Democrats Have Lost What Was Left Of Their Minds

Imagine being a Democrat right now. You have the House, and the Republican majority in the Senate is small. In the race for the presidency, you have every advantage with the exception of incumbency. Yes, the economy is booming but there isn’t a mainstream media or cultural institution that isn’t on your side and willing to anything to help you win. All you have to do is not act crazy and you’re 99 percent of the way home. And that’s the problem, there are no longer any sane Democrats.

The House hearing with Robert Mueller on Wednesday was supposed to be their shining moment, their chance to rally the country to their thus far rejected cause. Instead, it was another in a long line of flops. After watching it, I wanted to call a hotline to, as I put it in my podcast, report a shameless display of elder abuse.

It’s true that Mueller didn’t want to be there, but it appears everyone was wrong about the reason why. He’s not “above the fray,” as he was portrayed by liberals, he’s lost a lot of steps. Most shockingly, the hearing exposed that he was, at best, barely involved in the investigation. He was a name to put on the letterhead to give it gravitas and the appearance of bipartisanship.

The hearing left those who watched it with the realization he was an autopen to sign off on subpoenas, letters, and the final report. I’d feel pity for him were there not so much destruction in his wake. No matter how many steps he’s lost, he knew he was driving people into bankruptcy chasing a unicorn and he sat there, silently, hammering paychecks.

But Mueller’s embarrassing testimony wasn’t the only problem for Democrats. They had to polish that turd, no matter what. This was their moment in the sun.

Democrats are running out of silver bullets to take out President Trump. First, they thought he’d implode. He didn’t. They said he’d destroy the economy, it’s thriving. They swore he colluded with Russia. He didn’t. The promised the Mueller report would change minds. It didn’t. They switched their focus to obstruction of justice. No one cared.

After dozens of unfulfilled promises and shifting goalposts, even with so many advantages working for them and a team of investigators with unlimited power, they have nothing. Because facts matter, evidence matters. So much of the past 2 years has been spent trying to change that, trying to “fundamentally transform” the country into something it was created to be the opposite of, and they failed. They’re handling it about as well as you’d expect.

On Wednesday, CNN and MSNBC were worth watching, for once. It was like watching the kid who annoyed everyone in elementary school learn their parents never loved them. They and Congressional Democrats wanted a way out. But it’s too late, they’re pot-committed.

By the next day they were back to their old form, calling for impeachment because, well, just because. The alternative would be to talk about their ideas – socialized medicine, American taxpayer-funded health insurance for illegal aliens, open borders, higher taxes, etc. They don’t want the public knowing that’s what they’re advocating for any more than the American public wants it.

Donald Trump’s existence and persistence is Chinese water torture to the left, and they’re at the breaking point. They’re down to the last gift box on Christmas morning and they know the “official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle” not only isn’t in it, it’s not hiding behind the desk either.

They simultaneously declare impeachment proceedings must begin now because “no one, not even the President, is above the law,” without offering evidence of a crime beyond existing wrong in their eyes. They also do it while advising illegal aliens on how to thwart our immigration laws and avoid consequences. It seems some people are, in fact, above the law.

The drooling and incoherence will continue, as will the digging. Democrats know they’re drilling a dry well, but as long as they’re still drilling they can keep those on the hook from realizing they’re being hoodwinked.

And that’s where the Democrats are now – they’re the homeless guy losing an argument to a lamppost on a street corner. If they had the capacity to be sane, or even fake it for a while, they’d be doing it. Reality and the public’s understanding of it has taken the last sliver of rational thought they had, and with it their dignity. Donald Trump’s success and Robert Mueller’s testimony has driven them to the edge of crazy. On the plus side for them, carbon footprint was very small since it was a very short drive.

SOURCE 

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Racism accusations are a red herring to distract attention from destructive Leftist policies

The media wants to make the feud between President Donald Trump and four Democratic congresswomen known as “the squad” about race, instead of focusing on their policies which are dangerous for the country, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

“I think the news media really wants to make this about race. You just did it. This isn't about race. It's not about gender. It's not about religion. These members of the House of Representatives more, it's not just these four, it's also some of the candidates who are running for President on the Democratic side fundamentally believe in policies that are dangerous for this nation, and as Republicans, we are going to fight against those even if the mainstream media accuses us of racism when we do that,” Cheney said.

She said it is “absolutely wrong” for the crowd at Trump’s rally last week to chant, “Send her back,” as the president has acknowledged, and “it should not have happened.”

Cheney said she would like to see the media “as focused on the substance of what this wing of the Democratic Party is advocating because that is really dangerous for our country.”

“Socialism is dangerous for our country,” she said, adding that the presidential election “and these issues that we’re talking about are fundamental to the future of this country.”

“When you have members of Congress who are as anti-Semitic as Ilhan Omar has been, when you have members of Congress who are advocating the, you know, complete elimination of the use of all fossil fuels, all air travel, the elimination of private insurance, the imposition of socialism on this country, we're not going to stand for that. We're not going to stand for policies that take freedom away from the American people. That's what this fight is about,” Cheney said.

SOURCE 

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Court declines to block new Trump administration rule barring most Central American asylum petitions

A federal judge Wednesday let stand a new rule that bars migrants who failed to apply for asylum in at least one country on their way to the southwest border from obtaining protections in the United States, dealing the Trump administration a temporary win.

Judge Timothy J. Kelly of the US District Court in Washington declined to issue a temporary restraining order that would have blocked the government from effectively banning asylum for most Central American migrants, who have been arriving in record numbers this year.

The rule, now being applied on a limited basis in Texas, requires migrants to seek asylum in the first safe country they arrive in - in most of the current cases, Mexico.

"I do not find on this limited record the plaintiffs have provided sufficient evidence of a certain great and immediate harm to meet this high burden," Kelly said Wednesday.

Under the policy, which the administration announced July 15, only immigrants who had officially lost their bids for asylum in another country through which they traveled or who had been victims of "severe" human trafficking are permitted to apply for asylum in the United States.

Hondurans and Salvadorans have to apply for asylum and be denied in Guatemala or Mexico before they became eligible to apply in the United States, and Guatemalans have to apply and be denied in Mexico. The policy reversed longstanding asylum laws that ensure people can seek safe haven no matter where they come from. On July 16, the day the new rule went into effect - initially in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas - the American Civil Liberties Union challenged the policy in court in San Francisco. The case under review Wednesday in Washington was filed separately by two advocacy organizations, the Capital Area Immigrants' Rights Coalition and Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services.

The groups had asked the court to find that Congress did not intend that mere transit through another country would render an applicant ineligible for asylum in the United States, and to rule that the policy did not comply with required procedural steps. Kelly, however, disputed the plaintiffs' contention that Attorney General William Barr overstepped legal requirements when issuing the rule.

"I think at this point, the plaintiffs are reading too strictly a limitation on the attorney general's authority," Kelly said.

He also found that the two advocacy organizations did not provide sufficient support for the contention that there would be "irreparable harm" to the plaintiffs in the case if an immediate, temporary block to the policy were not imposed. Although the rule would impact migrants seeking asylum, "The plaintiffs before me here are not asylum-seekers," the judge said.

"They are only two organizations, one of which operates in the D.C. area, far from the southern border," he said.

Claudia Cubas, the Capital Area Immigrants' Rights Coalition's litigation director, said the organization was disappointed in the decision. "This new rule is contrary to our laws, and we will continue to challenge this attempt to remove asylum eligibly from those who are fleeing violence and persecution around the world," Cubas said in a statement.

In recent years, the number of migrants petitioning through the asylum process has sharply increased.

In record numbers, migrant families and unaccompanied children have been turning themselves in to Border Patrol agents and requesting asylum, which typically enables them to remain in the United States for years as their cases wind through the backlogged immigration courts. Only about 20 percent of them ultimately win asylum, according to the government, and many of those whose applications are rejected remain in the country unlawfully.

The majority of the 688,375 migrants who were encountered at the border since the beginning of the fiscal year that began in October have come from Central America. Kelly did seem to concur with the administration's contention that there was a need to contain migration numbers at the border.

"The records suggest our immigration system at the border has been severely strained and that such an increase, if it occurred, would at minimum have negative repercussions," the judge said.

The administration announced the new asylum policy despite the fact that Guatemala and Mexico had not agreed to the plan, which means those countries have made no assurances that they would grant asylum to migrants who were intending to go to the United States.

The Trump administration has been negotiating for months with Guatemala and Mexico in the hope of reducing the number of asylum-seekers showing up at the nation's southern border. Talks with Guatemala broke down and the country's president, Jimmy Morales, backed out of a meeting that had been scheduled for July 15 at the White House. Talks with Mexico remain in flux.

SOURCE 

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Trump Enjoys The Best Week Ever

In the past week, President Donald Trump has enjoyed an incredible stretch of good news. In fact, it has been his best week since he entered the presidential race in 2015.

The highlight of the week was former Special Counsel’s Robert Mueller embarrassing performance during two congressional hearings. He spent six hours bumbling and fumbling through incomplete answers. He seemed unable to hear or understand many of the questions. Overall, it was a shocking display of ignorance. Not only was Mueller unaware of Fusion GPS, but he also seemed to be clueless about the type of partisan Democrats he hired for the investigation. The Republican congressmen who questioned Mueller exposed him as a figurehead who was not in charge of the two-year $40 million investigation.

After such a debacle, Democrats should have shifted gears and ended the witch hunt to start focusing on issues that are of true importance to the American people. Fortunately for President Trump, the Democrats cannot move on to other issues. They are all infected with a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Amazingly, Democrats, continue to act like unhinged political crazies. Even after Mueller’s weak testimony on Wednesday, many top Democrats were still claiming that impeachment was a viable option. This shows Democrats are detached from political reality as Americans are clearly tired of the Russian collusion investigation and the never-ending Democratic Party obsession with impeachment.

