A meditation on the Trump triumph

A conservative intellectual finds Trump has many things in common with American thinkers of the past

Trump is the first candidate since Reagan to take the fight directly to the opposition. For the most part, he does not instigate fights, he finishes them. Only after he is attacked does he go all in and defend himself and (it is important to add, the country) while simultaneously leading a counterattack on his opponent. His penchant to counterpunch aggressively has unhinged his opponents, the Clintons in particular, who literally paid people to harm fellow citizens at his rallies. Only someone like Trump could defend the United States against such thuggery. It was his penchant to defend himself, and this country, that ultimately led to his victory.

Jaffa is right about one important thing in this regard. Great statesmen are those who appeal to a timeless ideal and enduring principle.

As Jaffa noted in Crisis of the House Divided, Lincoln’s argument pertained to the rights we all possess by nature. It is this person who gives “rise to legitimate government.” Against the backdrop of one candidate’s attempt to circumvent consent, one thing the anti Trump people have failed to consider is that Trump is actually persuasive and reviving the twin pillars of safety and happiness. That he has attempted to persuade is a necessary condition to legitimate rule. Jaffa is explicit about this: “the first task of statesmanship is not legislation but the molding of that opinion from which all legislation flows.” He goes on to remind us that the “Constitution and Union were means to an end,” that secures “the equality of all men.”

Trump is a particular figure for a particular time no less than Lincoln was for his. Just glance at any number of his speeches, and you will find that his stated intention is to restore America. We also find that the economy’s dangerous trend of increasing debt has the effect of placing our country into a form of slavery—a slavery that is compounded by forcing people to pay for unusable healthcare insurance. His support of school choice and deliberate non-patronizing appeal to black voters is a direct assault on the academic Jim Crow that presently afflicts this nation.  His remarkable goal is the restoration of our ancient faith by defending without apology our Constitution and those natural rights stated therein. As Ken Masugi noted, his campaign’s focus on the fraudulent and rigged nature of the electoral system was not a complaint, but a defense, of the natural right of the consent of the governed. His opponent sought to overthrow that consent. Trump made the case for the consent of the governed. The voters responded by giving their consent to him.

Trump is thus a restorationist and a Declarationist. This is most obvious in his Lincolnian inspired promise to return the government to one “of the people, and by the people.”

Lincoln believed in building up the Union and re-adopting its idea. The current “conservative” elite believe in burning down the house to save it. But, nothing could be gained from destruction of the Republic by handing it over to what is clearly a criminal crime family. It is imprudent at best to suggest that the country could have been saved by handing it over to a party that does not seek our enlightened consent. Yet, our consent is but one aspect of the American Idea. The other is having the ability to secure the blessings of liberty in order to pursue our own happiness. Trump argued that liberty and happiness is strengthened by the means of gainful employment.

NAFTA is a free trade document of more than 1,700 pages. Almost 700 of those pages are the treaty itself. TPP is another marvel of “free trade” weighing in at more than 2,000 pages. Neither are truly free trade agreements. They are riddled with crony capitalism and side deals that defy the very meaning of freedom. While the agreements are supported by many of the Never Trumpkins, the fact is it has not benefitted the majority of the people of this Union in a meaningful way. Cheap goods may be good for the consumer, but not when the consumer is out of a job. As Decius noted, free trade is not a principle, but, following Jaffa, it should only be a means to realizing our humanity founded in our natural equality.

America’s Founders were not strict free traders. Alexander Hamilton’s “Report on the Subject of Manufactures” remarks that domestic markets are preferable over foreign markets. He does not mean this in terms of rejecting foreign trade, but as a matter of national wealth, and even as a defensive mechanism so as not to rely on foreign nations for subsistence. The foreign obstacles to domestic business, are impediments so great, Hamilton believed, that they cannot conduct business equally. Foreign trade must exist on “terms consistent with our interest.”

The longest serving treasury secretary after Hamilton, Albert Gallatin, though in theory a proponent of free trade, stated in his “Free Trade Memorial” of 1832 that equal intercourse with Europe was not desirable because it would not encourage “domestic manufactures.” He supported a duty on imports of 25 percent so they fall “equally upon all.”

As it pertains to Trump, he is the first candidate in the 20th century to be in such concord with the Founders not only in his economic policy, but in the reason for such a policy: the defense of the American Republic against trade that harms the nation. In a modern context, free trade means literally the end of America because it is coupled with a borderless politics.

“The preservation of the hope of an equality yet to be achieved, was the ‘value’ which was the absolutely necessary condition of the democratic political process,” Jaffa wrote. “That men may be called upon to fight for such a conviction cannot be called a failure of democracy. It would be a failure only if they refused to fight for it.”

Those who abandoned our ancient faith failed because they did not fight for the heart and soul of our nation and the idea that gave it its birth.

Trump did.

SOURCE

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The Great Liberal Freakout

The Great Liberal Freakout is under way, as we’ve noted below. Here’s my haul:

The head of the Joint Center for Political Studies, which the Washington Post describes as a “respected liberal think tank,” reacted to Trump’s landslide thus: “When you consider that in the climate we’re in—rising violence, the Ku Klux Klan—it is exceedingly frightening.”

Castro, still with us, said right before the election: “We sometimes have the feeling that we are living in the time preceding the election of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.”

Claremont College professor John Roth wrote: “I could not help remembering how economic turmoil had conspired with Nazi nationalism and militarism—all intensified by Germany’s defeat in World War I—to send the world reeling into catastrophe… It is not entirely mistaken to contemplate our post-election state with fear and trembling.”

Esquire writer Harry Stein says that the voters who supported Trump were like the “good Germans” in “Hitler’s Germany.”

Sociologist Alan Wolfe is up in the New Left Review: “The worst nightmares of the American left appear to have come true.” And he doubles down in The Nation: “[T]he United States has embarked on a course so deeply reactionary, so negative and mean-spirited, so chauvinistic and self-deceptive that our times may soon rival the McCarthy era.”

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, keeper of the “Doomsday Clock” that purported to judge the risk of nuclear annihilation, has moved the hands on the clock from seven to four minutes before midnight.

Oh wait, did I say this was the reaction to Trump??  Sorry—these are what the left was saying the day after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Some things never change.

SOURCE

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Republicans Maintain Strong Control of State Capitols. Here’s What That Means

Republicans largely retained their grip over state legislative chambers and governorships in Tuesday’s elections.

The Republican takeover of the presidency may have been the biggest election news, but political experts expect states to continue to take the lead on policymaking in the years ahead.

“Despite total Republican control in Washington now, states are where the action is—and will be—for public policy that actually impacts people,” said Dan Diorio, a policy specialist at the National Conference of State Legislatures.

As of noon Wednesday, with a few results still not confirmed, Republicans have control of 66 of the nation’s 98 statehouse chambers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. This does not include Nebraska, which has a nonpartisan legislature.

Before Tuesday’s election, Republicans held 68 of the nation’s statehouse chambers.

Republicans now control both legislative chambers in 32 states, compared to 13 for Democrats.

The GOP also increased its majority of governorships from 31 to 33.

In the most high-profile of the 12 states voting for their chief executive, Democratic Attorney General Roy Cooper declared victory over incumbent Republican Gov. Pat McCrory in North Carolina.

But Republican governors won in Missouri and Vermont in races that had been considered toss-ups.

And Republicans increased the number of states in which they hold what is known as a “political trifecta”—with one party in control of both legislative chambers and the governorship.

Republicans increased the number of states they fully control from 22 to 24. Democrats have total control of six states.

Combined, the results in the states did not dramatically alter the GOP wave of success that followed Republicans’ redrawing legislative districts in 2010.

Republicans were mostly playing defense in the 2016 elections, since most of the state legislature seats being defended by Democrats were safely blue.

“Democrats were poised to make gains due to the natural return of the pendulum to the other side,” said Tim Storey, the director of state services at the National Conference of State Legislatures. “But they did not make huge gains and Republicans got a couple of [new] chambers. So Republicans remain in a dominant position.”

