Republican Senator On DACA Fallout: President Obama Created This Unconstitutional Mess

Is the RAISE act a solution?

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that originated under Obama is winding down. Liberals are freaking out—and Congress now has to deal with this as they return from August recess.

The executive action has been controversial, with many making the argument that it’s an unconstitutional overreach from the White House on immigration policy. In fact, the Trump administration’s lawyers felt it was indefensible in its current form, while the Department of Homeland Security was adamant that an act of Congress was needed to keep DACA as it stands today.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), along with Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), proposed the RAISE Act, which was one of the most extensive overhauls in our green card policy, placing an emphasis on language and skills requirements. It’s aimed to protect American workers. Now, with the fate of the so-called DREAMers in Congress’ court, there could be a window to pass the RAISE ACT, along with legalizing the 800,000 DACA recipients who are vulnerable to deportation.

Cotton is certainly in favor of this, though reminded everyone on Hugh Hewitt today that DACA is one giant constitutional mess that was created by Obama and left in the lap of the Trump White House

HUGH HEWITT: Senator, will you agree with me to stipulate to get this started, DACA is un-constitutional, and but for the President’s six month action, which adds a ripeness element, the state attorneys general who were about to challenge it would have been successful, in my opinion, and that the President did a favor to every DACA kid by giving a ripeness argument to every court to delay ruling it un-constitutional?

TOM COTTON: Hugh, those points are almost undisputable. President Obama created this mess. And it’s landed in President Trump’s lap and our lap in the Congress. The reason we know it’s unlawful is President Obama himself said it was unlawful in 2010 and 2011 when he was asked to take these steps and did not. But he did so in 2012 in the middle of his reelection.

I don’t know if any capable and forthright lawyer who argues that the administration can defend this proposition in court. They certainly have weaker ground to stand on than President Obama did when he refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act a few years ago in court. So it’s just not, this is all a mess of President Obama’s making.

HEWITT: And President Trump has done a favor to the Dreamers by giving a six month order which will cause courts to pause. Now the next question is will Democrats give up what they perceive to be a political advantage in having the Dreamers screwed to work with you and Senator Perdue and others to come up with a comprehensive bill that combines protections for DACA Dreamers with reform of immigration to make it more coherent?

COTTON: Well, Hugh, I certainly hope the Democrats will focus on the art of the possible here, what kind of agreement we can reach to achieve the President’s own stated goals. He has said repeatedly that he wants to “take care” of the DACA recipients. I have no objection to that. But we have to recognize there are going to be two negative consequences of that action.

One, we create a new opportunity for citizenship through chain migration for their parents, the very people who violated the law by bringing them here as children in the first place.

And two, we encourage other people around the world to bring their children here illegally. So we have to do something to stop chain migration. My bill does that, and we have to do something to enhance enforcement. That’s a very simple, logically-coherent legislative package. It’s not comprehensive reform. It’s not the Gang of 8 bill. It’s not trying to blow ocean. It’s trying to take the action that Democrats say they want, which is to give legal status to approximately three-quarters of a million of these people in their 20s and 30s while also mitigating the consequences of that action.

When asked about the prospects of Congress acting on legislation to reform immigration, Cotton was “optimistic,” while also saying he’s not just for blanket amnesty for the DREAMers.

“Hugh, I’m pretty optimistic. You know, the Democrats have said for years they want to give legal status to these people. The President says he wants to, but he also knows that we have to control the consequences of that,” said Cotton, “and there’s a very, like I said, logically coherent, straightforward, relatively small package that can be negotiated here. That’s what I’m going to work on. I’m not going to support just a blanket amnesty with nothing to control the consequences of it, or some kind of rebate Gang of 8 legislation. I’ll be an opponent of that.”

SOURCE

****************************

There Is No Such Thing As a 'Deserving DREAMer'

Since when did DACA become the Depression and Anxiety Cure for Amnesty-seekers?

It's this insatiable appetite for collective entitlement that demonstrates the perils of blanket amnesty. Give a privileged political class an inch and they'll take, take, take until feckless public servants give away their country.

The proper response to illegal alien activists demanding that Washington act "NOW!" to preserve their comfort, allay their anxieties and extend their unconstitutional protections indefinitely is this:

Five million American young people between 16-34 were unemployed last year and 50 million more are not even in the labor force. Imagine their anxiety.

Hundreds of thousands of law-abiding people from around the world are waiting patiently for their backlogged visa and green card applications to be reviewed. Imagine their frustration.

Why don't their dreams come first?

Nancy Pelosi called on House Republicans to help her "safeguard our young DREAMers from the senseless cruelty of deportation and shield families from separation and heartbreak."

Never has this Bay Area elitist called on House Republicans to join her in shielding native-born and law-abiding immigrant families from the senseless and preventable violence committed by criminals in this country illegally who've caused immeasurable heartbreak for decades in her overrun California sanctuary.

Jamiel Shaw Sr., whose son was mercilessly shot to death by a sanctuary-protected gang member living in outlaw-coddling Los Angeles illegally, administered a bracing reality check:

"You want to talk about families being separated? Try spending your holidays talking to a grave!"

The left-wing DREAM racket is a self-perpetuating political marketing machine. Its primary contribution to American society? Lashing out at how cruel, racist, ignorant and ungrateful the rest of us are for not bowing down before the hallowed angel children of the Obama administration's amnesty program. It's no coincidence that the publicity-hungry leaders of the DREAMer movement are full-time fulminators in government-funded academia, community organizing outfits, immigration law foundations and the grievance-nursing media.

A deserving DREAMer would respect the sovereign right of an independent nation to determine who stays and who goes based on its national interest and constitutional obligations to put its citizenry first.

The deserving DREAMer, in other words, would admit he or she is owed nothing and deserves nothing. There is no such thing as a "deserving DREAMer."

SOURCE

*****************************

Conservatives in America -- Like Marranos in Medieval Spain

For those unfamiliar with the term, Marranos was the name given to Jews in medieval Spain and Portugal who secretly maintained their Judaism while living as Catholics in public, especially in the 15th century during the Spanish Inquisition.

There is, of course, no Spanish Inquisition in America today -- no one is being tortured into confessing what they really believe, and no one is being burned at the stake. But there are millions of Marrano-like Americans: Americans who hold conservative views -- especially those who hold conservative positions on social issues and those who voted for Donald Trump for president.

Millions of Americans who hold conservative and/or pro-Trump views rationally fear ostracism by their peers, public humiliation, ruined reputations, broken families, job loss and the inability to work in their field. Under these circumstances, they have decided that coming out as conservative or pro-Trump is not worth the persecution they would endure.

In terms of the percentage of the population effected, there is no parallel in American history. Coming out as a homosexual prior to the 1960s and 70s, or publicly announcing oneself as a member of the Communist Party in the 1950s would have often led to similar dire consequences in one's social, work and family life. But gays and Communist Party members comprised a tiny percentage of the American population. And Communists supported true evil.

I wish I could share all the emails sent to me from professional musicians who play in some of the premier orchestras in America. They wrote to me following the nationally publicized attempts by left-wing members of the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra and the Santa Monica city government to prevent me from conducting a Haydn symphony at the Walt Disney Concert Hall three weeks ago. These people publicly called on members of the orchestra to refuse to play and members of the public to refuse to attend.

These people wrote to encourage me and tell me how they are compelled to hide their conservative views -- how, in effect, they live as Marranos.

A violist with one of the most prestigious orchestras in the country (I figured out which orchestra using the internet; she was even afraid to tell me wrote to me last week about how quiet she is about her conservatism. While she could not be fired for it, she said, she would be socially ostracized within the orchestra for which she has played for decades.

A middle-aged professional musician told me that he wears his hair very long in order to appear hippie-like and camouflage his conservative politics. He is no more likely to tell fellow musicians that he supports President Trump than a Marrano in medieval Spain would have been to go public with his Jewish beliefs.

One musician in Minnesota wrote to me: "I was a professional musician from the age of 17. I wanted you to know that I, too, lost my career because of my views. My choice, actually; I just could no longer take the abuse."

I'm fortunate. As a radio talk-show host and columnist, I'm paid to express my opinions. As for my avocation of conducting orchestras, I'm lucky there, too. Because the permanent conductor of the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra and the orchestra's board remained principled, and because so many people support me and my values, the efforts to thwart me failed. The Disney hall, with 2,000-plus seats, was sold out -- a first for a community orchestra in that venue.

