation had apparently weakened the military. Therefore, new race- and gender-based criteria would ensure fewer and now unneeded white males in positions of rank and influence.

Abroad, China serially threatens to annex Taiwan. A hungry and perennially restless Vladimir Putin once upon a time thought he was restrained from invading his neighbors by fear of more costs incurred than the likelihood of benefits to be gained. But like an earlier reaction to a weakened U.S. in 2008 and 2014, Putin assumed that the 2022 Biden administration would likely do little if he annexed greater swaths of Ukraine. And so he invaded.

National security advisor Jack Sullivan, on the eve of the October 7 Hamas massacres of Jewish citizens, claimed the Middle East was at last calm. Now it is on the verge of a theater-wide war, once Iran sensed that the Biden team would appease and beg it to behave.

So the Biden administration was eager to end oil sanctions, plead with Iran to reenter the Iran Deal, remove the Houthis from terrorist designations, route billions of dollars to Tehran for hostages, junk the Abrams accords, and restore millions of dollars in please-be-nice bribe money to the Palestinians.

Biden’s abject misreading of human nature has ensured that a thuggish theocracy that slaughters abroad and tortures at home would interpret that reproachment as either naiveté or stupidity. And thus it would respond with contempt and escalating aggression. And so it has.

Somehow, over just three years, the Biden administration did to the Middle East what it did to the southern border: blew it up in the same exact manner of mindlessly undoing any policy that had previously worked with Trump’s finger prints on them.

What Is Going On?

What is the common denominator, what is the rationale behind the anarchy, and what is the reason why a president would so willingly rend the fabric of America?

Why would the government privilege the illegal alien over the law-abiding citizen? The violent pro-Hamas, anti-Semitic foreign-born protestor over the peaceful pro-Israel, U.S. citizen? The smash-and-grabber over the dutiful security guard?

We are nearing a French Revolution, reign-of-terror moment. The law seems to be what a cabal of hardcore leftists who control the Oval Office say it is.

Joe Biden’s administration offers no better confirmation of warnings from Thucydides to Thomas Hobbes that the veneer of civilization is precious, hard-won, quite thin, and beneath it churns innate human savagery and chaos roaring to be released.

So why did Biden unleash the hounds of anti-civilization? Did he despise the supposedly boring middle-class citizen who follows the law, pays all his taxes, and never gets arrested? Does he hate the idea of meritocracy? In Biden’s puppeteers’ dangerous calculus, is all this savagery and chaos a deliberate mechanism to ensure parity? Equity? Inclusion?

So is the deliberate nihilism—economic, social, cultural, social, and political—a way of leveling the field? Making life difficult for the more successful? Making those who cherish the traditions and protocols of America pay?

Is that the plan to take the country to near collapse, and then only at the abyss itself to force revolutionary change—or else?

How else can anyone explain the descent of our city downtowns into dank medieval cesspits, our notion of male and female transformed into the sexual circus right out of Petronius’s Satyricon, our race relations into a mixture of Rwanda and Yugoslavia, and our universities into Soviet-like “People’s Universities of Correct Thought?”

None of this was by accident. It is the dividend of a philosophy that says, “We have to blow up your America before we can reboot it for us.”

Anti-Gunners Don't Care About Mass Shootings

posted by Jeff Charles at RedStateVIP 

Given that this is an election year, the left is going to pull out their usual tricks to tilt the odds in their favor in November. Among their usual wedge issues, we can expect more conversations about gun control in an effort to paint Republicans as callous people who don’t care about children getting shot.

In fact, we are only another mass shooting away from having yet another national debate over gun rights and the Second Amendment.

Indeed, these tragedies are the number one tool Democrats weaponize to push their anti-gun agenda. Standing on the graves of mass shooting victims, they cynically play on people’s emotions to coax them into giving up more of their liberty “for the greater good.”

RedState’s Mike Miller wrote a piece highlighting a study from the Crime Prevention Research Center, which published a report that poked a Grand Canyon-sized hole in the mass shooting narrative peddled by the anti-gunner lobby.

