The Kiffin v. Finebaum beef continues

Bangladesh has carried out ‘a near-total national internet shutdown’

He is suing his alma mater for permitting and perpetuating antisemitism on campus, a Harvard University graduate said Wednesday night at the Republican National Convention. Shabbos Kestenbaum, a first-generation American and Orthodox Jew, told delegates from the convention stage that after Hamas’ brutal terrorist attacks Oct. 7 inside Israel, he placed 1,200 Israeli and American flags on Harvard’s campus in honor of the dead.  The flags “were all vandalized within 24 hours,” his peers harassed him for being a Jew, and he received death threats online, Kestenbaum, 25, said in Milwaukee as one of the “everyday Americans” featured each night at the GOP convention. “Students and professors [at Harvard] have openly called for new, Hamas-style attacks against the United States,” he said.   It was “perhaps most damning,” Kestenbaum said, that Harvard refused to condemn the Oct. 7 attacks “when Hamas terrorists butchered 45 American citizens” and “took 12 Americans hostage.”  Having voted once before for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for president, the Harvard graduate said, he now sees how the radical Left has abandoned both the Jewish people and most Americans.  Kestenbaum said the Democratic Party he registered to vote for on his 18th birthday “has become ideologically poisoned,” and that poison is contaminating too many American students. He said he went to Harvard to study religion—the foundation of Western civilization—but found “not theology, but a contempt for it.” He said he was in an environment that was “anti-Western,” “anti-American,” and “antisemitic.”    His problem with Harvard “is not its liberalism, but its illiberalism” and the fact that Harvard students “are taught not how to think, but what to think,” Kestenbaum told the crowd in Fiserv Forum. He said that “far-left, antisemitic extremism has no virtue, and the radicalism on our campuses and on our streets has no moral legitimacy.” Kestenbaum proclaimed his support for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his “policies to expel foreign students who violate our laws, harass our Jewish classmates, and desecrate our freedoms.”  Kestenbaum concluded his speech by encouraging Americans to elect a president who understands that Jews never will abandon the United States “because Jewish values are American values and American values are Jewish values.” The post Jewish Harvard Grad Decries Campus Antisemitism in Speech to GOP Convention appeared first on The Daily Signal.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The Biden administration announced Thursday it would forgive $1.2 billion in student debt held by 35,000 public service workers. President Joe Biden will have forgiven $168.5 billion across 4.76 million student loan borrowers following the most recent round of debt relief, according to the Department of Education. The billions in debt relief comes as the president lags in the polls behind former President Donald Trump and as he faces calls from within his party to drop out of the presidential election due to perceived electoral weakness. Some Republicans have criticized the Biden administration’s debt forgiveness programs as a ploy to provide financial incentives to vote for them. “It’s clear there is vote buying going on at a scale we’ve never seen before,” North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican, said during a CNN interview in May. “Citizens understand those are like free election payoffs. Those are like ‘Hey, folks, please vote for us because we’re relieving your debt.’ At what point does it cross over from programs like student debt [forgiveness] to just vote buying?” The White House, however, contends that student debt relief is a useful mechanism to “ensure higher education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to opportunity,” according to a Thursday press release. Debt forgiven under Thursday’s order will apply to beneficiaries who qualify under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, a nearly two-decade-old initiative that was expanded under the Biden administration to make it easier for government employees to qualify for relief, according to The Washington Free Beacon. Nonprofit employees, teachers, nurses, law enforcement officials, and first responders are among those covered by the PSLF, Axios reported. Prior to the Biden administration, only about 7,000 people had received relief through the PSLF since 2007, according to Axios. That total has surged to 946,000 under Biden. Though the Supreme Court blocked Biden’s flagship student loan relief program in June 2023, the president has still managed to cancel billions of dollars in debt by diverting overhauling existing programs like the PSLF, CNN reported. The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post Biden Wipes Out Another $1.2 Billion in Student Debt as He Fights to Stay in 2024 Race appeared first on The Daily Signal.

