Historically speaking, Trump's foreign policy not all that radical

Ivan Eland

Although the administration of President Donald Trump is still new to its duties and has been somewhat erratic with its foreign policy plans, a historic comparison with past presidents shows that while Trump is indeed shaking things up with a few key ideas, he's largely following the usual route on international relations.

Leaving Russia's meddling in the recent election aside for a moment, it should be noted that Trump's long-running efforts to better relations with Russia are nothing new. Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush both attempted but failed to carry out resets with our Cold War enemy. Their efforts fell short because they refused to empathize with Russia's intrinsically poor security situation.

Russia has been invaded across the North European Plain many times, including the Nazis' catastrophic attack during World War II that cost millions of Russian civilian lives. And although the United States is half a world away, in the wake of the Cold War, it advanced a hostile NATO alliance to Russia's borders and today still performs military maneuvers in Eastern European ally nations.

Russia is still weak and its meddling in Eastern Ukraine, including its annexation of Crimea, has primarily been aimed at keeping a vital country out of NATO.

While Trump may come across as more sympathetic than usual to Russia's perspective and has called NATO "obsolete," his vice president, secretary of defense, and secretary of homeland security all recently traveled to Europe to reiterate support for the alliance. While there, they reminded some of our wealthy allies of their financial obligations to the pact, something past administrations have failed to do.

That said, tough guy Trump needs to stiffen his spine and tell Russia bluntly and publicly that there will be hell to pay if it ever tries to meddle in American elections again. If China and other would-be meddlers hear the message too, even better.

In regards to immigration, while Trump's travel ban seems to have been based on a wildly exaggerated threat of terrorism, his plans to deport illegal immigrants en masse follow in the footsteps of Obama, whose administration did more than its fair share of deporting.

Even Trump's proposed wall isn't totally new. America's southern border is already sporadically fenced in some locations along its extensive course.

Trump has talked about reversing Obama's thawing of relations with Cuba and scrapping the international nuclear deal with Iran. But Michael Flynn, an anti-Iran hawk, is out as national security adviser, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, though he takes a dim view of Iran, has supported living with the deal. The agreement, which will therefore probably survive, will delay an Iranian nuclear weapon for at least 10 to 15 years, a positive outcome for the entire world and particularly Iran's primary adversaries - the Arab Gulf states and Israel.

The one area where significant change could occur is his ill-advised protectionist trade policies, a centerpiece of his campaign.

He has scrapped Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would have further opened up trade with Asian nations but was politically dead even before Trump took office. In addition, he's threatened to increase tariffs on Mexico, China and on U.S. companies that manufacture products overseas and send them back to U.S. shores.

Such initiatives could cause worldwide trade war, as did the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff during Herbert Hoover's administration. The vast reduction in world trade caused by that measure, and adverse foreign reactions to it, deepened the Great Depression and helped cause the conditions leading to World War II. Hopefully, Trump's rhetoric in this area will turn out to be mostly bluster.

In the end, Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of Defense Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly will probably end up taming Trump's foreign policy - for better or for worse.

SOURCE

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Obama's Intelligence Chief Says `No Evidence' of Trump-Russian Collusion; Media Focus on Wiretap Denial

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on Sunday denied knowledge of any wire-tapping of then-nominee or president-elect Donald Trump - but in an assertion receiving considerably less press attention also stated he had no knowledge of evidence of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Clapper appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" a day after the president alleged on Twitter that President Obama had tapped Trump Tower before the election.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer in a series of subsequent tweets said Trump wanted congressional investigations into Russian activity to be broadened to probe "whether executive branch investigative powers were abused in 2016." Spicer also said the White House would not comment further about the allegations until that happens.

Clapper made two key statements during Sunday's interview.

First, he said that the agencies he oversaw as DNI - which include the CIA, FBI Intelligence branch and National Security Agency - did not conduct any "wiretap activity" against Trump or his campaign and that to his knowledge no FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court order for such surveillance was issued.

He stressed that he could only speak for the intelligence community, not for state or local agencies or for government entities authorized under Title Three of the 1968 "Wiretap Act."

But Clapper then went on to say that to his knowledge there was "no evidence" of "collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians."

"We did not include any evidence in our report - and I say `our,' that's NSA, FBI and CIA, with my office, the Director of National Intelligence - that had anything, that had any reflection of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. There was no evidence of that included in our report."

"I understand that," said interviewer Chuck Todd. "But does it exist?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"If it existed, it would have been in this report?"

"This could have unfolded or become available in the time since I left the government.," Clapper replied, "but at the time I - we had no evidence of such collusion."

Clapper stepped down on January 20, the day Obama's term ended.

The former DNI told Todd it was in the interests of the president Republicans and Democrats alike, and the country, to get to the bottom of the Russia allegations.

"Because it's such a distraction," he said. "And certainly the Russians have to be chortling about the success of their efforts to sow dissention in this country."

Clapper said towards the end of the interview he had little doubt he would be called upon to testify in congressional probes into the Russian activities.

A non-exhaustive review of media coverage in the hours after the NBC show aired found just a small handful of headlines that focused on Clapper's comments about no evidence having been found of Russia-Trump collusion.

In contrast, scores of news stories' headlines focused on Clapper's no-wiretapping remarks, ranging from straight "Clapper denies" to the liberal PoliticusUSA site's breathless, "Clapper Destroys Trump's Wild Accusations Saying There Was No Such Wiretap Activity."

Rare exceptions included a McClatchy report headlined "Obama's intel chief says he knows of no evidence of Trump-Russia collusion" and a Newsmax story headlined "Obama Intel Chief Clapper: Denies Wire Tap Claim, `No Evidence of Collusion' Between Trump, Russians."

NBCNews.com's own homepage on Sunday evening included five headlines linked to the wiretapping claim - and none to Clapper's no-Russia-Trump collusion claim.

SOURCE

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EEOC's Budget Should Be Cut to Protect Free Speech and Jobs

Congress should cut the budget of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Doing so will help the economy and protect civil liberties. As legal scholars and journalists have noted, the EEOC's actions have often discouraged hiring and undermined free speech.

Under the Obama administration, the EEOC sued employers for using hiring criteria required by state law, demanding that they violate health and safety codes. It even pressured employers to hire felons as armed guards. The EEOC sued companies that quite reasonably refuse to employ truck drivers with a history of heavy drinking, even though companies that hire them will be sued under state personal-injury laws when they have an accident. The EEOC has also used costly lawsuits to pressure businesses into hiring or rehiring incompetent employees. In 2011, a hotel chain had to pay $132,500 for dismissing an autistic clerk who did not do his job properly, in order to get the EEOC to dismiss its lawsuit. In 2012, a caf‚ owner had to pay thousands of dollars for not selecting a hearing- and speech-impaired employee for a customer-service position that the employee was unqualified for.

The EEOC has also been criticized by free speech advocates and legal scholars. In 2016, the EEOC was criticized for ordering a racial harassment investigation simply because an agency employee repeatedly wore a harmless cap with the Gadsden flag on it (a flag whose imagery and origins are not racist at all).

Since the EEOC is an independent agency (it currently has three Democratic commissioners and only one Republican commissioner), this problem will likely persist even under the new administration. Last month, the EEOC angered free-speech advocates by using an erroneous definition of religious harassment to force an agency to pay over $20,000 to a lawyer and Labor Department employee because a supervisor used the word "Hebrew slave" to describe himself.

The EEOC sometimes exhibits contempt for the very laws it administers. The EEOC was found guilty of systematic, illegal, reverse discrimination in Jurgens v. Thomas (1982), which it continued to illegally engage in for years, even after being ordered to stop. (See Terry v. Gallegos, 926 F.Supp. 679 (W.D. Tenn. 1996)). EEOC officials have also frequently committed sexual misconduct. (See, e.g., Spain v. Gallegos, 26 F.3d 439 (3rd Cir.1994)). The Washington Post reported in 2009 that "the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, responsible for ensuring that the nation's workers are treated fairly, has itself willfully violated the Fair Labor Standards Act on a nationwide basis with its own employees."

Given the EEOC's contempt for the law, and its attacks on free speech, its budget should be cut substantially. Budget cuts would effectively force EEOC staff to focus more on its core areas of responsibility - such as processing valid federal employee discrimination claims-rather than suing private employers, or stretching the law to hold agencies liable for perfectly legal conduct. There are many overlapping legal remedies for discrimination and federal employee dismissal, so a smaller EEOC budget need not lead to valid discrimination or harassment claims going unaddressed. Most discrimination victims already sue without any help from the EEOC.

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 Mediterranean diet faith is struggling on

That eating like a traditional Greek or Southern Italian is good for you is now widely believed. We must not let it upset our faith that mainly Nordic populations such as Iceland, Finland and Australia have the longest lifespans, must we?

The faith has come under heavy attack in the medical journals lately.  In 2011, for instance a Dutchman named Piet van den Brandt found that the diet had some benefit to women but none to men.  Icelandic men should marry Greek women, or something.