According to myth-busting data from the Crime Prevention Research Center, while the national gun-control debate focuses heavily on AR-15-style rifles, handguns have been used in most mass public shootings over the past 25 years.

Moreover, according to Dr. John R. Lott Jr., the center’s founder, and author of the report, shootings primarily have taken place in what are supposed to be “gun-free zones,” according to the law enforcement officials, and none of the shootings from 1998 to 2023 would have been stopped by requiring universal background checks.

The Democrat Party was unavailable for comment.

Here's more from Dr. Lott:

When another shooting happens at a place such as a school or a mall, politicians and the media are apt to claim that many hundreds of mass shootings occur each year. “Over the last year since Uvalde, our country has experienced a staggering 650 mass shootings,” President Joe Biden claimed last year. After a mass murder in Lewiston, Maine in late October, CNN said that there had already been “586 mass shootings” that year.

These statements give an incorrect impression that there are massacres every day like the infamous 2022 Uvalde shooting, which claimed the lives of nineteen students and two teachers, or the 2023 Lewiston murders, where eighteen people were murdered. A new report by the Crime Prevention Research Center, which I head, shows that much [of] what we believe about these attacks isn’t true.

The numbers cited by Biden and CNN come from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) broadly defines mass shootings to include any case with four or more people shot or injured. Some injuries are not from actually being shot.

Of course, mass shootings are awful tragedies that should be prevented. Nobody is disputing that. However, it is common to see anti-gunners constantly misrepresenting the rate and nature of mass shootingsoccurring all across the country. However, the solutions these people put forward do very little to decrease the majority of gun violence, which typically involves gang and drug activity.

The incessant emphasis on employing gun control measures such as stricter background checks, limiting certain types of firearms, and others fail to address the underlying issues that lead to this type of violence. The anti-gunners typically neglect the role that mental health, socio-economic disparities, broken families, and substandard education play in creating environments in which violent crime flourishes. Moreover, they overlook and outright reject measures that could deter or prevent mass shootings – especially in schools.

After a tragic mass shooting that occurred at a school in an Iowa town, parents spoke out, demanding preventative measures to stop future attacks. Instead of pretending that making it harder for responsible Americans to keep and bear arms would have stopped the shooting, they were seeking effective solutions, including armed security, metal detectors, and others. Naturally, leftists were not a part of that particular discussion.

The bottom line is that the anti-gunners rarely focus on addressing the root issues that lead to violent crime. Instead, they pursue restrictions that don’t stop the types of criminals who commit these offenses.

This is because their objective is not to curb mass shootings and other types of violence. Their aim is to disarm as many individuals as possible under the guise of protecting public safety. Because of this, folks on the left don’t actually care how many mass shootings happen each year. To them, these tragedies are nothing more than propaganda tools used to persuade people to allow the government to crack down on our Second Amendment rights.

Houthis claim fresh attacks on British and US ships in Red Sea

 

The Houthis say they have successfully targeted a British and a US ship in the Red Sea, casting doubt on the effectiveness of three waves of US-UK strikes on missile sites belonging to the group in Yemen.

Neither of the two ships were badly damaged but the incident will underscore the need for commercial ships either to pay higher insurance premiums or take longer, more expensive routes to avoid the threat of Houthi attacks.

The US military undertook a daylight raid on the port of Hodeidah on Monday without UK support. 

A Houthi spokesperson, Yahya Saree, said in a statement on Tuesday: “We carried out two military operations, the first targeted an American ship (Star Nasia), and the other targeted a British ship (Morning Tide).”

The Greek-owned Star Nasia, managed by Star Bulk Carrier, was damaged by an explosion at 11.15 GMT, a Greek shipping ministry official said, adding that its crew were not injured. It is unclear whether the explosion was caused by a sea mine or a rocket, the official added. 

The security company Ambrey reported earlier on Tuesday that a British ship flying the Barbados flag “suffered minor damage to its port” 57 nautical miles from the coast of Hodeidah, without any casualties. The ship continued on its way.

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations agency said just after midnight GMT on Tuesday that it had received a report of a projectile fired at the port side of a ship west of Hodeidah and that a small craft was seen nearby.

