Day One of Trump Presidency: Withdraw From the TPP

It does appear that the main beneficiaries of this deal were going to be crony-infested big businesses. It was conceived as a free trade pact but rapidly got corrupted into favours for insiders. The potential benefits for average Americans were slight

President-elect Donald Trump said Monday that on his first day in office next January he will begin the process of withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a prospective trade deal which has been a centerpiece of the Obama administration’s “rebalance” to Asia, but which Trump while campaigning called “horrible.”

Trump said in an online video message on priorities for his first 100 days that he has asked his transition team “to develop a list of executive actions we can take on day one, to restore our laws and bring back our jobs. It’s about time.”

“On trade, I am going to issue our notification of intent to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a potential disaster for our country,” he said. “Instead, we will negotiate fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back onto American shores.”

Trump characterized the move a part of a plan to advance the simple core principle of “putting American first.”

“Whether it’s producing steel, building cars, or curing disease, I want the next generation of production and innovation to happen right here, on our great homeland, America – creating wealth and jobs for American workers,” he said.

The TPP partners the U.S. with 11 countries on either side of the Pacific – Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam.

U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman has said the agreement would usher in more than $130 billion a year in estimated GDP growth and more than $350 billion in additional exports.

But Trump during the campaign described the TPP as “horrible” and “one of the worst trade deals,” adding that “I’d rather make individual deals with individual countries. We will do much better.”

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time negotiations for the deal were launched, also opposed it during her presidential campaign – despite having praised it in earlier years, saying in 2012 that it set “the gold standard in trade agreements.”

‘There is no free lunch’

During a series of meetings in New Jersey on Sunday, Trump on Sunday met with Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor who is believed to be in the running to be commerce secretary in a Trump administration.

“They engaged in a conversation regarding negotiating the best foreign deals, American manufacturing and job creation,” the transition team said in a statement afterwards.

Ross is known to be critical of free trade deals.

“Free trade is like free lunch,” he said in a Fox Business interview last August. “There is no free lunch. Somebody wins and somebody loses and unfortunately we’ve been losing with these stupid agreements that we’ve made.”

Trump’s announcement Monday came three days after Obama met with the other TPP leaders in Peru and, in the words of a White House readout, “discussed the United States' continued strong support for trade, our commitment to strengthening ties to the Asia-Pacific, and the need to remain engaged in an increasingly interconnected world.”

“President Obama discussed his support of high-standard trade agreements like TPP, which level the playing field for American workers and advance our interests and values in the economically dynamic and strategically-significant Asia-Pacific region,” it said.

The readout said Obama had urged the other TPP partners’ leaders “to continue to work together to advance TPP.”

During a press conference in Lima on Sunday, Obama said his meeting with the TPP partners had been “a chance to reaffirm our commitment to the TPP, with its high standards, strong protections for workers, the environment, intellectual property and human rights.”

“Our partners made very clear during the meeting that they want to move forward with TPP; preferably, they’d like to move forward with the United States.”

Obama said that not moving ahead with the TPP “would undermine our position across the region and our ability to shape the rules of global trade in a way that reflects our interests and our values.”

In a speech last September, Secretary of State John Kerry urged Congress to pass the TPP during the lame duck session.

“We can’t just stand up and say to the world, ‘Hey, we’re a Pacific power.’ We have to show it in our actions and in our choices,” he said at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

“We can’t talk about the ‘rebalance’ to Asia one day and then sit on the sidelines the next, and expect to possibly send a credible message to partners and to potential partners around the world.”

Trump's other priorities

Other measures listed by Trump in Monday’s video included:

--canceling “job-killing restrictions on the production of American energy, including shale energy and clean coal”

--formulating a rule saying that for every new regulation introduced, two old regulations must be eliminated

--tasking the Pentagon and joint chiefs of staff to develop a comprehensive plan to protect the nation’s vital infrastructure from cyber or other types of attack

--directing the Department of Labor to investigate all visa program abuses “that undercut the American worker”

--introducing a five-year ban on executive officials working as lobbyists after leaving the administration, and a  lifetime ban on executive officials lobbying on behalf of foreign governments

“These are just a few of the steps we will take to reform Washington and rebuild our middle class,” he concluded.

SOURCE

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Backward-Looking 'Progressives'

Thomas Sowell
 
People who call themselves “progressives” claim to be forward-looking, but a remarkable amount of the things they say and do are based on looking backward.

One of the maddening aspects of the thinking, or non-thinking, on the political left is their failure to understand that there is nothing they can do about the past. Whether people on the left are talking about college admissions or criminal justice, or many other decisions, they go on and on about how some people were born with lesser chances in life than other people.

Whoever doubted it? But, once someone who has grown up is being judged by a college admissions committee or by a court of criminal justice, there is nothing that can be done about their childhood. Other institutions can deal with today’s children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and should, but the past is irrevocable. Even where there are no economic differences among various families in which children are raised, there are still major differences in the circumstances into which people are born, even within the same family, which affect their chances in later life as adults.

For example, among children of the same parents, raised under the same roof, the first born, as a group, have done better than their later siblings, whether measured by IQ tests or by becoming National Merit Scholarship finalists or by various other achievements.

The only child has also done better, on average, than children who have siblings. The advantage of the first born may well be due to the fact that he or she was an only child for some time, perhaps for several formative years.

By the time people have grown up and apply to college, all that is history. Nothing that a college admissions committee can do will change anything about their childhoods. The only things these committees' decisions can affect are the present and the future. This is not rocket science.

Nevertheless, there are people who urge college admissions committees to let disadvantaged students be admitted with lower test scores or other academic indicators.

Those who say such things seldom even attempt to see what the actual consequences of such policies have been. The prevailing preconceptions — sometimes called what “everybody knows” — are sufficient for them.

Factual studies show that admitting students to institutions whose standards they do not meet often leads to needless academic failures, even among students with above average ability, who could have succeeded at other institutions whose standards they do meet.

The most comprehensive of these studies of Americans is the book “Mismatch” by Sander and Taylor. Similar results in other countries are cited in my own book, “Affirmative Action Around the World.”

When it comes to criminal justice, there is much the same kind of preoccupation on the left with the past that cannot be changed. Murderers may in some cases have had unhappy childhoods, but there is absolutely nothing that anybody can do to change their childhoods after they are adults.

The most that can be done is to keep murderers from committing more murders, and to deter others from committing murder. People on the left who want to give murderers “another chance” are gambling with the lives of innocent people. That is one of many other examples of the cruel consequences of seemingly compassionate decisions and policies.

Ironically, people on the left who are preoccupied with the presumably unhappy childhoods of murderers, which they can do nothing about, seldom show similar concern about the present and future unhappy childhoods of the orphans of people who have been murdered.

Such inconsistencies are not peculiar to our time, though they seem to be more pervasive today. But the left has been trying, for more than 200 years, to mitigate or eliminate punishments in general, and capital punishment in particular. What is peculiar to our time is the degree to which the views of the left have become laws and policies.

A long overdue backlash against those views has begun in some Western nations, of which the recent election results in the United States are just one symptom. How all this will end is by no means clear. Just as the past cannot be changed, so the future cannot be predicted with certainty.

SOURCE

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Australia cuts Clinton Foundation funds

The federal government has not renewed any of its partnerships with the Clinton Foundation.

Labor and coalition governments over the past decade have paid more than $75 million to the anti-poverty foundation set up by the former first family of the United States, but questions have been raised about its accountability.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told the coalition joint party room on Tuesday agreements entered into by the Rudd-Gillard government had not been renewed.

SOURCE

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

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

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The Politics of Hate

John C. Goodman



One family canceled Thanksgiving dinner so they wouldn’t have to be with pro-Trump relatives. Another family canceled a Christmas reunion for the same reason. One couple changed the date of their wedding so that a pro-Trump relative wouldn’t be able to attend. Another couple chose to get married in Italy — a place too distant for their relatives to travel to. These are just a few of the ruptures that have followed the election of Donald Trump, as reported by The New York Times.

Are we a deeply divided nation? Maybe. But if we are divided the cause of that division comes squarely from the left, not the right. In virtually every case, the people who are canceling reunions and refusing to talk to their friends and family members are Hillary supporters. The Times reported not a single instance of a Trump voter shun.

