Trump Boldly Defends America During CPAC Speech. Naturally, CNN Compares Him To Hitler

On Saturday, President Trump spent his day at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) where he addressed a wide variety topics. The extremely patriotic speech was greatly loved by the conservative audience.

The speech, which to the normal viewer, was a good, patriotic speech, was interpreted completely different by CNN analyst Sam Vinograd who compared President Trump’s speech to Adolf Hitler killing six million jews. You can’t make this stuff up.

“The men and women here today are on the front lines of protecting America’s interests, defending America’s value, and reclaiming our nation’s priceless heritage,” Trump said to the audience at CPAC. “With your help, we are reversing decades of blunders and betrayals. These are serious, serious betrayals to our nation and to everything we stand for. It’s been done by the failed ruling class that enriched foreign countries at our expense. It wasn’t America first, in many cases it was America last. Those days are over, long over.”

Seems pretty innocent, right? Well according to Vinograd, this speech was just as bad as killing 6 million jews. The radical CNN analyst who is also a former Obama official, said: “His statement makes me sick, on a personal level, preserving your heritage, reclaiming our heritage, that sounds a lot like a certain leader that killed members of my family and about six million other Jews in the 1940s.”

Vinograd then said that Trump “pretends that there are massive flows of illegal immigrants coming over our borders.” She conveniently ignored the fact that there were over 360,000 arrests made on the border last year.

It gets worse. Vinograd then suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin was behind Trump’s CPAC speech. Trump Derangement Syndrome runs deep at CNN.

“By the way, this whole CPAC speech, how many pieces, parts of President Putin’s to-do list was President Trump trying to accomplish today?” Vinograd said. “He denigrated our institutions – the Department of Justice and U.S. Congress, he spread misinformation and conspiracy theories, he undermined the credibility of several of our institutions – he sowed divisions, he sowed confusion, he was speaking to his base but he was also saying things that really looked like Vladimir Putin scripted his speech. So it helped him perhaps with his base, and politically, while at the same time, making Russia’s job a lot easier.”

Talk about a sociopath! It’s one thing to not like someones speech, but quite bizarre to compare someones innocent speech to the killing of six million jews and blaming the Russian President for what was said as well.

Maybe Vinograd was just a little butt hurt at what Trump had to say about CNN.

“I’ve learned because with the fake news — if you tell a joke, if you’re sarcastic, if you’re having fun with the audience, if you’re on live television with millions of people and 25,000 people, in an arena and if you say something like Russia please, if you can, it is Hillary Clinton’s e-mails! Please, Russia, please!” Trump said jokingly at CPAC. “Please, get us the e-mails! Please!”

“So everyone is having a good time, I’m laughing, we’re having fun and then that fake CNN and others say, ‘he asked Russia to go get the e-mails. Horrible!'” Trump said. “I mean, I saw it like two weeks ago. I’m watching and they are talking about one of points. He asked Russia for the e-mails. These people are sick and I’m telling you — they know the game. They know the game and they play it dirty. Dirtier than anyone who’s played the game. Dirtier than it’s ever been played.”

One thing Trump is extremely good at, is getting under the skin of CNN employees which obviously seemed to be the case considering Vinograd compared the speech to Adolf Hitler killing six million jews. CNN’s radical agenda seems to be getting more and more out of hand and it’s an extreme disservice to the American people.

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Amid a sea of Leftist lies, the truth still matters

We were listening to Jordan Peterson, along with thousands of other Sydneysiders who turned out to hear him. Lots of men in suits, some in shorts and cut-away tanks, all neat and polite and eager to listen. Some women too, but mostly men, and mostly young men.

This Canadian psychologist became famous only a few years ago for refusing to follow a Canadian law that instructs people about which pronouns to use. That Peterson is a now a cultural phenomenon is itself a phenomenon worth pondering.

His fame speaks to the enduring power of reason. It tells you that not everyone has fallen for the new rules where victimhood must be prized, and feelings are the new measurement of morality.

There is a hunger for Peterson’s core messages about responsibility and reason, values many others have discarded as relics of another age.

Peterson took his rapt audience on a tour of the importance of truth, in part by examining this question to the panel on Monday night’s Q&A program.

“Do you believe in God?” asked someone in the audience.

Peterson critiqued the answer from one panel member in particular. In response to the question, feminist, trade unionist and writer for The Guardian Van Badham said she is both a Christian and a Marxist.

