Italians: Sheriff Joe and Silvio Berlusconi

I want to put in a broader context the current outpouring of media hate against hero sheriff Joe Arpaio. Joe's parents originated from Lacedonia, an ancient town in Southern Italy and I want to suggest that there is much about him that is Italian.



I grew up among Italians and have the warmest feelings towards them.  I see them as cheerful, hard-working, family-oriented, warm people who have an instictive irreverence for authority. Italians are notorious scofflaws.  Just about everyone in Italy regards the law as an obstacle to be gotten around.  They have their own personal and family-oriented values and have a healthy disrespect for the edicts thrown down at them by government.  It would not be too far from the truth to say that most Italians  regard even the Ten Commandments as the Ten Suggestions.

So you see where I am going there. Italy may be the most libertarian society on earth.  Their "black" economy is certainly huge.  It was their inability to raise much tax revenue that caused successive Italian governments to inflate the currency.  The Lira was constantly being devalued.  Now that they have the Euro, they borrow at an unsustainable rate instead.  The Germans have propped that up so far but awareness of that puts the average German into a rage so who knows how and when that bubble will pop?

And a set of rules that are constantly being forced down all our throats are the onerous and inconsistent idiocies of political correctness.  So it should be no surprise that most Italians don't take to political correctness at all.

A minor example of that was when the EU handed down an edict that government schools could not have religious imagery in them.  But virtually no Italian could imagine a school without aids to contemplation such as a picture of the Blessed Virgin or the Sacred Heart of Jesus. That was just not done.  I forget how it was gotten around but I gather that Italian schools still feature their holy pictures and statuary. And you can be in no doubt that NYC Italians will fiercely defend their statues of Cristoforo Colombo.

And the king of political correctness is without a doubt, Silvio Berlusconi, by far the most popular and successful Italian politican of the postwar era.  Because of their individuality, Italians constantly depose their political leadership.  Nobody impresses them for long.  For a long time the average life of a Prime Ministership in Italy was one year or thereabouts.  Then along came Silvio.  He smiles a lot, is a little short guy, a media mogul and a billionaire. He was also once a cruise ship crooner. He would have been (and has been) laughed to scorn in countries with colder climates but to Italians he was a real Italian and many loved him for just that. So he had amazingly long runs in office as Prime Minister. He was Prime Minister for nine years in total, making him the longest-serving post-war Prime Minister of Italy.



And his political incorrectness was legendary.  He was constantly being accused by outsiders of "gaffes", some of which were jokes, some of which were simple truths and all of which were him  speaking his mind at the time, political correctness regardless. Time magazine did a collection of some of them a few years ago.

His repeated expressions of admiration for the "suntans" of Africans would forever condemn him to the outer darkness of American politics but to Italians they were just humor. And there was also worldwide horror when he said to a female Italian doctor doing earthquake relief work that, "I wouldn't mind being resuscitated by you".  But the lady, being Italian, quipped back and insisted that he was just being gallant.

And so we come back to sheriff Joe.  He did not at all like people strolling into his country uninvited and had no time for the politically correct view that  they were simply "undocumented".  And even under great pressure from the politically correct Obama administration he stuck by his values.  He is a great Italian as well as a great American.  And as for the media, how about a bit of cross-cultural sensitivity? Cultural sensitivity is their bag, is it not?

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That double standard again

The media and the Left generally have roundly condemned the pardon given to Sheriff Joe because his offence was to disobey an order from a judge while being a government officer.  Strange that the events in 2015 described below elicited no outcry from the same people.  Only conservatives have to obey judges, it seems:

In another midnight filing last week in the immigration lawsuit filed by 26 states against the Obama administration in the Southern District of Texas, the U.S. Justice Department admitted that the Department of Homeland Security had violated federal Judge Andrew Hanen’s Feb. 16 injunction against President Obama’s immigration amnesty plan.

This was not the first such admission by the government. It had previously filed an “Advisory” on March 3 informing Judge Hanen that between Nov. 20, 2014, when the president announced his immigration plan, and Feb. 16 when the injunction was issued, the Department of Homeland Security had begun implementing part of the president’s plan by issuing three-year deferrals to over 100,000 illegal aliens.

In other words, despite having told Judge Hanen both in court and in written pleadings that no part of the president’s plan was being implemented until late February at the earliest, government officials were doing exactly the opposite.

On April 7, Judge Hanen issued an order with a scathing analysis of the Justice Department’s misbehavior, finding that “attorneys for the government misrepresented the facts” to the court. He told the Justice Department that he expected all of the parties in the case, including the government, “to act in a forthright manner and not hide behind deceptive representations and half-truths.”

Hanen also gave the Justice Department lawyers a hard time over not having informed him immediately upon their discovery of this misrepresentation, saying that their claim that they took prompt, remedial action was “belied by the facts” – namely, that they waited over two weeks to tell the judge.

In a separate, supplemental three-page order issued on May 8, Judge Hanen cites additional evidence to support his finding that the states have standing to challenge Obama’s immigration plan. In his Feb. 16 injunction order, Hanen referenced statements by Obama that there would be consequences for any Homeland Security employee who did not follow the requirements of the Nov. 20 amnesty plan.  The Justice Department had tried to downplay the president’s statements.

However, Judge Hanen notes that while testifying on April 14 – after the injunction was issued – before the House Judiciary Committee, Sarah Saldana, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, “reiterated that any officer or agent who did not follow the dictates of the 2014 DHS Directive would face the entire gamut of possible employee sanctions, including termination.”

Hanen said that “the President’s statements have now been reaffirmed under oath by the very person in charge of immigration enforcement.”

Thus, according to Hanen, the government “has announced, and has now confirmed under oath, that it is pursuing a policy of mandatory non-compliance (with the [Immigration and Nationality Act], and that any agent who seeks to enforce the duly-enacted immigration laws will face sanctions – which could include the loss of his or her job.”

It is this “clear abdication of the law by the Government – a law that is only enforceable by the Government and outside the province of the states” that gives the states standing to bring suit.

SOURCE

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The growing political power of silicon valley

For decades now, all of America’s major institutions – have been broadly, unquestionably Leftist, and rigidly opposed to any deviance from the entrenched doctrine. Colleges and universities, Hollywood and entertainment, the Sciences and the News Media – all deeply in Leftism’s thrall.

And then there is the Silicon Valley – now the biggest, baddest, broadest institution of them all. Because of their dominance of the Internet – they have their hands in all of the legacy institutions.

The Silicon Valley has had for more than a decade a license to print money. And they bestow tens of millions of dollars of it in endowments to Leftist colleges – including tons of coin in directed “science” like global warming…oops, I mean climate change.

The Valley is out Hollywood-ing Hollywood – self-producing a great and growing number of movies and television shows.

And then…there’s the News Media. As we have documented, the News Media cartel’s nexus has shifted from the New York City-Washington, D.C. corridor- to the heart of the Valley. Because with every passing day subscriptions matter less and less – and clicks, Tweets and Shares matter more and more.

And since the Silicon Valley controls clicks, Tweets and Shares – they are more and more controlling the news. Which is…really bad news for those of us who like less government.

Because in case you haven’t noticed – the Valley is decidedly, overwhelmingly Leftist. As Leftist as the News Media NYC-DC cabal is – the Valley, is decidedly, overwhelmingly worse.

The Valley elects people…like Democrat Leader Nancy Pelosi – whom 95+% of Americans find bizarrely, perversely out-of-touch with any semblance of Reality.

The Valley has given hundreds of millions of dollars to all sorts of unbelievably Leftist politicians, people and organizations. Heck, why not cut out the middlemen – Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is considering a run for President.

The Silicon Valley is increasingly the gatekeeper to all things News. More and more people get their news via stories shared on Valley platforms – Facebook and Twitter to name but two giants.

And if you want to search for a news story, Google dominates. Three years ago, Google – all by its onesies – was the search engine used on 67% of computers and 83% of mobile devices.

Which is yet another reason why the Google Memo debacle – is such a debacle. Google scientist James Damore wrote an internal document that, amongst other things, decried Google’s uniform Leftism. It became an external document – and Google made Damore an ex-Google scientist. Reinforcing Damore’s point about Google’s uniform Leftism.

Google Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Sundar Pichai immediately thereafter asserted: “Over the past two days, I have had the chance to meet with so many people here, and I have read each of your emails carefully. The vast majority of you are very supportive of our decision.”

But a poll of Googlers – begs to differ: “When Blind asked its users if they thought Google should have fired Damore, over 4,000 from different companies weighed in. Perhaps most pertinently, 441 Google employees responded. Of them, more than half – 56% to be precise – said they didn’t think it was right for the company to fire Damore.”

Which means the average Googler – is afraid to deviate from the Google political line when interacting with the boss. Further still reinforcing Damore’s point.

