Important Takeaways:
- The moral logic at work here is inexorable. What you see now at the DNC you will eventually see at the RNC.
- Did you hear about the free abortions and sterilizations on offer at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week? Incredibly, the news is real. Abortion-inducing drugs (mifepristone and Plan B) will be doled out from the back of a Planned Parenthood RV, along with vasectomies, just a few blocks from a convention that will embrace a radical abortion-until-birth policy that would have been unthinkable, even for Democrats, just a decade ago.
- Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance was savaged by the corporate press for repeatedly describing Democrats as “anti-family” in media appearances last week. Now, as if to prove Vance’s point, here they are with an abortion van at their convention and supporters marching through the streets dressed as abortion pills.
- What’s more difficult to understand and accept is how all of this is the inevitable consequence of a liberal worldview that the GOP has already accepted, which means what we’re seeing this week at the DNC we will eventually see at the RNC.
- I don’t just mean that the Trump campaign and the Republican Party have softened their opposition to abortion in the post-Dobbs era. It’s not merely that abortion was all but removed from the GOP platform and the party’s previous position in favor of federal abortion limits was abandoned. It’s that Trump and his Republican Party would like very much to stop talking about abortion altogether now, as if the matter is settled and we can move on to more important matters, like the border and inflation.
- The choice to take these issues off the table, or try to, is usually framed as pragmatic. We want a big tent, Democrats are radical, Republicans can present their side as reasonable.
- But it doesn’t work like that. There’s a reason the Democrats went from talking about how abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” in the 1990s to celebrating it with free abortions from the back of an RV in 2024. Once you cede the principle of the thing, once you accept the premise that it’s justifiable to kill the unborn under certain circumstances, the list of allowable circumstances will continuously expand.
- The point here is not to sow discord on the right or decry a big tent strategy for the GOP, but merely to point out that when you violate the moral principles on which a social order is based, you don’t get to say when enough is enough. The slippery slope does not cease to be slippery when you think you’ve had enough. You will go all the way down it.
- Put another way, the time to say “no” was before the moral principle was violated, not after.
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Important Takeaways:
- Along with a surge of combat aircraft and warships, President Biden dispatched three of his top Mideast advisers, including CIA Director Bill Burns, to the region this week to try to delay Iranian and Hezbollah military retaliation against Israel, and to use that borrowed time to craft an offramp from the collision course that ultimately risks a regional war that could draw in U.S. forces.
- But it is unclear how long Iran and its proxies may hold off. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Thursday that an Iranian attack could come with “little or no warning, and certainly could come in the coming days.”
- But multiple sources in the region told CBS News that Iran’s government continues to internally debate whether to use military force as it did on April 13, when it launched hundreds of drones and missiles towards Israel, or whether to conduct a covert intelligence operation.
- The U.S. assesses that Hezbollah could launch an attack with little to no warning.
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Important Takeaways:
- Kishida’s resignation opens the door to a chaotic era
- The prime minister’s decision not to seek another term may set up Japan’s most exciting race for a leader in years.
- Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party will elect its new leader late next month, and in recent weeks, the momentum in Tokyo had been swinging one way: That the unpopular but famously stubborn Kishida would run, and win, as potential successors demurred and bided their time for a better opportunity.
- That momentum suddenly ran out Wednesday when the prime minister announced he wouldn’t seek another term as LDP head, effectively tendering his resignation and throwing the race for Japan’s next leader into chaos.
- Parallels are there to be drawn with Joe Biden, the US president with whom he deepened the bilateral alliance.
- This time, all bets are off — at least right now. Up against a weak opposition, the LDP almost always wins national elections.
- But potential challengers should take a tip from Kishida, known to be a voracious reader. One of the prime minister’s favorite books is reportedly Crime & Punishment. Dostoyevsky writes that “power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up… one has only to dare.”
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Important Takeaways:
- World War III Coming Soon, U.S. Military Woefully Unprepared
- “The Commission finds that DoD’s business practices, byzantine research and development and procurement systems, reliance on decades-old military hardware, and culture of risk avoidance reflect an era of uncontested military dominance… Such methods are not suited to today’s strategic environment…. The U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare,” — Commission on the National Defense Strategy, July 29, 2024.
