Bad conservatives?

I recently received the following email from M. DeV. mcdv133422@gmail.com.  It appears to be a riposte to the way conservatives point to murderous Leftist regimes from the French revolution on.  I have a little spare time so I thought I might point out some of the lacunae in it.  I will add my coments at the bottom of it.

1. Those who promoted child labor were conservatives.

2. The brutal genocidal colonizers of the Americans were christian conservatives.

3. Franco was helped into power by conservatives.

4. Hitler was helped into power by conservatives such as Papen and Hindenburg.

5. World War I was started by conservatives.

6. Lenin was helped to get to Russia by German conservatives.

7. Those who opposed food safety laws were conservatives (thousands of children died in 19th century Britain because of arsenic poisoning).

8. The American Civil War was started by treasonous conservative democrats.

9. Centuries of European warfare was brought on by monarchists and conservatives.

10. Al Qaeda and the Taleban were created by the mujahedeen which was supported throughout the 1980s by American conservatives.

11. Iran Contra was treason by conservatives (Reagan should have been hanged for it).

12. Conservatism is a disease and the American GOP is a huge threat to the western world.


1. The man who did most to regulate and cut back child labor was Benjamin Disraeli, Conservative Prime Minister of Britain in the late 19th century

2. The Pilgrim fathers had friendly relations with the natives from 1620 to 1675, when they were attacked

3. Franco was suported by the Falange, a Fascist  (Leftist) party

4. Hitler's rise was his own doing -- particularly by way of his remarkable oratory.  But at various points both the Social Democrat Left and the Communists sided with him

5. Who started WWI is contentious but it would have remained a local affair except for the intervention of the Rusian Tsar, who was above politcs

6. At the beginning of World War I, Germany was a constitutional monarchy in which political parties were limited to the legislative arena. They could control neither the government nor the military.  It was the military who sent Lenin to Russia

7. Those who opposed food safety laws were businessmen with various political loyalties.  They were gradually brought to heel by governments.  But again Disraeli was in the lead.  In 1874 Disraeli brought in an aggressive program of social legislation, including a pure-food-and-drug act

8. The American Civil War was started by treasonous Leftist  politicians.  Republicans were at that time the Left of American politics.  No other country in the world shed a drop of blood to free their slaves.  So why did America?  Because the Republicans were in the grip of Leftist self righteousness.  See here

9. Centuries of European warfare were brought on by national and dynastic rivalries.

10.Al Qaeda and the Taleban were native Muslim movements that started in opposition to the Soviets. American opposition to Soviet intervention in Afghanistan started under Jimmy Carter (D)

11. Iran Contra was part of an attempt to overthrow a Communist regime

12. Leftism is a disease and the American Democrats are Fascists.

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LOL.  Trump can't win

As a catastrophic fire tore through one of the world’s most beloved cultural treasures, US President Donald Trump assessed the response from the other side of the globe and offered unsolicited advice for firefighters.

“So horrible to watch the massive fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris,” Mr Trump tweeted earlier today as more than 400 firefighters tried to save the Notre Dame cathedral. “Perhaps flying water tankers could be used to put it out. Must act quickly!”

France’s civil defense agency, Sécurité Civile, tweeted — once in French and once in English — less than two hours after Mr Trump sent his tweet and appeared to directly respond to the US president.

“Helicopter or aeroplane, the weight of the water and the intensity of the drop at low altitude could indeed weaken the structure of Notre Dame and result in collateral damage to the buildings in the vicinity,” the agency wrote in French.

And despite never posting updates in English, the agency then sent out a second tweet.

 Hundreds of firemen of the Paris Fire Brigade are doing everything they can to bring the terrible #NotreDame fire under control. All means are being used, except for water-bombing aircrafts which, if used, could lead to the collapse of the entire structure of the cathedral.

Mr Trump’s tweet was almost universally slammed, with many of the president’s Twitter followers calling his advice “ignorant”.

"When California burned you did not seem to be a fire expert. Please, shut up. It is a tragic moment for the cultural heritage of humanity."

"Has anyone else found themselves wondering if, aside from the massive, ignorant ego inserting himself into the story by telling French fire fighters how to do their job, what's really happening here is this sorry excuse for a human is jealous because the news is not about him?"