And again, Google controls the search results for about 3/4 of Americans. Which, again, is really bad news if you like less government.

In 2012, when someone searched Google for “completely wrong” – Google returned a page of images of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Google favorably “personalized” searches for Romney’s incumbent opponent – Democrat Barack Obama – but not for Romney.

And small wonder – Google and the Valley were chiefly responsible for Obama being president in the first place.

Google was no better in 2016. They were caught rigging searches to favor Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Google issued a mea culpa – and then was caught STILL rigging searches to favor Clinton.

Yet again: For 3/4 of Americans, these horrendously skewed Google results – are what they’re getting when they search for news.

Facebook is no better. They launched a “news feed” – that overwhelmingly featured Leftist “news.” It was blatantly biased – so much so that it was quickly scrapped.

We are still left to wonder how Facebook’s regular feed algorithm determines which of our Friends’ stories we get to see – and not see.

And now the ultimate irony.  After spending the last decade-plus skewing the News – Google, Facebook and their Valley brethren are now charging themselves…with battling “fake news.”  Physicians – heal thyselves.

SOURCE

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

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

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Here Are Some Key Ways the Mainstream Media Distorts the Truth

Dennis Prager

“Our leading media” are characterized by “indefensibly corrupt manipulations of language repeated incessantly.” -- Patrick Lawrence in The Nation, Aug. 9, on the media’s reporting of the alleged collusion between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia.

To understand America’s crises today, one must first understand what has happened to two institutions: the university and the news media. They do not regard their mission as educating and informing but indoctrinating.

In this column, I will focus on the media. I will dissect one issue that I know extremely well: the national and local coverage of the invitation extended to me to guest conduct the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The concert took place last week.

I am well aware that this event is far less significant than many other issues. But every aspect of the reporting of this issue applies to virtually every issue the media cover.

Therefore, understanding how The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and NPR covered my story leads to an almost perfect understanding of how the media cover every story where the left has a vested interest.

When it comes to straight news stories—say, an earthquake in Central America—the news media often do their job responsibly. But when a story has a left-wing interest, the media abandon straight news reporting and take on the role of advocates.

As I explained in detail in a previous column, the board of directors of the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra and its conductor, Guido Lamell, invited me to guest conduct a Haydn symphony at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.

I have conducted regional orchestras in Southern California over the last 20 years.

Sometime thereafter, four members of the orchestra published a letter asking their fellow musicians not to perform, claiming, “Dennis Prager is a right-wing radio host who promotes horribly bigoted positions.”

They were joined by former Santa Monica Mayor Kevin McKeown, who announced, “I personally will most certainly not be attending a concert featuring a bigoted hate-monger,” among others.

Then, The New York Times decided to write a piece on the controversy.

The first question is why? Why would the Times write about a controversy begun by a few members of a community orchestra in California?

I am quite certain that one reason was to protect the left. My original column on the issue, titled “Can a Conservative Conduct an Orchestra?“, went viral. And it made the left look bad.

Not only was the left trying to prevent conservatives from speaking; it was now trying to prevent a conservative from not speaking—from just making music.

Therefore, it was necessary to show that the left in Santa Monica had legitimate reasons to try to prevent me from conducting. And the only way to do that was to reaffirm that I am a hater and a bigot.

The Times writer wasted no time in portraying me that way. He wrote, “a number of them are refusing to play the fund-raiser, saying that allowing the orchestra to be conducted by Mr. Prager, who has suggested that same-sex marriage would lead to polygamy and incest, among other contentious statements, would be tantamount to endorsing and normalizing bigotry.”

Lesson No. 1: When the mainstream media write or say that a conservative “suggested” something that sounds outrageous, it usually means the conservative never actually said it.

After all, why write “suggested” and not “said” or “wrote”? Be suspicious whenever anything attributed to a conservative has no quotation marks and no source.

Seven paragraphs later—long after having mischaracterized my words to prime the readers’ perception—the Times writer did quote me on the subject.

He said, “Mr. Prager suggested that if same-sex marriage were legalized, then ‘there is no plausible argument for denying polygamous relationships, or brothers and sisters, or parents and adult children, the right to marry.'”

Though no context was given, the words quoted are accurate and a source was given. It was a 2014 column I wrote about judges having hubris for overturning voters in state after state who voted to keep marriage defined as the union of a man and a woman.

I was responding to then-District Judge Vaughn Walker, who ruled that California’s Proposition 8, which amended the state’s constitution to define marriage as “the union of a man and woman,” was unconstitutional.

One of Walker’s arguments was that “Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis.”

I wrote in the column, “If American society has a ‘constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis,’ then there is no plausible argument for denying polygamous relationships, or brothers and sisters, or parents and adult children, the right to marry.”

Had The New York Times author been intellectually honest, he would have written the context and the entire quote.

Or, if he had wanted to merely paraphrase me, he could have written, “Prager suggested that if same-sex marriage were legalized, there were no arguments against legalizing polygamy and adult incest.”

But that would have sounded a lot less awful than saying I suggested same-sex marriage will lead to polygamy and incest.

So, for as long as human beings and the internet exist, people who wish to dismiss me or my views on same-sex marriage will quote The New York Times mischaracterization. Readers will not know that the quote about same-sex marriage and incest is not mine but that of a New York Times writer.

Lesson No. 2: When used by the mainstream media, the words “divisive” or “contentious” simply mean “leftists disagree with.”

Both words were used in The New York Times piece. The writer wrote that my “political views are divisive” and that I’ve made “other contentious statements.”

But the only reason my views are “divisive” and “contentious” is The New York Times differs with them.

During the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama, did The New York Times once describe anything he did or said as “divisive” or “contentious” (including his pre-2012 opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage)?

Lesson No. 3: Contrary evidence is omitted.

Despite all the Santa Monica musicians who supported my conducting; despite the musicians from other orchestras—including the Los Angeles Philharmonic—who asked to play when I conducted; and despite the orchestra’s conductor and board members who have followed my work for decades, not one quote in the entire article described me in a positive light.

Rather, the article is filled with quotes describing me in the worst possible way.

Two of the four musicians who wrote the original letter against me are quoted extensively (calling me “horribly bigoted” and saying I help “normalize bigotry”); a gay member of the orchestra is quoted accusing me of writing “some pretty awful things about gay people, women, and minorities” (for the record, I have never written an awful word about gay people, women, or minorities); and the former mayor’s attack on me was quoted.

Lesson No. 4: Subjects are covered in line with left-wing ideology.

The subject of the article could have easily (and more truthfully) been covered in a positive way, as something unifying and uplifting.

“Despite coming from different political worlds, a leading conservative and a very liberal city unite to make music together”—why wasn’t this the angle of the story?

Similarly, instead of its headline, “Santa Monica Symphony Roiled by Conservative Guest Conductor,” the Times could have used a headline and reported the very opposite: “Santa Monica Symphony Stands by Conservative Guest Conductor.”

That also would have conveyed more truth than the actual headline. But the difference between “roiled by” and “stands by” is the difference between a left-wing agenda and truth.

And even with the headline as it appeared in the Times, shouldn’t the story have offered quotes from supportive musicians to balance the negativity? One was left wondering why the invitation to guest conduct was offered to such a person to begin with.

Now let’s go to the Los Angeles Times, which was as negative as The New York Times, though at least its two negative columns were opinion columns—unlike The New York Times, they were not news stories, strictly speaking.

On Aug. 8, Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik, a Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote a column headlined “How right-winger Dennis Prager politicized his own symphony gig—and declared himself the victim.”

The mendacity of the title is quite something. Never in all the years I have conducted orchestras have I used the opportunity to say a political word. My sole purpose has been to conduct orchestras, raise funds for those community orchestras, and bring new people to classical music.

The only people to ever politicize my conducting appearances are a few left-wing musicians and politicians in Santa Monica.

Those people made my conducting a political issue. Yet Hiltzik writes that I am the one who did. “It’s Prager himself who pumped up the political component of the controversy,” he says.

This is a fine example of “the indefensibly corrupt manipulations of language repeated incessantly in our leading media.”

It is also worth noting that every mainstream news source, like the Los Angeles Times, identified me as either “right-wing” or “conservative.”

Commentators and talk show hosts on the left, however, are virtually never identified as “left-wing” or “liberal.” This is because in the closed world of the left, the left is the norm and the right is the aberration.

Hiltzik also wrote that “many in the orchestra find Prager’s views noxious.” That was after writing, “So far, seven musicians have said they won’t perform … leaving 70 still on the roster.”

Apparently, about one out of 10 is “many.” (Hiltzik also didn’t mention the equal number of musicians from other orchestras who asked to play when I conducted.)

Then there was the column by the Los Angeles Times classical music critic, Mark Swed.

He wrote: “Can a divisive public conservative amateur musician conduct an orchestra? That’s asking for trouble.”