Of course, American conservative Marranos don't just live in the world of music. They are in every profession. We know about the high-profile cases, the conservatives whose careers have been ruined by saying the "wrong" thing, or supporting the "wrong" candidate or ballot proposition; we know about the conservative speakers who have been physically attacked and prevented from speaking on college campuses. But we don't know about the millions who are just afraid to speak up, who remain silent in a business meeting or at a dinner party when someone casually expresses a view with which they strongly disagree. These Americans live in fear, legitimately so in many cases, that if they do speak out, there will be severe consequences -- a job lost, a promotion not given or even a child who will no longer speak to them.

This is all new in our country.

Had anyone predicted that in America -- the land more renowned than any other for liberty and free speech -- the word "Marrano" would ever accurately characterize citizens, let alone close to half the voting population, that individual would have been regarded as a charlatan.

But given the intolerance and hatred on the left, and its dominance over almost every area of American life, that individual would have been a prophet.

SOURCE

*****************************

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)

***************************

Union Bosses Have Too Much Control. It’s Time to Protect the Rights of American Workers

Rep. Phil Roe

For the past eight years, union bosses have held the upper hand over East Tennessee workers, as the previous administration tried to stack the deck in favor of unionization.

The National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Labor combined to pursue an agenda that put union bosses and special interests ahead of the rights of individual workers and job creation.

If there was any doubt the Department of Labor was pushing a partisan agenda, just look at former Labor Secretary Tom Perez’s new job: head of the Democrat Party.

It is time to restore employee rights and create a pro-growth, pro-employee environment within the workplace, and I am pleased to already see the new administration working aggressively to create jobs by undoing job-killing regulations.

I’ve said time and time again that promoting fair and free labor policies in the workplace have nothing to do with whether or not you are pro- or anti-union, and everything to do with the rights to which every American worker is entitled.

Still, current law does not accurately reflect the 21st century we live in today. In fact, these laws have remained largely unchanged since the National Labor Relations Act was passed 70 years ago.

A striking statistic finds that 94 percent of workers represented by a union today never voted for that union to represent them. Today, labor unions’ membership is down to about 11 percent of the workforce as more and more employees have opted for a free-market economy.

For this reason I introduced the Employee Rights Act.

The Employee Rights Act is a comprehensive labor law update that will allow places of employment to serve the interest of their employees—not unions or other special interests.

The Employee Rights Act would ensure the right to a secret ballot is always protected.

It would also require permission from union members for the use of their dues for any purpose other than collective bargaining, ensuring union members’ dues cannot be used for political purposes without members’ knowledge or permission.

The bill requires periodic recertification of union elections so every employee has a chance to weigh in on whether or not they wish to be represented by a union.

Finally, the Employee Rights Act requires a majority vote of all employees—not just those present—to decide whether to unionize or strike.

These are commonsense protections every worker deserves.

The right to a secret ballot is one of the most fundamental protections of American democracy. It’s how we elect our presidents, our representatives, and our local leaders.

A secret ballot protects employees from intimidation during union elections—from both sides. Further, requiring employees to recertify their union regularly will keep union leaders attentive to the needs of workers.

This commonsense measure will help protect employee privacy and create safeguards for the American worker, and I look forward to working with the Trump administration to ensure worker rights are protected.

SOURCE

************************************

In a World of Real Evil, the Left Fights Fake Evil

Dennis Prager

All my life, I have known this rule about people: Those who don’t fight the greatest evils will fight lesser evils or make-believe evils. This happens to be the morally defining characteristic of the left.

During the Cold War, many liberals and nearly all conservatives fought communism, but the left fought anti-communism.

The left opposed American military buildups and regarded the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union as nothing more than two scorpions in a bottle fighting to the death. It loathed Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, not Communist Party Secretary-General Leonid Brezhnev.

It regarded Reagan’s labeling of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” with contempt.

Typical was the reaction of one of America’s best-known intellectuals, Henry Steele Commager, then a professor of history at Amherst College. He said, “It was the worst presidential speech in American history, and I’ve read them all.”

With regard to fighting communism—which, aside from Nazism, has been the greatest evil in the modern world (it killed and enslaved far more people than Nazism)—the left was an obstacle, not an ally.

The left in the West and elsewhere did far more to enable communist evil than to stop it.

The same holds true with regard to the greatest evil in the world at this time: totalitarian Islam, or Islamism.

The left is doing precisely what it did during the war against communism: It’s fighting the anti-Islamists, not the Islamists. Just as it labeled anti-communists “cold warriors” and other derisive epithets, the left labels those fighting Islamism as “Islamophobes” and, of course, “racists.”

In the moral order as perceived by the left, it is the anti-Islamists who are the enemy of the good.

In this battle, the left fights American conservatives—and Israel, the country in the front line against Islamism. In a nutshell, rather than fighting evil, the left fights those who fight evil.

Therefore, if you have moral clarity, you are not on the left. If you have moral clarity, you can be a liberal, a conservative, a centrist, an atheist, a believer, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a black, a white, a Latino, an Asian, a Native American, a gay, a straight, or a bisexual.

But you cannot be a leftist.

The problem, however, is that people want to feel morally good about themselves, and no one wants this more than the left. It has written the proverbial book on moral self-esteem. Therefore, it does not merely believe that it is morally superior to all others; it knows it is.

Leftists know they are more compassionate, more enlightened, more intellectual, and more intelligent than conservatives. And they know that they care more about the “downtrodden,” the “marginalized,” and the “disenfranchised” than conservatives.

But to feel good about yourself, you have to fight against something bad. Since the left doesn’t fight real evil (that would take moral courage in addition to moral clarity), it has to fight lesser evils or made-up evils.

For example, the left relentlessly fights racism in America, even though America is the least racist multiracial society in history; it relentlessly fights sexism in America, the country that has afforded unprecedented equality and liberty to women (but it does not fight the terrible sexism that pervades the world’s most women-suppressing societies—those in the Muslim world); and, of course, it fights Nazis and white supremacists—who, though evil, constitute an utterly negligible threat to America today.

Fighting Nazis in Germany between 1933 and 1945 was an act of moral heroism. Given their negligible numbers and nonexistent power, fighting Nazis in America in 2017 is an act of moral onanism.

There’s a lot more on the list of made-up or lesser evils that the left fights instead of fighting real evil.

It fights religious Americans, specifically religious Christians and especially evangelicals. Now that’s an enemy worth fighting—those mean Christians (and Jews) on the religious right. And it fights conservatives, or at least the conservatives who fight them.

And, of course, it fights global warming. Leftists have convinced themselves that the real fight against evil in the world today is not against Islamism; it’s against carbon emissions.

And now, we can add statues to the list. The left was AWOL against communism, and it’s AWOL against Islamism. But it’s in the vanguard of fighting statues.

SOURCE

*******************************

Leftist hate never falters
   
The nation’s eyes are fixated on dramatic flooding in Houston after Hurricane Harvey, where the death toll (so far) is thankfully small compared to flooding in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The government response on all levels seems to be fairly effective, and unlike with Katrina, the press coverage hasn’t been dominated by accusations of racism or inhumanity in the rescue effort.

There’s one obvious exception: cartoonists for the Left. Politico tweeted an image by radical artist Matt Wuerker in which he mocks Christian wackos wearing Confederate flag shirts. A man being rescued from his rooftop declares: “Angels! Sent by God!” A Coast Guard pilot is shown correcting him. “Er, actually Coast Guard … sent by the government,” he says.

After mocking the victims still suffering from a hurricane as stupid religious folks, Wuerker tried to dig himself out of a hole on Twitter. He lamented: “Just trying to point out times like this we’re lucky to have rescue services. Don’t see how this takes away from private individuals heroism.” Then he added: “Respectfully — it’s making fun of the Secessionist movement. Not at all aimed at all Texans.” Politico soon deleted its promotional tweet, but not the cartoon.

A poll taken in 2016 (by Democrat pollsters) showed that 59 percent of Texans opposed secession, and only 26 percent expressed support. Wuerker claimed that his job is to prod people into considering “the ironies and subtleties of the world we live in,” but cartoons like this aren’t ironic or subtle. They’re ham-fisted and ignorant.