Wrong, said Peterson. You can be a Christian and a Marxist only if you are deluded or disingenuous. It is not that Christianity and Marxism are different, like an apple v a pear. They are ­diametrically opposed to one another. Only someone who understands only one or the other, or neither, could claim to be both.

Why did Peterson pursue this issue for so long on Tuesday night? Because truth matters, and it matters to understand the difference between being a Christian and being a Marxist.

Peterson took the audience on a long excursion through the collective guilt and class war tenets of Marxism. It is a doctrine premised on materialism and the violent overthrow of a rich oppressor class.

Christianity is a spiritual belief system for the soul that focuses on the power of the individual. Christianity makes room for the state: Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.

Whereas Karl Marx believed that “the first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion”.

Victorian pastor Murray Campbell kicked a goal for truth too, writing on his blog after listening to Badham that not a single country that has fully embraced Marxism has allowed for religious freedom. In fact, “the sum total of Marxist states that support Christianity is zero”.

Badham can be either a Marxist or a Christian. She cannot be both. Care to punt whether she prefers collective guilt or individual responsibility?

The Marxist idea of collective guilt is having an unfortunate resurgence. It explains the Smollett story after all. The actor faked a hate crime on himself because he assumed that people would jump to defend a gay black victim bashed by two men in MAGA hats, no questions asked.

Just as so many people sided with a woman to stop a white, middle-class, conservative man being appointed to the Supreme Court, no matter how flimsy the evidence against him. Just as people jumped, brains disengaged, to condemn schoolkids from Covington Catholic school so they could side with a Native American man, even though the adult man was the ­aggressor.

In this brave new world, social justice movements are based on this one guiding principle: in the hierarchy of power, if you’re up near the top, you are presumed guilty of oppressing those below.

Notice that this word “social” is used to signal incontrovertible goodness, as in social justice, ­social conscience, social equality, social licence to operate, or corporate social responsibility. Being incontrovertibly good renders them beyond challenge by decent people. Except they are not always good.

The #MeToo movement was always prone to abuse by those who assume an accused man is a guilty man because women must be believed. It explains why Gillette knew it would hit a social conscience sweet spot with an advertisement premised on all men being bad, hence the need for a commercial telling them to be good.

Other movements, from Black Lives Matter to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Jewish businesses, are all premised on this same crooked notion of presumed collective guilt.

Here, then, is the next question for those interested in the truth. Can we trust our justice system not to succumb to this same misguided tenet of our times? What happens if the idea of collective guilt seeps into the legal system, into a jury room, and ensnares an innocent man?

Take the shocking sexual abuse crimes within the Catholic Church. What if this new, yet old Marxist idea — if you find the powerful, you will locate the guilty — dislodges the fundamental idea that a person’s guilt must be established beyond reasonable doubt?

Is the guilty verdict against Cardinal George Pell, convicted last December for sexual abuse crimes in a he said/he said trial, an example of this new form of justice? The first jury could not agree on Pell’s guilt.

The second jury found him guilty. Pell has always maintained his innocence. There are legitimate concerns about the evidence supporting a guilty verdict.

To be sure, none of us here knows what happened in the sacristy of St Patrick’s Cathedral in December 1996. But all of us should agree that the truth matters. Except many don’t agree that truth matters.

On Wednesday, The Australia Institute’s Ben Oquist plumbed the sewers of collective guilt. He claimed that the causes that Pell believed in, from his support of traditional marriage to his scepticism about the hype over climate change, and political allies who shared those views are now diminished by Pell’s conviction.

Welcome to our brave new world where the retreat from reason and truth continues apace.

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Oregon’s Proposed Rent Controls Would Shrink Supply of Housing

Some follies never die

Oregon just took a big step this week toward becoming the first state in the nation to impose statewide rent controls—a step in the wrong direction.

Senate Bill 608—which has now passed both houses of the Legislative Assembly—limits annual rent increases to the inflation rate plus 7 percent and imposes stringent restrictions on the ability to evict tenants without cause. (It exempts new construction for 15 years.)

A united Republican caucus was joined by only three Democratic House members in opposition when it passed the lower chamber Tuesday. Only one Democrat opposed the legislation when it cleared the state Senate on Feb. 12.

The Willamette Week reported that Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, is likely to sign the measure into law.