Note again the word “divisive”—only conservatives divide because, again, in the mind of the left, left is normative. And in case you missed it the first time, Swed later wrote about my “militant polarizing of issues.”

As a conservative, I am not only divisive. I am a militant polarizer.

Does Swed provide an example of my militant polarizing? Yes, just one: my “calling liberalism a cancer.”

Like The New York Times article, Swed did not place the words he attributed to me in quotation marks, and for good reason.

I have never in my life written or said that “liberalism is a cancer.” What I did write recently is that “leftism is a terminal cancer in the American bloodstream.”

But I always distinguish between leftism and liberalism because the two have almost nothing in common. Leftism is as anti-liberal as it is anti-conservative. But Swed knows that writing “liberalism is a cancer” renders me far more extreme-sounding than writing “leftism is a cancer.”

However, what is most disturbing about Swed is not that he wrote a column against the Santa Monica Symphony inviting me to conduct. Hiltzik wrote a similar piece, after all.

But as irresponsible as Hiltizk’s piece was, Hiltzik is a political columnist. Swed is not. He is a classical music critic.

What he did was one of the reasons I wrote that leftism is a cancer in the American bloodstream: The left damages virtually everything it touches—the arts, education, religion, the economy, the news media, and the military, among other areas of life.

When I was a young man living in New York City, I read every column the legendary New York Times classical music critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote. I do not recall him ever writing a political column.

To this day, I have no idea whether Schonberg was a liberal, a leftist, a conservative, or a Buddhist. He knew his role was to write about music. Swed, a man of the left, does not.

Finally, we come to NPR. It published a piece on Aug. 13 titled “Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra Confronts Controversy Over Right-Wing Guest Conductor.”

Putting the title aside—again, it communicates a negative story when a positive take would have been just as valid—the piece was considerably more balanced than those of the Los Angeles Times or that of The New York Times.

But it had the usual media defect: It gave away its political bent. The second paragraph read:

Dennis Prager’s day job, however, has members of the orchestra up in arms—and laying down their instruments. He is a conservative talk show host who often targets multiculturalism, Muslims and LGBTQ people.

The writer gave an example in each case.

For multiculturalism, she cited a column I wrote titled “1,400 Girls Raped by Multiculturalism.” In it I described the kidnapping and sexual enslavement of over 1,400 English girls by young Muslim men over the course of more than a decade—while the police and the media conspired never to divulge that the rapists were Muslim.

The reason, as British authorities later admitted, was their commitment to multiculturalism.

But for a writer at NPR—even one who did not go out of her way to portray me as a mean-spirited bigot, as The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times did—the mere fact that I wrote a column against multiculturalism explains why members of the orchestra were “up in arms.”

As for “targeting” Muslims, she cited my column titled “Yes, Muslims Should Be Asked to Condemn Islamic Terror.”

In NPR’s moral universe, asking Muslims to condemn Islamic terror is equivalent to “targeting” Muslims. When the left demands that our white president condemn white supremacist violence, is it targeting whites?

And the example she supplied for my “targeting” LGBTQ people is my 2014 critique of judges who, I argued, overreached their authority when they overturned popular votes to keep marriage defined as the union of a man and a woman.

The whole article was a critique of judges, not LGBTQ people. But on the left, merely disagreeing with judges about an LGBTQ issue is “targeting” LGBTQ people.

In summary, all mainstream media coverage of this one story was tainted, biased, often false, and predicated solely on left-wing presumptions.

Magnify what they did to me a thousandfold and you will begin to understand media behavior over the last two generations, and especially behavior today, when hysteria and advocacy have completely replaced news reporting.

The media pay little or no price among those who still believe them.

But I will pay a price. The New York Times lied when it wrote that I “suggested that same-sex marriage would lead to polygamy and incest.” Yet that will be cited forever as if it were true.

It’s already begun. On the night of the concert, the Fox TV station in Los Angeles reported:

"A left-wing attempt to boycott a performance of the Santa Monica Symphony due to a guest appearance by conservative radio host Dennis Prager backfired on Wednesday night; the event was a sellout. … Prager has made controversial comments in the past, saying that he believes gay marriage would lead to incest."

SOURCE

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

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

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You've got to love him: Trump has just pardoned America's most favorite sheriff



Trump might get his words mixed up at times and the congressional GOP is too timid to follow him but he delivers on many important things. Here he has delivered long-overdue justice to a great man who had been hounded by nasty Obama bureaucrats.  They said his sweeps to nab illegals were "discriminatory". And it's great to see Sheriff Joe looking so fit at his age

President Trump granted a pardon to Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., on Friday.

Arpaio, 85, was recently found guilty of criminal contempt for defying a judge's order to stop traffic patrols that allegedly targeted immigrants.

He had been charged with misdemeanor contempt of court for allegedly willfully defying a judge’s order in 2011 and prolonging his patrols for another 17 months.

Arpaio acknowledged extending the patrols, but insisted it wasn't intentional, blaming one of his former attorneys for not properly explaining the importance of the court order and brushing off the conviction as a "petty crime."

He was expected to be sentenced on Oct. 5 and faced up to six months in jail if convicted.

"Sheriff Joe Arpaio is now 85 years old, and after more than 50 years of admirable service to our Nation, he is worthy candidate for a Presidential pardon," the White House said in a statement.

"I am pleased to inform you that I have just granted a full Pardon to 85 year old American patriot Sheriff Joe Arpaio," the president tweeted on Friday night. "He kept Arizona safe!"

SOURCE

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We Are Finally Moving Towards Actually Free Global Trade

I am a retired musician. I play three instruments – but I sang, is what I mainly did. My first band in high school was big into three-part vocal harmonies. We covered a bunch of songs – and wrote a few – that featured this rousing sound.

One thing you immediately learn (if you didn’t already know it) is that when three or more voices are simultaneous and in harmony – they create a resonance that is louder than the voices operating individually. It is beautiful music – more powerful in coordinated conjunction.

So it is with global trade. Now-President Donald Trump – is introducing proper music education to Washington, D.C.

DC for decades has been perfectly happy with – and accommodating of – the world’s many nations performing from sheet music far different than the pages we have.

The phony “free trade” in which we have long engaged – has had us lowering tariffs and government impediments to the globe’s goods and services entering our market.

While nigh every other nation on the planet has taxed and regulated the living daylight out of nigh everything we send them. While subsidizing the daylight into their domestic products.

Imagine the lead singer in the key of “G” – and every other nation crooning in “C#dim7.” So it now is with global trade. The rest of the planet is in harmonious sync – all working from the same anti-free trade songbook. We’re the lead singer – and our go-it-alone less government trade approach is dissonantly clashing.

These many nations have used our decades of stupidity against us – and have drained hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth out of here and into there. Very many of them have had year after year, decade after decade of ridiculously huge Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth – at our exorbitant expense, as ours continued towards flatline.

Trump has finally pointed out the obvious – that the global trade market is the Emperor with No Tone. That the Singing Emperor – is naked, and off-key. That it’s high time that EVERY nation – join us on the free trade song sheet.

Most of DC – still doesn’t get it. They confuse things like Trump threatening to impose a massive tariff on all things China or tariffs on imported steel – with Trump actually imposing them.

What Trump’s doing – is using the threat of tariffs as a can opener to pry open the world’s closed markets.

And piece by trade piece, Trump is moving us – and the world – in the free trade direction. We’re getting less government impediments to trade – all over the place.

An Ag Subsidy Dream for Buenos Aires: “WTO members this week also wrapped up a session of agriculture talks where they discussed a deluge of six new proposals on farm subsidies….

“On the top of the pile was a proposal led by the European Union and Brazil that aims to limit trade-distortive support by setting a percentage threshold on the amount of support a country can provide as it relates to the total value of its agricultural production. The EU at the meeting said the proposal “provides a new architecture which would put all WTO members on the same basis and encourage reform efforts,” according to a Geneva trade official.”

US Beef is Back on Market in China: “(W)henever changes make foreign sales easier, they are welcome. In that regard, a new trade pact with China is an especially positive development. The door to U.S. beef exports to the world’s most populous nation has been re-opened after being closed for 14 years.

“According to the USDA, the return of U.S. beef and beef products is a part of the U.S.-China 100-Day Action Plan that was announced by the Trump administration on May 11.”

U.S., Mexico Clear Way for NAFTA with New Deal on Sugar Trade: “‘The Mexican side has agreed to nearly every request by the U.S. industry to address flaws in the current system and to ensure fair treatment of American sugar growers,’ Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said at a news conference Tuesday.”

That’s a whole lot less government – all over the world. A shocking novelty in DC trade. And portending a whole lot more less government going forward.

Not everyone doesn’t get it.

