Left's Latest Demand: Race-Based Reparations

Race is the Left's unending obsession

Having embraced "Medicare-for-all," free college tuition and a Green New Deal that would mandate an early end of all oil, gas and coal-fired power plants, the Democratic Party's lurch to the left rolls on.

Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren both called last week for race-based reparations for slavery.

"Centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, legal discrimination and segregation, and discrimination that exist today have led to a systemic wealth gap between black and white Americans," Harris told The New York Times. "I'm serious about taking an approach that would change policies and structures and make real investments in black communities."

Echoed Sen. Warren: "We must confront the dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination in this country." This history has crippled "the ability of black families to build wealth in America for generations."

That black Americans are handicapped by their history in this country, and cannot accumulate wealth as easily, and require compensatory reparations for slavery and segregation, is more than a controversial assertion.

Are the Democrats going to say this in their national platform in 2020? And how much will be the rest of America be forced to pay, and for how long?

Warren says Native Americans, too, must be "part of the conversation." Apparently, they suffer from a similar handicap and need the same reparations.

How far and fast has the Democratic Party lunged leftward? In 2016, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders all rejected reparations.

Have Warren and Harris thought this through?

The questions that instantly arise are: Who would qualify as a beneficiary of reparations, and who would pay the immense transfer sums involved?

In 1860, there were 4 million slaves in 15 states and D.C. There are 45 to 50 million African-Americans in the USA today.

Would all black Americans, even the middle class and affluent, be entitled to reparations? How would the government go about proving that folks living here today had ancestors in slavery before 1865?

Do we, as Warren did to prove her Native American ancestry, conduct a DNA test? Do we consult Ancestry.com for every applicant for reparations?

The last 50 years have seen many marriages between blacks and whites. Would the children of such marriages qualify for reparations?

Barack Obama, whose mother was a white teenager and father was a Kenyan, would not qualify. But would wife Michelle and daughters Sasha and Malia?

Harris's mother was from India, her father from Jamaica, where the British abolished slavery in the mid-1830s. But if the father had ancestors who were enslaved in Jamaica, would the senator qualify, or do reparations go only to the descendants of slaves within the USA?

While a higher percentage of African-Americans than whites are poor, there are more white poor than black poor in the USA. Does not endemic poverty produce the same negative consequence regardless of race?

What is the justice in excluding poor whites, or poor Asians and Hispanics, whose ancestors were not here in the USA when slavery existed before 1865?

From 1845 to 1849, the Irish fled a potato famine that persisted under the indifferent rule of the same British who introduced slavery into what became the United States.

As for the great migration of Eastern and Southern Europeans — Poles, Italians, Jews, Slavs, Slovaks — slavery was gone before they arrived. They had nothing to do with instituting Jim Crow. Why should they pay reparations?

Asians and Hispanics were a tiny fraction of the U.S. population as late as 1960, when segregation was being outlawed everywhere, but they are more than 75 million Americans today.

Should they be made to pay for sins their ancestors did not commit?

Warren took a DNA test to prove she was partly American Indian, as she put down on various legal forms. Would her less than 1 percent of Indian DNA be sufficient to provide her with reparations for America's Indian wars?

If slavery and segregation explain the disparity in wealth between black and white in the U.S., what explains the equally wide disparity in wealth between Hispanics and Asians?

Politically, the party of slavery, secession and segregation was the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Wilson and FDR, who put a Klansman on the Supreme Court — the Democratic Party. It was the Republican Party that was formed to contain and end slavery, and did.

One need not be a cynic to suspect Warren's motivation. Her claim to be an American Indian angered Native Americans, and she would like to mollify them, and ingratiate herself with African-Americans, who constitute more than 60 percent of all Democratic voters in the crucial South Carolina Primary.

By pushing for compensatory reparations, Warren and Harris may be helping themselves, but they are further splitting their party along the lines of ethnicity and race and elevating an issue certain to divide their country more than it already is.

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The Left Hates Children
   
The Left hate everyone.  Karl Marx hated his own mother and Lenin had most of his fellow Bolsheviks put to death

In recent days, little children and teenagers have been all over Capitol Hill. They were being used as props in a campaign to pass radical legislation that we are told will stop climate change.

