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~ Featuring ~
How Did Jews Get Kicked Off the ‘Woke Team’?
THANE ROSENBAUM
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MSNBC reporter stunned by Latino
response to Trump visit to El Paso
by Carlos Garcia
{ theblaze.com } ~ An MSNBC correspondent expressed his bewilderment at the response from El Paso, Texas, resident to a visit from President Donald Trump... in the wake of a horrible racially motivated attack. Jacob Soboroff said that many residents were "surprisingly positive" during the visit from the president on Wednesday. "Jacob, you've been in El Paso, talking to the community," said MSNBC anchor Ali Velshi. "What's the feeling there about the president's visit?" "Well, Ali, given the way that the president has talked about Latinos, and Latinos make up the vast majority of the population of the city of El Paso, surprisingly positive is the way that people are responding here, in the wake of the shooting," Soboroff responded. "I see calls for unity and a great spirit of togetherness," he added. The account for the Trump 2020 campaign posted the video of the comments, but Soboroff objected to the editing of the video that cut out the last part of his report where he said El Paso residents were optimistic despite the president's statements."How about you guys show the rest of the clip instead of this out-of-context distortion?" responded Soboroff..
Why endless wars can’t be ended
by Clifford D. May.
A pause in the battle over the
Cadillac health insurance tax
by Alan D. Viard
{ aei.org } ~ The longstanding battle over the Cadillac health insurance tax entered a pause, after the Senate left for its summer recess without acting on the bill... that the House passed by a 419-6 vote on July 19. As I previously explained, that bill would repeal the Cadillac tax before it takes effect in 2022, depriving the country of a powerful tool to control health care costs. Unfortunately, the momentum for Cadillac tax repeal remains strong. A Senate bill to repeal the tax has drawn 62 sponsors. Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-South Dakota) recently suggested that the Senate move this fall to repeal the Cadillac tax in conjunction with the extension of expired tax provisions.Of course, there has been no change in the economic case for letting the Cadillac tax take effect. The tax would provide an effective, though imperfect, offset to the unwarranted income and payroll tax break enjoyed by high-end employer-provided health insurance plans. On July 29, nearly 100 economists and other policy experts, spanning the political spectrum, came together to oppose Cadillac tax repeal. In a letter to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and Senate minority leader Chuck scumbag-Schumer (D-New York), they urged “Congress to take no action to weaken, delay, or reduce the Cadillac tax until and unless it enacts an alternative tax change that would more effectively curtail cost growth.” In addition to eight scholars in residence at AEI myself among them and scholars at other conservative organizations, the signatories included scholars at the Brookings Institution, the Urban Institute, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Scholars at numerous universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Dartmouth, and the University of Pennsylvania, also signed. As the letter notes, the signatories hold a variety of views on other provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The letter also highlighted the fiscal impact of the House-passed repeal bill, noting that it “would add directly to the federal budget deficit, an estimated $197 billion over the next decade according to the Joint Committee on Taxation.” The fiscal harms would grow over time. The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates that the bill would add a staggering $947 billion to the deficit during its second decade. By voting to repeal the Cadillac tax last month, the House chose to increase health care costs and widen the fiscal imbalance. The Senate will soon decide whether to follow suit. http://www.aei.org/publication/a-pause-in-the-battle-over-the-cadillac-health-insurance-tax/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTlRZd056VXlaRFkwT1dGaiIsInQiOiJzKzRnUEJTakZiK0RQTnJHQjJWekFKT01zVjlLNlk4SG00OFNEK0hvN1AzRm9FUmMyWTFTaW56Rm5SUUtDUW5TeUZEcFhPbkxKbXQ2S1kwaVwvbUlSZnk2N0I0R1FlK3lcLzE5dkdzSWZjZWtlZllNaHlXcjNmdUVKN2F3QUJWTVwvTyJ9 .
Next Generation Of Air Dominance
Will Rely On Sharing Data
By Ben Werner
{ news.usni.org } ~ Developing data links to enable existing aircraft to transfer data with forces at sea and on land could prove to be more critical than crafting new platforms for America’s next air war... experts said on Wednesday. The next generation of air dominance will be a plan that will organize air assets and integrate their abilities into an overall operation involving land, sea, air, space and cyberspace platforms. The key to creating such a system is building capacity for secure data sharing between platforms, service branches and allied nations, said members of a panel speaking Wednesday at the Mitchell Institute. “The next generation of air superiority is a network-connected family of systems that works together to gather things we need to gather,” said Air Force Maj. Gen. David Krumm, the director of global power programs in the office of the assistant secretary of the air force for acquisition, technology and logistics. “It is not one thing; it is a multiple of things.” The Pentagon’s next generation of air superiority already has core elements, namely the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. The aircraft can collect tremendous amounts of data, said Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Jon Davis (ret.), a former deputy commandant for aviation.“Right now the F-35 has incredible sensors,” Davis said. “It is the smartest kid in class and will be the smartest kid in class for some time.” The military needs the F-35 to share the information it gathers, Davis said. This is an engineering challenge the military is working on solving – how to digest the vast amounts of data collected. The goal is for the F-35 and other aircraft to make each other better shooters, but also make the sea and land forces better shooters he said. Nearly three years ago, the Navy and Lockheed Martin tested pairing an F-35B with an Aegis Combat System armed with a Raytheon Standard Missile-6. An Aegis test site at the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, used data from the F-35 to launch an SM-6 anti-air missile at a Beechcraft MQM-107 target representing an adversarial fighter....