That finding doesn't seem to have fazed our dogged Dutchman, however.  He has just found that the diet helps to prevent breast cancer -- but only a minority of cancers in post-menopausal women.  Still a pretty thin finding for him, I would think.

And it may even be true.  A diet that does not bother most people can be bad for some subsets of people. A Southeast Asian diet rich in peanuts can kill some allergic Westerners, for instance.

I should note that the layman's report below overstates the findings.  The connection between diet and ER negative  breast cancer was extremely weak -- to the point of negligibility.  It is certainly not enough to influence anyone's diet.  The connection was statistically significant only by virtue of the large sample size. And the connection between diet and ER positive breast cancer was not even statistically significant. So the layman's summary immediately below is essentially fake news.

Report below plus abstract:


Eating a Mediterranean diet rich in vegetables, nuts, fish and olive oil cuts the risk of getting a deadly form of breast cancer by 40 per cent, a study has found.

The diet – which keeps white bread, red meat and sweets to a minimum – significantly reduced the likelihood of oestrogen-receptor negative breast cancer in post-menopausal women.

The cancer is more likely to prove fatal than other types. It is often harder to treat than hormone-sensitive cancer. Nearly a third of the 55,000 women in the UK diagnosed with breast cancer each year have this form. Around 11,400 women die from breast cancer in the UK every year.

A typical Mediterranean diet includes high intakes of plant-based proteins such as nuts, lentils and beans, whole grains, fish and 'healthy' monounsaturated fats such as olive oil.

Refined sugars and saturated fat are kept to a minimum.

Professor Piet van den Brandt, from Maastricht University in the Netherlands, led the study of 62,000 women over 20 years. He said: 'Our research can help to shine a light on how dietary patterns can affect our cancer risk.

A Mediterranean diet only had a weak non-significant effect on the risk of hormone-sensitive oestrogen-receptor positive breast cancer, the study published in the International Journal of Cancer found

SOURCE

Mediterranean diet adherence and risk of postmenopausal breast cancer: results of a cohort study and meta-analysis

Piet A. van den Brandt et al.

Abstract

The Mediterranean Diet (MD) has been associated with reduced mortality and risk of cardiovascular diseases, but there is only limited evidence on cancer. We investigated the relationship between adherence to MD and risk of postmenopausal breast cancer (and estrogen/progesterone receptor subtypes, ER/PR). In the Netherlands Cohort Study, 62,573 women aged 55–69 years provided information on dietary and lifestyle habits in 1986. Follow-up for cancer incidence until 2007 (20.3 years) consisted of record linkages with the Netherlands Cancer Registry and the Dutch Pathology Registry PALGA. Adherence to MD was estimated through the alternate Mediterranean Diet Score excluding alcohol. Multivariate case–cohort analyses were based on 2,321 incident breast cancer cases and 1,665 subcohort members with complete data on diet and potential confounders. We also conducted meta-analyses of our results with those of other published cohort studies.

We found a statistically significant inverse association between MD adherence and risk of ER negative (ER−) breast cancer, with a hazard ratio of 0.60 (95% Confidence Interval, 0.39–0.93) for high versus low MD adherence (ptrend = 0.032). MD adherence showed only nonsignificant weak inverse associations with ER positive (ER+) or total breast cancer risk. In meta-analyses, summary HRs for high versus low MD adherence were 0.94 for total postmenopausal breast cancer, 0.98 for ER+, 0.73 for ER− and 0.77 for ER − PR− breast cancer. Our findings support an inverse association between MD adherence and, particularly, receptor negative breast cancer. This may have important implications for prevention because of the poorer prognosis of these breast cancer subtypes.

SOURCE

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Salt. Medical wisdom tipped on its ear once again

I have been pointing out for years the research findings showing that it is lack of salt rather than an excess of it that is the problem.  So it is good to see the research findings slowly beginning to percolate into medical practice

For years we have been told to cut down on our salt intake, but one health expert has now said we need to eat MORE salt.

Professor Salim Yusuf has argued that eating less than three grams of salt per day is worse for your health and can increase the risk of heart failure.

The professor, who stepped down from the role of president of the World Health Federation earlier this year, disagreed with current health advice given by Public Health England, which says to eat no more than six grams of salt per day.

'It is futile to target such low intakes and, moreover, it may well be harmful. Studies show below about three grams of sodium per day there is increased mortality, heart attack and heart failure,' he told the Sunday Express.

'Reaching sodium intake levels below 2.3g day over a sustainable period of time is not feasible. There is no evidence that this is beneficial and there are concerns it could be harmful.'

Professor Yusuf suggests eating between 7.5g and 12.5g of salt per day.

However, Alison Tedstone, chief nutritionist at Public Health England (PHE), told the newspaper that reducing salt consumption helps lower blood pressure, adding: 'We are still eating a third more than we should. That's why industry needs to continue to reduce salt in everyday foods.'

PHE argues reducing salt intake can help aid blood pressure levels, meaning there is a lower chance of people of suffering a heart attack, stroke or vascular dementia.

But does it?  Does salt control reduce adverse cardiovascular events?  Is the theory right?  It is not.  But the theory still hangs on, facts regardless

SOURCE

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Hollywood as Science Experts

Let's try and get this right.

These are people who excel at pretending they're someone else - mostly people who never existed - while mouthing words they memorized, written by someone else, while being told how to say those words, by another person, in order to maximize the emotional impact on an audience.  All the while being professionally filmed by a bunch of others to enhance that image.

That makes them look smarter, faster, tougher and depending on the theme of this fictional character they're promoting more empathetic, more compassionate, more likable, or more sympathetic, but that's all illusion. That's why they call it acting.

Let's get this right.  Being a celebrity is their only qualification! Not being an actor, singer or comedian - being a celebrity!  Why don't they send in actors, singers or comedians who no one ever heard of? Because they're actors, singers or comedians no one ever heard of. They're just actors, singers or comedians - not celebrities!

How many actual scientists who testify does anyone know?  Unless you're involved in their fields - or as in my case I write about them - the public is clueless as to who they are.  So why are they there?  They're there because they really are experts, not celebrities playing at being an expert.

Although in recent years we're finding so many of these experts are actors like Bill Nye, The Science Guy, and Doctor Oz, who has been ripped by scientists for a lot of their views. These 'experts' they have to face the music within the scientific community after they spew out nonsense. Who do these actors have to answer to?

When they're called before some Congressional panel to testify about issues in which they're completely unqualified to speak - that's not fine - because they're totally unqualified to be there unless they're there to sit down, shut their mouths, listen and learn. But that's not what "celebrities" do and that's not celebrities are used to.

Once these people reach a certain level of celebrity they live in a world of "yes"! Everything they say and do is "news", everything they think is "important", every utterance is splashed over the media as if what they say really means something - or anything for that matter - and many in the public eat it up.  But when you turn out the lights - you get someone who was parking cars, pumping gas and waiting on tables, but now they've become 'stars' and society hungers for their insights on life.

What a sorry state we're in

SOURCE

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A low information voter



At one of the DC marches, one woman carried a sign that said "I dream women will someday have the same rights as guns."  Huh??

Does that mean that this brilliant liberal wants...

- you to have to wait 72 hrs after you go out and buy a woman to have your background investigation completed?

- women to be banned from entering school and college campuses?

- women to be banned from any establishment selling alcohol?

- women to be banned from polling places on election days?

- women to be banned from any official government group meetings?

- all women to be banned from all airports?

- you to have to pay a fee to the state before you can carry a woman on your person?

- some women to be banned outright simply because they look too scary?

- all women to be locked up at all times that they are not in use?

Hmmmm.  Does she also think that all guys should have more than one?

That all women should come with silencers?

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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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Levin: Conservatism Can Never Be Dead – It’s a Way of Life

(And is also rooted in the personality)

Nationally syndicated radio talk show host Mark Levin passionately defended conservatism on Monday, referring to it as “a way of life” that “can never be dead” despite the attempts of the liberal media and some forces within the conservative movement.

“The lib media wants it that way,” said Mark Levin. “They want conservatism dead, but conservatism can never be dead. As long as there is a desire for liberty and individualism, as long as there’s a desire for faith, and there are believers, conservatism can’t go away.”

Below is a transcript of Levin’s comments from the show:

“I keep reading almost breathless and excited reporters writing that CPAC demonstrated that conservatism is no more. I also read it from people I’ve never heard of before on pseudo-conservative websites.

“Well that’s not the CPAC I was at. I can’t speak for the people who were speaking, but as I went around – and I spent about three hours there – and spoke with an enormous number of particularly young people. They’re wrong. They want Trump to succeed, and they endorse the conservative parts of his agenda. And they’re skeptical about the other parts of his agenda. And this is what you would expect from people who are conservative. And they also know the enemy, the left, is diabolical.