- “The Department’s usual laser focus on mission has been supplanted by Marxist-inspired instruction, an eradication of meritocracy in favor of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion promotion programs, with an extra emphasis placed on administration fetishes like climate change… The Chinese, Russian, North Korean, and Iranian militaries are not burdened by such nonsense.” — Blaine Holt, former US Air Force brigadier general, to Gatestone Institute, August 5, 2024.
- Unfortunately, Biden has not addressed the American people in a comprehensive and meaningful way about the greatest threat they face.
- The Commission on the National Defense Strategy is clear on what must be done: “A bipartisan ‘call to arms’ is urgently needed so that the United States can make the major changes and significant investments now rather than wait for the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11.”
- It is unlikely, however, that bad actors will give America a decade more to prepare.
- General Mike Minihan, the chief of the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command, predicted in a memorandum to his command leaked in January of last year that America would be in a war with China “in 2025.”
- Xi Jinping can see the United States is starting to stir; why would he wait for his foe to get ready?
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Important Takeaways:
- President Joe Biden is scheduled to meet with his national security team in the Situation Room later on Monday amid heightened tensions between Iran and Israel.
- The Islamic Republic could attack Israel in the next 24 to 48 hours following a major attack by Hezbollah that left two IDF soldiers injured, top western diplomats have warned.
- Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told the G7 yesterday that an attack in response to Israel killing Hamas’ political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Fuad Shukr in Beirut, was imminent, as reported by Axios.
- It would be the second time during the growing crisis in the Middle East that Iran has directly attacked Israel, the first being in April when it sent a salvo of missiles and drones overnight.
- But unlike the April attack, the US admitted in a private call with G7 members that it doesn’t know what the expected retaliatory strike will look like.
- Nevertheless, Iran has clearly signaled that it intends to attack its foe, claiming it has the ‘legal right’ to respond to Haniyeh’s assassination, with foreign ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanani telling a news conference: ‘No one has the right to doubt Iran’s legal right to punish the Zionist regime.’
- The threats from Iran comes just hours after Hezbollah, backed by the Iranian regime, launched a silo of 30 missiles from Lebanon towards upper Galilee.
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Important Takeaways:
- President Joe Biden is weighing more US defenses in the Middle East as the US prepares for an Iranian retaliation against Israel that officials say could include an attack on American forces.
- In a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Thursday, Biden said the US would “support Israel’s defense against threats,” which would include “new defensive US military deployments,” according to a readout of the call.
- The statement did not detail what new deployments would occur ahead of an anticipated Iranian attack in response to the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
- The USS Wasp amphibious assault ship and several other Navy vessels are currently operating in the Mediterranean Sea. The group includes a Marine expeditionary unit capable of carrying out an evacuation of American citizens from Lebanon if the US ordered such an evacuation.
- The US is expecting the anticipated Iranian attack may be similar to the barrage of ballistic missiles and drones launched against Israel on April 13, officials said. But this attack could be larger and more complicated than before, including the possibility of a coordinated attack with Iranian proxies from multiple directions.
- “Because they have picked a fight with everyone, they don’t know where the response will come from … the response will come separately or coordinated,” Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech Thursday.
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Important Takeaways:
- The number of unlawful crossings by migrants at the US southern border has dropped for the fifth consecutive month, according to official data.
- US Border Patrol agents apprehended around 57,000 migrants along the border in July – the lowest recorded since September 2020.
- The numbers are down significantly from December, when around 250,000 migrants were caught crossing the border.
- President Joe Biden’s administration has credited the decrease to recent actions by him to tackle illegal immigration into the US, an election-year political vulnerability for the Democrats.
- Government data shows that the number of migrants stopped at the US-Mexico border had dropped even before the order.
- Border Patrol recorded 141,000 apprehensions in February, 137,000 in March, 129,000 in April, 118,000 in May and 84,000 in June.
- The figures do not include official border crossings, where the Biden administration has been processing around 1,500 migrants each day through a smartphone app that schedules appointments between migrants and US border agents.
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Important Takeaways:
- Since October 7…. the total of US taxpayer funds donated to Gaza as a reward since the massacre on October 7 to $896 million, or close to a billion dollars.