During President Barack Obama’s presidency, Republican politicians have not been shy about enacting their agenda in states.

More than 900 state legislative seats have switched hands from Democrats to Republicans since Obama took office.

“Republicans have taken full advantage of their position in the states, including implementing tax cuts in a number of places, imposing stricter limits on abortion and voting rights, and combating controversial issues like gun control,” Storey said.

Republicans see more areas for policy gains after Tuesday’s elections.

Jonathan Williams, the vice president of the Center for State Fiscal Reform at The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), was especially enthusiastic about one noteworthy chamber that flipped from Democratic to GOP control—the Kentucky House.

The Kentucky House had been the last state chamber in the South with a Democratic majority.

Republicans gained control of the chamber for the first time since 1922 and only the third time in the history of the state.

Williams said that he expects the newly Republican-controlled Kentucky House to help ease the passage of right-to-work legislation, which is backed by Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, and the GOP-controlled state Senate.

Twenty six states have right-to-work laws, meaning workers have the right to not join a union.

“Right-to-work now becomes a slam dunk in Kentucky during the first 100 days,” Williams said.

Williams also counts Iowa as a state ripe for policy action. The hotly contested Iowa Senate flipped for Republicans, giving GOP total control of the state. Iowa’s Republican Gov. Terry Branstad, and its Republican-controlled House, have been stymied by the formerly Democratic-run Senate in enacting tax cuts.

“With the Republican takeover of the Iowa Senate, I can see Iowa as an area of opportunity for conservatives when it comes to tax cuts,” Williams said.

More HERE

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

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

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Trump and America win: A letter to America

By Rick Manning

Dear America:

Thank you, thank you, thank you. You just saved the nation.

All of those unconstitutional pen and phone executive orders to do what Congress rejected — ripped up.

The regulations that are intended to destroy the coal industry and drive up the cost of manufacturing forcing jobs overseas — rescinded.

All the bad, bad trade deals that put the wants of big donor multi-national corporations ahead of the needs of American workers — torn up.

The job killing highest corporate tax rate in the world that has stifled economic growth — lowered.

And the near permanent takeover of the Supreme Court by those who don’t believe that the Constitution should be their guide, but instead hate the idea of individual liberties that come from God Almighty himself — prevented.

America, Nov. 8, 2016 will go down in the history books as the day that the people stood up and remembered that their country is one of laws and not men and women, rejecting the easy temptation of continuing a slide into the recesses of history, instead choosing the more difficult, noble path of freedom.

Your choosing in favor of our common national bond over those who would hyphenate each of us, separated by our race, religion and even sexual preference stops the slide into the abyss of mean-spirited fights that deprive us of our individual and national character.

The very transformation that you rejected is one designed to conform our nation to the world, rather than playing the role that God created for America to be a shining beacon of freedom for all in the world to see and be inspired by.

Donald Trump is just one man. He is flawed like all of us. He will need to be kept in check, just as the Framers intended for all presidents. And he may falter and fail, but the vote of 2016 signals that America is not dead, but instead is a concept that its people still cherish and are willing to fight for.

Hope for the future can now replace the despair of acceptance of a new normal where every day each of us were just a little less free, with a little less opportunity to make our own way without Uncle Sam’s forceful guiding hand.

In the end, that is what America is about, a land of individual opportunities to try, sometimes fail, get up and try again with an eye to becoming the best that each of us can be with the collective result being a strong, vibrant people and nation.

America is about an abiding faith that our freedom comes from God Himself, and cannot be taken away by men. A freedom worth fighting for not only here, but abroad as we help others overcome oppressors to join us in the light.

We were losing that confidence and sense of purpose and vision for ourselves. On Nov. 8, a glimmer has been restored in the lamp of freedom.

Thank you, America, for taking a chance on yourself again. Now, let’s get to work with the hard task of restoring our nation.

SOURCE

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A view from the Left

Mostly pretty factual

Trump defied all expectations on Tuesday, sending shudders around the world by claiming the keys to the Oval Office. It was the crowning moment of a political career built on proving the so-called experts — pollsters, campaign advisers, and pundits — wrong again and again.

And as the results were tallied, it became clear that Trump was redrawing the electoral map in the same way that he said he was going to. He won over white working class voters who have felt abandoned.

Accusations of groping women? Didn’t matter. Deporting immigrants en masse? Not a problem. Repeated claims that he was unfit, ill-tempered, and too erratic? Didn’t change enough minds.

He played it loose with the truth in a way that, in the past, would have been fatal for other politicians. But voters around the country demonstrated on Tuesday that they were so frustrated, so fed up — so mad as hell — that they were willing to roll the dice on the unknown rather than stick with the status quo.

“The country,” Tom Brokaw said on NBC, “is more agitated than we realized.”

Only 37 percent of voters said in exit polls that Trump is qualified to be president, while a mere 34 percent said he had the right personality and temperament for the office. But the overwhelming thirst for change seemed to take precedence. Some 70 percent of Trump voters said the most important attribute in choosing him was he “can bring needed change.”

It was a monumental loss for Hillary Clinton, but it was also an earth-shattering win for Donald Trump. Clinton dramatically underperformed President Obama in 2012, while Trump far out-performed Mitt Romney.

Rural voters turned out in greater numbers. Over and over in exit polls, voters reported they wanted change. But he also won in Florida, a far more diverse state that Hillary Clinton banked on taking by driving up Hispanic turnout.

Trump supporters gathered at a Boston-area F1 track on election night

Pollsters were woefully wrong, and perhaps unable to capture voters who didn’t vote before — or who were afraid to admit they were voting for Trump until they got into the voting booth. Political analysts late on Tuesday night were flabbergasted. “I literally have no idea what to think right now,” said one.

The New York Times’ Upshot had a projection that had Clinton with an 85 percent chance to win — the same probability that an NFL kicker has at missing a routine 37-yard field goal.

Yet Clinton missed. Despite spending twice as much money. Despite running far more ads. Despite a much bigger campaign staff. Despite a popular sitting president of the United States campaigning relentlessly on her behalf.

Those who couldn’t wait for Trump to exit stage left now have to imagine him sitting down in the Oval Office, giving a State of the Union address, and hosting state dinners. Anyone who turned the channel when Trump came on the news because they didn’t want their children to hear now have to talk with them about Trump or stop watching the news for the next four years.

If you can’t stomach a man who built his campaign on chants of “Build a wall!” and “Lock her up!” — or a man who has a Middle East policy that goes little beyond “Knock the hell out of ISIS” — that man is now your president.

He has rocked the Republican Party, but he now will have House and Senate majorities to try and carry out his priorities.

That means Obama’s health care law could be dismantled, and Supreme Court nominees will be filled by Trump. He almost certainly will attempt to carry out his far-fetched plan to build a wall along the southern border, on the Mexican government’s dime. He wants to deport any immigrant in the United States illegally, which could mean tearing families apart and sending some home.

Any Syrian refugees who had been planning to have safe harbor could be turned away. Muslims could face a temporary ban from entering a country with a motto of e pluribus unum, out of many one.

He could also attempt to follow through on his bold — potentially illegal — suggestion during a debate to instruct his attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to go after Clinton’s e-mail “situation.”

When Clinton said it was a good thing he wasn’t in charge, he vowed, “Because you’d be in jail.”

Trump defies predictions and polls in unexpected win

Later this month, Trump — the president-elect — is slated to testify in a lawsuit from former students who say they were scammed by his Trump University real estate seminars. The case is being overseen by US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, whom Trump said should recuse himself because he is “of Mexican heritage” (the federal judge was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrants).

Trump never went on the traditional foreign trip that most presidential candidates do. Instead, he went to Scotland and opened a new golf course. While he was there, Britain took a stunning vote to leave the European Union. In answering questions during the leadup to the referendum, Trump did not seem familiar with it. But as soon as it happened, he embraced it.

“I think it’s a great thing that happened,” Trump told reporters after getting out of a helicopter. “People are angry, all over the world. People, they’re angry.”

