June 28, 2024

Writers use pen names, or pseudonyms, for a variety of reasons. Often, their actual, given names and surnames are less well-known than their adopted ones, as is the case with Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, for one. Their professions and achievements offer clues for identifying their true identities. Using these hints, can you identify […] The post 10 Pen Names More Famous Than Their Authors appeared first on Listverse.

A group of Republican lawmakers is working to strip all DEI programs out of the government through legislation they call the Dismantle DEI Act.  “This bill goes through the federal government and works to remove the officers, the programs” centered on DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion, Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, says.  Cloud and Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, along with 20 other members of Congress, introduced the Dismantle DEI Act to end the use of taxpayer money to fund programs that Cloud says are discriminatory in nature.  DEI programs “make race the very first lens in which you interpret everything,” Cloud said, adding that millions in taxpayer dollars are being spent on something that “produces no value for anyone.”  Cloud joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain how the Dismantle DEI Act would work if passed and enacted. The Texas lawmaker also discusses growing threats along the southern border and how his fellow Texans view the border crisis.  Listen to the podcast below: The post GOP Lawmakers Aim to Strip Government of All DEI Programs appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Not long ago, Snopes, a left-wing “fact-checking” site, finally admitted that former President Donald Trump had never called the neo-Nazis who marched at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 “very fine people.” For years, Democrats, including President Joe Biden, have repeated this false claim. Indeed, Biden, who’s been running for the presidency since 1987, ludicrously told the press in 2019 that the events in Charlottesville, and Trump’s alleged reaction, inspired him to run in 2020. Well, there’s a new Charlottesville every week in America nowadays. They aren’t led by a few hundred Nazi cosplayers, but thousands of Islamists and leftist fellow travelers whose goals are supported by numerous administration officials, congressmen, and newsrooms. In the latest Charlottesville, a mob of pro-Hamas goons showed up in front of a synagogue in the heavily Jewish Pico-Robertson neighborhood in Los Angeles. They wore terror apparel, called for violence against Jews, allegedly beat up a Jewish woman, and impeded people from worshipping. Unlike in November, when a 69-year-old Los Angeles Jewish man was killed after a pro-Hamas “protester” threw a megaphone at his head, no one died. If reports are true, the Los Angeles Police Department ensured that pro-Hamas “protesters” were able to encircle the synagogue and kept Jewish worshippers and counterprotesters out. Only one person was arrested, charged with a misdemeanor for allegedly possessing a “spiked flag”—as one does at a peaceful protest. I wonder if it was a Hamas flag or a Hezbollah one? Many in the media again framed the violence as a clash between anti-Israel and pro-Israel protesters—“Protesters clash outside synagogue in L.A.” or “Fights break out during dueling protests in Pico-Robertson,” and so on. But why do the pro-“Palestine” protesters show up in front of synagogues, Holocaust museums, and the performances of Jewish comedians in the first place? Why do they target Jewish students and Jewish businesses? Pro-Israel protesters don’t show up in front of mosques. Nor do “peace protesters,” who never seem to object to the string of atrocities happening thousands of miles away in the Islamic world—which, unlike most claims regarding Gaza, aren’t concocted. But back to Biden. His very presidency supposedly hinges on the events of Charlottesville, and yet outside the occasional perfunctory denunciations—where he usually reminds everyone of “Islamophobia”—he does nothing. “I condemn the antisemitic protests,” Biden told reporters after anti-Jewish demonstrations at Columbia University a few months ago. “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” Boy, that sounds like the president is saying there are “very fine people” on both sides. Biden’s odious moral relativism is to compare antisemitic, keffiyeh-wearing terror cheerleaders and those who don’t “understand”—or accept—the rationalization for Hamas’ murder and rape of civilians. The truth is Biden, who has repeated fake “genocide” casualty numbers to Muslim audiences, is scared to offend the pro-Hamas faction in his party. And it’s not just words. While Biden’s Justice Department is raiding the homes of pro-life protesters who pray in front of abortion mills or trying to throw elderly anti-abortion activists into prison, it does nothing about the systemic, highly funded, violent antisemitic movement that has erupted on campuses. While Attorney General Merrick Garland likens the actions of parents who are opposed to COVID-19 restrictions and racist curriculums to “domestic terrorism”—there still hasn’t been a single incident to substantiate his action—he doesn’t have the same designation for pro-Hamas rioters who target synagogues and Jewish businesses. While the Biden administration helps states deal with scary MAGA terrorists who