Wuerker also felt it was safe to mock conservatives. “Times like this it’s ironic to say that the government is the enemy,” he said. It’s not conservatives who have protested the front-line heroes of local government but leftist street agitators who have endlessly denigrated the police as racist child killers.

Then there’s the scabrous French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose latest cover shows a bunch of Nazi flags mostly underwater and a few white hands sticking out of the water in the “Heil Hitler” salute. The cover text in French translates to “God Exists! He Drowned All Neo-Nazis of Texas!”

To liberal elites, all Texans are somehow bigoted white Christian males. Even a hurricane can’t restrain their rage about their satirical targets having any power in America. Cartoons like these strongly underline why so many Americans find that the secular-progressive media are either tone-deaf or blatantly hostile toward what (and Who) they hold dear.

SOURCE

*****************************

By their deeds shall ye know them



*****************************

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)

***************************

America's melting pot and America's Muslims

Jeff Jacoby notes below that in opinion surveys American Muslims are very tolerant and pro-American.  He draws much comfort from that. Although their religion is very authoritarian -- preaching Islamic supremacism -- Jeff believes that they are peaceful pussies.

I spent 20 years doing opinion surveys for academic purposes so I think I can offer an informed perspective on that.  I will start out by making a very old comment:  "Deeds, not words". What people say in response to surveys is often not what they think and is certainly not what they do.  The attitude/behavior discrepancy is a well-known problem in psychology.  I am one of many who have researched it.

Let me give a glaring example.  Leftism is intrinsically authoritarian. Even Friedrich Engels (co-author of Karl Marx) recognized that.  Let me quote him:


"A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists"

The whole point of Leftism is to change society and you can only change society by changing what people do. Leftists proceed from a perception of fault in the world to a conviction that they are entitled to abolish that fault.  They think, for instance, that inequality is wrong and proceed from that to think that they have the right to abolish it.  Conservatives, by contrast, are much more humble.  They see inequality too but have no fantasy of their right or ability to change it.  They just try to work around it  -- by charitable giving, for instance.

Leftists of course are not always able to implement their plans and wishes.  It is only when a society is in a very disordered state -- due to war or some other cause -- that they can seize complete power.  You then see how authoritarian they really are.  As Engels foresaw, they then have to become practitioners of terror and mass murder.  And, sadly, a large part of the world's  population has experienced that:  Russia, China etc.

In the USA and the Anglosphere generally, democratic traditions obstruct what Leftists can do so they have to be content to nibble at the edges of society -- as we saw from the torrent of destructive regulations that emanated from the Obama regime.  But in all cases Leftism is about forcing change upon society. And if that is not authoritarian, what would be?

From all that, one would expect Leftists to have very authoritarian, pro-authority attitudes.  They should enthusiastically proclaim the wonders of government power. They should exult in the subordination of the many to the few.

But they do not. I did many surveys of authority attitudes during my 20 years as an academic researcher and I routinely found that Leftists were no more likely to express acceptance of authority than anyone else. Their attitudes to authority were completely compartmentalized, to use Freud's term. They could reject authoritarianism in their attitude statements while also voting for it and working towards it. It was the same in Engels' day. His fellow revolutionary Leftists were condemning authority while also being prepared to exercize it to an extreme degree. His essay on the matter is well worth reading to this day

So if attitude statements tell you nothing about Leftist behaviour, why would we think that attitude statements tell us anything about Muslim behaviour?  And we do know about Muslim behaviour. Like Leftists who get full power, they are mass murderers of the innocent.  That goes on all the time in the Middle East and other Muslim lands.

And it goes on on our countries too.  Muslims have very little power to change anything in our countries so it is only a small minority who can achieve authoritarian Muslim aims -- usually by sacrificing their own lives in a shooting or bombing spree.  And even Muslims are wary of sacrificing their own lives so it is usually socially marginal Muslims who go on such sprees. They feel that their lives are useless so why not give up that life for Allah?

So I think Jeff Jacoby below is totally naive.  What Muslims say is no guide to what they really think and may well do.  They are a dangerous element in a our society and should be sent back to their ancestral lands where they can vent their violent urges  onto one-another.

Just to expand a little on that last point:  The Left erupt into a febrile rage about largely imaginary white supremacists but completely ignore Muslim supremacism. You just have to read the Koran or listen to Muslim preachers to be left in no doubt about the supremacist nature of Islam.  Is it only imaginary threats that the Left can deal with?  Do real threats simply have to be blocked out?  It would seem so.  What might be called "cognitive management" seems to be essential to Leftism


THE STORY of American pluralism began with the migration of Puritan separatists, who came to the New World seeking a haven where they could practice their faith as they saw fit. The Puritans didn't show much tolerance toward subsequent newcomers practicing other faiths, such as Quakers and Baptists. But those religions put down roots, and the intolerance evaporated over time.

That became the pattern. Though religious diversity is one of the hallmarks of American life, believers from less-familiar traditions typically start out facing resentment and mistrust. After a while, however, those minority creeds and churches grow accepted and comfortable and become part of the nation's religious and cultural mosaic.

We don't often think about it, but it's an amazing phenomenon. In a world torn by religious bitterness, the United States has repeatedly managed to assimilate clashing faiths. It was true for Quakers and Baptists in the 18th century, for Catholics in the 19th, and for Mormons and Jews in the 20th. It is proving true yet again in this century for American Muslims.

The Pew Research Center recently released the results of a detailed survey of Muslims in the United States — the third it has conducted since 2007. It is no secret that many Americans, especially since 9/11, have come to regard Muslims with fear or suspicion. During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump fueled that animus, decrying the "great hatred towards Americans by large segments of the Muslim population" and demanding a "total and complete shutdown" of Muslims entering the United States.

Yet for all that, the Pew surveys make clear, US Muslims are replicating the age-old trajectory of religious minority communities: They adopt American values, reject fundamentalism, and form ties of friendship and love across religious lines.

In the latest poll, an overwhelming 92 percent of Muslims agree with the patriotic statement "I am proud to be an American." When asked how much they feel they have in common with most Americans, 60 percent of Muslims say "a lot" and another 28 percent say "some." Only 36 percent say that all or most of their friends are fellow Muslims, a striking drop from the 49 percent who said so in the 2011 survey — and far less than the 95 percent of Muslims who say so in other countries.

Islamist fanaticism and terror have been among the world's intractable problems for decades; the scholar Daniel Pipes has estimated that as many as 15 percent of Muslims worldwide support radical Islam. There is no simple solution to the problem of militant Islamist extremism, and too many Americans — from Boston to Fort Hood to San Bernardino to Orlando — have been among its victims.

But as the Pew data show, the Muslim community in America is the most religiously tolerant and socially liberal Islamic population in the world. And Muslims in America, far from sanctioning deliberate violence against civilians, are actually more likely than the general public to oppose it in all circumstances.

In Pew's latest survey, 59 percent of Americans overall said that targeting or killing civilians for a "political, social, or religious cause" can never be justified. Opposition among US Muslims, however, was 17 percentage points higher — three-fourths of Muslim respondents opposed such killings. The Cato Institute's David Bier suggests that American Muslims are so strongly opposed to religion-based terrorism for the obvious reason that Muslims worldwide are its most frequent victims.

Perhaps it is for the same reason that Muslims in the United States are considerably more likely to reject fundamentalist or monolithic interpretations of Islam.

While many U.S. Muslims attend mosque and pray regularly, majorities say that there is more than one way to interpret their religion and that traditional understandings of Islam need to be reinterpreted to address contemporary issues.
About 43 percent of US Muslims say they attend religious services at least once a week; 65 percent say religion is very important to them. For US Christians, the numbers are comparable — 47 percent say they go to church at least weekly, and 68 percent consider their religion very important in their lives. Contrary to the popular view of Muslims as dogmatic, however, a large majority of those living in America take a latitudinarian approach to Islam and the Koran. Pew found that nearly two-thirds (64 percent) "openly acknowledge that there is room for multiple interpretations" of their religion" and just over half of all US Muslims agree that "traditional understandings of Islam must be reinterpreted to reflect contemporary issues." Polls of Muslims worldwide have found overwhelming majorities supporting a literal interpretation of the Koran; in America, less than half of Muslims do.

