Comey confirms that I'm right - and all the Democratic commentators are wrong

Alan Dershowitz

Comey's opening testimony: Trump admin lied, defamed me

In his testimony former FBI director James Comey echoed a view that I alone have been expressing for several weeks, and that has been attacked by nearly every Democratic pundit.

Comey confirmed that under our Constitution, the president has the authority to direct the FBI to stop investigating any individual. I paraphrase, because the transcript is not yet available:  the president can, in theory, decide who to investigate, who to stop investigating, who to prosecute and who not to prosecute.  The president is the head of the unified executive branch of government, and the Justice Department and the FBI work under him and he may order them to do what he wishes.                    

As a matter of law, Comey is 100 percent correct.  As I have long argued, and as Comey confirmed in his written statement, our history shows that many presidents—from Adams to Jefferson, to Lincoln, to Roosevelt, to Kennedy, to Bush 1, and to Obama – have directed the Justice Department with regard to ongoing investigations. The history is clear, the precedents are clear, the constitutional structure is clear, and common sense is clear.

Yet virtually every Democratic pundit, in their haste to “get” President Trump, has willfully ignored these realities.  In doing so they have endangered our civil liberties and constitutional rights.

Now that even former Director Comey has acknowledged that the Constitution would permit the president to direct the Justice Department and the FBI in this matter, let us put the issue of obstruction of justice behind us once and for all and focus on the political, moral, and other non-criminal aspects of President Trump’s conduct.

Comey’s testimony was devastating with regard to President Trump’s credibility – at least as Comey sees it.  He was also critical of President Trump’s failure to observe the recent tradition of FBI independence from presidential influence.  These are issues worth discussing but they have been distorted by the insistence of Democratic pundits that Trump must have committed a crime because they disagree with what he did politically.

Director Comey’s testimony was thoughtful, coherent and balanced.  He is obviously angry with President Trump, and his anger has influenced his assessment of the president and his actions.  But even putting that aside, Comey has provided useful insights into the ongoing investigations.

I was disappointed to learn that Comey used a Columbia law professor as a go-between to provide information to the media.  He should have has the courage to do it himself.  Senators must insist that he disclose the name of his go-between so that they can subpoena his memos and perhaps subpoena the professor-friend to provide further information.

I write this short op-ed as Comey finishes his testimony. I think it is important to put to rest the notion that there was anything criminal about the president exercising his constitutional power to fire Comey and to request – “hope” – that he let go the investigation of General Flynn. Just as the president would have had the constitutional power to pardon Flynn and thus end the criminal investigation of him, he certainly had the authority to request the director of the FBI to end his investigation of Flynn.

So let’s move on and learn all the facts regarding the Russian efforts to intrude on American elections without that investigation being impeded by frivolous efforts to accuse President Trump of committing a crime by exercising his constitutional authority.

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House Republicans Pass Bill to Rein In Dodd-Frank

On Thursday, while seemingly everyone in Washington was fixated on former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, House Republicans were busy. A bill entitled the Financial Choice Act was passed, along party lines, which aims to significantly roll back many of the onerous banking regulations created by the Dodd-Frank Act. Referencing the need to continue the process of government deregulation, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) tweeted, “Let me put it this way: #DoddFrank is more than a thousand pages long and has more rules and regulations than any Obama-era law.”

While the Financial Choice Act does not repeal Dodd-Frank, it does go a long way in reining in its congressionally independent powers. The House Republicans' bill specifically targets the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), an unelected and unaccountable board of bureaucrats. Clamping down on the CFPB’s ability to create new financial regulations without approval from Congress is a very welcome change given the fact that elected representatives, not unelected bureaucrats, should have the power and responsibility to create significant rules and regulations. The new bill also stops the CFPB from collecting consumers' information without their permission.

Democrats' justification for the passage of Dodd-Frank was to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis — a crisis for which Democrats sowed the seeds with housing regulation. As is often the case with onerous government regulations, Dodd-Frank proved to do little in the way of actually helping small businesses and small banks, instead hurting them and resulting in years of sluggish economic growth. Rep. Rod Pittenger (R-NC) states, “Local bank leaders tell me they now hire more compliance officers than loan officers, as filling out forms for bureaucrats has become more important than growing the economy.” The irony in Dodd-Frank is that its regulations, which were supposed to protect the little guy, have proven to prevent and hinder economic growth and opportunity for the little guy.

Many are predicting that the House bill is dead on arrival in the Senate, and it is certain to undergo significant changes, but there are some Democrats who have voiced support for reforming Dodd-Frank.

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President Trump’s Lower-Court Nominees Are As Good As His SCOTUS Pick

Whatever’s happening with James Comey’s testimony, Donald Trump’s Twitter account, or congressional inaction on Obamacare repeal, tax reform, or much of anything else, from where I stand all that is fake news designed to distract your eyes from the prize: we have more judicial nominees!

This week, in an echo of how the 21 contenders for the Supreme Court vacancy were rolled out during the presidential campaign, 11 would-be black-robers join last month’s stellar list of 10 lower-court nominees. They join the one confirmed nominee, Sixth Circuit Judge Amul Thapar, who was elevated from a Kentucky district court after having been on that list of Supreme Court potentials.

Case Western law professor Jonathan Adler, who appeared with me on a panel at Cato’s 40th anniversary celebration right before the May 8 announcement, says they’re “‘incredibly strong nominees’ who were within the judicial mainstream and should ‘have an intellectual influence on their courts.’” As they say in Congress, I wish to associate myself with that analysis—and to extend those remarks to apply to all the nominees we’ve seen thus far.

Let’s Take a Look:

In that first batch are two state justices who were on the potential Supreme Court list, Michigan’s Joan Larsen (nominated to the Sixth Circuit) and Minnesota’s David Stras (nominated to the Eighth Circuit). These are engaged and scholarly jurists—both former law professors who still teach on the side—who will make terrific circuit judges.

Eleventh Circuit nominee Kevin Newsom, a former Alabama solicitor general who hosted me when I spoke to the Birmingham Federalist Society chapter earlier this year, is a serious lawyer and public servant who will serve the nation well even if I disagree some with his interpretation of the Slaughterhouse cases.

Pacific Legal Foundation’s Damien Schiff, with whom I’ve worked on many cases, is an inspired pick for the Court of Federal Claims, an Article I court that mainly handles government-contract disputes and property-rights claims against the government. Throughout his career, Damien has shown a commitment to protecting individual rights against government overreach.

This week’s second batch brought us three more circuit court nominees, including Justice Allison Eid of the Colorado Supreme Court to fill Neil Gorsuch’s vacant Tenth Circuit seat and professor Stephanos Bibas of the University of Pennsylvania Law School for the Third Circuit. I know Eid by reputation. A former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, she’s a thoughtful and intellectual jurist much in the mold of her former boss. Bibas is one of the top criminal-law scholars in the country. I’ve worked with him professionally and had drinks personally; he’ll be outstanding but leaves a gaping hole as faculty adviser for Penn’s Federalist Society chapter.

Then there’s Stephen Schwartz, an old friend who was a few years behind me at the University of Chicago Law School and has also been nominated to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Stephen has the perfect blend of nerdiness and skepticism of federal power that the job demands.

I’ll Never Tire of This Kind of Winning
If the other eight announced June 7 are of the same caliber as these three (and the previous 10)—and we have no reason to think otherwise given that the administration’s nominations staff is the same—then this is the sort of #winning of which I won’t ever tire.

The only curiosity is the continued absence of Justice Don Willett of the Texas Supreme Court—and indeed no nominees to the Fifth Circuit at all. As Hugh Hewitt tweeted, of the 11 original SCOTUS short-listers, five were state judges. Three have now been nominated to the federal appellate courts. The two remaining are Tom Lee of Utah (which has no current vacancies) and Willett (and Texas has two vacancies). Moreover, Willett was apparently one of the five or six finalists for the seat that Gorsuch filled, and is close to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. So you’d think he’d be a shoo-in.