Polls commissioned by the Republican Party revealed that impeachment is especially unpopular in swing districts with opposition reaching 60 percent among voters. A recent nationwide Gallup poll showed that impeachment was only supported by only 45 percent of the American people and a solid majority, 53 percent, opposed it.

While the President pursues policies in line with his “America First” agenda, the Democrats are advocating a platform of radical ideas that are hopelessly out of touch with mainstream Americans. Unlike previous generations of party leaders, today’s Democrats support a bevy of radical positions including massive tax increases, open borders, socialized medicine, a $93 trillion Green New Deal and a host of other ideas that would destroy our nation in innumerable ways.

While President Trump enjoys very strong support from Republicans, Democrats are deeply divided between traditional liberals, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and radical socialists, like U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). The relationship between the two has been very tense in recent months as they differed on several issues. This week, after the two women met, Speaker Pelosi praised her young colleague and informed the press that impeachment was still an option and the decision would be made in a “timely fashion.”

In response, President Trump called his Democratic Party opposition “clowns.” However, he is not only fortunate to have his radical political opposition pursuing “impeachment nonsense,” he is only benefitting politically from his economic policies. This week, it was announced that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) grew by a solid 2.1 percent in the second quarter, beating the expectations of most economists. This follows an especially robust first quarter of 3.1 percent GDP growth. These reports clearly show the president’s tax and regulation reduction policies are working and the economy is expanding, which will improve his chances of winning re-election.

This was also a great week for the president in his quest to secure our Southern Border. In 2016, the top campaign promise of then-candidate Donald Trump was to “build the wall.” Unfortunately, upon entering the White House, the president has faced non-stop opposition from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

On Friday, in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court gave the President a tremendous boost with their decision to allow the administration to use a portion of the authorized funds, $2.5 billion from the Defense Department, to construct sections of the border wall.

After this Supreme Court decision, the president will be able to campaign for re-election by showing at least some progress on his promise to “build the wall.” It will help maintain his strong support among Republicans and those voters who care deeply about border security.

In his political career, President Trump has enjoyed both successes and setbacks; however, the events of this week were truly remarkable. With good news from the congressional hearings, the economic reports and the Supreme Court, the president’s chances for re-election have improved dramatically. The opposition’s main argument for defeating President Trump was exposed as a total delusion. Their policies have been revealed as radical pipe dreams, while the president’s policies are consistently showing positive results for the American people. By week’s end, the president is stronger politically, which is great news for the United States of America as his re-election is essential for the future security and stability of our nation.

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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Supreme Court paves the way for Donald Trump to build his wall

It was one of his biggest 2016 election promises - and today it looks like it may happen, and Donald Trump isn’t holding back his delight

The US Supreme Court has cleared the way for the Trump administration to tap billions of dollars in Pentagon funds to build sections of a border wall with Mexico.

The court’s five conservative justices gave the administration the green light to begin work on four contracts it has awarded using Defence Department money. Funding for the projects had been frozen by lower courts while a lawsuit over the money proceeded. The court’s four liberal justices wouldn’t have allowed construction to start.

The justices’ decision to lift the freeze on the money allows President Donald Trump to make progress on a major 2016 campaign promise heading into his race for a second term. Trump tweeted after the announcement: “Wow! Big VICTORY on the Wall. The United States Supreme Court overturns lower court injunction, allows Southern Border Wall to proceed. Big WIN for Border Security and the Rule of Law!”

The Supreme Court’s action reverses the decision of a trial court, which initially froze the funds in May, and an appeals court, which kept that freeze in place earlier this month. The freeze had prevented the government from tapping approximately $A3.6 billion in Defence Department money to replace existing sections of barrier in Arizona, California and New Mexico with more robust fencing.

The case the Supreme Court ruled in began after the 35-day partial government shutdown that started in December of last year. Trump ended the shutdown in February after Congress gave him approximately $1.4 billion in border wall funding. But the amount was far less than the $5.7 billion he was seeking, and Trump then declared a national emergency to take cash from other government accounts to use to construct sections of wall.

The money Trump identified includes $3.6 billion from military construction funds, $2.5 billion in Defence Department money and $600 million from the Treasury Department’s asset forfeiture fund.

The case before the Supreme Court involved just the $2.5 billion in Defence Department funds, which the administration says will be used to construct more than 160 kilometres of fencing. One project would replace 74 kilometres of barrier in New Mexico for $789 million. Another would replace 101 kilometres in Arizona for $646 million. The other two projects in California and Arizona are smaller.

The other funds were not at issue in the case. The Treasury Department funds have so far survived legal challenges, and Customs and Border Protection has earmarked the money for work in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley but has not yet awarded contracts. Transfer of the $3.6 billion in military construction funds is awaiting approval from the defence secretary.

SOURCE 

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The time when all Republicans were RINOs

There has always been a lot of conservatism in America but it has not always had a political voice.  The long rule (4 terms!) of Democrat presidential hero FDR had so thoroughly captured the media, the bureaucracy and the educational system that it was almost impossible for a conservative to get heard.  There was an absolute liberal consensus among public voices.  Liberals really believed that there was no reasonable alternative to liberralism and therefore saw conservative utterances as simply kooky. And their view prevailed.  So even the Republican party has become basically liberal -- just an alternative liberal voice

That could not continue, however.  The first conservative voice to gain some respect was Bill Buckley.  He was very much like an affluent Eastern states liberal and was always highly clubbable, respectful of indiviual liberals and very well-spoken and literate.  He could reason with liberals in their terms.  His impact was however only in Eastern States clubland.  He was not a man of the people

Then along comes Barry Goldwater.  From here on I quote from here:


AT the beginning of the 1960s conservatives were in a better position than at any time since the 1930s to challenge moderate Republicans for control of the party. But large obstacles remained. Not only were conservatives widely viewed as wild-eyed fanatics but they squabbled among themselves, had trouble articulating a positive program of reform, had few grassroots organizations, and lacked the funding to make the movement a serious political force.

The year 1960, though, brought a turning point for the conservative movement. That year Barry Goldwater published The Conscience of a Conservative. Generally dismissed in the national media, the book stands today as one of the most important political tracts in modern American history.

As the historian Robert Alan Goldberg demonstrates in Barry Goldwater, his fine new biography, The Conscience of a Conservative advanced the conservative cause in several ways. Building on William F. Buckley's pathbreaking work at National Review, Goldwater adeptly reconciled the differences between traditionalists and libertarians. The expansion of the welfare state, he wrote, was an unfortunate and dangerous development that undermined individual freedom. Suggesting that New Deal liberalism marked the first step on the road to totalitarianism, Goldwater argued that government should be removed from most areas of American life.

Yet he was no strict libertarian. Appealing to those on the right who longed to recapture lost certitudes, he argued that the state had a duty to maintain order and promote virtue. "Politics," Goldwater wrote, is "the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order."

Goldwater also united disparate conservative factions by focusing their attention on the dangers of Soviet communism. He wrote,

"And still the awful truth remains: We can establish the domestic conditions for maximizing freedom, along the lines I have indicated, and yet become slaves. We can do this by losing the Cold War to the Soviet Union."

Goldwater rejected the containment strategies that had guided U.S. foreign policy since the late 1940s, and called for an aggressive strategy of liberation. Conservatives might disagree about the proper role of government in American life, but surely they could unite to defeat the "Soviet menace."

Goldwater also dispelled the notion that conservatives were a privileged elite out to promote its own economic interests. "Conservatism," he wrote, "is not an economic theory." Rather, it "puts material things in their proper place" and sees man as "a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires." According to one right-wing magazine, Goldwater gave conservatives humanitarian reasons for supporting policies usually "associated with a mere lust for gain."

But perhaps the greatest achievement of Goldwater's book--and the reason for its startling success with the right--was that it gave conservatives, for the first time, a blueprint for translating their ideas into political action. In his introduction Goldwater rejected the idea that conservatism was "out of date."

"The charge is preposterous and we ought boldly to say so. The laws of God, and of nature, have no dateline. The principles on which the Conservative political position is based ... are derived from the nature of man, and from the truths that God has revealed about His creation. Circumstances do change. So do the problems that are shaped by circumstances. But the principles that govern the solution of the problems do not. To suggest that the Conservative philosophy is out of date is akin to saying that the Golden Rule, or the Ten Commandments or Aristotle's Politics are out of date."

Supporting states' rights, lower taxes, voluntary Social Security, and a strengthened military, Goldwater emphasized the positive in his philosophy and demonstrated "the practical relevance of Conservative principles to the needs of the day."

That altered the American political landscape, galvanizing the right and turning Goldwater into the most popular conservative in the country. By 1964, just four years after its release, the book had gone through more than twenty printings, and it eventually sold 3.5 million copies. "Was there ever such a politician as this?" one Republican asked in disbelief. The Conscience of a Conservative "was our new testament," Pat Buchanan has said. "It contained the core beliefs of our political faith, it told us why we had failed, what we must do. We read it, memorized it, quoted it.... For those of us wandering in the arid desert of Eisenhower Republicanism, it hit like a rifle shot."

REPUBLICAN Party leaders, however, ignored the "Goldwater boomlet." Vice President Richard Nixon, the front-runner for the 1960 Republican nomination, believed that the greatest threat to the party came not from the right but from the left. In July, Nixon met with Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, and agreed to change the party platform to win moderate-Republican support. Conservatives were outraged, referring to the pact, in Goldwater's words, as the "Munich of the Republican Party."

A few days later, at the Republican National Convention, an angry Goldwater called on conservatives to "grow up" and take control of the party. And that, according to Brennan, is exactly what they set out to do. At a time when "liberal and moderate Republicans, like the rest of the country at that time and like historians ever since, continued to view conservatives in a one-dimensional mode," conservatives believed that Goldwater's popularity, the rise of a conservative press, and the growing strength of conservative youth groups boded well for the future.