Jumbo rates are below conforming rates:
when did this happen and why?
by Stephen D. Oliner, Lynn M. Fisher, Tobias Peter & Mike Fratantoni
{ aei.org } ~ Pre-crisis estimates of the jumbo-conforming spread, utilizing a variety of methodologies, ranged from 10 to 25 basis points... In the post-crisis period, this spread has decreased and has been negative since 2013, indicating a lower rate on jumbo loans. This study re-examines the jumbo-conforming spread in light of market and policy changes, utilizing loan-level data from 2000 to 2017. We show that changes in GSE guarantee fees, movements in the GSE funding advantage, and bank deposit growth – which we use as a proxy for jumbo loan demand – all help explain the variation in the jumbo-conforming spread over this period. The shift from a positive spread before the financial crisis to a negative spread post-crisis is due specifically to a combination of increased bank demand for jumbo loans and higher GSE guarantee fees. Even though the GSE rate advantage has disappeared, some borrowers continue to opt for GSE loans at the conforming limit. The borrowers bunching at the limit likely would not meet the underwriting requirements for a jumbo loan or did not undertake the rate shopping and negotiation required to obtain a substantial jumbo rate advantage. We thank Xudong An and other participants at the 2019 AREUEA International Conference for helpful comments. Dr. Fisher completed this paper while a resident scholar and co-director of the Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute. The views expressed herein are the authors’ alone and do not represent those of the American Enterprise Institute, the Mortgage Bankers Association, the UCLA Ziman Center, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, or the United States... https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Oliner-WP-080719.pdf .
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How Did Jews Get Kicked Off the ‘Woke Team’?
THANE ROSENBAUM
{ jewishjournal.com } ~ “Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles” is more than just a lyric these days on Broadway. The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s absolutely flawless production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” with its stellar cast, lush orchestration, nimble choreography, and sleek minimalist take on the shtetls of yesteryear — all performed in Yiddish with a soulful musicality that makes the actual translation almost unnecessary — is also the source of a puzzling Broadway mystery, and an inconvenient truth.
Who are these actors supposed to be portraying, and what in the world are they speaking?
Surely these are not Jews.
Well, yes, they are, but the confusion is somewhat understandable in this new morning of American “wokeness,” with its heightened awareness of social injustice and indictments of discrimination everywhere. In this universe of automatic virtue bestowed upon anyone with a history of oppression, Jews are, bizarrely, kicked off the team, their privileges suspended all because of their ostensible white privilege.
Indeed, they are now members of fine standing within the patrician white class, indistinguishable from WASPs, not a trace of Ellis Island on their finery and surely not among the steerage class. Jews are no different than upscale voyagers on the Mayflower. Guilty oppressors and not the powerlessly oppressed. Exploiters and never among the plundered. Murderers themselves and not the mass murdered. Craven colonizers of the Middle East, settlers with no ancestral homeland of their own. The cosmopolitan shysters of Western civilization — pronounced guilty of sins that can never be atoned.
Are these actors imposters speaking a foreign tongue that isn’t Hebrew, performing in a Broadway musical that has conjured fictional Jews? They certainly do not in any way resemble how Jews are regarded on American college campuses and on the staffs of assorted intellectual magazines: as white Americans with no discernibly ethnic character, no claim to minority status, or, heaven forbid, historical sympathy. Deserving not even of the benefit of the doubt.
Yes, on Broadway, in the most foreign and feigned of tongues, we are being hoodwinked by Jews who are truly staged. How else to explain that they spend the duration of the play in abject, but good-natured poverty. And even more improbably, they are haunted by violent, riotous pogroms where weddings come to an abrupt end and entire Jewish villages are forced into exile — only one of many such expulsions that they purportedly faced.
Aren’t Jews already “rich men”? What are they singing and complaining about?
In the mythologically intersectional safe space where some now live, the trigger-happy environment where trigger warnings are in abundance and where microaggressions are maximized into war crimes, “Fiddler on the Roof,” in Yiddish no less yet another thing Jews ended up losing along the way, is a historical anomaly if not outright falsehood. In today’s progressive precincts, Jews need not apply for special pleading or inclusion in anything where their very own politics of identity is to be counted and respected.
But here’s the thing: Wokeness includes the experience of Jews living in the Diaspora and in Israel. In both places, they have been persecuted minorities: whether facing the Christian anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust in Europe, the czarist anti-Semitism that led to pogroms in the Pale of Settlement or the communist persecution of Jews in Soviet Russia, and, of course, the Islamic terrorism or Pan-Arab Jew-hatred that has plagued Israel since its existence in 1948 and for centuries before that — yes, when Jews lived in their historic ancestral, biblical homeland. Social injustice and systemic anti-Semitism have been endemic to the Jewish experience — no matter where they have lived.
“Fiddler on the Roof” is a reminder of how difficult it has been historically to put a secure roof over the heads of the Jewish people. Of course, any reasonably informed and intellectually honest person would not need to be reminded that Jews, who surely have thrived in the United States and elsewhere, also still remain, regionally, an ethnic minority everywhere.
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