Now, it’s certainly possible there’ll be some grand bargain whereby two other worthies get the Fifth Circuit slots but Willett goes to the high court whenever Justice Anthony Kennedy decides to retire. But that’s pie-in-the-sky because so many other stakeholders are involved at that point. Of course, if this deal—a fabulous deal, believe me!—is ratified by the president himself, that would be bigly indeed.

In the meantime, the White House counsel’s office should just keep these black-robe orders coming. Their work, and that of the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, has allowed President Trump—regardless of what else he does with his time—to continue fulfilling what was probably his most important campaign promise: to appoint “the best” judges.

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Justice Department Ends Government Bankrolling of Liberal Groups in Legal Settlements

The federal government no longer will make settlement agreements with any person or organization not directly involved in a legal dispute, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Wednesday.

The move by Sessions abolished a practice that has funneled likely millions of dollars in banking settlements to outside organizations in such “third-party” payments.

Left-wing groups, including La Raza and NeighborWorks America, benefited from the practice, The Daily Signal previously reported.

In a formal statement, Sessions said: Effective immediately, [Justice] Department attorneys may not enter into any agreement on behalf of the United States in settlement of federal claims or charges, including agreements settling civil litigation, accepting plea agreements, or deferring or declining prosecution in a criminal manner, that directs or provides for a payment or loan to any non-governmental person or entity that is not a party to the dispute.

For over a decade, the Justice Department has permitted corporations found guilty of wrongdoing to pay part of their financial penalty as a donation to certain pre-approved nonprofit organizations, as The Daily Signal reported last year.

After the 2008 financial crisis, the Obama administration alleged that banks were responsible for inflating the mortgage bubble.

The Justice Department and the banks settled with the settlements running into the millions of dollars, Paul J. Larkin, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an interview.

Sometimes the Justice Department would allow donations to third parties to be counted toward the settlement value.

The practice is unlawful, said Larkin, whose work on the issue was cited by Sessions in the attorney general’s decision.

“Some of the settlements allowed a settling party to treat $1 given to a favored organization as counting for $2 toward the settlement,” Larkin said.

He added:

Federal law requires Justice Department lawyers to deposit the funds they receive from a settlement into the U.S. Treasury so that Congress, not the president or the Justice Department, can decide how those funds should be spent.

The announcement is welcome news, Steven J. Allen, vice president and chief investigative officer at the Capitol Research Center, a conservative research institution based in Washington, told The Daily Signal in a phone interview Wednesday.

“It’s about time that someone did something about this,” Allen said. “It is a practice that had been going on throughout the government for decades, and we need to crack down. This is a very important first step by the attorney general.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, praised Sessions’ move.

“Today’s decision by the attorney general to end the Justice Department’s use of settlement agreements to fund politically favored organizations is a win for the victims in such disputes and for checks and balances in government,” Grassley said. “Under the Constitution, Congress holds the purse strings.”

The decision by President Donald Trump’s attorney general to end third-party settlements also benefits taxpayers, Larkin said.

“Sessions’ decision is the right one because it ends an unlawful and unethical Justice Department practice,” he said. “The department’s third-party payment practice was tantamount to the theft of money that belonged to the public.”

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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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WaPo's Horowitz Conspiracy Piece Ignores Democrat Ties to Radical Left

David Horowitz is an open advocate of the Constitution, while George Soros lurks in the shadows to undermine it

Last Sunday, the Washington Post published a lengthy exposé supposedly chronicling how a “‘shadow’ universe of charities” teamed up with right-wing political warriors to fuel the rise of Donald Trump. We knew immediately, “This should be good.”

And just what are the nefarious aims of this dastardly assemblage of conservative villains? To “upend the Washington establishment” and its Big Government/Big Business collusion, combat the dangers of radical Islam (as opposed to the Left’s “see no evil” approach), stop illegal immigration, protect religious liberty, and generally to promote a pro-Constitution, pro-American values worldview. Oh, the horror!

The Post’s story focuses primarily on David Horowitz, a 1960s leftist radical turned right-wing political warrior (though without any more than a single mention of the words “former ‘60s radical). Raised by Communist parents in New York City, Horowitz was a "red diaper baby” who grew up marinating in left-wing, anti-American ideology. He attended liberal Columbia University, then graduate school at lefty nirvana UC-Berkeley, and became editor of Ramparts, arguably the most influential publication of the New Left.

Horowitz grew close to Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton, even raising funds to buy a church that was turned into a “learning center” for children of the Black Panthers. He recruited Ramparts bookkeeper Betty Van Patter to manage the finances.

Horowitz’s journey from far-left radical to conservative warrior began when Van Patter was murdered, her badly beaten body found floating in the San Francisco Bay. Police, convinced the murder was committed by the Panthers, were unable to bring an indictment, and the feds and the mainstream press refused to look into it, so Horowitz investigated the murder on his own.

After repeated denials followed by threats of retribution if he continued, he came to the disturbing conclusion that the murder was committed by the very left-wing radicals he considered allies. As noted in a National Review piece in 2015, “The Life and Work of David Horowitz,” “His lifelong friends and associates on the Left were now a threat to his safety, since they would instinctively defend the Panther vanguard; and no one among them really cared about the murder of an innocent woman, because the murderers were their political friends.”

This realization led to further realizations, including the fact that the Communist regimes vigorously supported by the Left had engaged in the wholesale slaughter of their own innocent people. As Horowitz would later write, “A library of memoirs by aging new leftists and 'progressive’ academics recall the rebellions of the 1960s. But hardly a page in any of them has the basic honesty — or sheer decency — to say, ‘Yes, we supported these murderers and those spies, and the agents of that evil empire,’ or to say so without an alibi. I’d like to hear even one of these advocates of ‘social justice’ make this simple acknowledgement: ‘We greatly exaggerated the sins of America and underestimated its decencies and virtues, and we’re sorry.’”

These realizations led Horowitz to the conservative right, becoming more tireless in his efforts to expose, undermine and destroy radical leftism than he had been in promoting it.

And it is the unapologetic conservative activism of people like Horowitz, and his friend and Trump advisor Steve Bannon, that has the Post and progressives everywhere in a breathless tizzy.

Yet these same hysterical leftists are either completely oblivious to, or openly dismissive of, their own hypocrisy in funding and supporting radical leftism.

For example, billionaire socialist George Soros — a man who, as a 14-year-old boy living in Nazi-occupied Hungary, helped confiscate the property of imprisoned fellow Jews, and later described it as the “happiest time” of his life — has spent much of his life providing massive funding for radical progressive and socialist causes around the world. Yet the Leftmedia and their Democrat counterparts usually refer to him as a “philanthropist.”

Soros seeks the elimination of national borders in favor of a unified global government, using his vast wealth and influence to achieve those aims; funding radical left-wing organizations with benign-sounding names such as the Center for American Progress, Change America Now, the Human Rights Campaign, and the Alliance for Global Justice, the last of which gave $50,000 to the “antifa” organization that violently attacked bystanders at UC-Berkeley. Soros also funded the violent Black Lives Matter movement.

Somehow the media never seem to root out the shadowy players behind leftist violence, possibly because Soros is a powerful behind-the-scenes player, not only funding dozens of radical leftist groups, but also funding dozens of major “news” outlets.

The mainstream media was totally uninterested in the fact that through a complex, shadowy network of progressive organizations, Soros funded the campaigns of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Nor are they concerned that Obama launched his political career in the home of left-wing domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn. They yawned at the fact Obama spent decades in the pews of “Reverend” Jeremiah Wright, who spewed anti-American, anti-white, anti-Semitic venom each week from the pulpit.

The double-standard among the progressive Left and their media co-conspirators is as unsurprising as it is hypocritical. They slam Trump for his association with staunch conservative political activists, warning of conspiracies and dire consequences, yet actively hide the subversive, often violent actions of the Left.

Horowitz, Bannon and others like them are anything but shadowy. Unlike the political Left, which must disguise its true aims, Horowitz et al are as open and vocal as people can possibly be in their efforts to restore the Constitution and the Rule of Law in our great nation, and in their efforts to protect and defend American values.

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Socialism in one country






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Great Moments in Fake News 'Journalism'

What about President Donald Trump’s complaint about “fake news”? Let’s look at some examples of “Great Moments in ‘Journalism’” over the last few years.

Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), in an appearance on ABC’s Sunday morning political show hosted by George Stephanopoulos, called former Democratic Alabama Gov. George Wallace a “Republican.” Ellison said, “At the same time, [in Trump] we do have the worst Republican nominee since George Wallace.” Stephanopoulos either ignored or was ignorant of the fact that Wallace — who proudly proclaimed, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” — was a long-standing Democrat who served four terms as governor and twice sought the Democratic nomination for president. Tellingly, Stephanopoulos did not correct Ellison. Fortunately, another guest, Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), did correct the history-challenged Ellison.

MSNBC’s Luke Russert, covering the 2008 presidential election, said students at the University of Virginia will vote Obama because: “You have to remember, the smartest kids in the state go there, so it’s leaning a little bit towards Obama.” Get it? Smart people vote Democrat. Dumb people vote Republican. Russert later apologized.

CNN’s Carol Costello laughed hysterically as a frantic Bristol Palin, daughter of Sarah Palin, told cops she was assaulted at a party. Listen to how a gleeful Costello introduced the audiotape of Bristol describing the attack to the police: “This is quite possibly the best minute and a half of audio we’ve ever come across — well, come across in a long time, anyway. A massive brawl in Anchorage, Alaska, reportedly involving Sarah Palin’s kids and her husband. It was sparked after someone pushed one of her daughters at a party. That’s what Bristol Palin told police in an interview after the incident. … So sit back and enjoy.” A near-hysterical Palin says: “A guy comes out of nowhere and pushes me on the ground, takes me by my feet, in my dress — in my thong, dress, in front of everybody — ‘Come on, you [expletive], come on, you [expletive], get the [expletive] out of here.’”

At the conclusion of the segment, a smirking Costello said, “You can thank me later.”

MSNBC’s Erin Burnett, now with CNN, called then-President George W. Bush a “monkey.” With videotape rolling of President Bush flanked by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to his left and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to his right, the reporter gushed, “Who could not have a man-crush on that man? I’m not talking about the monkey, either. I’m talking about the other one.” The host asked, “Who’s the monkey?” Burnett replied, “The monkey in the middle” — meaning President Bush. She, too, later apologized.

The late Tim Russert, in a 2007 interview with New York Times war correspondent John Burns, repeated an often-cited anti-Iraq War talking point — that Americans expected to be greeted as “liberators” in Iraq, but weren’t. Burns, who was in Iraq at the time of the invasion, corrected him: “The American troops were greeted as liberators. We saw it.”

Trump is clearly right to fulminate against what he calls the “fake news media.” The real question is what took Republicans so long to fight back.

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GORGEOUS REPORTER UNLOADS ON HILLARY



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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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"Trumpileaks" and Leftist flexibility

Leftists have no principles, ethics or morals.  How do I know that?  They tell us.  Whenever they are cornered in an argument, they will say, with a great air of superiority, "But there's no such thing as right and wrong".  And they do mean that.  We should take them at their word.  They do have aims -- destroying anything they can -- but that is all, no ethics or principles.  You can see it for yourself any time.  When they say something is wrong -- like anything that Trump does -- just reply: "But  there's no such thing as right and wrong".  It really stumps them.  Years ago I did some research into their insincere use of "right" and "wrong" which showed their inconsistency.

And there is no limit to what Leftists will appeal to. When George Bush's intervention in Iraq was being mooted -- Bush made sure to get Congressional approval for it first -- John Kerry and others even made an appeal to preserve the status quo -- the one thing Leftists most consistently oppose.  They even stressed the importance of the Peace of Westphalia -- a set of documents created in the year 1648.  You couldn't make it up! Leftists will appeal to anything that they think will be persuasive to others, regardless of what they themselves think.

And that brings us to Michael Moore and his establishment of a gossip site called "Trumpileaks".  Moore gives a classic exhibition of Leftist "flexibility".  He claims that Trump has done all sorts of illegal things but can't actually name one.  He mistakes Leftist howls for evidence of illegality.

He makes up for his lack of substance, however, by appealing to all sorts of authorities that Leftists normally abhor. He speaks warmly of the founding fathers and even quotes Mike Pence approvingly. The whole thing is too silly to reproduce but a reader has done an extensive fisking of it so I will forward the fisked version to anyone who asks for it.

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The Church of Globalism Wants Your Blood (and Money)

I am still concerned with what I have been writing about as “human sacrifice” (here and here)  but in the aftermath of the London Bridge Attack it has become apparent that there are deeper concerns and the death of innocent people is a symptom of an even graver danger.

it is, surely, “The Jihad” and the renaissance of fundamentalist Sharia law that are the proximate causes of the slaughter but it is a mistake to focus solely on the Muslim side of the equation.  It is not so much the Islamists that we should be afraid of, it is the Globalist movement in the west that has allowed, and even fostered, those squalid barbarians to grow so dangerous and impudent.

The limp, mealy-mouthed responses of Kahn and May to President Trumps tweets after London have gotten me thinking. The majority of our elected officials, and their bureaucratic minions along with our leading academics and the majority of our artists and entertainers have conspired to lull us into suppressing our spiritual, intellectual and cultural defenses and open our borders to the unfettered immigration and the terror, disease, rape and murder it brings. But the terror is just the most noticeable manifestation. There is a whole complex Globalist movement that has pervaded and polluted our body politic.

I am not one of those who believe in an organized Globalization Conspiracy. I know there are conspiracy theories out there but they seem a bit overwrought and impossibly arcane. I think, though, that once you understand Globalism and its underpinnings you will see that its worse and more pervasive than any centralized conspiracy could be.

Globalism is actually a pseudo-religion, it is the Sharia Law analog of the West. It is an extreme belief in the infallibility and inevitability of Globalization. It and all of its doctrines are unassailable and anyone who questions them are disqualified from legitimacy. There are a number of dogmas connected with Globalism Chief among them is what is now commonly called Climate Change. Other dogmas include:

    The Right to Migrate (for western countries this means unfettered immigration- legal and otherwise)

    Multiculturalism (which is more accurately described as Cultural Relativism)

    Disdain for Nationalism and Populism

    Condemnation of Income Inequality (although, ironically most of those who trumpet this the loudest are pulling down vast incomes for doing so- see Bernie Sanders, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, et al)

But you don’t need to take my word for it. An excellent, if unintentional, indictment of Globalization may be found on the Barclay Bank website. The research paper abstracted on this page is a perfect case study in the arrogant cluelessness of what might be called the Globalist Elite. The title “The Politics of Rage” sets the tone. It is cold research seen through a pro-globalist lens. It presents a chilling picture of what Globalism aims to do. Here is the list of of factors necessary to globalization that are identified as causing the rage against globalization among the middle classes:

    Sovereignty (as in the loss of national sovereignty through Trade Pacts and the EU - See Brexit)

    Representative Reform (related to Sovereignty- the loss of local representation through mandates from national governments and their commitments to supra-national bodies)

    Immigration (unfettered migration of the un-assimilate-able, terrorists, carriers of diseases and non-productive third world populations into western countries)

    Trade (free trade that costs jobs and economic dislocation in developed countries)

    Redistribution of Income (related to Trade- loss of employment and depression of wages costs the lower and middle income people in developed countries  and creates more profit for the wealthy and corporations)

    Anti-Corporatism (see Redistribution)

I finally have a complete understanding of what Barak Obama meant when he vowed to “fundamentaly transform the United States of America.”  The picture that emerges is that the middle and lower middle class in the developed countries of the world are being sacrificed, in every way possible. Their jobs and wealth are being diluted and lost to the tidal wave of “migration”. They lose their very lives to the terrorists who wash ashore with that same wave.

All the while, the corporations, government apparatchiks, media pundits, academic theorists and financial manipulators, those that I call the Global Elite, get ever fatter and more insolent. They are not the ones being run over, slashed to death and shot in the streets. They live in enclaves with high walls. They are not losing their financial security, their interests are doing very well thank you. It is no transformation. It is a betrayal.