Similarly, a majority of Muslims in this country reject the view that Sharia should be a source (let alone the source) for national legislation. In France and Britain, by contrast, majorities of Muslims insist that Sharia should be the primary law of the land. When asked if there is "a natural conflict between the teachings of Islam and democracy," 65 percent of American Muslims say no.

All this is a wonderful affirmation of the power of the American melting pot — E Pluribus Unum. It is a reminder of the fundamental difference between the blood-and-soil nationalism that prevails in Europe and the American conviction that nationhood is grounded in equality and natural rights.

During the debate on independence in 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia declared that liberty in America must be universal, embracing "the Mahomitan [Muslim] and the Gentoo [Hindu] as well as the Christian religion." The potency of that embrace has not diminished. Immigrants of every faith still come to America, and become Americans.

SOURCE

********************************

Donald Trump's response to Hurricane Harvey has been exemplary

Even the fiercest of Donald Trump's critics would have to concede that he has performed well after the last few days. Given the devastation which has befallen Texas, it would be crass to say the president has had a "good hurricane",  but the US media and political establishment will inevitably analyse his performance from that perspective anyway. And it would be churlish to ignore the fact that he has, as it happens, shown leadership.

Trump has tweeted to good purpose, cajoling people to get to safety, encouraging and praising those on the ground. He has been refreshingly non-partisan, hailing the performance of John Bel Edwards, the Democrat governor of Louisiana as well as his Republican counterpart in Texas, Greg Abbott.

The president has not pretended to be King Canute, but has let the professionals get on with the job while pledging they will get the resources they need.

SOURCE

*****************************

Just when you think you've heard the dumbest comment ever made... Maxine Waters does her best to lead us all into peace and prosperity



*****************************

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)

***************************

Why the Democratic Party Hates the President of the United States

Now that Hillary Clinton has lost the presidential election, the Democrats feel emotionally betrayed and have lost all hope. They see President Trump as a human wrecking ball who will destroy the U.S. welfare state through his policies of deporting criminal illegal immigrants, the extreme vetting of refugees entering the U.S. and those immigrating from countries that are state sponsors of radical Islamic terrorism, building a wall on our southern border, the deregulation of business, the lowering of personal and corporate taxes, supporting the fossil fuel industry, repealing and replacing the ACA, etc. This explains, in large part, why the Democrats keep repeating the statement that President Trump is “not my president.”

The impending destruction of the U.S. welfare state has thrown the Democratic Party and most of the mainstream news media into a frenzy because, although President Obama had expanded it throughout the eight years of his presidency, the Democrats needed Hillary Clinton to win the election to continue the expansion. Now that President Trump has won the election, their goal of building a utopian society in the United States has been shattered.

Because the Democrats view President Trump as a threat to their Progressive ideology, there is no line they will not cross in opposing him, his supporters and the Republican Party. This explains the fake news stories, the identity politics, the protests and the misrepresentations of President Trump’s words and deeds. The Democrats are using their negative rhetoric to disrespect both our president and his supporters while simultaneously attempting to undermine his presidency by creating misconceptions in the minds of the American people concerning his character and his policies.

Additionally, from the middle of the 2016 presidential campaign to the present day, some very prominent Democratic politicians have been playing the race card, calling President Trump a racist and a bigot, and his supporters deplorables and irredeemables.

These vile accusations were factored into the decisions made by the voters in formerly blue states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania who voted overwhelmingly for President Trump. Their votes, combined with the additional votes from the other flyover states, enabled him to achieve a total of 304 electoral votes, well over the 270 required to win the presidency.

The Democratic Party’s predictable response to their electoral defeat has been to assert that Hillary Clinton should have been elected because she won the popular vote. They blame her loss on the electoral college, stating that it is a voting system that is both unfair and outdated, and should be abolished.

Abolishing the electoral college is a very serious undertaking because its legitimacy is established by the 12th Amendment of the United States Constitution. The electoral college provides for the indirect election of the president and the vice president of the United States in order to give every voter in every state an equal say in our presidential elections. By denying the legitimacy of the electoral college, the Democratic Party is denying the democratic principle of free and fair elections. The conclusion can be drawn that the Democrats’ thirst for power has become so great that they would be willing to abolish the electoral college from our Constitution if it would help their party win the next presidential election.

The message sent from the Trump voters to both the Democratic and Republican Parties is loud and clear: They are sick and tired of the corruption in the U.S. government, the ever-rising costs of health insurance and pharmaceutical drugs, the $19.9 trillion in national debt, the 94 million Americans out of the labor force, the radical Islamic terror attacks, the murders of innocent U.S. civilians perpetrated by criminal illegal immigrants, the extreme violence in the inner cities, the smuggling of drugs and the human trafficking occurring at our southern border and the condescending political correctness of the Democratic political elites, most of the national news media outlets, many Hollywood celebrities and a large percentage of far-left college professors and their students.

It is obvious to President Trump’s supporters that their message to the Democrats has fallen upon deaf ears. Many Democratic politicians, aided by a largely Democratic mainstream news media, continue to viciously malign President Trump, using the same identity politics they employed throughout most of the presidential campaign. I believe they will continue their smear campaign throughout the 2020 presidential election because of their deep, personal hatred of our president. Some of them are already calling for his impeachment!

In the 2016 presidential election, millions of honest, hard-working, middle-class Americans voted for President Trump, believing that as president he would work with Congress to restore the job security of every able-bodied U.S. citizen, address the domestic and national security concerns of all Americans and restore the dignity and respect of our great veterans.

Under President Trump’s administration, the American citizens will be spared the negative consequences of the welfare state, such as the loss of personal freedoms and the continued decline in wages and job opportunities within the middle class. The election of President Trump highlights the intelligence of the American voters because they have elected a president who possesses the administrative experience necessary to dismantle the welfare state and replace it with free market policies designed to produce high economic growth.

I believe that the Democratic Party has unwittingly endangered itself with the constant repetition of its victimization narrative. It maintains that President Trump and the Republican Party are a group of wealthy capitalists tied to extremely wealthy shareholders of multinational companies and Wall Street banks, all having the same goal of increasing the oppression and victimization of minorities through institutional racism and economic inequality in order to achieve an ever-greater accumulation of wealth and power.

Overplaying the victim card could eventually lead many of the Democratic minority voters, including the Millennials and others, to the conclusion that their party is involved in the same capitalistic system of institutional racism and white privilege the Democratic politicians are accusing the Republican Party of maintaining. If these voters reach the conclusion that they are being victimized by their own party, it’s possible that they could reject it altogether. If that were to occur, the Democratic Party would cease to be a viable, mainstream political party.

SOURCE

*********************************

Impressive Economic Growth Steadily Continues

The Commerce Department revised its second-quarter GDP numbers up to 3%, better than previously reported news.

The Commerce Department released its revised figures for U.S. gross domestic product in the second quarter, and there’s good news — GDP grew not 2.7% but 3.0%. In other words, the U.S. economy is growing faster than was initially thought, and Donald Trump’s ambitious target of 3.0% annual growth for 2017 is closer than many had believed legitimately possible. Now some economists are estimating that third-quarter growth could be has high as 3.4%, based on early job numbers from August. There is a word of caution here, as Hurricane Harvey’s devastation of Houston, America’s fourth largest city, is bound to produce a negative hit to the U.S. economy. But even so, many experts believe it will be minimal and short-lived.

Trump’s greatest contribution to the economy has been his focused Washington deregulation crusade. It has saved Americans billions of dollars and has freed businesses from mountains of over-reaching, economically stifling regulations. But is this growth sustainable? This is where congressional action is needed in the form of tax reform.

Thus, on Wednesday, Trump kicked off his tax-reform push in a speech in Missouri by pressing Congress. Trump said, “This is our once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver real tax reform for everyday, hard-working Americans. And I am fully committed to working with Congress to get this job done. And I don’t want to be disappointed by Congress. Do you understand me?” He pushed for Democrats and Republicans to work together, stating, “What could possibly be more bipartisan than allowing Americans to keep more of what they earn and creating an environment for real job and wage growth in the country that we love so much?” Well, it would counteract Democrats’ class warfare strategy, for one thing.