“But there seem to be efforts to redefine conservatism and conservative institutions by, among others, conservatives, who— It’s very strange. It just is. It’s very strange, at least, to me.

“Not by the lib media. The lib media wants it that way. They want conservatism dead, but conservatism can never be dead.

“As long as there is a desire for liberty and individualism, as long as there’s a desire for faith, and there are believers, conservatism can’t go away.

“As I said, it’s a way of life. Progressivism, Marxism, nationalism, populism, they’re not ways of life; they’re ideologies that require government to impose a will, somebody else’s will, on you. That’s not conservatism.”

SOURCE

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These Cases Prove the Left Is Wrong to Dismiss Voter Fraud

Voter fraud is back in the news, and liberals are not happy about it.

President Donald Trump has pledged that his administration will fully investigate voter fraud in U.S. elections and recently appointed Vice President Mike Pence to lead the charge.

This is a welcome development. Free and fair elections are the foundation of our political system. If Americans are to have faith in that system, they need to be able to say with confidence that the results of these contests accurately reflect the will of the people.

But for some, the integrity of the ballot box is less important than victory. These fraudsters and thieves are not above rigging elections and stealing votes to advance their careers and their causes.

And because few states have the policies needed to detect and prevent their fraud, there is little risk of being caught. In these situations, it is all too easy to thwart the will of voters.

Of course, there are many on the left who prefer to bury their head in the sand, insisting that voter fraud is a red herring meant only to justify acts of “voter suppression.” It makes for a powerful narrative, but liberals can hide from the facts for only so long.

We have developed and maintained The Heritage Foundation’s voter fraud database, listing confirmed cases of election fraud that have resulted in criminal convictions. Our records are the incontrovertible proof the left insists does not exist—and the database grows larger as new convictions roll in nearly every week.

Today, Heritage is adding 13 cases to our voter fraud database. As of this writing, we have documented 755 confirmed criminal convictions in 474 voter fraud cases from across the country.

Here are three of the newest cases from 2017.

Texas

Rosa Maria Ortega, a noncitizen, was found guilty on two counts of voting in the November 2012 general election and the 2014 Republican primary runoff. Ortega claimed she thought she was a citizen, and blamed her lack of education for the mix-up, but prosecutors pointed out that Ortega had previously indicated on a driver’s license application that she was a noncitizen.

A judge sentenced her to eight years’ imprisonment, after which she faces the possibility of deportation.

Virginia

Vafalay Massaquoi pleaded guilty to one count of falsifying voter registration applications and two counts of forging a public record. While working for New Virginia Majority, a liberal advocacy group, Massaquoi filed voter applications for completely made-up Alexandria residents. An Alexandria official noticed the voter applications were all filled out in the same handwriting and turned the documents over to the authorities.

Massaquoi was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for each count, to run concurrently, but his sentence will be suspended pending his good behavior. He was also ordered to perform 500 hours of community service.

Colorado

While working for Black Diamond Outreach, a Denver-based community outreach organization, Maureen Marie Moss forged 34 signatures on petitions she was circulating to get U.S. Senate candidate Jon Keyser on the ballot for the June 2016 primary.

Moss ultimately pleaded guilty to two counts, and was sentenced to four years’ probation on each count. She was also ordered to complete 250 hours of community service.

When it comes to election integrity, opponents of voter ID and other protective laws do not understand that absence of evidence is not the same thing as evidence of absence.

Voter fraud often goes undetected for a multitude of reasons. Many states lack the policies and procedures needed to detect fraud, either as it occurs or after the election. Prosecutors, forced to work with limited resources, often do not prioritize these cases, particularly after an election has occurred.

The Heritage Foundation’s report, “Does Your Vote Count?,” outlines reforms that states should adopt—including requiring photo identification, proof of citizenship, and entering into interstate cross-check programs—that will preserve the sanctity of the ballot box and protect the right of all citizens to cast a ballot.

These policies will finally make it possible to reliably detect, deter, and penalize election crimes.

Every instance of voter fraud is a threat to a system that guarantees every American the right to vote, and to have that vote counted. It is time to get serious about the integrity of our elections.

SOURCE

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Democrats Hypocritical on Recusal

Newly installed Attorney General Jeff Sessions is being harshly castigated over conflict of interest allegations that link him to last year’s non-scandal Russia scandal. Unsurprisingly, those Democrats who aren’t calling for his immediate removal from office are urging Sessions to recuse himself from any investigations into Donald Trump’s links to Russia. And, to his credit, that’s just what Sessions did late yesterday. As the National Review editors write, “Government officials ought to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Given that that standard has been honored mainly in the breach over the past eight years — especially in the Justice Department — Sessions’s decision is a marked improvement on the conduct of his most recent predecessors.”

On that note, let’s step back and evaluate several conflicts of interest the Leftmedia sidestepped when Barack Obama was in power. Let’s start with Justice Elena Kagan. Before her promotion to the Supreme Court, Kagan served as Obama’s solicitor general. Her job was to convince the High Court on the legality of Obama’s agenda. After her ascension to the Supreme Court, however, Kagan refused to recuse herself from NFIB v. Sebelius, the contentious ObamaCare case. This is critical because, despite the administration’s assurances, she was clearly involved in defending the health care overhaul as solicitor general. That ruling, you’ll recall, was 5-4, and it had a far bigger impact than any meetings Sessions had with Russian officials.

Then there’s Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Despite being, as Daniel Horowitz wrote last year, “a long-time activist in open borders activism,” she ignored her own prejudice and voted in United States v. Texas. This case pertained to Obama’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) program, more accurately described as executive amnesty. The only good thing that can be said of this case is that the 4-4 tie (Justice Antonin Scalia died before the vote) didn’t change a lower court’s ruling. Regardless, if Democrats were truly concerned about impartiality, Sotomayor would have stepped aside.

And finally, recall the utter malfeasance of former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who masqueraded last summer’s private meeting with Bill Clinton as a happenstance that included friendly small talk and nothing more. Democrats actually expected Americans to believe the exchange had nothing to do with the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email. Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi even called the meeting “serendipitous.” Despite the obvious conflict of interest, Lynch ultimately refused to recuse herself.

These are just a few examples of non-recusals. Democrat shenanigans go far beyond this. Remember that Eric Holder’s DOJ targeted media outlets and trafficked guns to Mexico as part of an elaborate gun control agenda. Where was the Democrat opposition then? The most embarrassing of hypocrisy came from Sen. Claire McCaskill, who this week claimed on Twitter: “I’ve been on the Armed Services Com for 10 years. No call or meeting w/Russian ambassador. Ever.” Yet that very same Twitter feed reveals that in 2013 and 2015, respectively, she tweeted “Off to meeting w/Russian Ambassador,” and, “Today calls with British, Russian, and German Ambassadors re: Iran deal.” Moreover, some 30 Democrat senators met with the Russian ambassador in 2015 as Obama was hawking his nuclear deal with Iran.

But now, there’s blood in the water, and the Left is doing its best to exploit it. The reality is that the Sessions uproar is a political witch hunt. One that Democrats embark on while ignoring their own hypocrisy.

SOURCE

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Why is Obama using a spokesperson to deny wiretap? The non-denial denial

A spokesman for former President Obama issued a statement denying the former president or his White House ordered a wiretap of Trump Tower during the election.

The statement came from the former president’s current spokesman Kevin Lewis on Saturday afternoon, after President Donald Trump made the accusation in a tweetstorm that shifted the focus of the news day.

There are still questions such as, why didn’t the 44th president issue the statement himself but rather opted to have it done through a spokesman who signed his name to it?

And, was it actually a denial? Jon Favreau‏, a speechwriter who worked for former President Obama during his administration, warned the media, and fellow liberals, not to paint the statement as a denial that Trump Tower was wiretapped.  He is correct. Nowhere in the “denial” is any denial that the wiretap occurred or that the Obama administration knew of it.

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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Biden Warns Against Delegitimizing the Courts, Undermining the Media

He's got a point.  Both the courts and the media are important checks and balances on an out of control administration. But it's not Trump who is delegitimizing them.  They have already delegitimized themselves -- by their furiously partisan reporting and their selective enforcement of the law.

That the 9th circuit ignored many precedents set by Obama and others in disallowing Trump's Muslim travel ban was blatant even for them.  So when a major part of the judiciary is so selective in enforcing the law, why should anyone have respect for them? Why is something wrong only when Trump does it?

And note that the media just bowed down to Obama's constant and explicit efforts to supplant legislation by regulations.  And the courts let a lot of that through as well

So Biden is right.  The present situation is a bad one for America -- but his side of politics is responsible for it.  One can only hope that Trump's judicial appointments will help restore the balance

Former Vice President Joe Biden spoke out Wednesday about efforts to undermine the press and “delegitimize the courts,” saying “an independent and free press is the fundamental element” in a functioning democracy.

Biden spoke about “the almost drumbeat of denigration of the institutional structures that govern us.”