He also drew parallels to his own campaign.

“They’re angry over borders. They’re angry over people coming into the country and taking over. Nobody even knows who they are,” Trump said. “They’re angry about many, many things. They took back control of their country. It’s a great thing.”

Nearly five months later, the United States would do something similar.

SOURCE

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The left brought the rise of Trump on themselves

A concise and succinct letter to the editor below

DONALD J. TRUMP is the natural result of the left’s highly politically correct, anti-white, anti-male, and anti-American rhetoric.

It turns out that if you demonize the people you disagree with, paint them as racists and oppressors, and tell them that any and all of their successes are a result of some unearned “privilege,” they will create a counterrevolution.

Progressives, President-elect Trump is the consequence of your actions, your rhetoric, and the identity politics you brought into American politics. You made your bed, now lie in it.

SOURCE

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Crash? What crash? Stocks defy prediction of a Trump meltdown

Conventional wisdom said Donald Trump couldn’t win the White House. Conventional wisdom said that in the event of an upset, financial markets would crater. Conventional wisdom was wrong.

US stocks rallied Wednesday, as shock over the billionaire’s presidential victory gave way to measured bets that he could stoke economic growth by funding infrastructure and cutting corporate taxes.

Pharmaceutical and biotech stocks rose, freed from Democratic threats to restrict drug prices. Bank stocks gained on prospects of higher interest rates and less regulation.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 1.1 percent, shaking off a 5 percent plunge overnight as global investors had watched Trump claim state after state, despite polls leaning toward Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton.

Investors went into the election with a high degree of confidence that Clinton would come out on top, shaking off an 11th-hour e-mail inquiry by the FBI. Wall Street had favored Clinton as a more predictable hand on the economy.

But instead of taking a Brexit-like nosedive Wednesday, stocks showed surprising resilience after the votes were all counted.

Despite the vagueness of Trump’s plans so far, investors liked the sound of spending on job-creating projects, such as roads and transportation, to provide stimulus to the economy that the central bank can no longer provide with near-zero interest rates. Corporate tax cuts, too, appeared to be a welcome prospect.

“Trump has a mandate to get growth going,’’ said Kathleen Gaffney, a bond fund manager at Eaton Vance Management in Boston. If Trump is able to generate blue-collar jobs and lower taxes, she said, “those are two things that could affect our economy in a positive way.”

Trump helped ease the global markets’ early emotional reaction to his win with a conciliatory tone in his acceptance speech, analysts said. But markets were expected to be choppy in the days ahead, as investors at home and abroad try to discern more about the president-elect’s intentions.

More HERE

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

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

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It's Trump!

I am so happy I could cry.  America has been saved from the psychopathic b*tch and all her ilk who would destroy America.  In my own tiny way, I helped campaign for him so his victory is a victory for me too.  Great blessings and prosperity ahead for America now.

And Trump has singlehandedly reformed and reinvigorates American conservatism.  The Congressional GOP had become just a watered-down version of the Left.  They refused to oppose Muslim immigration because that would be "racist", which is what the Left say.  Trump has turned all that on its head.  The Left no longer rule the roost.  And with both the Senate and the House still in GOP hands, Trump should have little problem getting through any changes to the law that he wants. I am looking forward to his SCOTUS nominee too.

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Donald Trump 'could make the world a safer place', claims former British Army chief

Lord Richards said he believes Trump 'would reinvigorate big power relationships' Former Chief of the Defence Staff Lord Richards said he believes controversial Republican Donald Trump could make the world a safer place if elected.

The ex-head of the British Army said the billionaire’s approach to foreign policy could “reinvigorate big power relationships” and in the process “might make the world ironically safer”.

Lord Richards of Herstmonceux, the chief of defence staff between 2010 and 2013, said: “There is a case for saying that big power politics is what we’re missing.

“If countries and states could coalesce better to deal with these people – and I think Trump’s instinct is to go down that route – then I think there's the case for saying that the world certainly won’t be any less safe.

“It’s that lack of understanding and empathy with each other as big power players that is a risk to us all at the moment.

“Therefore I think he would reinvigorate big power relationships, which might make the world ironically safer.”

Richards, who is now a peer in the House of Lords, said there was no reason to think Trump would cause chaos adding the biggest threat came from such groups as ISIS.

Speaking to The House magazine, he added: “It’s non-state actors like Isis that are the biggest threat to our security."

While on the campaign trail Trump has said he would “make a friend” of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

SOURCE

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Want to know why Trump wins? Ask Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton understands the white middle class voter who elected him president over George Herbert Walker Bush in 1992 like few remaining in the Democrat Party.

Wikileaks revealed that Bill Clinton expressed thoughts that sound as if they come straight from a Donald Trump rally to a group of donors in 2015 when he said the following: “We have incredible debates all over America that shouldn’t exist between people in different racial groups because they don’t trust law enforcement anymore.” he said.

“And in the middle of all this we learned, breathtakingly, that middle-aged, non-college-educated white Americans’ life expectancy is going down and is now lower than Hispanics, even though they make less money. And the gap between African Americans and whites is closing, but unfortunately not because the death rate among African Americans is dropping but because the death rate among white Americans is rising.” Clinton continued.

“Why? Because they don’t have anything to look forward to when they get up in the morning. Because their lives are sort of stuck in neutral. Because their lives are sort of stuck in neutral.”

And that is why Donald Trump will be elected President of the United States, because he has given those who had previously lost hope, a glimmer of expectation of being able to achieve the future they had hoped for themselves and their family.

Bill Clinton understands exactly why the slogan, “Make America Great Again” resonates with so many voters. They have been left behind, sand kicked in their collective faces by multi-national corporations who are incentivized by their own elected officials to move job opportunities overseas.

Former President Clinton understands why voters who have been failed by the status quo will listen to an outsider who promises to fight for them against the elites who have abandoned them, after all, that was at least part of his appeal that won him the White House.

It was Bill Clinton’s ability to “feel the pain” of voters contrasted with Bush’s seemingly aloof style which helped him connect with those who he grew up with in Hope, Arkansas, even though he had virtually nothing in common with them.

Isn’t it ironic that his wife is now cast in the villain role as the representative of big Wall Street against the aspirations of the average person, as a true celebrity outsider hits all the chords on trade, jobs and guns against her.

The question is whether the political wheel turned 180 degrees on the Clinton family, or have the Clinton family turned their collective backs to the hopes and dreams of average Americans?

SOURCE

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All Americans Now?

A comment from English Libertarian Sean Gabb

For me – and I think for many others – the American presidential election has been a repeat of the European Referendum. I went to bed with a faint hope. The BBC coverage of the results was filled with faintly crumbling Establishment optimism. I woke and turned on the computer, to look at the same shocked faces as last June. It is too early to say for sure if he has won, but it does seem that Donald Trump will be the next President of America.

Now, I make the usual reservation about the Libertarian Alliance that I direct. We are a charity. We take no part in electoral politics. We were, as an organisation, perfectly indifferent between Mr Trum and Mr Clinton. Speaking for myself, I am delighted, and I extend congratulations to all my American friends, who worked so hard and hoped to such to see this result.

The idea that Mr Trump will do all the things he has promised is, and must be, unlikely. It seems to be in the nature of things for politicians to support the people who elect them. But leave that aside. As with the European Referendum, this has been a vote on the New World Order. For generations, the British and American peoples have stood outside a wall of managed democracy. We have been asked to decide between issues that others have defined for us. At best, we have been able to choose between the lesser of evils. Last June, and this November, we given a real choice, and we raced for the exit.

The moral effect of what seems about to happen will be explosive. Two bloated, treasonous Establishments have faced electoral challenges, and have lost. The “loons” and “deplorables” have ignored the big media and the big money, and have voted for their conscience. Cultural leftism is not defeated – it has too great a control of the institutions to vanish overnight. But it has been put on notice of dismissal.