These children have been told that they are all going to die in 12 years unless the “adults” in Congress completely turn life upside down as we know it. No more air travel. No more hamburgers. No more fossil fuels. But lots and lots of big government controlling what little would be left of our economy.

Oh, by the way, there would be no more children either.

The darling of the progressive left, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), discussed in a recent Instagram video the “legitimate question” of whether we should even have children given the damage done to the planet.

Using frightened children to advocate for socialism and something more barbaric than China’s “one child policy” would be bad enough. But Senate progressives managed to outdo AOC with a vote Monday night essentially allowing fourth trimester abortions.

I know there are only three trimesters in pregnancy. But the left is now arguing for the right to kill a baby if it manages to escape the womb alive.

The vote on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act was 53-to-44. Fifty out of fifty-three Republicans voted for the bill. (Due to travel delays, three Republican senators were unable to vote.) But even with their support, the bill still would have failed to overcome the 60-vote threshold needed to defeat the Democrat filibuster.

Just to be clear, the bill did not limit abortion in any way. It simply declared that a born baby is entitled to legal protection and medical care; that infanticide is not acceptable in this country. Incredibly, 44 out of 47 Democrats, including every announced or likely Democrat presidential candidate in the Senate, seem to believe it is.

Remember back in 2008 when Pastor Rick Warren asked Barack Obama, “When does a baby get human rights?” Obama couldn’t answer the question then. Sadly, 44 senators couldn’t answer it Monday night.

This is where the slippery slope of abortion has taken us: We are now debating whether a born baby has any rights at all.

Trump Responds

President Trump was quick to respond, tweeting Monday night:

“Senate Democrats just voted against legislation to prevent the killing of newborn infant children. The Democrat position on abortion is now so extreme that they don’t mind executing babies AFTER birth.

"This will be remembered as one of the most shocking votes in the history of Congress. If there is one thing we should all agree on, it’s protecting the lives of innocent babies.”

Once again, this president is showing a willingness to fight on values issues. No one had to pressure Trump to issue a statement following the vote. And I guarantee you that none of the “professional” GOP consultants would have written THAT statement.

Thank you, Mr. President, for boldly defending the sanctity of life.

Meanwhile, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) tweeted this after Monday night’s vote:

“Republican politicians just tried (and failed) again to score political points at the expense of women. Enough. Women and their doctors should decide what’s best for their health — not the @SenateGOP.”

Read that again, and remind yourself that we’re talking about a baby outside the womb.

The woman who wants to be president thinks it is a matter of the woman’s health to kill the baby outside of the womb. At that point, Senator Warren, it’s not about the woman’s health anymore. It’s about the baby’s life.

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Protect Life Rule Is Good News for America
   
The Trump administration has taken another critically important step in strengthening the moral health of our nation, and hence our future.

The Department of Health and Human Services has issued the Protect Life Rule, stopping the flow of Title X federal funds to family planning clinics that perform abortions or do abortion referrals.

It also requires that clinics receiving Title X funds be “physically and financially” separate from any entity providing abortions.

This puts a stop to organizations like Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, from claiming that, although they perform abortions, Title X funds they receive are used for other purposes.

Estimates are that this rule will reduce federal funding flowing to Planned Parenthood by some $60 million.

The Title X program was enacted in 1970, as part of the Public Health Service Act, to provide family planning assistance, primarily to low-income families.

In 2018, $286,479,000 was appropriated to this program.

Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., chairman of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, notes that Title X funds were “never” meant to fund abortions services. Given that the program was enacted three years before abortion was legalized nationwide as result of Roe v. Wade, his case is convincing.

A Planned Parenthood spokesperson attacked this rule-making, saying that “the Trump-Pence administration has aggressively targeted the … rights and bodily autonomy of people of color.”

There was a time in our nation’s history when the rights and bodily autonomy of people of color were aggressively violated.

But as vile a sin slavery was, those that committed it did so by choice. Americans who wanted no part of it weren’t forced to participate as slave owners.