“When you delegitimize the courts, you delegitimize the legislative body. It’s corrosive, and it makes it almost impossible to reach compromise,” he said during a speech where he was given the 2017 Congressional Patriot Award by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Biden said “if we undermine or destroy” the media, “we do it at our own peril.”

He said he’s taken more than his “fair share of hits from the press,” adding that he’s been “covered by the very best in the business and some of the worst.”

“Some of you press guys are lousy, just like some senators are lousy, like doctors are lousy, lawyers are lousy, but it doesn’t matter. We should never challenge the basic truth that an independent and free press is the fundamental element in functioning of our democracy,” Biden said.

Biden complained that politics “has become much too negative, too nasty, too petty, too personal, and yes, too partisan.”

“Compromise has literally become a dirty word,” he said. “We don’t just question other people’s judgment [when] we disagree with them, but we question their motivation now.”

“If you don’t agree with me, it’s because you’re in the pocket of somebody or if you don’t agree with me, you’re being bought off. If you don’t agree with me, it’s because you are not a good person. We don’t know each other anymore,” Biden said.

He said it’s hard to dislike someone “on the other side when you understand their problems.”

“We’ve got to stop being blinded by anger,” Biden said. “We’ve got to see each other again and continue to focus on hope and the things that unite us.

“I’ve always believed that we’re strongest when we’re one America, and I really mean that – rich, poor, middle-class, black, white, Hispanic, gay, straight, transgender - folks like my family and all of yours at some point who came to this country with a dream – new immigrants arriving today. One America. We’re all in this together. Everybody does their fair share. We can argue about what that share is… but we’ve got to move beyond where we are today,” he said.

SOURCE

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Reporters savaged Trump for suggesting liberals behind anti Jewish threats

Now a liberal king of fake news has been arrested for the offences

President Donald Trump this week, lamenting a national wave of phoned-in threats to Jewish community centers, countered the mainstream media’s insistence that Trump supporters were behind it by suggesting perhaps it was a liberal.

Reporters reacted with feral outrage, howling at the thought a liberal could be behind such vile threats, until the FBI arrested a suspect in connection with some of the threats.

He’s a liberal.  In fact, he’s a liberal reporter.  And he’s a nationally notorious liberal reporter.

“A St. Louis man has been arrested for making some of the bomb threats against Jewish community centers,” The Washington Examiner reports.

“According to a criminal complaint filed in the Southern District of New York, Juan Thompson was arrested on one count of cyberstalking.”

Thompson made threats to several Jewish community centers, as well as the New York headquarters of the Anti-Defamation League.

The Juan Thompson taken into custody is no stranger to media coverage.  He used to be on the other side of it.

Thompson was fired in 2015 from his job as a reporter at The Intercept after reporting on his interview with Scott Roof, the cousin of racist mass killer Dylann Roof. It was a massive scoop, and Thompson’s story grabbed national headlines.

But there was a problem.  Scott Roof didn’t exist.  Thompson made up the story and the quotes.  His editors looked into other stories he had written, and found many of them to be completely made up.

“Thompson fabricated several quotes in his stories and created fake email accounts that he used to impersonate people, one of which was a Gmail account in my name,” Intercept editor-in-chief Betsy Reed confessed to readers. One of the people Thompson impersonated through fake email accounts was Reed herself.

Thompson was back in the national news, but this time exposed as a liar.

After being bounced from The Intercept, Thompson landed a job at “Media Blackout USA” before being canned after writing just six stories.

Thompson’s writing are unapologetically leftist.  In  “‘No Justice, No Respect’: Why the Ferguson Riots Were Justified,” Thompson claimed to have been gassed by police while in Ferguson, Missouri.

“…any person who looks at Ferguson and does not recognize the root cause of it is not the least bit interested in confronting America’s institutionalized racism. He or she is committed to maintaining the current social order that was built to oppress and degrade black life. He or she is an opponent of justice and a proponent of white supremacy,” he wrote.

“You show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker,” he writes on his Twitter profile.

Thompson was planning to run for St. Louis Mayor.  As a socialist. “F–k it. I’m young, gifted, black, and a socialist and I’m running for mayor of St. Louis in 2017. #peoplepower,” he wrote on Twitter. (We deleted the expletive.)

“Make no mistake: #Chicago’s southside is about to be ethnically cleansed. It will look drastically different in 10 yrs,” he posted to Twitter Feb. 23, claiming President Trump was plotting to exterminate black people.

Thompson also took to Twitter to show off his latest tattoo, of Malcolm X, which he got in Cuba.  He also promoted anti-Trump “Resist” t-shirts.

Now he’s in custody for a series of bomb threats and threats to kill President Trump, which he made while impersonating a woman he once dated.  He claims he’s being framed by the “nasty white woman.”

“Thompson appears to have made some of the … threats as part of a sustained campaign to harass and intimidate” the woman, the FBI complaint reads.

“The defendant allegedly caused havoc, expending hundreds of hours of police and law enforcement resources to respond and investigate these threats,” said NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill. “We will continue to pursue those who peddle fear.”

All of this begs the question.  How did such an obvious liar and mentally unstable psychotic land multiple jobs at liberal media outlets?

And will liberals finally admit liberalism’s mainstream has a domestic terrorism problem?

SOURCE

Below is a picture of Juan Thompson, together with a picture of Jayson Blair, the famous creator of fake news at the NYT.  What makes such people think they can get away with totally made-up stuff?

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Soft on Russia?

Not Trump.  Obama/Clinton were much softer

If you want to contain rather than coddle Russia, you certainly would not do what Barack Obama did ahead of his 2012 presidential election. Recall if you will, Obama told then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that incoming President Vladimir Putin needed to “give me space” on missile defense and other major policy and security matters ahead of the 2012 presidential election, and that after the election Obama would have “more flexibility.” Medvedev said he would “transmit” the message to Putin.

So as opposed to Obama’s weak and subservient sop to Moscow, let’s examine if Donald Trump’s policy is promoting or containing Russian power. There are a couple of key elements:

First, Russia’s anemic economy is totally dependent on oil and gas prices, so what has Trump done — opened the gate on oil exploration to keep the price down. And in general, to ensure dominance over totalitarian and dictator states, Trump is taking action to rekindle America’s economic might.

Second, Trump is following Ronald Reagan’s playbook to rebuild our military to contain threats like Russian expansion into Ukraine, which got a yawn from Obama.

Make no mistake, Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary “Reset Button” Clinton, were soft on Russia. Trump, on the other hand, is restoring America’s standing in the world.

And as for the Demo claims that Jeff Sessions perjured himself in confirmation testimony, that’s all political theater designed to derail Trump’s momentum after his congressional address Tuesday night.

SOURCE

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Mattis livid at reports disputing value of Yemen raid

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is hopping mad about media reports disputing his assessment that the U.S. special operations raid in Yemen last month yielded "vital intelligence."

Aides say Mattis is particularly upset about an NBC News report suggesting that so far none of the intelligence gathered in the raid, which cost the life of Navy SEAL William "Ryan" Owens, has proven to be either "actionable or vital."

"That is inaccurate," said a senior Pentagon official, who said while much of the intelligence is still being exploited, the cache of seized computers, cell phones, and hard drive has already produced leads as to where other al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula terrorists were located in Yemen, and their contacts.

The official said the raid was considered worth the risk of sending U.S. ground forces because AQAP has a history of plotting, inspiring, and exporting terror to America and the West, and because the U.S. has no military presence on the ground.

The U.S. said AQAP was behind the "underwear bomber," Boston Marathon bombing, and the 2015 attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris.

As if to underscore that the Jan. 29 raid gave the U.S. a better idea of where to strike in Yemen, U.S. warplanes and drones struck a suspected al Qaeda hideout in a mountainous region of Yemen on Thursday, according to the Associated Press.

The Pentagon has consistently said that the raid was a success, and that it was a worthwhile mission given that AQAP is the "most capable element of al Qaeda in exporting terror to the west."

"Valuable and actionable intelligence was taken in this operation," said Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, in a Pentagon briefing earlier this month.

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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It is now Trump's party

President Trump's first address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night underscored how he has redefined the Republicans' political base and their policy message on issues from trade to immigration to deficits to international alliances. While he struck a sunnier tone than he did in his inaugural address six weeks ago, when he had talked darkly of "American carnage," he once again warned that the nation was threatened with decline at home and threats from abroad.

He had led a political "earthquake" of disenchanted American voters in last year's election, he boasted. "They were united by one very simple but crucial demand, that America must put its own citizens first," he declared, "because only then can we truly make America great again."

(In the text distributed by the White House, Trump's familiar four-word campaign theme appeared in all caps.)

The hourlong speech was in many ways a conventional presidential address, with a laundry list of proposals, allusions to American history and tributes to American heroes. That's notable in part because so much about Trump's presidency has been unconventional — and because many of his populist, nationalist prescriptions that defy Republican orthodoxy are becoming part of the GOP mainstream.

