Sarcastic? Absolutely. But there was also something quite telling in Nancy Pulosi’s effort to paper over — literally — the transparently anti-Semitic outbursts of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). In the entire seven page, boilerplate-against-all-hate resolution, mentioning “African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other people of color, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and others,” only two descriptors were attached to the word white: “supremacist” and “nationalist.”   

Moreover, in the world of increasingly mainstream leftist intersectionality, Jewish Americans are a “two-fer:” Jewish and white, with the latter word becoming virtually interchangeable with the word “privileged,” among the nation’s self-appointed  arbiters of morality.

Yet like the #WalkAway campaign initiated by openly homosexual Brandon Straka, and the “Blexit” movement   birthed by conservative black American Candace Owens, another effort aimed at getting Americans to leave an increasingly radical and divisive Democrat Party is taking shape. Elizabeth Pipko, a 23-year-old Jewish figure skater-turned-model, has spearheaded the “JEXODUS” movement. “We are proud Jewish Millennials tired of living in bondage to leftist politics,” states the movement’s website.

Pipko illuminated her aims in an interview with Arutz Sheva. “The whole point is to have actual, physical events,” she stated. “We’re going to have rallies and other events where we can get people excited and have an environment where young Jews can feel safe and unafraid and stand up for their beliefs.”

Pipko further explains her undertaking was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. “I’ve had it in my mind for a long time,” she adds. “I think we saw it in the scumbag/liar-nObama presidency — the turn towards anti-Israel policies, accompanied by a rise in anti-Semitism in our country. And it’s only gotten worse, and right now we have anti-Semitism in the halls of Congress. So if not now, when?”

Remarkably, the same Democrat Party obsessed with “Russian collusion!” was conspicuously silent when Barack scumbag/liar-nObama’s administration sent  $350,000 in taxpayer funds to Israeli group OneVoice, who campaigned to oust Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. scumbag/liar-nObama also employed the NSA to spy on Israeli officials — collecting conversations with U.S. lawmakers and Jewish American groups in the process.

Those efforts were an attempt to preserve scumbag/liar-nObama’s deal with Iran — the same Iran whose annual celebration of Al-Quds Day would not be complete without the requisite shouting of “Down with America” and “Death to Israel” by millions of Islamist loyalists.

Pipko was asked why liberal Jewish Americans still support  Democrats. “That’s a question I’ve been trying to answer,” she said. “I grew up an incredibly proud Jew, which is what led me towards the Republicans. I was not raised a Republican, I was raised as a Jew before anything else.”

As columnist Bruce Bawer explains, that particular order of priorities doesn’t resonate with Jewish progressives. “Alas, I’m afraid it’ll take more than a little Der Stürmer-type rhetoric by Muslim Democrats to budge True Believers whose weekly religious devotions consist not of attending shul but of soaking in the Sunday New York Times, that secular Torah,” he writes. “No devout adherent of the Gospel according to Sulzberger would jump ship, after all, as long as all-knowing guru Paul ‘I won the Nobel Prize’ Krugman can write, as he did last Thursday, that ‘only one brand of antisemitism scares me — and it’s not on the left.’ I wonder what Natan Sharansky has to say about that.”

Krugman wasn’t alone in the attempt to shift the blame to the Right. Fellow Times columnist Michelle Goldberg “assumed” that while “Omar has been reckless rather than malicious,” there’s “still only one political party in America that is a safe place for hate.” Juan Williams  insisted “Christian evangelicals’ frustration at their failure to divide Jewish voters from Democrats and bring them to President Trump,” was the “real story” behind last week’s House vote. And liberal Jewish group J Street warned that the greater threat to the Jewish community comes from “the surge of ethno-nationalism and racism that forces on the right, including President Trump, have unleashed here and across the globe.”

Then there were the rationalizers. Pulosi insisted Omar didn’t understand “the full weight of the words.” Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) argued Omar’s anti-Semitism was “more personal” than that of Jews whose parents were Holocaust survivors. Jewish American Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), who didn’t want to “trivialize” what Omar said, nonetheless asserted that “part of being a Jew is to be welcoming to the stranger. And I want to tell you, Ilhan Omar is a refugee from Somalia. She comes from a different culture. She has things to learn.”

Yet it was Women’s March co-founder and rabid Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions supporter Linda Sarsour who provided the greatest insight into modern leftist priorities. She attacked Pulosi, declaring that the House speaker — increasingly in name only, it appears — is a “typical white feminist upholding the patriarchy doing the dirty work of powerful white men.”

