Wednesday, November 02, 2016


Democrat Corruption is Much Worse Than Trump



In a hilarious 1996 episode of The Simpsons, evil reptilian aliens Kang and Kodos dress up as Bob Dole and Bill Clinton and run for president by way of taking over Earth. Homer arrives in the nick of time to reveal that the candidates are really horrifying monsters. As the crowd screams, one of the aliens cries triumphantly: "It's true! We are aliens! But what are you going to do about it? It's a two-party system! You have to vote for one of us!" The crowd murmurs disconsolately: "He's right! It is a two-party system!"

Many of us feel the show was an uncanny prediction of the election we're in right now. So I have nothing but compassion and understanding for #NeverTrumpers like Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens, who wrote a column this week entitled "My Former Republican Party":

I grew up with parents who liked the old line that they didn’t leave the Democratic Party—the Democratic Party left them.... Now it’s my turn to watch the Republican Party drift away.
Stephens expresses his wholly understandable disappointment in the Trumpian GOP's abandonment of free trade, generosity toward immigrants, a muscular foreign policy and an insistence on decency and character.

Yet if Trump is Kang, I can't help but feel that Kodos is still much worse.

This week the Journal revealed that Clinton crony Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe— no stranger to suspicious fund-raising irregularities — funneled more than half a million dollars to the unsuccessful state senate campaign of the wife of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. McCabe, whom the Journal describes as FBI Director James Comey's "right-hand man," was deeply involved in the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server — an investigation that found Mrs. Clinton in clear violation of the law but unindictable because... well, just because. Fortunately, Mr. McCabe has investigated himself and found himself completely innocent of any wrongdoing!

What makes this even more disgusting is the FBI and the Justice Department's decision to convict retired four star Marine Corps General James Cartwright, a hero with a storied career, who lied about sharing some classified information with reporters in an attempt to protect other information he deemed more important. Cartwright is facing up to five years in the slammer. As U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein said: “People who gain access to classified information after promising not to disclose it must be held accountable when they willfully violate that promise.”

Wow.

Only Trump Has a Chance to Bring the Country Together - and It's Slight

Add to this, a top story in the New York Times, a former newspaper, saying our blandly sinister Attorney General Loretta Lynch is unhappy with her department's failure to bring charges against the police who arrested Eric Garner. Garner, you'll remember, was busted for selling illegal cigarettes, and died after an arresting officer put a chokehold on him. Thus:

The Justice Department has replaced the New York team of agents and lawyers investigating the death of Eric Garner, officials said, a highly unusual shake-up that could jump-start the long-stalled case and put the government back on track to seek criminal charges.

Federal authorities have been investigating whether officers violated Mr. Garner’s civil rights in his fatal encounter with the police. But the case had been slowed by a dispute because federal prosecutors and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials in New York opposed bringing charges, while prosecutors with the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department in Washington argued there was clear evidence to do so.

In other words, if you don't get the politically correct decision you want, fire the investigators. It stinks — almost as badly as the Clinton investigation and the Cartwright conviction. But then what do you expect of the administration — and the party — that gave us the first attorney general ever to be held in contempt of Congress for his stubborn cover-ups of obvious incompetence and wrongdoing?

Where once the Democrat Party called for jail time for men like Donald Segretti, a Nixon political operative who did four months for some silly dirty campaign tricks, today they shrug off verified reports that Clinton operatives incited violence at Trump rallies and pulled off nasty stunts at the instigation of the candidate herself. Why should such nonsense even make the news, when journalists have given a pass to a corrupt IRS, a corrupted FBI, and a Justice Department with no commitment to justice?

If, as Stephens writes, the Trumpian GOP has lost track of its principles, the Democratic Party has no principles left to lose. It is filthy to its core — and at that core is Hillary Clinton. In the end, she's the one they're protecting. She's the one it's all about. And she's the one this dirty bureaucracy will gladly serve if she wins the White House.

Donald Trump may be no prize as a candidate or a human being, but at least he is not sitting at the heart of the party that has corrupted even our highest instruments of law and justice. Better the devil who does not know the devils we know.

SOURCE

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What Have Democrats Done for Blacks?

Nothing good, and it's time more voters realized it

While politics is about policies and the role and scope of government, politicians' appeal to voters is the critical aspect of those proposals in winning elections. This reality created the class-driven politics of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt era and the 1960s-identity politics that we still see today.

In this presidential cycle, identity politics continue with emphasis on the women’s vote, the Hispanic vote and the black vote as opportunities to tickle the ears of these voting blocs with specific messages and promises. Without question, Democrats have excelled in controlling these demographics for decades due to skillful manipulation of issues that create victims of whichever group needs rescuing while painting Republicans as misogynists, racists and bigots. Democrats always present their solutions through the lens of government control, even to the point of becoming a ward of the state, in contrast to Republicans who offer personal achievement and responsibility yielding individual freedoms and prosperity. Yeah, who’d want that, right?