Increasingly disillusioned with Republican moderates and with the whole tenor of American political debate, the right began to see organization as the key to political power. In the midst of the 1960 presidential campaign, for example, William Buckley, the conservative fundraiser Marvin Liebman, and almost a hundred student activists met at Buckley's estate in Sharon, Connecticut, and formed Young Americans for Freedom. Within six months the organization could claim more than a hundred campus and precinct-level political-action groups and at least 21,000 dues-paying members. Using newsletters, radio broadcasts, and frequent rallies, YAF had almost overnight become a powerful nationwide movement.

Had Young Americans for Freedom and other grassroots organizations remained isolated from one another, their impact would have been weak. But in 1961 the political activist F. Clifton White organized a movement to nominate a conservative for President. Traveling around the country, White exhorted conservatives to seize control of their local party organizations and elect conservative delegates to the national convention. The movement orchestrated by White gave conservatives control over the Republican Party and helped to persuade Goldwater to run for President.

Capturing the presidential nomination was one thing; winning the presidency proved much more difficult. In the early 1960s conservatives tried to distance themselves from the radical right. No group troubled conservatives more than the John Birch Society. With organizations in all fifty states, thousands of members (who, according to Brennan, were "zealous letter writers, demonstrators, and voters"), and a full-time staff, the society wielded significant influence. But Birchers, many of whom believed that Dwight Eisenhower and other government officials were Communist agents, tarnished the reputations of more-rational conservatives.

Buckley understood the problem: conservatism, he explained, had to bring "into our ranks those people who are, at the moment, on our immediate left--the moderate, wishy-washy conservatives. ... I am talking ... about 20 to 30 million people.... If they are being asked to join a movement whose leadership believes the drivel of Robert Welch [the founder of the John Birch Society], they will pass by crackpot alley, and will not pause until they feel the warm embrace of those way over on the other side, the Liberals."

But in 1964 Goldwater could not escape the taint of extremism. Brennan points out that despite their sporadic attacks on the radical right, conservatives were still political neophytes. Goldwater and his supporters believed that all they had to do was expose Americans to conservative ideas. But Goldwater had no positive program, and spent much of the campaign railing against Social Security and threatening to roll back the Communist tide. Moderate Republicans labeled him a racist and a warmonger, and Goldwater seemed to confirm such charges when he threatened to "lob" missiles "into the men's room at the Kremlin."

Perhaps most damaging, the media condemned him as a kook who sounded more like Adolf Hitler than like a Republican presidential candidate. Norman Mailer, writing in Esquire, compared the Republican National Convention to a Nazi rally. The columnist Drew Pearson described the "smell of fascism" in the air. Roy Wilkins, of the NAACP, told readers of The New York Times that "a man came out of the beer halls of Munich, and rallied the forces of Rightism in Germany" and that "all the same elements are there in San Francisco now." When Democrats mocked Goldwater's campaign slogan, "In your heart, you know he's right," by adding, "Yes, extreme Right," Goldwater's candidacy was doomed.

Poor campaign management, Goldwater's image, and the lack of unity in the Republican Party contributed to the Democratic landslide in November of 1964. But whereas liberals saw the election results as the final repudiation of the American right, conservatives took solace in Goldwater's 27 million votes and vowed not to repeat their mistakes. What appeared to be a defeat for conservatives was actually a dramatic success: Goldwater had paved the way for a generation of Republicans by appealing to the "forgotten" and "silent" Americans "who quietly go about the business of paying and praying, working and saving." He had also raised new social and moral issues that would prove vital to future conservative successes.

But the liberals, of course, never gave up and used their continuing control of the media to reassert their old consensus.  And that reached its highpoint in the Obama regime. They nearly got their old dominance back.  Like all Leftist regimes, however, it was intrinsically authoritarian and that paved the way for a big wave of dissent.  And that rejection of a kid-gloves dictatorship brought  Donald Trump to power. The lesson from it all is that the Left never gives up and never learns.  So, sadly, our fight with them must never cease.

There is a video below of a Barry Goldwater speech that describes an America that sounds distressingly familiar:



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Trump administration proposed rule would cut 3 million people from food stamps

The Trump administration on Tuesday proposed a rule to tighten food stamp eligibility that would cut about 3.1 million people from the program, U.S. Department of Agriculture officials said, drawing ire from Democratic senators and advocacy groups.

The administration has been rolling out rule changes related to the food stamps, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), after efforts to pass new restrictions on it were blocked by Congress last year. The program provides free food to some 40 million Americans, or about 12 percent of the total U.S. population.

The USDA billed Tuesday’s move as a way to save money and help eliminate what it sees as the widespread abuse of the program. But Democrats and advocacy groups criticized it as an attack on the nation’s poorest.

“This rule would take food away from families, prevent children from getting school meals, and make it harder for states to administer food assistance,” said Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry.

Currently, 43 U.S. states allow residents to become eligible for food stamps automatically through SNAP, or if they receive benefits from another federal program known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, according to the USDA.

The agency wants to change that by requiring people who receive TANF benefits to pass a review of their income and assets to determine whether they are also eligible for free food from SNAP, officials said.

If enacted, the rule would save the federal government about $2.5 billion a year by removing 3.1 million people from SNAP, according to the USDA. Advocacy group First Focus on Children said 7.4% of households with children participating in SNAP would lose their access to food stamps.

“To cut money for people who need to be fed? It’s just another example of the heartlessness of this administration,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters.

President Donald Trump has long argued that many Americans using SNAP do not need it given the strong economy and low unemployment, and should be removed as a way to save taxpayers as much as $15 billion.

“Some states are taking advantage of loopholes that allow people to receive the SNAP benefits who would otherwise not qualify and for which they are not entitled,” USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue told reporters on a conference call on Monday.

The USDA does not need congressional approval to stop states from automatically allowing recipients of TANF benefits to become eligible for SNAP, said Brandon Lipps, a USDA acting deputy undersecretary.

Current rules allow people to access SNAP benefits worth thousands of dollars for two years without undergoing robust eligibility reviews, he told reporters on the call.

“Unfortunately, automatic eligibility has expanded to allow even millionaires and others who simply receive a TANF-funded brochure to become eligible for SNAP when they clearly don’t need it,” Lipps said.

The liberal-leaning Center For American Progress advocacy group said the proposal would hurt the poor “by forcing states to take food assistance away from those with even modest savings of a few thousand dollars” as well as raise administrative costs for states.

The move could also potentially hurt discount retailers such as Dollar Tree (DLTR.O) and Dollar General (DG.N), which have blamed weaker traffic on reduced food stamp coverage in the past. Dollar General shares were down 0.67% while Dollar Tree shares were down 1.90%.

The Congressional Budget Office in December estimated the rule could save the federal government $8.1 billion from 2019 to 2028, lower than the USDA’s estimate. In 2016, the CBO said there were concerns the move would eliminate benefits for households in difficult financial situations and increase the complexity and time needed to process SNAP applications.

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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‘Disaster for the Democrats’: Why the Mueller testimony failed to deliver what Donald Trump’s opponents wanted

For many of Donald Trump’s opponents, Robert Mueller’s testimony was one final chance to impeach the President. In a best-case scenario, the former special counsel would shed damning new light on his 22-month investigation and reveal that Mr Trump was indeed impeachable.

At the very least, Mr Mueller would relay powerful excerpts from the 448-page document on national television, which would engage the 90 per cent majority of the American public who did not read the report, and in particular dissuade people in crucial swing states from voting for him at next year’s election.

Instead, the almost seven-hour testimony fell flat. Not only did it fail to yield any new information on the investigation, but Democrats failed to get that powerful made-for-TV sound byte they were hoping for.

For Mr Trump’s opponents, the testimony was like watching a really great trailer for a movie that … ultimately kind of sucked.

Mr Mueller repeatedly refused to answer questions from Democrats and Republicans alike.

The Democrats had hoped to hear him respond to a series of questions surrounding Mr Trump’s potential crimes and ongoing investigations relating to him and his associates.

Republicans sought to interrogate him on any potential political bias that may have compromised the investigation.

Both sides were waved off — along with any questions on impeachment. Instead, Mr Mueller focused almost entirely on the text of the report — which was already made public months ago.

None of this should have come as a surprise. In the lead-up to the testimony, this is exactly what Mr Mueller said he would do. In his opening statement, he reiterated: “The report is my testimony and I will stay within that text.”

Bear in mind, not all Democrats supported impeaching the President. Some, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, vocally opposed an impeachment motion but still supported the testimony as a way of discrediting Mr Trump in the lead-up to the 2020 election.

For this to work, Mr Mueller was to read out a selection of powerful excerpts from the report, which, in televised form would resonate with the viewer.

But instead, he largely stuck to “yes” and “no” answers, refused to comment on a range of questions, and basically refused to dramatise his findings.

Several media commentators across the US have since concluded the testimony was a bust, saying it’s now time for the Democrats to move beyond the impeachment issue.

“Impeachment’s over,” declared ABC’s Terry Moran. “I don’t think Nancy Pelosi is going to stand for her members bringing forth something that is going to obviously lose in the Senate, lose with the American public.”

“It’s time for Democratic leaders to stop obsessing over this closed case and to put the American people first,” wrote CNN’s Alice Stewart, who described the testimony as an overall “nightmare” for Congressional Democrats.

Fox News anchor Chris Wallace deemed the testimony “disastrous”. “I think this has been a disaster for the Democrats and I think it’s been a disaster for the reputation of Robert Mueller,” he said.

Experts have warned the Democrats need to move on from the impeachment issue and focus on producing sound policies and unity ahead of the 2020 election.