What’s the cause of all this? I think it is identity politics.

Remember, the two candidates ran completely different campaigns. Trump’s campaign was an issues campaign, mainly economic issues. In every speech he gave, he complained about abandoned factories, lost jobs and low wages. Even if he was completely wrong about the cause of those problems (bad trade deals), his was still campaigning on issues.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, ran a largely issueless campaign. Do you know what her position was on international trade? Of course not. What she said in private was the opposite of what she said in public. On the Pacific trade deal, as a candidate she contradicted everything she said while she was Secretary of State. Her confidants quietly advised worried Wall Street backers that they could safely ignore what was being said publicly on the campaign trail.

But none of that matters because Hillary wasn’t asking people to vote for her because of differences with Donald Trump over trade policy anyway. Or on corporate tax reform. Or school choice. Or safe neighborhoods. Or environmental policy. Or any other policy.

Hillary' s entire campaign, and the Democratic Party’s approach to elections in general, is based on appeals to people as members of racial, ethnic and sociological groups. Since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic Party has approached people as groups, pitted group against group, and promised each to protect them from outsiders. In the Roosevelt era, the appeal was almost exclusively to economic groups.

Today the Democratic party has largely abandoned economic appeals in favor of identity politics. For example, they ask blacks to vote for them because they are black, not because of any policy differences they have with their opponents. And their appeals carry with them an assault on the opposition, either express or implied: The Republican candidate is anti-black. The same approach is used with Hispanics, women, the LGBT community, etc.

For example, here is Michelle Obama telling a black audience they had a duty to vote Democrat, no matter who is on the ticket. (And by implication, no matter what the candidate stands for or what he or she would do once in office.) Her husband was even worse. I have cited many examples in previous posts at Town Hall. (See “Which Is the Party of Hate?”) But you can check it out for yourself. Just Google the words “Obama” and “race baiting” and see how many links pop up.

Now if the election were covered fairly, it would be obvious that one side is talking about issues and the other is not. But as I pointed out last week, the mainstream media viewed the entire election the same way Hillary Clinton did. Even Fox News spent almost the entirety of election night talking about how many blacks were voting versus whites, or women versus men — as if demography were destiny at the polls.

An example of someone who has completely bought into the Democratic Party’s view of the world is Lee Drutman, who has a rather lengthy article explaining why the political fault line between the two parties are based on race and identity and why that is likely to continue for years to come. Much of what he says is correct. But it describes Democrats, not Republicans.

Identity politics works on some voters. I have heard stories of women who break down crying at the mere mention of the election results. Are they crying because NAFTA may be renegotiated? Or the pipeline may be built? Of course not. If elections are about identity, then elections are about you in a very personal way. If the other candidate wins, you have been personally rejected. I would probably cry too if I were naïve enough to believe all that.

As I pointed out last week, Donald Trump uttered not one word during the election that was anti-black, anti-Semitic or anti-gay. Although he may have been insensitive, he really never said anything that was anti-Hispanic. In fact, it’s just the opposite. See this post by Scott Alexander on what Trump really did say, along with the finding that Trump did much better among minorities than either Romney or McCain.

SOURCE

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President Trump’s Cabinet picks are likely to be easily confirmed. That’s because of Senate Democrats

Senate Democrats are not going to be able to block Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions bid to become attorney general. And they can’t do much to stop Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo from assuming the helm of the CIA.

And they have only themselves to thank for it. That’s because exactly three years ago, the Democratic Senate majority — led by Harry Reid (Nev.) — rammed through controversial rules fundamentally changing the way the Senate does business. They unleashed in November 2013 what’s called the “nuclear option” allowing senators to approve by a simple majority all presidential appointments to the executive branch and the judiciary, with a big exception for Supreme Court justices.

Democrats took the controversial step because they were so frustrated by what they saw as Republican foot-dragging on President Obama’s choices for his administration and federal judgeships. Under the new rules, it takes only a simple majority of senators to confirm such appointments instead of the 60 typically needed to force Senate action.

But now that Trump is in the White House and Republicans control the Senate, Democrats have lost their most powerful weapon to block his appointments. Democrats will have 48 seats in the new Senate.

The architect of the rules change, outgoing Senate Minority Leader Reid (D-Nev.), says he doesn’t regret his decision to go nuclear.

“Sen. Reid has no regrets on invoking the nuclear option because of Republicans’ unprecedented obstruction,” said Reid spokeswoman Kristen Orthman. “The nuclear option lets presidents show their true colors and guarantees a nominee a fair up-or-down vote. If Republicans want to go on record supporting radicals, that’s their decision and they will have to live with it.

Incoming Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) noted that he opposed the rules change in the first place.

“I wanted 60 for Supreme Court and Cabinet, but I didn’t prevail,” Schumer said in an interview Friday, in which he also expressed hope that Trump would nominate “mainstream” candidates.

“If it’s somebody who is out of the mainstream,” he added, “we’ll fight tooth and nail and use every tool we have.”

The problem is, those tools are now severely limited. It would fall to Republicans to join Democrats to stand in the way of any Trump appointment deemed objectionable.

“The most controversial nominees should attract Republican opposition as well as Democratic,” said Thomas Mann, a congressional expert with the Brookings Institution. “If they don’t, it’s speaking volumes about the Republican Party, and Democrats are relatively powerless to do anything about that.”

Republicans warned at the time that Democrats were making a mistake with what they called a “power grab,” warning they would be sorry about the change when they eventually found themselves in the minority.

Democrats defended the decision crucial to forcing action in a Washington gripped by partisan warfare.  “The important distinction is not between Republicans and Democrats, it is between those who are willing to help break the gridlock in Washington and those who defend the status quo,” Reid said in 2013.

SOURCE

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Creepy Billionaire Soros Trying to Buy Prosecutors Across America

Creepy Left wing billionaire George Soros is spending a massive amount of his ill-gotten fortune trying to amass an army of robot prosecutors all across the country he can activate to attack his political enemies at his bidding.

Soros is already well known for his underwriting of direct political “activism” like the Black Lives Matter riots and the recent anti-Trump violence he sponsored.

But a post election analysis shows how the shadowy billionaire is trying to put his globalist open border stamp on America by putting his political enemies in jail on trumped up charges.

Republican Matthew McCord was feeling pretty good about the $12,000 he had raised for his campaign for Henry County district attorney when he was blindsided by a September surprise.
New York billionaire George Soros dumped $147,000 into Georgia Safety & Justice, an independent-expenditure committee registered on Aug. 26, aimed at defeating Mr. McCord and electing his opponent, Democrat Darius Pattillo.

After recovering from the shock, Mr. McCord, a former prosecutor in Clayton and Newton counties, did what he thought was best for himself and the party: He dropped out of the race, allowing Mr. Pattillo to run unopposed.

“It was horrible,” said Mr. McCord, a lawyer in private practice in McDonough. “They rented space, they had a staff, they were using a Washington, D.C.-based PR firm. So what I knew was they could say whatever they wanted to say about me. It didn’t matter if it was true, and I would have no way to respond.”

He had already received a taste of things to come. “I’ve always been fairly centrist. I have a foundation that I started that has paid to send minority kids to school. And they [Soros campaigners] were already trying to paint me as a white racist,” he said. “It’s deplorable.”

Mr. McCord wasn’t alone. In 2015 and 2016 Mr. Soros, a leading Black Lives Matter funder, sunk more than $7 million into at least 11 local prosecutorial races in 10 states in an effort to implement criminal justice reform from the inside.

That’s a lot of money for a simple prosecutor position and for some phony “criminal justice reform” initiative from a billionaire known for ruthless investing and manipulation of the the political process to fatten his already considerable wallet.

Soros’s commitment to so-called reform was called into question when one of his bought and paid for robots was busted for his own brand of criminal justice reform:

Those concerns were heightened when one Soros-backed candidate, Hinds County District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith, was indicted in September on charges of attempting to hinder the prosecution of two criminal defendants. He has pleaded not guilty.

The Mississippi Safety & Justice PAC spent about $56,000 to help re-elect Mr. Smith in November 2015.

Soros’s minions have taken control in many key jurisdictions over the past few years.  Expect plenty of politicized prosecutions from the Soros-bots in the near future.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. “Only time will tell if there was a specific policy he [Mr. Soros] wanted them to implement,” said Mr. Thompson. “But we’re keeping our eyes wide open.”

