What Lincoln Foresaw Would Occur If Maxine Waters, Others Got Their Way With Mob Justice

Lincoln has already been proved right.  With typical Leftist lack of foresight, Waters did not foresee pushback against her foul comments.  Now it has come. She has received a couple of threats of violence against her -- reducing her to a blubbering heap.  Leftism really is a mental defect

In 1836, at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, a 28-year-old lawyer named Abraham Lincoln delivered one of his finest addresses.

Lincoln condemned the sharp increase of mobs in America, which had exploded in number as the debate over slavery and regional animosity intensified.

“Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times,” Lincoln said.

Many of these mobs had turned violent and subverted the law. They were undermining free government.

Calls for civility are sometimes vapid excuses to shut down political dissent. But what’s occurring now in America is not just heated debate at political rallies, it’s a surge in mob activity directed at political opponents in everyday life.

In just the past few weeks we’ve seen the harassment of a Trump Cabinet member, Kirstjen Nielsen, at a District of Columbia restaurant.

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Republican, was, somewhat ironically, accosted as she left a movie about Fred Rogers, or “Mr. Rogers,” the nationally beloved children’s show host famous for welcoming people to his fictional neighborhood.

These incidents were bad enough, but some are calling for much more.

Over the weekend, the owners of a Virginia restaurant booted White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders because of her association with the Trump administration.

This incident provoked the debate over freedom of association, but then Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., stepped into the fray and made the situation worse.

At a rally Saturday, the Los Angeles congresswoman called for mobs to go after political opponents wherever they may be.

“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd,” Waters yelled.

Waters also said in an interview with MSNBC: “I want to tell you, these members of [Trump’s] Cabinet who remain and try to defend him, they won’t be able to go to a restaurant, they won’t be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop at a department store.”

Some activists have grabbed hold of these recent incidents to call for more radical action. One writer on a left-wing blog, Splinter, went even further than Waters. In an article titled “This Is Just the Beginning,” he took the next big leap to essentially condoning outright violence:

"Read a recent history book. The U.S. had thousands of domestic bombings per year in the early 1970s. This is what happens when citizens decide en masse that their political system is corrupt, racist, and unresponsive. The people out of power have only just begun to flex their dissatisfaction. The day will come, sooner that you all think, when Trump administration officials will look back fondly on the time when all they had to worry about was getting hollered at at a Mexican restaurant."

Of course, Lincoln in his Lyceum address begged to differ.

“There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law,” Lincoln said. “In any case that arises, as for instance, the promulgation of abolitionism, one of two positions is necessarily true; that is, the thing is right within itself, and therefore deserves the protection of all law and all good citizens; or, it is wrong, and therefore proper to be prohibited by legal enactments; and in neither case, is the interposition of mob law either necessary, justifiable, or excusable.”

Some, even on the left, have been a little unnerved by calls for mobs, whether violent or nonviolent, to attack political foes in everyday life.

“Those who are insisting that we are in a special moment justifying incivility should think for a moment how many Americans might find their own special moment,” The Washington Post said in an editorial. “How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?”

Her fellow Democrats have voiced some condemnation of Waters’ demand for mobs to harass political opponents. Much of this criticism has been muted, though.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., did take to Twitter, calling such language “unacceptable,” but ultimately blamed President Donald Trump for the “provoked responses.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., offered the strongest condemnation of Waters, saying that calling for harassment of political opponents is “not American.”

One would hope that mob law and mob justice don’t become the norm, but we’ve already seen a steady uptick in the mentality that leads to that point.

We’ve seen it with the mobs that descended on historic statues to illegally pulverize them in the name of social justice. Now the mobs are coming for living people.

This kind of ugliness is a bad sign for our future.

Lincoln explained to his Springfield audience what could ultimately destroy the United States.

“Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow?” Lincoln asked.

No, never.

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?” Lincoln asked again. “I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

Passionate debates are good and healthy in a republic.

There was never a “golden age of civility” when all Americans got along, nor should we necessarily desire one.

Nevertheless, the ability to live together as free citizens in large part necessitates a respect for civil relations among us, where we look to persuasion and ballots to put our ideas in action, not brute intimidation of opponents.

The constitutional system the Founding Fathers built is strong, but it can’t survive when citizens en masse are ready to come to blows with one another on a semipermanent basis, are ready and willing to gin up mobs to go after one another for political disagreements.

That system shattered in 1860, and ended with the bloodiest period in our nation’s history.

This sort of crackup may, in fact, be what some want, but it’s unlikely to end well for those who believe in free institutions in the United States.

SOURCE

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Holocaust Survivor Has Message for Americans Calling Detention Centers ‘Concentration Camps’

It used to be that anyone who compared a president to the infamous Austrian dictator was ignored or laughed out of town. Today, that appalling comparison is being thrown around with reckless abandon … but a Polish-American Holocaust survivor has had enough of the dangerous discourse.

“Listen to me. I went through it. Please,” Polish-born David Tuck looked into the camera during a sobering interview with The Daily Caller.

“This is not a concentration camp,” he stated bluntly about the HHS and ICE refugee centers that have drawn so much uninformed ire from the left-leaning media.

Tuck knows a few things about actual concentration camps in tragic, first-hand detail. He witnessed true horrors as a Jew who was thrown into camps by Nazis, and barely survived hellish conditions in places such as Posen and Auschwitz.

The Holocaust survivor is adamant about one thing: There is absolutely nothing in common between U.S. border refugee centers and real concentration camps.

“I looked up there (at the border centers) and I said to myself, all the mattresses, everything … food. I said, at that time I’d think it was a country club,” Tuck explained to Daily Caller.

That matches the true image of border centers that have come out since the immigration issue reached a fever pitch over the last few weeks. Contrary to the staged and deceptive images of “kids in cages,” the actual centers are safe and comfortable shelters where social workers work to help children and everyone is well fed.

The conditions that the elderly survivor remembers have much more in common with socialist regimes like North Korea or Venezuela than America.

When asked by the Daily Caller journalist if he had a message for media talking heads and radical leftists who think America runs concentration camps on the border, Tuck said two blunt words: “Grow up.”

SOURCE

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ICE Director Tells Protesting Democrats to ‘Get Their Facts Straight and Inform Themselves’

As demonstrators across the nation prepared to protest the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy this week, the director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had some advice for those seeking to blame his agency for the results.

More than 700 protests were planned for Saturday after weeks of mounting backlash over a policy that resulted in family separations and reports of children being temporarily housed in what critics have described as cages.

In recent days, ICE has been the target of increasing opposition by demonstrators and even some elected officials.

As a protest movement to “Abolish ICE” has gained some traction in recent days, two prominent New York politicians, both Democrats, have endorsed the effort.

U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said in an interview on Thursday that she believed the agency “has become a deportation force,” adding that “you should get rid of it, start over, reimagine it and build something that actually works.”

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio offered a pithier take in a radio interview the following morning.

“We should abolish ICE,” he said.

Tom Homan, the agency’s acting director, defended the agency against such protests and suggested those calling for its dissolution are misplacing their anger.

“They need to educate themselves,” he said in a Fox News interview on Friday. “I mean this protest yesterday to protest about family separations on the border, ICE doesn’t separate families on the border. That’s the Border Patrol. We’re a different agency.”

Though he said critics of ICE “need to get their facts straight” about the two federal agencies, he noted that the U.S. Border Patrol is not to blame for the controversial practice either.

“If the American public wants to know who to blame for family separations, the first people they need to blame is Congress,” Homan said. “We went up the Hill several months ago and told them what the loopholes were.”

He took specific aim at Gillibrand for her statements about the agency. “She needs to study the issue too because she went to a protest on family separation on the border and she tries to blame ICE for it — ICE separated families,” he said. “First of all, she’s got to get her facts straight.”

Homan also saved some indignation for other elected officials who have been similarly critical of ICE and other agencies working to secure the border.

“I’m insulted at a lot of the Democratic senators and congressmen that want to vilify the men and women that put their lives on the line every day for this country,” he said.

Though Homan is in the process of retirement, he pledged to continue working on behalf of those enforcing America’s border laws amid ongoing attacks by protesters.

SOURCE

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2 Reasons Why the Media Will Drop Coverage of the Capital Gazette Shooting

The shooting was not politically motivated but those who knew the shooter say he was a very angry man.  Maybe as angry as the Leftist critics of Donald Trump. One can only guess how he voted but birds of a feather flock together

On Thursday, four journalists and one staff member of the Capital Gazette were murdered in the newspaper’s Annapolis, Maryland, office.

While the event was initially widely covered by all major news outlets, the media is likely to quickly move on from the story, just like it did with the Santa Fe High School shooting, because it doesn’t fit the right narrative. (Unlike many of the Parkland students, the Santa Fe students didn’t respond to the tragedy by calling for gun control measures.)

That in itself is a shame, not just because there is much to learn from this tragedy, but also because the inspiring courage of the surviving journalists deserves more than a single news cycle.