More HERE

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Trump sues to block New York law allowing Congress to get his state tax records

State taxes require similar information to Federal taxes so the new NY law could be a way around Trump's refusal to publish his Federal tax records.  The new NY law was clearly written to accomplish exactly that.

Confidentiality of tax returns is however something of a bedrock principle of tax law so the new law is unlikely to survive a challenge in the courts.  Whether it does or does not, legal challenges to it could undoubtedly be prolonged well past the next election.

Even if someone does eventually gain the information through the courts he could still be vulnerable to legal action if he publishes it.  That should be sufficient to scare off politicians and major media


President Donald Trump on Tuesday filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent the House Ways and Means Committee from obtaining his state tax returns through a newly passed New York law.

The president's lawyers said the state law was nothing more than an effort to get information about his personal finances to embarrass him politically.

The suit referred to an NBC News article on Monday that said Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., was under pressure from fellow Democrats to make use of the new law.

The suit asks the court to provide a declaratory judgment that the committee "lacks a legitimate legislative purpose for obtaining the President's state tax information."

The lawsuit asserts that the law, called the TRUST Act, violates Trump's First Amendment rights. It seeks to block the Ways and Means Committee from being able to request the taxes through the law, prevent New York Attorney General Letitia James from enforcing it, and stop New York Department of Taxation and Finance Commissioner Michael Schmidt from complying with any request for Trump's tax filings.

"The House Rules authorize the Committee to oversee 'Federal laws,' not state tax laws," says the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia. "And nothing in the House Rules allows the Committee to demand the private financial information of a sitting President."

The president's personal attorney, Jay Sekulow, said in a statement that the lawsuit was filed as part of "our ongoing efforts to end Presidential harassment."

"The targeting of the president by the House Ways and Means Committee, the New York Attorney General, and a New York tax official violates article 1 of the U.S. Constitution," he said. "The harassment tactics lack a legitimate legislative purpose."

The New York law allows the chairmen of three congressional tax-related committees — the House Ways and Means Committee, Senate Finance Committee and Joint Committee on Taxation — to request the state returns of public officials only after efforts to gain access to federal tax filings through the Treasury Department have failed. Neal is the only Democrat who can use the law.

The legislation states that any "legitimate task" of Congress is a valid reason to make the request, should efforts to obtain the returns at the federal level be stonewalled by the Treasury Department. New York state tax filings are not identical to the federal returns, but contain much of the same information.

"I have every confidence that the president’s legal challenge will fail and New York’s standing offer to support Congress in its oversight role on taxes will remain in effect," New York state Assemblyman David Buchwald, a Democrat who sponsored the legislation, said in a statement. "It's no surprise that the President has moved quickly in an attempt to strike down New York’s tax transparency law as he is fighting the release of his tax returns on every front."

The bill, signed into law this month, was written broadly and makes it easier for New York to turn over the state tax returns of certain public officials to Congress.

Neal said last month he wouldn't use the law to request the state returns because he feels it could harm his attempt at getting the federal filings. Neal sued the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department for those returns citing a section of tax law that states the Treasury Secretary "shall furnish" to congressional tax committees "any return or return information" request by its chairman. The stated purpose of Neal's request is to review the IRS process for auditing presidential returns.

Earlier this month, Neal said House counsel was "reviewing" the law and had "some legitimate concerns" regarding it.

But he is under pressure from Democrats to act. An aide to a Democratic member of Ways and Means told NBC News in a report on Monday that "there has been widespread frustration from members of the committee at how slowly this process has moved."

Trump broke with decades of tradition by refusing to release his returns while running for the presidency, claiming he was under audit. Such an audit would not preclude him from releasing the returns, however. A president's returns undergo IRS audits annually.

SOURCE 

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Democrats’ forced unionism bill threatens jobs and tramples workers’ rights

The Protecting the Right to Organize Act of 2019 (PRO Act) is a great illustration of just how radical and out-of-touch today’s Democrat Party is. The bill, which has 179 House Democrat cosponsors and 40 Senate Democrat cosponsors, would force millions of workers into unions they oppose and destroy jobs while lining the pockets of liberal fat cat donors. Just when some workers finally begin recovering from the Great Recession is no time to be killing jobs in the franchise industry and the gig economy. For these and other reasons, the bill must be rejected.

On May 2nd, Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) introduced the PRO Act in the House; the same day, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) introduced the companion bill in the Senate. The bill is essentially a grab bag of liberal Democrat labor policies designed to prop up failing unions at the expense of workers and the economy. Of course, the bill should not be considered charity but rather as a quid pro quo.

First of all, the bill would invalidate Right to Work laws in 27 states, not only overturning the will of the voters in many of these states, but also forcing many workers to join unions and pay union dues against their will. Of course, by paying union dues, union members would be subsidizing speech and political activity that they might oppose and this is exactly what the Democrats are trying to achieve in this naked grab for power.  Furthermore, by effectively repealing Right to Work laws, House Democrats would be negating the revitalization of the US manufacturing sector making our nation less competitive with the rest of the world.  Just when President Trump’s strong tax, regulatory, and trade policies are paying off with the creation of more than half million manufacturing jobs, Congressional Democrats would adopt policies guaranteed to send jobs overseas.

Secondly, the bill institutes card check which effectively ends secret-ballot union elections inviting a climate of workplace intimidation. In other words, instead of being required to win an election, unions could gain power by simply conning or pressuring workers into signing unionization cards. Making matters worse, businesses would be forced to hand over contact information for all employees to unions without the employees’ consent so that union organizers could harass the workers at their homes.

Thirdly, the bill mandates ambush unionization elections. These snap elections may prevent those opposed to unionization from having a sufficient opportunity to make their case to workers giving unions an unfair advantage. Apparently Democrats are worried that if both sides have a fair hearing, then more workers will be inclined to vote against unionization.

Fourthly, the bill would bring back the Obama era joint-employer standard making franchisors responsible for the actions of franchisees. Franchises are often the gateway to entrepreneurship for middle-class Americans, and House Democrats would deliberately pour cold water on this basic American dream.  By making the parent company responsible for labor law mistakes made by franchisees, House Democrats would likely kill the franchise goose that laid the golden egg.

Finally, the bill would make it tougher for workers to qualify as contractors. This could cripple the business models of FedEx Ground, Uber, Lyft and a number of other innovative companies that rely upon contractors to deliver their services to customers. The significant additional employment costs imposed by this bill are designed to create unionization opportunities for Democrats’ labor union benefactors, but it is doubtful whether currently independent drivers would survive the transition as they became little more than scheduled cab drivers.

The PRO Act is a threat to workers’ rights, to millions of American jobs, and to the U.S. economy as a whole; therefore, it must be defeated. Fortunately, not a single Republican has signed on to this disastrous legislation.

SOURCE 

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Bernie Sanders Runs Into Socialist Reality
   
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., proudly announced this year that his presidential campaign would be the first in history to have a unionized workforce. Well, he just became the first presidential candidate in history to face a labor revolt from his unionized workforce.

According to The Washington Post, the Sanders campaign workers union, United Food & Commercial Workers Local 400, complained that field organizers are “making poverty wages” and that “many field staffers are barely managing to survive financially.” Because field organizers are working 60 hours a week, according to the union, their annual salary of $36,000 works out to $13 an hour — well below the $15-an-hour federal minimum wage Sanders has called for.

It gets worse. When the Sanders campaign offered to raise salaries to that level, the union rejected the offer. Why? Because, The Post reports, “the raise would have elevated field staff to a pay level responsible for paying more of their own health-care costs.” It turns out that Sanders pays only 85% of health-care premiums for campaign staff making more than $36,000 — despite campaigning on a promise of free health care for all with “no premiums, no deductibles, no co-payments, no out-of-pocket expenses.”

So, what was Sanders’s solution? First, he cut the hours of his field staffers from 60 to about 43 a week — which meant the campaign could say it was paying $15 an hour without actually increasing field organizers’ pay. Then on Monday, his campaign finally gave in and agreed to raise salaries to $42,000, preserve full health premium coverage and limit workers’ hours to 50 per week.

During the dispute, Sanders’s campaign defended its policies, declaring, “We know our campaign offers wages and benefits competitive with other campaigns.” Well, McDonald’s offers wages competitive with other fast-food chains, but that has not been good enough for Sanders. He has marched with McDonald’s workers, and attended Walmart shareholder meetings, to demand they be more generous with their workforces. How could he demand those companies provide pay and benefits that he was resisting giving his own employees?

Now the union has forced Sanders to capitulate on wages and health care. But why stop there? The Sanders union seems to be suffering from a lack of imagination. If union organizers really want to hold Sanders to his own standards, then a $15 minimum wage and premium-free health care should be only the beginning.

Sanders has promised to cover the cost of prescription drugs and make sure “no one in America pays over $200 a year for the medicine they need.” He has promised to pay for “universal childcare and pre-kindergarten.” He has promised free college, because “you are not truly free when the vast majority of good-paying jobs require a degree that requires taking out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to obtain.” He has promised to “free generations of Americans from the outrageous burden of student loans by canceling all existing student debt.” Is he setting an example by providing all these benefits to workers on his campaign?

Of course not. Because if he did, his campaign would quickly run out of cash. Ah, but there’s the rub. As former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher famously put it, “the trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

A political campaign literally runs on other people’s money. It is bare-bones operation, in which staffers choose to work ridiculous hours for low pay, and rely on donations from supporters to get the candidate’s message out. In Sanders’s case, the majority of his donations come from small donors — ordinary Americans who are sacrificing their hard-earned money to help get him elected, not to fund social welfare for political operatives.