SOURCE

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

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

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Why the Radical Left Never Learns

Leftism is inherently violent.  They want to force people to behave in ways that they normally would not

Many everyday citizens are perplexed as to why the Radical Left is resorting to violence to protest the outcome of a democratically held election. And I’m perplexed as to why anyone would not understand why the Radical Left is resorting to violence to protest the outcome of a democratically held election.

It’s not really all that complicated. Plain and simple, violence is a trademark of the Radical Left. Its members resort to violence whenever they’re challenged — or, worse, when a majority legitimately rejects their ideas. This is a result of their being extraordinarily disciplined in staying focused on their two main objectives — implementation of their radical agenda and complete domination over all those who oppose it.

Before going any further, I should point out that not all those on the Radical Left are cut from the same cloth. There are three main groups that comprise this dangerous, anti-liberty segment of the human race.

* Elitists: These are the leaders of revolutions, men like Vladimir Lenin, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Mao Zedung, and Ho Chi Minh. It’s probably true that most Radical Left leaders sincerely believe, at least at the start of their climb to power, that they are acting nobly in an effort to improve the lives of the oppressed masses. But it’s equally true that all of them have one thing in common: While they claim to believe in equality, they simultaneously believe in the cognitive-dissonant proposition that some animals are more equal than others (credit George Orwell, Animal Farm). Translation: Unlike the unwashed masses, revolutionary leaders live like royalty while their duped followers live in misery and poverty.

* Low-information losers: These are the college kids, welfare professionals, and those who, for any one of a number of reasons, are angry about life in general. Whether crying in a “safe space” at Princeton or stealing cigarillos from a convenience store, they are the losers of society who can be paid, if necessary, to vent their anger for any cause drummed up by the Radical Left elites.

* Rank-and-file true believers: These are everyday people who may or may not work for a living, but what they all have in common is a belief that a majority of the world’s population (or at least a majority of the Western world’s population) consists of ruthless and “greedy” people who must be restrained by morally superior folks like themselves. They can be counted on to go to the wall for their leaders whenever a call to action is put out to them.

Now, to understand the violence that the Radical Left is currently engaging in to protest Donald Trump’s victory over the Face of Evil, the first thing you should do is disregard the low-information losers. They are irrelevant because their lack of knowledge relegates them to nothing more than attack dogs who obediently obey the commands of the elites.

The rank-and-file true believers and elitists, however, have one very important thing in common: cunning. Whenever the Radical Left achieves power, its mouthpieces make it clear to all those who disagree with them that they have no interest in compromising and that they intend to implement their agenda one way or another — through legal or illegal means. And, if necessary, through the use of force.

However, when they are out of power, as they are about to be, they cunningly talk about the need for both sides to “come together,” unite, be nonpartisan, and compromise. Because they can be counted on to buy into this age-old, Radical Left tactic, people like the Bushes, John McCain, Mitt Romney, John Kasich, Paul Ryan, and the rest of their ilk are useful idiots every bit as much as are the low-information losers of the Radical Left.

To those on the Radical Left, it’s all about getting their foot in the door. Then, once in, they boldly put down a place marker and use that as the new starting point for future negotiations. It’s a very clever strategy that has paid huge dividends for the Radical Left over the past fifty years. Giving credit where credit is due, Barack Obama has been an absolute master at implementing this strategy during his two terms in office.

A lot of people also seem surprised that since the humiliating repudiation of both Hillary Clinton and, more specifically, Barack Obama’s policies by the voting public, the Radical Left has not let up on its smear and violence tactics. This should not come as a surprise to anyone, because the Radical Left has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not learn anything through experience. That’s because it has no interest in learning. Its interest is focused on achieving and maintaining power.

The Radical Left aligns with George Orwell’s character O’Brien in another of his classics, 1984, who said: “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. … We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. … The object of power is power.”

That being the case, you can count on the Radical Left to double and triple down on its past mistakes. Notwithstanding their feigned introspection on what went wrong on the way to Hillary’s second planned coronation, the same old radical leaders will use the same old tired identity politics to drum up the same old hatred and division among voters.

Their leading lights — villainous people like Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and Barack Obama will continue to drive the party’s already far-left agenda further leftward. They not only don’t care what the “forgotten man” outside New York and California thinks, they loathe him and rather enjoying seeing him endure ever more pain.

Thus, it’s not surprising that the Dirty Dems are now talking about making Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison leader of the Democratic National Committee. There’s nothing wrong with Ellison’s being both a black man and a Muslim. The problem is that he’s a Radical Left black man and a Radica Left Muslim. Just the fact that the Dirty Dems are considering him for the role of head of their party is a way of saying to the 60 million forgotten-man voters: “In your face.”

This while they act outraged that Trump has tabbed Steve Bannon as his chief strategist, insisting that he’s too “extreme.” Their hypocrisy takes chutzpah to a new level.

Keeping all this in mind, if you’re still celebrating Donald Trump’s big upset, I feel obliged to sober you up by reminding you yet again that 60+ million people — nearly half of all voters! — voted for a Radical Left career criminal in the most recent election. Do you really believe they are going to have a change of heart and be more civil to their opponents anytime soon?

The uncomfortable reality is that the Radical Left has no intention of backing down. America is irreversibly entrenched in a civil war that is guaranteed to become increasingly violent, and the most dangerous thing the Trump administration can do is bend over backwards to be “inclusive.” Always remember that the Dirty Dems use the inclusiveness trick to get their foot back inside the door with an eye toward regaining power.

As I said in my last article, be careful, Donald … be very, very careful. Just do a little reading on the Internet if you have any doubts about whether the Radical Left is prepared to undertake a violent civil war. Which is why I’ve said for years that the solution to the Radical Left problem is not to work with them, but to try to defeat them.

Sure, total defeat is an unrealistic expectation, but continuously working toward it is not. Harsh containment is a realistic goal, but it takes a steel resolve and an unbudgeable, no-compromise attitude to accomplish it.

SOURCE

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The Slacker Mandate and the Safety Pin Generation

News flash, kids: Things aren’t free. Things cost money. And “free” things provided to you by the government cost other people’s money.

Donald Trump gets it — somewhat. He vows to repeal Obamacare’s most burdensome federal mandates that are jacking up the price of private health insurance. But he also plans to preserve the most politically popular provisions of the Orwellian-titled Affordable Care Act, including the so-called “slacker mandate.” It’s the requirement that employer-based health plans cover employees' children until they turn 26 years old.

That’s right: Twenty-freaking-six.

Is it any wonder why we have a nation of dependent drool-stained crybabies on college campuses who are still bawling about the election results one week later?

Trump briefly mentioned during a “60 Minutes” interview on CBS this weekend that the slacker mandate “adds cost, but it’s very much something we’re going to try and keep.” That’s because most establishment Republicans in Washington, D.C., are resigned to keeping it. Once the feds hand out a sugary piece of cradle-to-grave entitlement candy, it’s almost impossible to snatch it back.

Who pays for this unfunded government mandate? As usual, it’s responsible working people who bear the burden.

Earlier this year, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the No Slacker Left Behind provision resulted in wage reductions of about $1,200 a year for workers with employer-based insurance coverage — whether or not they had adult children on their plans. In effect, childless working people are subsidizing workers with adult children who would rather stay on their parents than get their own.

Moreover, according to company surveys and other economic analysis, the slacker mandate has resulted in overall increased health care costs of between 1 and 3 percent. The nonpartisan American Health Policy Institute reported one firm’s estimate of millennial coverage mandate costs at a whopping $69 million over 10 years.

At the time the federal slacker mandate was adopted in 2010, some 20 states had already adopted legislation requiring insurers to cover Big Kids — some up to age 31!

Yes, thirty-freaking-one.

In Wisconsin, the slacker mandate covered not only adult children, but also the children of those “children” if they lived in single-parent homes. In New Jersey, champions of the provision claimed it would help cover 100,000 uninsured young adults. But health policy researcher Nathan Benefield of the Commonwealth Foundation reported that “only 6 percent of that estimate has been realized” in its first two years. “The primary reason — health insurance is still too expensive.”