- A lawsuit, brought in December 2022 and updated in March 2024, by Rep. Ronny Jackson and victims of terror attacks in Israel, alleges that President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken “knowingly and unlawfully” provided more than $1.5 billion in aid to Gaza and the West Bank since taking office. Biden and Blinken have “known for years” that the US aid is providing “material support” for Hamas’ “tunnels, rockets, weapon procurement, and command and control infrastructure,” among other terror structures, the lawsuit stated.
- The Biden administration has sought to have the case dismissed twice but failed. On June 28, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas ruled that the lawsuit can proceed, and that there is evidence the Biden administration continued awarding taxpayer cash to UNRWA even after Congress blocked funding to that group due to its support for Hamas’s military infrastructure.
- In short, the Biden administration has donated less to Sudan and DRC Congo combined, where a total of nearly 50 million people face starvation, than to Gaza, where 2 million people face no such thing. What is going on? And where is Congress?
- According to FBI director Christopher Wray, “the actions of Hamas and its allies will serve as an inspiration the likes of which we haven’t seen since ISIS launched its so-called caliphate years ago.” Iran, officially labeled the world’s leading sponsor of state terrorism by the 2023 US annual Terrorism Report, calls the US “the Great Satan” and continues to vow “Death to America.”
- Blinken casually announced in a July 19 interview that Iran had reduced the time it would need to create sufficient fissile material for a nuclear weapon “to one to two weeks.” He then went on to gaslight the audience by claiming that the Biden administration has been “maximizing pressure on Iran across the board.”
- Why is the Biden administration, under the pretense of “humanitarian aid,” drowning these terrorist enemies of America in US taxpayer money? And what, if anything, is Congress going to do about it?
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Important Takeaways:
- Senior Hamas terrorist Musa Abu Marzouk announced on Tuesday the signing of a Palestinian unity agreement that includes Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction, which rules areas of Judea and Samaria.
- “Today, we sign an agreement, and we say that the path to completing this journey is national unity. We are committed to national unity, and we call for it,” said Abu Marzouk.
- The “Beijing declaration” was signed by 14 Palestinian factions that took part in negotiations hosted by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
- The Islamist group reportedly also gave its blessing to P.A. chief Abbas’s proposal to establish a “government of technocrats” whose primary purpose would be the reconstruction of Gaza after the war prompted by Hamas’s murder of some 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7.
- Hamas is an “essential part of the Palestinian political mosaic,” then-P.A. Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh told world leaders gathered in Qatar in December.
- “We want a situation in which Palestinians are united. … I think it is time that Hamas call the Palestinian president and tell him we’re all united behind you, and you are the legitimate authority of the Palestinian people and we are ready to engage,” Shtayyeh stated at the Doha Forum.
- Amid the unity talks, Shtayyeh submitted the collective resignation of his government last month. Abbas then appointed Fatah loyalist Mohammad Mustafa to fill the prime minister’s role.
- U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has insisted that an “effective and revitalized Palestinian Authority” should ultimately govern Gaza.
- The Biden administration wants the P.A. to assume control of the Strip after Israel’s war against Hamas ends, a move that Jerusalem rejects because of Ramallah’s overt support for terrorism.
- According to recent polls, 89% of Palestinians support establishing a government that includes or is led by Hamas. Only around 8.5% said they favor one controlled exclusively by Fatah.
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Important Takeaways:
- In a statement, the Israeli Government Press Office said:
- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara, last night (Tuesday, 23 July 2024), in Washington, met with US evangelical community leaders.
- The Prime Minister expressed his appreciation to the community leaders for their strong and constant support of Israel but especially in these complicated times.
- Minister Netanyahu heard from them about their prayers for the return of the hostages, the wellbeing of the soldiers and the security of the State of Israel.
- The Prime Minister also thanked the evangelicals for their vigorous activity among the community’s young people to encourage continued support for Israel.
- Prime Minister Netanyahu added that he is well aware of their deep commitment to Israel and how strong their support is for the truth and our common values.
- Netanyahu is set to address Congress on Wednesday afternoon, before meetings with President Joe Biden and (separately, and privately) Vice President Kamala Harris, who is the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.
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