There will not be an escalation of the war in Syria. There will not be a war with Russia. There will be no pressure from the highest points of the American Government for the British Government to fudge our exit from the European Union. There will, almost certainly, be further upsets in the forthcoming elections through Europe.

Speaking personally again, it is too early to be sure. However, I have, for many years, been denouncing the United States as The Great Satan. It was the New World Order. It was the source of all war and unaccountable government. Well, all I can say at the moment, is that the Great Satan appears to have repented, and I shall look on the American flags that I encounter as I go about my daily business in England with far less distaste than at any time this century.

Regardless of our nationality, my friends and I are all Americans this morning.

Via email

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Why Elections Today Are So Contentious

The American people have allowed tremendous power to coalesce in DC

It wasn’t that long ago when national elections were more perfunctory, less volatile and certainly less contentious. Those halcyon days are long gone! Today the bile and vitriol spewing over the airwaves mirrors that of society generally, and the seemingly innocent question, “Can’t we all just get along?”, is body-slammed with a resounding “Hell NO!!” So what happened?

To borrow a meme from infamous Clintonista James Carville, “It’s the power, stupid!” That is, it’s the tremendous power the American people have allowed (demanded, even) to coalesce inside the DC Beltway, and particularly at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Decisions that used to be made by individual states or local governments are now decided somewhere in Washington, DC, often by a single branch, or even worse — and more often the case — an unaccountable sub-entity within that branch. As a result, elections nowadays are “for all the marbles.”

We offer as a case-in-point the Supreme Court of the U.S. One facet of the current election is that it is effectively a referendum on who will replace the late, great Antonin Scalia and give the winning party a 5-4 majority on an otherwise (arguably) evenly divided bench. Less than a century ago, the Court was largely apolitical; now it’s an ideology-based “final arbiter” of national law. Instead of faithfully interpreting the plain text and intent of a given law, many justices skew their judgments to “outcome-based” jurisprudence, in which they decide the outcome they want and then “walk-back” their logic — and, unfortunately, their “law” — to support the desired result. Thus whichever party chooses the next justice “wins,” by-and-large, any issue arriving at the doorstep of SCOTUS. But the problem doesn’t stop there.

No, it worsens exponentially because every branch of the federal government has too much power, in one way or another. For example, the Executive Branch has arrogated to itself the power of all three federal branches, temporarily relenting only when checked by another branch of government. As His Worship is fond of saying, “If Congress won’t act, I will” or, alternatively, “I’ve got a pen and a phone.” Translation: “I don’t need the Legislature: I am the Legislature!” In any case, the current Occupation Force inside the Executive Branch does not consider the Separation of Powers doctrine as an impediment to its reach or effectiveness.

As for Congress, with the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment morphing senator selection by state legislature into popular election, senators are no longer accountable to their states, but only to “the people.” That might sound good at first blush, but it crippled states' abilities to check federal government power. Moreover, Congress generally has too much power. The Constitution enumerates specific responsibilities for Congress, the president and the Supreme Court. Those not specifically granted to these branches are supposed to be reserved either to the states or to the people — the Tenth Amendment. Today, the Tenth Amendment is all but a dead letter. Like the Executive Branch, Congress — using the courts as well as the Executive Branch — has assumed far more power than “We The People” ever granted it under the Constitution.

The aggrandizement of power by the federal government was a primary concern of the so-called “Anti-Federalists,” who opposed ratifying the Constitution on the grounds that the federal government would eventually become all-powerful and too distant from those it governed. They were also concerned that the states would become mere conduits through which the federal government would exercise its overwhelming power. Fast-forward to today and the Anti-Federalists have been prophetic. An increasingly distant government brandishes immeasurable power over a vast expanse, over hundreds of millions of people with conflicting ambitions and needs. The input of the average American citizen to the federal Leviathan is so remote that the output — the federal government’s influence upon that individual in daily life — seems totally arbitrary. “No taxation without representation”? What about the case of “no representation,” period?

However, the real issue here is not “who’s right” in a national election, but rather the broader issue of “good governance.” Originally, the Founders viewed the states as individual “experiments” on how to “get along” as a people. The idea was that if a particular state went awry with respect to governance, people would “vote with their feet” and relocate to a better state. With the power of the federal government increasing and the power of the states diminishing over time, these “experiments” became less and less distinguishable: Today all is now “federal.”

The Founders did provide an “out” through which states can bridle an over-expansive federal government: Article V of the Constitution states, in part, “The Congress … on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which … shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress.”

The basic idea behind Article V was — and is — that if the federal government went so off the rails that it was on the verge of becoming uncontrollable, the states could reel it in, via a “Convention of States.” A discussion of the merits and perils associated with such a convention is beyond the scope of this piece, but we’ve written of the merits and risks previously.

Contentious elections are merely a symptom of a much bigger problem: Too much power amassing in the federal government and a discontinuity between its applied power and the will of the people who have no real say in its control. The solution to both problems is to again disperse the federal government’s power by redistributing it across all three branches of the federal government and among the states. But such an act won’t happen from any initiative within the Beltway, which has become so drunk with the mass-accrual of power that the vast majority of today’s members of Congress and senior Executive Branch leaders are millionaires — another clear indicator of the magnitude of the problem. No, it will only happen if the states and the people resolve to cage the tiger.

SOURCE

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

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

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Could German-Americans install Trump as President?

Some interesting speculation from Germany below.  My translation.  Trump himself has German ancestry

46 million people of German descent live in the US - the majority of them supporting Donald Trump. Many live  in the swing states that could tip the scales in the presumably narrow election.

The "German belt", ranges from Pennsylvania in the Eastern United States to Oregon in the far West. Although Germans have left a deep impact in everyday life (kindergarten, Pretzels), they have  no clear political profile.

Sandra Bullock. Kevin Costner. Kirsten Dunst. David Letterman. Uma Thurman. Christopher Walken. Bruce Willis.  They all have two things in common: They are Americans. And they have German ancestors.

And they are not alone. Every seventh American has at least partly German roots: When asked by the Census Bureau, where their family is from, 14 percent of US citizens give Germany in either first or second place.

In elections this group has been because of their sheer size of great potential. And in the upcoming presidential election this weight could actually come to fruition: According to a survey, German Americans are conspicuously strongly Donald Trump inclined. Over half preferred the Republican candidate - and only a third prefers Hillary Clinton.

46 million people of German ancestry live in the United States. There are more German Americans than Americans of English, Irish or Italian descent.  There are even more German Americans than blacks (43 million) or Mexican Americans (36 million) in the USA.

SOURCE

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Is this the last majority white election?

According to a WalletHub survey on the impact of minorities in America, 2016 is the last chance Republicans stand to win the White House… until 2060:

    "The study used two models based on population projections and matched to the overwhelming 65 percent minority turnout for President Obama in 2012 and the underwhelming 50 percent response for George W. Bush in 2004.

    The bottom line: In no presidential election from 2020-60 do the Republicans win. The closest the Republicans come is 2020 when the Democratic vote under the 2004 model reaches 50.48 percent, WalletHub said. The widest gap is projected for 2060, when the minority population will be its biggest, delivering the Democrats 58.8 percent of the vote."

The analysis pretty much states the obvious: that the growth of liberal-leaning minorities is outpacing the growth of both minority and white Republicans. It’s unclear, however, whether WalletHub’s survey accounted for voter fraud, or even acknowledges that it’s a real problem.

SOURCE

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Why Trump could really win this

A comment from Australia

AS AMERICANS go to the polls in hours, one of the most respected pollsters in the United States, Nate Silver, is giving Donald Trump a 34.6% chance of being elected. That’s about the same chance of tossing a coin three times and getting heads twice. It’s close.

The question is why. To Australian ears, many of the things that Trump supporters say are outside the boundaries of common experience. The anger and resentment they express towards their entire political system is something that has no real equivalent in the Australian political system.

The idea that the whole election is rigged — which so many of them believe — sounds absurd. In Australia, even outliers like Pauline Hanson respect the basic tenet of the democratic system: That the umpire’s decision is to be respected.