This week, Donald Trump officially becomes the Republican nominee. Soon, he is likely to again be president, according to the most accurate predictions, which come from people who put their money where their mouths are—people who bet. They currently give Trump a 67% chance of winning. President Joe Biden’s chances have fallen below 20%. This is good news to those of us who fear America is gradually being strangled by ever-increasing regulations. Trump promises to get rid of bad rules. “Remove the anchor dragging us down!” he said. “We’re going to cancel every needless job-killing regulation!” Trump was a developer, so he knew about the thicket of rules that often make it nearly impossible to get things done. But Republicans routinely talk about deregulation and then add rules. The media called George W. Bush the “anti-regulator.” But once Bush was president, he appointed thousands of new regulators. Trump was different. Once in office, he hired regulation skeptics. He told government agencies: Get rid of two regulations for every new one you add! But they didn’t. Growth of regulation slowed under Trump, but it still increased. Still, I think Trump’s anti-regulation attitude was why stock prices rose and unemployment dropped. He sent a message to businesses: Government will no longer crush you! Businesses then started hiring more people. Of course, the media weren’t happy. Reporters love regulation. The New York Times ran the headline, “Donald Trump Is Trying to Kill You”! Regulation advocates don’t understand that regulations’ unintended side effects often outweigh the good the regulation was supposed to do. Cars built smaller (to comply with Democrats’ rules that require increased gas mileage) kill people. That’s because smaller cars provide less protection in crashes. “Should the government tell you what kind of car to buy?” complained Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform in a video I made about Trump. Norquist says that Trump largely kept his deregulation promise, and that was great for America. For example, Trump repealed the Obama-era plan to classify franchise businesses like McDonald’s as one single business. Why was that good? “Trial lawyers want to be able to sue all McDonald’s, not just the local McDonald’s, if they spill coffee on themselves,” says Norquist. “Labor unions want to unionize all McDonald’s, not just one store. That would have been a disaster.” Trump’s Federal Communications Commission repealed Barack Obama’s “net neutrality” rules, which slowed the growth of internet options by limiting providers’ freedom to charge different prices. Democrats screamed. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., tweeted that repeal would mean “the end of the internet as we know it.” Instead, none of the terrible things predicted (they’ll cut you off!) happened. Innovation continued. The internet just got better. Yet now the Biden administration wants net neutrality reinstated. It also wants to ban election betting, the useful mechanism that gives us better predictions about the future, and the election odds I quoted above. Regulators give their repression nice names to make their rules sound valuable: Today they propose a Data Privacy Protection Act, a Cybersecurity Resilience Act, Fair Lending For All Act, etc. “The names for these regulations are written by regulators,” laughs Norquist. “They’re advertisements for themselves,” He jokes that regulators should, like drug companies, list side effects of their rules: “May cause unemployment, reduce wages, raise the cost of energy … .” Trump’s deregulation record would be better if he hadn’t added new regulations, like tariffs, at the same time. “Trump is a protectionist in many ways,” says Norquist, sadly. “Tariffs are taxes, and regulations on the border are regulations on consumers.” When Trump took office, he announced, “We have cut 22 regulations for every one new regulation!” But it’s not true. America’s deep state is hard to fight. Many of the 22 million Americans who work for government think they’re not doing their job if they don’t regulate more. Despite Trump’s promises, he left America with more regulations than we had when he took office. I hope a future President Trump will cut his tariffs and agricultural subsidies, and kill the Export-Import Bank, drug prohibition, and thousands of other rules that do more harm than good. Every repealed regulation is a step toward freedom. COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Trump’s Deregulatory Promises, Past and Future appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Team Biden Nukes Obama, Schumer, Pelosi: They Gave Us Trump in 2016!

Morning Joe Retreats: Get Biden Out of the Race

HotAir Live Blogs the RNC Grand Finale - Make America Great Again!