That has only gotten worse, of course, as Obamacare’s other expensive mandates — especially guaranteed issue for those with pre-existing conditions — sabotage the private individual market for health insurance, leaving young and healthy people with fewer choices, higher premiums and crappier plans. The solution is not more mandates, but fewer; more competition, not less.

The Obama White House will brag that the slacker mandate has resulted in increased coverage for an estimated 3 million people. As usual with Obamacare numbers, it’s Common Core, book-cooked math. Health care analyst Avik Roy took a closer look and found that the inflated figure came from counting “(1) young adults on Medicaid and other government programs, for whom the under-26 mandate doesn’t apply; and (2) people who gained coverage due to the quasi-recovery from the Great Recession.”

To add insult to injury, another NBER study found that roughly 5 percent of people younger than 26 dropped out of the workforce after the provision was implemented. They used their spare time to increase their socialization, sleeping, physical fitness and personal pursuit of “meaningfulness.”

Then there are the hidden costs of the millennial mandate: the cultural consequences. All this “free” stuff, detached from those actually paying the bills, reduces the incentives for 20-somethings to grow up and seek independent lives and livelihoods. Why bother? The societal sanctions have been eroded.

Now, the nation is suffering the consequences of decades of that collective coddling. Precious snowflakes can’t handle rejection at the ballot box or responsibilities in the marketplace. Appropriately enough, the new virtue signals of tantrum-throwing young leftists stirring up trouble are safety pins — to show “solidarity” with groups supposedly endangered by Donald Trump.

Safety pins are also handy — for holding up the government-manufactured diapers in which too many overgrown dependents are swaddled.

SOURCE

CHRIS BRAND has perked up and is probably now out of danger.

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

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

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Trump's triumph is all the fault of the thick, ill-informed, irrational mob

Or is it?  Who is REALLY being thick, ill-informed and irrational?

Brendan O'Neill

After Brexit in June and now the victory of Donald Trump, everyone’s freaking out about the howling little people and their ripping up of the political script.

This is the year of rage, commentators claim. Brexit was a “howl of rage”, says The Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland. And now it has been joined by the “anti-establishment anger” of those US voters who elected Trump. It was “rage, not reason” that made people go for Trump, says a US neuroscientist. All this hand-wringing over the rage of Them gives an impression of a swarm of folk brutishly disturbing politics and business as usual. Brexit and now Trump have “shaken the postwar liberal order”, says the Financial Times.

Apparently these pesky plebs, driven by “temporary populist passions” rather than “reasoned deliberation”, in the words of British-American conservative Andrew Sullivan, have done great harm to liberal, rational public life.

This is nonsense. It’s a dangerous and distracting myth. For it isn’t ordinary people, whether Brexiteers or Trumpites, who threaten to dismantle important liberal ideals; it’s their critics, the members of the political class raging against what they view as the raging masses, who risk doing this.

Yes, huge numbers of ordinary people are expressing dissatisfaction with the status quo. As British Prime Minister Theresa May said in a speech this week, Brexit and Trump show that people are peeved at the “emergence of a new global elite” and they want change. But this people’s protest, this polite registering of dissent, isn’t blind rage and it isn’t throttling decent politics. That is being done by the response to Brexit and Trump, by the new elites’ demophobia.

It’s this response that is likely to seriously damage political life. The truly disturbing thing about 2016 is not the rage of the masses against the establishment but the rage of the elites against democracy.

In the 20 years I’ve been writing about politics, I cannot remember a time when disgust for democracy has been as explicit as it is now. It’s everywhere.

“Trump won because voters are ignorant”, says a headline in Foreign Policy magazine. The piece, written by Jason Brennan, US professor and author of Against Democracy, says Trump owes his victory to “the uninformed”.

But this goes beyond Trump, says Brennan. The public’s stupidity calls into question the whole idea of making decisions democratically. Perhaps what we need is an “epistocracy”, where “votes are in some way weighted according to basic political knowledge”, he says. In short, let’s have IQ tests and give greater power to the clever over the dumb.

This isn’t an extreme view anymore. Being anti-democratic has become positively fashionable among the chattering classes.

We are no longer successfully “keeping the mob from the gates”, says Matthew Parris in The Spectator. It has been a while since observers openly talked about “the mob”. Trump’s victory calls into question the wisdom of having “government by the people”, Parris says. So who should govern? Kings? Priests? Parris?

We have become “too democratic”, says Sullivan. The “passions of the mob” have become too great a player in political life. We need a better “elitist sorting mechanism” to prevent people’s “untrammelled emotions” from dominating political discourse.

There is much talk of “low-information voters” or “low-information white people”, as Brennan calls them: a politically correct way of saying “the underclass”. Everyday people are ill-suited to big politics, apparently, because they know little and are driven by rage over reason.

In the words of leading US liberal magazine The Atlantic, the masses are “ignorant of basic facts”, meaning they cannot “act reasonably and rationally in the political process”.

The elitist fury that has greeted the low-information mob that voted for Trump echoes what was said after Brexit. The temerity of 17.4 million Brits to vote to leave the EU, when so many of our betters instructed us to vote remain, sent the establishment and commentariat into a rage that overshadows any rage from below.

It was ridiculous to ask “ignoramuses” to decide on the future of the EU, said famed atheist Richard Dawkins. The public, being ignorant of “the highly complex economic and social issues facing our country”, should “have no say on our EU membership”, he said.

Philosopher AC Grayling denounces the politics of the “crowd”. “Rule by crowd acclamation is a very poor method of government,” he says, since most members of the crowd, dimwitted specks, are susceptible to “misinformation, distortion, false promises (and) tabloid urgings”.

That is, our minds are easily fried by demagogues and lying newspapers; we’re controlled more by sentiment than reason.

Post-Brexit, elitists started to express their disdain for democracy casually and frequently. “What if democracy doesn’t work?” The Guardian’s George Monbiot asked. Maybe the idea that ordinary people behaved as “rational beings” was a myth, he said.

“Never before has the fate of a country … been changed by the swing of such a blunt axe, wielded by … poorly informed citizens,” Belgian writer David Van Reybrouck wrote in an essay hilariously titled “Why elections are bad for democracy”.

The horror of Brexit shows that we must not allow “popular sentiment (to hold) sway over informed decision-making”, former UN official Shashi Tharoor said. So let the smart rule the stupid? A pro-remain conservative said the EU referendum took a “noble idea, that everyone’s political views should count equally, too far”. So sometimes certain people’s views should be more equal than others’.

There are now legal efforts to overthrow Brexit, to thwart the will of the low-information people. And a good thing, too, says a writer for The Washington Post, since it was “widespread political ignorance” that fuelled Brexit.

The chattering-class narrative is that Brexit and Trump are products of idiocy and rashness, and we should now rethink how often we ask the plebs to have their say.

It’s naked elitism. And it should worry anyone who thinks of themselves as progressive far more than the rise of Trump or Britain leaving the EU. It echoes dark anti-democratic moments in history. The idea that crowds are manipulated by demagogues and thus can’t be trusted is the same sneer that was made against the Chartists, the 1840s British movement to expand the franchise to working-class men. The “lower orders of the people” did not have a “ripened wisdom”, said one opponent of Chartism. And this meant they were “more exposed than any other class” to be “converted to the ­vicious ends of faction”.

Such ugly snobbery is rehashed in the foul idea today that Brexiteers and Trumpites, being “low-information”, were easily hood­winked by “misinformation”.

The idea that ordinary people lack expertise and are too ruled by emotion was also said of the suffragettes. As one historian says, women back then were seen to “lack the expertise” necessary for “informed political activity”. They were low-information.

They were also said to have difficulty “forming abstract ideas”. They are too emotional, and “government by emotion quickly degenerates into injustice”, the British journal the Anti-Suffrage Review said in 1910. Now that is said about women and men: too many of them are driven by “feeling, emotion”, in the words of Sullivan. And we can’t have government by emotion, can we?

From the Victorian period to the dark days of eugenicist thinking in the early 20th century, there was a profound discomfort among the elites with the idea of democracy. Now it’s making a comeback.

Crowd politics gives rise to “blubbering sentimentality”, Bis­marck said in the 1800s; government by “crowd acclamation” gives us a useless “snapshot of sentiment”, Grayling says today. The language has become politer but the agitation with the throng remains the same.