Five Good Reasons Trump’s Agenda Is a Win for America: “Trump’s priorities are more than defensible; they are essential to the future of our country….1) Resetting the scales with our trading partners to ensure U.S. workers are treated fairly….5) Letting the world know that the U.S. will stand up for its citizens”

Those are two massively important principles for which to stand. They will vastly improve America’s prospects in innumerable ways.

It is way past time to level the international trade playing field. It has for far too long been tilted sharply against us.

And harmonizing global trade policy – will harmonize a great many other things.

There’s a whole lot less acrimony and mistrust – when everyone knows everyone is getting a good deal.

SOURCE

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Canada: 10,000 words to describe the rise and fall of Ezra Levant

Except that he hasn’t fallen, and his critics offer no reason whatever why he should. Levant is Canada's most outspoken free speech advocate.  There was a fuss recently when one of his reporters gave a hearing to the wrong side in the Charlottesville fracas

Ted Byfield

I had a singular experience last week. I read the longest newspaper story I’ve ever seen. No, it did not concern the assassination of the American president, nor a nuclear attack by North Korea, nor the catastrophic fiscal collapse of the Ottawa government. None of the above.

The astonishing fact is that what filled nearly the whole front page, plus five full inside pages of the National Post newspaper and ran to something like 10,000 words was an account of the rise and fall of a Canadian journalist. Except that he hasn’t quite fallen, and now with this avalanche of free publicity to sustain him, he isn’t likely to. Nor did this gargantuan tome provide any valid reason why he should fall. It was, in other words, as badly reported as it was overwritten,

The man’s name is Ezra Levant, a graduate lawyer from Calgary who opted to go into both the media and politics instead of law. He wrote columns for our magazine, Alberta Report, until it folded, and my son Link and I wrote columns for Ezra’s magazine, the Western Standard, until it folded. Then Ezra moved to Toronto as a commentator on the Sun newspapers’ television channel until it folded as well. (So, alas, it goes with Canada’s conservative media.) But that’s when Ezra came into his own.

He established, some say in his basement, what he called TheRebel Media, an online television news and commentary show that lives up to its name in every possible way. But its audience zoomed upward and with good reason. It covered all the news that the “respectable” media tended to avoid.

This proved fortunate for our province of Alberta. A socialist government took over in 2015 because the conservative ranks had split into two parties. In the circumstance, neither at first provided an effective opposition. This role was effectively filled by the Rebel Media, which the government unsuccessfully tried to ban from the press gallery.

A crisis arose this month, however, when in the uproar over the coverage of the Charlottesville affair led to TheRebel and Levant (himself a Jew) being labelled anti-Semitic. Two key on-air reporters wound up being fired or quitting and at least one major financial backer withdrew his support.

Enter the National Post with what it plainly saw as the opportune moment to write, with ill-disguised satisfaction, the downfall of Ezra and an obituary for TheRebel. In the pursuit of which, the thesis is submitted that what really killed Ezra was his unremitting opposition to Islamic immigration. In the course of this we are introduced to a new term (new to me, anyway) “counter-jihadism.” What it actually means, we are not ever quite told. All we are given to know is that it’s a very bad thing, and being good liberals, that’s all we need to know.

When this sprawling story, first introduced me to this term, I was relieved to see it. At last, I thought, somebody is going to tell us why opposing jihadism is wrong. Wikipedia lists 20,998 deaths and 52,032 wounded in terror attacks, beginning with 9/11. Nearly all are declared to be done in the service of Allah whose teaching is destined to govern the world. That is almost always the given reason for the attacks.

Why is it wrong to try to prevent this? It is the clear responsibility of the writer to fully answer that question. Yet not a single sentence or even phrase in the entire 10,000 words offers to do this. Counter-jihadism is a terrible thing, but we’re nowhere told why.

Perhaps fittingly, the very day before this appeared, the Post had another story, this one from Barcelona, Spain. A van raced down a street crowded with pedestrians. Swerving from side to side to hit as many people as possible, it killed 13 and injured nearly 100. Some were children. The Islamic State “took credit” for the attack. As an acknowledged counter-jihadist, Ezra thinks we should be doing a lot more than we’re doing to stop this stuff. What the National Post thinks we don’t know, and we’ll never find out from this effusion of verbiage.

SOURCE

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

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

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A free-speech rally, minus the free speech

Jeff Jacoby

IF ONE LINE captured the essence of Saturday's Boston Common rally and counter-protest, it was a quote halfway through Mark Arsenault's Page 1 story in the Boston Globe:

"'Excuse me,' one man in the counter-protest innocently asked a Globe reporter. 'Where are the white supremacists?'"

That was the day in a nutshell. Participants in the "Boston Free Speech Rally" had been demonized as a troupe of neo-Nazis prepared to reprise the horror that had erupted in Charlottesville. They turned out to be a couple dozen courteous people linked by little more than a commitment to — surprise! — free speech.

The small group on the Parkman Bandstand threatened no one. One of the rally's organizers, a 23-year-old libertarian named John Medlar, had insisted vigorously that its purpose was not to endorse white supremacy. "The rally I'm helping to organize is about promoting Free Speech as a COUNTER to political violence," he had posted on Facebook. "There are NO WHITE SUPREMACISTS speaking at this rally."

Indeed, nothing about the tiny rally, whose organizers had a permit, seemed in any way connected with bigotry or hatred. One of the speakers was Shiva Ayyadurai, an immigrant from India who is seeking the Republican nomination in next year's US Senate race. As Ayyadurai spoke, his supporters held signs proclaiming "Black Lives Do Matter."

But he and the others who gathered at the Parkman Bandstand had never stood a chance of competing with the rumor that neo-Nazis were coming to Boston. That toxic claim was irresponsibly fueled by Mayor Marty Walsh, who denounced the planned rally — "Boston does not want you here" — even though organizers were at pains to stress that they had no connection to Charlottesville's racial agenda and intended to focus on the importance of free speech.

What happened on Saturday was both impressive and distressing.

A massive counter-protest, 40,000 strong, showed up to denounce a nonexistent cohort of racists. Boston deployed hundreds of police officers, who did an admirable job of maintaining order. Some of the counter-protesters screamed, cursed, or acted like thugs — at one point the Boston Police Department warned protesters "to refrain from throwing urine, bottles, and other harmful projectiles" — but most behaved appropriately. Though a few dozen punks were arrested, nobody was seriously hurt.

But free speech took a beating.

The speakers on the Common bandstand were kept from being heard. They were blocked off with a 225-foot buffer zone, and segregated beyond earshot. Police barred anyone from approaching to hear what the rally speakers had to say. Reporters were excluded, too.

Result: The free-speech rally took place in a virtual cone of silence. Its participants "spoke essentially to themselves for about 50 minutes," the Globe reported. "If any of them said anything provocative, the massive crowd did not hear it."

Even some of the rally's own would-be attendees were kept from the bandstand. But when Police Commissioner Bill Evans was asked at a press conference Saturday afternoon whether it was right to treat them that way, he was unapologetic.

"You know what," he said, "if they didn't get in, that's a good thing, because their message isn't what we want to hear."

No, Commissioner Evans. It was not a "good thing" that people with a right to speak were effectively silenced by the operations of the police. The ralliers did nothing wrong. They followed the city's rules. They did what police asked of them. They absorbed the slanders flung at them by the mayor and others. They didn't try to shut their critics down, and they weren't the ones hurling "urine, bottles, and other harmful projectiles."

All they were guilty of was attempting to defend the importance of free speech. For that, they were unjustly smeared as Nazis and their own freedom of speech was mauled.

Boston was kept safe on Saturday, for which city authorities deserve great credit. But in the course of preventing a riot, those authorities rode roughshod over the free-speech rights of a small, disfavored minority. That is never a good thing, whatever the police commissioner may think.

SOURCE

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The hysteria over Russia is hurting democracy

When it comes to Russia, Trump is often more rational than his critics

President Donald Trump signed a Senate bill last week designed to enforce sanctions on Iran, North Korea and, most significantly, Russia. Unusually, the bill also specifically limits any executive measures the president could take to get around the sanctions, requiring him to go first to Congress. The sanctions’ impact on Russia may be fairly limited, but what’s important is what they symbolise; namely, Congress’s determination to stop Trump from softening relations between Russia and the US. Which is why American and Russian pundits claimed that, as a result of the bill, any possible Russia-US détente had just been thrown into the deepest part of the ocean.

However, the sanctions bill is not just about Russia, or indeed Iran and North Korea. The real story here is the crisis within the US. It is going through a process not entirely dissimilar to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when the entire political elite was in meltdown, and had lost contact with its own citizens. Yuri Andropov is purported to have said to the 1983 Soviet Communist Party plenum that the Soviet ruling elite no longer knew its own society. The same can be said of America’s ruling elite today. It bears repeating that a collapsing American establishment has even chosen the extraordinary path of arguing that its own democratic system has been taken over by a foreign power in preference to engaging with its estrangement from vast swathes of the public.