Unfortunately for Oregon residents, public policy crafted in defiance of economic reality yields poor results, good intentions notwithstanding.

Rent control is the cause celebre of the chief sponsor of the legislation, state Sen. Shemia Fagan, D-Portland. She knocked off incumbent state Sen. Rob Monroe in a Democratic primary last May in part by sharply criticizing his opposition to rent control.

Her win proved instrumental in shifting the entire Democratic caucus to the left on the issue. Her stern message to fellow Democrats: “They need to take a message from my victory. My community is not interested in watering down my victory.”

Across Oregon, stringent zoning restrictions, density limitations, and aggressive environmental regulation limit supply of housing while increasing the costs of construction.

Rental costs reflect those realities. Capping rent increases does nothing to make housing less costly to build. But it will have the perverse effect of shrinking future supply by deterring new construction and incentivizing landlords to spend less money on upkeep and remodeling.

With rents capped, demand likely will increase further, but with supply unable to keep up with demand, housing shortages will likely continue.

“Oregon Democrats are carpet-bombing our state with regulations that will deliberately destabilize the housing market and leave it obliterated,” said Jonathan Lockwood, a spokesman for a group of Republicans in the Oregon House and Senate. “And in the smoldering remains, they will cry out that Senate Bill 608 wasn’t enough.”

The legislation also denies landlords the option to give a tenant a one-month “no-cause notice” to vacate a unit after 12 months of tenancy. Ostensibly, the intent of the sponsors is to protect tenants from higher-priced rents elsewhere or the inconvenience of relocating.

Legislators neglected to take note that a no-cause notice is also the best way for a landlord to remove a tenant engaged in harassment of his or her neighbors. In effect, this new prohibition will restrict compliance with Fair Housing Act protections against harassment.

Salem, Oregon, property manager Melodie Atkinson warned in a Feb. 8 op-ed in The Oregonian that “taking away landlords’ ability to issue these no-cause notices removes a valuable tool in protecting other tenants from one who has been harassing them or engaging in behavior that falls short of a for-cause eviction.”

She added, “Under current law, residents are better protected, and bad actors creating a hostile environment are given ample time to make alternative arrangements.”

Criticism of rent control as bad economics is hardly limited to landlords or to free-market conservatives.

As far back as 1965, Gunnar Myrdal, one of the visionaries behind Sweden’s welfare state, warned, “Rent control has in certain Western countries constituted, maybe, the worst example of poor planning by governments lacking courage and vision.”

Economics professor Assar Lindbeck, Myrdal’s fellow Swede, cautioned in 1972, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”

In 1989, communists running Vietnam linked the abject condition of Hanoi’s housing directly to rent control. Then-Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach said, “The Americans couldn’t destroy Hanoi, but we have destroyed our city by very low rents. We realized it was stupid and that we must change policy.”

Although the Oregon legislation may score cheap political points, rent control and handcuffing property managers does nothing to solve the affordable housing problem.

It’s no surprise that with its already onerous restrictions on landlords, rents in Portland soared 42 percent from 2010 to 2017, more than triple the overall rate of inflation. Now, these ills are likely to adversely affect the rest of the state, too.

By contrast, reforming land-use laws—in effect, increasing supply—would be a big step in the right direction. With increased supply, rental prices could plateau or even decline.

The governor defends land-use regulations as a reason why the state’s wine industry thrives. Even if that were true, the unaffordable rental costs would amount to a hidden tax on the general public (many of them working class) in order to allow wealthy vineyard owners to thrive.

Adding new controls will only force renters to live in more dilapidated conditions and preclude additional units from being built.

That’s what you might call a Pyrrhic victory for Fagan and her fellow advocates of rent control.

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Lookit that chin

Lying Liz Warren has a hatchet jaw.  So what?  It in fact explains a lot about her.  Females normally have much more receding chins than males.  That's why a receding chin on a male is commonly regarded as "weak". A "strong" jaw on a woman is normally inherited but what exactly is inherited?  Testosterone, male hormones. 

And as most men who live with women know, hormones can have strong behavioral effects. Male hormones tend to enable ambition, strong drive and aggression.  And that summarizes comrade Warren pretty well.  Despite the huge gaffe of falsely claiming native  ancestry, she is still pushing on.  She still wants to be President. Most women would have gone home to their families after such a big setback but not the lady with the chin -- JR.

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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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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