This isn’t the case when taxpayer funds are channeled by the federal government to abortion providers.

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9th Circus gets another Trump-picked judge, after White House bypasses consultation with Dems

Once again the Dems have shot themselves in the foot.  They abused the blue slip system to delay confirmations and now they have lost it

Senate confirms President Trump's nominee to be a judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals 53-46 in a party-line vote
The Senate confirms President Trump's nominee Eric Miller to be a judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals 53-46 in a party-line vote.

The Senate on Tuesday confirmed President Trump's nominee to be a judge on the liberal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in a party-line vote -- and, in a historic snub, the White House ignored the input of the judge's two Democratic home-state senators in the process.

The aggressive and unprecedented move to bypass the traditional "blue slip" consultation process and plow ahead with the confirmation comes as the Trump administration seeks to systematically erode left-wing dominance on the key appellate court, which Trump has called "disgraceful" and politically biased.

The new 9th Circuit judge, Seattle attorney Eric Miller, was confirmed 53-46. Miller was one of the 51 federal judicial nominees left over from the previous Congress whom the White House re-nominated last month.

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The Federal Government’s Great American Cheese Stockpile

In the 1930s, the U.S. federal government established dairy subsidies to bail out America’s dairy farmers from the Great Depression. Managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, those same subsidies are still in effect today, where they have underwritten a massive surplus of milk in the U.S. dairy industry that far exceeds the appetites of over 327 million Americans to consume it.

But rather than reduce the subsidies to reduce the surplus to more reasonable levels, the USDA is instead paying the U.S. dairy industry to make billions of pounds of cheese from the millions and millions of gallons of surplus milk. According to Emily Moon’s reporting at Pacific Standard, the USDA now has a stockpile of 1.4 billion pounds of processed American cheese.

The United States’ dairy surplus has reached a record high, rounding out at 1.4 billion pounds of cheese. Reports attempting to quantify this astonishing amount have deferred to metrics like “enough to wrap around the U.S. Capitol.” Suffice to say, nobody’s suggesting we could consume it all.

The nation eating this much cheese is not only mind-boggling: It’s growing less and less likely. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, Americans have cut their milk consumption down from 35 pounds to an average of 15 per person annually. The excess is turned into cheese for storage and longevity (and the enjoyment of delicious cheese products). At the same time, government subsidies have continued to support dairy production, buying up surplus to keep prices steady. That leaves us with more cheese than anyone, even the experts, knows what to do with.

It also leads to the question of what the government has been doing with the cheese it has been buying for all these years. Beginning in the 1980s, the government’s primary solution was to give as much of it away to the poor as they can. Today, this is provided through multiple federal nutrition assistance welfare programs such as SNAP, CACFP, NCE, SFSP, WIC, and also through school lunch programs.

But in the 1990s, they also started making deals with fast food restaurant chains to incorporate more cheese products in their menus at low prices.

To help sell its surplus in the 1990s, the National Dairy Promotion Board created Dairy Management Incorporated, a semi-public marketing branch of the USDA funded through government “checkoff” fees from dairy producers. This agency gave us the “Got Milk?” campaign and a host of popular fast food menu items, including Domino’s seven-cheese pizzas and Taco Bell’s very cheesy Quesalupa. A 2017 Bloomberg Businessweek investigation called the group of chemists and nutritionists the “Illuminati of cheese.” “The checkoff [program] puts DMI’s agents inside Burger King, Domino’s, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, and Wendy’s, where they’re privy to each restaurant chain’s most closely guarded trade secrets,” writes Clint Rainey.

There is an unintended consequence in the federal government forcing so much unwanted cheese into the diets of American consumers. It is contributing to the growing health problem of obesity.

For a federal agency dedicated to improving overall nutrition and providing dietary guidance, these partnerships may seem like a contradiction—with good reason, experts say. DMI’s efforts “impose health costs on Americans generally, but disproportionately harm low-income African Americans and Latina/os who live in urban centers dominated by fast food restaurants,” argues legal scholar and food oppression expert Andrea Freeman in a 2013 report.

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