Every dollar his campaign spends on higher pay and free stuff for campaign workers is a dollar not spent on campaign ads in Iowa and New Hampshire. And if his campaign can’t get those ads on the air, then Sanders will lose — and his entire team will lose their jobs, their benefits and their chances of a cushy White House job. Then they won’t ever get access to the United States treasury and the chance to really spend other people’s money. So, we should all be grateful to the UFCW Local 400 for pulling more Sanders campaign money off the airwaves and into the pockets of Sanders’s field workers, while limiting the hours they can work to spread his socialist message. They’ve done the country a great service.

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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Inheritance is mostly overrated as a reason for wealth

Inherited money seldom lasts long

Perhaps more than ever before, people claim that almost the only way to join the ranks of the rich is through inheritance. Apparently, in the good old days, it was still possible build a fortune from the ground up—but not anymore. Such claims discourage people who have set themselves the goal of becoming wealthy as entrepreneurs or investors. The message, whether explicit or unspoken, is as clear as it is sad: “Don’t even bother trying—those days are long gone.” There are even so-called classism researchers who criticise the media for reporting on people who have ascended from humble beginnings to become rich. Such articles, the researchers claim, only perpetuate a false illusion that capitalism, in reality, can never live up to.

67% of The Forbes 400 Are Self-Made

Forbes has proved that this is simply not the case. In fact, the opposite is true: In 1984, less than half the people on The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans were self-made. By 2018, in stark contrast, this same figure had risen to 67%! Forbes’ analysis is based on a scoring system in which each member of The Forbes 400 is given a score on a scale from 1 to 10. A 1 is awarded to people who have inherited their entire fortune and have done nothing to increase their wealth. A 10 means that someone has pulled themselves up by their bootstraps to build their incredible wealth in the face of substantial obstacles. Anyone on The Forbes 400 who merits a score of between 6 and 10 is rated as having truly made it on their own.

The Buddenbrooks: An Exemplary Tale

The importance of inheritance is overestimated because, in reality, most heirs are unable to preserve let alone expand their assets. In 1901, the German writer Thomas Mann published one of his most celebrated novels, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, which tells the story of how a rich merchant family, the Buddenbrooks, slowly but surely squandered its fortune over the course of four generations. As is so often the case, fact mirrors fiction, as demonstrated by the scientists Robert Arnott, William Bernstein and Lillian Wu in their research paper “The Myth of Dynastic Wealth: The Rich Get Poorer.” Their key findings include the following: “The average wealth erosion for the 10 wealthiest families of 1930, 1957, and 1968… was 6.6 percent, 5.3 percent, and 8.7 percent, respectively. These figures correspond to a half-life of wealth—the length of time it takes for half of the family fortune to be redistributed within society through taxation, spending, and charitable giving—of 10 years, 13 years, and (remarkably) 8 years, respectively.”

Great Ideas And Personality Traits Are Not Necessarily Passed On To The Next Generation

One glance at the list of the richest people in the world is enough to see that the vast majority—insofar as they have not inherited their wealth—have earned their fortunes as entrepreneurs. And according to the findings of entrepreneurship research, successful entrepreneurs become rich because they have a very specific combination of personality traits. However, these personality traits cannot simply be passed on to the next generation. The super-rich became rich because they had incredibly good ideas. Why is it that Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergej Brin and Larry Page are among the richest people in the world? Because they had great ideas, founded Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google and knew how to turn them into extremely profitable companies. It’s very unlikely that their children will have the same personality traits or such brilliant ideas.

The Secret Weapons Of The Super-rich?

Left-wing economists, such as the Frenchman Thomas Piketty, believe that the rich have access to particularly profitable investments—some would even call them a license to print money—which allow them to automatically increase their wealth even without their own entrepreneurial ideas. Just like left-wing anti-capitalists, family offices that earn their money by promising to increase the wealth of rich families have a vested interest in maintaining the myth that there are secret, extremely lucrative investment opportunities that are reserved only for the super-rich. This is, after all, the basis of their entire business model. But there are very good reasons to doubt that this is the case. It is more likely that most of these exclusive asset managers deliver even worse results for their super-rich clients than an average investor would achieve by investing in an index fund. For example, hedge funds have enjoyed an almost legendary reputation as the super-secret weapons of the rich for many years. And yes, some hedge funds have achieved extremely high returns, for which they have received a great deal of celebratory media attention. On average, however, they have performed worse than an index fund that absolutely anyone can buy on the internet.

In 2007, Warren Buffett entered a million-dollar bet with fund manager Protége Partners that the S&P 500 Index would outperform a portfolio of hedge funds over the next ten years. Buffett was right and donated his winnings to Girls Incorporated of Omaha. The S&P 500 Index fund in which he invested delivered a compound annual return of 7.1%, outperforming the return on the funds selected by Protégé Partners (2.2%). The extent of the difference is really put into perspective when you compare the actual monetary returns: Anyone who invested a million dollars in hedge funds before 2008 would have made a profit of $220,000 by 2017. S&P 500 investors, on the other hand, would have collected $854,000. So much for the supposed license to print money and “secret weapons” of the super-rich.

How People Inherit Money And Lose It Again

Many rich heirs could actually live very well off their inheritances if only they followed the advice Warren Buffett has already given his wife for when she inherits (a minor part) of his fortune: Simply invest the money in an index tracker fund. But most people think they are smarter and believe they can make particularly canny investments—which all too often turn out to be flops. Or they inherit a company but do not have the entrepreneurial talent of their predecessors. Others overestimate themselves, start new companies and lose money. Still others go through expensive divorces or simply spend far more each year than their inheritances would sensibly allow. There are countless examples that show just how difficult it is to manage an inheritance. Many heirs have more in common with lottery winners who, by a stroke of luck, win massive fortunes, but lose them again because they lack the requisite skills to handle money.

Welcome To The Self-Made Billionaires’ Club, Jay Z

In reality, the chances of getting rich, even at a young age or as someone who comes from a humble background, have never been so good. Recent headlines have trumpeted the fact that Jay Z, who was raised by a single working mother, has become the world’s first hip-hop billionaire and the latest member of the Self-Made Billionaires’ Club. Of course, very few people will ever make it quite so far. But what helps more? Telling someone “You have no chance anyway. If you don’t inherit money, you’ll never get rich,” or, “Forget it! Capitalism only makes the rich even richer.” Or saying, “You probably won't become a billionaire, but look at the people who started out at the very bottom and made it to the top. Seize your opportunities!”

SOURCE 

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The Left vs. Law Enforcement
   
While the border crisis continues, the American left is becoming more violent, and its enablers in Congress and the courts resist efforts to stem the crisis. Here are the latest developments from the weekend.

In Tacoma, Washington, police shot and killed an Antifa anarchist who attacked a detention facility in an apparent effort to kill the guards there. The attacker, Willem Van Spronsen, had been arrested during a protest at the same facility last year.

Several friends indicated he sent a manifesto promising something big. The governor of Washington blames the incident on the atmosphere President Trump has created.

At an ICE facility in Aurora, Colorado, demonstrators took down the U.S. flag and replaced it with the Mexican flag. They also took down and defaced a Blue Lives Matter flag with the words “Abolish ICE” and raised another flag that said “F—k Cops."

Late in the evening, a squad of armed guards was finally able to remove the Mexican flag and restore the American flag to its rightful place.

Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who is running for the Democrat presidential nomination as a supposed moderate, defended the flag desecration as "free speech.” Wrong!

It is not free speech to trespass onto federal property to destroy federal property. It is free speech to burn your own flag. You cannot tear down or burn someone else’s flag.

I’m glad we have Gov. Hickenlooper on the record on this incident. Every Democrat presidential candidate should be asked about their views of what happened this weekend and whether they support raising the flag of a foreign nation in the place of the American flag.

All over America this weekend, elected Democrats ran to microphones to profess their loyalty to illegal immigrants. Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, posted a video with the police chief standing next to him and declared, “Your city is on your side, and rest assured, here in Los Angeles we are not coordinating with ICE.” Garcetti may come to regret that decision. (See next item.)

Who’s on the side of law-abiding U.S. citizens? And why isn’t the LAPD cooperating with federal law enforcement?

It was the same thing in Chicago, where authorities showed more interest in protecting illegal immigrants than protecting Chicago residents from the mass violence that results in dozens of people being shot every weekend.

Leftists were on bicycles in Hispanic neighborhoods warning illegal immigrants of any law enforcement efforts by ICE. Why aren’t they going through those neighborhoods warning kids of gangs and drug dealers?

A few weeks ago, various left-wing spokesmen called for the public harassment and “doxing,” exposing personal information online, of those who guard our borders. Go to their homes, go to their kids’ schools. Shame them publicly, the left insisted.

This weekend, Sen. Elizabeth Warren upped the ante by threatening to prosecute Border Patrol guards. She told the radical Netroots conference, “On my first day, I will empower a commission in the Department of Justice to investigate crimes committed by the United States against immigrants.”

While she pursues policies that make it impossible to detain illegal immigrants, now she’s threatening to target those guarding the border. This is how extreme the left has become.

In stark contrast, President Trump issued an executive order giving “voice” to the victims of crimes committed by illegal aliens, crimes that never should have happened but did because liberal politicians refuse to secure the border.

By the way, only 33% of voters think the government is “too aggressive” when it comes to deporting illegal immigrants.

SOURCE 

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A good rationale



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Sen. Cruz Introduces Measure to Designate Left-Wing Antifa a 'Domestic Terrorist Organization'

Given the radical, left-wing Antifa group's well-documented history of violence, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-La.) introduced a resolution on July 18 that condemns Antifa's "violent acts" and calls for the designation of the group as a "domestic terrorist organization."

"Antifa is a group of hateful, intolerant radicals who pursue their unhinged agenda through aggressive violence," said Sen. Cruz in a statement. "Time and time again their actions have demonstrated that their only purpose is to inflict harm on those who oppose their views."