Why It Will Go Away Quickly

Reason No. 1: It doesn’t fit the gun control narrative.

This shooting can’t be blamed on lax gun laws. Maryland has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country, earning it an A- rating from the Giffords Law Center—one of only six states to earn above a B+ score. It has enacted almost all of the gun control measures commonly proposed by gun control advocates.

And yet, despite this, not only did this incident occur, but Baltimore is one of the worst cities in the U.S. for gun-related violence, and was recently named by USA Today as “the nation’s most dangerous city.” In the last sixth months, 120 Baltimore residents have been murdered with firearms—21 in the last 30 days. Maryland itself does not fit the gun control narrative.

But this tragedy does fit the actual common fact pattern of mass public shootings: An individual with a long history of concerning behaviors managed to avoid a disqualifying criminal or mental health record, took a legally owned “non-assault” firearm to a gun-free zone, and picked off defenseless people in the time it took law enforcement to respond.

This reality, however, is inconvenient for pushing common gun control measures like raising the minimum purchase age to 21, imposing universal background checks, and banning “assault weapons.”

That makes it much more likely this story will quietly fade and be replaced by other stories that can be better weaponized against conservatives, like Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement.

Reason No. 2: Pundits immediately—and incorrectly—blamed President Donald Trump.

Within an hour of the first reports of shots fired in the Capital Gazette building, numerous media pundits took it upon themselves to blame the shooting on Trump’s rhetoric about “fake news.” A Reuters reporter accused the president of having blood on his hands, followed by similar accusations from a New York Times journalist, a White House correspondent, an investigative reporter from Politico, and other high-profile media personalities.

They were completely, unequivocally wrong.

The suspect wasn’t motivated by political ideology, but by a longstanding feud with the newspaper that predates Trump’s election by roughly four years. Had these journalists waited for the facts of the situation to come out, they could have avoided looking exactly like the “fake news” media the president has accused them of being.

Instead, they’re having to backtrack and justify irrational statements. That’s not an easy job, and often requires a bit of humility.

On the other hand, simply dropping the story as fast as possible is much more convenient.

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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Justice Dept. announces new family detention policy for illegal immigrants

The administration announced a new policy Friday to detain nearly all illegal immigrant families nabbed at the border, offering the latest bold ante in an ongoing battle over President Trump’s attempt to stop a new surge of migration.

The policy will be controversial not only with congressional Democrats and immigrant-rights activists, but also with a federal judge who had ordered that children could be held no longer than 20 days in immigration detention.

Government lawyers, though, said yet another judge’s ruling earlier this week making most family separations illegal supersedes the 20-day rule and other restrictions, and gives the government the ability to hold families together until their immigration cases are completed.

“The government will not separate families but detain families together during the pendency of immigration proceedings when they are apprehended at or between ports of entry,” the Justice Department said in a filing with Judge Dolly M. Gee.

The arguments come as lower courts are increasingly asserting control of the immigration system — leaving the executive branch struggling to carry out its own policies amid potentially competing rulings and judges working at cross purposes.

SOURCE 

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If the (Brown) Shirt Fits...

The hateful vitriol of the American Left is reminiscent of a hateful vitriolic 20th century leader.

“The art of leadership consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention.”

“F—k Trump!” —Robert De Niro

“Mr. President, f—k you!” —Caitlin Marriott, an intern for Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH). Marriott was suspended, but will continue working through August.

“You’re the presi-dunce but you’re turning into a real prick-tator. … In fact, the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s c—k holster.” —Stephen Colbert

“Demoralize the enemy from within by surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination. This is the war of the future.”

“It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress Wednesday was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted.” —former CBS news anchor Scott Pelley, following the attempted assassination of Rep. Steve Scalise and other Republicans by Bernie Sanders volunteer James Hodgkinson during practice for the annual congressional baseball game

“If you see anybody from [Trump’s] Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd! And you push back on them! And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere!” —Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA)

“We should rip Barron Trump from his mother’s arms and put him in a cage with pedophiles. … We should hack the system get the address of the ICE agents the CPB agents and surround their homes in protest. We should find out what schools their children go to and surround their schools in protest.” —Peter Fonda

“Around two dozen threat reports were issued in the past few days, primarily against Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. … Each of these reports is generally related to a specific online threat. All employees are personally contacted by DHS security if they are the target of a violent threat. … In one example, a senior DHS official living in the Washington, DC, area found a burnt and decapitated animal on his front porch” —ABC Radio

“If you see these people in public, you should remind them that they shouldn’t have peace.” —DOJ paralegal Allison Hrabar, who joined the mob of fellow Democratic Socialists of America that surrounded Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen while she dined at a Mexican restaurant

“I would have done the same thing again,” stated Stephanie Wilkinson, the owner of the Red Hen restaurant who asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave. Wilkinson reportedly organized a mob to follow Sanders and her family to another restaurant and continue berating them. CNN’s Symone Sanders endorsed the actions, insisting people “calling for civility need to check their privilege.”

“The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category.”

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up."—Hillary Clinton

"I always said about the Trump people, there’s two things they hate: being called a racist, and black people.” —Bill Maher

“We can no longer say Trump’s the bad guy. If you vote for Trump, you’re the bad guy. If you vote for Trump, you are ripping children from parents’ arms. … If you vote for Trump, then you, the voter — you, not Donald Trump — are standing at the border, like Nazis, going ‘you here, you here.’” —former CNBC talk show host Donny Deutsch

“[Trump supporters] cannot say, ‘Oh, I’m just supporting him because he’s giving them hell in Washington, DC. No, he’s been openly racist just like we said back in December of 2015 — openly racist. If you support him, then you’re supporting that, and you are that. It’s that simple.” —MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough

“Anybody who enables, anybody who votes for and supports a racist is a racist. You are culpable, white America, I’m sorry.” —Michael Moore

“Trump’s supporters are all poor to middle class, uneducated, lazy POS [pieces of s—t] that think he will magically grant them jobs for doing nothing.” —an unidentified FBI employee, according to the inspector general’s report

“Just went to a southern Virginia Walmart. I could SMELL the Trump support.” —FBI agent Peter Strzok

“It is not truth that matters, but victory.”

“In late May, before the uproar over the Trump administration’s family separations policy had reached fever pitch, several prominent journalists and activists tweeted disturbing photos published in the Arizona Republic from a facility that allegedly housed minors who had been wrenched from their parents. The pictures showed children, covered only in a thin layer of aluminum foil, sleeping in cages. … But there was one problem. The photos, it turned out, were from 2014, during the Obama administration’s second term.” —NY Magazine

“The original version of this story misstated what happened to the girl in the photo after she [was] taken from the scene. The girl was not carried away screaming by U.S. Border Patrol agents; her mother picked her up and the two were taken away together.” —correction issued by Time magazine following its cover photo of Trump and a crying child. Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal nonetheless insisted the misrepresentation “capture the stakes of this moment.” Later it was learned the mother had been previously deported in 2013.

“Now look, I know we’re not Nazi Germany. But there is a commonality there and a fear on my part that we have standards we have to live up to.” —former CIA Director Michael Hayden, defending his tweet containing a picture of Auschwitz with the caption “other governments have separated mothers and children”

“I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the almighty creator

"God is on OUR side!” —Maxine Waters

“If you win you need not have to explain. … If you lose, you should not be there to explain.”

“Do you think that being asked to leave a restaurant, or having your meal interrupted, or being called by the public is bad? My fascism-enabling friends, this is only the beginning.” —Splinter columnist Hamilton Nolan, who further insists that “when you aggressively f—k with people’s lives, you should not be surprised when they decide to f—k with yours.”

“I’m not a Republican and I don’t vote. But because I’ve been labeled as a Trump supporter … I’ve stopped appearing in public … because of the physical danger. … And I’m feeling like the best reason for Republicans to vote is they’re coming for you next. And they’re not hiding it. They’re coming for Trump right now, but they’re making it pretty clear they’re coming for Trump supporters next.” —Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Socialist. Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.” —Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller

Final note: All of the italicized quotes in this column come from the same source: Adolf Hitler.

SOURCE 

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Neoliberalism: No regrets,/b>

Dr. Madsen Pirie writes from Britain:

Two years ago, in 2016, Prof Colin Talbot, Professor of Government at the University of Manchester, claimed that the term “Neoliberalism” was devoid of meaning. He was attacked by a ‘progressive’ student who demanded that he be disciplined by the university authorities. Talbot claimed that no-one admitted to being a neoliberal, and that it was now simply an all-purpose insult.

Cambridge took a lead with its debate in mid-June of 2018 on the motion, “This House Regrets Neoliberalism.” The Cambridge Union took the line that the term does in fact have meaning, and that it is something one can be for or against. The Adam Smith Institute is for it. Asked to speak at the end of a 2015 term-long seminar at Brighton University, I chose the title, “Looking at the World Through Neoliberal Eyes,” and subsequently had a T-shirt custom-made reading “Neoliberal and proud of It.”