This is the scary thing about 2016: not Brexit, not even Trump, but the openness with which democracy is now written off as a terrible mistake. We need to stand up for the crowd. It isn’t an unthinking swarm; it’s a collection of thoughtful individuals, each capable of rationalism and goodness.

In fact, these ordinary people, because they live and work in the belly of society in a way that cut-off experts and observers usually don’t, often have a better understanding of what’s wrong with society and how it might be fixed.

Less jaundiced by power, more aware of where everyday society isn’t working properly, the people can have a keener, more sensitive appreciation of political and social problems and what might be done about them.

I would sooner entrust political decisions to the first 50 people I encounter on my walk through town than to 50 people with PhDs. Too much democracy? There isn’t nearly enough.

SOURCE

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Hillary’s crybabies need to grow up

Miranda Devine

It’s astonishing that we’re in the second week of anti-Trump protests, with the sore losers showing they have learned nothing from their humbling.

Their placards read Love Trumps Hate but it’s the other way around for them. Refusing to accept the verdict of the ­people unless it goes their way, they beat up suspected Trump voters, torch cars, break windows and injure police officers.

The impression is of a profound sense of entitlement.

They demand “dump Trump” because they are so certain of their moral superiority. They think if they splash around lazy insults, “racist, sexist, Islamophobe, homophobe”, they’ve won the argument.

They describe a vote for Trump as a “hate crime”. Yet they ignore actual hate crimes, like the bashing of a 15-year-old boy wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat in Maryland, or a 24-year-old on the subway in New York wearing the red Trump cap, or a 50-year-old man in Chicago suspected of being a Trump supporter ­because he was white.

Imagine if it were a Clinton voter who had copped beatings; it would be reported as the end of civilisation and evidence of the utter depravity of Trump voters.

If you needed proof for why Trump won the election, look no further than the hypocrisy of the left’s crybabies and sore losers, even now imagining they can bully their way into refusing Trump the job he won fair and square.

And where is President Obama, as his cities erupt? In Germany, with Angela Merkel, refusing to call for peace: “I would not advise people who feel strongly (about) the campaign. I wouldn’t advise them to be silent.”

Why hasn’t Clinton called off her goons? Why isn’t she urging that “peaceful transition of power” she was so big on when she thought she had the election in the bag?

She’s been at home, feeling sorry for herself. When she finally emerged for her first public function since the election on Friday, she was hailed as a feminist hero for not wearing makeup or brushing her hair. It was a deliberate statement, but what did it mean, other than to enhance the self-pity in which she is wallowing?

“There have been a few times this past week when all I wanted to do is just curl up with a good book or our dogs and never leave the house again”, she said, crying out for sympathy, but not ­respect.

Thus the anti-Trump protesters are being encouraged by their establishment elders, who ought to be setting a good example but instead have resolved their loss by turbocharging their contempt for the “deplorables”.

“Trump won because voters are ignorant, literally,” wrote Jason Brennan in Foreign Policy magazine.

But when anyone bothered to ask real Trump voters why they did it, as the Washington Post did last week, the answers defy the stereotypes.

“I am a gay millennial woman and I voted for Trump because I oppose the political correctness movement which has become a fascist ideology of silence and ­ignorance,” Samantha Styler, 21, of Arizona, wrote.

Deniz Dolun, 22, of Florida: “My entire family — five Muslim immigrants from Turkey — voted for Trump because of the Democratic Party’s pandering to Islamism. As people who have actually experienced Islamism in its purest form... we supported the candidate who promised to help us fight that issue.”

Christopher Todd, 53, of Florida: “I voted for Trump on the calculated bet that he would nominate conservative Supreme Court justices. If people want to permit gay marriage or abortion for any reason, then make both legal through the legislature, not via an unelected oligarchy rewriting the Constitution.”

Lori Myers, 51, of Texas, wrote: “I voted for Trump ­because the media was so ­incredibly biased. They were ­unhinged in their obvious role as the Clinton campaign propaganda machine.”

SOURCE

CHRIS BRAND is gravely ill.  He is however in good hands in Edinburgh so we hope he will pull through.  He is lucid enough to express his regrets that he cannot do his blog updates this week.

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

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

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Liberals stunned when this icon calls out their Trump hypocrisy

Former “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart is as liberal as they come. But he recently called out leftists for being a bunch of hypocrites:

    Mr. Stewart, former host of “The Daily Show,” sat down with CBS’ Charlie Rose in an interview aired Thursday to discuss his new book, “An Oral History” and weigh in on Donald Trump’s stunning Election Day victory.

    “I thought Donald Trump disqualified himself at numerous points,” Mr. Stewart said. “But there is now this idea that anyone who voted for him has to be defined by the worst of his rhetoric.

    “Like, there are guys in my neighborhood that I love, that I respect, that I think have incredible qualities who are not afraid of Mexicans, and not afraid of Muslims, and not afraid of blacks. They’re afraid of their [health] insurance premiums,” he continued.

“In the liberal community, you hate this idea of creating people as a monolith. Don’t look as Muslims as a monolith. They are the individuals and it would be ignorance. But everybody who voted for Trump is a monolith, is a racist. That hypocrisy is also real in our country.”

Stewart added that America isn’t “fundamentally different” today than it was two weeks ago, pointing out that “the same country that elected Donald Trump elected Barack Obama.”

At least one liberal gets it.

SOURCE

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Anti-Defamation League Backs Down: ‘We Are Not Aware of Any Anti-Semitic Statements from Bannon’

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has backed away from its earlier accusations against Stephen K. Bannon, stating on its website: “We are not aware of any anti-Semitic statements from Bannon.”

The statement appears at the end of an article on the ADL, “Stephen Bannon: Five Things to Know.”

The “five things” are:

    Bannon has embraced the alt right, a loose network of white nationalists and anti-Semites.

    Under Bannon, Breitbart published inflammatory pieces about women, Muslims, and other groups.

    Bannon is a critic of the Republican establishment and the left.

    Bannon has held a number of positions in his career.

    We are not aware of any anti-Semitic statements from Bannon.

The first two claims are false. The next two claims are true, and innocuous. The final claim is exculpatory.

The ADL further explains:

    While there is a long fact pattern of evidence that Breitbart served as a platform for a wide range of bigotry and there is some controversy related to statements from Mr. Bannon’s divorce proceedings in 2007, we are not aware of any anti-Semitic statements made by Bannon himself.

In fact, Jewish employees of Breitbart have challenged the characterization of him and defended him from charges of anti-Semitism. Some have pointed out that Breitbart Jerusalem was launched during his tenure.

    Nevertheless, Bannon essentially has established himself as the chief curator for the alt right. Under his stewardship, Breitbart has emerged as the leading source for the extreme views of a vocal minority who peddle bigotry and promote hate.

The statement that “Breitbart served as a platform for a wide range of bigotry” is completely false, and reflects the ADL’s left-wing ideological orientation rather than objective reality. The statement that Bannon is “the chief curator for the alt right” is also completely false, and defamatory.

The ADL, which calls itself “the nation’s premier civil rights/human relations agency,” launched a defamatory campaign on Sunday against Breitbart News and Bannon, the company’s Executive Chairman, when Bannon was named Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor by President-elect Donald J. Trump. (Bannon has been on leave from Breitbart since his appointment in August as CEO of the Trump presidential campaign.)

In a statement noting that the ADL “strongly opposes” Bannon’s new White House appointment, ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt — a former aide to President Barack Obama — called Bannon “a man who presided over the premier website of the Alt Right, a loose-knit group of white nationalists and unabashed anti-Semites and racists.”

That is a completely false accusation.

Breitbart.com is not “the premier website of the Alt Right.” The only supposed “alt-right” content on the site, among tens of thousands of articles, is one widely-cited journalistic article, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right.”

As one author more familiar with the alt-right noted recently, the main alt-right sites are “/r/altright, Stormfront, and 4chan’s politics board” — not Breitbart News.

Given the wide international interest in the presidential election, and the evident popularity of Trump among some portions of the alt-right (and unpopularity on the far-left), Breitbart has attracted wider attention beyond the company’s core audience of center-right and conservative readers.

But Breitbart is not an alt-right publication, and the daily news content of the website speaks for itself. Moreover, there are no “white nationalists and unabashed anti-Semites and racists” working at, or published by, Breitbart.