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has approached the black vote just like he’s approached every other aspect of his campaign — vacant of nuance or poll-tested phrases. Instead, Trump directly challenged black voters: What do you have to lose?

He made a speech last week offering his plan for black Americans based on “three promises: safe communities, great education and high-paying jobs.” True to less-than-articulate form, The Donald told a Toledo, Ohio, rally, “And we’re going to work on our — ghettos…” He continued to note these areas to have “so many horrible, horrible problems — the violence, the death, the lack of education, no jobs.”

Naturally, Hillary Clinton’s Leftmedia apparatus latched onto the politically incorrect word “ghetto” so as to charge Trump with racism.

Not even a year ago, calling attention to “too many communities, from Baltimore to St. Louis to Oakland to Memphis to Chicago” a Dec. 10, 2015, CNN article noted the “need for reconstruction in impoverished urban areas” citing the dismal situation in Chicago where “a quarter of black adults and half of black youth are unemployed, about 50 public schools have closed in recent years, along with more than 70 grocery stores and dozens of businesses.” Continuing in the piece written by Wayne Drash and Bill Kirkos, “There are more jobs to be had in the ghetto than there are people.”

Oh, wait! That was Jesse Jackson admonishing Barack Obama and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — both Democrats — for failing to address key issues in the black community, while using the same term “ghetto.”

Funny, isn’t it? Two men use the term “ghetto,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “a part of a city in which members of a particular group or race live usually in poor conditions.” One is mocked and framed as an out-of-touch man of white privilege and the other makes his living keeping black voters on the take. Actually, that’s not funny. It’s pathetic and outrageous.

What have Americans whose skin at birth has more melanin gained from the Democrats? Even though history documents the true home of racial violence, such as the Ku Klux Klan, is the Democrat Party, while the earliest elected blacks were in the Republican Party, let’s just focus on the years of the first black president and the hard data.

Per the U.S. Census, the poverty rate of black children in 2015 was 32.9%, an improvement from 35.7% when Barack Obama took office in January 2009. During that same window of time, the number of white children born into poverty has fallen from 17.7% to 17.2%. Looking at seniors, Caucasian 65-year-olds have lived in poverty at a rate that fluctuated at 7.5%. For black seniors, 19.5% were in poverty when Obama was sworn in with a reduction to 18.4% last year.

For unemployment, the black unemployment rate was at 12.7% in January 2009 and peaked at 16.8% in March 2010, adjusted to remove those who had given up looking or were underemployed. In September 2016, black unemployment was recorded at 8.3%. For white adults, however, the unemployment rate has consistently been about half that of blacks.

Relative to more subjective characteristics, the turmoil within the urban communities in the grips of gang activity and the economy of illicit drug sales is raging. As Jesse Jackson declared in December of last year, Democrats have failed “to address blighted inner cities and renew hope for black America.”

The greatest hope the inner-city family should cling to in the candidacy of Donald Trump is his support of school choice that frees children trapped by a zip code in failing schools instead of the protected mediocrity enforced by educrats and their school union cartel — a cartel endorsed by the NAACP. Trump promises choice where money follows the child to the school of their choosing. What a concept!

Trump has been blunt. Specifically, he has declared to black voters, “My vision rests on a principle that has defined this campaign: America First…”

Citing the role of black Americans in defending our great nation in battle and beliefs, Trump strides headlong into the fact that all citizens of this nation are his priority — Americans, not illegal immigrants who are sought by corporatists to drive down their cost of labor and compete for entry-level and lower-skilled jobs. That disproportionately harms blacks. “I promise that under a Trump administration the law will be applied fairly, equally and without prejudice,” the GOP nominee offers.

Wow. Think of that. “There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.” Those were once the lofty campaign words of Barack Obama. As Sun Tzu described an impotent king, his words paint the likes of Obama and many in black leadership, “The King is only fond of words, and cannot translate them into deeds.

SOURCE

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Soda Tax Nonsense

Soda-tax advocates in San Francisco and Oakland are making a final push for ballot measures—Proposition V and Measure HH, respectively—that would impose a one-cent-per-ounce tax on soda and other sugar-sweetened drinks. For anyone who passed Econ 101, the advocates’ propaganda is sure to leave a bad aftertaste.

Independent Institute Senior Fellow Lawrence J. McQuillan has noted the economic ignorance on display when they claim the tax would burden only distributors, not consumers. Now Independent Institute Research Director William F. Shughart II and Strata Policy Analyst Josh T. Smith are calling them out for touting a fatally flawed study of beverage consumption after Berkeley enacted a similar soda tax. Ironically, the study itself cautions against applying its findings to other cities.

“The fundamental scientific problem with the study,” Shughart and Smith write, “is that it required people in a nonrandom, street intercept survey to recall and compare their pretax and post-tax drinking habits.” Such informal surveys, the two economists note, are highly vulnerable to their respondents’ hazy memories and tendency to placate their interviewers. Moreover, Shughart and Smith write, “it simply is inconceivable that the tax will have perceptible effects on obesity, tooth decay, or any other health problem.”

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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