The ASI’s executive director at the time, Sam Bowman, then published in 2016 an essay about what it meant to be a neoliberal. The ASI rebranded itself as “a neoliberal, free market think tank.” Far from regretting neoliberalism, the institute took pride in it, indulging in it, and trumpeting its virtues and achievements, and explained why it did so at every possible opportunity.

I am often asked at schools about the causes of poverty, and I reply that there are none. Unfortunately, poverty has been the condition of humankind for most of its 3 million-year existence. To ask its causes is like asking the causes of cold in the universe. It is the absence of heat or energy. Similarly, poverty is the absence of wealth. Wealth is the unusual condition that requires explanation. Poverty is what happens when there is no wealth, none of that unusual condition. It is wealth that requires explanation. I do not, of course, mean that poor people are poor because they do nothing. I mean they are poor because of the absence of that unusual condition, the one we should study, understand, and try to replicate as widely as possible.

A fundamental cause of wealth is the use of resources for investment instead of consumption. It is the deferment of present consumption in order to achieve future gain, the use of resources as capital. This is what financed the Industrial Revolution – the best thing that has ever happened to humanity. The addition of free markets and free trade ensured that the wealth created by the Industrial Revolution increased the living standards and the life chances of ordinary people. It led to cheaper food, medical advances, and it paid for such things as sanitation and education. It lifted humankind above subsistence and starvation, and onto that upward road that we have been climbing ever since.

This year marks an anniversary. In 1978 there came Star Wars, three popes, democracy in Spain, and the Sex pistols. But the most significant event of 40 years ago passed without notice at the time. In the village of Xiaogang in China, 18 farmers met at night in secret to sign a pact that divided the village’s collective land between them, allowing each family to keep a share of the proceeds they generated. They knew how risky this was, going against the ruling socialist ideology, and added a clause pledging to raise and educate the children of any exposed and executed. Their first harvest yielded more than the previous 5 years added together, and they were exposed by neighbouring villages.

Under Mao Zedong they would undoubtedly have been executed, but the paramount leader Deng Xiaoping was consolidating his power. He ordered that the experiment of the villagers be studied, and then replicated across China. So began the modernization of China. The approach was copied in India and other countries, and marked the beginning of the neoliberal hegemony.

Those who praise China’s “economic progress since 1949” are glibly glossing over the great socialist famines that killed 60 million people from starvation. The progress dates from 1978, not 1949, and it was the brave farmers of Xiaogang who led the way. It was not socialism but its abandonment, and the spread of neoliberal policies that paved the way to success.

Is this something we should regret? Not at all.

2 billion people were lifted out of subsistence and starvation

The average incomes of the world’s poor doubled in real terms
Life expectancy doubled

Deaths in childbirth and infancy became a fraction of what they had been

Access to sufficient food, healthcare and education reached unprecedented levels

Did it increase inequality? Yes, it did within countries. This always happens when countries embark on that upward road to growth and prosperity. Inequality increases at first, then levels off and subsequently declines. But inequality decreased between countries as poor countries vied to join the ranks of richer ones.

However, neoliberals think that absolute command of resources matters more. Access to enough food, healthcare and education is more important than the gap between rich and poor. Will there be food on the table on Friday? Do the children have a safe place to sleep? Can our parents get though winter? These things matter more than how far ahead rich people might be. Neoliberalism brings the greatest help to those who need it most – those on the bottom rung of society.

Should we regret what it has achieved? Absolutely not. We can be justly proud that we have discovered a formula that uplifts the common lot of humanity. Its achievements cannot be ignored, because they are real-world facts, not some fancy theory of what might happen. They did happen. Is neoliberalism the last word in economic progress? Probably not. It is essentially empirical. If something better comes along, it might well replace it.

But that is no reason to regret what it has achieved. It is the best system we have yet found to bring decent lives to ordinary people around the world. We should no more regret it than we should regret the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, or the Industrial Revolution.

We carried the torch for a time and we let its blaze light up the world. We should honour it and exult in its achievements, and reject emphatically any idea that we should regret it.

SOURCE 

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Leftmedia: Trump Caused Newspaper Attack,/b>

The murderer was motived by his own personal animosity. It had nothing to do with Trump

Five journalists who worked at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, were murdered Thursday when an individual with a longstanding grudge against the newspaper blasted his way into the building seeking revenge for a lost 2015 defamation lawsuit he had leveled against the paper. It was personal animus against that specific newspaper, not some generalized anti-media sentiments. Nevertheless, as news of the attack quickly spread across the country, once again leftists politicized the atrocity by blaming President Donald Trump.

The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman wrote, “What happened today is sickening. This alleged gunman appears to have had a longstanding grudge against the paper and little else is known so far. But Trump is the only president in memory to call the press ‘the enemy of the people.’”

Reuters’ Rob Cox went further, angrily pontificating, “This is what happens when [Donald Trump] calls journalists the enemy of the people. Blood is on your hands, Mr. President. Save your thoughts and prayers for your empty soul.” Others joined in with similar memes.“

The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway observed, "We also didn’t see [the MSM] wonder if the media’s harsh treatment of Republicans led to the mass assassination attempt on a baseball field filled with Republican senators and members of Congress last June. They also didn’t wonder if anti-police rhetoric led to the targeted murders of various policemen in recent years. The blame game seems to work one way with traditional media sources.”

Is it any wonder that 72% of Americans think the MSM intentionally reports misleading news?

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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YUGE: Justice Anthony Kennedy to retire, opening Supreme Court seat for President Trump nomination

Reagan's greatest mistake erased at last

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement Wednesday, handing President Trump and Senate Republicans an opportunity to create a solidly conservative court that could last for decades.

Kennedy first informed his colleagues on the court about his plans, then personally delivered a simple, two-paragraph letter to Trump addressed, "My dear Mr. President."

Within minutes, the president said he would move "immediately" to select someone from a list of 25 potential nominees assembled previously with the help of conservative interest groups.

"It will be somebody from that list," Trump said. "Hopefully, we will pick someone who is just as outstanding."

Kennedy's long-rumored decision to step down July 31 will touch off a titanic battle between conservatives and liberals in the nation's capital, on the airwaves and in states represented by senators whose votes will be needed to confirm his successor.

Within hours of Kennedy's announcement, the conservative Judicial Crisis Network said it would launch a seven-figure, cable TV and digital advertising campaign targeting vulnerable Senate Democrats. The ad, titled "Another Great Justice," praises Trump’s nomination last year of Justice Neil Gorsuch in anticipation of his next nominee.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who refused in 2016 to consider President Barack Obama's nomination of federal appeals court Judge Merrick Garland for a vacant seat, vowed to move ahead swiftly.

“The Senate stands ready to fulfill its constitutional role by offering advice and consent on President Trump’s nominee to fill this vacancy," McConnell said. "We will vote to confirm Justice Kennedy’s successor this fall."

SOURCE

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Supreme Court deals major financial blow to nation's public employee unions

A deeply divided Supreme Court dealt a major blow to the nation's public employee unions Wednesday that likely will result in a loss of money, members and political muscle.

After three efforts in 2012, 2014 and 2016 fell short, the court's conservative majority ruled 5-4 that unions cannot collect fees from non-members to help defray the costs of collective bargaining. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the decision, with dissents from Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

About 5 million workers could be affected by the ruling — those who pay dues or "fair-share" fees to unions in 23 states where public employees can be forced to contribute. Workers in 27 states cannot be forced to join or pay unions.

Justice Neil Gorsuch cast the deciding vote against what conservative opponents have labeled a form of compelled speech. The money helps labor unions maintain political power in some of the nation's most populous states, including California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Gorsuch, who had remained silent during oral argument in February, was the key because the court had deadlocked in a similar case two years ago following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. The newest justice recently authored the court's 5-4 ruling that denied workers the right to join together in class action lawsuits rather than submit employer-sponsored arbitration.

The 2016 case challenged a powerful teachers union in California; the new one targeted state employees in Illinois. But the threatened impact was the same: elimination of fees paid by police, firefighters, teachers and other government workers who don't join the unions that represent them.

The landmark ruling overrules the court's own 41-year-old precedent, which said workers did not have to pay for unions' political activity but could be required to contribute to other costs of representation, such as wage and benefit negotiations and grievance procedures.

The court's decision frees those non-members from the fees, but unions also are braced to lose some dues-paying members who stand to save more under the new rule. That could force unions to raise dues on those who remain.

The case, Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, was backed by conservative groups that have tried for years to overturn the court's 1977 decision upholding the fees for collective bargaining but not for political action.

The court ruled 7-2, 5-4 and 4-4 on three similar cases in the past six years, eating away at the 1977 decision without overruling it entirely. In 2016, Scalia's death a month after oral arguments denied conservatives their fifth vote.

The decision comes at a time when 61% of Americans approve labor unions -- the highest rating in Gallup polls since 2003 -- and teachers' strikes have roiled states from West Virginia and Kentucky to Oklahoma, Colorado and Arizona.