On Wednesday morning, nationally syndicated talk show host Dennis Prager — who has written a widely-respected book on antisemitism — called the accusations against Bannon “libel” and said that the ADL had damaged itself with the false claims.

Reacting partly to those false claims, hundreds of demonstrators gathered at the Los Angeles City Hall on Wednesday evening to stage a demonstration against Bannon, including signs referring to Bannon as a “Nazi.”

Also on Wednesday, the ADL initially denied press credentials to Breitbart News’ Adelle Nazarian, who was to cover a conference on antisemitism in New York on Thursday.

Nazarian, who is Jewish, is an experienced journalist who has covered antisemitism and foreign affairs for Breitbart News, and most recently covered the 2016 presidential campaign as part of the national traveling press corps.

Late Wednesday, the ADL reversed its decision and credentialed Nazarian for the event.

SOURCE

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Leftists Demean Instead of Debate

Rule #5 from Alinsky's Rules for Radicals: "Ridicule is man's most potent weapon."

What happens when a leftist disagrees with a conservative? The standard response is Rule #5 from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”

If you stand for the right to keep more of what you’ve earned rather than see 25%, 35% or more legally stolen by the government of course, you’re labeled as greedy and not paying your fair share.

If you voice support for the right to bear arms as enumerated in the Second Amendment, you’ll be declared responsible for untold numbers of deaths due to the lack of gun control.

If you stand for protecting the unborn and for the societal value of marriage and family, you’ll be accused of hating women and homosexuals.

If you oppose massive income redistribution through “Great Society” programs, you’ll be dismissed as racist.

No rationale. No intellectual debate. No substance. But all these issues have a common theme: The one on the Left is permitted to insult, name-call and criticize to create an easily hated target for the masses of uninformed and entitled voters.

Michelle Obama loves to declare, “When they go low, we go high.” Sure thing, FLOTUS. Just tell POTUS and the former FLOTUS that. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton recently warned voters of the Ku Klux Klan’s support of Donald Trump, despite the fact that his campaign swiftly denounced any support of the racial hate group — founded by post-Civil War Democrats.

Then you have Hillary’s September speech where hatred of the Right was only preceded by the Left’s second most-oft used tool, fear. Clinton proclaimed, “I am all that stands between you and the apocalypse.” Her follow-up was, “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables,” as she rattled off the leftist lexicon calling Trump supporters “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic.” And her conclusion was, “Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”

Now she has the temerity to say, “I think I have some work to do to bring the country together.” Why? Because, she says, “these splits, these divides, have been not only exposed, but exacerbated by the campaign on the other side.”

The other side didn’t call anyone deplorable or irredeemable.

Meanwhile, in Obama and Hillary’s fundamentally transformed America, another target of the hounds of hate are any who would tie terrorism to radical Islam.

A recent case in point is courtesy of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which claims the role of civil authority in identifying and labeling “violent extremist groups.” The SPLC’s website has a “hate map” that charts those whose “Hate group activities can include criminal acts, marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, leafleting or publishing.”

Much of that “hate group” activity, with the exception of criminal acts, sounds suspiciously like political campaigning. Include the criminal acts, and the quote perfectly describes the Hillary Clinton campaign.

The SPLC keeps a list called “Extremist Files.” This list of alleged haters, according to the Left’s immoral mouthpiece, catalogues some authentic agitators whose motives should be exposed — like Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, who despises Jews, as well as black nationalist Malik Shabazz and a few others. These are there solely to “legitimize” the remainder of the hit list.

For example, Libertarian political scientist and author Charles Murray is also labeled an “extremist” for his decades of demographic research that exposes the American welfare system as a contributor to poverty. Christian historian David Barton of Wallbuilders is considered a hater because he dares to document the founding of America on the moral truths of the Christian faith with the audacity to cite specific evidences that reject the “myth” of the separation of church and state. Finally, the SPLC Extremist Files includes Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, for his “false propaganda” in defending traditional families against the Rainbow Mafia’s agenda.

SPLC adds to this list “critics of the violence and extremism too often associated with Islam.” Who makes the updated Extremist Files? Daniel Pipes, Ph.D. in Islamic history from Harvard, who has taught foreign policy in relation to the Middle East at Harvard and the University of Chicago. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-born Dutch-American activist, a former Dutch politician who is a leading opponent of female genital mutilation practiced by Muslims. And Maajid Nawaz, a British Muslim reformist and founding chairman of Quilliam, a counter-extremism think tank, who was held as a political prisoner in Egypt.

The point, simply, is to expect the tool of hate to be employed by the Left in their ongoing efforts of covering their failed policies and corrupt practices — ranging from the epic destruction of America’s health care or the open border that permits cheap, illegal labor, and as this election may record, illegal voters.

Be ready, constitutionalist, when you offer your strong, principled argument for a pro-America, limited government policy, to be shamed and marginalized by your leftist opponent. You must quickly expose the tactic of intellectual dishonesty to deflect from the true issue and restate your stance. The hyper-partisan political climate and inability to govern is a malignancy that is destroying our nation. Let’s continue to expose the Left by rejecting the worn tactic of hate and ridicule while pressing through with effective policy that wins both hearts and minds.

Our Fallen Patriots and our posterity deserve as much.

SOURCE

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

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

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Trump is the Best Thing That Has Happened to Israel in Years

Leftists never hesitate to lie if that seems expedient.  They have to lie.  Reality is so hostile to their claims and ambitions.  So the media are awash with unapologetic claims that Trump is a racist and sexist.  They state those things without apology or explanation.  They speak it as if it were incontrovertible  and universally accepted.  Yet any objective analysis show both claims to be quite false.  Trump has treated women very well in his businesses and there is no doubt of his friendship to Israel.

Both Trump and I went to Presbyterian Sunday School as kids and, even though I am now an atheist, I cannot lose, nor do I want to lose, a feeling that Jerusalem is the holy city and that  Israel is the God-given land of the Jews.  Some feelings die hard and I strongly suspect that Trump has inherited similar feelings.  You don't have to be a Jew to love Israel.

And the Left are not done lying when they talk about Trump. His supporters get traduced too. "Spengler", below takes on one such myth


The hysteria in the Establishment is astonishing: today's email blast from the usually staid Financial Times begins, "Donald Trump has chosen Reince Priebus, the establishment head of the Republican National Committee, as his chief of staff, while naming Steve Bannon — his campaign chair who ran Breitbart News, a website associated with the alt-right and white supremacists — as his chief strategist and counsellor."

To claim that Breitbart is associated with white supremacists is a despicable lie, but the FT feels compelled to say such things because polite opinion requires ritual anathemas of Trump. And the liberal Jewish website The Forward writes, "The reaction was quick and furious from Jews and anti-hate groups. The Anti-Defamation League, which stays out of partisan politics and vowed to seek to work with Trump after his election, denounced Bannon as 'hostile to American values.'" The Forward headline asks, "Will Steve Bannon bring anti-Semitism into Trump's inner circle?"

This again is a foul slander. I know Steve Bannon, and have had several long discussions with him about politics. I first met him when he approached me at a conference to tell me that he liked my writing, which is unabashedly Zionist. Steve is strongly pro-Israel, and it is utterly ridiculous to suggest that he is anti-Semitic.

The Establishment is floored and flummoxed. It doesn't understand what it did wrong, it doesn't understand why it has been evicted from power, and it can only explain its miserable situation as the consequence of an evil conspiracy. In short, the Establishment is having a paranoid tantrum, compounding its humiliation with a public meltdown. Sadly, that includes liberal Jews.

Trump's election is the best thing that has happened to Israel in many years. It eliminates the risk of a diplomatic stab in the back at the Security Council and sends a dire warning to Iran, the only real existential threat to the Jewish State. The security of the Jewish people in their homeland is vastly enhanced by the vote on November 8, and Jews everywhere should thank God that the head of state of the world's most powerful country is a friend of Israel with Jewish grandchildren. Instead of slanders, Jews should offer up prayers of Thanksgiving.