"My job is not to represent the world," he said as he discussed the U.S. role around the globe. "My job is to represent the United States of America."

In the ornate House chamber Tuesday, Republican senators and representatives gave him repeated standing ovations, though only a handful had endorsed his candidacy before his nomination became inevitable. (Some of them didn't do so even then.)

In a final sign that his takeover of the GOP, once viewed as hostile, was complete: 84% of Republican-leaning voters in the Pew Research Center poll approved of the job Trump is doing in the White House, a level of support that nearly matches what Barack Obama received among Democrats at this point in his presidency, in 2009, and is a bit better than the backing Ronald Reagan was getting among Republicans in 1981.

"In the first 30 days it's hard to think about how he could have cemented his relationship with the conservative heart and soul of the party any better," says Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, which sponsors CPAC. "I think it's indisputable that he is the political head of the Republican Party."

That said, strains and a spiderweb of fractures in the GOP already are apparent as Trump continues to face allegations about his campaign's ties to Russia and gets more enmeshed in the details of the proposals he had outlined only in broad strokes before. On Tuesday afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., warned that the president's budget plan to slash State Department funding, an idea floated just 24 hours earlier, probably couldn't pass.

And policymakers in both parties were roiled after TV anchors emerged from a luncheon with the president to report that a "senior administration official" told them Trump was open to negotiating a comprehensive immigration bill, language that typically indicates a path to legal status or even citizenship for undocumented workers.

There turned out to be no such conciliatory language in the president's public remarks about dealing with the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants now living in the United States, though. Instead, Trump reiterated his pledge to build a wall along the southwestern border and introduced guests he had invited to sit in the gallery who had seen family members killed by illegal immigrants.

In the first 40 days of his tenure, Trump has demonstrated the power of executive action, ordering limits on new regulations and laying the groundwork for more aggressive deportation of illegal immigrants.

However, reaching his most consequential goals, including a repeal of the Affordable Care Act and an overhaul of the tax code, will require building congressional coalitions to pass legislation. Providing some details about what he wants to see in a big health care bill, he called on "all Democrats and Republicans in the Congress to work with us to save Americans from this imploding Obamacare disaster."

Republicans applauded that line. Democrats didn't.

The tumultuous start to Trump's tenure that has been a textbook reminder of American system of checks and balances. A federal appeals court decision blocked the immigration order he had signed with fanfare; another is still being drafted. In the wake of noisy protests at town-hall meetings, congressional Republicans are struggling to devise a health care plan to replace Obamacare. His national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was forced out of the White House in a controversy about Russia's role in the election that is far from over.

Trump sought to pivot from all that in a speech he read almost verbatim from the teleprompter, a contrast with the freewheeling style he has displayed since he launched his long-shot presidential bid. He started with a mention of Black History Month and a denunciation of anti-Semitic violence, and he avoided his most provocative rhetoric against Muslims and his attacks on the news media.

With his victory in November, Trump made the Republican Party of Main Street and Wall Street also the party of working-class white voters who felt sidelined in a globalized economy. The GOP had long been the party of free trade; the new president denounces multilateral trade deals and already has pulled out of the Trans Pacific Partnership. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has pursued a long crusade to get control of Social Security and Medicare costs, part of the traditional GOP focus on the deficit; the White House on Monday said the president would keep his campaign promise not to touch those programs.

"Donald J. Trump has expanded the base, there’s no two ways about it," says Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., the first member of Congress to endorse his campaign and still a booster. "The loss of manufacturing jobs, good jobs, going to Mexico and going to China have decimated upstate New York and certainly Western New York and it’s decimated Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin. And those workers, the good middle-class families, have said enough is enough."

That, he says, is what put Donald J. Trump in the White House and standing before joint session of Congress.

SOURCE

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How Trump voters feel now

From a Left-leaning survey researcher

One of my biggest lessons so far is how wrong the stereotypes are. For instance, if you live in Massachusetts or California or New York, you don’t need to drive to the Midwest to find a Trump voter. They are in your office, in your neighborhood, and in your places of worship. Some of them lied to pollsters and read Facebook posts from friends about how bigoted and evil — and yes, deplorable — they were. Many of them voted for Trump reluctantly, agonizing over how they could overlook his lies and attacks. Now, they no longer feel alone.

Take Sheila, a 49- year-old actuary from Eastern Massachusetts. She was always a Democrat, but her perspective changed over time. Her work at an insurance company required her to speak with customers who were claiming reimbursement for their injuries. “It seemed like every call I did was a person who wasn’t working, who was living off the system, “ she explained. “It was classic: people faking headaches and whiplash just to get another $5,000, and it made me cynical.” Sheila voted for Trump, despite being “horrified about some of the things he said,” in the hope that things would change. “The country has gone way too far to the left, and sometimes you have to take a sharp right to correct it.”

Sheila explained to me that she doesn’t talk about whom she voted for because she is worried about losing friends, but she is happy right now with Trump. She wonders whether anyone has noticed that our new President is trying to communicate clearly, working seven days a week, and doing everything he promised in record time. She loves his efforts to cut taxes, to try to make our country more secure, to limit lobbying by former politicos, and to put people in cabinet positions who have executive experience. “When I do admit I voted for Trump, people attack me,” she added.

Like Sheila, the Trump voters I connect with weekly are very hopeful, and many are downright exhilarated. Some voted for Trump because they wanted a strong and decisive leader; many hated the Clintons; some were torn and decided to go for change; and yes, some had lost their jobs to companies that outsourced them overseas.

At the moment, there is only one area in which the Trump voters I talked to are generally unhappy. It’s not the cabinet appointments or policy decisions, but rather the haphazardness with which work is getting done — especially the recent immigration ban, which most support. “I am not worried about executive orders, because Obama used them day in and day out also,’’ said Charles from Texas. “However, it just seems that things are so stupidly executed. I wonder who is in charge, and I am betting that some heads will roll shortly.”

And from Karen in Michigan, “ If Trump is a good businessman, he needs to use more of his business skill to make his organization work.” Or from Sherman in Kentucky, “It is so important to slow down immigration and to get our act together on how we vet refugees. I would rather have seen this implemented slowly and well.” Or from Karl in Montana, “As my grandma always said, ‘Haste makes waste.’ It pains me to see such a colossal screw-up as the immigration fiasco, when the original intent was well founded.” They feel this way despite Trump’s claim that the White House is a fine-tuned machine.

SOURCE

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Ben Stein calls out the media

During an interview on CNN about President Donald Trump’s decision to not attend the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) dinner, writer, producer, and speechwriter Ben Stein said he is not surprised because the media treat Trump like a “punching bag day after day,” and CNN and the New York Times are “slamming him” daily, always “negative,” constantly searching for “a scandal.”

On the Feb. 25 edition of CNN Newsroom, host Brianna Keilar explained that Ronald Reagan was the last president to not attend one of the WHCA events – because he had been shot in an assassination attempt – and asked Stein about President Trump’s decision not to attend.

“I'm not surprised and I'm not disappointed,” said Stein. “I don't blame Mr. Trump one bit for doing it. I mean, he's a punching bag day after day after day in the media, especially what's called the mainstream media. And I don't blame him for not wanting to go and be a punching bag in person.”

When asked about Trump’s remarks that the media are the enemy of the people and they concoct “fake news,” Stein said, “Well, I wouldn't say that all of the media is the enemy of the people. Look, every day you pick up The New York Times, every day they're slamming, slamming, slamming him.”

“I'm a great fan of CNN, I watch it quite faithfully,” he continued.  “Every day CNN is slamming him, slamming him, slamming him. Every day, they're looking for a scandal.”

“They're just turning the woods upside down looking for a scandal,” said Stein.  “They're hoping, I think, to do to him what they did to Nixon a long time ago. And, you know, still haven't found any real scandals.”

“And with all due respect, I don't blame him for being furious at them,” said Stein. “And I think he's got a lot of company.

Stein further said, “I'm out there giving speeches all around the country all the time, people -- an awful lot of people are not great fans of the media, and they see the media as an unelected aristocracy, an effete corps of impudent snobs, as Vice President Agnew called them a long time ago, who are dumping all over the mainstream of America. And I think Mr. Trump has a lot of company.”

SOURCE

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

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

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A Nation of Immigrants — Only if They Assimilate

I am writing this column in Japan, a country whose crime rate is the lowest among countries with large populations. I asked my Japanese translator, a middle-aged woman, what she thought.

“Why is there is so little crime in Japan?” I asked.

Without taking a moment to reflect, she responded, “Because we don’t allow immigration.”

Anyone who visits Japan is struck by the ethnic homogeneity of the nation. If you meet a Caucasian, a black or a Hispanic in Japan, you can be all but certain that the person is visiting or studying there, not a citizen.

Likewise in the United States, there is direct correlation between ethnic homogeneity and low levels of violence. According to 2016-2017 data, the four states with the lowest percentages of violence are:

Vermont — where 95 percent of the population is one race (white).