On a final note, the good economic news was buried by The Washington Post on page 16 in “the digest” without even a headline. Evidently for the Post, good economic news in the era of Trump must die in darkness.

SOURCE

*******************************

Florida Democrat Election Official Admits Noncitizens, Felons Voting

A veteran Democrat chief election official in Florida has conceded in court that noncitizens and felons possibly voted, in a case that could have national implications for how localities clean up voter rolls.

Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes is defending her office against a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Rights Union, a conservative legal group that contends there are more voters registered on Broward’s rolls than there are eligible voters in the county.

Those rolls are said to be inflated with not only noncitizens and felons, but also other ineligible people who have voted illegally.

On July 31, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper reported that, in court, “Snipes acknowledged the processes her office [has] been using aren’t perfect and that some noncitizens and felons have voted despite not being eligible—especially right before major elections, when groups are actively registering new voters.”

Burnadette Norris-Weeks, a lawyer for Snipes and Broward County, said the statement was “blown out of proportion” and was in response to a question, rather than a statement of definite voter fraud in the county.

“This wasn’t a suggestion there was rampant voter fraud in Broward County,” Norris-Weeks told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. She added that suggested improvements were “no admission of anything.”

“The supervisor will try anything to improve the system,” she said.

As of Aug. 30, just over half of the county’s 1.18 million registered voters, 595,688, are Democrats, according to county figures. About 21.6 percent of them, 254,966, are Republicans, while 326,405 are not affiliated with a political party, and 3,891 are described as “other.”

Snipes has been the county’s top election official since being appointed in mid-2003, and has won subsequent elections starting in November 2004.

U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom of the Southern District of Florida in Miami, an appointee of President Barack Obama, has not yet rendered a decision. A ruling will likely come in October, Norris-Weeks said.

“One of the things that is the beauty of this country is that anybody can sue for anything on any day,” Norris-Weeks said. “This is just a right-wing conservative organization trying to make sure it’s more difficult for people to vote.”

The case’s four-day trial this summer came at a time when voter fraud has become a national issue. President Donald Trump in May named a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to examine the issue nationally.

Broward County’s problems reportedly included voter registration lists with 130-year-old voters (or would-be voters, if they were living), felons, duplicate registrations, and commercial addresses listed as residential addresses.

“Snipes said she does not use Social Security death records to check up on extremely old voters—like age 130. She waits for a death certificate to fall in her lap. She won’t even look at local obituaries as a starting point,” Logan Churchwell, a spokesman for the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which is representing the plaintiffs in the case, told The Daily Signal in an email.

Foundation President J. Christian Adams, a member of Trump’s elections commission, is arguing in court on behalf of the American Civil Rights Union.

The Snipes testimony provided many disclosures about noncitizens voting, Churchwell noted.

“Of those outing themselves as noncitizens, she has seen records of ballots cast prior,” he said.

Still, the case is not a voter fraud case, but about whether Broward County manages voter records in accordance with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the “motor voter” law. That law allows people to register to vote when they apply for their driver’s license, but also requires local elections offices to keep their voter lists accurate.

Snipes reportedly said in court that her office was applying to be connected to Florida’s Driver and Vehicle Information Database.

“She made references to episodes involving voter registration drives before an election that turned in bad information. She gave the example of fictitious names on the stand,” Churchwell said. “She agreed that her office had registered ‘hundreds’ of voters claiming illegal commercial addresses as residential ones. They were usually rented mailboxes.”

SOURCE

*****************************

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)

***************************

Why the Media Are in a Never-Ending Hunt for Right-Wing Violence

ANN COULTER below points out that, on past form, the media characterization of the Charlottesville marchers as "white supremacists" is almost certainly wrong.  I pointed out from the beginning that most of them were probably just Southern sentimentalists and Mr. Trump also said from the beginning that they were a mix of people.  It will be fascinating to see what emerges from the trial of the man who drove his car into some of the Antifa people.  That he was attacked first could give him a good self-defense claim.  What howls there will be if he is acquitted!  It would be another good instance of what Ann describes below

After I’d spent a decade begging Republicans, including a few presidential candidates, to take up the immigration issue, Donald J. Trump came along, championed the entire thesis of Adios, America, and swept all contenders aside.

It’s too late for the likes of Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan to avoid humiliation, but if they don’t want to keep making asses of themselves in public by, for example, praising today’s version of the KKK, they should read my entire corpus of work, starting with Demonic. (Trump somehow grasped the whole point of that book, too.)

The reason normal people are suspicious of the media’s narrative on Charlottesville is that we’ve heard this exact same story many, many times before.

Facts on the ground:

— Approximately every other year since forever, liberal hooligans have been rampaging through the streets, beating people up, setting off bombs, killing cops, smashing store windows, assassinating politicians and burning down neighborhoods — against capitalism, Vietnam, Nixon, Wall Street, a police shooting, Trump, Starbucks, a sunny day.

— Conservatives, mostly families, have generally avoided even the mildest forms of political protest, and, when they finally are driven to petition the government over their grievances, they pick up after themselves — at tea parties, townhalls, Trump rallies and so on.

Result: The entire media are constantly on Red Alert for the threat of Right-Wing Violence.

The explanation for this apparent madness is that the left — both the scribblers and the shock troops — bear all the characteristics of a mob, as set forth more than a century ago by the father of group-think, French psychologist Gustave Le Bon. No behavior of the left is mysterious if you’ve read Le Bon — or “Demonic.” In The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Le Bon observed that the “complete lack of critical spirit” prevents crowds from “perceiving … contradictions.”

No matter the year or the circumstances, the media and their eunuch politicians are quick to blame any surprising violence on the Right-Wing Nazis of their imaginations — from Lee Harvey Oswald (communist) to Jared Lee Loughner and James Holmes (psychopaths) to the two stabbing murders on a Portland train earlier this year committed by a Bernie Sanders supporter, whom the media — to this day — insist, all evidence to the contrary, was a Trump supporter.

When, a few months after the first murders by a Sanders supporter, a second Sanders supporter opened fire on a congressional Republican baseball practice, putting GOP Rep. Steve Scalise in critical condition, that political attack was simply discarded. The media put the story of left-wing assailant James Hodgkinson in a lead casket and dropped it to the bottom of the sea.

There are scores of other examples of imaginary right-wing violence invented by the media — then quietly abandoned when the facts come out. After weeks of hair-on-fire headlines, suddenly you just stop reading about the Duke lacrosse “rapists,” homicidal maniac Officer Darren Wilson or legions of Trump-supporters ripping off Muslim women’s hijabs.

But I remember! Here are as many as my word limit allows –- maybe more!

SARAH PALIN AND THE RISE OF NAZISM IN AMERICA

During the 2008 campaign, the media were in a perpetual state of fright that racist Republicans would assassinate Barack Obama.

Naturally, when a local reporter claimed he’d heard someone in a crowd at a Sarah Palin rally yell, “Kill him!” about Obama, the media didn’t wait for more facts! The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank promptly reported the reed-thin allegation, which was then repeated in hundreds of other news outlets.

On CNN, David Gergen said that Palin was “whipping up these crowds,” creating “ugly scenes” with audience members yelling, “Kill him. Kill him” — and also claimed (without evidence) that they were yelling “racial epithets.” A CNN article on the alleged shout-out appeared under the headline: “Rage rising on the McCain campaign trail.”

Vice presidential candidate Joe Biden weighed in, somberly calling the alleged incident “dangerous.”

MSNBC’S Rachel Maddow railed against the “mere mention of killing someone at a political rally,” saying, “it’s horrific.”

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann took the gold, yammering on and on about the claim in nightly updates, culminating in one of his prissiest ever “Special Comments,” in which he demanded that John McCain suspend his campaign until “it ceases to be a clear and present danger to the peace of this nation.”

Needless to say, the Secret Service undertook a complete review. Agents listened to tapes of the event, interviewed attendees and interrogated the boatloads of law enforcement officers spread throughout the crowd.

Conclusion: It never happened. As even the nutty left-wing site Salon noted, “If (the Secret Service) says it doesn’t think anyone shouted, ‘kill him,’ it’s a good bet that it didn’t happen.”

No apologies, no retractions, no memory.