SOURCE

See also: The SPLC Calls Bannon A Bigot For Something Charlie Rangel Also Said

And: Alan Dershowitz Defends Steve Bannon: ‘Not Legitimate To Call Somebody An Anti-Semite Because You Disagree With Their Policies’

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The delusional Left and its tribes

Scott Lively

The rioting of leftist street activists in response to the election of Donald Trump is entirely predictable and will quickly morph into a very large and highly destructive international “resistance” movement if is not effectively countered. To respond appropriately, we must first understand that the political left is delusional and implacable, but easily defeatable if we act quickly and don’t waste our time trying to bargain or compromise with them.

The top tier of the leftist elite is not populated by the self-righteous know-it-alls of academia, nor the Stalinist autocrats of the Democratic Party, nor the utopianist manipulators of the foundations and “nonprofit” sector: It is ruled by the story-tellers and dream-weavers of Hollywood. That is because the core of the Cultural Marxist worldview – what defines its purpose and drives its zealots – is “The Narrative.” According to this narrative, the world is enslaved to an ancient and deep-rooted system of institutional bigotry of various forms to which the masses are largely blind, but thankfully there exists a growing network of enlightened social justice warriors. It is the role and duty of these brave and selfless champions of the oppressed to replace the evil established order with an egalitarian socialist utopia only they are privileged to envision and implement. The urgency of this need, and righteousness of their goal, justifies whatever means are necessary to achieve it.

This is roughly the same narrative introduced by Karl Marx in the 19th century, refined by the Frankfurt School of Cultural Marxism in the 1920s and ’30s and embraced with religious fervor by American liberals since the 1960s. It is what drives every aspect of the leftist political agenda.

If you’ve ever tried to debate a true-believer liberal on any aspect of that agenda, you know that facts, reason and logic are frustratingly unpersuasive. That’s because their “reality” is the closed universe of the social justice narrative. Like the schizophrenic, the leftist ideologue interprets all facts, reason and logic as confirmation of their delusion or disregards them as if they don’t exist.

However, while the fantasy of the schizophrenic is uniquely personal to him, the leftist narrative is a common, shared mass-delusion that is continually being both self and mutually reinforced. It is Hitler’s “Big Lie” phenomenon on a massive scale, and its impact on the society as a whole is dramatically compounded by mutual reinforcement across multiple spheres of social influence.

For example, when Donald Trump recommenced a temporary moratorium on immigration from Muslim countries conditional on proper vetting procedures for applicants, the left (some disingenuously, some delusionally) instantly began misrepresenting that as a “ban on Muslims.” In a truth-oriented culture that claim would have been quickly dismissed, but in our leftist-dominated culture the lie was then continually repeated by leftist media organs, establishment Democrats and Republicans, leftist college professors and street-activist organizations. The chorus of multiple false witnesses created a “false reality” in the general public that persists to this day. It is one of many such misrepresentations fueling the hysterical moral outrage and street violence of the anti-Trump rioters whose narrative-driven sense of purpose and identity blinds them to actual reality.

I have also been and am currently a victim of the leftist “narrative.” A subplot of it holds that all disapproval of homosexuality leads inevitably to hatred, violence and murder of homosexuals. It is a paranoid delusion within a delusion, but when the Ugandan government put forward a bill proposing severe criminal penalties for homosexuality and pederasty following my visit there in 2009, and later, David Kato, a leader of Ugandan’s “gay” movement was murdered in his home, the global leftist media named me as the evil mastermind of a campaign of genocide against homosexuals. It never mattered to them that I opposed the Ugandan bill as written from the beginning and had advocated for rehabilitation and prevention during my visit. Nor did they care that the confessed and convicted murderer of David Kato was his own “gay” lover whom he had bailed out of jail to be his live-in boyfriend. All that mattered was the narrative – and so the whole truth was suppressed in favor of only those facts that fit the false reality.

I’ve endured four years of intensive litigation charging me with “Crimes Against Humanity” as a direct consequence of the leftist commitment to their narrative. As U.S. president, Donald Trump, and what’s left of normal society in this nation, is facing (at least) four years of similar leftist hatred and delusion but on a much, much larger scale.

To paraphrase a famous Hollywood movie, “That army of social justice warriors is out there! It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear! And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!” The hard left is the Terminator of the cultural/political sphere. It’s mission is conquest, supremacy and elimination of Judeo-Christian civilization. Any attempt at compromise with it is just perceived as weakness to exploit. In the end either the truth or the leftist narrative will prevail.

It’s highly significant that despite its utopian rhetoric, Hollywood’s vision of the future, as portrayed in nearly every forward-looking film, is so dark and dystopian. Subconsciously, the leftist writers, actors and directors know that their worldview produces chaos and disaster, but their fanatical loyalty to the social justice narrative blinds them to the truth, even at the top of the Marxist food chain.

The only effective response to the leftist narrative is the continual reaffirmation of the plain truth without apology or compromise. No spin. No waffling. No pandering to political correctness, I believe this plainspoken approach on policy matters by Donald Trump was by far the single most important factor in his victory over the unified leftist lie-machine. It will define him as one of the greatest American presidents if he continues on that track. He and we must resist the pressure of the GOP establishment and the “experts” on cultural and political matters to trade plainly spoken truth for manipulative “messaging” and public-relations strategies, no matter how well-intentioned.

Trump’s campaign exposed the whole network of hard leftists across the entire culture and every sphere of public influence, including the media. They knew that if Hillary won, they would be vindicated by the elevation of their narrative to the status of officially accepted “reality,” allowing them to lie and spin forever after with impunity. So they came out of hiding, thinking a Clinton presidency was inevitable. Thus, Trump’s victory has made the job of “draining the swamp” all the easier. It is now incumbent upon all of us who love truth and the former truth-based culture we once enjoyed as a nation to work quickly and vigorously to take back all of the seats of power, and use them probatively to affirm truth, like water cannons dousing street anarchists’ fires. If one truth-teller rises up for every leftist liar, their “uprising” will quickly fail.

SOURCE

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Stop Calling Mike Pence Homophobic

Democrats unfairly distort Pence’s record with distractions – and sometimes outright lies. Facing the most gay-friendly Republican nominee in history, the LGBT intelligentsia have engineered a phobic Frankenstein Veep to keep their minions from considering non-leftist alternatives.

Start with the most fabulously contrived lie about Mike Pence: that he supports “conversion therapy,” or in one grotesque iteration, that Pence “advocated for public spending on conversion therapy in Indiana.”  The article’s hyperlinks provide no support for the baseless charge.

Conversion (or “reparative”) therapy noxiously tells people, including teens participating involuntarily, that navel-gazing, role-playing, and prayer can “heal” their homosexuality. I’ve been denouncing this fraudulent practice for a decade, since it doesn’t work, misrepresents genuine religion, insults the integrity of queer experience, and tortures innocent youth.

And that’s what the people penning Mike Pence’s Web site (I’ve seen no evidence he wrote it personally) referred to in 2000 when they said federal AIDS money should be redirected “toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior.”

Those 14 words are the only evidence Pence’s detractors have proffered to show the man supports conversion therapy. But conversion therapy is about changing sexual orientations, not behavior. That’s why we’ve been fighting it so hard!

Much more HERE

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

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

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Alt-right star Milo Yiannopoulos and what the movement is really all about

A YOUNG Donald Trump supporter and member of the “alt-right” movement pitched for the role of Press Secretary in a Trump Administration said he would relish the chance to turn briefings into a reality television show.

Senior Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, who describes himself as “the most fabulous supervillain on the internet”, has made a name for himself as a leader of the alternative right-wing energised by the President-elect’s campaign and victory.

The UK-born shock columnist has recently seen his name added to a half-genuine list of contenders for Josh Earnest’s role — something Mr Yiannopoulos said he would love to turn Apprentice-style if given the chance.

“I would have everybody show up in my house, throw The New York Times and The Washington Post in the back room, have E! Entertainment Television and TMZ at the front and on Tuesdays only answer questions about fashion,” he told The Sunday Times.

“The more you stick your nose up to the establishment ... the more people are gonna love you for it.”

Now, the young commentator may well get his wish. He’s one of the main figures in the new alt-right powered by Breitbart news that this week confirmed a direct link to the White House with the appointment of former editor Stephen Bannon as Mr Trump’s chief strategist.

It comes alongside the selection of establishment Republican Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff and cements the status of the alt-right as the latest political force on the scene.