The projectile passed over the deck and caused slight damage to the bridge windows, but the vessel and crew were safe and proceeded on the planned passage, it added.

The leader of Yemen’s Houthis, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, said on Tuesday that the group “will further escalate” if the Israeli attack on Gaza does not stop.

On Monday the UK defence secretary, Grant Shapps, told MPs there had been a change in the cadence of Houthi strikes. “The clock is running down for the Houthis, in as much as their ability is being degraded,” Shapps said. “They do not have the eyes and ears from the radar stations; they are more reliant still on Iran.”  

The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, is on his fifth trip to the Middle East since the 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel. He travelled to Egypt after meeting Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh to discuss how to achieve “an enduring end to the crisis in Gaza”.

Blinken is also due to travel to Qatar, Israel and the West Bank. His efforts will largely turn on the response Hamas finally gives to a framework for a ceasefire deal, which would involve the exchange of more than 100 Israeli hostages held in Gaza in return for a lengthy pause in fighting and the release of Palestinians detained in Israeli jails. Hamas has said it wants a permanent ceasefire and the removal of all Israeli troops from Gaza, something the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is not prepared to offer.

The price for the US not securing a lengthy ceasefire is rising as it finds itself embroiled in fighting directly against Iranian-backed forces in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. It is not clear how US strategic interests in any of these three countries are being advanced by the military confrontation. In Iraq, political forces calling for US bases to be closed down have grown stronger as a result of US strikes on Iranian-backed militia inside the country. In Syria, the US-backed Kurdish forces that have formed the linchpin of the US drive against Islamic State suffered a serious blow on Monday when they lost six fighters to a drone strike.  

In Yemen, the UN-recognised government in Aden has sacked its prime minister, replacing him with the hardline anti-Houthi foreign minister Ahmed Awad bin Mubarak. Hugely experienced, Mubarak is sceptical of plans by Saudi Arabia to strike a peace deal with the Houthis to formally bring Yemen’s civil war to a close. Last Thursday he said Iran’s al-Quds force operatives had been deployed to Yemen’s coastline.

The reshuffle will reflect concerns in the US about the quality of the anti-Houthi alliance in the country. The prime minister is overseen by a disparate eight-strong presidential leadership council, some of whom are backed by Saudi Arabia and others by the United Arab Emirates. 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/06/houthis-claim-fresh-attacks-british-us-ships-red-sea

chobox=1707227989    

New Study Blows Gaping Hole in Gun Grabbers' Mass Shootings Myth

Mike Miller reporting for RedState 

We've all heard the Democrats' fantastical gun-grabbing narrative about "assault rifles," "weapons of war," "high-powered rifles," and other such nonsense. And we've all seen the left exploit every "mass shooting" that comes down the pike — which is always a demand for ever-stricter gun-control legislation.

AKA: Further erosion of Second Amendment Rights.

At the center of the calls for tighter gun laws is the dreaded AR-15 — the so-called "assault rifle," a term concocted by the left. Incidentally, "AR" stands for "ArmaLite rifle" — Armalite being the manufacturer that first developed the rifle for civilian use in the early 1950s. Anyway, nary a "mass shooting" occurs without Democrat lawmakers rushing to microphones to histrionically demand a ban on "assault rifles" and/or "weapons of war." 

Just one problem. A new study blows a gaping hole in the gun grabbers' myth.

According to myth-busting data from the Crime Prevention Research Center, while the national gun-control debate focuses heavily on AR-15-style rifles, handguns have been used in most mass public shootings over the past 25 years. 

Moreover, according to Dr. John R. Lott Jr., the center’s founder, and author of the report, shootings primarily have taken place in what are supposed to be “gun-free zones,” according to the law enforcement officials, and none of the shootings from 1998 to 2023 would have been stopped by requiring universal background checks.

The Democrat Party was unavailable for comment.

Here's more from Dr. Lott:

When another shooting happens at a place such as a school or a mall, politicians and the media are apt to claim that many hundreds of mass shootings occur each year. “Over the last year since Uvalde, our country has experienced a staggering 650 mass shootings,” President Joe Biden claimed last year. After a mass murder in Lewiston, Maine in late October, CNN said that there had already been “586 mass shootings” that year.