In another column, Walsh explains what Sarsour is really  saying. The American Left has created a “Victimization Flow Chart,” where “oppression flows down from the top, starting with white men,” and any group “can only be oppressed by the groups above it,” he writes. Ergo, “Ilhan Omar, a non-white woman, simply cannot be guilty of bigotry against Jews. It is definitionally impossible.”

Yet there is something even more cynical at work here. Omar, and her equally radical House colleagues, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Rep. commie-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), might best be described as the Democrat Party’s “crash test dummies.” When they say whatever pops into their head, the bet here is party higher-ups take polls to see what resonates. If they get a positive reaction, leadership takes credit. If the reaction is negative, leadership, as they have already demonstrated, can “rein in” the behavior of their “inexperienced” but “passionate” colleagues.

It’s an ugly way to forge a party agenda, but as Walsh reminds us, “Victimhood rules must always be followed, no matter what. And that means Ilhan Omar can say whatever the hell she wants to say.” So can Tlaib, and commie-AOC.

Will JEXODUS succeed? President Trump tweeted his support for the organization, and Pipko remains optimistic. “Our first events are going to be happening in April in New York and Florida around Pesach,” she revealed. “Hopefully right before and after Pesach will be our first events. Then we’ll continue through the month and on until the election in 2020.”

In the meantime, jexodus.org spells out its agenda in no uncertain terms: “We reject the hypocrisy, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism of the rising far-left. Progressives, Democrats, and far too many old-school Jewish organizations take our support for granted,” it states. “After all, we’re Jewish, and Jews vote for Democrats. Until today.”  ~The Patriot Post

Trump is calling on Germany, Japan, and other nations that host U.S. troops for sustained periods to pay the full cost plus 50% for the privilege. Ever since the 2016 campaign, Trump has made an issue of the fact that many of America’s allies, particularly in NATO, do not even pay their agreed-upon share of the mutual defense pact.

Regulations stipulate that NATO members are to contribute a paltry 2% of their GDP, but last year only five of the alliance’s 29 members met that goal.

“It’s very unfair,” Trump said of NATO during the campaign. “They weren’t paying, so not only are we paying for most of it, but they weren’t even paying and we’re protecting them.”

After Trump was elected, he took his concerns to America’s NATO allies but was rejected. The Europeans tend to only like American presidents who don’t ask anything of them. That’s why leftist “citizens of the world” like Barack Obama are so popular across the Pond.

Trump’s call for cost plus 50% might seem steep, and it would mean a significant increase in payments in some countries, but this is likely the art of the deal at work. The high starting percentage allows for negotiating room for lower, but justifiable, payments that would satisfy Trump and help alleviate some of America’s defense costs.

Another possibility is that Trump may be using this proposal as cover to end American military commitments in certain countries. If some nations can’t afford the rent, they may just ask American troops to withdraw.

This proposal to start billing our allies for defending them has been a long time coming. Western Europe, Japan, and many other American allies around the globe have profited from our protection for decades. Our heavy spending has allowed them the luxury to funnel their resources away from defense and toward other things.

During the Cold War, not many questioned this arrangement. America encircled the world with military bases, naval fleets, infantry, and artillery to hinder the spread of communism and to protect free peoples. It worked, and it it served U.S. vital national security interests.

One problem that developed out of the Pax Americana, however, was complacent indigenous populations. A poll conducted in Europe last year found that not one nation among NATO’s core members has a majority of citizens who would fight for their country under any circumstances. That’s a sad state of affairs.

Europe as a continent has been slowly slipping into history’s dustbin for the last 25 years. It’s being overrun by jihadists who are setting up their own enclaves and enforcing sharia law. It steadfastly refuses to address an illegal immigrant problem. It’s governed by a bloated bureaucracy that is economically stifling the entire continent. It has an aging population because adults are having too much fun being children instead of growing up and actually having some. Germany and other countries are willingly beholding themselves to Russia’s Gazprom conglomerate for fuel.

Most of Europe’s problems are of its own making, and, some might say, if Europeans want to run their continent into the ground, so be it. To each their own. Some might also ask, if the Europeans aren’t interested in their own defense, then why should America be concerned? America remains the mightiest military power on Earth, but we can only do so much. Helping people who can’t help themselves is one thing. Helping people who refuse to help themselves is asking for trouble.