Maine — where 95 percent of the population is one race (white).

Wyoming — where roughly 93 percent of the population is one race (white).

New Hampshire — where roughly 94 percent of the population is one race (white).

Sweden, which for much of its modern history has had among the world’s lowest rates of violent crime, was almost always as homogenous as Japan. Now that it has admitted hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, it is no longer a homogenous country, and its levels of violence have increased dramatically.

All this leads to a particular rule, which is, in order to maintain a low crime rate and social stability, a country has only two choices: Do not allow immigrants into the country, or allow immigrants into the country, but be certain to assimilate them into the native population as quickly as possible.

The second choice has been America’s choice throughout most of its history, and it has been uniquely successful in shaping people from all over the world and from every background into one nation known as Americans. One of America’s three fundamental principles has been e pluribus unum, or “out of many” (the other two, as our coinage testifies, are liberty and In God We Trust). And that is precisely what America has done.

But since the 1960s, the Left has supplanted e pluribus unum and its national American identity with the antithetical doctrines of diversity and multiculturalism.

Diversity and multiculturalism celebrate the national/ethnic identities of the nations from where American immigrants came instead of celebrating the American identity and traditional American values.

The result is the beginning of the end of the United States as we have known it since its inception.

The Left constantly repeats “we are a nation of immigrants” without citing the other half of that fact — “who assimilate into America.” The Left mocks the once-universally held American belief in the melting pot. But the melting pot is the only way for a country composed of immigrants to build a cohesive society.

America was never just “a nation of immigrants.” America was always a nation of immigrants who sought to become — or at least were taught by American public schools and by the general American culture to become — Americans.

If America becomes a nation of nonassimilating immigrants, or a nation consisting of nonassimilating ethnic, racial and national groups who are already here, it will cease being a glorious idea and become just another nation torn by conflicting interest groups. These various groups will fight one another — first verbally and then, perhaps, violently (and America will see more and more violence) — just as France, Sweden and Germany have seen since they began taking in millions of immigrants, many of whom have no intention of becoming Frenchmen, Swedes or Germans.

Contrary to one of the Left’s more mendacious claims, diversity has not been America’s great strength. America’s great strength has been forging an American identity out of diversity.

But the Left, with its identity politics and commitment to multiculturalism — as expressed, for example, by ballots in dozens of languages, the proliferation of ethnic studies departments at universities and the allowance of all-black dorms and graduation ceremonies — is undoing that.

If you want to understand the immigration crisis, just know that because the Left has undone the second choice, it has made the first choice — Japan’s choice — look tenable to many for the first time in American history.

SOURCE

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The Pouting and Shouting Left Is Just Being Itself

I'd almost forgotten how unreasonable the Left can be when out of power, but liberals are giving us a daily refresher course, and it's almost hard to take seriously - except we must.

They describe everything President Donald Trump does in hyperbolic terms. He's a fascist. He's destroying our liberties. He disrespects the rule of law. He represents a threat to humanity. He is going to start a world war. He is a danger to the freedom of the press. He needs to be impeached.

A few quick examples. America did fine for 240 years without a lawless federal mandate requiring all public school districts to allow transgender students to use bathrooms that match their gender identity rather than those that correspond with their actual gender. According to liberals, the world is coming to an end. Trump has dealt a devastating blow to this beleaguered group of people, and he's an ogre. In fact, Trump lawfully reversed a lawless order, which will result in leaving the matter to the states to decide. Far from harming this minuscule group, he is protecting all other people from the concern that they or their children will have to share the same bathroom with those of the opposite gender.

Sunsara Taylor, an activist with Refuse Fascism, appeared on Tucker Carlson's Fox News Channel program to rant maniacally about how Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are operating out of "Hitler's playbook." Trump, she said, "is more dangerous than Hitler ever could have been." She called Trump and Pence a "danger to humanity" but offered no evidence they had done anything to justify her ridiculous charges. From what I could tell, Taylor's main concern is that Trump is trying to advance a conservative agenda while in control of "the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world." Conservatism plus nukes apparently equals a clear and present danger to mankind.

Before you dismiss this as a one-off exception to normally rational behavior, consider that Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota - who is vying to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee, no less - said he is open to calls to begin impeachment proceedings against Trump. "I think that Donald Trump has already done a number of things which legitimately raise the question of impeachment," said Ellison. And Ellison is not an outlier. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) also called for Trump's impeachment, describing Trump's team as "a bunch of scumbags."

Such lovely tolerant liberals took to social media to attack first lady Melania Trump, mocking her accent and religion - some calling her a whore, others a hostage - because she recited the Lord's Prayer at a campaign rally.

The glaring irony with all this is that it is liberals who are hateful and intolerant, authoritarian and lawless. They are the ones who represent a threat to our liberties - not Trump, Republicans or conservatives.

It's worth noting that almost every charge these breathless critics make against Trump is baseless and grounded on their irrational fears of what he might do rather than anything he's done. It's also remarkable that though these concerns are exaggerated when applied to Trump, many of them could have been accurately applied to President Barack Obama.

The dirty big non-secret is that the Left isn't concerned about the rule of law or any alleged threats to liberty. Liberals are pouting (and shouting) because for once in their lifetimes, they are not getting their way. For once, someone in a position of authority is refusing to roll over to political correctness. For once, a powerful public official is holding his hands up against this bullying liberal juggernaut and saying: "Stop. We've had enough. The people have had enough. You are not going to steamroll us anymore. We aren't any longer going to look the other way when you ignore the law, when you use the courts and unaccountable administrative agencies to legislate your will, when you use holdover federal bureaucrats to thwart the will of the chief executive and when your biased media distort the facts and advocate a liberal agenda rather than objectively report the news. We are not going to cower at the demagogic cabal that says people aren't paying their fair share of taxes. We aren't going to be shamed as heartless or nativists for demanding secure borders and safe cities. We aren't going to accept your belittling for identifying the enemy, by name, that is at war with us and with Western civilization. We aren't going to accede to your narrative that radical Islamic terrorists are only at war with us because we provoke them, so we reject your mindless mantra that the prison at Guantanamo Bay is a recruiting tool for otherwise peaceful global citizens. We aren't going to passively ignore your own selective assaults on religious liberty - on Christians. We aren't going to continue to allow you to dominate the public dialogue. We're finally fighting back - not as some tit-for-tat pettiness but because we believe that we are doing the right thing, that your virtual monopoly on the culture has been devastating and that it's time to begin reversing the destruction you've wrought.

"But unlike you, we won't break the law in undoing your agenda and advancing ours. To us, the ends don't justify the means. We won't - despite your projected concerns - diminish the freedom of the press or the constitutional liberties of any other individuals or groups. We are going to aggressively pursue policies that are in the best interests of America and the American people. Please keep calling us crazy and displaying your true colors to the American people, and with any luck, we'll do even better in 2020, provided we persevere in standing up to your bullying and proceed with a pro-growth, pro-defense, pro-liberty agenda."

SOURCE

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Why the DNC Chose Perez as New Chief

The new chair of the Democratic National Committee will be Barack Obama’s former labor secretary Tom Perez. In what proved to be a tight vote, Perez beat out Keith Ellison, the former Nation of Islam member and representative from Minnesota. While the mainstream media portrayed Perez’s election as evidence that Democrats are seeking to moderate their current hard-left stance, the reality is that both candidates are committed lefties.

Perez was one of the most leftist members of Barack Obama’s cabinet and a radical and relentless ideologue. For example, he has long touted the “disparate-impact theory” — a blatantly racist method for economic control. The Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro explained, “He essentially operationalized Eric Holder’s radicalization of the Department of Justice.” And Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, “Perez has shown a glaring inability to tell the truth and dispassionately apply the basic constitutional tenet of ‘equal justice under law.’”

In the end, the primary reason Democrats chose Perez rather than Ellison may have more to do with a strategy to oppose Donald Trump specifically over the issue of immigration. Perez, who is Hispanic, has a long history of pushing for legal acceptance of illegal immigration. He is an open-borders proponent, is strongly opposed to voter ID laws and has consistently pushed for greater expansion of government programs designed to support illegal aliens. Democrats would love nothing more than to create another solid voting block out of Hispanics like they currently have with blacks. Redefining immigration appears to be their recipe.

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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Note:

I will be going in for surgery later today and then for more surgery tomorrow.  So I am not sure how much blogging I will be able to do for a few days.  You can't keep a good blogger down, however so I should be able to put up something.

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Despite the Hysteria, Trump Is Trending Less Authoritarian Than Obama

Through personnel and policy, President Trump is limiting the executive branch

Lost in most of the coverage of President Trump's decision to rescind the Obama administration's transgender mandates is a fundamental legal reality - the Trump administration just relinquished federal authority over gender-identity policy in the nation's federally funded schools and colleges.