embrace “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism,” it does nothing about the DAs and AGs who let antisemites funded by Qatar do whatever they like. Last week, the Manhattan district attorney let dozens of rioters (not protesters), who occupied and trashed Hamilton Hall, off without any charges. This week, a Jewish couple was allegedly beaten at a Brooklyn elementary school graduation by an Arabic-speaking family—who taunted them with shouts of “Free Palestine!”, “Gaza is Ours!”, and “Death to Israel!” I’m sure the perpetrators have nothing to worry about in NYC. They are perched high on the Left’s victim class hierarchy. It would be nice if there was even a fraction of the anger or coverage of these new Charlottesvilles. But most Democrats aren’t offended by all antisemites. If you insult George Soros, sure, you may be condemned in the pages of The New York Times. If a pro-Hamas mob beats down a Jewish woman, we’re lucky if the paper even reports on the incident. And every time there is a new Charlottesville, it not only affirms why Israel needs to exist—or that “anti-Zionism” and antisemitism are now indistinguishable—it tells us that Jews can’t rely on the contemporary Left to be on their side. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post There’s a Charlottesville Every Week, and Joe Biden Is Fine With It appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Nearly eleven months ago, in August 2023, The New York Times reported that U.S. officials had estimated that some 500,000 Russians and Ukrainians had been killed, wounded, or missing in the then 18-month Ukrainian War. Both Russia and Ukraine underreport their losses. Hundreds of thousands of additional casualties have followed in the 28 months of fighting. In the West, the mere mention of a negotiated settlement is considered a dangerous appeasement of Russia’s flagrant aggression. In Russia, anything short of victory would be seen as synonymous with the collapse of the Putin regime. Yet as the war nears two and a half years this summer, some facts are no longer much in dispute. Controversy still arises over the circumstances of the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. Russia charges that the West engineered the “Revolution of Dignity”—an effort to Westernize the former Soviet republic, to expand the borders of Europe right to the doorstep of Russia, and eventually to fully arm Ukraine as a member of NATO. Westerners counter that most Ukrainians wished to be part of Europe and independent from Russian bullying—and they had a perfect right to ask to join either NATO or the E.U. or both despite anticipated escalating tensions. After the heroic Ukrainian defeat of the 2022 Russian bid to take Kyiv, there have been few significant territorial gains by either side. Like the seesaw bloodbath on the Western Front of World War I, neither side has developed the momentum to force the other to negotiate or grant concessions. As nuclear Russian threats against Europe mount, NATO is seeking to regain deterrence capabilities by boosting defense budgets, incorporating robust front-line nations Sweden and Finland, and uniting over shared concerns about Russian aggression. Many in the U.S. cheer on the conflict as a necessary proxy war to check Russian aggression and bolster NATO’s resistance. But unlike third-party wars during the Cold War, now the Western client, Ukraine, is fighting directly against the chief antagonist of European NATO members. Arming a proxy in a war waged against the homeland of a nuclear adversary is a new and dangerous phenomenon. The West counts on supplying Ukraine with more and better weapons than a richer, larger, and more populous Russia. But Ukraine’s problem is not so much weapons as manpower. Nearly a fourth of Ukraine’s population has fled the country. Ukraine may have suffered some 300,000 causalities. The average age of its soldiers is over 40 years. It already lacks sufficient forces to replay the failed 2023 counteroffensive. The Russian plan of attrition is to wear down and bleed out the Ukrainian people. In a geostrategic sense, the new alignment of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea is starting to gain opportunistic support from illiberal Middle East regimes, Turkey, and the Islamic world in general. The Biden administration’s respective approaches to the Ukraine and Gaza wars continue to be utterly incoherent. It lectures our strongest ally Israel on the need for a cease-fire, proportionality, a coalition wartime cabinet, and the avoidance of collateral damage. The administration considers the terrorist group Hamas almost a legitimate state. However, President Joe Biden and the American diplomatic establishment urge Ukraine to keep fighting without negotiations. They urge Kyiv to seek critical disproportionality through superior weaponry, including hitting strategic targets inside Russia. The U.S. has overlooked the cancellation of Ukrainian political parties and elections by the Zelenskyy administration. America does not seem to care about Ukrainian collateral damage to the borderlands. And it considers the Russian government a near-terrorist state. No one in the West, at least prior to the Russian February 2022 invasion—neither the prior Obama, Trump, and current Biden administrations or the Ukrainian government itself—had considered it even possible to regain by force Crimea and the Donbas absorbed by the Russian invasion of 2014. Add up all these