"The fictional narrative of labor’s downfall is being upended by the reality working people are creating for ourselves," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said recently. "No matter the outcome of this case, millions of workers will continue to stand together to build a stronger, fairer America."

It remains unclear what impact the ruling will have on organized labor in general, which has suffered a 70-year decline in union membership. The nation's roughly 15 million union members make up less than 11% of the workforce, a drop from 35% during World War II. The decline is magnified in the private sector, where only 6.5% of workers remain unionized.

In the public sector, more than one in three workers belong to a union, a percentage that has held relatively steady for decades. AFSCME, the National Education Association, Service Employees International Union and American Federation of Teachers now face a likely loss of members.

Some groups that have fought to end compulsory fees argue that unions can stave off membership declines by better representing workers. They cite data from states such as Indiana and Michigan after the enactment of right-to-work laws.

SOURCE

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Unhinged Democrat hate on show

The Republican National Committee released a brutal campaign ad on Tuesday exposing the violence the political Left, showing voters ahead of crucial midterm elections what the Democratic Party supports.

The video, which has gone viral across social media, shows numerous instances in which liberals have made chilling comments about inflicting violence on President Donald Trump and officials who work in his administration.

The ad features comedian Kathy Griffin posing for a photo with a bloody, decapitated head that looks like President Trump; singer Madonna saying she has thought about blowing up the White House; rapper Snoop Dogg shooting the president in his music video; HBO host Bill Maher saying he wants the economy to crash so it hurts Trump; Samantha Bee calling Ivanka Trump a “feckless c**t”; House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi saying she doesn’t know why there aren’t uprisings “all over the country”; and Rep. Maxine Waters calling for violence, harassment, and uprisings against Trump officials.

The ad is so chilling to watch because it’s accurate. It went viral because this is what the Democratic Party has become in the era of Trump.

Rather than have healthy discussions on policy, the Left would rather stoke tensions and call for violence against the president, his supporters, and anyone who works in his administration.

The ad comes after several members of the Trump administration have already been targeted in recent days by liberal mobs after Waters urged people to confront them in public.

On Tuesday, a violent crowd showed up at the home of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife, Transportation Department Secretary Elaine Chao. She was caught on camera standing up to the protestors and defending her husband.

Over the weekend, pro-Trump Florida Republican Attorney General Pam Bondi was spit on by liberals while being chased out of a movie theater over the weekend.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was forced to get her own personal security detail from the Secret Service after being refused service and harassed at a restaurant last Friday.

Prior to that, a mob of deranged liberals swarmed the home of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielsen, putting her family at risk of being attacked, harassed, and confronted.

This is what Waters wanted, and the RNC is showing Americans exactly what the Democratic Party stands for ahead of crucial midterm elections in November.

SOURCE

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'Ridiculous’ government bureaucracy

US Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney gave an intricate and often eccentric explanation of redundancy and overlap in federal bureaucracy in a presentation that stunned the president and the press.

“I call this the ‘drain the swamp’ cabinet meeting,” Mr Mulvaney said, adding that it has been about 100 years since the federal government was reorganised at this scale.

He criticised the “Byzantine nature” by which the government regulates, creating headaches for business owners, employees and taxpayers.

“If you have a cheese pizza, it’s governed by the Food and Drug Administration. If you put a pepperoni on it, it’s governed by the [Department of Agriculture],” he said.

“If you have a [live] chicken, it’s governed by the USDA. If that chicken lays an egg, it’s governed by the FDA, but if you break the egg and make an omelet, that’s again governed by the USDA.”

He said that a hot dog is regulated simultaneously by two government agencies and said that one of the most intricate and “bizarre” cases of regulations involved saltwater fish.

Mr Mulvaney said that a salmon in the ocean is governed by the Department of Commerce, but that when the salmon is swimming upstream into freshwater where it breeds, it is governed by the Department of the Interior.

On its way to the breeding grounds, it encounters a fish ladder — a device used to help fish navigate waterfalls and other impediments — that is governed by the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Mr Mulvaney said government regulations as they exist are often “stupid” or “make no sense”. President Donald Trump then interjected, “That was incredibly said. I think you should put that on television, not what I said [previously].”

Mr Mulvaney said the examples he gave were just a few of the impediments faced by small businesses trying to operate in compliance with the government.

He said that is part of the reason the Departments of Education and Labor should be merged. “They’re all doing the same thing,” he said, noting that both “try to get people ready for the workforce”.

He added that there are “horror stories” from the Army Corps of Engineers because of the overlaps they have with the Interior, Transportation and Defense Departments

SOURCE

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Comparing the Border Situation to Nazi Germany? That’s a Form of Holocaust Denial

Dennis Prager

Last week, on the MSNBC show “Morning Joe,” MSNBC contributor Donny Deutsch said that every American who votes for President Donald Trump is a Nazi. His exact words: “If you vote for Trump, then you, the voter—you, not Donald Trump—are standing at the border like Nazis going, ‘You here. You here.'”

Now, as virtually every Jew of Deutsch’s generation knows, a Nazi saying, “You here. You here,” refers to guards at Nazi extermination camps sending Jews to gas chambers or to work the barracks.

Also last week, Gen. Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA (a fact that, among other things, gives credence to the increasingly widespread realization that our intelligence elites have been morally and intellectually compromised) tweeted a photo of the tracks leading into Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most infamous Nazi extermination and concentration camps, with the caption: “Other governments have separated mothers and children.”

Deutsch, Hayden, and the myriad other fools who compare Trump to Hitler and the Nazis have utterly trivialized the Holocaust. As everyone who isn’t on the left knows, there is nothing morally analogous between the way the last three presidential administrations dealt with some children of immigrants who are in the country illegally and what the Nazis did to Jewish children.

American children are routinely separated from their parent when that parent is arrested, and if the arrestee is a single parent, the child is taken into government custody until other arrangements can be made. With regard to immigrants who are in the country illegally, the only way to avoid separation is to place the children in detention along with their arrested parent(s).

But this was expressly forbidden by the most left-wing court in America—the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals—if detention lasts longer than 20 days, as it nearly always does when either a not-guilty plea or an asylum claim is made.

Moreover, as awful as separation from a parent is, these children were not treated like animals in cages but transferred to the care of relatives or foster homes, or housed with other detained children where they were provided with room, board, education, sports facilities, etc.

By contrast, Jewish children separated from their parents by Nazi guards were sent to gas chambers to die a gruesome, painful death by their lungs being filled with poisonous gas. And their parents almost always eventually suffered the same fate unless they were worked, starved, or tortured to death.

Comparing the two is not only a trivialization of the Holocaust; it is actually a form of Holocaust denial.

If Jewish children were treated by the Nazis the same way Central American children have been by America, then everything we know about the Holocaust is false.

Jewish children weren’t subjected to torturous medical experimentation, and they weren’t gassed and cremated. They were simply separated from their Jewish parents for a finite period of time, sent to stay with Jewish relatives or provided for by foster families while their parents were detained pending due-process legal proceedings.

According to Deutsch, Hayden, and all the leftists comparing America and Trump to the Nazis, Jewish children weren’t gassed; they played soccer while waiting to be reunited with their parents.

What is even more depressing than Deutsch and Hayden is the reaction—or silence—of most American Jewish organizations.

The Anti-Defamation League, which once defended Jewish interests, is becoming just another leftist interest group. I looked for some condemnation of Deutsch or Hayden and found none. Instead, in the words of the left-wing Israeli  newspaper Haaretz, the Anti-Defamation League “made a direct comparison to the Holocaust.”

It tweeted: “Children separated from their parents during the Holocaust speak out about the trauma it has caused. How can anyone defend such inhumane policies?”

The only criticism the Anti-Defamation League could muster was this: “People need to be extremely careful in drawing comparisons to the Holocaust and the Nazi regime in whatever context it is used.” But it offered no condemnation of those who actually made this odious comparison.

Leftism has poisoned much of American Jewish life. That is the primary reason, as reported in the just released American Jewish Committee poll, American and Israeli Jews are so divided on so many issues.

There were rabbis who announced they fasted when Trump was elected. Non-Orthodox synagogues around America sat shiva (the religious mourning period for a deceased immediate family member) when Trump won. And the Hebrew Union College, the Reform Jewish movement’s rabbinical seminary, had an Israel-hating writer as this year’s graduation speaker.

If you support Trump or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or hold almost any traditional Jewish worldview—like God creating the human being as male and female—you must either hide your opinion or risk being ostracized at almost any non-Orthodox synagogue.

To their credit, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Zionist Organization of America, and a few other organizations did condemn those who equate America under Trump with Nazi Germany. But most Jewish organizations kept quiet, offered tepid caution, or actually echoed the sentiment.

In other words, at this time, many American Jewish organizations are bad for the Jews, bad for Judaism, and trivialize the Holocaust in order to score political points.

If it’s any comfort (and it isn’t), things are no better in mainstream Protestantism or at the Vatican.

But here is real comfort: If the left keeps on smearing nearly half its fellow Americans as Nazis, it will assure more Republican victories this coming November.