SOURCE 

My sympathies in the matter were somewhat reduced when I heard that the cathedral was a repository for the crown of thorns from Christ's crucifixion plus a fragment of the true cross plus one of the holy nails which held Christ to the cross.  I guess my Presbyterian background is showing but the word "idolatory" did spring to my mind

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Boston Globe Writer Suggests Waiters Should ‘tamper’ With Republicans’ Food,/b>

Once again Leftists have no ability to foresee the consequences of their actions.  Once Democrats start polluting the food of conservatives, the way will be open for conservatives to do some polluting as well.  A lot of working people who voted for Trump might be angry enough to do that


A Boston Globe columnist called for waiters to contaminate the food of Trump administration officials.

“As for the waiters out there, I’m not saying you should tamper with anyone’s food, as that could get you into trouble,” O’Neil wrote. “You might lose your serving job. But you’d be serving America. And you won’t have any regrets years later.”

He added that “not pissing in Bill Kristol’s salmon” when he was a waiter was one of his eternal regrets. “I was waiting on the disgraced neoconservative pundit and chief Iraq War cheerleader about 10 years ago at a restaurant in Cambridge and to my eternal dismay, some combination of professionalism and pusillanimity prevented me from appropriately seasoning his entree,”

The Globe to found itself dealing with a wave of outrage. Herman Cain, one of President Trump’s two picks for the Federal Reserve Board, tweeted, “Who makes the editorial decisions at the Boston Globe?”

O’Neil hit back at the Globe for removing the article from its website.

“Absolute brain genius move by the Globe to edit my story three times then take it down altogether and put up a note saying I’m not on staff instead of perhaps standing by a long time contributor and siding with labor instead of bad faith critics who would hate them no matter what,” O’Neil said on Twitter. He added: “I will never write for them again.”

SOURCE 

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Appeals court rules Trump admin can temporarily continue to send asylum-seekers back to Mexico

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of President Trump on Friday when it determined that the government can at least temporarily continue to send asylum-seekers back to Mexico.

The asylum program was scheduled to be shut down at midnight under an order from District Judge Richard Seeborg, but the White House requested that the appeals court intervene.

The 9th Circuit temporarily stayed the lower court’s ruling as the parties get ready to submit their arguments next week on the government’s request for a longer stay that would likely last months.

“Finally, great news at the Border!” Trump tweeted Friday night.

The administration has defended the policy as necessary to deal with what it calls an immigration crisis at the border that is overwhelming existing enforcement mechanisms.

The lower court ruled earlier this week that the policy contradicted U.S. immigration law and issued a nationwide injunction but delayed its implementation to give the government time to appeal.

The administration has sent more than a thousand asylum-seekers, many from Central America, back to Mexico as their asylum claims make their way through the U.S.’s backed-up immigration system.

Trump has doubled down on his hard-line stance on immigration in recent weeks, threatening to close the border with Mexico, cutting off funding to El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras, and overseeing a purge at the Department of Homeland Security.

Trump has said that many claiming asylum seek to do harm, saying last weekend some asylum-seekers should be "fighting for the UFC" and that approvals of asylum claims should be curtailed.

"The system is full. Can’t take you anymore," Trump said while visiting the border earlier this month, adding that for both "illegal immigration" and asylum-seekers, the answer is "I’m sorry. We’re full."

SOURCE 

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Abolish the Income Tax, Abolish the IRS

It's possible

BY STEPHEN GREEN

Everybody hates income taxes. Some people say there are too many loopholes or too few incentives or that they're too high or too low or that the system is rigged against (insert your favorite group here) or biased in favor of (insert your least favorite group here) or that the IRS is abusive or too lenient and -- almost everybody agrees -- the whole thing is corrupt and corrupting.

I know several of these complaints contradict other complaints, but you know what? They're all true. Every single one. Our tax code is a jumbled mess of contradictions, and the IRS is alternately abusive and permissive.

At the left-leaning Daily News today, David Cay Johnston writes that "there’s a fundamental problem at the heart of the way we fund our government." He says that there are actually two tax systems, one for "working stiffs and retirees," and the other for "rich business owners [who] operate under a different system." Johnson's solution? Hire a lot more IRS auditors who will stick it to the rich.