The level of hysteria in the US over Russia is incredible and it has ominous consequences for free speech. For instance, the long-established think tank, the German Marshal Fund of the United States, has just set up a project to ‘track Russian influence’ in the US. As an article in the Nation noted, it looks as if any outlet critical of anything in America can be classified as Russian propaganda, including not just the Moscow-backed Russia Today or Sputnik, but The Atlantic and Fox News. Remember, this is not the work of Trump and his supposed ‘fascist’ administration, but the so-called Resistance. As the old saying goes, with friends like these, American democracy has no need of enemies.

The Russian political establishment, given its statements and actions, is well aware of the internal American crisis. Hence Russian retaliation to the new sanctions has been low key, affecting mainly locally hired Russians, rather than Americans. The Kremlin has also said that despite the sanctions, it is still open to dialogue with the White House.

This latest White House-Kremlin drama obscures other changes in US relations with Russia and the rest of the world. Look at the EU’s criticism of the sanctions, for instance. This is because the bill gives the president the ability to impose sanctions on any company (including European) that contributes to the development or operation of energy export pipelines not just in Russia, but in Europe, too, or involves itself in oil ventures with Russian companies – a power that certainly affects the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.

The EU has said that the US is acting in accordance with its own economic interests, and promised retaliation against the US if necessary. We’re a long way from a trade war, but the EU’s stance towards the US is more aggressive than it has been for decades.

Meanwhile, in other spheres, Russia and the US are actually cooperating – in Syria, for example. Until recently, Syria had been a site of major potential conflict between Russia and the US. Contrary to some commentary, this was not because American and Russian airforces were in the same airspace. That there was never an incident between the two suggests very effective military-to-military communication since Russia entered the war at Assad’s invitation in 2015.

Rather, the point of potential conflict was the extent to which the US, under the Obama administration, was pushing for regime change in Syria. Russia has explicitly said that it would not permit another Iraq to unfold in Syria. As a result, it did appear that the US, in conjunction with the UAE and others, was preparing for war with Russia in Syria.

It seems, however, that the current US administration really is going to follow through on Trump’s original promise to disengage from Syria. Despite the Trump administration’s decision to bomb a Syrian airfield in April, after last month’s Trump-Putin meeting, it was announced that several ‘de-escalation zones’ had been agreed.

It is notable that unlike the US-Russia announcements of various ceasefires and deals that took place in 2016, this deal was worked out behind closed doors rather than conducted in public. These agreements seem to be working and ISIS is now being rolled back in both Syria and Iraq. Trump has also announced the end of the CIA programme of funding of Syrian anti-Assad Islamists.

While some pundits ludicrously called this a sop to Moscow (as if arming radical Islamist jihadists was not in any way problematic), this particular CIA programme was actually losing support under Obama. As one observer pointed out, Trump’s decision was partially motivated by a video of fighters from one of the West-backed anti-Assad groups, the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement, beheading a little boy. This should be mandatory viewing for pro-interventionists.

On the flipside, NATO-Russian relations are at their worst since the end of the Cold War. We are seeing a remilitarisation of the Baltics and Poland and supposedly neutral countries such as Sweden. Several American newspapers have reported that the Pentagon has just made public a proposal to arm Ukraine with anti-tank missiles, a plan drawn up under, but rejected by, the Obama administration, although the Pentagon has been training Ukrainian soldiers since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. There is no information yet as to whether the White House will consider the plan.

However, within NATO there are backstage dramas, too. Turkey for example may still be a NATO member in principle, but whether it is in fact is another question. Disagreements over funding ISIS (Turkey, along with the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, has been a key funder and supporter of ISIS in Syria), and claims that the US was behind the attempted coup in Turkey in 2016, and a recent Turkish purchase of billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware from Russia, suggest that all is not well in the NATO family.

Last year, the German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said NATO was playing a provocative and destabilising role in relations with Russia. Several EU countries, including Germany, although not the UK, are understandably hostile to the idea of arming Ukraine on the grounds that it will inevitably lead to more conflict.

The sanctions bill, then, is about more than the US-Russia relationship. It is about what is going on within the US itself. The confusion and collapse of the American political elite is accelerating geopolitical trends that have been developing since the 1990s. The sanctions bill certainly will not help relations between Russia and the US, but for all the claims that it will destroy the relationship for good, the relationship is probably more complex than it has been since the Second World War. Cooperation and conflict now exist in so many different areas and it is changing all the time.

SOURCE

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Democrat leaders fail to denounce violence in Phoenix

Commentary on the speech itself here

Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today called on leaders in the Democrat Party to denounce the violence on the streets of Phoenix, Ariz. after President Donald Trump’s speech there last night:

“Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren should all denounce the attempt by the violent political wing of the Democrat Party known as Antifa, Black Lives Matter and Resist to shut down a speech by the President to his supporters. The effect of these Democrat Party surrogate groups is to attempt to stifle and intimidate Americans from being able to attend an event featuring the duly elected President of the United States. Democrat Party leaders face a crossroads of whether to embrace violence as a legitimate means of political protest or to denounce it.

“There is no place for the kind of hate displayed on the streets of Phoenix last night in a civilized nation and anything less than a complete shunning by leaders of the violent Antifa, Black Lives Matter and Resist movement’s actions in Phoenix is acceptable, disqualifying them from serving in office. Anyone who fails to condemn political violence in all of its forms is not fit to serve.”

SOURCE

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

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

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What is a white supremacist?

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, where a varied group of marchers were set upon and halted by violent Leftist attackers, the media were unanimous in describing the marchers as "white supremacists".  When President Trump disagreed with that description, he was mightily abused.

But what is a white supremacist?  How do we define that and how do we tell that there were any white supremicists among the Charlottesville marchers?  The Left neither define "white supremacist" nor prove that there were any at Charlottesville.  We are apparently required to take them at their word and not question any part of it. But what if it was fake news?

Let us then attempt a definition so that we can go on and sanely discuss the matter.  Let us say that a white supremacist is someone who believes that whites are supreme in the world.  Would the Left like that definition?  I suspect that they would.  But what student of history could think otherwise?  From the industrial revolution of a couple of hundred years or so ago whites have dominated everything.  From steam trains to nuclear reactors, practically every innovation has come from whites.  And whites have used those innovations to assist their mastery of  what was happening in the world. Other races tagged along and imitated whites to various degrees but it is white civilization that has made the running.  It has been and still is dominant.

So in mentioning that plain truth am I a white supremacist?  I have been called it but what alternative account of the last 200 years could I give?   I cannot see that I am doing any more than describing reality.  But Leftists never do seem to like reality.  So, OK. I have outed myself as a white supremacist.

The only problem is that I don't think I am one.  I think that white supremacy is a passing phase.  I think that by the end of this century China will be supreme in most ways.  I may be wrong but that is what I see as the trend.  So I guess that I am a pretty funny white supremacist.

Which brings me to another possible definition of a white supremacist-- someone who thinks that whites SHOULD be supreme.  But why would anybody bother to think that?  "Should" implies that what should happen has not yet happened.  But it has happened.  Whites are already supreme.

But I suppose there are some people who think that whites should fight to remain supreme -- attack China maybe.  Good luck with that.  That would be insanity.

So who or where are these white supremacists that the media talk about?  There were about two marchers who carried swastika flags so are they the ones?  As it happens, I know a bit about neo-Nazis so maybe I can help there.  I did an extensive study of them some years ago, the results of which appeared in Jewish academic journals.  See here and here.  So I have a very good idea of what modern-day Nazis think.

And they know very well that whites are already supreme.  So what they want is to preserve that from attack and undermining.  They want it acknowledged and defended. They also don't like Jews of course.

But take away the antisemitism and what you have is actually a form of patriotism. But instead of being supportive of one nation, they are supportive of a group of (white) nations:  Rather like what the EU aims at.

So the extent to which they are aggressive, they want to DEFEND traditional white civilization.  They don't want to impose it.  It exists already.  The one door you cannot open is one that is open already.

And as far as I can tell, the Charlottesville marchers were also  defensive.  They didn't want part of their culture attacked and subjugated to a new "politically correct" ideology.  The Left are undisputably on the attack to erase much about existing society that they disapprove of so the perception of having much that they regard as right and good as being under attack was a perfectly realistic one among the marchers.

For most Americans, political correctness only nibbles at the edges of their lives so they feel no need to go out and march against it but we must expect that some people will resent the nibbling and see a need to protest against it.  And that is what we saw at Charlottesville as far as I can tell.  There were NO white supremacists there.  But there were there people who wanted their traditions, customs and beliefs respected and defended -- JR.