realities, and the only practicable way to avoid another near 1 million dead and wounded would be a settlement, however unpopular. It would entail the formalization of the 2014 Russian absorption of Crimea and Donbas. Russia would then agree to withdraw all its forces to its pre-2022 borders. Ukraine would be fully armed but without NATO membership. Both sides would agree to a demilitarized zone on both sides of the Russian-Ukrainian border. Russia would brag that it prevented its former province from joining NATO while finally institutionalizing its prior incorporation of the Donbas and Crimea. Ukraine would be proud that, like heroic 1940 Finland, it miraculously stopped Russian aggression. It would remain far better armed than at any time in its history and soon enjoy a status similar to that of non-NATO Austria or Switzerland. The deal would anger all parties. But it would make public what most concede privately—and stop the ongoing destruction of Ukraine and the further slaughter of an entire generation of Ukrainian and Russian youth. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Stop the Ukrainian Meat Grinder? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

There was no question about President Joe Biden’s disastrous performance during the first 2024 presidential debate, Thursday night on CNN. Even NBC political director Chuck Todd could not hide his disgust and declared that the President looked like a conservative media “caricature.” Todd referenced a conversation from even before the debate, sharing how there had been a discussion about which “candidate [would] look like the caricature that the other campaign has been trying to paint of them.”  To him, the answer was obvious. “Joe Biden looks like the caricature that conservative media has been painting,” and, this time, there was no hiding behind the White House’s new pet excuse: “cheap fakes.” Todd told NBC co-host Tom Llamas that “You saw it before your eyes.”     He also mentioned a variety of exchanges he had with Democratic Party leaders, both elected and coalition. To Todd, it was clear that support for Biden was waning as a result of the debate: There’s a full-on panic about this performance. Not like, oh, this is recoverable, it is more of a, okay, he’s gotta step aside, there’s a lot of that chatter. This is–this is about as bad of a performance in order to–that Biden could have delivered if his goal was to try to sort of calm the waters among Democrats. Todd further drew attention to polls among Democrats that had already demonstrated their hesitation at a second Biden presidency. He suggested that those numbers would only increase: I mean, look, there was a poll just out earlier this week that showed, you know, a lot of Democrats, it’s not just elected Democrats, rank-and-file Democrats are both supportive of Biden, but think he should not be seeking a second term. I have a feeling we're gonna see more polling on this and we’re gonna see that number even higher. But the panic level particularly among elected Democrats who have to share the ballot with him–there is a full-on panic tonight.  He emphasized that the results of Thursday night’s debate spelled trouble for the Biden campaign, specifically with regards to donors and, again, Democratic leaders. In Todd’s opinion, it was only the tip of the iceberg: Maybe they’ll get calmed down in the morning, but there is gonna be–there’s a lot of chatter among donors tonight, a lot of chatter among major elected leaders tonight. Again, if the Biden campaign–they have a lot of calming calls that they're gonna have to start making. Or they may–they may see this get momentum publicly and I don’t know if they can stop that. The transcript is below. Click "expand" to read: NBC News NOW 6/27/2024 11:05:28 PM EST CHUCK TODD: Look, we began this conversation before this debate. You know, one of the things was would either candidate look like the caricature that the other campaign has been trying to paint of them. And at the end of the day, Joe Biden looks like the caricature that conservative media has been painting, and there were no clips tonight, right? This was–you saw it before your eyes.  Look, I don't want to just tell you what I think here, Tom. I’ve been talking to a lot of leaders in the Democratic Party, elected’s, coalition leaders. There’s a full-on panic about this performance. Not like, oh, this is recoverable, it is more of a, okay, he’s gotta step aside, there’s a lot of that chatter. This is–this is about as bad of a performance in order to–that Biden could have delivered if his goal was to try to sort of calm the waters among Democrats. I mean, look, there was a poll just out earlier this week that showed, you know, a lot of Democrats, it’s not just elected Democrats, rank-and-file Democrats are both supportive of Biden, but think he should not be seeking a second term. I have a feeling we're gonna see more polling on this and we’re gonna see that number even higher. But the panic level particularly among elected Democrats who have to share the ballot with him–there is a full-on panic tonight.  Maybe they’ll get calmed down in the morning, but there is gonna be–there’s a lot of chatter among donors tonight, a lot of chatter among major elected leaders tonight. Again, if the Biden campaign–they have a lot of calming calls that they're gonna have to start making. Or they may–they may see this get momentum publicly and I don’t know if they can stop that. (...)