Trump has repeatedly said he won’t necessarily respect the results of the election — unless he wins.

The key that helped me understand the Trump phenomenon is that — contrary to the impression that you receive from much of the Australian coverage — Trump supporters are, on average, richer than Clinton supporters.

The first time this was put to me, I was sceptical. We were talking to a merchandise salesperson at a rally for Trump’s running mate Mike Pence, in Wilmington, North Carolina. Proudly wearing multiple Trump badges, a “Make America Great” cap and a “Hillary for Prison” T-shirt, the salesperson looked like a Trump partisan, but the truth was much better. He was simply a capitalist who knew his market.

He was there to make a buck out of, as he put it, “anyone who is looking to get rid of their money”. That afternoon, he was driving an hour across the state to attend a Clinton rally, presumably while proudly wearing his “I’m With Her” badge.
The salesperson explained that in his experience Trump supporters had a lot more money. He said that Trump supporters were crazy for caps, bumper stickers and T-shirts, while Clinton supporters tended to stick to badges.

The idea that Trump supporters were richer ran contrary to all my expectations. Donald Trump sells himself on being the candidate for low-paid white battlers, living in the America’s vast rust-belt: The eastern and mid-Western states that used to manufacture America’s cars, fridges, airconditioners and anything else made of steel, but had, according to legend, become vast wastelands.
Isn’t that the reason that even on election eve, Michigan — once a union-dominated Democratic stronghold — is in the balance, and could provide Trump with one of the oddest paths to victory for a Republican candidate?

I mean, Detroit, right? It’s byword for urban decay. Right?
But from a logical perspective, it makes sense that Clinton supporters are poorer. Trump’s main supporters are white men. From a statistical perspective, that’s a double whammy for prosperity.

In the US, men enjoy 23% more pay on average than women. And white workers tend to be higher paid than black or Latino workers.

But it still runs contrary to Trump’s rhetoric. What about the fabled rust belt that Trump is drawing his support from?
I’m not saying that the rust belt doesn’t exist, but in our travels through two of the biggest rust belt areas in Pennsylvania and Ohio, it was something that people we met talked about in the past tense.

Take Wooster, Ohio, a town of about 30,000 people, that until the early 1980s, had an economy that centred almost entirely around steel. Steel for car doors, steel for washing machines, steel for old-style American-made toys.

At the beginning of the 1980s, it lost seven thousand jobs directly involved in steel manufacturing at one plant alone, and then tens of thousands more that had supported those industries. Crime soared. The rust set in.

This is Trump territory. For a start, it’s white. Very white. City-Data.com puts its whiteness at over 96%. Our hosts in Wooster claimed it was more like 98%.

At a state level, the Democrats have all but conceded the space to the Republican machine. They aren’t even running a state senatorial candidate in this election. But it’s not because people there are poor and dejected.

Today, unemployment runs at less than 3%. And the new jobs aren’t some race-to-the-bottom Wal-Martification of America that you might expect if you listened to Donald Trump. They’re steel jobs.
But instead of just making steel, Wooster now imports it from China, and then crafts it into high-precision goods. They manufacture 85% of the world’s jet blades in Wooster, and VW now makes its steel drive trains for Audi in the city.

It’s a perfect case-study for Economics 101. Low-value manufacturing got replaced by higher-value manufacturing.
Unfortunately, whereas in the textbook, it happens overnight, it’s taken the better part of four decades for Wooster to rebuild. If you were 30 in 1980, then chances are that even though you’re employed now, you spent much of the second part of your career underemployed, waiting for Economics 101 to kick in.

During that time, the promises that politicians, corporations, and even unions made, bred cynicism — for the entire system.
The life lesson was that you can go from being utterly embedded in “the system”, with all the expectations of suburban stability, to being completely abandoned by the very same system: By the corporations and the government who allowed it to happen. Even if you were a white man.

What Trump delivers is a way to explain and put in context that jolting reality, without threatening the idea that there is nothing really that special about being a white man.

He could blame it on Ronald Reagan — who was in charge when it happened. Or he could place the blame on the companies who fled to first Japan, and then Mexico and later, China. And in some senses he does. But mostly he points to a far more tangible threat: Multicultural America.

If you were a white man who just wasted the best years of your life waiting for the next steel boom, it’s not your fault. It’s someone else’s fault — the ones who look different to you, and whose presence has boomed in the past four decades.

Of course, in Wooster, you don’t see many Latinos or blacks at all. But you do see them on TV, and it kind of makes sense. By some estimates, 2016 is the year that whites become a minority in America, in that they now make up less than 50% of the population (they are still the biggest race, by a long margin).

But this is why that for all the crazies that Trump rallies throw together, who seem utterly foreign to the Australian experience, there is an underlying logic that makes Trump such a potent force, and brings out many sensible people.

Sure, his plan — to return America to a pre-1980s world of protectionism and steel manufacturing without the pesky presence of 11 million illegal immigrants — is an unrealistic journey into nostalgia, but it speaks to a very real experience that millions of Americans have lived through (or who’ve watched their parents live through).

Once you understand that, all the policies that may sound absurd at first glance, start to make more sense. A wall between the US and Mexico is a visual metaphor for stanching the flow of jobs south.

His foreign policy is to “make America safe again,” is about trying to find a way to get America to a place where 9/11 never happened.

If stopping Muslims at the border sounds absurd to us, it works for his supporters, because many of them wouldn’t have even met a Muslim in their life.

And if cutting taxes for those on high incomes sounds like a policy that wouldn’t be popular in the rust-belt, think again: His core base are richer than you’d think.

Annual income is one of the best predictors of whether you’ll turn up on election day. Indeed, one of the main reasons that Donald Trump still has a good chance at the Presidency is that his supporters aren’t that poor. If they were, they would be less likely to turn out.

Which, given his rhetoric, is kind of ironic, really.

SOURCE

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

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

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The strange way Leftist psychologists measure conservatism

Leftist psychologists have long worked with a concept of conservatism that is very different from what conservatives actually think.  Their idea of conservatism is a caricature.  Their oldest caricature is that conservatives are opposed to change.  Tell that to Trump and his supporters! All the conservatives I know have a whole list of things they would like changed in the world about them.

So where did that strange definition come from?  Easy.  Conservatives oppose LEFTIST changes.  Leftists are all about change and are very authoritarian about it.  Note Mr Obama's aim to "fundamentally transform" America.  If that's not authoritarian, what would be?  So the changes that conservatives oppose are Leftist attempts to boss them around. Mr Trump articulates that.

It's an extreme demonstration of Leftist closed-mindedness that they can conceive of no other explanation for opposition to their policies than a general opposition to change.  The reasons conservatives give for opposing Leftist changes -- e.g. "That has already been tried and it failed" -- are simply not heard or not believed by Leftists.  To them there is no rational reason for opposition to the changes they want.  So opposition to change generally has to be the explanation for what conservatives do and say.

And an inadequate understanding of conservatism leads to dead-ends all the time.  Robert Altemeyer's recent work on "Right-wing authoritarianism" was based on a definition of conservatism as opposition to change and his set of questions ("scale") designed to detect conservatism ended up not detecting it at all.  High scorers on his scale were roughly as likely to be Democrats as Republicans when it came to voting.  Just to rub that in:  The highest scorers on his scale were actually Russian Communists! Altemeyer put a lot of work into his efforts to measure  conservatism but ended up with an abject failure on his hands.  Conservatism is nothing like what he thought it was.

There is actually a larger tradition among psychologists about what conservatives think -- a tradition that goes beyond opposition to change.  Conservatives are also said to have a large body of extreme thoughts about all sorts of things. Some examples:

* Patriotism and loyalty to one's country are more important than one's intellectual convictions and should have precedence over them.

* Treason and murder should be punishable by death.

* The English-speaking countries have reached a higher state of civilization than any other country in the world and as a consequence have a culture which is superior to any other.

* In taking part in any form of world organization, this country should make certain that none of its independence and power is lost.