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The New York Times Continues Its Tradition of Whitewashing Communism

The New York Times now has actually found a way to create fanciful notions of Soviet-style authoritarianism—and whimsical tales of its influence in America—in a new section dedicated to the “Red Century,” which explores “the history and legacy of communism, 100 years after the Russian Revolution.”

Romanticized Tyranny

While some of the pieces explore the horrors and failures of communist rule, others delve into topics that would seem funny if the subject matter weren’t so horrifying.

For instance, the Times ran what can aptly be described as a “puff piece” on Vladimir Lenin, the man who led the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and is linked to the death and murder of millions of people.

The article, titled “Lenin’s Eco-Warriors,” paints the man as some kind of Siberian John Muir, and incredibly concludes that leaving “landscapes on this planet where humans do not tread” was the Soviet dictator’s “legacy.”

As absurd as that piece was, the Times managed to outdo itself with another article on, no joke, “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism.”

This piece is an idealized account of how life under an absolutist government could be liberating and possibly a better model for the feminist movement.

The author wrote:

"Those comrades’ insistence on government intervention may seem heavy-handed to our postmodern sensibilities, but sometimes necessary social change—which soon comes to be seen as the natural order of things—needs an emancipation proclamation from above."

The absurdly romanticized account of life under tyrannical government explains little of the hopelessness of a system where an individual has no hope and no future.

These examples certainly weren’t the first, or the worst, instances of the Times engaging in communist revisionism. One of the most egregious examples of “fake news” in the mid-20th century was conducted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Walter Duranty in the 1930s.

Fake News

Duranty, who was the Times’ Moscow bureau chief, wrote a series of glowing pieces about the USSR’s policies under General Secretary Josef Stalin in 1931.

While millions of people were starving in Ukraine, Duranty reported back that things were going swimmingly under the communist regime despite a few bumps in the road.

“Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please,” Duranty wrote. “Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin’s program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding.”

He attacked reports that portrayed the Soviet policies in a negative light as “malignant propaganda.”

Though the total number of deaths due to forced starvation in the Holodomor is unknown, estimates are generally around 3 million from 1932 to 1933.

Despite his blatant misreporting, Duranty was never stripped of his Pulitzer and has still been listed on the Times’ honor roll.

It would be good on The New York Times if it ran a piece about Duranty’s egregious reporting and disinformation campaign that gave Americans a distorted picture of communist reality, but, alas, that hasn’t happened amid the various fables about socialist “successes.”

It may seem easy to dismiss The New York Times accounts as eyerolling fantasies of the left trying to defend a broken ideology, but the danger of this historical revisionism is real.

Dangerous Historical Fantasy

A worrying study sponsored by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that millennials are generally clueless about communism. “Just 37 percent of millennials had a ‘very unfavorable’ view of communism, compared to 57 percent of Americans overall,” according to a Daily Signal report.

Perhaps even worse, a full third of millennials say they think that more people were killed under former President George W. Bush than under Stalin.

As The New York Times joins with others to peddle a warped image of what communism is really about, generations that have never witnessed its horror may be lulled into buying the clichéd line that “real communism has never been tried.”

As historian Sean McMeekin wrote in his book, “The Russian Revolution,” after communism’s “century of well-catalogued disasters … no one should have the excuse of ignorance.”

Communist revival is growing in Western countries even as it is nearly extinct in places it was tried. This is folly fueled by historical blindness.

“Today’s Western socialists, dreaming of a world where private property and inequality are outlawed, where rational economic development is planned by far-seeing intellectuals, should be careful what they wish for,” McMeekin wrote. “They may just get it.”

SOURCE

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Noxious Leftist hysteria

A sports broadcaster for ESPN was scheduled to call a game played by the University of Virginia’s football team, but he was pulled from the gig because his name is Robert Lee. It was determined by all concerned that in the interests of racial sensitivity, it would be better if Mr. Lee were replaced by someone with a less unfortunate name.

The thing is, this particular Robert Lee is not the scion of a benighted Southern family. He is not even white. He is an Asian — not a British-type “Asian” from Pakistan, but a man of Chinese descent who speaks both Mandarin and English. His surname is sometimes spelled “Li”. It’s very common in China.

SOURCE

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A thought experiment: Would blowing up Charlotte St. create any problem?

In my burg there is a skyscraper in Charlotte St which houses most of the State government bureaucracy.  So what would happen if some Muslim blew the whole thing up, killing all the bureaucrats in it?

There would be much wringing of hands of course but what would change in the lives of my fellow citizens?

The supermarkets would still be open; the trains would still be running; the traffic lights would still work; the farmers would still bring their produce to market; the abbatoirs would still be slaughtering and selling carcases to butchers, bakers would still be baking; dentists would still be fixing teeth; the great turbines in our coal-fired power stations would still be spinning; the police would still be attending crimes about an hour late; and doctors would still be handing out prescriptions.

And so it goes.  I cannot see that the inhabitants of the Charlotte St. tower would be missed. Are they any use to us at all?  Why not dismiss them all and leave the tower empty?  I cannot see anything that we need them for -- JR.

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

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

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Leftist supremacists, not white supremacists, are the big danger

The Master Party would rather destroy America than question its own superiority

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

The Democrats went into the election certain that they were going to win. The New York Times rated Hillary’s chances at 93%. The Huffington Post raised that to 98%. That was still too modest for Obama campaign manager David Plouffe who predicted a 100% likelihood of Hillary winning.

It wasn’t strategy or statistics that made the Dems think that victory was certain. It was ideology.

Obama had spent two terms telling them that they were on the “right side of history”. The more the Dems swung left, the closer to the right side of history they were. Their leftist views were naturally superior. They were based on science while their opponents were superstitious buffoons. They were enlightened while their enemies were bigots. They were smart and conservatives were dumb.

Delusions of superiority had convinced them that Republicans couldn’t win an honest election. When Bush won, it was because his brother and the Supreme Court had rigged the election. The Republican victories that swept much of the country were only due to voter suppression and redistricting.

The Democrats had allowed themselves to believe that they were so innately superior that they couldn’t lose an election except through fraud or dirty tricks. The humiliating defeats of McGovern, Carter, Mondale and Dukakis were all in the past. They had gone so far to the left that they couldn’t lose.

They had confused ideology with electability. The fallacy of fanatics is the conviction that their beliefs explain reality. And that following their beliefs must therefore lead to a successful outcome.

Leftists had convinced themselves that winning elections was an inevitable as the success of ObamaCare and the rejuvenation of the economy. Their media became a propaganda echo chamber filled with their own assurances of inevitable victory. But ObamaCare failed, the economy lingered and Trump won.

Instead of realizing that they had been lying to themselves, they seized on conspiracy theories.

Convinced of their natural superiority, members of the Master Party believed that their subjective contempt for Republicans in general and Trump specifically was an objective truth. It wasn’t that they despised conservatives. No, conservatives were inherently despicable. And Trump was so despicable and so absurd that he just had to lose. It was inconceivable that he couldn’t have lost. So he had lost.

Human beings don’t react well to having their egomaniacal fantasies come apart around them.

After losing World War I, many Germans seized on the Dolchstosslegende or the Stab-in-the-Back theory to explain what happened. The German military didn’t lose the war. It was undermined and stabbed in the back. Otherwise, despite the collapse of its allies and the entry of the United States, it would have won. The Nazis rode the Dolchstosslegende all the way into power. And to an even more devastating defeat in an even more devastating war all while trying to disprove the fact that America, the United Kingdom, France and Russia really could beat them in a war once there were no more Jews in Germany.

You can deny reality, but reality always wins.

Unsurprisingly, the Dolchstosslegende was most popular with German military leaders. Likewise the Democrat Dolchstosslegende arose from the ranks of Hillary’s campaign leaders. It’s those in charge of the losing team who have the most incentive to blame anyone and everyone else. The Nazis blamed a long list of people including the Jews. The Democrats blamed everyone from the FBI to the Russians.

Hillary has become another Hindenburg touting her own Dolchstosslegende. Her latest book, ‘What Happpened’, will put the Dolchstosslegende into print. It will list everyone who lost the election for her. ‘What Happened’ may be an awkward title, but calling it ‘Mein Kampaign’ might have been a bit much.

The Hillary Dolchstosslegende tearing apart our country passes itself off as patriotism. The Nazis claimed that they were patriots too. But Dolchstosslegendes aren’t patriotic. They’re exercises in divisiveness by losers who don’t want to take responsibility for their stupidity, incompetence and hypocrisy.

Hillary went from pressing a reset button with one of Putin’s minions to a posthumous political campaign claiming that Putin had rigged the election. Never mind that even if Russian hackers did leak Podesta’s emails, less than 1% of Americans have any idea who Podesta is or cared about the contents of his chats. But Podesta’s emails embarrassed the future promoters of the Dolchstosslegende.

And that’s why the Dolchstosslegende’s humiliated inventors are obsessed with their own emails.