THE TEA PARTY AND THE RISE OF NAZISM IN AMERICA:

Remember when polite, hardworking Americans came together to oppose Obamacare at tea party rallies in 2009 and 2010?

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Steny Hoyer called the protesters “un-American.” The Democratic National Committee called them “rabid right-wing extremists.” Sen. Harry Reid called the tea partiers “evil-mongers.” Jimmy Carter pronounced an “overwhelming portion” of them racists.

ABC called them a “mob.” CNN called them “rabble-rousing critics.”

Democratic congressman Brian Baird of Washington accused tea partiers of using “close to Brown-shirt tactics.” The AFL-CIO called them an “extremist fringe,” using “mob rule.”

As Le Bon explained, “one of the surest means of making an idea enter the mind of crowds” is to affirmatively state something, “free of all reasoning and all proof.” Indeed, “the more destitute of every appearance of proof and demonstration” a claim is, “the more weight it carries” with a mob.

As usual, once the dust had settled, the only violence at the tea parties and town halls had been committed by liberals.

On Aug. 6, 2009, for example, a black tea partier was beaten up by union thugs shouting the N-word at him at a St. Louis town hall. Six members of the Service Employees International Union were arrested. About a month later, on Sept. 3, 2009, 65-year-old tea partier Bill Rice had his finger bitten off at a health care rally in Thousand Oaks, California, by a lefty Obamacare supporter.

To this day, The New York Times has never mentioned either incident, so it can happily return to railing against the non-existent right-wing rage surging in the red states.

THE CENSUS WORKER AND RISE OF NAZISM IN AMERICA:

In the fall of 2009, the naked body of Census worker Bill Sparkman was found hanging from a tree in southwestern Kentucky, with the word “fed” written across his chest.

Liberals wasted no time in concluding that right-wing extremists had murdered Sparkman in a burst of anti-government hate.

A Census worker? Who hates Census workers? Unlike an IRS agent, an EPA inspector or even an agriculture inspector, a Census worker can’t arrest you, seize your property or fine you hundreds of thousands of dollars. They just hand out questionnaires.

No matter. The left has been waiting for right-wing violence for centuries and, finally, here it was!

New York magazine ran an article about the dead Census worker, asking, “Has Nancy Pelosi’s Fear of Political Violence Been Realized?”

The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan blamed “Southern populist terrorism” for Sparkman’s death, “whipped up by the GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts.”

But MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow owned the Bill-Sparkman-was-murdered-by-right-wingers story. Night after night, she breathlessly reported this “breaking national news.” Although Rachel’s main move is giggling and eye-rolling, she was all deadly earnestness when it came to the “troubling story” and the “worry that he was killed in fact because he was a federal employee.”

In case you missed the point, Maddow reminded viewers there’s “a strong suspicion of government generally among people who live in that area.”

A month later, investigators announced that Sparkman had committed suicide in an insurance scam. Rachel left it to her guest host, Howard Dean, to break the bad news to her conspiracy-minded viewers, sparing her the humiliation.

And then we never heard the story of the Census worker again.

A media capable of turning tea partiers, Palin supporters and a random insurance scam into weeks of terror at right-wing violence are not going to let a few nuts waving Nazi flags at a “Unite the Right” rally pass without leaping at the opportunity to outlaw conservatism.

Based on the media’s 100-year history of fantasizing a burgeoning Nazi Party in America, the rest of us would like to wait for the facts on Charlottesville.

SOURCE

***************************

Christians Sign Statement of Christian Faith, Left Goes Nuts

Christians aren't supposed to believe what the Bible teaches but what social justice warriors demand

Christians aren’t supposed to believe what the Bible teaches; Christians are instead supposed to believe what 21st century social justice warriors allow them to believe. That’s essentially the message of progressives in the wake of the signing by many prominent Evangelical Christians of the Nashville Statement.

National Review’s David French, who was among the signers, sums it up: “It’s a basic declaration of Christian orthodoxy on sexuality, sexual orientation, and sexual identity. Its 14 articles can be boiled down to a simple statement: We believe the Bible is the word of God, and the word of God declares that sexual intimacy is reserved for the lifelong union of a man and a woman in marriage. It acknowledges the reality of same-sex attraction as well as the reality of transgender self-conceptions, but denies that God sanctions same-sex sexual activity or a transgendered self-conception that is at odds with biological reality. In other words, it’s basic Christianity.”

Naturally, that’s vile bigotry to many on the Left. In addition to the leftist Christians whose politics often trump their belief in the Bible’s teachings, Nashville’s Democrat Mayor Megan Barry weighed in, tweeting, “The @CBMWorg’s so-called ‘Nashville Statement’ is poorly named and does not represent the inclusive values of the city & people of Nashville.” But given the large conservative Evangelical presence in Nashville, we’d say that the statement is in fact a fair and accurate representation.

But as French notes, Barry’s proclamation, as representative of Nashville’s government, is “a declaration of state against church.” It’s the mayor telling many of her own citizens that they do not represent their city. This line of totalitarian thinking is exactly what drove the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage, among other things.

Americans are being told what to think by the Rainbow Mafia and its Big Media enablers. Or should we say feel? Because that’s what this is — emotion-driven, “love wins” policymaking that subjects those who disagree to disdain, mockery and even criminal penalty. Is that the kind of religious liberty the Pilgrims came here to establish?

SOURCE

*****************************

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)

***************************

Right, Left, Facts, and Values

Since my job is to proselytize on behalf of economic liberty, I’m always trying to figure out what motivates people. To be blunt, I’ll hopefully be more effective if I understand how they decide what policies to support. That’s a challenge when dealing with my friends on the left since some of them seem to be motivated by envy.

Unsurprisingly, there are people on the other side who also contemplate how to convert their opponents.

Harvard Professor Maximilian Kasy wrote a column for the Washington Post that advises folks on the left how they can be more effective when arguing with folks on the right. He starts with an assertion that conservatives are basically impervious to facts.

    Worries about…our “post-factual era” impeding political debate in our society have become commonplace. Liberals…are often astonished at the seeming indifference of their opponents toward facts and toward the likely consequences of political decisions. …A common, though apparently ineffective, response to this frustration is to double down by discussing more facts.

This is a remarkable assertion. I’m a libertarian rather than a conservative, so I don’t feel personally insulted. That being said, conservatives generally are my allies on economic issues and I’ve never found them to be oblivious or indifferent to facts (I’m speaking about policy wonks, not politicians, who often are untethered from reality regardless of their ideology).

So let’s see how Mr. Kasy justifies his claim about conservatives. Here’s more of what he wrote.

    …maybe the issue is not conservatives’ ignorance of facts, but rather a fundamental difference of values. Taking this point of view seems essential for effective communication across the political divide.

I basically agree that differences in values play a big role, so I’m sort of okay with that part of his analysis (I’ll return to this issue in the conclusion).

But my alarm bells started ringing at this next passage.

    Much normative (or value-based) reasoning by liberals (and mainstream economists) is about the consequences of political actions for the welfare of individuals. Statements about the desirability of policies are based on trading off the consequences for different individuals. If good outcomes result from a policy without many negative consequences, then the policy is a good one.

Huh? Since when are liberals (and he’s talking about today’s statists, not the classical liberals of yesteryear) and mainstream economists on the same side?

Though I admit it’s hard to argue about the rule he proposes for policy. He’s basically saying that a change is desirable if “good outcomes” are more prevalent than “negative consequences.”

That’s probably too utilitarian for me, but I suspect most people might agree with that approach.

But he makes a giant and unsubstantiated leap by then claiming it would be wrong to repeal a supposedly good policy like Obamacare.

    When Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) remarked on the Affordable Care Act this spring, for example, she said, “…we’re talking about something that would deny those in need with the relief and the help that they need, that they want and deserve…” In other words, if a policy will harm the welfare of individuals in need, it’s a bad policy.

Huh? What happened to his utilitarian formula about “good outcomes” vs “negative consequences”? Sure, some additional people have health insurance coverage, but is he blind to rising premiums, job losses, higher taxes, loss of plans and loss of doctors, dumping people into Medicaid, and other downsides of Obamacare?

If facts are important, shouldn’t he be weighing the costs and benefits?

In other words, Kasy must be in some sort of cocoon if he thinks the Obamacare fight is between Republicans motivated only by values and Democrats motivated by helping individuals.