SOURCE

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

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

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Supreme Court Makes 5-4 Finding for Trump’s Travel Ban

The Supreme Court handed Trump a major 5-4 victory in favor of President Trump’s travel ban! The Neil Gorsuch appointment came through once again!

As CNBC points out, the 5-4 opinion states that Trump’s immigration restriction fell “squarely” within the president’s authority. The court rejected claims that the ban was motivated by religious hostility.

“The [order] is expressly premised on legitimate purposes: preventing entry of nationals who cannot be adequately vetted and inducing other nations to improve their practices,” Roberts wrote. “The text says nothing about religion.”

SOURCE 

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Now it's McConnell

Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao told a group of protesters at Georgetown University to back off when they began harassing her husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

McConnell and Chao were leaving an event at Georgetown University on Monday night when they were confronted by a group of protesters who repeatedly asked McConnell why he was separating families and played audio of children crying at the border.

The protesters swarmed the SUV set to take McConnell and Chao off campus

SOURCE 

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James Woods Levels Maxine Waters, Tells Conservatives To Arm Themselves

“Let’s make sure we show up, wherever we have to show up,” Waters told a crowd in Los Angeles protesting immigration on Sunday. “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you cause a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome — anymore, anywhere.”

So, there you have it: Maxine going full Maxine. And, as usual, James Woods couldn’t resist responding.  And his thoughts were spot on.

“Now that a United States Congresswoman has called for harassment against Republicans and the inevitable violence that will come of it, I urge all of you to a) get armed, and b) vote,” Woods said.

“Your life literally depends on it.”

Woods was hardly the only one who urged conservatives to take similar precautions in the wake of Waters’ threat. Former Milwaukee County, Wisconsin Sheriff David Clarke also advised similar actions.

SOURCE 

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Lawmaker Introduces Measure to Censure Maxine Waters After Calls to Violence

Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs introduced a measure calling for Maxine Waters to be censured after her comments calling on opponents of President Trump to harass and protest administration officials in public.

Many viewed Waters’ comments as an incitement to violence, something the left has already engaged in with multiple incidents against Republican women including Flordia Attorney General Pam Bondi, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.

Biggs’ measure not only seeks to censure the congresswoman, it suggests she resign for telling her followers to confront political opponents in public.

“Individuals have the right to debate their differences civilly, without fear of retribution,” he said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Maxine Waters’ comments condone public violence and encourage actions that jeopardize the safety and security of government officials and the American people.”

The measure also suggests Waters apologize to officials “for endangering their lives and sowing seeds of discord.”

Waters insists that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer don’t really disagree with her call for members of the Trump administration to be harassed in public.

Senator Cory Booker also offered his opinion, nodding in agreement with Waters. “Yes, you should protest. Yes, you should confront evil and injustice,” he said.

SOURCE 

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Hysterical Leftist demonization of conservatives: A prelude to violence

Patrick J. Buchanan

If Trump's supporters are truly "a basket of deplorables ... racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic" and "irredeemable," as Hillary Clinton described them to an LGBT crowd, is not shunning and shaming the proper way to deal with them?

So a growing slice of the American left has come to believe.

Friday, gay waiters at the Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, appalled that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was being served, had the chef call the owner. All decided to ask Sanders' party to leave.

When news reached the left coast, Congresswoman Maxine Waters was ecstatic, yelling to a crowd, "God is on our side!"

Maxine's raving went on: "And so, let's stay the course. Let's make sure we show up wherever ... you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere."

Apparently, the left had been issued its marching orders.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was heckled and booed at a Mexican restaurant last week, and then hassled by a mob outside her home. White House aide Steven Miller was called out as a "fascist" while dining in D.C. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi was driven from a movie theater.

Last June, the uglier side of leftist politics turned lethal. James Hodgkinson, 66-year-old volunteer in Bernie Sanders' campaign, opened fire on GOP congressmen practicing for their annual baseball game with the Democrats.

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was wounded, almost mortally. Had it not been for Scalise's security detail, Hodgkinson might have carried out a mass atrocity.

And the cultural atmosphere is becoming toxic.

Actor Robert De Niro brings a Hollywood crowd to its feet with cries of "F—- Trump!" Peter Fonda says that 12-year-old Barron Trump should be locked up with pedophiles. Comedienne Kathy Griffin holds up a picture of the decapitated head of the president.

To suggest what may be happening to the separated children of illegal migrants, ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden puts on social media a photo of the entrance to the Nazi camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

What does this tell us about America in 2018?

The left, to the point of irrationality, despises a triumphant Trumpian right and believes that to equate it with fascists is not only legitimate, but a sign that the accusers are the real moral, righteous and courageous dissenters in these terrible times.

Historians are calling the outbursts of hate unprecedented. They are not.

In 1968, mobs cursed Lyndon Johnson, who had passed all the civil rights laws, howling, "Hey, hey, LBJ: How many kids did you kill today!"

After Dr. King's assassination, a hundred cities, including the capital, were looted and burned. Scores died. U.S. troops and the National Guard were called out to restore order. Soldiers returning from Vietnam were spat upon. Cops were gunned down by urban terrorists. Bombings and bomb attempts were everyday occurrences. Campuses were closed down. In May 1971, tens of thousands of radicals went on a rampage to shut down D.C.

A cautionary note to progressives: Extremism is how the left lost the future to Nixon and Reagan.

But though our media may act like this is 1968, we are not there, yet. That was history; this is still largely farce.

The comparisons with Nazi Germany are absurd. Does anyone truly believe that the centers where the children of illegal migrants are being held, run as they are by liberal bureaucrats from the Department of Health and Human Services, are like Stalin's Gulag or Hitler's camps?

This is hyperbole born of hysteria and hate.

Consider. Two million Americans are in jails and prisons, all torn from their families and children. How many TV hours have been devoted to showing what those kids are going through?

Thirty percent of all American children grow up with only one parent.

How many TV specials have been devoted to kids separated for months, sometimes years, sometimes forever, from fathers and mothers serving in the military and doing tours of duty overseas in our endless wars?

Because of U.S. support for the UAE-Saudi war against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, hundreds of thousands of children face the threat of famine. Those Yemeni kids are not being served burgers in day care centers.

How many Western TV cameras are recording their suffering?

When it comes to the rhetoric of hate, the cursing of politicians, the shouting down of speakers, the right is not innocent, but the left is infinitely more guilty. It was to the Donald Trump rallies, not the Bernie Sanders rallies, that the provocateurs came to start the fights.

Why? Because if you have been told and believe your opponents are fascists, then their gatherings are deserving not of respect but of disruption.

And, as was true in the 1960s, if you manifest your contempt, you will receive the indulgence of a media that will celebrate your superior morality.

SOURCE 

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Empathy, but also realism, are necessary in facing immigration

By Niall Ferguson 

I AM AN IMMIGRANT — a legal one. Over a period of 16 years, I’ve gone through a succession of work visas, acquired a green card, married an American citizen (herself an immigrant), passed the citizenship test, and in just 17 days will take the naturalization oath, accompanied by my wife and our two American-born sons.

Since 2002, I and members of my family have entered the United States umpteen times. At times, those crossings have been fraught. Once, before she got her green card, my British-born daughter was held up by immigration officers who doubted her story that she was visiting her father. Those were agonizing hours.

So I can well understand the great wave of moral outrage that swept the United States and world last week at the separation of asylum-seeking parents from their children at the US-Mexican border.

I can sympathize, too, with the parents, most of whom are from poor and violent Central American countries. My wife was once an asylum seeker from a poor and violent country. Her main motive for leaving Somalia for the Netherlands was to avoid an arranged marriage to a man she scarcely knew. Knowing that this was not a sufficient reason to be granted asylum, she emphasized the civil war in her country. In the same way, whatever their true motivations, today’s asylum-seekers from Honduras and Guatemala know to talk about the violence they are fleeing. This has become easier since 2009, when a court ruled that victims of domestic violence were entitled to asylum.
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To those of you contentedly living in the country where you were born, I address a plea for empathy and also realism. A world without cross-border migration would be a poorer world in multiple ways. The question is not whether to stop migration but how to manage it. But from those of you who regard any regulation of immigration as somehow unjust — who want illegal immigrants to be treated the same as those who follow the rules — I plead for rationality. Wholly open borders are not a sane option for any country. And comparing today’s US government with the Nazis — who systematically persecuted native-born German Jews by depriving them of their citizenship, then their rights, then their property, and finally their lives — is preposterous.

Last week, Vanity Fair quoted the claim of an anonymous “outside White House adviser” that Trump’s speechwriter Stephen Miller “actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border. He’s a twisted guy . . . He’s Waffen-SS.” I think this quotation tells us more about the standards of journalism at Vanity Fair than about Stephen Miller, who is both conservative and Jewish.