John Podesta and Robby Mook had formulated the Russian Dolchstosslegende after her defeat. Podesta and Mook, like General Ludendorff and Hindenburg had the most need to assign failure elsewhere. And millions of loyalists were eager to be convinced that they had not truly been defeated.

The Clinton campaign was as big of a disaster as the Hindenburg Program. Both were Socialist projects that substituted technocracy for common sense leading to utter disaster. Rather than admit that their plan didn’t work, Hindenburg and Ludendorff blamed the defeat on the battlefield and misery at home on a conspiracy. The Nazis then tried to prove that a Socialist militarized industry could work once you got rid of all the possible conspirators. After killing six millions Jews, National Socialism still didn’t work.

Meanwhile Clintonworld had been trying to prove that Hillary’s ’08 loss to Obama was a fluke. They proved it by rigging the Dem primaries only to have Hillary lose the general election. And so out came more excuses. Hillary was an unbeatable candidate. The left was unbeatable. It was a conspiracy.

The myths of the undefeated Germany and the undefeated Democrats were rooted in a false conviction of superiority. A populace glutted on an endless diet of propaganda found it inconceivable that they had lost. As a dog returns to its vomit, the Democrats began licking the propaganda out of their media sewer twice as hard. They ate up the lies that they hadn’t lost, the promises that they would soon reclaim what was rightfully theirs and that everyone who had conspired against them would soon be punished.

Then they turned to street violence and attempted coups… because those worked so well in Germany.

At the maddest there are the ravings of Twitter experts who promise that the intelligence community will shortly be rounding up and executing all the traitors. But even the mainstream media, CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times feed their readers a poisonous glut of the Dolchstosslegende.

It’s bad for the Democrats and it’s worse for the democracy.

Instead of learning from their defeat, an entire political party, its elected officials and a sizable portion of its base have convinced themselves once again that a presidential election was illegitimate. They have staked their hopes on a coup, ranging from military intervention to impeachment, to undo it all.

Instead of questioning the superiority of their leftist ideology, they have doubled down on it. Like the National Socialists, the Socialist supporters of the far left have turned to street violence, they fantasize about military coups and media coups, without caring about the damage that they are doing to America.

The Democrats believed that they would win the election because their left-wing politics were absolutely right. Now they are convinced that they will pull off their coup because they are even more fanatically left-wing in 2017 than they were in 2016. This same logic led the Nazis to destroy Germany. And the Democrats have learned absolutely nothing about the dangers of delusional fanaticism.

They were told that they are on the right side of history. And if the right side of history requires wrecking the political process, a coup and a civil war, they are willing to pay it. Just as in the election, they can’t lose because they’re on the right side of history. Wherever they end up must be utopia.

They are willing to destroy everything rather than question their delusions of superiority.

The Soviet Union attributed all its setbacks to sabotage, rather than policy failures. Muslims continue to believe that they lost their last Caliphate, the Ottoman Empire, due to an assortment of conspiracies from the Jews and the Freemasons. The Dolchstosslegende is as ubiquitous as it is destructive. It is seductive because it tells us the lie that we most wish to believe in our darkest hour.

 The lie is that we did nothing wrong and do not need to change.

The Democrats’ Dolchstosslegende is the surest way of turning 2020 into a repeat of 2016.

SOURCE

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THE CHARLOTTESVILLE BIG LIE

To my surprise, on Fox News’ “Outnumbered,” the usually thoughtful Kennedy said about President Trump’s reaction to the Charlottesville violence, “If he had said the right words, we wouldn’t be talking about this.” Sorry, Kennedy, but you’re wrong. No matter what Trump would have said, the left, as well as the FNM and establishment sewer rats in the Republican Party, would have found fault with it.

That said, what most people have missed in this ugly story is that while hysteriacs in the FNM scream relentlessly that “there is only one side to this” (i.e., that white supremacists were the only ones resorting to violence in Charlottesville), the actual facts tell a much different story.

Let’s get this out on the table once and for all without fear of ugly backlash:  White supremacists are hateful and potentially dangerous, to be sure, but, fortunately, they are relatively few in number.  Consider that out of a population of 330 million, the white supremacists in Charlottesville attracted only about 500 like-minded people.

The other major fact that the FNM is totally ignoring is that it’s the Radical Left, not the right, that resorts to violence on a regular basis, as seen in Ferguson, Baltimore, Berkeley, and elsewhere throughout the United States.  It’s not surprising then that they were more than happy to engage in battle the right-wing protesters in Charlottesville.

Numerous pundits have pounced on the FNM talking point that putting the Radical Left on the same moral plane as white supremacists is outrageous.  In the words of fearless truth-teller David Webb, such a contention is intellectual cowardice at its worst.

The whole thing is an attempt to do what the Radical Left does best — intimidate those people with opposing views into silence.  Of course the Radical Left is just as bad as white supremacists.  Why are so many people afraid to admit something that is so clearly supported by the raw facts?  Doing so doesn’t mean that you support white supremacists, only that you are being honest.

As I have repeatedly stated, violence is the most prominent trademark of the Radical Left, not only in the United States, but throughout the world.  The one thing that makes these angry folks worse than white supremacists, if that’s possible, is that they put their hatred on display 365 days a year.

By contrast, white supremacists, despicable as they may be, are so pathetic and so small in numbers that, as much as the FNM would like us to believe otherwise, right-wing violence is, thankfully, exceedingly rare in America.

So I guess you could say that the one good thing that came out of the Charlottesville melee is that it reminded thinking people — repeat, thinking people — that white supremacists are not a serious threat to Americans.  If they were, this single event would not have received such over-the-top coverage.  It’s precisely because we don’t hear much from this loathsome group of losers that the Charlottesville brawl was such big news.

The truth be known, the Radical Left has been hoping for a showdown like Charlottesville for a long time.  The tragic Oklahoma City bombing of a federal building more than two decades ago, as horrific as it was, has grown stale, and the Radical Left has desperately needed a violent event instigated by right-wing extremists.

I should point out here the obvious fact that white supremacist groups do not represent conservative values.  True conservatives stand unequivocally against violence, regardless of who perpetrates it, and believe in free speech for everyone.  By contrast, the Radical Left openly advocates violence and actively tries to shut down speakers with whom it disagrees.

As to Donald Trump, he’s been in the public spotlight for more than four decades, and during that time there has never been a hint of bigotry attributed to him — i.e., not until he did the unthinkable and became a president intent on draining the swamp in Washington.  For committing such an unforgivable sin, he is now compared to Adolf Hitler and Kim Jong-un.

All this is once again a reminder of the overarching problem when it comes to racism —identity politics, which is a cowardly tool the Radical Left never tires of using.  It’s also important to understand that the key to the success of the Radical Left when it comes to identity politics is the support it receives from Republican toadies like Marco Rubio, John McCain, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan.  If Republicans had the moral courage to hang together like the Democrats do, identity politics would be overwhelmed and buried under the facts.

Disgusting is the only way I can describe the total disregard for the facts surrounding Charlottesville by the FNM, toady Republicans, and, of course, all liberals.  The FNM has reached yet another new low in its false portrayal of the Charlottesville rioting and Donald Trump’s response to it, and it is yet another example of The Big Lie that Joseph Goebbels so openly spoke about:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.  It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Goebbels would have loved the big lie that is being perpetuated about Charlottesville.  David Webb had it right when he used the term “intellectual cowardice,” because it perfectly describes the immoral folks who are pushing a false narrative about the violence in Charlottesville — the same folks who gave us that never-to-be-forgotten whopper, “Hands up, don’t shoot.”

SOURCE

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

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

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U.S. Has 3.5 Million More Registered Voters Than Live Adults — A Red Flag For Electoral Fraud

Elections: American democracy has a problem — a voting problem. According to a new study of U.S. Census data, America has more registered voters than actual live voters. It's a troubling fact that puts our nation's future in peril.

The data come from Judicial Watch's Election Integrity Project. The group looked at data from 2011 to 2015 produced by the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, along with data from the federal Election Assistance Commission.

As reported by the National Review's Deroy Murdock, who did some numbers-crunching of his own, "some 3.5 million more people are registered to vote in the U.S. than are alive among America's adult citizens. Such staggering inaccuracy is an engraved invitation to voter fraud."

Murdock counted Judicial Watch's state-by-state tally and found that 462 U.S. counties had a registration rate exceeding 100% of all eligible voters. That's 3.552 million people, who Murdock calls "ghost voters." And how many people is that? There are 21 states that don't have that many people.

Nor are these tiny, rural counties or places that don't have the wherewithal to police their voter rolls.

California, for instance, has 11 counties with more registered voters than actual voters. Perhaps not surprisingly — it is deep-Blue State California, after all — 10 of those counties voted heavily for Hillary Clinton.