His analysis of the death tax is similarly off base.

    …consider the example of bequest taxes, labeled “estate taxes” by liberals and “death taxes” by conservatives. A liberal might invoke various empirical facts…our empiricist liberal might conclude that bequest taxes are an effective policy instrument, providing public revenue and promoting equality of opportunity. The conservative addressee of these facts might now just shrug her shoulders and say “no thanks.” Our conservative likely believes that everyone has the right to keep the fruits of her labor, and free contracts of exchange between any two parties are nobody else’s business. …Taxing bequests thus means punishing moral behavior, the exact opposite of what the government should do.

Once again, Kasy is deluding himself. Conservatives do think the death tax is morally wrong, so he’s right about that, but they also have very compelling arguments about the levy’s negative economic impact. Simply stated, the death tax exacerbates the tax code’s bias against capital formation and results in all sorts of economically inefficient tax avoidance behavior (with Bill and Hillary Clinton being classic examples).

His column concludes with some suggestions of how folks on the left can be more persuasive. He basically says they should appeal to conservatives with values-based arguments such as these.

    We should evaluate the policy based on its effect on individuals, and assign a higher weight to the majority of less wealthy people. …nobody can be said to consume only the products of their own labor. We rely on social institutions including markets and governments to provide us with all the goods we consume, and absent a theory of just prices (which present day conservatives don’t have) there is no sense in which we are entitled to specific terms of exchange.

I’m not the ideal person to speak for conservatives, but I don’t think those arguments will win many converts.

Regarding his first suggestion, Kasy’s problem is that he apparently assumes that people on the right don’t care about the poor. Maybe I’m reading between the lines, but he seems to  think conservatives will automatically favor lots of redistribution if he can convince that it’s good to help the poor.

I think it’s much more accurate to assume that plenty of conservatives have thought about how to help the poor, but they’ve concluded that the welfare state is injurious and that it is more effective to focus on policies such as school choice, economic growth, and occupational licensing.

Indeed, I hope most conservatives would agree with my Bleeding Heart Rule.

And his second idea is even stranger because economic conservatives have a theory of just prices. It’s whatever emerges from competitive markets.

Let’s close with a column by Alberto Mingardi of the Bruno Leoni Institute in Italy. Published by the Foundation for Economic Education, the piece is relevant to today’s topic since it looks at why an unfortunate number of intellectuals are opposed to economic liberty.

    …some have replied that the main reason is resentment (intellectuals expect more recognition from the market society than they actually get); some have pointed out that self-interest drives the phenomenon (intellectuals preach government controls and regulation because they’ll be the controllers and regulators); some have taken the charitable view that intellectuals do not understand what the market really is about (as they cherish “projects” and the market is instead an unplanned order).

Alberto then shares Milton Friedman’s answer.

    I think a major reason why intellectuals tend to move towards collectivism is that the collectivist answer is a simple one. If there’s something wrong pass a law and do something about it. If there’s something wrong it’s because of some no-good bum, some devil, evil and wicked – that’s a very simple story to tell. You don’t have to be very smart to write it and you don’t have to be very smart to accept it.

My two cents, based on plenty of conversations with well-meaning folks on the left, is that there’s actually a lot of agreement of some big-picture values. We all want less poverty and more prosperity. In other words, I think most people have similar good intentions (I’m obviously excluding communists, Nazis, and others who believe in totalitarianism).

But similar good intentions doesn’t translate into agreement on policy because of secondary values. Especially differences in whether we view “equality of outcomes” as an appropriate goal for government. Some on the left openly are willing to sacrifice growth to achieve more equality (Margaret Thatcher even claimed that they would be willing to hurt the poor if the rich suffered even more). Folks on the right, by contrast, are much more focused on helping the poor with growth rather than redistribution.

SOURCE

*****************************

A Plea for Do-Nothing Government

Nothing promotes bad public policy as much as disaster. An economic depression gives rise to demands for Keynesian “economic stimulus” spending; elevated rates of unemployment among low-skilled workers give rise to demands for increases in the legal minimum wage; shortages of goods and services caused by floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other such acts of God give rise to demands for legal prosecution of “price gougers”; and so on and on.

Probably the single most beneficial amendment to the U.S. and state constitutions would be an amendment to forbid the government from “doing something” beyond its normal actions in response to national or local emergencies. Nearly everything the government does on such occasions makes matters worse, ultimately if not immediately. If only the people understood that the government waits for emergencies with saliva flowing, knowing that it can then get away with extensions of its power and the enrichment of its cronies to an extent that would be impossible in normal circumstances.

SOURCE

****************************


The defense of truth is motivated by love, not hate

Last week, I made a short video about how the media and the Southern Poverty Law Center were getting “hate” wrong, slandering good groups such as the Family Research Council and Alliance Defending Freedom by calling them hate groups.

Liberal activist groups do this because they disagree with conservatives on marriage and gender identity. But it’s wrong to think every disagreement is the result of hate.

Anti-gay bigotry exists. It’s wrong. And we should condemn it.

But support for marriage as the union of husband and wife isn’t anti-gay. Believing the truth about marriage—that it unites a man and woman as husband and wife in an act that makes them one flesh—isn’t “anti” anything.

Believing that men and women aren’t interchangeable, and that mothers and fathers aren’t replaceable, that children deserve both a mom and a dad—that’s not hate. It’s truth. And even if you disagree, you should acknowledge that it’s motivated by love, not hate.

Anti-trans bigotry is real—and it’s wrong. And we shouldn’t tolerate it.

But biology isn’t bigotry. The best biology, psychology, and philosophy conclude that sex is a biological reality and that gender is the social expression of that reality. And it’s entirely reasonable to have concerns about privacy and safety when males who identify as women can go into the ladies’ and girls’ bathroom and locker room.

Likewise, having concerns about giving children puberty blockers, or performing sex reassignment surgery on adults, isn’t anti-trans. It’s a disagreement about medicine.

The most helpful therapies for gender dysphoria focus not on achieving the impossible—changing bodies to conform to thoughts and feelings—but on helping people accept and even embrace the truth about their bodies and reality.

These are difficult questions. We need to be able to disagree about them without smearing our opponents, on either side.

SOURCE

*****************************

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)

***************************

Terror can be conquered ONLY with greater terror

I think ALEXANDER MARKOVSKY is right below but whether soft Western politicians will ever do what he advises is doubtful.  As a former Soviet citizen he is tougher than most

It is exceedingly obvious that the West continues projecting weakness and strategic incoherence. The Western Democracies are incapable of rejecting postmodern liberal thinking that Islam is peaceful and acknowledge that we are in the age-old struggle between freedom and tyranny.

Radical Islam poses both internal and external threats to Western civilization on the scale of Nazism and Imperial Japan in terms of the potential mass death and destruction. Islam is conducting a war against the Western democracies with religious zeal and fanatical determination, using all resources available-from engaging in open warfare to spreading terrorism across the globe; from sponsoring radical ideology within Muslim communities to indoctrinating schoolchildren to hate Western values. In this war America and the Western world are facing a type of peril they have never faced before.

The West fails to recognize as an immutable fact that radical Islam is not just a religion; it is also a political totalitarian movement, just like communism and fascism. The movement embraces a fanatical agenda that includes religious supremacy and a Marxist-type utopian/egalitarian standard of virtue. However, unlike communism and fascism, which were adopted by countries that could be defeated militarily, radical Islam is not a country. It is a mass movement sustained by an ideology embodied in unlimited human resources around the globe.

Moreover, many Muslims residing in the West evince a favorable attitude toward radicalism. They form a silent but effective network of support that allows terrorists to avoid security forces, survive, plan, recruit new members, and provide training. Hence, diplomatic solutions cannot be found, nor is it possible to defeat it in strictly military terms. Therefore, the war on terror is not just a military confrontation; it is also an ideological and a political affair.

First and foremost, this monster has to be defeated ideologically by superior principles advanced by Islam itself. Indeed, across the Atlantic in Egypt, a new and different version of Islam is emerging. Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has assertively lead his country out of the Arab Spring. He has denounced Islamic terrorism and challenged religious clerics and scholars to "revolutionize the religion" and bring it in line with Western morality. The president of Egypt is a leader who exhibits moral clarity, courage, and charisma. With the enhanced stature of the restorer of stability, he is in a position to use his authority to isolate radicals ideologically.