With President Biden’s Wednesday Covid diagnosis and growing questions about his competence taking top billing over the Republican National Convention on Thursday morning, ABC, CBS, and NBC didn’t mince words in burying Biden by observing this “coordinated” push by other Democrats to force him out was reminiscent of a famous scene from A Few Good Men and deployed a term they’d repeatedly invoke to suggest Trump was toast: “The walls are closing in”! ABC’s Good Morning America co-host and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos has already made his true feelings known about Biden on a hidden camera, so it was no surprise when he bleakly told viewers of Biden “testing positive for Covid” and “facing mounting pressure from the top congressional Democrats...to leave the race”.     Senior White House correspondent Selina Wang was more generous toward the man she covers, but not before lamenting “[t]his could not have come at a worse time for President Biden” as he had “been on the campaign trail trying to prove he has the stamina to stay in this race, but now all of that is on hold as calls for him to drop out grow louder.” After a mundane blow-by-blow of Wednesday, Wang conceded his “support among democratic leadership is now crumbling”, but closed with some happy talk for this still supporting Biden:  Most Democratic lawmakers are standing by President Biden. Only 21 have publicly called on the President to step aside and their effort to replace Biden is running out of time. The party is planning to hold a virtual roll call to nominate the President in early August and this decision to step aside — it is the President’s to make and it is his alone.  Speaking a few minutes later with chief Washington correspondent Jonathan Karl, Stephanopoulos dropped the “walls” quote: “Jon, we have to begin with President Biden. Boy, the walls are closing in on him.” Karl didn’t disagree, blurting out, “oh, they sure are, George” before laying out his reporting that “Senator Chuck Schumer over the weekend...visited one-on-one with President Biden and very directly, very bluntly told him that it would be bad...if he stayed in the race.” Karl claimed that was reported “first here on ABC”, but was actually shared a day earlier by our friends at the Rutheless variety progrum. “I just don’t see how it is tenable for — for Joe Biden to continue as the — as the Democratic nominee, President — and Democratic nominee in 2024,” Karl added. The two further slammed Biden by pointing out “a majority of Democrats polling — in polling shows that a majority of Democrats now want him to leave the race” and his campaign’s fundraising has not only “completely dr[ied] up”, but “stopped” where it seems as though this will be “very hard to sustain”. NBC’s Today wasn’t even better. Not sitting on the set of Biden’s favorite show, Morning Joe, where he’s a co-host, Willie Geist told it straight: “A rollicking show of unity there Milwaukee for Republicans, as questions are raised now about the political future among Democrats of the President of the United States.” Senior White House correspondent Gabe Gutierrez described Biden’s Covid test as having arrived “at a devastating time for the President” and “threatens to intensify Democrat’s anxiety about his health as he faces calls to leave the race.” Gutierrez also noticed Biden’s gait in observing he “slowly boarded Air Force One” and touted the litany of leaks from leading Democrats. Co-host Savannah Guthrie — who’s married to a Democratic strategist and Gore 2000 campaign official — correctly diagnosed that if “you look at the — the events unfolding yesterday, nothing happens by accident” and thus “felt coordinated and calculated.” Making the movie reference, Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker agreed and argued that, “when you take it all together and the fact that no one is denying these stories, Savannah, it’s as good as all of them basically saying, yes, we did order the code red” Like Stephanopoulos and Karl, they also brought up the money crunch as likely to play a role in whether Biden stays or goes. CBS Mornings didn’t have zingers, but they didn’t go any easier on Biden. Co-host Tony Dokoupil said Biden’s “new setback” in the form of Covid was made worse by footage of him “seem[ing] to struggle to board Air Force One, another scrutinized moment, renewing those big questions about his future as a candidate.” Correspondent Nikole Killion also spotlighted Biden’s trouble walking: “The President took his time coming down the stairs of the plane, pausing to look around and holding on to the railing. He then slowly made his way into the car, appearing to struggle as he climbed in.” Dokoupil and correspondent Ed O’Keefe later discussed how this is not how the opposing party would want their counter-programming of the other party’s convention to look like (click “expand”): DOKOUPIL: You know, Ed, you don’t want to counter-program in quite the way Democrats are — O’KEEFE: No. DOKOUPIL: — against the Republican National Convention, but counter-programming it is. We hear Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi potentially making moves behind the scenes when it comes to Joe Biden in the race. O’KEEFE: There was a congressman who texted me yesterday and said, “Could we have one day without bad news this week?” I mean, it’s been that incredibly terrible for them, frankly. We do know that the two top congressional leaders, Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer — and Nancy Pelosi now — have all said to him, essentially, “There’s a potential you’re gonna lose. We’re gonna lose dozens of House races, handful of Senate races, and lose total control of Washington. That message has been conveyed. His team knows that. They understand it. They’ve seen the polling, but he’s not going anywhere. There is no plan for him to leave. There is no plan for an alternative schedule at the Democratic National Convention. Wilmington, or his campaign headquarters as we say, his team, essentially, says, this has been a bad stretch. We’re gonna come out of this. We’re gonna have our convention, you’re gonna see our stars. The President’s going to be talking about different proposals. We mentioned, for example, the Supreme Court changes, proposals to cap rent across the country, things that speak to the voters that Democrats — DOKOUPIL: Yeah. O’KEEFE: — need to turn out in November. And if they can do that, they believe things will rebound. DOKOUPIL: Well, a bad stretch. There’s not that much stretch left. To see the relevant transcripts from July 18, click here (for ABC), here (for CBS), and here (for NBC).