The problem of what exactly to do with asylum-seeking families predates Miller by about two decades. It was in 1997 that a consent decree was issued, known as the Flores settlement, which prohibits the US immigration authorities from keeping children in detention — even with their parents — for more than 20 days. As it takes up to 50 times longer to adjudicate asylum applications, the authorities either let the families go (at which point most disappear into the invisible army of the undocumented) or they try to separate parents from children.

The last time the issue surfaced, in 2014, the Obama administration threw in the towel. Just 3 percent of the tens of thousands of children from Central America who entered the United States that year were ultimately deported. The Trump administration didn’t want to be such a pushover. It was nevertheless pushed over — not by the asylum seekers, but by the media.

The German leader Trump more closely resembles is not Adolf Hitler but Angela Merkel. She too was forced to cave by the media, in 2015, when her statement to a sobbing Palestinian girl that Germany “could not manage” to accommodate refugees from the Middle East triggered a storm of emotion. You may recall what happened in the months after Merkel’s U-turn. European and American leaders confront essentially the same problem. I just wish the media would express the same outrage about the camps in Turkey and North Africa where Europeans are now trying to confine their would-be immigrants.

This is not an American problem. It is a global problem. According to a Gallup survey published a year ago, more than 700 million adults around the world would like to move permanently to another country. Of that vast number, more than one-fifth (21 percent) say that their first choice would be to move to the United States. The proportion who name a European Union country as their dream destination is higher: 23 percent.

As I said, they have my sympathy. I love Scotland, the country where I happened to be born, but it was not where I wanted to spend my life. What I didn’t do was jump on a boat with my kids and try to bluff my way into America, intending to stay there even if my asylum claim was rejected.

The United States has a broken immigration policy and it cannot be fixed by presidential executive orders. The Constitution clearly states that this is a job for Congress. That’s one of the things a newly minted American citizen learns. It’s the native-born journalists, with their addiction to hyperbole and bad history, who seem to have forgotten it.

SOURCE 

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The ethical emptiness of liberals

Do you guys remember that time when 2 nonpaying customers got kicked out of a Starbucks & liberals threw such a big temper tantrum that their employees were forced to take “diversity training”.... then 8 paying customers were kicked out of a Red Hen & they cheered?

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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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Liberals Harass Pro-Trump Attorney General From Florida At Movie Theater, Spit On Her

This is a very slippery slope. If these attack on Trump officials continue there is a real possibility that Trump will encourage his followers to do the same to Democrats.  Trump very clearly believes in striking back.  He does it all the time.  So we could well see prominent Democrats spat upon.

I am confident that prominent Democrats would suddenly call for civility under those circumstances but if they did not, a mini civil war could develop.  And Trump would win that one too. Prosecution of the offenders described below is therefore important. The alternative justice system is vendetta and no sane person would want that primitive system in America


Intolerant liberal activists harassed Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi at a movie theater on Saturday over her support for President Donald Trump. One deranged individual reportedly spit on her while yelling in her face.

According to the Tampa Bay Times, a video taken by left-wing activist Timothy Heberlein of Organize Florida shows law enforcement escorting Bondi out of the theater and back to her vehicle as several people harassed her.

Bondi was reportedly trying to see Won’t You Be My Neighbor, a movie about Mr. Rogers and his life.

“What would Mister Rogers think about you and your legacy in Florida? Taking away health insurance from people with pre-existing conditions, Pam Bondi!” said Maria José Chapa, a left-wing organizer. “Shame on you!”

Another heckler yelled: “You’re a horrible person!”

During an interview Monday on Fox & Friends, Bondi said “three huge guys” came up to her in the theater, and began screaming and cursing in her face. She said the abhorrent liberals also tried to provoke her boyfriend, who was with her at the theater.

The Florida AG said that one of the men spit on her while screaming in her face.

Bondi made it clear that she will not allow vile liberals to bully or alter her actions. She said she will continue to support enforcing the law whether liberals like it or not.

Bondi getting harassed and spit on came on the same weekend as Sen. Maxine Waters calling for more attacks and violence against members of the Trump administration.

During an unhinged speech on Saturday outside the Wilshire Federal Building, the California Democrat screamed that anyone who works for the president shouldn’t be welcomed in society. She also urged people to harass and confront administration officials and those who support the president when they are out in the public.

Waters’ extremist rhetoric comes one year after a Sen. Bernie Sanders supporter tried to assassinate multiple Republican lawmakers during a congressional baseball practice in Virginia. The deranged shooter shot Republican Rep. Steve Scalise, leaving him severely injured and fighting for his life in the hospital for several months.

Last week, a group of liberals swarmed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristjen Nielsen’s home over the migrant crisis, putting her family at risk while trying to leave.

As the Left gets more desperate to oppose Trump ahead of midterm elections, these disgusting tactics and calls for violence only prove how insane and unhinged they have become.

SOURCE

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More Violent Acts: DHS Official Finds Decapitated Animal On Front Porch Amidst Threats

An unidentified official at the Department of Homeland Security reportedly found a burnt, decapitated animal carcass on his front porch amidst further incidents of protests and calls for violence from Democrat members of Congress.

Reporting of the incident comes as employees of the agency have seen an increase in violent threats to them and their families, a response from leftists for President Trump’s illegal immigration policies.

A letter from Claire Grady, acting deputy secretary of DHS, went out to agency members of the department revealing that there has been a “heightened threat against DHS employees.”

“This assessment is based on specific and credible threats that have been levied against certain DHS employees and a sharp increase in the overall number of general threats against DHS employees,” Grady wrote.

ABC reported that “an official with knowledge of the incident” confirmed that “a senior DHS official living in the Washington, D.C. area found a burnt and decapitated animal on his front porch.”

Watch very closely on how the media is reporting the increase in threats – they don’t blame the people making the threats, they blame the Trump administration and their policies.

Even the ABC report states that DHS employees are “seeing violent threats with greater frequency because of the president’s immigration policy.”

It’s not “due to immigration policy” or “because of the President’s immigration policy.” It’s due solely to unhinged Democrats literally wishing ill and physical harm on their political opponents.

This vile animal abuse to threaten an administration official comes as Rep. Maxine Waters of California called for her supporters to form mobs and harass members of the Trump administration.

It wasn’t an off-the-cuff statement from the unhinged Waters. The threats have been defended by prominent Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, for example, seeks to blame President Trump for the level of discourse rather than Waters.

Senator Cory Booker also chimed in, offering a rambling response to the controversy which eventually lent support. “Yes, you should protest. Yes, you should confront evil and injustice,” he said.

“If I saw an administrator out and about, there’s nothing wrong with confronting that person, but not to lead with love and to do it in a way that is more reflective of the values that we are trying to reject in our country is unacceptable to me,” Booker said.

Is leaving a decapitated animal carcass on the porch of a DHS employee ‘leading with love,’ Mr. Booker?

SOURCE

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Cheers Erupt as Calif. Trump Fan Warns What Illegals Are Doing to Black Community

A Donald Trump fan from the Golden State is going viral after a video showed her denouncing illegal immigration.

According to The Daily Wire, the video was taken at a meeting of the Santa Clarita City Council in May. The woman speaking is unidentified, but the video was posted by a Twitter user who describes herself as a “Christian, Conservative, Wife, mum.” An African-American herself, she says she wants to lead the “mass #Blaxit from the Democratic Party.”

The speaker in the video sporting a Make America Great Again cap is part of a group of citizens who turned out to speak against California’s “sanctuary state” policies, according to The Daily Wire.

And she didn’t mince words about the damage that unchecked illegal immigration in California has caused the black community there.  “The black community is most adversely affected by illegal alien activity,” the woman said.

“Because when these people — and I don’t care if they’re Swedish, Mexican, Nigerian, Nicaraguan, Arab, I don’t care — when you come here illegally, they don’t get trucked into Brentwood. They don’t get trucked into Beverly Hills. Hell, they don’t even get trucked into the fairly modest upper-class suburb where I live.

“They get trucked into Watts. Here in California in SoCal, they get trucked into the streets of Crenshaw. The Jungles (Baldwin Village, an underprivileged Los Angeles community). East LA.

“A lot of black people don’t have the privilege that I have,” she continued. “A lot of black people are already suffering academically. Thus they suffer economically. Thus they suffer in abject poverty and crime.

“Their schools are beyond a disgrace already,” she added. “When those schools get pumped with illegal aliens, (black students are) even more likely to drop out.”

She went on to note that money had to be spent on Spanish-language textbooks “because the illegal alien minors cannot speak the king’s English.”

“I, as an American citizen, born and raised in Los Angeles, cannot get a job if I want to do something different than what I do, which is fight for American people — I have to learn two languages,” she said. “Specifically Spanish. In my own country. You tell me how that’s fair.” (The crowd’s supportive noise here drew a gavel from the dais to demand quiet.)

As for children and parents who are separated when they’re caught at the border, the woman mentioned the number of people who have been separated from their families by illegal aliens, and how “they gotta go to the grave. You tell me how that’s fair.”