Second, we must learn from past experience. Vladimir Lenin, the father of modern terrorism, who was also on the receiving end of it, summarized his experience with Bolshevik brevity: "Terror can be conquered ONLY with greater terror."

Whether this nation is prepared to conquer terrorists with greater terror is an open question. In the past, civilized society had little hesitation to use all its might to protect and defend its ideals. Bombing Dresden in 1945 was, in contemporary terms, a clear act of terrorism aimed at German civilians in order to break the Germans' resolve. Dropping two nuclear bombs on Japan was hardly a humanitarian act either. What is not in question is the imperative for survival of our civilization. Our contemporary American challenge is not the military aspect of killing a lot of people; it is the moral issue, regardless of reasoning and justification. This imperative shall be reconciled vis-à-vis Western thinking, which embraces the humanitarian principles that separate us from the barbarians, and the necessity of survival. Henry Kissinger addressed this dilemma when he wrote, "While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive."  

Assuming that the United States possesses the psychological stamina to do what needs to be done to survive, we shall stop shaping our foreign policy by personal animosities and professed moral superiority, and start forming alliances based on National Interests. We should embrace President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and form a new alliance founded on common interests between the United States, Russia, Egypt and Jordan to eradicate radical Islam. El-Sisi's led ideological offensive augmented by the well-equipped and well trained Egypt and Jordan military supported by the infinite firepower of the United States and Russia will deliver the ultimate wish to those who claim to love death more than life quickly and decisively.

Political posturing will not instill the fear of God in the Islamists, but el-Sisi will-if he lives long enough. Courageous leaders in this part of the world before him did not, so time is of the essence.

SOURCE

*******************************

Today as in the 1930s, real fascism comes from the Left

Norman Tebbit [Prominent British Conservative politician]

Over recent days I have become more  and more irritated by the skill of those on the Left in labelling any event of unreason or violence as being the work of "the far Right", and the foolishness of us on the Right for letting them get away with it.

James Bloodworth wrote recently in the New Statesman that Ukip's Anne Marie Waters  had "started out on the political left , but like Oswald Mosely before her has since veered dramatically to the right."

We have been fortunate in this kingdom in that we have had only one prominent fascist, Oswald Mosley, who never held office in government at Westminster. I often see or hear references his political journey to the "far Right" from the wilfully ignorant. The facts are otherwise.

Mosley's journey started from his Conservative roots and his election as a Conservative Member of Parliament in 1918. He then defected to Labour, losing his seat in 1924, but returning as Labour Member for Smethwick in 1926 and taking office in the Labour Government  of Ramsay MacDonald as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1929. His advocacy of nationalisation of industry and a huge programme of public works (and who does that remind you of these days?) was rejected by the Labour government, and he resigned.

Mosley then became impressed by the collectivist ideas of Mussolini's Fascist Party and Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party, before founding the British Union of Fascists, which opposed war with Hitler's Germany. He was interned in 1940 by Churchill's wartime government.

After the war his National Party of Europe campaigned for "Europe a Nation", a proposed European super-state to  have been run according to principles of "European Socialism". Mosley died in 1980, still committed to the anti-Semitism he shared with the German National Socialists and Russian Communists, having never swung back to the Conservative roots he had torn up in 1923..

With the Labour Party of today committed to far Left  policies akin to those rejected by Ramsay MacDonald 85 years ago, and the Lib Dems united only by their belief that the United Kingdom should not be a self-governing state, the political market is wide open for a party which could unite around the Thatcherite Conservative policies which saved the country in the 1980s.

It would be nice too if we could get away from the sheer nastiness which has of late been used in an effort to close down a good deal of entirely legitimate debate on public affairs. The believers in climate change came out to attack the BBC for allowing Lord Lawson air time to express some scepticism about the wilder claims of imminent climatological disaster.  One describing himself as a physicist tweeted that "there should be no debate anymore about climate change."

Perhaps the very nature of the so-called "social media" on which so much of this nastiness is expressed – often by frustrated attention-seekers who have no other platform – has a role in the general degradation of comment and conduct over a much wider field than politics today.

SOURCE

****************************

5 BIG Companies Just Stabbed Trump In Back With SICK Announcement About Who They’re Working With

There has practically never been a better time to be in business than right now with President Donald Trump in the White House. He’s done more for workers and companies in his first few months than his predecessor did in two presidential terms. The economy is booming because of this incredible businessman.

Now, five major companies have just decided to stab him in the back at once with a disgusting announcement. Apparently, they don’t care that their businesses are better under Trump since their disdain for him seems to supersede all else.

The fallout began with the most unsuspecting retailers who is about as synonymous with the U.S. as any store can get. Walmart profits heavily from their reputation of patriotic values and being the picture of success from capitalism, hard work, and the fruits of pursuing the American dream, despite using cheap overseas labor to produce a glutenous amount products.

The retail giant’s CEO, Doug McMillon, came forward last week to stab President Trump in the back with an announcement after what he saw happen in Charlottesville, Virginia. He had the option to pick a side or remain neutral and he chose to blame the president for the racist violence in which had no part in promoting.

Strangely, McMillion didn’t take the same stance on Barack Obama when he was in offices at the time a member of his beloved Black Lives Matter group shot and killed multiple Dallas cops in the name of the racist cause.

“In a statement posted on the retail giant’s website, McMillon wrote that Trump ‘missed a critical opportunity to help bring our country together by unequivocally rejecting the appalling actions of white supremacists’,” the Washington Examiner reported of CEO’s statements.

Now, four other companies, including another major retailer have come out against Trump after Charlottesville. However, of the five companies, three made it much worse with who they have been secretly doing business with behind his back.

Amid the flood of CEOs rushing to distance themselves from Trump who committed a sin in their eyes by calling out both the White Supremacists and the Antifa crowd was Marcus Lemonis, who is the CEO of one of NASCAR’s biggest sponsors.

Representing the major outdoor retailer, Camping World, Lemonis appeared on CNBC’s “Power Lunch,” where he seemed to suggest he wouldn’t be shattered if people who supported Trump’s comments decided to shop elsewhere. So basically he told all of us NASCAR fans to shop elsewhere.

Publicly announcing that Trump supporters are not welcome at your business is not good for profits. However, all business sense has gone out the window with common sense in the aftermath of Charlottesville. Three other companies who jumped aboard the blame train don’t really care about American money in coming out against Trump this week since they’re getting it from our enemies.

The Washington Free Beacon explains:

Several prominent U.S. companies that have distanced themselves from the Trump administration over its response to the recent violence in Charlottesville, Va., continue to do business with the extremist Iranian regime, sparking accusations of hypocrisy from a leading advocacy group that works to expose Iran’s global atrocities.

Major U.S. companies such as airplane manufacturer Boeing, General Electric, and industrial company Caterpillar all issued public statements distancing themselves from President Donald Trump over what they viewed as his failure to adequately condemn the recent riots in Charlottesville, where far-right white nationalists and neo-Nazis clashed with leftist counter-protestors.

While each company was quick to distance itself from the Trump administration and condemn the open racism and bigotry on display in Charlottesville, all three of the corporations continue to do business with Iran, an openly anti-Semitic regime that threatens to murder Jewish people and endorses leading racists such as David Duke.

Considering the incredibly disgusting double standard of coming out against Trump for not condemning White Supremacists and quickly as they thought, it seems that these three companies are more about grandstanding the president than what they are actually saying.

What makes it even worse, is that “all of these corporations also have refused to sign on to pledges to refrain from doing business with Iran due to the regime’s pursuit of nuclear arms and continued sponsorship of terrorism, including operations targeting U.S. forces,” according to the Free Beacon.

This is an interesting stance, to say the least, considering that Boeing is contracted with the government to build the next Air Force One. “This activity has sparked concerns from lawmakers and U.S. officials that Iran will use any new Boeing planes to boost these operations,” the report noted.

It’s a big slap in the face for these companies to come out and makes statements like, “There is no room for hatred, racism or intolerance” as Caterpillar recently said while increasing relationships with one of the most hateful, anti-American countries in the world.

SOURCE

********************************

A high level Leftist commentator at work



Straitjacket time for Olby?

*****************************

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)

***************************