We now have, as we would expect, a tsunami of commentary regarding the horrible assassination attempt on Donald Trump. It is not trivial to observe that at least the good news is that just about everyone agrees what happened is very bad and not an encouraging sign about the state of our nation. After that point of agreement, we have many different and diverging opinions about who or what is to blame. Republicans, Democrats, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, etc., etc. This act of violence against Donald Trump is, unfortunately, not a one-off in our nation today. Rarely do we open the news and not read about murders, too often mass murders, to which we cannot even clearly ascribe a motive except that of a deranged individual looking for the supreme venting of his or her frustrations. What strikes home about an assassination attempt of a political leader is not just the public position of the individual, but that we know who the victim is. We may be moved by news and statistics. But once a human face is put on a tragedy, once it is no longer just a dry statistic, it takes on a different dimension. Once the human condition is before us, we start asking serious questions. I believe Donald Trump was honest and sincere in his Truth Social post saying that “it was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening.” The late Claremont Institute scholar Harry V. Jaffa noted the importance of understanding the words in the Constitution’s preamble, that its purpose is to “secure the blessings of liberty.” “A blessing,” writes Jaffa, is “what is good in the eyes of God. It is a good whose possession — by the common understanding of mankind — belongs properly only to those who deserve it.” And Jaffa continues to remind us that the founders concluded the Declaration of Independence saying, “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the Protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” I regularly reference Gallup polling that points to the percentage of Americans satisfied with the way things are going in the country. Today it is barely more than 20%. Most Americans feel there is something very wrong in our nation. It is my great hope that what will come out of all this is a renewed sense that human freedom, the ideal on which our nation is founded, is rooted in the sacred. Each human life is unique so each must be free to live and express and do what no one else can. And it is my hope that a renewed sense of the sacred will inspire personal humility that comes from appreciation that each of us is part of something greater than ourselves. And that this will inspire respect for others, knowing that each one is created in the image of God. This, I hope, will stop the blame game and inspire everyone to double down in taking personal responsibility for a better world. And that our sense of the sacred will extend to and include that magical moment when life is first conceived in the womb. Abraham Lincoln gave his second inaugural address just 41 days before he was assassinated. He spoke to a nation that could not have been more divided. Let’s learn from Lincoln’s great closing words that day. “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Star Parker is president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and host of the weekly television show “Cure America with Star Parker.” Her recent book, “What Is the CURE for America?” is available now. To find out more about Star Parker and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.