The video was posted in response to a tweet from MSNBC’s Joy Reid, a liberal flamethrower who wanted “to get our #AMJoy hashtag higher” in the conversation about illegal immigration. This certainly did it, although not perhaps in the way Reid might have expected.

SOURCE

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IRONY: Anti-Gun David Hogg Strolls Through New York…With ARMED GUARDS!

For someone who hates guns, David Hogg sure does feel the need to be protected by them.

While taking a stroll through New York City, Anti-Gun Parkland student David Hogg was seen being protected by armed guards. Pretty ironic when you realize this is the same kid that doesn’t want armed guards to protect him at school.

As the American Mirror points out:

Hogg has courted the spotlight since the school shooting with numerous appearances on talk and political shows to champion gun control, speeches at rallies to fight the National Rifle Association, and calls for a political revolution that hasn’t materialized.

SOURCE

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Now, we have a Constitutional Crisis

Printus LeBlanc notes that Deputy AG Rosenstein has expressed an intention to prosecute Congress -- an action forbidden by the constitution

Since the election of President Trump, the media and progressives have been clamoring for a “constitutional crisis.” Well, they finally got the crisis, although it doesn’t appear to be the one they wanted. The actions of a senior Justice Department official have thrust the country into a constitutional crisis involving the Department of Justice and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).

On Feb. 3, Gregg Jarrett of Fox News first reported on an incident involving Rosenstein and the House Intelligence Committee. Jarrett stated, “In a meeting with Chairman Devin Nunes, FBI Director Christopher Wray and others, the source says that Rosenstein threatened to subpoena the texts and emails of Congress because he was ‘tired of dealing with the Intelligence Committee.’” Jarrett was roundly criticized for the report by the mainstream media, and the story seemed to die.

Further investigation by Catherine Herridge would result in a bombshell report released on Wednesday, June 13, confirming the Jarrett story. Herridge acquired emails from then senior counsel for counterterrorism Kash Patel writing to the House Office of General Counsel stating, “The DAG [Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein] criticized the Committee for sending our requests in writing and was further critical of the Committee’s request to have DOJ/FBI do the same when responding…Going so far as to say that if the Committee likes being litigators, then ‘we [DOJ] too [are] litigators, and we will subpoena your records and your emails,’ referring to HPSCI [House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] and Congress overall.”

The FBI does not dispute the action took place just that the people involved took it the wrong way, stating, “The FBI disagrees with a number of characterizations of the meeting as described in the excerpts of a staffer’s emails provided to us by Fox News.” Notice the bureau did not deny the conversation took place.

The next tactic the DOJ took was to defend the Deputy AG’s actions. The DOJ excused his outburst against Congress by was stating he was referring to how the DOJ would defend litigation brought by the Committee, including contempt or impeachment proceedings. There is a slight problem with this excuse, the Constitution.

Article 1, Section 6, Clause 1 of the Constitution is known as the Speech or Debate Clause. It states, “For any Speech or Debate in either House, [The Senators and Representatives] shall not be questioned in any other Place.” What this means is that as long as Congress is doing its official duty, such as oversight, it shall not be interfered with, from say a subpoena by an overzealous DOJ employee. If Rosenstein thinks he is going subpoena records for a civil trial, the only thing he will get is a House Resolution number.

The Congressional Research Service wrote a report in Dec. 2017 on the clause stating, “Judicial interpretations of the Clause have developed along several strains. First and foremost, the Clause has been interpreted as providing Members with general criminal and civil immunity for all ‘legislative acts’ taken in the course of their official responsibilities. This immunity principle protects Members from “intimidation by the executive” or a “hostile judiciary” by prohibiting both the executive and judicial powers from being used to improperly influence or harass legislators.

Second, the Clause appears to provide complementary evidentiary and testimonial privileges. Although not explicitly articulated by the Supreme Court, lower federal courts have generally viewed these component privileges as a means of effectuating the purposes of the Clause by barring evidence of protected legislative acts from being used against a Member, and protecting a Member from compelled questioning about such acts.”

So, either Rosenstein didn’t know about the Speech or Debate Clause, or he did and ignored it in a fit of rage. Either is extremely disturbing.

Finally, and probably the most important, Congress has a constitutionally mandated duty to investigate the executive branch. The Deputy AG is not in the Constitution, Congress is. Congress has the constitutional authority to provide oversight of executive agencies, of which the DOJ is part of. The DOJ does not have the authority to subpoena Congress because it doesn’t like bias and wrongdoing within its walls being exposed.

This latest crisis is another in a long line of missteps by Rosenstein. First, the Deputy AG signed a FISA warrant to spy on an American citizen, despite the warrant being filled with unverified intelligence, according to the Nunes memo.

Second, Rosenstein wrote the memo that outlined why James Comey should be fired as Director of the FBI. That action led to the creation of the out of control Special Council currently investigating anything and everything. Rosenstein is the very definition of “conflict of interest.” And now we have Deputy AG Rosenstein spitting in the face of Congress, essentially declaring he is his own kingdom and responsible to no one.

To top everything off, as this story is being written, the DOJ Inspector General report on the FBI’s actions during the Clinton email probe, and one thing sticks out. The DOJ possibly misled Congress when it turned over text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The DOJ handed over a string of text messages, but left out one of the most damning messages from Strzok to Page stating, “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it,” when answering a question about Trump possibly becoming President.

Since AG Sessions is recused from this matter, the fault must lay at the feet of the Deputy AG. This goes well beyond the appearance of impropriety.

If House Speaker Paul Ryan will not defend Congress, now is the time for a wannabe Speaker to rise. Several Members are jockeying for position to be the next Speaker after Ryan leaves, and the American people want to see someone that wants to be a Speaker stick up for the Article I branch of government. Two things need to happen. Rosenstein needs to be fired, and Congress should immediately move to secure the requested documents. If the Speaker lets this blatantly unconstitutional act go unanswered, he might as well turn out the lights and lock the Capitol up. There is no reason to have a Congress if it will not stick up for itself.

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 Administration Wins Key Obamacare Lawsuit

Federal appeals court rules that insurers aren’t entitled to risk corridor subsidies.

A federal appeals court has handed the Trump administration a major victory by ruling against an insurance company whose lawyers claimed the taxpayers owed it $214 million in Obamacare subsidies. Moda Health Plan had sued the government, claiming that it was owed the money pursuant to the law’s “risk corridor” program. The Trump administration argued that it couldn’t legally disperse the funds because doing so would have violated an explicit congressional requirement that this particular subsidy program remain budget neutral. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit agreed with the Trump administration.

Yesterday’s appeals court ruling reversed a summary judgment handed down by Judge Thomas C. Wheeler of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims wherein he ordered the government to reimburse Moda for losses it incurred on coverage sold via Obamacare exchanges. That Wheeler’s ruling was reversed shouldn’t be surprising, however. He was the only judge to find for the plaintiffs in any of several risk corridor lawsuits — and for good reason. Article I of the Constitution is not ambiguous about which branch of our government is authorized to appropriate funds from the U.S. Treasury. Judge Wheeler evidently skipped the high school class where the rest of us learned these things:

There is no genuine dispute that the Government is liable to Moda. Whether under statute or contract, the Court finds that the Government made a promise in the risk corridors program that it has yet to fulfill. Today, the Court directs the Government to fulfill that promise. After all, “to say to [Moda], ‘The joke is on you. You shouldn’t have trusted us,’ is hardly worthy of our great government.

The problem with Judge Wheeler’s “reasoning” is, of course, that it wasn’t the government that made the promise involving the risk corridors program. It was the Obama administration and its congressional accomplices. Insurers were told that this subsidy program would force insurers enjoying big profits via Obamacare to pay into a pool from which less profitable plans would be subsidized. It evidently never occurred to the people who run Moda that their competitors would also lose their shirts and find themselves unable to pay into the pool. But this is exactly what happened. The amount paid into the fund was a mere fraction of the reimbursement claims.

In late 2015 the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that profitable insurers had paid in a mere $362 million while their far more numerous unprofitable counterparts had requested $2.87 billion to cover their losses. In other words, more insurers lost their bets on Obamacare than won. And the latter, having been gullible enough to believe the promises of the Democrats, expected the taxpayers to fund their stupidity. But Congress passed, and former President Obama signed, a bill requiring the risk corridors to remain budget neutral. Consequently, losers like Moda Health Plan were able to recover only 12.6 percent of their Obamacare losses.

But the problem here isn’t the legislation that imposed budget neutrality on the risk corridor program. It is that Obamacare was so poorly designed that insurers were doomed from the moment they bet on it. The authors of the law provided no source of reimbursement beyond the “excess funds” contributed by “highly profitable” carriers. When the excess funds failed to materialize, the insurers sued. Health Republic filed a class action lawsuit against the government for $5 billion, Highmark Health sued for $223 million, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of North Carolina filed a $129 million lawsuit, Land of Lincoln Health sued for $70 million, and Moda Health filed its suit.