In other words, Trump was less authoritarian than Obama. And that's not the only case. Consider the following examples where his administration, through policy or personnel, appears to be signaling that the executive branch intends to become less intrusive in American life and more accountable to internal and external critique.

Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, a man known not just for his intellect and integrity but also for his powerful legal argument against executive-branch overreach. Based on his previous legal writings, if Gorsuch had his way, the federal bureaucracy could well face the most dramatic check on its authority since the early days of the New Deal. By overturning judicial precedents that currently require judicial deference to agency legal interpretations, the Court could put a stop to the current practice of presidents and bureaucrats steadily (and vastly) expanding their powers by constantly broadening their interpretations of existing legal statutes.

For example, the EPA has dramatically expanded its control over the American economy even without Congress passing significant new environmental legislation. Instead, the EPA keeps revising its interpretation of decades-old statutes like the Clean Air Act, using those new interpretations to enact a host of comprehensive new regulations. If Gorsuch's argument wins the day, the legislative branch would be forced to step up at the expense of the executive, no matter how "authoritarian" a president tried to be.

Trump nominated H. R. McMaster to replace Michael Flynn as his national-security adviser. McMaster made his name as a warrior on battlefields in the Gulf War and the Iraq War, but he made his name as a scholar by writing a book, Dereliction of Duty, that strongly condemned Vietnam-era generals for simply rolling over in the face of Johnson-administration blunders and excesses. In his view, military leaders owe their civilian commander in chief honest and courageous counsel - even when a president may not want to hear their words.

 When the Ninth Circuit blocked Trump's immigration executive order (which was certainly an aggressive assertion of presidential power), he responded differently from the Obama administration when it faced similar judicial setbacks. Rather than race to the Supreme Court in the attempt to expand presidential authority, it backed up (yes, amid considerable presidential bluster) and told the Ninth Circuit that it intends to rewrite and rework the order to address the most serious judicial concerns and roll back its scope.

Indeed, if you peel back the layer of leftist critiques of Trump's early actions and early hires, they contain a surprising amount of alarmism over the rollback of governmental power. Education activists are terrified that Betsy DeVos will take children out of government schools or roll back government mandates regarding campus sexual-assault tribunals. Environmentalists are terrified that Scott Pruitt will make the EPA less activist. Civil-rights lawyers are alarmed at the notion that Jeff Sessions will inject the federal government into fewer state and local disputes over everything from school bathrooms to police traffic stops.

A president is "authoritarian" not when he's angry or impulsive or incompetent or tweets too much. He's authoritarian when he seeks to expand his own power beyond constitutional limits. In this regard, the Obama administration - though far more polite and restrained in most of its public comments - was truly one of our more authoritarian.

Obama exercised his so-called prosecutorial discretion not just to waive compliance with laws passed by Congress (think of his numerous unilateral delays and waivers of Obamacare deadlines) but also to create entirely new immigration programs such as DACA and DAPA. He sought to roll back First Amendment protections for political speech (through his relentless attacks on Citizens United), tried to force nuns to facilitate access to birth control, and he even tried to inject federal agencies like the Equality Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) into the pastor-selection process, a move blocked by a unanimous Supreme Court. In foreign policy, he waged war without congressional approval and circumvented the Constitution's treaty provisions to strike a dreadful and consequential deal with Iran.

There's no doubt that Trump has expressed on occasion authoritarian desires or instincts. In the campaign, he expressed his own hostility for the First Amendment, his own love of expansive government eminent-domain takings (even to benefit private corporations), endorsed and encouraged violent responses against protesters, and declared that he alone would fix our nation's most pressing problems. But so far, not only has an authoritarian presidency not materialized, it's nowhere on the horizon.

Instead, he's facing a free press that has suddenly (and somewhat cynically) rediscovered its desire to "speak truth to power," an invigorated, activist judiciary, and a protest movement that's jamming congressional town halls from coast to coast. This tweet, from Sonny Bunch, is perfect:

"Donald Trump is such a terrifying fascist dictator that literally no one fears speaking out against him on literally any platform"

It was just three weeks ago that David Frum published a much-discussed essay in The Atlantic outlining how Trump could allegedly build an American autocracy. Over at Vox, Ezra Klein wrote at length about how the Founders' alleged failures laid the groundwork for a "partyocracy." And now? Trump's early struggles are leading pundits to ask, "Can Trump help Democrats take back the House?" In the American system, accountability comes at you fast.

Liberals were blind to Obama's authoritarian tendencies in part because they agreed with his goals and in part because their adherence to "living Constitution" theories made the separation of powers far more conditional and situational. But authoritarianism is defined by how a president exercises power, not by the rightness of his goals. It's early, and things can obviously change, but one month into the new presidency, a trend is emerging - Trump is less authoritarian than the man he replaced.

SOURCE

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Trump Administration Said to Be Mulling Withdrawal From UN Human Rights Council

Get America out of the UN and the UN out of America

The U.N. Human Rights Council opens a regular four-week session on Monday, amid reports that the Trump administration is considering withdrawing from a body which its predecessor chose to embrace despite acknowledging its many flaws.

Citing unnamed “sources in regular contact with former and current U.S. officials,” Politico reported Saturday that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s office had initiated a series of requests suggesting “that he is questioning the value of the U.S. belonging to the Human Rights Council.”

A spokesman for the U.S. Mission in Geneva said he had no response to offer on the report, “beyond [the] fact that the U.S. is actively involved in the session that started today.”

President Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the U.N., and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley questioned the council’s worth at her confirmation hearing last month.

“What is the goal of the Human Rights Council when they allow Cuba and China to serve on those?” she asked. “They are basically protecting their own interests, while they’re going after other countries to make sure they give them a hard time. And so, do we want to be a part of that?”

One of the criticisms most often raised by U.S. officials about the Geneva-based HRC since its creation in 2006 is the presence of rights-abusing governments on the U.N.’s top human rights body.

At no time over the past decade have more than 25 of the council’s 47 members (53 percent) been countries characterized by Freedom House as “free.” At its worst, last year, only 18 members (38 percent) were “free.”

This year, one in four of the elected members are rights-abusing autocracies.

A second major criticism is the council’s relentless focus on Israel, while some of the world’s most egregious abusive situations are often ignored.

In her Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony, Haley noted that over the past decade, the HRC “has passed 62 resolutions condemning the reasonable actions Israel takes to defend its security. Meanwhile the world’s worst human rights abusers in Syria, Iran, and North Korea received far fewer condemnations. This cannot continue.”

The actual number of HRC resolutions condemning Israel since 2006 is 67, according to data compiled by the NGO Human Rights Voices. Next comes Syria’s Assad regime, at 22, Burma at 15, Sudan at 14, Somalia at 11 and North Korea at 10.

In many cases countries with poor rights records have not faced a single critical HRC resolution. They include Cuba, China, Ethiopia, Laos, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.

The two key criticisms were cited by the Bush administration when it decided not to join or cooperate with the HRC. Its successor, which came in pledging to deepen U.N. engagement in general, reversed course in 2009, still critical of the HRC but arguing that it could best achieve change from within.

The anti-Israel bias is driven largely by the fact that, out of 192 U.N. member-states, Israel alone is targeted with a permanent agenda item. Every time the council holds a regular session Israel stands to be examined and condemned, irrespective of crises elsewhere in the world. When the HRC held a review in 2011 of its first five years, the Obama administration tried but failed to have the Israel agenda item removed.

Still, it maintains that its HRC engagement was effective. In an “exit memo” last month, outgoing ambassador Samantha Power argued that U.S. leadership had eased some of the pressure on Israel.

“[T]hrough our leadership in the Council since 2009 we have succeeded in getting the body to expand its focus, reducing by half the share of country-specific resolutions on Israel,” she said.

Human Rights Voices data show that the proportion of total HRC resolutions targeting Israel did drop, although only in 2011 (from 40 percent in 2008, 43.7 percent in 2009, and 44.4 percent in 2010, to 29.1 percent in 2011.)

Despite concerns, one of the HRC’s most outspoken critics argued on Sunday for the U.S. not to walk away.

“Should the U.S. leave the morally corrupt U.N. Human Rights Council?” asked Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based NGO U.N. Watch. “Walking out would feel good – but probably only make things worse.

“There’s a reason that France, Russia, China and every other world power invests time, money and political capital to campaign for a seat at the U.N. Human Rights Council: to gain influence in a consequential world body,” he said.

“Like it or not, the UNHRC’s decisions, translated into every language, influence the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of people around the globe.”

“If the U.S. wants to be a winner, it would be foolish to abandon the coveted 3-year term [2017-2019] that it just won a few months ago.”

“The Obama administration did become a cheerleader of the council. That was wrong,” Neuer hold the lawmakers. “But someone who would come to the council and take the floor as Moynihan did in the ‘Zionism is racism’ debate [in 1975], would actually be a contribution to human rights and to combating anti-Israel bias. So I would like to see the new administration send an ambassador of that nature.”

SOURCE

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A photobomb?