And to what effect is all this havoc being visited on the workers, earners and entrepreneurs who make it all possible? There is no proof that refugees from failed states can adapt well enough and in large enough numbers to modern western economies to do anything more than increase the burden of entitlements in those countries. There is no proof either that there is any chance that the other “benefits” predicted for globalization will ever materialize.

The Barclay researcher blandly asserts that it would lead to faster development in undeveloped countries. Even allowing for the scabrous old allegation that the abuses of the colonial era are responsible for the economic devastation in those countries, colonialism has been over for a century and the third world is still poor.

Culture is the most important determinant of development. Israel, for example, is a country founded in a place bereft of natural resources on land that had been poverty stricken for two millennia. In sixty years, under constant hostility and attack from neighbors with overwhelming numerical advantage, it is one of the strongest economies in the world. Globalists hate Israel for the very example that she is!

No! The only benefit that is real in the globalization scenario is that which accrues to the Globalist Elite who are trying to squelch the natural resistance to it by calling our distress “rage”. They call us “bitter clingers” (Obama), “deplorables” (Clinton), “uneducated” (Mainstream Press), deniers and they belittle our very sacrifice with statistical cruelties like “London is still one of the safest cities” or “undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the general population”.

These are untrue in any sense but they are most sinister in the way they negate real suffering. It is heartless to tell the families of the little girls killed in Manchester, or of the nine year old boy killed in Boston or of Kate Steinle that they should be comforted by those cold statistics when their loved ones would be alive today if immigration were under sufficient control. This is not inchoate “rage” as Barclay and the progressives try to invalidate it. It is not we who are “the deniers”.

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Enforced Equality: Fair or Foul?

Economic inequality has generated much discussion in recent years—in academia, on the campaign trail, and even on the international bestsellers list. Some might say that one of the dialogue’s core ideological drivers—egalitarianism—has claimed more than its fair share of public attention. The editors of The Independent Review, however, see the trend as a welcome opportunity to improve the quality of debate about economic progress and opportunity, the rule of law, intellectual history, public opinion, and ethics. The result is the Summer 2017 issue’s fascinating, in-depth Symposium on Egalitarianism—perhaps the most important forum in the journal’s twenty-two-year history.

“Love it or loathe it, egalitarian sentiments and concerns about inequality are clearly on the rise in both politics and the academy,” writes the journal’s co-editor Robert M. Whaples in his introduction to the symposium. The fact of inequality, he counsels, requires thoughtful consideration. “Will our response to it be ugly, say by envying or injuring those who have ended up with more than we have or by belittling and mistreating those who have less? Or will we see the dignity in all people—great and small—and treat others with respect, cooperating with them to fulfill that promise by achieving the virtue, prosperity, and peace that we all desire?”

Incidentally, of the symposium’s many outstanding essays, The Independent Review’s editors singled out one as standing above the rest—“The New Egalitarianism,” by Adam Martin. In it, the Texas Tech University assistant professor shows why today’s leading theoreticians of egalitarianism “are not your father’s collectivists.” Along with their obscurantist analysis of the ways that existing practices and norms may benefit the powerful at the expense of the disadvantaged, the New Egalitarians are distinguished by their decidedly anti-egalitarian solution to the world’s social ills: to appoint themselves as society’s adjudicators and enforcers of right and wrong.

More than merely of academic interest, the New Egalitarianism is a threat to be taken seriously. For his deep erudition, penetrating insights, and stylistic accessibility, Martin will be awarded the symposium prize of $10,000. Quick—someone call the equity police!

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Funeral of Chris Brand

I have received the following email from Dr. Shiou-Yun Fang

The date for Chris' funeral and memorial and thanksgiving service has just been set. They will take place on the 26th of June (Monday). The funeral will start at 2:30pm, for family and friends. Then is the memorial and thanksgiving service for the public which is going to be held in St Peter's Church, Lutton Place, Edinburgh at 3:30pm. This is the church Chris and I went every Christmas Eve. It has warmly-decorated interiors and the two vicars there are well known to us. After the service, there will be a reception in the sitting room of our Brand's mansion. I started joining his life in 2000. From close friends, I have heard lots of amusing stories about many parties that he had thrown there before. I believe that Chris will like the reception being held here.

I have received the photo below from Shiou: happy times for her and Chris at a Boxing Day party. You can see how well Chris did to get a lady who was beautiful and accomplished.  In a comment on the happy photo, Shiou said poignantly: "My happiness has been changed to much pain and grief".  I feel her grief.  A quality lady -- JR



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

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

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Seeds of fascism sprout anew in Trump’s America (?)

H.D.S. Greenway below focuses mainly on style and it is true that Trump has a forceful style. But style is not substance and what Greenway omits is that Mussolini was a Marxist and Trump is a capitalist.  Those are REAL differences and they matter.  And the ideology matters too.  Mussolini was a centralizer intent on expanding government control whereas Trump has scrapped regulations by the bagful.   The unending shrieks from the Left should tell you about  that. So the idea that Musso is a forerunner for Trump is a strange comparison indeed.  H.D.S. Greenway should look to policies, not appearances

It is however true that the seeds of Fascism are to be found in the USA.  The constant expansion of government regulation and control under Obama was very Fascist.  It was Fascism with a courteous face but Fascism nonetheless.  Even Hillary's election slogan "better together" was what the Fasces of ancient Rome symbolized and it was that Roman example which Musso adopted as the symbol and name of his party.  Fascism is indeed not far away in the USA. Trump is doing his best to roll it back

Leftists make many attempts to redefine what Italian Fascism was -- some examples below -- so let us look at Mussolini's own summary of the Fascist philosophy: "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato" (Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State).  Clear enough? How does that compare with "Drain the swamp"?

WATCHING DONALD TRUMP on TV whipping up his base of supporters at a rally in Harrisburg, Pa., I had a sudden feeling I had seen this all before. I remembered a speech I had seen on YouTube. It was a speech Mussolini had given in Milan in 1932. I watched it again, and it was all there. The chin thrust, the pouts, the hand gestures, the adoring base cheering every word. He spoke of the might of his army “second to none,” the “injustices committed against us,” and how he had “stormed the old political class.” There was even a complaint about the press that had drawn “arbitrary conclusions” to what he was saying. Mussolini’s Blackshirts, his squads of roughnecks, were used to assaulting reporters they didn’t like.

Today the Italians are an easygoing and generous people. But when Fascism took hold in the early 1920s, Italy became belligerent and bullying. Its concentration camps for the native population in Libya and its use of poison gas became genocidal. And it was quick to join the Nazis in dreams of conquest. Mussolini was telling Italians they had to begin winning again.

In his 2004 book, “The Anatomy of Fascism,” Robert O. Paxton wrote that fascism did not die with the end of World War II, that its seeds were planted “within all democratic countries, not excluding the United States.” According to Paxton, fascism was a “form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood. . . . “Fascism was an affair of the gut more than of the brain.”

Or as R.J.B. Bosworth wrote in his 2005 book “Mussolini’s Italy,” “Border fascism,” an obsession with borders and keeping the population pure, was always a “key strain in the fascist melody,” as was “allowing the nation to stand tall again.” All you needed was a charismatic leader, Mussolini, whom Paxton compared to the modern “media-era celebrity.”

Thirteen years ago Paxton wrote that all that is required for a rebirth of fascism is “polarization, deadlock, mass mobilization against internal and external enemies, and complicity by existing elites. . . . It is of course conceivable that a fascist party could be elected to power in free, competitive elections.”

SOURCE

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Governor Gasbag Abuses Taxpayers

California governor Jerry Brown has signed off on a $5.2 billion deal that will raise the tax on gasoline, raise the tax on diesel and raise user fees on motorists. Before the Memorial Day weekend, Brown ranted that those who complain about this tax hike are “freeloaders.” This doesn’t deserve a response, but taxpayers may find one helpful.

The tax hike is intended to fix California’s disastrous roads, but maintenance of roads is already part of California’s budget. Trouble is, as we noted, the California Department of Transportation developed a model for the allocation of maintenance funds but abandoned it because it would have reduced more than 100 Caltrans staff positions. Caltrans distributes funding based the previous spending patterns of the region in question, whatever the road conditions. Taxpayers might also recall that for years the state has diverted $1.5 billion in transportation infrastructure taxes to subsidize California’s General Fund bond payments.