While it was obvious to all that President Biden’s debate performance Thursday night was an unmitigated disaster that had Democrats scrambling behind the scenes for a new candidate, it wasn’t for CNN’s lack of skewing the debate questions in Biden’s favor. According to a NewsBusters analysis of the questions, there were 11 from the left, seven neutral questions, and only three from the right. Surprisingly, moderator Jake Tapper launched out of the gate with one of the right-leaning questions: Let's start with the issue that voters consistently say is their top concern: the economy. President Biden inflation has slowed, but prices remain high. Since you took office, the price of essentials has increased. For example, a basket of groceries that cost $100 then, now costs more than $120. And typical home prices have jumped more than 30 percent. What do you say to voters who feel they are worse off under your presidency than they were under President Trump?     The next right-leaning question didn’t occur for another 15 minutes. For that one, Dana Bash pointed out that a handful of states and no restrictions on abortion and asked Biden if he supported any limit at all. “Seven states have no legal restrictions on how far into a pregnancy a woman can obtain an abortion. Do you support any legal limits on how late a woman should be able to terminate a pregnancy?” she wondered. Tapper had the third and final question from the right (also for Biden), this one about illegal immigration and crime: President Biden, a record number of migrants have illegally crossed the southern border on your watch, overwhelming border states and overburdening cities such as New York and Chicago, and in some cases causing real safety and security concerns. Given that, why should voters trust you to solve this crisis? Former President Trump did not receive any of the right-leaning questions. NewsBusters counted both age-related questions to the candidates as neutral since poll after poll shows the American people were unhappy and concerned with the candidates’ ages. Also included in the neutral questions were those about what the candidates planned to do about the opioid crisis, something neither candidate seemed prepared to answer. The moderators’ repeated requests for an answer were not counted as questions because they were just asking the candidates to respond to the original one. The same standard was applied to the other instances of that occurring. In addition to questions pushing the liberal policy agenda like climate change and abortion, three of the questions from the left were questions about January 6, accepting the results of the election, or suggesting Trump and his supporters were a threat to democracy. Here’s an example of Tapper teeing up Biden to attack Trump’s supporters: President Biden, you have said, quote, “Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy.” Do you believe that the tens of millions of Americans who are likely to vote for President Trump will be voting against American democracy? The final question of the debate was Bash pressing Trump on if he’d accept the results of the election.

One of the repercussions of President Joe Biden’s catastrophic debate performance is that Vice President Kamala Harris was brought out to do cleanup media. The vice president sat down for an interview on MSNBC, where she and host Rachel Maddow talked mostly about the abortion portions of the debate. Watch as Maddow and Harris seethe over Trump’s citation of former Virginia Governor Ralph Northam’s proposed disposition of newborn survivors of an abortion attempt: RACHEL MADDOW: You know, the issue of former President Trump lying came to the fore on this issue of choice, on this issue of abortion rights in a very pointed way. He kept asserting over and over again that if you are pro-abortion rights or if you want to codify Roe or if you're a critic of the decision to overturn Roe and have these abortion bans then you are a murderer and you want to kill infants, and that what people who are pro-choice are are people who want to kill babies after they are born. And it’s- it’s- it’s- I sometimes say this is Earth Two. This is not a factually based thing at all. But he repeatedly reiterates that. It’s not the moderator's job, though, to fact check that. It’s essentially the other candidate's job to fact check that. I wonder what your thought, strategically, is in terms of countering a counternarrative and lie about abortion rights that’s so obscene and yet so consistently repeated by their side and by their candidate. KAMALA HARRIS: Well, the facts are exactly what are on our side to your point, Rachel. First of all this- what they are talking about is they are attempting, as they are wont to do, especially Donald Trump, create fear based on fiction for the sake of getting and hitting political points. What we know and what he is acutely aware of is what he has done and intended to do is not politically popular with a lot of people in both so-called red states and blue states and so now, you see him wavering. Let's not forget when he was President of the United States, he said that if a national abortion ban was sent to his desk, he would sign it. He said that. As Maya Angela told us a long time ago, when people tell you who they are, take them at their word. Believe them. We know when Donald Trump comes in, if he has a Congress that passes a national abortion ban he will sign it into law. One of the most fundamental issues of our time. As much as Maddow and Harris may choose to seethe over it, Trump was not wrong about late-term abortion. As our colleague Nick Fondacaro noted, this is what Northam actually said: RALPH NORTHAM: So, in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that is what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue. Democrats’ historic resistance to born-alive protections for survivors of abortions is a matter of record. A more recent example of such Democrat initiatives is the so-called “Women’s Health Protection Act”, which passed the last Democrat House and eliminates most restrictions on abortions. This stuff can’t be spun or explained away, no matter how hard they try or how many times they yell “disinformation”. But abortion is the left’s sacred ritual and, after the disastrous debate, Harris had to come in and do cleanup. Given historical norms for vice presidents with regard to presidential debates, it had to have been unsettling for Harris to come on and try to put a spin on Biden’s performance.  

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