Los Angeles County, whose more than 10 million people make it the nation's most populous county, had 12% more registered voters than live ones, some 707,475 votes. That's a huge number of possible votes in an election.

But, Murdock notes, "California's San Diego County earns the enchilada grande. Its 138% registration translates into 810,966 ghost voters."

State by state, this is an enormous problem that needs to be dealt with seriously. Having so many bogus voters out there is a temptation to voter fraud. In California, where Hillary Clinton racked up a massive majority over Trump, it would have made little difference.

But in other states, and in smaller elections, voter fraud could easily turn elections. A hundred votes here, a hundred votes there, and things could be very different. As a Wikipedia list of close elections shows, since just 2000 there have been literally dozens of elections at the state, local and federal level decided by 100 votes or fewer.

And, in at least two nationally important elections in recent memory, the outcome was decided by a paper-thin margin: In 2000, President Bush beat environmental activist and former Vice President Al Gore by just 538 votes.

Sen. Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, won his seat by beating incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman in 2008. Coleman was initially declared the winner the day after the election, with a 726-vote lead over Franken. But after a controversial series of recounts and ballot disqualifications, Franken emerged weeks later with a 225-seat victory.

Franken's win was enormous, since it gave Democrats filibuster-proof control of the Senate. So, yes, small vote totals matter.

We're not saying here that Franken cheated, nor, for that matter, that Bush did. But small numbers can have an enormous impact on our nation's governance. The 3.5 million possible fraudulent ballots that exist are a problem that deserves serious immediate attention. Nothing really hinges on it, of course, except the integrity and honesty of our democratic elections.

SOURCE

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Trump-Endorsed Immigration Bill Would Save Taxpayers Trillions

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump endorsed the RAISE (Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment) Act introduced by Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and David Perdue, R-Ga., a bill to reform the merit-based immigration system and limit low-skill immigration.

Low-skill immigration is very costly to U.S. taxpayers. For example, a legal immigrant without a high school degree typically receives $4 in government benefits for every $1 he pays in taxes.

By limiting future low-skill immigration, the RAISE Act has the potential to save U.S. taxpayers trillions of dollars in future years.

There are 12.8 million low-skill legal immigrants with a high school degree or less currently residing in the U.S. The households headed by these low-skill legal immigrants impose a net fiscal cost (total government benefits received minus total taxes paid) of $150 billion each year.

The $150 billion tax burden is equivalent to a $1.04 tax on every gallon of gas purchased by U.S. motorists every year for the foreseeable future.

The RAISE Act seeks to curtail future fiscal costs linked to low-skill immigration by eliminating chain migration, the visa lottery, and the current low-skill worker allotment. It also caps the future flow of refugees and asylees.

Nearly 400,000 legal immigrants enter the U.S. through these channels each year. The majority of these appear to be low-skill.

The bill’s reforms to chain migration are particularly important.

Chain migration starts with a foreign citizen who is given a green card. This individual is allowed to bring in his or her nuclear family consisting of a spouse and minor children.

Once the original immigrant and his or her spouse become U.S. citizens, they can petition for their parents, adult sons and daughters, and adult siblings and brothers- and sisters-in-law to also enter.

This second group can bring their minor children. Once they become citizens, the brothers- and sisters-in-law and parents can petition for their siblings, in-laws, and parents to legally enter the U.S.

The RAISE bill limits future chain migration. Each future migrant can bring only nuclear family members.

Parents can be brought to the country on a guest visa but will not be given access to government benefits or citizenship status. The sponsors must demonstrate that they have purchased insurance to cover the future medical costs of the parent.

The U.S. tax and benefit system is redistributive—it provides extensive benefits to less skill/low-wage individuals while asking them to pay comparatively less in taxes. On average, low-skill individuals, whether non-immigrants, legal immigrants, or illegal immigrants, impose substantial costs on U.S. taxpayers.

The report’s calculation of government benefits is comprehensive—it includes routine government services such as police and fire protection, highways and sewers; public education costs; benefits from over 80 means-tested welfare programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, the earned income tax credit, and housing vouchers; and other government direct benefits, including Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance.

The report also provides a comprehensive analysis of taxes paid at the federal, state, and local levels, including personal income taxes, FICA taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes, property, and business taxes.

Having estimated the government benefits received and the total taxes paid, the report then analyzes the fiscal balance (total government benefits received minus total taxes paid) for immigrants and non-immigrants with different levels of education.

The report shows that less educated individuals, whether immigrants or non-immigrants, receive far more in government benefits than they pay in taxes.

In particular, the report provides 75-year projections for the fiscal balance of immigrants and their immediate descendants based on the immigrant’s education level. It measures future cost in "net present value."

Based on the National Academy of Sciences’ estimates, the average low-skill immigrant (with a high school degree or less) who enters the country imposes a net present value on taxpayers of negative $142,000.

This means the government would need to immediately raise a lump sum of $142,000 and put it in a high-yield bank account to cover the future net fiscal cost (total benefits minus total taxes) of that immigrant.

The National Academy of Sciences’ cost figures represent a mixture of costs for legal and illegal immigrants. The RAISE Act is focused directly on low-skill legal immigrants.

Since low-skill legal immigrants receive more benefits, their fiscal impact is greater than similar illegal immigrants. The net present value for a legal immigrant with a high school degree or less is around negative $170,000, and the undiscounted long-term fiscal cost (benefits minus taxes) would be around $476,000 in constant 2012 dollars.

Over the last decade and a half, an average of 470,000 low-skill adult immigrants (both legal and illegal) have arrived in the U.S. each year. The net present value of this inflow is around negative $67 billion per year.

Of course, in the next year another 470,000 would arrive, requiring another lump sum payment of $800 per taxpaying household. The year after, another 470,000 will arrive, requiring another $800 per taxpaying household, and so on.

Fiscal costs can also be analyzed per decade. Under existing government laws and policies, an estimated 4.7 million low-skill immigrants (both legal and illegal) are likely to enter the U.S. over the next decade.

The fiscal net present values of these immigrants to the taxpayers will be around negative $670 billion. In other words, government would need to immediately raise taxes by $670 billion to cover the future costs.

Of course, the government will not actually raise taxes in this manner—instead, the future costs will be hidden and passed on to future taxpayers.

The future net outlays (benefits given less taxes paid) for the inflow of 4.7 million low-skill immigrants will be around $1.9 trillion (in constant 2012 dollars).

Over half these costs are linked to future low-skill legal immigration. By limiting future legal low-skill immigration, the RAISE Act could save at least $1 trillion.

Additional large savings could be achieved by limiting future illegal immigration. These saving figures apply to only a single decade of low-skill immigration. Similar savings would occur by limiting low-skill immigration in subsequent decades.

Opponents of such reforms argue that such immigration increases the gross domestic product.

It is true that immigration increases the GDP, but as Harvard immigration economist George Borjas explains, 98 percent of the increase "goes to the immigrants themselves in the form of wages and benefits."

Metaphorically speaking, low-skill immigrants increase the economic pie, but they eat nearly all the increase themselves.

Low-skill immigration reduces the wages of similar U.S.-born workers. An immigration-induced increase in the low-skill labor force of 10 percent can reduce the wages of low-skill non-immigrant labor by 3 to 10 percent.

Some studies show wage losses as high as 17 percent. Black male wages and employment are especially hard hit. By reducing wages of less skilled non-immigrants, low-skill immigration increases economic inequality in the U.S., redistributing income from the least advantaged Americans to the more affluent.

Finally, low-skill immigration shifts the political balance in the nation.

According to Cooperative Congressional Election Survey, the political alignment of immigrants is far to the left that of non-immigrants. Immigrants in general are twice as likely to identify with and register as Democrats than as Republicans.

This pattern is somewhat more pronounced among immigrants without a high school degree who are almost three times as likely to register as Democrats than as Republicans.

Low-skill immigration imposes large fiscal costs on U.S. taxpayers. It drives down the wages and employment of the disadvantaged American workers (especially black males), and it arbitrarily shifts the political balance in the U.S.

The RAISE Act would appropriately address these problems.

SOURCE

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

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

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A very small update:

I will probably have to delete this post some time -- but -- I have just spent several hours drinking  hard likker with my son.  He drinks Bourbon.  I drink gin. And we have decided that -- much as we love Mr Trump -- Steve Bannon is the man who really speaks for us.  We understand that he is not the right man for political compromise but we are still grateful to have a man of great influence who represents us!

An update to an update:

I failed to mention that my son had a bottle of a single-malt whisky from Islay -- that a good friend had given him for his birthday. So I got a wee dram of that at one stage. And it was exactly the peaty taste that you expect from Islay.

The pedagogue in me comes out even in my cups, however, so I note that Islay is in the Inner Hebrides due west of Glasgow -- hence the famous song about Islay: "Westering home":