Anybody who drives already pays substantial gas taxes every time they fill up, so in no sense are working motorists “freeloaders.” California workers already pay the highest income and sales taxes in the nation, and they are weary of government shaking them down for more. Taxpayers might note that Brown and the legislature made zero cuts to the state’s bloated bureaucracy and failed to trim wasteful spending. Brown and the legislature could have scrapped the $70 billion “bullet train” boondoggle, and $15 billion to dig tunnels under the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta. Fixing the roads and building new ones would be a better application for those funds.

As is happens, Caltrans employs more than 3,000 engineers who basically do nothing but Brown is okay with that sort of parasite, common in state government. The first recourse of California’s hereditary, recurring governor, is to punish the workers with higher taxes and fees then abuse them as “freeloaders.” As working taxpayers may recall, this is the same governor who responded “I mean, look, shit happens,” to safety lapses on the new span of the Bay Bridge, a project that came in 10 years late and $5 billion over budget.

SOURCE

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Leftist mob Cheers As Speaker Criticizes U.S. Bombing of ISIS

Hundreds of anti-Trump protesters gathered at the Washington Monument on Saturday in what was billed as a “March for Truth.”

According to the group’s Twitter page, the rally in Washington and other U.S. cities was a call for “urgency and transparency” on the Trump-Russia probe.

At the event, protesters carried signs accusing President Trump of colluding with the Russian government. Signs read “Investigate Trump,” “Liar, liar, Pence on fire,” and “Follow the money.”

The headline speaker at the event was Linda Sarsour, who describes herself as a Palestinian-American-Muslim, civil rights activist, and national co-chair of the Women’s March. Sarsour blamed “right-wing Zionists” for victimizing her, and she also criticized President Trump’s decision to bomb ISIS fighters in Afghanistan.

After her speech, CNSNews.com asked Sarsour why she opposed the April 13 airstrike that killed 94 ISIS fighters in Afghanistan, but no civilians. Sarsour responded that “civilians were being directly affected.”

“I’m anti-war, and I also didn’t get any confirmation about that, like, did you see a list of these ISIS fighters? I didn’t.”

Both Afghan and U.S. officials confirmed that no civilians died in the airstrike.

Asked if she was okay with the fact that the bomb killed ISIS members, Sarsour replied: “If we are actually not killing civilians, and we’re directly targeting terrorists.”

Sarsour has come under fire for some of her controversial connections and statements. In March, she was arrested for disorderly conduct at the “Day Without A Woman” protest in New York City near Trump Tower.

Sarsour also has called shari’a Law “reasonable” and “misunderstood,” tweeting what she sees as the benefits of shari’a

SOURCE

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Whom are you calling crazy?

By Alex Beam, writing in the Boston Globe

IT IS AN article of faith in polite society, where I live in a kind of internal exile, that President Trump is clinically insane.

Here are some headlines from the august New York Times: “Mental Health Professionals Warn About Trump,” “Is It Time to Call Trump Mentally Ill?,” and so on. Before those two articles appeared in February, Sharon Begley of STAT wrote a more convincing and measured overview of head-shrinkers’ thoughts about Trump, cannily titled, “Crazy Like a Fox.”

Trump’s mental state definitely interests me. He seems deeply wounded, frantically impulsive, and obviously capable of endangering the nation and the world. But medicalizing heinous behavior — a favorite pastime of the chattering classes — is counterproductive. Not everyone who is sad is depressed. Not everyone who is excited is manic. Not every miscreant is nuts.

It’s a good idea to leave diagnoses to the diagnosticians, and we don’t have access to any of Trump’s psychiatric records, if such even exist. It should not go unnoticed that the man who literally wrote the book on the “narcissistic personality disorder” so commonly ascribed to Trump, opined, “He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill.”

Dr. Allen Frances, the chairman of the committee that created psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Volume 4, continued: “It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither).”

Mental health professionals should be familiar with the “Goldwater Rule,” which strongly cautions psychiatrists against commenting on the mental state of people they have not examined. The rule harks back to 1964, when several psychiatrists dilated on the mental fitness of the Republican presidential candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater.

Goldwater sued the publication that quoted them, and, in an unusual legal victory for a public figure, won. Savor the irony: Goldwater, a five-term US senator, was about 20 times more qualified to be president than Trump. Talk about defining deviancy down.

There have been other comical attempts at psychoanalyzing presidents. In 1931, the prominent Freudian A.A. Brill published a paper diagnosing Abraham Lincoln as a “manic schizoid personality.” He observed that Lincoln’s famous stories and jokes “are of an aggressive and [sexually masochistic] nature, treating of pain, suffering and death, and that a great many of them were so frankly sexual as to be classed as obscene.”

Simultaneously rebutting and demeaning Freud’s American disciple, analyst Jacob L. Moreno noted that the barely five-foot tall Brill sported a beard and was also named “Abe.” “Brill had waited patiently for a chance to measure up to that other Abe,” Moreno wrote.

In 1967, the retired diplomat William Bullitt published a “psychological study” of Woodrow Wilson purportedly coauthored by Freud, who had been dead for 28 years. The “authors” refered to Wilson as “Tommy” throughout, and attributed his reformist urges in part to an “under-vitalized” mother and “the ego of a boy who has no sister.”

“What a can of worms,” the New York Sun editorialized. “The tome was so weird that it horrified even Harvard’s Erik Erikson,” who called it “a disastrously bad book on Wilson.”

If and when Trump is forced to answer for his many depradations, let’s not rationalize his behavior with a bogus insanity defense.

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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Trump’s Food Stamp Reform Would Close the Trap of Dependency

President Donald Trump’s newly released budget contains a proposed food stamp reform, which the left has denounced as a “horror” that arbitrarily cuts food stamp benefits by 25 percent.

These claims are misleading. In reality, the president’s proposed policy is based on two principles: requiring able-bodied adult recipients to work or prepare for work in exchange for benefits, and restoring minimal fiscal responsibility to state governments for the welfare programs they operate.

The president’s budget reasserts the basic concept that welfare should not be a one-way handout. Welfare should, instead, be based on reciprocal obligations between recipients and taxpayers.

Government should definitely support those who need assistance, but should expect recipients to engage in constructive activity in exchange for that assistance.

Work Requirements

Under the Trump reform, recipients who cannot immediately find a job would be expected to engage in “work activation,” including supervised job searching, training, and community service.

This idea of a quid pro quo between welfare recipients and society has nearly universal support among the public.

Nearly 90 percent of the public agree that “able-bodied adults that receive cash, food, housing, and medical assistance should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving those government benefits.”

The outcomes were nearly identical across party lines, with 87 percent of Democrats and 94 percent of Republicans agreeing with this statement.

Establishing work requirements in welfare was the core principle of the welfare reform law enacted in the mid-1990s. That reform led to record drops in welfare dependence and child poverty. Employment among single mothers surged.

Despite the harsh impact of the Great Recession, much of the poverty reduction generated by welfare reform remains in effect to this day.

Unfortunately, though, welfare reform altered only one of more than 80 federal means-tested welfare programs. The other programs were left largely untouched. Trump’s plan is to extend the successful principle of work requirements to other programs.

Restoring State-Level Accountability

The second element of Trump’s plan is to restore a minimal share of fiscal responsibility for welfare to state governments.

As noted, the federal government operates over 80 means-tested welfare programs providing cash, food, housing, medical care, training, and targeted social services to poor and low-income persons. In addition, state governments run a handful of small separate programs.

Last year, total federal and state spending on means-tested aid was over $1.1 trillion. (This sum does not include Social Security or Medicare.)

Some 75 percent of the $1.1 trillion in spending comes from the federal government. Moreover, nearly all state spending was focused in a single program: Medicaid.

Excluding Medicaid, the federal government picks up the tab for nearly 90 percent of all means-tested welfare spending in the U.S.

The United States has a federal system of government with three separate levels of independent elected government: federal, state, and local. Under this three-tier system, the federal government already bears full fiscal responsibility for national defense, foreign affairs, Social Security, and Medicare.