These statements give an incorrect impression that there are massacres every day like the infamous 2022 Uvalde shooting, which claimed the lives of nineteen students and two teachers, or the 2023 Lewiston murders, where eighteen people were murdered. A new report by the Crime Prevention Research Center, which I head, shows that much [of] what we believe about these attacks isn’t true.

The numbers cited by Biden and CNN come from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) broadly defines mass shootings to include any case with four or more people shot or injured. Some injuries are not from actually being shot.

“The number of mass public shootings that you see each year is from one to eight," Lott said, adding: 

That’s a very different number than what you see that the media covers all the time. The causes and solutions for these mass public shootings are very different.

Is it any surprise that the liberal media ride shotgun (pun intended) for the gun-grabbing Democrat Party?

Gang-Related Shootings

According to Lott, the vast majority of GVA data involves shootings among rival drug gang members. 

We hear about all the shootings in Chicago, but the individual attacks almost never get national coverage because they overwhelmingly involve drug gangs. Any type of murder is a tragedy, but the causes and solutions differ for drug gang fights and school shootings.

[...]

Conflating Uvalde with armed robberies or fights over drug turf doesn’t make sense, but it does create inflated numbers that can be used to scare and mislead people. Mass public shootings are very rare, and it’s much rarer still for them to be committed by rifle-toting white supremacists.

And there we have it. Dr. Lott laid it bare for all (who care) to see. 

The Democrat Party conflates rare mass shootings like Uvalde with gang-related shootings that occur nearly daily— often with little or no mention by the media. Yet along comes a rare shooting by a "rifle-toting white supremacist," and it's off to the races for the gun-grabbing Democrats.

'Amazon Files' Expose Biden Regime's Censorship of Books for Political Reasons

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

How deep did the Biden administration's censorship regime go, which infamously targeted Twitter and Facebook? According to newly subpoenaed emails by the House Judiciary Committee, it even reached the world's largest retailer, Amazon. 

Rep. Jim Jordan released some of the details on Monday, which included former Biden official Andy Slavitt pressuring Amazon to censor books that questioned the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines. 

That last sentence is chilling. As if there's nothing wrong with what was occurring, an Amazon worker asks, "Is the Admin asking us to remove books, or are they more concerned about search results/order (or both)?"

As Jordan shows in the chain of emails, Amazon did hold off for a short period, but it wasn't long before they relented to White House demands, censoring search results for books deemed to be "disinformation" regarding COVID-19. 

It's hard to describe how insanely improper (and possibly illegal) this is. The Biden administration used the power of its office to pressure a private company to censor books at they found politically inconvenient. 

Contrast that with the absolute freak-out from Democrats when schools in Florida banned literal gay porn from being in classrooms. All the hand-wringing, including from the White House itself, was just for show. They don't really care about the First Amendment. They just want to expose children to gross content while getting books they don't like, which actually do fall under the broad rubric of freedom of speech, censored and removed. 

Various court rulings in the aftermath of the original Twitter Files have put the Biden administration's censorship regime on ice, mostly thanks to the State of Missouri and its attorney general. Still, it's important to know how deep this went. It is downright Orwellian for the executive branch to pressure retailers to censor search results and sales of books. 

🌲 Mario Lopez joins Great American Family

 

Source: https://itsawonderfulmovie.blogspot.com/2024/02/mario-lopez-joins-great-american-family.html

Breaking News from Great American Family: Actor, Broadway Star, Emmy Award Winner, and Television Host, Mario Lopez to join the Network!

According to the press release below, Mario's first film project with the Great American Family will be a 2024 Great American Christmas movie, in which he'll star alongside his wife, Courtney.

See all of the details in Great American Media's press release below...