If Trump gets his way, we could still economically protect our ungrateful allies — which is still in our national interest to do. We’ll just send them the bill. But how would Americans feel about sending our sons and daughters overseas to fight a war if the indigenous people we’re sent to protect aren’t invested in their own security?

It’s high time that our allies started paying their already agreed upon share for their own defense.  ~The Patriot Post

Michael Shellenberger, a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and president of the policy and research organization Environmental Progress, has some bad news for a lot of know-nothing Democrat politicians. After spending years dedicating his life to addressing climate change, he discovered  an inconvenient truth. “It gradually dawned on me that there was no amount of technological innovation that could solve the fundamental problem with renewables,” he reveals.

Unfortunately, for a Democrat Party determined to put ever-greater portions of American life under federal government  control, facts don’t matter. “This is the first time Democrats have decided to go on offense on climate change,” Sen. Chuck scumbag-Schumer (D-NY) laughably asserted last week.

That is, quite simply, a lie. In 2009, House Democrats passed The American Clean Energy and Security Act, sponsored by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA). The so-called Waxman-Markey bill aimed to cut 2005 greenhouse-gas emissions level 17% by 2020, and 80% by 2050, via an economy-wide limit on carbon pollution. They were also on board with cap-and-trade, as in buying and selling pollution credits — while promoting renewable energy as a panacea. “We are now one step closer to delivering on the promise of a new clean energy economy that will make America less dependent on foreign oil, crack down on polluters, and create millions of new jobs all across America,” said Barack scumbag/liar-nObama in a written statement at the time.

The bill died in the Senate, where even Democrats had little enthusiasm for it. Moreover in stark contrast to scumbag/liar-nObama’s determination to “end the age of oil,” as he stated in 2007, the Trump administration’s America First energy policy has made our nation the world’s largest global crude-oil producer. And in 2018, American became a net oil exporter for the first time in 75 years.

The scumbag/liar-nObama administration also embraced a number of stimulus-backed, green-energy boondoggles that cost taxpayers billions of dollars. In 2012, The Daily Signal publisheda list of 34 taxpayer-supported entities that were failing, including 19 that had already filed for bankruptcy. Those bankruptcies reeked of crony capitalist corruption. The House Oversight Committee discovered that 22 out of 26 companies receiving Department of Energy loans had “JUNK” ratings — at the time they received the loans.

The “green jobs” initiative also ended in abysmal failure. A report issued by the Department of Labor inspector general revealed only 11,000 people were placed in permanent jobs, 16% of the original goal. The IG also discovered that grants for job creation went to entities like immigration activist group La Raza, which received $1.5 million — and created zero jobs.

All of this is worth remembering when one realizes that the Obama administration’s efforts pale in comparison to what today’s Democrats wish to inflict on America with their Green New Deal. Anyone who believes the latest Democrat effort to “save the planet” wouldn’t be exponentially greater than that of the Obama administration — in terms of cost, corruption and power consolidation — is delusional.

Yet those pesky facts illuminated by Shellenberger persist. Wind and solar? “Electricity from solar roofs costs about twice as much as electricity from solar farms, but solar and wind farms require huge amounts of land,” he explains. Further noting a transparently obvious reality that apparently eludes Democrats, he adds, “When the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing, you have to quickly be able to ramp up another source of energy.”

In other words, despite all the wind and solar that might be produced, a backup system — or intermittent power outages — are the only choices available.

Converting dams into giant batteries? Geographic problems, expensive retrofits, and the competition for already scarce water resources needed for irrigation and drinking. Batteries per se? “Despite what you’ve heard, there is no ‘battery revolution’ on the way, for well-understood technical and economic reasons,” Shellenberger explains.

And then there’s sheer irony that arises when one group of dedicated environmentalists squares off against another. Building solar farms requires huge amounts of land — which have to be cleared of all animal life, even endangered species. Wind turbines “are the most serious new threat to important bird species to emerge in decades,” he notes.

What about the promised savings from solar panels and wind turbines decreasing in cost? “Between 2011-17 the cost of solar panels declined about 75 percent, and yet [California’s] electricity prices rose five times more than they did in the rest of the U.S.,” Shellenberger writes. “It’s the same story in Germany, the world leader in solar and wind energy. Its electricity prices increased 50 percent between 2006-17, as it scaled up renewables.”