* Certain religious sects whose beliefs do not permit them to salute the flag should either be forced to conform or else be abolished.

* When the dictator Mussolini made Italy's trains run on time, that at least was an important thing to achieve.

Statements such as the above do draw on tendencies in conservative thought but are expressed in an extreme and aggressive way.  But conservatives are generally rather moderate people so would disagree with such statements.  The first statement could be reworded to attract conservative agreement as:

* Patriotism and loyalty to one's country is important

The last statement would be most likely to attract conservative agreement as:

* "I have never heard of Mussolini"

And so on.  So in their haste to demonize conservatism, Leftists create a set of "conservative" statements that conservatives don't actually agree with!  No wonder then, that agreement with such statements does not correlate with voting conservative.

So the research into conservatism that Leftist psychologists do is not actually about real-life conservatism at all.  They waste their time. They fail to do what they aim to do.  They know nothing about conservatism.

So how come that they keep up such foolish behaviour?  Easy.  Leftists rarely talk to conservatives.  They get their ideas about conservatism from one another.  They live in a little intellectual bubble that is hermetically sealed against the big bad world outside, with all its inconvenient facts.

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Dem donor compares Republican blacks to Nazis

Project Veritas Action released another undercover video Wednesday, and this one may be the most difficult to stomach yet. In the footage, prominent Democratic donor Benjamin Barber compares Republican African-Americans to Nazis at a fundraiser in New York City for North Carolina U.S. Senate candidate Deborah Ross (language warning):

    “Have you heard of the Sonderkommandos? Jewish guards who helped murder Jews in the camps. So there were even Jews that were helping the Nazis murder Jews! So blacks who are helping the other side are seriously fucked in the head,” Barber said. “They’re only helping the enemy who will destroy them. Maybe they think ‘if I help them we’ll get along okay; somehow I’ll save my race by working with the murderers.’”

Project Veritas Action shared the video with some black Republican voters. Needless to say they were shocked and disappointed:

    “I think that Deborah Ross has shown her true colors,”  said Bishop Wooden, another black Republican in North Carolina. “If this is not a, if that…what you just showed me is not racism and condescending and basically calling blacks stupid and ignorant and saying that we are voting against our own self-interest if we support any republican [sic]. I am appalled. I am in incensed. Deborah Ross should be called to task for something like that.”

SOURCE

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James Carville Loses It, Says House GOP and the KGB Are in Cahoots

Since the GOP was the chief opponent of Russian ambition in thre Soviet period, to say that they are now pro-Russian is strange indeed

When you're insisting that MSNBC is too right-wing, you know you've lost your mind. James Carville argued that his interviewer was defending James Comey and the House Republicans, who he says are behind this investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails. He also alleged that the KGB is hijacking our election. Is it sad to see a once political mastermind become this insane?

SOURCE. (Video at link)

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Another campaign ends, and my wishes didn't come true

by Jeff Jacoby

"THE MOST dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself," wrote H. L. Mencken. "Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable."

That was in 1922. If the Sage of Baltimore thought the political class during the Age of Harding was "dishonest, insane, and intolerable," God only knows how he would have characterized the Era of Trump and Clinton, or what he would have made of the ghastly presidential campaign of 2016. About the only good thing to be said for it is that it ends on Tuesday, and that one of the two worst presidential candidates in American history will go down to defeat. The other, alas, will go to the White House.

There's no denying that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have been uniquely odious nominees. But in too many ways to count, they have also been depressingly typical examples of American politicians in the modern era. When it came to shallowness, insincerity, and hypocrisy, the 2016 presidential hopefuls (along with most of the contenders who faced off during the interminable primary season) were just more of the same — the latest batch of pettifogging jacklegs greedy for authority, and prepared to debase themselves and the American democratic system by any means necessary to achieve it.

So here we are, on the cusp of another Election Day, dreading the national hangover to follow. If you're like me, you may find yourself wondering why campaigns for the highest office in the land invariably play out at the lowest common denominator.

Just once, I wish I could hear presidential candidates set aside the pandering, and tell voters that there are some problems the government has no business trying to fix.

Just once, I wish candidates could acknowledge candidly that yes, they have changed their position on a slew of issues over the years, and yes, the new position has always been the one polls show to be more popular.

Just once, I wish candidates in a debate would refuse to answer a question posed by the moderator, on the grounds that it raises a subject far too complicated to be answered in two minutes.

Just once, I wish the candidates would remind voters that it's not the president's job to wipe their noses, and that people who make dumb personal choices shouldn't expect Washington to relieve them of the consequences.

Just once, I wish candidates would decline to "approve this message," and would repudiate campaign ads that traffic in the defamation and distortion of an opponent's record.

Just once, I wish candidates would stop bragging about the laws "they" passed, and would point out instead that no bills get passed without the cooperation of scores, or even hundreds, of lawmakers.

Just once, I wish candidates would make a point of reading John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage — or Federalist No. 51 — or Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men — or Abraham Lincoln's 1865 inaugural address — and then deliver a speech explaining what they learned from it, and how it shapes their political understanding.

Just once, I wish candidates would make it clear that merely because they strongly oppose something, that doesn't mean it should be illegal — and that merely because there's some innovation they would passionately support, that's doesn't mean it ought to be mandatory.

Just once, I wish candidates would show that they understand that a course of action can be unwise, undesirable, and unpopular, yet still be perfectly constitutional.

Just once, I wish candidates, while touting their plan to do X or Y, would have the humility to concede that it might not work as envisioned.

Just once, I wish candidates would fairly and respectfully summarize an opponent's position before proceeding to dispute or criticize it.

Just once, I wish candidates would demonstrate that they've given serious thought to some of the tensions built into America's civic culture — such as equality vs. liberty, or individual liberty vs. the common good — and are able to discuss them with more depth than bumper-sticker sloganeering.

Just once, I wish candidates would admit that elected officials and government regulators are as flawed as any other human beings, and as prone to blunders and temptations as people who work in the private sector.

"If experience teaches us anything at all," wrote H.L. Mencken "it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."
Just once, I wish candidates would spend less time crowing about what they'll do on Day 1 — which is usually of little more than symbolic importance — and would instead spend more time outlining what they'll do prepare themselves before Day 1.

Just once, I wish candidates would emphasize that it is nearly always more important to block bad bills than to pass good bills.

Just once, I wish candidates would place as great a premium on maintaining their personal decency as they do on achieving political victory — that they would be intent, in other words, not merely on winning, but on deserving to win.

Ah, well. Somewhere, I suppose, the shade of Mencken is smirking at the naiveté of my wish list. "If experience teaches us anything at all," the old cynic wrote long ago, "it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- mainly about immigrants

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

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

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Former FBI boss slams Crooked Justice Department for election rigging

It’s pretty obvious that the Obama administration is protecting Hillary Clinton from serious scrutiny. So obvious, in fact, that a former FBI assistant director said Thursday that you’d have to be “deaf, dumb, and blind” not to see it:

    James Kallstrom, known for leading the 1996 investigation into the explosion of TWA flight 800, told Fox News’ “Kelly File” on Thursday evening that current agents are “furious” at how higher-ups in the federal agency and Justice Department have “stonewalled” requests to open up a serious probe into an alleged pay-to-play scheme between the Clinton Foundation and State Department.

    “You think they perceive the agency or some at Justice as taking sides?” host Megyn Kelly asked Kallstrom.

    “You’d have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to see that. Of course that’s what’s happening. I mean just look at what’s in the public domain. I mean, look at the stuff that they left on the table. Top secret codeword documents,” Kallstrom responded.

Kallstrom added that hundreds of current and former agents are “very, very frustrated” because “they see the whole due process thing going down the tubes” under Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

“There’s no way they’re going to indict anybody in this administration,” he finished.