"The hate and violence they spread must be stopped, and I am proud to introduce this resolution with Senator Cassidy to properly identify what Antifa are: domestic terrorists," he said.

Sen. Cassidy, a medical doctor, said, "Antifa are terrorists, violent masked bullies who ‘fight fascism' with actual fascism, protected by Liberal privilege."

"With bullies, they get their way until someone says no," he added. "There must be courage, not cowardice, from the elected officials who allow violence against the innocent."

The two senators noted the recent attack by Antifa members on photojournalist Andrew Ngo in Portland. Ngo was taking pictures at a June 29 demonstration when he was beaten by Antifa members. He suffered a brain hemorrhage and a torn ear lobe.

Antifa, which is an abbreviation of the word "anti-fascist," is a radical, left-wing group with members across the country. Antifa group members engage in direct action -- intimidation, brutality, and violence -- targeted often at conservatives and supporters of President Trump, as well as against private property.

Antifa's actions are face-to face but also online, and through other digital or technical means to harass and intimidate people. Antifa also sometimes engages in action against the police.

The resolution from Sens. Cruz and Cassidy reads:

Title: Calling for the designation of Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization.

Whereas members of Antifa, because they believe that free speech is equivalent to violence, have used threats of violence in the pursuit of suppressing opposing political ideologies;

Whereas Antifa represents opposition to the democratic ideals of peaceful assembly and free speech for all;

Whereas members of Antifa have physically assaulted journalists and other individuals during protests and riots in Berkeley, California;

Whereas in February of 2018, journalist Andy Ngo was intimidated and threatened with violence by protestors affiliated with Antifa;

Whereas on June 29, 2019, while covering demonstrations in Portland, Oregon, journalist Andy Ngo was physically attacked by protestors affiliated with Antifa;

Whereas employees of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (referred to in this preamble as "ICE") were subjected to doxxing and violent threats after their social media profiles, phone numbers, and home addresses were posted on the Internet by left wing activists;

Whereas according to the Wall Street Journal, an ICE officer was followed by left wing activists and "confronted when he went to pick up his daughter from summer camp", and another "had his name and photo plastered on flyers outside his home accusing him of being part of the ‘Gestapo'";

Whereas the ICE office in southwest Portland, Oregon, was shut down for days due to threats and occupation by Antifa members;

Whereas Rose City Antifa, an Antifa group founded in 2007 in Portland, Oregon, explicitly rejects the authority of law enforcement officers in the United States, and Federal, State, and local governments, to protect free speech and stop acts of violence;

Whereas Rose City Antifa rejects the civil treatment of individuals the group labels as fascists, stating: "We can't just argue against them; we have to prevent them from organizing by any means necessary."; and

Whereas there is no place for violence in the discourse between people in the United States, or in any civil society, because the United States is a place where there is a diversity of ideas and opinions: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the Senate-

(1) calls for the groups and organizations across the country who act under the banner of Antifa to be designated as domestic terrorist organizations;
(2) unequivocally condemns the violent actions of Antifa groups as unacceptable acts for anyone in the United States;
(3) expresses the need for the peaceful communication of varied ideas in the United States;
(4) urges any group or organizations in the United States to voice its opinions without using violence or threatening the health, safety, or well-being of any other persons, groups, or law enforcement officers in the United States; and
(5) calls upon the Federal Government to redouble its efforts, using all available and appropriate tools, to combat the spread of all forms of domestic terrorism, including White supremacist terrorism.

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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The Totally, Utterly Irrefutable Case Against Socialism

When a dozen of conservatism’s best minds take on Socialism and expose it for the utopian fraud it is, attention must be paid.

In a brief foreword to a special issue of National Review, Editor-in-Chief Richard Lowry admitted that many conservatives thought socialism in America had been “vanquished” after the collapse of Soviet Communism 30 years ago. But as T. S. Eliot insisted, “There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.”

The experts examine socialism in its many guises, beginning with Charles Cooke’s blunt assessment that socialism is not and never can be “democratic.”

Cooke, the editor of NationalReview.com, writes that voters should not be fooled by the left’s attempt at rebranding.

“There is no sense in which socialism can be made compatible with democracy as it is understood in the West.” At worst, says Cooke, “socialism eats democracy, and is swiftly transmuted into tyranny.” At best, socialism “stamps out individual agency, places civil society into a straitjacket of uniform size, and turns representative government into a chimera.”

Cooke’s description of socialism as tyrannical was confirmed by Ugo Okere, a socialist candidate for the Chicago City Council, who explained that “democratic socialism, to me, is about democratic control of every single facet of our life.”

That would mean, presumably, rewriting the first words of the Constitution to something like, “We the people of the United States in order to form a more democratically controlled Union … ”

What has Okere’s “democratic control” produced in the socialist “paradise” of Venezuela?

Ricardo Hausmann, the former chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank, has written that “Venezuela’s economic catastrophe dwarfs any in the history of the U.S., Western Europe or the rest of Latin America.”

How catastrophic? Under Chavez-Maduro socialism, the child mortality rate has increased 140%. Ninety percent of Venezuelans now live in poverty. This year inflation will hit an unbelievable 10 million percent. (That is not a typographical error.) All this in a country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves—far greater than those of the United States.

Cooke concludes his essay with lessons learned from 6,000 years of civilization, including “never relinquish the right to free speech, the right to free conscience, the right to freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, or the right to a jury trial.”

Whatever you do, he warns, don’t be seduced by socialists bearing promises. But if you are seduced, “get out before it’s too late. You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

The distinguished author Joshua Muravchik, a fellow at the World Affairs Institute, takes a historical approach to the myths of socialism.

He writes that the initiator of Soviet terror, tyranny, and violence was its founding father, Vladimir Lenin, who exhorted his followers to exert “merciless mass terror against kulaks, priests, and White Guards; persons of doubtful standing should be locked up in concentration camps” (i.e., the Gulag).

To what end? Not just to accumulate political power, but in pursuit of a sacred mission—a socialist world.

When the farmers resisted collectivization, Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin, engineered a famine in which at least 5 million and perhaps as many 10 million starved to death—the Holodomor.

If Stalin was “a tyrant of stupefying brutality,” writes Muravchik, he was outdone by Communist rulers Mao Zedong, whose Cultural Revolution resulted in at least one million deaths, and Pol Pot, who wiped out one-fourth of Cambodia’s population in his attempt to emulate Mao.

Why did they kill so many? Muravchik provides the answer: “It was their devotion to an ideal [socialism] that prompted them to slaughter millions of unresisting innocents.”

Economist Jeffrey Tucker begins with the damning comment: “Among the most conspicuous of socialism’s failings is its capacity to generate vast shortages of things essential for life.”

In Maoist China, he points out, there was no meat and no fat in which to cook anything. In Bolshevik Russia, there was never enough housing or food, not even loaves of bread.

What happened when Nikita Khrushchev took over as Soviet leader following Stalin’s death in 1953? He and his colleagues tried desperately to “cobble together” a system of planning that made sense without relying on “bourgeois” market forces.

They failed miserably. In Tucker’s words, Khrushchev “spent his last years as a discredited, dejected, and sad old man on a park bench.”

If you love deprivation, constriction, and general limits on material aspirations, says Tucker, plus a “tyrannical ruling class that oppresses everyone else, you will love what socialism can and does achieve.” Indeed, he concludes, “misery seems to be its only contribution to economic history.”

Socialists, says National Review correspondent Kevin Williamson, are guilty of a fatal conceit: They think they can develop a system so powerful that it can consider every variable in society and propose scientific answers “about how many acres of potatoes to plant, and when and where to plant them.”

But free-market economists Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek (a Nobel Laureate) showed that “complete knowledge was not attainable on social, economic, or political questions.”

Therefore, says Williamson, the more intelligent and non-ideological governments have largely given up on central planning.

Even the Nordic social democracies, so dear to the self-styled socialists of the United States, “mostly have been divesting themselves of state enterprises.”

Reasonably successful state-run enterprises, such as the Swiss railroads, “have been converted into stock corporations or reformed in other market-oriented ways.”

The subtitle of Hayek’s last work “The Fatal Conceit” is “The Errors of Socialism.” Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have failed to learn from those errors, says Williamson, asserting that “you cannot call yourself the party of science and the party of socialism too. You have to choose one or the other.”

Socialists flaunt their compassion, argues former National Review Editor-in-Chief John O’Sullivan, because it gives them an excuse to impose their will on others “unlawfully and even murderously.”

Modern socialists tend to disapprove of placing conditions on aid to the poor—“workfare”—viewing the receipt of aid as “an unqualified right.”

That sounds generous, says O’Sullivan, but it traps the poor “in long term dependency” and undermines what the scholar Shirley Letwin calls the “vigorous virtues” among their neighbors.

Before a single socialist regime had established itself, says O’Sullivan, 19th-century writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky, W. H. Matlock, and Rudyard Kipling saw “the horrors that lay concealed within socialism’s humanitarian promise.” Their examination of country after country refutes the fraying excuse that socialism has never been tried.

In the later stages of Soviet Communism, for example, a woman would sell herself for a pair of jeans; in Venezuela today, “people exchange family heirlooms for a little food.”

Although the French welfare state is often offered as a shining example of progressivism, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, declares you must look at “actual France, not the fantasy France of progressive propaganda.”

He challenges the French elite who believe they have the right “to order society for the benefit of everyone.”

Given the results of their leadership—low growth, mass unemployment, social strife, and a general mood of pessimism—Gobry suggests that “they might want to rethink their idea of progress.”

BT (Before Thatcher), the Great Britain of the 1970s was generally described as “the sick man of Europe,” due to its prolonged experiments with statism and the pervasive stagnation they produced.