It makes no sense for the federal government to also bear 90 percent of the cost of cash, food, and housing programs for low-income persons.

But for decades, state governments have increasingly shifted fiscal responsibility for anti-poverty programs to the federal level. As a result, the federal government picks up nearly all the tab for welfare programs operated by the states.

This is a recipe for inefficiency and nonaccountability.

One of the key lessons from welfare reform—now 20 years ago—is that both blue and red state governments spend their own revenues far more prudently than they spend “free money” from Washington.

Efficiency in welfare requires state governments to have some fiscal responsibility for the welfare programs they operate.

The food stamp program is 92 percent funded by Washington. Washington sends blank checks to state capitals—the more people a state enrolls in food stamps, the more money Washington hands out.

A dirty secret in American politics is that many governors, both Republican and Democrat, regard this type of “free money” poured from Washington as a benign Keynesian stimulus to their local economies. The more spending, the better.

The Trump budget recognizes that the food stamp program will become more efficient if the state governments that operate the program have “skin in the game.” Therefore, it raises the required state contribution to food stamps incrementally from 8 percent to 25 percent.

By 2027, this would cost state governments an extra $14 billion per year. Half of the so-called “cuts” in food stamp spending in the Trump budget simply represent this modest shift from federal to state funding.

The remaining savings in food stamps in the Trump budget come from assumed reduction in welfare caseloads due to the proposed work requirement.

A Proven Policy

Today, there are some 4.2 million nonelderly able-bodied adults without dependent children currently receiving food stamp benefits. Few are employed. The cost of benefits to this group is around $8.5 billion per year.

In December 2014, Maine imposed a work requirement on this category of recipients. Under the policy, no recipient had his benefits simply cut. Instead, recipients were required to undertake state-provided training or to work in community service six hours per week.

Nearly all affected recipients chose to leave the program rather than participate in training or community service. As a result, the Maine caseload of able-bodied adults without dependent children dropped 80 percent in just a few months.

A similar work requirement for able-bodied adults without dependents, imposed nationwide, would save the taxpayer $80 billion over the next decade.

Even this would be a pittance compared to the $3.6 trillion the federal government will spend on cash, food, and housing benefits over that period.

The Trump policy is the exact opposite of so-called “block grants” in welfare.

In a welfare block grant, the federal government collects tax revenue and dumps money on state governments to spend as they will.

Welfare block grants have always been failures. In fact, the Trump budget would eliminate two failed block grant programs—the Community Development Block Grant and the Community Services Block Grant.

Instead of block grants, Trump is seeking to reanimate the principles of welfare reform from the 1990s that emphasized work requirements and renewed fiscal responsibility from state governments.

Deeply Needed Reforms

Of course, the left adamantly opposed welfare reform in the 1990s. In their view, welfare should be unconditional. Recipients should be entitled to cash, free food, free housing, and medical care without any behavioral conditions.

No wonder they have proclaimed Trump’s proposal to be “devastating” and a “horror.”

Contrary to protestations from the left, the U.S. welfare state is very large and expensive. For example, federal spending on cash, food, and housing benefits for families with children is nearly three times the amount needed to raise all families above the poverty level.

But the current welfare state is very inefficient. Trump seeks to reform that system.

In Trump’s unfolding design, welfare should be synergistic. Aid should complement and reinforce self-support through work and marriage rather than penalizing and displacing those efforts.

A welfare state founded on this synergistic principle would be more efficient than the current system. It would reduce both dependence and poverty.

More importantly, it would improve the well-being of the poor who have benefited little from the fractured families, nonemployment, dependence, and social marginalization fostered by the current welfare state.

SOURCE

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The myth of ‘caring liberals’

Progressive politics is now about feeling good, not doing good. Comment from Britain:

It’s long been a common assumption that liberal, left-wing people are more caring than those on the right, that they are more compassionate people than conservatives. Right-wing people, by contrast, are generally assumed to be selfish, greedy and generally horrible. This consensus explains why now, if you live in a British city or large town, you will be surrounded by a multitude of signs outside houses exhorting you to vote Labour, Liberal Democrat or Green, and why you will scarcely see any ‘Vote Conservative’ signs. Everyone wants to be seen as a caring lefty, and no one wants to parade their right-wing opinions.

I have never fallen for this myth myself, that left-wing people are better or morally superior people. If anything, and if we are going to judge a person’s character by their politics, I’ve always been more inclined to believe the opposite – that people who loudly espouse caring politics tend to be more egotistical and selfish. This is because the main things that ostentatious liberals care about are themselves, their public image and their reputation as really nice people.

The ‘caring liberals’ myth was exposed once again in the aftermath of the Manchester bombing. The bien pensants were on hand to issue clamorous declarations of peace, love, hashtags and sympathy, but few from the liberal media or in the Labour Party dared to speak out unequivocally against the obvious evil afoot: Islamism, an extreme variant of a creed that now deliberately kills children.

The thing that metropolitan liberals fear most is to be accused of racism and being ‘right-wing’. They are utterly terrified of losing face this way. Hence in times of terror, they stick to pacifist platitudes and evasive, deceitful words. Far better, and far safer, to direct their anger instead against people like Katie Hopkins and other non-U vulgarians. For the liberal left, the abiding concern is always: how do I make myself look good out of this situation?

This reluctance to speak the truth after Manchester is indeed despicable, but none of us is surprised. The tactic by the liberal left has always been to change the subject of a conversation about Islamist terrorism, and to instead invoke the mythical spectre of ‘Islamophobia’. Or ‘foreign policy’. Or ‘root causes’. This egotism is all the more outrageous in that it masquerades itself as altruism and outward-looking compassion.

This behaviour is not new. It’s part of our Christian heritage, which long ago instilled in our collective mindset the notion that self-abasement and self-hatred are virtues. George Orwell wrote copiously about the liberal left’s infantile, attention-seeking self-hatred. And I remember my dad telling me about a letter he read in the Guardian in the 1960s, from a reader who would bump into West Indians and Pakistanis on purpose on the buses, just so he could say sorry to them. ‘We are all guilty’ remains the mantra of simpering, self-flagellating pietists.

‘Progressive’ politics today is about feeling good first, making yourself look good second, and doing good third. Ostensible and ostentatious liberal politics is now less about changing the world and more about you. Nietzsche’s warning about conspicuously caring types remains pertinent: ‘Where in the world have there been greater follies than with the compassionate? And what in the world has caused more suffering than the follies of the compassionate?’

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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Five Reasons Why America Is About To Become A Very Conservative Country

For generations, we’ve seen the political landscape in this country teeter back and forth between the Left and the Right. Usually about every 8 years or so, whichever political party is dominating Congress, the Executive Branch, and the state legislatures, is kicked out by voters and replaced with the other political party.

However, there’s something very different going on this time around. Donald Trump’s ascent to the oval office represents a major shift in our society and culture, and I’m not talking about the intermittent shuffle of politicians that we see every few years. Instead, the pendulum is about to swing very hard to the right.

I think that the political landscape in America is going to be drifting towards conservatism for the next 20-40 years. Though it may not be identical to what we view as conservative today, and it certainly won’t be the phony neoconservatism that dominated the past, it will be right-wing nonetheless. Here’s why:

1. The Supreme Court Is About To Change

President Trump has already chosen one Supreme Court justice, and there’s a good chance that he’s going to wind up choosing several more (much to the dismay of the Left). Because of their advanced age, we may see three more Supreme Court justices retire or die over the next four to eight years, two of whom lean to the left.

If Trump lasts two terms, we’re definitely going to see a Supreme Court that is dominated by conservatives for the next 20-30 years. So even when liberals take back Congress and the presidency on occasion, many of their most radical ideas won’t be able to take hold for many years.

2. Immigration Is Going To Decline

The percentage of the population that is foreign born hasn’t been this high since the early 1900’s, and most of those immigrants are liberal. That’s why our loose borders, combined with The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, have probably done more to bolster the ranks of the Left than any other law.

But just as our nation’s political landscape tends to swing back and forth between the Left and the Right, so to does number of immigrants in America. In the short term, we can expect people like Trump to restrict the border and maybe pass laws that will decrease immigration to some degree.