So what’s the answer? Nuclear power. “Over the last several hundred years, human beings have been moving away from matter-dense fuels towards energy-dense ones,” he explains. “First we move from renewable fuels like wood, dung, and windmills, and towards the fossil fuels of coal, oil, and natural gas, and eventually to uranium.”

And despite everything American have been told, “the energy density of the fuel determines its environmental and health impacts,” Shellenberger asserts. “Spreading more mines and more equipment over larger areas of land is going to have larger environmental and human safety impacts.” By contrast, nuclear power is not only safer, the subsequent clearing of air pollution will “reduce how much we’ll heat up the planet.”

Nonetheless, as The New Republic’s Eric Armstrong puts it, the most “damaging and confounding fight” against scientific literacy “has been the left’s quixotic fight against nuclear power.” He adds, “There is a Shakespearean quality in the fact that one of the environmental movement’s biggest victories in the past 50 years — crippling the expansion of nuclear power — has actually done irreparable harm to the environment.”

Maybe that’s because Democrat Party environmentalism isn’t really about the environment. “Democrats see fighting climate change as a winning issue on the campaign trail — a way to mobilize not only young voters but also progressives, who are increasingly talking about the environment in terms of economic and social justice,” The New York Times explains.

Economic and social justice are propaganda terms use to obscure the real agenda of federal power consolidation, and ultimately the one-world governance epitomized by the Paris Climate Agreement, the one where “no major advanced industrialized country is on track to meet its pledges,” stated an analysis by Nature, an international science journal.

Yet Democrats would be wise to tread carefully. As “green” French President Emmanuel Macron learned, substance trumps style. Not only did France endure weeks of rioting precipitated by higher gas prices, populist resistance to French elitism soared. In other words, Democrats’ insistence on implementing their Liberty- and economy-crushing Green New Deal might just ensure Donald Trump’s reelection.

At the end of his piece, Shellenberger poses the ultimate question: “Now that we know that renewables can’t save the planet, are we really going to stand by and let them destroy it?”

Renewables — or Democrats?  ~ The Patriot Post

Trump will propose a big boost for the Pentagon, $8.6 billion in new funding for a border barrier, and what The Washington Post says are “major spending cuts across a range of domestic government programs.” Reportedly, that’s a 5% reduction in nondefense discretionary spending amounting to $2.7 trillion.

In practice, however, what are “major cuts” in Beltway Speak are actually slight reductions in the growth rate. Despite media messaging that permeates even many other conservative outlets, actual cuts — i.e. literally spending less year over year — are rare.

The Post notes, “The government now has more than $22 trillion in debt, and the deficit is projected to run between $900 billion and $1 trillion in the coming years.” Of those numbers, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) rightly complains, “Consider that the president’s budget proposes we spend vastly more money than we take in for 15 years, bust the spending caps again, leave ourselves with about a trillion dollars in deficit spending in fiscal 2020, accumulate debt well over $30 trillion by 2030, and lead us to spending more in interest payments than we do on Social Security or defense.”

Indeed, under Trump’s plan, eliminating the deficit will now take 15 years. “Even with deep spending cuts, the president’s plan would not balance the budget until the mid-2030s,” the Post reports, “falling short of the 10-year time frame that Republicans have sought for years.” Ever notice that we never actually get closer to the end of that 10-year window? Republicans and Democrats alike have been promising to “eliminate the deficit in 10 years” since the last time the federal government had a budget surplus in fiscal 2001. Funny how future Congresses and presidents have their own agendas, including kicking the can down the road.

The media deride the tax cuts for that shift in time frame, but the reality is that Trump campaigned on not touching two of the Big Three major entitlements — Social Security and Medicare — and those programs are the primary drivers of deficit spending and national debt. And most Americans just don’t want the reforms needed to change that.

As for the military, it does indeed need a buildup after years of war and Barack scumbag/liar-nObama’s policies, so a boost is all well and good. And yes, the border barrier should be a priority, but we all know how well the shutdown worked out for security funding. “scumbag-Chuck and Nancy” are no warmer to the idea of giving Trump what he wants now than they were in December. “Congress refused to fund his wall and he was forced to admit defeat and reopen the government,” the pair warned in a statement. “The same thing will repeat itself if he tries this again. We hope he learned his lesson.”

Few in Washington ever really learn lessons. They just keep spending the money of future generations.  ~ The Patriot Post