In 1960, according to historian Andrew Stuttaford, the U.K. boasted Europe’s most productive economy, but that was before the Labour Party came to power and nationalized almost every industry in sight.

The mid-1970s were hard on most Western economies, but the U.K. “appeared to be in a hell of its own,” says Stuttaford. Inflation shot up 300%. Gross domestic product fell, unemployment rose, the pound crumbled, industry buckled, “and some of Britain’s best and brightest headed for the exit.”

The winter of 1978 was characterized by grotesque images—the dead unburied, the sick untreated, the trash piling up in the streets.

Just months later, promising radical change, Margaret Thatcher walked into 10 Downing Street and proceeded to denationalize coal, steel, and utilities; bring down inflation; spur economic growth; and refuse to give into organized labor’s draconian demands.

Her message: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

Markets, not bureaucrats, are better for the environment, asserts Shawn Regan, a fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, pointing out that Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union “were the most polluted and degraded places on earth.”

He quotes the economist Murray Feshbach and journalist Alfred Friendly Jr. as writing that when historians conduct an autopsy of Soviet Communism, “they may reach the verdict of death by ecocide.”

Closer to home, says Regan, the attempts of Cuban socialists to maximize production at all costs “has caused extensive air, soil, and water pollution.”

In Venezuela, socialist policies have contaminated drinking water supplies, fueled rampant deforestation, and caused frequent oil spills. The principal guilty party is the state-owned energy company.

Rarely, if ever, will Ocasio-Cortez and other sponsors of the Green New Deal concede the painful truth about socialism’s dismal environmental legacy.

Imagine a shoe store with just one brand of sneakers—now apply that to medical care. So begins journalist and health care expert Avik Roy, who explains the pluses and minuses of the British National Health Service, so beloved by Sanders and other American “democratic” socialists.

Because the British health system is funded entirely by taxes and is “free” to patients, there are no premiums, no co-pays, no deductibles.

How then does the system prevent excess consumption and control costs?

Roy says there are two principal ways: first, by controlling the fees that doctors, hospitals, drug companies, etc. receive; and second, by “aggressively restricting the … costly services that would otherwise blow up” the health care budget.

Notwithstanding Sanders’ contrary opinion, says Roy, “the NHS is no paradise.”

NHS doctors “routinely” conceal from patients information about new therapies the service does not pay for, so as not to “distress, upset or confuse them.”

Terminally ill patients are “incorrectly classified” as close to death to allow the withdrawal of expensive life support. Most NHS patients expect to wait five months for a hip operation or knee surgery, says Roy, but the actual waiting times are worse: 11 months for hips and 12 months for knees, compared with a wait of three to four weeks for such procedures in the United States.

NHS problems like limitations on access to care and dishonest statistics “will be familiar to those enrolled in America’s homegrown version of socialized medicine: the Veterans Health Administration.”

Understandably, writes Roy, American socialists are not calling for “VA care for all” but for “Medicare for All.”

Medicare features like subsidized premiums and unlimited access, says Roy, make the program popular with seniors who receive about $3 in benefits for every dollar they pay into Medicare. But the lack of controls has turned the program into an “oppressive fiscal burden.”

According to the trustees, the Medicare hospital trust fund will run out of money in 2026, less than a decade away. The ultimate price tag of Medicare for All is an incomprehensible $30 trillion.

The solution may be debatable (The Heritage Foundation, for example, favors block grants to the states and health savings accounts), but the answer is not “the Anglo-Canadian version of socialized medicine that tramples on individuals’ rights to seek the care and coverage that they want.”

The real reason why American socialists are 24/7 news, says Washington Examiner editor Timothy Carney, is the widespread “social and cultural poverty” in America.

The root cause of both Occupy Wall Street and Bernie 2016 was a “prevailing sense of alienation.” Young people, Carney says, “felt that they lost the ability to make a difference in the world.” They were a vacuum waiting to be filled.

Modern American society “in which community is weaker and people are more alienated,” says Carney, has proven a fertile ground for socialism. The political reaction from socialists and their fellow travelers is “a demand for a bigger federal safety net.”

Carney reports, for example, that the People’s Policy Project, a socialist think tank, calls for a raft of federal programs, including 36 weeks of federally funded paid parental leave, federally funded child care, a federal benefit for stay-at-home mothers, and federally funded pre-K.

The conservative response, Carney argues, should be “community.” That is, an extended family, neighbors, parishes, shuls, civic associations, dinner clubs, swim clubs, and all the other communal variations.

Such institutions—Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”—help families stay together, mothers and fathers “stay sane,” and new parents “navigate the daunting path of parenthood.”

Carney warns that the less we’re connected to one another via community institutions, and the more isolated we are, the more we grasp for something big to protect us. “For young Americans that’s often the state.”

Socialism is not only or even principally an economic doctrine, concludes the British author Theodore Dalrymple, “it is a revolt against human nature.” It refuses to believe that man is a fallen creature and seeks to improve him “by making all equal one to another.”

The development of the New Man was and is the goal of all Communist tyrannies, beginning with the Soviet Union.

Notwithstanding the disastrous results when such futile dreams are taken seriously by ruthless men in power, Dalrymple says, there are those who will continue to dream of “a life so perfectly organized that everyone will be happy.”

National Review’s analysts believe that such dreams will inevitably become nightmares as they have in the 40 some nations that suffered under socialism.

The record of failure without exception is clear. It remains for conservatives to expose the impossible promises of the socialists, drawing on the conclusions of National Review’s experts:

Socialism is not compatible with the Constitution.

Socialism, the idea that millions killed for, is a mirage.

Socialism is very good at generating vast shortages of the essential things in life.

Socialism can never know enough to plan all our lives every day.

Socialism tries to make all of us equal to one another.

Socialism is very good at promising all the benefits we’ll never see.

Socialism in Great Britain had one outstanding success—Margaret Thatcher.

Socialism was responsible for making Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union the most polluted and degraded places on earth.

Socialized medicine as practiced in Great Britain and Canada is bad for people’s health.

American socialism is on the rise because of widespread social and cultural poverty in America.

What is to be done? It rests with you and me. We must get to work exposing socialism for the fraud and failure it is and taking back our culture and our country.

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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Jordan Peterson’s year of trauma

Health problems.  A great mind in a frail body

Interviews with the Canadian academic, clinical psychologist and culture war belligerent Jordan B. Peterson can go badly wrong, sometimes for the interviewer, sometimes for Peterson. Sometimes for both.

His most infamous encounter was with Cathy Newman on Britain’s Channel 4 News last year, an interview that has been watched more than 16 million times. Although Newman’s approach seemed designed to confirm Peterson’s reputation among the liberal left as a misogynist, most think she was worsted by him.

After that, however, she received such violent abuse online that Peterson intervened on Twitter to ask his supporters to stop threatening her.

Eighteen months on, he is not exactly extending the hand of friendship. “I thought it was very underhanded of her to come out and play the victim. It wasn’t like I was attacking her,” he says from his home in Toronto.

The problem, I think, is that Peterson and his interviewers assume the lobster position when they meet. Those who have read the first rule of his bestselling 12 Rules for Life will know what I mean. “Stand up straight with your shoulders back,” it orders, citing in support the claw-waving, boxer champ-dancing, chemical-spraying crustacean and its visceral fights for hierarchical advantage. “Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom,” his first chapter concludes.

Family turmoil

When I ring him at 3pm his time, I deal him a real zinger. “How are you?” I ask.

“That’s a complicated question. I’ve some very bad health in my family,” he says in a weak, scratchy voice that is far distant from that of the irritable layer-down of laws with whom I have familiarised ­myself.

“We’re all rather devastated at the moment. My wife is very ill. She’s had two surgeries in the last two months and is suffering from severe complications from the last one, and the prognosis overall is uncertain.”

Peterson and Tammy Roberts knew each other as children growing up on the same street in Fairview, northern Alberta, and have been married for 30 years. This spring she had a rare kidney cancer diagnosed. Surgery determined that the cancer had not spread, but her recovery did not go as planned.

“We got hit by lightning twice, let’s say. It’s not the ideal circumstances to have a positive interview, I’m afraid,” Peterson says.

Although 12 Rules is subtitled An Antidote to Chaos (chaos somewhat unhelpfully being symbolically identified by him as feminine), it is really about human suffering and what to do when, as he puts it in his grimly vivid way, “your leg is clamped firmly in a crocodile’s jaw”.

If anybody knows how to approach suffering, it’s him, I say. “Well, you’d hope so, but this has still thrown us through a massive loop.” At the beginning and at the end of our 90-minute discussion, Peterson’s voice breaks and he sounds close to tears.

Fans and enemies

In the year after its publication in January 2018, 12 Rules sold about three million copies, but Peterson is known by millions more for his podcasts and online lectures. Introduction to the Idea of God has been viewed 4.1 million times on YouTube.

On book tours he attracts audiences of a size more usually enjoyed by stand-up comedians, although his act is short on laughs. He wins ecstatic reviews, many friendly comment pieces and the gratitude of thousands of mainly young men who felt lost.

It is his critics who tend to get noticed, however, invading his lectures, taking him down in print by pointing out his more bizarre utterances and turning interviews into gladiator fights.

The hostility started not with 12 Rules, let alone his previous opus, Maps of Meaning, but with his opposition in 2016 to an amendment to Canadian law that, he claimed, would compel him to refer to transgender students and colleagues by the pronouns of their choice. Academe and other realms in which the latest received wisdom prevail spotted a traitor.

His greatest heresy was to insist on gender being a biological fact, not a social construct. (And I do mean insist. In 12 Rules he writes: “This isn’t a debate. The data are in.”)