So who is Milo Yiannopoulos and what is the alt-right really all about? Here’s what you need to know.

ALT-RIGHT’S RISING STAR

Milo Yiannopoulos made a name for himself peddling shock tactics across US universities on his “dangerous faggot” tour where he defended hazing as a last bastion of masculinity, spoke about “why trannies are gay”, how “feminism is cancer” and the “election is rigged”.

He’s also produced podcasts and election videos railing against mainstream media and the establishment.

He didn’t doubt Mr Trump would “sail” into the White House off the back of the Brexit vote which proved “it doesn’t matter how loudly you call people bigots, racist and sexist, tell them that they’re being xenophobic — you name-calling them doesn’t work anymore,” he told the Times.

It’s an idea central to the new wave of right-wing politics championed by Breitbart which Mr Bannon described as the “platform for the alt-right”.

The site contains merchandise for sale and has been dismissed as “cheerleaders” for the far-right but is now set to become a major source of news on the Trump administration, with expansion planned in France and Germany to coincide with elections there next year.

In March, Mr Yiannopoulous and Allum Bokhari described the group in their “Conservative guide to the alt-right” as an “amorphous movement” of subcultures from “intellectuals” to “natural conservatives” and a “meme team”.

They’re “dangerously bright”, mostly college-educated men who live in a “manosphere” and revel in busting taboos on race, feminism, misogyny and any other kind of political correctness.

“Previously an obscure subculture, the alt-right burst onto the national political scene in 2015. Although initially small in number, the alt-right has a youthful energy and jarring, taboo-defying rhetoric that have boosted its membership and made it impossible to ignore,” the pair claim.

Those involved value homogenous communities over diverse ones, want stability, hierarchy and subversion, with some “young rebels” drawn to it “for the same reason that young Baby Boomers were drawn to the New Left in the 1960s: because it promises fun, transgression, and a challenge to social norms they just don’t understand”.

“Just as the kids of the 60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll, so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations with outrageous caricatures,” their guide reads.

They also claim the alt-right is separate to outright racists and white supremacists including the so-called 1488ers who praise Hitler. They claim the rise of the group comes after years of political correctness and a “safe space” culture gone too far.

“Had [the Left and establishment] been serious about defending humanism, liberalism and universalism, the rise of the alternative right might have been arrested.

“Instead, they turned a blind eye to the rise of tribal, identitarian movements on the Left while mercilessly suppressing any hint of them on the Right. It was this double standard, more than anything else, that gave rise to the alternative right. It’s also responsible, at least in part, for the rise of Donald Trump.”

Critics say the movement is dangerous, riddled with racism, xenophobia and misogyny as shown through Breitbart content that has included headlines saying women don’t get jobs in tech because they “suck at interviews”.

Another claimed birth control makes women “unattractive and crazy”. The site has also defended Mr Bannon is a “friend of the Jewish people” after his ex-wife made claims he did not want his daughter “going to school with Jews,” which Mr Bannon denies.

Political analyst and author Thomas J Main has described it as the “main challenge” to America’s way of life — with the anti-gay, diversity, feminism and gun-control positions hiding a “truly sinister” ideology.

“Alt-Right thought is based on white nationalism and anti-Americanism,” he wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “The Alt-Right holds, in essence, that all men are not created equal, and that as racial equality has displaced white dominance, America has declined and no longer merits the allegiance of its white citizens.”

US Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblat also slammed the decision to see Mr Bannon installed in the White House saying: “It is a sad day when a man who presided over the premier website of the ‘alt-right’ — a loose knit group of white nationalists and unabashed anti-Semites and racists — is slated to be a senior staff member in the ‘people’s house’.”

Even former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro told TIME Mr Bannon “regularly abuses people” and “sees everything as a war”. “Every time he feels crossed, he makes it his business to destroy his opponent.”

University College London US politics professor Iwan Morgan told news.com.au Mr Trump is definitely in for a wake-up call when he will have to reconcile different expectations of his presidency.

“Every president finds what got you to the White House isn’t what’s going to make you good in the White House. There is a sense now of anti-cosmopolitanism and nativism back in vogue. The sense of Making America Great Again is tied up with not only stopping change but reversing change.”

While “it’s very difficult to prove there wasn’t an anti-women vote in 2016,” he said there is a possibility that the first black President and the potential for a woman may have left some Americans feeling “that sequence was possibly too much change”.

“This is a 50/50 nation and the problem is that the 50 per cent who voted for Clinton can’t believe the other 50 per cent voted for Trump and the 50 per cent who voted for Trump can’t believe the other 50 per cent voted for Clinton.,” he said.

“Trump can be a unifier, he just hasn’t showed it yet and I suspect he would find it difficult. He’s going to have to find a way of persuading people to do what he wants.”

SOURCE

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At conference, political consultants wonder where they went wrong

Amusing to see the know-alls realizing that they know nothing

Just days after Donald Trump’s surprise presidential victory, the nation’s professional political forecasters and persuaders — the pollsters, the ad creators, the campaign strategists — gathered in Denver for their annual convention.

It was supposed to be a celebration of big data and strategic wizardry for a multibillion-dollar industry that has spent nearly a century packaging political candidates.

Instead, the conference of the International Association of Political Consultants felt like a therapy session for a business in psychological free fall.

At the governor’s mansion in Denver on Friday, Emmy Ruiz placed a hand on the shoulder of a fellow Hillary Clinton operative. “It’s like we’re at a funeral,” said Ruiz, dressed — perhaps coincidentally — in black.

Participants seemed eager to take part in the post-mortem analysis of what went wrong.

“I need to make sure I state this very clearly so that nobody thinks that I feel otherwise: I got this really wrong,” said Chris Anderson, a Democratic pollster who had predicted a Clinton win, speaking during a session before the gathering at the governor’s mansion.

“We’re going to continue to learn from Donald Trump how to effectively message. Because he can do it really well,” Anderson said.

Political consulting was born, many say, in 1933 when newspaper writers Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter were hired to defeat Upton Sinclair in his antipoverty bid for governor of California. When Sinclair lost, he blamed the defeat on a “staff of political chemists.”

The industry has since evolved into a sophisticated army of data analysts, message crafters, and others whose firms turn billions of dollars given to candidates and their surrogates into services. Television advertisements. E-mail lists. Get-out-the-vote strategies.

But everything about this election seemed to throw into question the value of those tactics — and even of the consultants themselves.

In the end, Clinton’s battalion of advisers was defeated by a wild, seemingly unchoreographed candidate who, according to the most recent data, spent more money on shirts, hats, signs, and similar items than on field consulting, voter lists, and data.

Over the weekend, 150 or so participants moved between a high-ceilinged conference room at the Westin hotel and other activities, including the reception at the governor’s mansion and a dinner at an adobe fort in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Organizers canceled a tour of a marijuana grow house after too many people expressed interest.

In one session dedicated to polling, three panelists who had predicted Clinton would win took to the stage, framed by a royal blue backdrop.

Instead of PowerPoint presentations and state-by-state voter analyses, there was self-flagellation, as some admitted they had spent the election seduced by “magical thinking,” unable to envision a Trump presidency and therefore blind to the story in front of them.

Margie Omero of PSB Research theorized that pollsters had held back Trump-leaning data, unwilling to release something that looked like an outlier. Or that Trump supporters had simply not told pollsters the truth, either embarrassed by their choice or angry at callers whom they perceived as part of a conspiracy against him.

“It was impossible to conceive of an incoming President Trump,” said Omero, whose firm has worked for both Bill and Hillary Clinton over the years.

In one of the more raucous portions of the conference, consultants assembled for a post-mortem session on campaign strategy.

Onstage was Ruiz, who ran Clinton’s operation in Colorado, and Rich Pelletier, a deputy campaign manager for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whom Clinton faced in the Democratic primary race. Between them was Wayne Allyn Root, a Trump adviser wearing a pinstripe suit, a red tie, and a very, very broad smile.

“He was going to win from the beginning. Nobody got it. And I got it. I knew it,” said Root, describing a campaign strategy based more on gut and anecdote than science. “No matter how bad the polls look, they are meaningless because the anger and volatility of this electorate does not show up in the polls. My people are not telling the pollster they’re for Donald Trump.”

SOURCE

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

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

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