This by no means exhausts the list of insurers who want the taxpayers to bail them out, which is why yesterday’s decision is so important. The ruling will set a precedent for the other pending cases. Although Moda and the insurers listed above made a half-hearted statutory argument for full payment of the risk corridor “obligations,” the real foundation upon which they built their case was the claim that the congressional rider requiring the risk corridor to be budget neutral didn’t relieve the government of its duty to pay the subsidies. They claimed that the program created an implied-in-fact contract requiring full payment. The Appeals Court rejected that argument out of hand:

Moda asserts an independent claim for breach of an implied-in-fact contract that purportedly promised payments of the full amount indicated by the statutory formula in exchange for participation in the exchanges.… Here, no statement by the government evinced an intention to form a contract.… Accordingly, Moda cannot state a contract claim.

The reality is that, like most of the arguments made in court by attorneys burdened with the unenviable task of defending Obamacare, the statutory and implied contract claims of Moda’s lawyers were post hoc confections meant to appeal to the liberal palate of Judge Wheeler. There was never any chance that an honest Appeals Court would swallow such muck. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve seen the last of Moda Health Plan v. United States. The insurance company may seek an en banc review, or even petition SCOTUS. But it’s unlikely that either will bite. Rack up another Trump win. This winning thing is starting to become a habit.

SOURCE 

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Trump Is Reorganizing The Federal Government And Interior Secretary Zinke Loves It

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to reorganize the federal government, a welcome move for Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke as he attempts to restructure the Department of the Interior (DOI).

Trump’s order directs the Office of Management and Budget to suggest ways to consolidate the federal government, streamlining agencies and repositioning some under departments more closely aligned with each agency’s responsibilities, according to a White House statement.

“President Trump is a businessman who knows that an effective operation needs to be organized for success, which is exactly why he is leading this commonsense reorganization of the executive branch,” Zinke said in a statement commending Trump’s move. “By merging agencies that handle similar, if not the same, functions we would be able to greatly improve services to the American people and better protect the land and wildlife under our care.”

Zinke is currently making plans to reorganize his own department, but those plans have been complicated by agencies that he has no control over.

For example, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) regulates many areas in tandem with the DOI agencies in rivers and lakes but falls under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The U.S. Forest Service (USFS), under the Department of Agriculture, governs millions of acres that cross over DOI-managed lands or habitats.

Zinke’s plans involve a massive reorganization that sets DOI agencies in charge of areas of the U.S. rather than breaking down responsibilities by habitat or animal.

He can only go so far streamlining responsibilities, however, without help from the White House. Trump’s reorganization of the executive branch could fix many of those issues.

“At Interior, we are leading the government reform and modernization by consolidating dozens of regional bureau boundaries into twelve common unified boundaries — down from 61 for the nine bureaus — and pushing more assets and decision-making out into the field,” Zinke said.

Some of the moves suggested involving both the NMFS and USFS, as well as the Army Corps of Engineers, which falls under the direction of the Department of Defense.

SOURCE 

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An Apology to David Horowitz: He Was Right about Bill Kristol

SPENGLER

The odious Bill Kristol tweeted today, "Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state." For those who are not aware of the term "deep state," it refers to the secret services in a dictatorship who overthrow governments, manipulate the press, and otherwise eliminate opponents. I first heard the term in reference to Turkey, whose military and intelligence services overthrew governments they didn't like with depressing regularity during the postwar period. To speak of a "deep state" in an American context is to say that the United States is turning into a banana republic.

This is no joking matter. I am confident that President Trump and the tough guys in his cabinet will root out the saboteurs, leakers, manipulators, and liars who infest the intelligence services and who conspire with the liberal media to invent fake-news charges against a duly elected administration. But the danger is real, and the fact that the intelligence community is playing games with domestic politics is a danger to our liberties.


Last May 15, the perspicacious David Horowitz denounced Kristol in Breitbart as a "renegade Jew." Of course, the headline was employed later to show that Breitbart was anti-Semitic--even though Horowitz was arguing that Kristol had betrayed critical Jewish interests. I responded with a note in this space to the effect that Kristol wasn't a "renegade Jew," just a sore loser throwing a tantrum. It was "churlish," I said, to attack a man's religion in that way.

'Renegade Jew'? No, Just Wrong About Everything
Horowitz was right and I was wrong, and I herewith offer him my apology.

Kristol is a renegade Jew, and an apologist for anti-Constitutional, illegal manipulation by America's self-designated "deep state." His hatred for Donald Trump has unhinged him. Decent people should cross the street to avoid walking too close to him.

SOURCE 

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Chain Migration Turned This Small Penn. Town of 25,000 Upside Down

With the sudden interest of the national media in the families-separated-at-border storyline, the American immigration narrative is currently wound up in what’s happening to children caught crossing illegally with their families on the southern border.

But a look at a town in northeastern Pennsylvania, where immigrant families staying together have completely overhauled the population and atmosphere might have more lessons for country in the long term.

And they don’t paint the rosy picture immigration activists are trying to sell the American public.

During the 2016 campaign, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and surrounding Luzerne County were occasionally in the national news because of the power of immigration as an issue. In October, The New York Times analyzed the area under the headline: “In a City Built by Immigrants, Immigration Is the Defining Issue.”

After Donald Trump’s unlikely victory in November, Newsweek published a December piece headlined, “Why did Donald Trump win? Just Visit Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.”

The premise still holds.

A lengthy piece published last week by the City Journal, a quarterly magazine of the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, is headlined “Chain Migration Comes to Hazleton.”

It describes how in less than 20 years – barely the space of a generation – a town with a population of 25,000 has “been radically transformed since the early 2000s by secondary chain migration, principally driven by Dominicans — immigrants, both legal and illegal, as well as second- and third-generation citizens arriving from the New York metropolitan area.”

The numbers tell the story:

In 2000, Hispanics made up less than 5 percent of Hazleton’s population; they now account for more than 50 percent. Such rapid and dramatic demographic shifts are rare in U.S. cities. For Hazleton, the consequences have been profound, and the city is struggling to cope.”

That might be something of an understatement.

The changing demographics have changed the physical appearance of the Luzerne County town, which was incorporated as a borough in 1857 and became a city in 1891.

City Journal reported:

  Vinyl banners with loud graphics soon came to dominate the facades of sober nineteenth-century retail buildings. Pentecostal and evangelical congregations now fill former Catholic and Protestant churches. Blocks of duplex homes, uniformly encased with aluminum siding, crowd with families living in Section 8 housing or in subdivided rental units.

The public school system has been radically altered:

  In 2007, the district was 28 percent Hispanic and 69 percent non-Hispanic white. As of 2014, the district was 45 percent Hispanic and 51 percent non-Hispanic white… But Hazleton’s budget can’t keep pace with all the new arrivals, many of whom need special services. A district that had need for only one ESL teacher in the 1990s, for example, now has 2,298 English-language learners, nearly 20 percent of its student body; more than half the student body today live in low-income households. By 2017, the school district—encompassing over 250 square miles of southern Luzerne County, northern Schuylkill County, and western Carbon County—faced a $6 million deficit, in part driven by the demographic change.

And then there’s crime. As the City Journal reported, the town’s location near the intersection of Interstates 80 and 81 makes it an “ideal location” for cocaine and heroin operations run by drug rings dominated by immigrants from the Dominican Republic or their families.

When the town eventually tried to take action, it ended up on the losing end of a court case that went all the way to the Supreme Court (and also made Hazleton a national headline name for a time).

As the City Journal reported:

  For many Hazletonians, the city reached a grim tipping point in 2006, when two illegal immigrants from the Dominican Republic were charged with murdering a 29-year-old father of three. The killing shocked the community. Hazleton’s then-mayor, Lou Barletta, responded by introducing an ordinance, soon passed by the city council: the Illegal Immigration Relief Act, which fined and penalized employers and landlords for hiring and renting to illegal immigrants. The ACLU challenged the act, and the fight went to the Supreme Court. In 2014, the Court declined to review two federal appellate decisions that struck down the measure. The following year, a U.S. district court judge ruled that Hazleton had to pay $1.4 million to the attorneys who had sued the city over the act. The judge’s order was devastating for a cash-strapped city struggling to provide adequate services to its growing Hispanic population.

None of that is good news for the Democrat Party, or activists on the side of unchecked immigration.

And there’s a reason: Donald Trump won Luzerne County with 77 percent of the vote, according to the City Journal.

However, Hazleton shouldn’t be seen as an example of why immigration should be opposed as a rule. One thing the liberals are right about is that immigrants have always played a key part of building the United States.

What Hazleton does show is the danger of unchecked immigration, based solely or even largely on the “chain” of relations to those immigrants who are accepted into the country.

America should be a nation that welcomes immigrants who are willing to assimilate into the country as a whole, not bunker themselves in ethnic enclaves for generations.

While liberals try to stage a tear-jerking soap opera about separating families in the Southwest part of the country, it might behoove the rest of us to look at a town in northeastern Pennsylvania for a bit, like Fox News host Tucker Carlson did in March.

Unchecked, chain immigration is not always a pretty picture.

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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