That's just silly, of course. The rich already pay the vast majority of income taxes. The top 1 percent pays more than 35 percent of all income tax collected; the bottom half pays only about 3 percent. Those figures come from the National Taxpayers Union Foundation from before the 2017 tax reform law, which generally cut taxes even further for the middle class, while raising them a bit on wealthy blue state residents. If anything, the bottom half of Americans aren't invested in what happens in Washington, because they don't have any skin in the game.

But even if they did, is putting thousands or even hundreds of thousands of additional Americans through the IRS audit wringer a good way to increase fairness?

Over on the libertarian side, Reason's Liz Wolfe was driven to such despair by the burdens and complexities of our tax code that she got stoned before doing her taxes this year. While I don't recommend this at all, Wolfe wrote, much to my entertainment, "I smoked a massive joint with my husband and browsed flights to Budapest and Dubrovnik before realizing that I could not procrastinate anymore and also could not fly to Eastern Europe to avoid my tax burden." As the guy who invented drunkblogging, I don't judge. Whatever gets you through the tax season.

At The Federalist today, Laura Baxter lists nine conservative complaints against the income tax, arguing that today should be a "national day of mourning." Three of her arguments really stood out to me, and in no small part because they're interrelated. And not just interrelated, but probably an inextricable feature of the income tax.

They are:

*  The Tax System Is Far Too Complex

*  The Tax System Favors Special Interests

*  The Tax System Is Easily Weaponized

I encourage you to click over and read the whole thing.

Tax laws are written by people and people prefer certain other people or provide favors to other people in exchange for something they want themselves. And that makes our income tax system -- any income tax system -- ripe for corruption, graft, and abuse.

Which brings us to the Fair Tax.

The Fair Tax isn't exactly a new idea, but it's one worth reminding people of every April 15.

The Fair Tax would completely eliminate payroll taxes and individual and corporate income taxes by repealing the 16th Amendment. Washington would be funded instead by a national sales tax -- partly offset by a monthly "prebate" paid to every household. As described by Americans for Fair Taxation, the prebate is "an 'advance refund' at the beginning of each month so that purchases made up to the poverty level are tax-free." You would take home 100 percent of your pay, and determine your own tax rate based on how much you spend each month.

The IRS is abolished, replaced by a tax collection mechanism every single merchant is already familiar with. Conspicuous consumption by the rich would be met with a heavy sales tax burden, but investments in jobs and growth and innovation would be tax-free.

Other benefits include zero compliance cost for individuals, no more audits, no more loopholes, and vastly reduced opportunities for official corruption and graft. Almost as good, perhaps, is that only legal U.S. residents are eligible for the prebate, but everybody, from native-born citizen to illegal alien, pays their fair share at the cash register.

For more information, you can visit FairTax.org.

SOURCE 

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Israel Hopes for Same Treatment, After Int’l Court Backs Down on US Probe

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday welcomed a decision by International Criminal Court (ICC) judges not to authorize an investigation into alleged U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, and implicitly expressed the hope an ICC probe into Israeli actions would meet the same fate.

“To come and put on trial U.S. or Israeli soldiers, or the State of Israel or the U.S., is absurd,” Netanyahu told a weekly cabinet meeting. “This corrects an injustice and will have far-reaching implications for the functioning of the international system regarding the State of Israel.”

A three-judge panel in The Hague ruled Friday that although the alleged offenses met criteria set down by the Rome Statute – the court’s founding treaty – an investigation “at this stage would not serve the interests of justice.” Accordingly it turned down chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s request to proceed.

President Trump hailed the development, which came a week after the State Department revoked Bensouda’s U.S. visa, in line with its recent decision to bar entry to anyone “directly responsible for any ICC investigation of U.S. personnel.”

The president called the decision “a major international victory, not only for these patriots [U.S. military and intelligence personnel involved in the conflict], but for the rule of law.”

Human rights advocacy groups voiced dismay, with Amnesty International accusing the ICC of “caving” to U.S. threats.

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 THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

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

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