PRESS RELEASE:

GREAT AMERICAN CHRISTMAS 2024

WILL BE FRAMED

BY ONE OF TELEVISION’S

MOST ICONIC LATINO FACES

GREAT AMERICAN MEDIA

SIGNS EMMY® AWARD WINNING HOST

AND ACTOR, MARIO LOPEZ

TO MULTI-PICTURE, MULTI-YEAR DEAL

TO SHOWCASE DIVERSE TALENT

NEW YORK, NY – February 6, 2024 – Great American Media announced it has signed Emmy® Award winning host and actor, Mario Lopez to a multi-picture, multi-year deal to star in content across the company’s vast media portfolio which includes linear networks Great American Family, Great American Faith & Living, Great American Pure Flix, Great American Adventures, and digital channel, Great American Faith & Home, with a focus to showcase diverse talent in front of the camera. Broader terms of the deal are not disclosed.

Lopez will be a major part of Great American Christmas 2024, starring in content for Great American Family where he joins a family of iconic TV stars who have made Great American Christmas a leader in original Christmas content. Great American Christmas 2024 returns in October. His very first film in this partnership will include a holiday film starring alongside wife and Broadway star Courtney Lopez.

“Mario Lopez has entertained millions of people for almost four decades,” said Bill Abbott, President & CEO, Great American Media. “From his breakout role of A.C. Slater on ‘Saved by the Bell’ to his nightly presentations of Hollywood news on ‘Access Hollywood,’ the world loves Mario Lopez. We welcome Mario to Great American Media and look forward to his many creative contributions to our ever-growing, emerging brand of beloved faith and family entertainment,” Abbott concluded.

“Throughout my career, I’ve aimed to create a body of work that appeals to diverse audiences and, above all, brings joy to people,” Lopez stated. “Joining Great American Media is immensely fulfilling. I look forward to creating uplifting, inclusive, and diverse content, viewed through a positive lens for all ages. At this stage in my life, family is the most important thing to me. Being able to share family-friendly stories representing diverse voices is a true blessing,” Lopez concluded.

Mario Lopez is a constant presence on the pop culture scene. Actor, NYT Best Selling author, producer, and Emmy winning host, Lopez’s prolific career has made him one of the most sought-after personalities in entertainment today. Lopez became a household name as ‘A.C. Slater’ on the hit 90’s teen series, “Saved By The Bell,” and he starred in, as well as served as a producer on the wildly popular “Saved By The Bell” reboot on Peacock. Lopez is the host of NBC’s “Access Hollywood,” & “Access Daily.” Additionally, Mario hosts the national iHeart radio programs “On with Mario Lopez.” In 2008, Mario Lopez made his Broadway debut in the revival of A Chorus Line where he met his wife, Courtney. Mario and Courtney have three adorable kids, Gia, Dominic and Santino. Lopez is represented by 3 Arts Entertainment, WME and Ken Lindner and attorney John Tishbi.

ABOUT GREAT AMERICAN FAMILY

Great American Family is America’s premiere destination for quality family-friendly programming, including original holiday movies, rom-coms and fan-favorite series that celebrate faith, family, and country. Great American Family is home to year-round seasonal celebrations including Great American Christmas, the network’s signature franchise featuring holiday themed movies and specials. Founded in 2021, Great American Family is part of the Great American Media portfolio of brands. Follow Great American Family on Twitter: @GAfamilyTV Facebook: @GAfamilytv Instagram: @greatamericanfamily

-----------------------------------------

My Quick Take:

This is certainly great news today! I'm looking forward to seeing all the ways Mario Lopez will contribute to Great American Media!

Based on the press release above, it sounds like he will be seen in various ways, not only on Great American Family, but also on Great American Faith & Living, Great American Pure Flix, Great American Adventures, and the digital channel, Great American Faith & Home! Wow, it sounds like he'll be really busy!

Like many of you, my first remembrance of Mario Lopez was on the Saturday morning show, “Saved By The Bell.” That show holds a special, nostalgic place in my heart. It was such a wholesome show for kids and families at that time, even spinning off with the original cast to one season of “Saved By The Bell: The College Years” and TV movies.

Of all of Mario's acting jobs through the years, next to “Saved By The Bell,” my favorite is his Lifetime Christmas movie, “Steppin' Into the Holiday.” I loved seeing more of Mario Lopez's dancing side in that movie with Jana Kramer, and I hope that's something we'll see more of as he's on Great American Family!

For now, that's a wrap!

Net 🎬