But there’s a long term trend to consider as well, because the election of Trump likely represents a turning point for our society. Considering how crucial his immigration stance was to his victory, it’s clear that a growing number of Americans want the border tightened up, and the number of immigrants moving here to decrease. And rest assured that in the near future, there will be more conservatives voting for politicians who will try to lower immigration rates, because…

3. The Next Generation Is Incredibly Conservative

Over the years we’ve seen each generation of Americans become a little more liberal than the last, but that’s about to change. According to a study from last year, Generation Z, which represents kids born after the year 2000, is the most conservative generation since World War Two. To give you an idea of just how right-wing the next generation is, when asked if they are “quite conservative,” 14% of teenagers say they are, compared to just 2% of Millennials. That’s a mind boggling shift, from one generation to the next.

4. Liberal Birth Rates Are Declining

The Left is about to pay a huge price for denigrating the family and traditional gender roles for so many years. Because liberal women tend to be more career minded and wait longer to have children, they often have fewer kids over the course of their lives. That’s why liberal states always have lower birth rates than conservative states.

All of the states with a birth rate of of 60 or less per 1000 people are liberal, and all of the states with a birth rate of 70 or more per 1000 people are conservative. That may not sound drastic, but consider that these states still have a sizeable mix of conservatives and liberals. Even the most liberal states have millions of conservative residents and vice versa, which offsets the results. If ideology is really driving birth rates, then liberals are probably having very very few children. They’re probably not reaching the minimum replacement rate of 2.1 children per mother.

When you consider how many values kids learn from their parents and carry into adulthood, it’s obvious that the Left has a serious demographic problem. The only way they’ve been able to create more liberals, is through immigration and through indoctrination in the school system. Unfortunately for the Left, they’re not going to have a stranglehold on our schools for much longer either.

5. Leftist Academia Is In Serious Trouble

From Kindergarten to college, our schools are breeding grounds for liberal ideas. That’s become abundantly clear in recent years, as we’ve seen the horrifying rise of political correctness and social justice beliefs on college campuses. These institutions are little more than indoctrination centers for the Left.

But this isn’t going to go on for much longer. We have a whole generation of kids who were buried in over a trillion dollars worth of debt, just so they could get worthless liberal arts degrees that won’t ever help them get a job. They paid tens of thousands of dollars to be indoctrinated by liberal professors, before going back home to live with their parents.

That’s why student loans constitute a bubble in our economy, and once it pops, colleges are going to have to cut back on many classes that don’t actually increase the earning power of students. Coincidentally, the fields of study that harbor the most liberal professors, are the ones that don’t help most students get jobs, like the arts, humanities, liberal arts, gender studies, etc. Someday soon, colleges are going to be forced to trim the fat, and many of these Marxist professors and diversity administrators are going to get the axe. Their positions are incredibly superfluous.

As for the leftists public schools, let’s not forget that the number of kids being homeschooled is growing rapidly, and most of their parents are conservatives. They’re raising a new generation that isn’t going to be brainwashed by government run schools.

And let’s not forget that the mainstream media, which has been largely wed to the left, is dying. So basically, every institution that the Left uses to teach its ideas, from the media to academia, is slowly crumbling away.

In summation, everything liberals have relied on to bolster their ranks, propagate their ideas, and pass their laws, are failing. So there shouldn’t be any doubt. Over the next few decades, America is going to become a very conservative place.

SOURCE

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Allah's war on us continues

Police believe three male suspects were involved in Saturday's London Bridge attacks, but say more work needs to be done to establish if they were alone. All three men were shot and killed by armed police at nearby Borough Market.

A white B&Q van being driven at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour mounted the pavement at London Bridge and ploughed into pedestrians.

Three men wielding knives 10 inches long then began attacking passersby, even entering at least one restaurant to attack Saturday night diners.

Police say the attack lasted around eight minutes before armed officers attended the scene and took down the assailants.

One eyewitness spoke of the men shouting “this is for Allah” as they stabbed indiscriminately.

"We saw people running away and then I saw a man in red with a large blade, at a guess 10 inches long, stabbing a man, about three times," one witness said.

"It looked like the man had been trying to intervene, but there wasn't much he could do. He was being stabbed quite coldly and he slumped to the ground."

SOURCE

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Written Out of History: The Forgotten Founders Who Fought Big Government

Some of America’s most important founders have been erased from our history books. In the fight to restore the true meaning of the Constitution, their stories must be told.
   
In the earliest days of our nation, a handful of unsung heroes—including women, slaves, and an Iroquois chief—made crucial contributions to our republic. They pioneered the ideas that led to the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, and the abolition of slavery. Yet, their faces haven’t been printed on our currency or carved into any cliffs. Instead, they were marginalized, silenced, or forgotten—sometimes by an accident of history, sometimes by design.
   
In the thick of the debates over the Constitution, some founders warned about the dangers of giving too much power to the central government. Though they did not win every battle, these anti-Federalists and their allies managed to insert a system of checks and balances to protect the people from an intrusive federal government. Other forgotten figures were not politicians themselves, but by their thoughts and actions influenced America’s story. Yet successive generations have forgotten their message, leading to the creation of a vast federal bureaucracy that our founders would not recognize and did not want.

For example:

 *  Aaron Burr who is depicted in the popular musical Hamilton and in history books as a villain, but in reality was a far more complicated figure who fought the abuse of executive power.

 *  Mercy Otis Warren, one of the most prominent female writers in the Revolution and a protégé of John Adams, who engaged in vigorous debates against the encroachment of federal power and ultimately broke with Adams over her fears of the Constitution.

 *  Canasatego, an Iroquois chief whose words taught Benjamin Franklin the basic principles behind the separation of powers.

If we knew of the heroic fights of these lost founders, we’d never have ended up with a government too big, too powerful, and too unresponsive to its citizens. The good news is that it’s not too late to rememberand to return to our first principles. Restoring the memory of these lost individuals will strike a crippling blow against big government.

More HERE

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Tucker Carlson: 'Humor Is Dead; Politics Killed It'

“Humor is dead; politics killed it,” Tucker Carlson declared after comedian Kathy Griffin held up, ISIS-style, a fake, bloodied severed head of President Donald Trump.

On his Thursday television program, Carlson bemoaned that so-called comedians like Kathy Griffin and Samantha Bee have stopped even trying to be funny.

Instead, they’re just appealing to the malicious attitudes of people who agree with their politics:

“People clap for her, not because they’re amused, but because they agree with her politics. That’s not art. It’s affirmation.

“An awful lot of comedy is like that all of a sudden. Ever watch Samantha Bee? If you like preachy self-righteousness in massive doses, that’s the show for you.

“Or try John Oliver – you get the same thing there - or Bill Maher or Trevor Noah, or Stephen Colbert. Some of these guys used to be funny, a long time ago – but, not Samantha Bee, she was never funny.”

And, because it’s working, all entertainers have been forced to abandon humor in order to preach liberal political propaganda:

“Now, they are playing to the biases and vanities of their audiences and it's working, unfortunately, which means they are all the exactly the same, prisoners of conformity, which is always the sworn enemy of art. Step out of line, and you pay the price.”

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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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Is President Trump our Messiah?

That heading will no doubt get a few laughs.  It may even attract some Leftist derision.  With his short temper and impatience with detail he is a most unlikely Messiah -- but the Pharisees thought that about the carpenter from Galilee too. I don't really believe in Messiahs but I am beginning to think that he is as near to our Messiah as we are likely to get.  His repudiation of the Paris climate accord is a YUGE break with the status quo.  Warmism will be on death watch from now on.  The greatest craze of the postwar era will have run its course. Someone of influence has finally declared that the emperor has no clothes.

And he brings us salvation from oppression of many other sorts too:  Tax reform, healthcare reform, immigration reform and much more is on his agenda.  None of those things are new ideas but it took Trump to get them rolling.  Jesus too based his teaching on what was already there in the Old Testament: "I came not to abolish ..." (Matthew 5:17).  The breadth of Trump's breaks with the past is truly astonishing.  He slays the sacred cows of convention daily.