SOURCE

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HILLARY CAN’T STOP LYING

It's typical psychopathic behaviour

Hillary Clinton can’t help herself. She lies constantly. Some of her lies, the most memorable ones, have a common quality: she is a superhero in her own fantasy world. Named after a famous mountain climber! Landed under sniper fire! Tried to join the Marines! Granddaughter of immigrants who left the White House dead broke! Yesterday she added a new one: she understands terrorism because she was in New York in 9/11. She will crush ISIS! Here she is:

That couldn’t have been in the script. It is a matter of record that Hillary was in Washington on September 11, not New York. The Senate was in session. As you probably remember, Senators and Congressmen of both parties gathered on the Capitol steps to sing “God Bless America.” Here is Hillary on the Capitol steps, singing:

And here she is being interviewed by CNN on the Capitol steps at about 8 p.m. on September 11:

Why does she do it? Why does she continue to make up lies that she ought to know will quickly be exposed? There is some psychological defect at work, a need to portray herself as more heroic than she actually is. It is a little creepy, though, when her efforts are so obviously doomed to failure.

SOURCE

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Justice, State Departments colluded with Hillary on illegal email server

Everything the Clintons touch turns to corruption. After decades of political involvement, the truth about the Clinton’s reign has come to light thanks to the breathtaking releases from Wikileaks this year. The newest releases show nothing less than outright collusion between the State Department, the Justice Department and the Hillary Clinton campaign to help her cover up her illegal private email server that housed classified information.

In the latest disclosure, Justice Department Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik, who has been leading renewed investigations into the Clinton email server, has also been given the Clintons a heads up regarding news releases to the Clinton campaign for months.

On May 19, 2015 Kadzik emailed Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta informing Podesta that, “There is a HJC oversight hearing today where the head of our Civil Division will testify. Likely to get questions on State Department emails. Another filing in the FOIA case went in last night or will go in this am that indicates it will be awhile (2016) before the Statement Departent posts the emails.” Were they getting their stories straight?

This unbelievable disclosure, has the Justice Department tipping off the Clintons when the State Department would start disclosing some of her emails publicly via the Freedom of Information Act.

While the corruption between the Justice Department and the Clinton campaign has already become obvious to most Americans, the relationship between these actors and the impact of their conversations is much more far reaching.

It all started in the 1990s when Podesta was questioned on perjury during the Monica Lewinsky case. Who was Podesta’s brave lawyer able to manipulate the grand jury to his innocence? None other than Kadzik himself.

Podesta has even noted that Kadzik was a “fantastic lawyer. Kept me out of jail.”

Ever since then the two’s relationship has been nothing shy of complete corruption.

Congress issued the subpoena for all of Clintons private server emails on March 4, 2015. A previous Wikileaks report revealed that on that same day, State Department officials were openly discussing which emails should be deleted, providing Clinton with the perfect opportunity to destroy them. And soon that is exactly what she did.

This is not where the saga ended, though. After destroying evidence that could have been used against her, Clinton had to make sure the press was going to report on this scene lightly and once gain the State Department would assist her.

A March 1, 2015 email shows correspondence between State Department press aide Lauren Hickey and Podesta working with New York Times reporters to “clear” changes to the story to “provide accurate information to the media.”

In a major news story about political corruption, the Times gave the final sign off to the corrupt agencies — and the Clintons — themselves.

Despite her best attempts, the Clinton email scandal is still acting as her biggest obstacle to her being elected president. Just last week the FBI announced it was reopening the email investigation due to new information discovered on former Congressman Anthony Weiner, husband of top Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

But we suppose Clinton doesn’t have too much to worry about, after all, this is the crooked game she has spent decades playing. The head of the reopened investigation into Clinton’s email misconduct is appears to be none other than Kadzik himself.

The Clinton campaign has become one with the Justice and State Departments, making it impossible for the current government to investigate her fairly, let alone one she would take control of if she is elected.

After destroying evidence and manipulating Americans perception of the situation, Hillary Clinton still heralds herself as the only presidential choice which is right for our country. But is more important than ever to realize that Clinton’s entire career has been built not on helping the country, but helping herself. She is willing to use government and the law—and subverting the law—to acquire power, and that is the last thing this nation needs.

SOURCE

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The ‘Untold Threat’ Responsible for 40% of Illegal Immigrants

While the debate over illegal immigration tends to focus on how to control and treat those who make it across our nation’s borders, a more enduring challenge for the U.S. government has been what to do to stop legal entrants from overstaying their allotted time here.

The problem of so-called visa “overstays”—which make up about 40 percent of the 11 million people living illegally in the U.S.—will continue on past the Obama administration and follow the next president.

That’s partially because the government has not yet delivered on its long-promised—and congressionally mandated—plan to create a better checkout system to track who has left the country on time, and who hasn’t.

“It [visa overstays] is the most overlooked issue when it comes to immigration,” Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, said in an interview with The Daily Signal.

“It’s an untold threat,” McCaul added. “We are allowing millions of people to overstay visas and remain in this country who could potentially pose a threat to homeland security.”

The uncertainty around the scope of the problem comes at a time when a growing percentage of the illegal immigrant population is made up of visa overstays as opposed to people being apprehended at the border.

For more than 20 years, the U.S. government had struggled to quantify just how many people entered the country legally with a visa and stayed too long, making it impossible to prescribe policy fixes.

That finally changed in January, when the Department of Homeland Security released a first-of-its-kind study reporting that 527,127 people who traveled legally to the U.S. for business or leisure and were supposed to leave the country in fiscal year 2015 in fact overstayed their visas.

This figure is larger than the 337,117 people caught crossing the border illegally last year.

The long-awaited data from 2015 was not all-encompassing. It counted only visa holders who entered the U.S. by air and sea, not by land, and it did not include those who came as students or temporary workers.

Still, immigration and security experts as well as policymakers welcomed the new information because they thought it would force the government to move faster on methods to improve, most importantly in trying to assemble a system to obtain biometric data—such as fingerprints, facial recognition images, and eye scans—on those leaving the country.

‘A Top Issue’

The 9/11 Commission recommended the Department of Homeland Security complete an entry and exit system “as soon as possible,” viewing it as an important national security tool because two of the hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001, had overstayed their visas.

Plagued by financial and logistical challenges, the government has introduced various pilot projects at some airports and land borders, but is still a few years off from implementing a biometric exit system on a large scale.....

‘It Doesn’t Matter’

Even if the U.S. were to settle on a workable exit tracking method, some national security experts doubt that such a system would be an effective counterterrorism tool, especially when considering its cost.

David Inserra, a homeland security expert at The Heritage Foundation, says the government could just as well use already collected biographical information, such as a traveler’s name and date of birth, to track exits and collect overstay data. But other experts say bad actors could use fake passports and aliases to bypass a system that did not require biometrics such as fingerprints and facial recognition.

No matter the method used, Inserra and other experts note that an exit system simply reveals who has departed—and remained—in the country. It would not help discover where those that stayed are living, and whether they present a security risk.

“Even if you have the greatest biometric exit system, if someone doesn’t leave, it doesn’t matter,” Inserra said, adding:

You are now left with the problem of every other police officer looking for someone. They are a missing person who doesn’t want to be found. If you want to stop visa overstays, the solution isn’t to spend money on an exit system.

Inserra argues that policymakers instead should give more money to intelligence agencies such as Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement so they can go into communities and try to locate—and deport—people who overstayed their visas.

More HERE

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

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

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New book: "The liberal's guide to conservatives" by J. Scott Wagner.  Summerborne Books.  Cotati CA. 2016

Once upon a time, when liberals wrote about the psychology of conservatives, they did so only to demonize conservatives.  More recently, however, the tendency has been to say that conservatives have a point but Leftists have a better point. Scott Wagner's book is in that camp. He does seem to be a nice guy and he has made some progress towards embracing reality.  He concedes, for instance, that Leftists can be authoritarian.  According to psychologists of the past, only conservatives could be authoritarian -- with Stalin and Mao ignored.

He has however still not thrown off a lot of Leftist baggage. He still thinks conservatives have something in common with Hitler, for instance, quite ignoring that the opposition to Hitler was led by a great Conservative, Winston Churchill.  More technically he is influenced in his conclusions  by such pieces of psychometric garbage as the SDO scale. So his castles are built on sand. Not worth reading. But Leftists will like it.