Confidence: Kellyanne Conway relaxes on the couch in the Oval Office as President Trump poses for a group photo with leaders of historically black universities and college.  Who said she was "on the outer" these days?  She's a great gal.

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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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Decline of Unions Under Right-to-Work Laws Levels Playing Field for Trump

Donald Trump prevailed where other Republican presidential candidates failed in Midwestern states in part because of new right-to-work laws that have diminished the power and influence of the teachers’ unions, according to labor policy analysts.

“Unions have been knocked silly in Wisconsin, thanks to the one-two punch of Act 10 and right-to-work,” @workerfreedom’s Matt Patterson says.

Final election results have Trump narrowly winning Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes by a margin of 47.9 to 46.9 percent over Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate. Trump had 1,409,467 votes to Clinton’s 1,382,210.

In Michigan, the margins were even closer with Trump winning that state’s 16 electoral votes with 47.6 percent against Clinton who had 47.3 percent of the vote. Trump had 2,279,805 votes to Clinton’s 2,268,193.

“Did the labor reforms enacted in Wisconsin and neighboring Michigan help Donald Trump win those states?” Matt Patterson, executive director of the Center for Worker Freedom, said in an email to The Daily Signal. “No question in my mind. Hard to fight when your bazooka’s been replaced by a squirt gun.”

Two teachers’ unions, the Wisconsin Education Association Council and the Michigan Education Association, both experienced a significant drop in membership since those states passed right-to-work legislation. Such laws prohibit employers from entering into agreements that make union membership and payment of union dues a condition of employment.

Wisconsin became a right-to-work state in 2015, Michigan in 2013. Since then, government figures show, the teachers’ unions in both states have lost thousands of dues-paying members.

The drop has been particularly precipitous in Wisconsin, where in 2011 Gov. Scott Walker signed legislation that reformed the state’s collective bargaining process. In fact, the Wisconsin Education Association Council has lost about 60 percent of its members since Walker’s reforms were implemented, an analysis of public records by the Education Intelligence Agency shows.

Under Act 10, also known as the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, most of Wisconsin’s government workers, including public school teachers, are now required to contribute more for their pension and health care benefits.

Act 10 also limits collective bargaining to wage negotiations, requires annual union recertification, ends the automatic deduction of union dues, and allows for public sector employees to decide whether they want to join a union and pay dues.

Wisconsin’s right-to-work law gives private sector employees the same right to decline union membership and payment of dues.

Diminished Union Clout

The Wisconsin Education Association Council had about 100,000 members before Act 10 passed; the latest figures show the union with 36,074. The decline reflects what has happened nationwide, the MacIver Institute for Public Policy, a free-market think tank in Wisconsin, reported.

The Wisconsin and Michigan unions are both affiliates of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest union for workers in public schools.

The 3 million-strong NEA lost more than 300,000 members in affiliated state teachers’ unions from 2010 to 2015, according to the analysis by the Education Intelligence Agency cited by the MacIver Institute. That’s a membership decrease of 10 percent.

So what is the political fallout?

“There’s no doubt that with the decline in union membership here in Wisconsin, the political clout of the union bosses and their ability to automatically turn out members for Democrats has declined dramatically,” Brett Healy, president of the MacIver Institute, told The Daily Signal, adding:

When we look at the decline in union membership and compare it to the recent political fortunes of the Democratic Party, you can clearly see that when people are given the ability to choose whether or not they want to join a union we are seeing less people voting for Democrats.

After the Wisconsin Education Association Council’s loss of tens of thousands of paying members, it has become evident that the teachers’ union’s ability to influence the outcomes of elections and public policy decisions has waned in the past few years, Healy added.

“The Wisconsin Education Association [Council] was the single biggest political player in the capital, but after the passage of Act 10 and right-to-work, their membership, which is where they derive their political power, has declined,” he said. “A majority of teachers in Wisconsin have decided that their money is better spent in other ways rather than turning it over to union bosses.”

Act 10 has been transformative not just politically, but financially.

A MacIver Institute analysis of the legislation’s budgetary impact found that it saved Wisconsin taxpayers more than $5 billion. Most of these savings were generated by requiring government employees to contribute more for their retirement, according to the analysis.

“Gov. Walker and the Republican legislature not only saved Wisconsinites an incomprehensible amount of money but they also fundamentally changed government in Wisconsin forever,” Healy said a year ago.

Trump benefited politically from right-to-work changes in Michigan just as he did in Wisconsin.

But the billionaire developer’s personal appeal with blue-collar union workers gave him an advantage other Republican candidates have not had recently, Vinnie Vernuccio, director of labor policy at the Mackinac Center, a free-market think tank in Michigan, said in an interview.

“The Michigan teachers’ unions, which have led the charge politically in the state, have been weakened in recent years and that certainly helped Trump,” Vernuccio said. “But don’t underestimate the union vote for Trump in key swing states. Exit polls show he did surprisingly well.”

Among union households (where at least one person is a union member), Trump’s margins improved significantly over those of Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who was the Republican presidential nominee in 2012.

When Michigan passed its right-to-work law in 2013, the Michigan Education Association had 113,147 members, the Mackinac Center reported. By 2016, the union had 90,609 members, a decline of about 20 percent.

The Daily Signal sought comment from both the Wisconsin Education Association Council and the Michigan Education Association on the right-to-work laws in their states and the impact on their membership rolls and political activism. Neither union responded.

“Unions have been knocked silly in Wisconsin, thanks to the one-two punch of Act 10 and right to work,” Patterson, of the Center for Worker Freedom, a Washington-based nonprofit affiliated with Americans for Tax Reform, told The Daily Signal:

Give people the chance to leave their union, it turns out, and lo and behold there’s a stampede for the door. And these fleeing workers take their money with them, money that unions can no longer use to buy politicians.

John Mozena, vice president of marketing and communications for the Mackinac Center, said in an email that he sees a growing separation between rank-and-file union members and union leaders that worked to Trump’s advantage:

In labor strongholds like Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, West Virginia and Missouri, union leaders have failed to turn out enough voters to create notable electoral consequences for politicians who introduced, supported, or voted for right to work or other worker freedom legislation.

That’s in part because union members have largely come to realize that these laws don’t actually hurt them or their unions. In fact, [the laws] give them as individuals more options than they had before.

Many union members also are voting against candidates that receive the lion’s share of their leaders’ support.

The contrast was most stark in the 2016 election, where almost all union leaders endorsed and used their members’ money to support Clinton. Yet in key states like Ohio, almost half of union members voted for Trump.

The only states to register significant increases in active membership in NEA-affiliated teachers’ unions over five years, according to the Education Intelligence Agency analysis, are Delaware (5 percent), Vermont (8 percent), Montana (16 percent), and North Dakota (19 percent).

Clinton won Delaware and Vermont, but Trump won Montana and North Dakota.

‘Unfortunate Situation’

After spending several months combing through the U.S. Department of Labor’s LM-2 financial disclosure forms, researchers with the Center for Union Facts found that unions directed about $530 million in membership dues to the Democratic Party and to left-leaning special interest groups from 2012 to 2015.

The Center for Union Facts is a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates transparency and accountability on the part of organized labor. Every labor organization that falls under the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act must file an LM-2.

“An unfortunate situation has developed where unions are more focused on politics than on collective bargaining or workplace issues,” @Richard_Berman says.

Recipients of union donations identified by the Center for Union Facts include Planned Parenthood and the Democratic Governors Association. These donations fall within labor’s political advocacy budgets, which are funded by dues and “disguised as worker advocacy related to collective bargaining—separate from direct campaign contributions,” the center said in a release.

“I do believe a very unfortunate situation has developed where the unions are more focused on politics than they are on collective bargaining or workplace issues,” Richard Berman, the center’s executive director, said in an interview with The Daily Signal.

Since surveys show that about 40 percent of union households vote Republican, this means the dues of a substantial number of union members are directed toward political causes they do not support, Berman said.

But he said he sees a strong potential for the growing right-to-work movement to level the political playing field in future election cycles, as it did in 2016.

In the meantime, Berman said, the new chairman of the National Labor Relations Board should use the board’s regulatory powers “to provide enough transparency in the area of labor finances” to inform union members of leadership’s activities.

SOURCE

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Brainless British tax greed

Have they never heard of the Laffer curve?

Treasury loses £500m in tax raid on luxury homes. Increases to the tax led to a fall in the number of top-end properties being sold

Sharp increases in the stamp duty on expensive homes are costing the Treasury as much as £500 million a year, a new analysis shows.

Increases to the tax in 2014 and last year led to a fall in the number of top-end properties being sold and a decline in income for the exchequer, according to Paul Nash, a partner at PwC.

The tax take from homes worth more than £1.5 million fell to £749 million in the nine months to November 2016, from £1.08 billion in the corresponding period of 2015, Mr Nash estimated using Land Registry data. Over a year, this would be a loss of almost £500 million.

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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