What he does not claim is that the average woman is any less intelligent than the average man, and when I ask him to confirm that he believes in the equality of opportunity between the sexes he replies: “You’d have to be a fool not to believe in the equality of opportunity. I mean, it’s not like we have an excess of talent.”

Has he ever called himself a feminist? “I wouldn’t say so, only because of the connotations, let’s say, of the term, but I have a wife and a daughter, and I have a sister and a mother. It’s not like I’m not hyper-concerned about their progress through life and doing everything I possibly can to ensure that they have all the opportunities they possibly can.”

Strange company

He is a suspect public figure for another reason: the company he not so much keeps as is photographed beside. The latest example was a snap of him with an arm around a man wearing an “I’m a proud Islamaphobe (sic)” T-shirt. When this became public in March, Cambridge University rescinded a visiting fellowship for Peterson to study theology there, a decision he calls “extremely unfortunate and shortsighted”.

A number of things are going on here. One is that some pretty weird alt-righters project their prejudices on to him and that Peterson has a mischievous side to him that objects far too little to this. Another is his naivety. He is a clinician and an academic used to rooms of two or lecture halls of 70. Encountering in his 50s (he is 57) the wider world of what passes for thought, he is a little awed by it and a bit unsure how to treat it.

Staring into abyss

I ask if I may make an observation about 12 Rules. Lobsters aside, I mostly agree with the rules, but the picture he paints is of life as a struggle, a battle, even a 70-year war. His prose style is matchingly combative. Even his humour can be violent.

Now “Being”, as he grandly capitalises it, has its sorrows, but I don’t regard it as a constant fight. Have I lived a particularly fortunate life? Or has his been so difficult that it has delivered him to this vision of life red in tooth and claw?

“I think that’s a good question,” he says. “I’ve studied totalitarianism for many decades and I would say that isn’t a study that predisposes you to a particularly rosy view of the world. What did Nietzsche say? If you look too long into an abyss, the abyss looks into you. It’s certainly possible that that’s happened to me to a degree.

“It might also have something to do with my temperament. I have suffered fairly chronically from depression, and you never know how that colours your worldview. It’s certainly made things have a greater impact on me emotionally than they might have.”

I say that from the book I was also struck by how tough his Canadian childhood was, just the weather for one thing. “Well, there’s some truth in that,” he says. “It’s not like I failed to see the beauty also, but, especially in the winters, the absolute harshness of the environment was right at hand, every morning for months.”

In adulthood, ill health encroached early on his young family. His daughter, Mikhaila, suffered severe juvenile arthritis from infancy and had hip and ankle replacements at 17. In January the ankle replacement was redone in Zurich.

“So it has been one hospital trip after another for the last six months.” Like her father, she suffers from depression, apparently ameliorated by eating a beef-only diet, a regimen that her father has adopted to some effect and mockery.

“Do I feel I’ve had a hard life? There’s been some of it that’s been hard,” he says. “It’s by no means been hard compared to many people’s lives, but there’s a strong familial streak of depression that runs through my family.

“That’s been hard. My daughter’s illness was hard, very hard at times. It was very difficult to see her in pain for so long.

“On the other hand, I’ve had great good fortune. I have wonderful children (a son too). I love my wife. I have a great extended family. I’ve had a wonderful career. I’ve had this strange streak of unparalleled success, but I’m distraught currently because of this unexpected occurrence in my family, which is quite devastating to everyone concerned.

“I’m having a difficult time reconciling myself to it, my own good advice notwithstanding. That was a shock and it’s conceivable that I wasn’t in the best psychological state to have received that news because the last three years have been, let’s say, exhausting.”

Behind the armour

The public demands on his time have meant him abandoning his teaching at the University of Toronto and his psychologist’s practice. Nevertheless, over the past three years he has been “terrified” of being “one slip of the tongue away from genuine and permanent trouble” (Rule 10: Be precise in your speech).

What has been “entirely surreal” is not being able to walk down a street unrecognised.

“My mother was here a couple of weeks ago, helping take care of things while my wife was in hospital,” he says. “I was sleeping in the hospital and I would come home and my mother would walk back to the hospital with me, which is only about five blocks away.

“Generally speaking, along the way, five or six people would stop me, sometimes more. This was usually in the morning and they’d tell me some heartfelt story about how they’d married their girlfriend or made peace with their father or quit drinking. They’re very emotional stories and it brought her to tears several times.

“And then the scandals: that adds an additional level of strangeness to it. So much of the scandal has been political, and yet virtually everything I do, certainly in my public lectures, is psychological and philosophical, and very little of it political.

“It’s not like I’m opposed to the left. I understand that people are dispossessed and they need a voice. I’m not a winner-takes-all guy. I know that life has an arbitrary element and that it’s best to set up a society so that people can’t fall too far and not get back up.

“I see a role for the right and the left because the right stands for what’s good about what is and the left gives a voice to those who aren’t served by it.

“The reason I’m a free-speech advocate is because a dialogue has to take place between those two positions in order for us to maintain an even keel.”

He sounds as if he is swallowing back tears. “You caught me at a rather emotional time, I’m afraid. That’s not particularly rare, but, yeah, it’s been rather brutal here.”

It is not the first time he has described himself as an emotional person, but it has been hard to accept the claim because of his adamantine Old Testament public face.

Now I see that facade as an armour that protects him from himself as much as from his enemies. Life’s a battle, but his emotions count among the hostile insurgents. Peterson’s fans will not want to hear this any more than his ­enemies.

Nor can I imagine him accepting what I mean as a compliment. Right now, however, Dr Peterson is nothing like a lobster.

SOURCE 

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If You Can't Beat 'Em, Call 'Em Racist

Trump's tweets about the America-haters did NOT MENTION race

Veteran journalist Brit Hume weighed in on the uproar over President Donald Trump's latest bomb-throwing: "Trump's 'go back' comments simply do not meet the standard definition of racist, a word so recklessly flung around these days that its actual meaning is being lost."

Hume even cited the Merriam-Webster's definition of racism to show that Trump's comments had nothing to do with race. Hilariously — and pathetically, in a sign of the times — Merriam-Webster replied with a lengthy explanation about how "the lexicographer's role" isn't to define "how some may feel [words] should be used," while warning that "it is prudent to recognize that quoting from a dictionary is unlikely to either mollify or persuade the person with whom one is arguing."

In other words, words have no meaning if facts conflict with your triggered feelings.

Trump said what he said poorly, leaving himself wide open for the very assault he's facing. He said what we think he meant far better in defending himself later. "These are people that hate our country," he said. "If you're not happy in the U.S., if you're complaining all the time, very simply, you can leave."

Oddly enough, leaving wasn't his idea. Are we the only ones who remember the scads of leftists pledging to flee America altogether if Trump were elected president? Instead, they're all still here, still hating our country, still undermining the "democracy" they claim to be defending, and still trying to impeach its president.

That brings us to the press conference Monday involving the four radical leftist congresswomen who are members of what has been dubbed "The Squad" — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley.

Omar, the anti-American, anti-Semitic refugee from Somalia — and thus the only one of the four women resembling Trump's original description — was the worst, calling Trump "blatantly racist" and decrying his "agenda of white nationalists." She rehearsed a slew of false charges against Trump. Among them:

Trump was "credibly accused of ... colluding with a foreign government to interfere with our election." (A team of Democrat lawyers spent two years and $35 million to determine that it was NOT a credible accusation.)

He has "pursued an agenda to allow millions of Americans to die from a lack of health care while he transfers millions of dollars in tax cuts to corporations." (Both charges are BIG Lies and/or tinfoil-hat conspiracies. Millions have not died for lack of health care. And no money was "transferred" to corporations because it wasn't taken via taxes in the first place. Democrats are the ones bent on transferring wealth and basing their platform on envy.)

"This is a president who has called black athletes 'sons of b—es.' This is a president that called people who come from black and brown countries 's—tholes.' This is a president who has equated neo-Nazis with those who protest them." (No, he didn't. No, he didn't. And no, he didn't.)

She falsely blamed Trump "for the deaths of children on our border," and she accused him of "committing human-rights abuses" like "keeping children in cages and having human beings drinking out of toilets." (Children and the traffickers who bring them might not be trying to illegally cross the border without Democrats' open invitation. And while no one is drinking from toilets, Border Patrol detention facilities wouldn't be overwhelmed without, again, Democrats' open invitation.)

Omar accused Trump of making a "mockery out of our Constitution," something Democrats do all day every day, while concluding, "It's time for us to impeach this president."

There was plenty more, but that should suffice.

The Democrats' clear agenda with the "racist" charge is a craven political calculation to send Republicans scrambling for cover. It's working, too, as elected Republicans distance themselves from the president while much of the conservative commentariat piles on Trump. But they're succumbing to the relentless drumbeat of the Democrats' Leftmedia super PAC. For example, a Washington Post story today is titled, "White identity politics drives Trump, and the Republican Party under him."

How to put this politely...? That's horse pucky. Buried under Trump's garbled prose is a legitimate point, and it has nothing to do with race. It has to do with loving or hating America and the political party guilty of the latter.

Finally, as we observed yesterday, Trump's strategy is to unite Democrats behind these four radical socialist faces. "Trump doesn't play tic-tac-toe. He plays chess," said Newt Gingrich. "He wants the Democratic Party to identify with" these four women. "Pelosi in a sense was trying to draw a line and say, 'We are not them.' After Trump's tweet, she said, 'Oh, we really are them.'" Pelosi is indeed standing with the four to push a new resolution to condemn Trump.

Likewise, Rush Limbaugh said, "Trump obviously is attempting to have these people become the face of the Democrat Party. It's a brilliant political move." No less than DNC Chief Tom Perez said that of Ocasio-Cortez last year. And a new poll says swing voters do indeed consider AOC to be the "definitional face" of Democrats.

So, we'll see if Trump's strategy really is brilliant.

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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