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NYPD to blow the whistle on Hillary

New York Police Department detectives and prosecutors working an alleged underage sexting case against former Congressman Anthony Weiner have turned over a newly-found laptop he shared with wife Huma Abedin to the FBI with enough evidence “to put Hillary (Clinton) and her crew away for life,” NYPD sources told True Pundit.

NYPD sources said Clinton’s “crew” also included several unnamed yet implicated members of Congress in addition to her aides and insiders.

“It involves Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, and Bill Clinton as well as Jeffrey Epstein,” DC insider Doug Hagmann said on The Alex Jones ShowWednesday. “According to my source, these files exist – he did not touch these files so he doesn’t know what’s in them, but the fact that they exist on this computer suggest some sort of overlap here.”

“It involves the Saudis, very big money and interests in the Middle East, and it involves Hillary, Huma, and to a much lesser extent Anthony Weiner.”

The NYPD seized the computer from Weiner during a search warrant and detectives discovered a trove of over 500,000 emails to and from Hillary Clinton, Abedin and other insiders during her tenure as secretary of state. The content of those emails sparked the FBI to reopen its defunct email investigation into Clinton on Friday.

But new revelations on the contents of that laptop, according to law enforcement sources, implicate the Democratic presidential candidate, her subordinates, and even select elected officials in far more alleged serious crimes than mishandling classified and top secret emails, sources said. NYPD sources said these new emails include evidence linking Clinton herself and associates to:

Money laundering

Child exploitation

Sex crimes with minors (children)

Perjury

Pay to play through Clinton Foundation

Obstruction of justice

Other felony crimes

NYPD detectives and a NYPD Chief, the department’s highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices.

“What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach,” the NYPD Chief said. “There is not going to be any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that.”

The NYPD Chief said once Comey saw the alarming contents of the emails he was forced to reopen a criminal probe against Clinton.

“People are going to prison,” he said.

Meanwhile, FBI sources said Abedin and Weiner were cooperating with federal agents, who have taken over the non-sexting portions the case from NYPD. The husband-and-wife Clinton insiders  are both shopping for separate immunity deals, sources said.

SOURCE

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The Bottom Line on Clinton

Allow me to summarize where this all stands on the eve of the presidential election.

Mark Alexander

Over the past year, the 24-hour MSM news recyclers across the political spectrum have spun and re-spun, ad nauseam, allegations and denials about the criminal activities of Hillary Clinton and her chief prevaricator, DNC point man Bill Clinton. The media is, first and foremost, interested in ad revenue, and the relentless ranting has resulted in “scandal fatigue.”

The big winners in this election cycle are the MSM bank accounts. The big loser is the American people, because what is important has been diluted by what is not, and too many media consumers can no longer distinguish between the two.

We note Hillary Clinton’s illegal effort to keep all of her communications as secretary of state off the grid in order to conceal them from freedom of information requests, which would expose her role in nefarious activities like the Benghazi cover-up to protect Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election and her own 2016 presidential plans.

I have clearly chronicled Hillary’s prolific record of malfeasance, and like Bill, her pathological penchant for lying. I have provided concise analysis on their criminal Clinton Foundation enterprise and renewed FBI investigation into their criminal activity — despite protection from “Justice” Department fixers.

The fact is, the Clinton’s abject corruption contaminates everything they touch, and it’s about to swamp the national government.

Allow me to summarize where this all stands on the eve of the presidential election.

The announcement by FBI Director James Comey of a renewed investigation into Clinton’s concealed communications is too little too late. The fact is, Clinton ordered 32,000 emails “bleached” from her server archives after congressional subpoenas were issued for those communications. Clinton and her attorneys (who have inexplicably been given immunity) decided for themselves what to turn over and what to destroy. It’s highly unlikely that those destroyed communications will ever surface.

The acknowledgment that the FBI has confidentially continued its investigation into the Clintons' illegal foundation pay-to-play political graft and influence schemes may produce indictments, but to what end?

The courts have determined that a sitting president is immune from criminal prosecution. Thus, if Clinton is elected, the only recourse would be impeachment.

Recall that Bill Clinton was guilty as charged in 1999, but Senate Democrats couldn’t muster enough integrity to reach the two-thirds mandate for conviction. The next House could refer charges to the Senate, but it’s even less likely now that Democrats would muster the integrity to reach the two-thirds mandate.

The only way to avoid nationalizing the Clinton’s crime syndicate is to defeat Hillary Clinton at the polls.

SOURCE

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The Sharpest Contrasts Between Clinton and Trump

Freedom of Speech

We know, it’s a shocker that freedom of speech is even on the ballot. But believe it. The FEC is trying to outlaw conservative media and talk radio. The Ninth Circuit upheld a California law requiring pro-life crisis pregnancy centers to promote abortion clinics. Senators and attorneys general are seeking to use RICO laws against so-called “climate change deniers.” And the IRS has gotten away with targeting conservative groups. In other words, while Hillary Clinton may walk free, those who dissent from progressivism get criminal charges.

We will see more of that with Clinton in the White House — you can bet your higher taxes on it. In essence, Trump may be the last line of defense for free speech in this country.

Second Amendment

Here, the differences are as obvious as night and day. Clinton is 100% behind the agenda of gun-grabbers, and has praised the Australian gun confiscation of 1996. But most insidious is her desire to repeal the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.

In short, lawsuits from big-city mayors and other gun-grabbers backed by billionaires like George Soros and Michael Bloomberg could drown firearms manufacturers in legal battles — functionally killing the Second Amendment regardless of any pro-2A court ruling.

Confronting the Islamic State/Addressing Syria

Hillary Clinton’s approach of taking in more refugees is, at best, putting a Band-Aid on malignant melanoma. But it’s likely to be far worse. With all the trouble vetting refugees from the region, we could import the perpetrators of the next Paris-style attack.

For better or worse, Trump promises to “bomb the hell out of ISIS” — which, by reducing its power in the region, would help solve the Syrian refugee crisis.

Religious Freedom

Just as our free speech rights are under attack, so is religious liberty. The Hobby Lobby case was a 5-4 ruling — and it’s on the list of rulings the Left wants overturned. They also want to repeal the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. We’ve seen pharmacists in Washington state ordered to either stock abortion pills or shut down. We’ve seen bakeries close over wedding cakes. Under Clinton, we could easily see a federal version of those mandates — or at least, legal support for them.

The stakes are high, as Justice Samuel Alito noted in a dissent from the denial of cert in the Washington case: “Ralph’s [Thriftway] has raised more than ‘slight suspicion’ that the rules challenged here reflect antipathy toward religious beliefs that do not accord with the views of those holding the levers of government power. I would grant certiorari to ensure that Washington’s novel and concededly unnecessary burden on religious objectors does not trample on fundamental rights.”

Which brings us to…

Judicial Nominations

One thing can tie all of the previous four cases together: Who the next president nominates to serve on the Supreme Court and on lower federal courts. The fact is, much of our domestic policy — and even a not insignificant amount of foreign policy — is in the hands of the federal judiciary. It shouldn’t be that way, but it is.

These days, a state legislature requiring someone who wishes to vote to show the same ID required to get on a plane, buy a firearm, purchase alcohol or cigarettes, cash a check, attend an NAACP rally against voter ID requirements, and a whole host of other things lands you in federal court. Are your state lawmakers no longer willing to give Planned Parenthood money? A federal court may be the last word on that. Then there’s same-sex marriage — 31 states voted NO, but five Supreme Court justices had the final word. Even the Syrian refugee resettlement could be decided in the federal courts.

In short, the Left uses the federal courts to get their way when the American people reject their agenda at the ballot box. Clinton’s judicial nominees would continue that trend. Trump has a list of strict constructionists for the Supreme Court — and some of them could end up at the Courts of Appeal, which have been packed by Barack Obama.

SOURCE

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

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

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