And the sacred cows he slays are mostly Leftist.  He even shows how Leftist thinking has seeped into conservative thought.  I myself plead guilty to having accepted the conventional doctrine that unalloyed free trade is an ultimate goal.  There is no doubt that unalloyed free trade delivers all goods and services at lowest cost but is that the only desideratum?  Do we care whether our Chinese electric kettle costs us $7 or $9? Are there goals more important than that? Trump has made clear that there are.  Stability of employment matters too; social stability matters too.  Preserving jobs may be well worth it if the price is  to accept a $9 kettle instead of a $7 kettle.

My brother is so far Right he is almost out of sight and he has always said you have to look after your own people as first priority.  Thanks to Prez. Trump we now agree on that.

And when my son got home from work after the climate announcement we toasted Mr. Trump in good Australian "Champagne"

So Trump has even educated conservatives on what is important.  He is a great educator and conservatives not on his wavelength should accept what they can learn from him rather than digging their heels in like the Pharisees

covfefe! -- JR

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What Kathy Griffin Means for Us

The most heinous aspect of the Kathy Griffin faked beheading of Donald Trump is that it shows us exactly how degraded the sensibilities of the liberal establishment have become- and how subverted they are by the Islamic Jihad.

I do not remember, prior to Daniel Pearl’s cold-blooded murder in 2002, even being aware of beheading in the modern world. I think that, to my mind it was, back then, as distant and ancient as impaling and crucifixion. After February 1, 2002 cutting the head off of a living human being with a knife became a particular and real horror. In an attempt to understand what happened to him, I found the video on line.The utter barbarity, the bloody reality, the ghastly psychopathic cruelty of the act was overpowering. This rough disconnection of the head from the body, accompanied by the flood of life’s blood is at once a terrifying, spectacular mutilation and a desecration of the most elemental spiritual wholeness of humanity. The mouth is open, the eyes go dull and if we fail to be horrified, we die inside ourselves.

I recognized it right away as a close cousin of the gas chambers, firing squads, death trucks and starvation of the holocaust. What sane American in the early twentieth century could have seen those coming? The numbers of victims were not the same but they were both cases of how the human mind can calculate its way- rage and reason its way- to doing deeds of previously unthinkable evil. Anyway, didn’t Stalin say that “the death of one person is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic”?

Now, more than 15 years later, beheadings are common, almost daily occurrences. The brutal savages post videos and pictures of them on the internet as terror tactics. How many people in the west have watched one of them- or even made themselves look at one of the pictures?  I wonder if Kathy Griffin ever watched one of those videos. They are real and they are happening all the time.

As unthinkable and despicable as joking about “Lynching president Obama” was for the past eight years, there had been no epidemic of racial lynchings for many decades to give them a similar dimension of possibility. Even the catcalls against Jews who support Israel that “the gas chambers are waiting” and “kill the Jews” taunts that are heard in anti-Israel demonstrations around the world are not as immediate and visceral as beheading is today. Only to people who are not paying attention to the wholesale murder of innocent Christians and Jews in the Islamic Jihad is a beheading anodyne enough to be a subject of a humorous satire. This is the worst horror of Kathy Griffin and her failed jape, It is yet another how so many of us are unwilling to look squarely at the most immediate threat to all of us.

She doesn’t get it. Nor do the rest of the clucking liberal press who are all in some degree sympathetic in their condemnations. They think it was “inappropriate”. Beheading is not funny,  it is not merely inappropriate, it is emblematic of how the barbaric Jihad is beginning to incrementally succeed in separating our minds from our hearts and our souls.

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Booming US jobs market lifts equities

American employers created more than a quarter of a million jobs last month in a “rip-roaring” labour market as manufacturing conditions improved for the sixth month running, according to reports yesterday which sent stock markets to new highs.

Private employers hired significantly more workers in May than economists expected, a closely watched forecast suggested, raising hopes of a strong showing in today’s official jobs report. A separate reading of manufacturing conditions showed that new orders, exports and backlogs built up rapidly.

The three main US share indices closed at record highs. The Dow Jones rose 135.53 points to 21,144.18 while the broader S&P 500 was 0.6 per cent up at 2,430.06. The tech-heavy Nasdaq finished 0.7 per cent higher.

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Loony Liberal Insults General Mattis With This Idiotic Statement




Prof. Juan Cole goofs again below. The Leftist "expert" on the Middle East (a  professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History in the History Department at the University of Michigan), Juan Cole, gets shown up for the know-nothing he is here. And there is another scathing takedown of him here.  For more on that see Mark Kleiman.  We also read  here that Cole thinks  Iraq is on the Mediterranean!  And if  you read here you will see that the wacky Prof. Cole does not even know that a large part of what is the USA today was taken from Mexico!

At least one national media contributor thinks professional singer Ariana Grande, not Secretary of Defense (DOD) Jim Mattis, is the leader America needs to win the war on terror.

The Nation contributor and University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole published an article Wednesday centered on Grande and how the Department of Defense could learn a thing or two from the 23-year-old Nickelodeon alum.

The headline reads: “Arianna Grande Understands Counterterrorism Better Than Jim Mattis.”

Even for skeptics of the Trump administration, this assertion is a bit of a stretch. Cole accuses Mattis of underestimating our enemy and feels it is pointless to wipe out terrorists because it would only turn their families against the U.S.

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Astounding Number of States Support Trump Against Illegal Immigration

Two thirds of the nation’s states have taken action to join in President Trump’s bid to crackdown on illegal immigration and “sanctuary cities,” a sweeping national move that would bolster the administration’s effort even if it loses in the Supreme Court.

The Migration Policy Institute reports that 33 states have moved to choke off illegal immigration, led by Texas which OK’d a law to block cities from giving “sanctuary” to illegals.

“While Texas was the first state to pass a sweeping law focused on illegal immigration since the presidential election, at least 32 other states have introduced immigration enforcement bills,” said the Institute.

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Local government abuse of poor families

A column in the Washington Post reveals that local governments try to make families pay if their kids wind up in the legal system, even if they’re ultimately declared not guilty of any offense.

In dozens of one-on-one meetings every week, a lawyer retained by the city of Philadelphia summons parents whose children have just been jailed, pulls out his calculator and hands them more bad news: a bill for their kids’ incarceration. Even if a child is later proved innocent, the parents still must pay a nightly rate for the detention. Bills run up to $1,000 a month… The lawyer, Steven Kaplan…is paid up to $316,000 a year in salary and bonuses, more than any city employee, including the mayor.
I haven’t given any thought to whether families should cough up money if kids are found guilty and then incarcerated.

But I find it to be outrageous that bills are sent to families when the kids are found to be not guilty.

And let’s be honest. Such a policy is not about criminal justice. It’s about figuring out new ways of pillaging people to finance bureaucracy.

To add insult to injury, most of the families are poor, so it’s very difficult to collect revenue. Indeed, very little money is collected after paying the lawyer.

Because these parents are so often from poor communities, even the most aggressive efforts to bill them seldom bring in meaningful revenue. Philadelphia netted $551,261 from parents of delinquent children in fiscal 2016.
And when you look at the consequences for poor families, it’s hard to think this is a good policy. Especially if the kid isn’t convicted of any crime!

When parents fail to pay on time, the state can send collection agencies after them, tack on interest, garnish 50 percent of their wages, seize their bank accounts, intercept their tax refunds, suspend their driver’s licenses or charge them with contempt of court.
Here’s an example from the west coast.

When Mariana Cuevas’s son was released from a California jail, after being locked up in a juvenile hall for more than 300 days for a homicide he did not commit, the boy’s public defender, Jeffrey Landau, thought his work was done. The case had been dismissed; his client was free. But at a celebratory dinner afterward, Cuevas, a Bay Area home cleaner, pulled out a plastic bag full of bills and showed Landau that the state had tried to collect nearly $10,000 for her child’s imprisonment. …In fiscal 2014-2015, Alameda County, which contains Oakland, spent $250,938 collecting $419,830 from parents. An internal county report called that “little financial gain.”
This is astounding. Trying to pillage a poor family for $10,000 when the kid didn’t commit the crime. If you care about decency and justice, this may even be worse than civil asset forfeiture.

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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