AMERICA GREAT AGAIN: Jobless Claims Hit 49 Year Low — Not Seen Since 1969!

Jobless claims throughout the United States continued to plummet in the first week of July, hitting the lowest levels seen in nearly half a century as the economy continues to roar to life under President Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress, reports Hannity.com.

According to Market Watch, new benefit claims dropped by roughly 20,000 in early July to just 214,000 applications; hitting a 49-year low and smashing expectations.

The number of people losing their jobs and seeking benefits has totaled fewer than 250,000 each week since last September. That’s an unusually low number for an unusually long time, reflecting the healthiest U.S. jobs market at least since the dot-com boom at the end of the 1990s.

“The number of claims last week was the third lowest of the current nine-year-old economic expansion that began in mid-2009,” continues Market Watch. “The last time jobless claims were consistently lower was in 1969.”

The strong economic data points to a potential disaster for Democrats heading into the 2018 midterm elections, with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi bizarrely claiming the booming job market is “reckless” for American workers and middle class families.

SOURCE 

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MN: Trump tariffs boost iron mining

Taconite is a low grade iron ore

When Jim Bailey lost his oil fracking job last year, the Bemidji resident took a chance relocating his family to Hibbing, which lies in the heart of the Iron Range and its boom-or-bust economy.

Bailey and his wife, Tracy, bought the shuttered Courtyard Cafe on historic Howard Street. In December, they received some splashy company when the large BoomTown Brewery & Woodfire Grill opened a block up the road.

Not far away, cranes and cement trucks are cranking out factory additions at the pipemaker Iracore International, the truck cooling-system maker L&M Radiator and the custom manufacturer Range Steel Fabricators.

Stores also are opening, and anecdotes of a healthier economy echo across Minnesota’s Mesabi Range, an ore-rich swath that rambles for 110 miles and has seen thousands of layoffs in recent years as the taconite industry weathered a severe slump.

“Since we got here we noticed there is more activity in the area and more people in the streets,” said Tracy Bailey while dashing to serve a customer pancakes. “We have been really busy.”

The level of activity has surprised some locals, but the reason behind it is clear: The iron ore companies are healthy again. Idled plants are reopened, with 2,000 employees back to work.

With residents working again — and some of the operations expanding — people are eating out more, shopping and spending more cash in general in their communities, Phillips said. “We are having another boom to an extent,” Phillips said.

Manufacturers and iron shipping firms across the region report business has improved greatly since late 2016. They note a host of factory expansions, street repairs, fresh upticks in product orders from the big mines and taconite-laden ships leaving Duluth’s harbor.

“Last year was the largest iron ore tonnage shipped through the Port of Duluth-Superior in a decade,” said Adele Yorde, spokeswoman for the Duluth Seaway Port Authority.

SOURCE 

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Explaining American Leftists: Part I

Dennis Prager

As I watch a great number of my fellow Americans and virtually all of the mainstream media descend further and further into irrational and immoral hysteria — regularly calling the president of the United States and all of his supporters Nazis, white supremacists and the like; harassing Republicans where they eat, shop and live; ending family ties and lifelong friendships with people who support the president; declaring their opposition to Trump and the Republican Party the “Resistance,” as if they were American reincarnations of the French who fought real Nazis in World War II; and so on — I ask myself: What is going on? How does one explain them?

Here are some answers:

1.) Naïveté

Many Americans are naïve, about life, about good and evil, and about America. They don’t realize how rare America is and how good they have it. This mass naïveté was vividly expressed by the reaction of tens of thousands of mostly white middle-class Americans to then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008, when he was campaigning in Columbia, Missouri. Obama announced, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

I frequently play the recording of Obama’s statement on my radio show not only to explain a basic difference between Right and Left — the Left believes America needs to be fundamentally transformed, while the Right thinks America needs to be incrementally improved — but also for people to hear the crowd’s reaction.

Very few contemporary American recordings are as depressing as the ecstatic and prolonged cheering the crowd gave that terrible promise from Obama. I believe it is not an exaggeration to say that had he announced a cure for cancer, the cheering could not have been louder and probably would not have been longer.

Why would middle-class Americans — people who have more affluence, more opportunity, better health, better health care and more liberty than almost anyone alive in the world today, and certainly than anyone who ever lived — thunderously applaud a call to fundamentally transform their decent country?

One answer — one of many, as we will see — is naïveté.

Earlier this year, I had a debate/dialogue with two left-wing students at the University of California, Berkeley. I thought debating left-wing students, rather than giving a speech, would accomplish two objectives: deter left-wing protesters from disrupting my appearance and enable young people at Berkeley and around the world (via the Internet) to hear differences between Right and Left clearly spelled out. Both aims were achieved.

My final question to them was “Do you believe people are basically good?” Without a moment’s pause, both students said yes.

I told them they think that way because they live in such a decent country. It is easy to remain naïve in America, where most are insulated from the suffering inflicted on so much of humanity in deeply corrupt, poverty-stricken and war-torn societies. Nevertheless, given the way humans have treated one another throughout history, and only two generations after Auschwitz, only the naïve can believe people are basically good. And since no Western religion (i.e., any religion based on the Bible) has ever posited that people are basically good, this naïveté is abetted by secularism, which allows for the pursuit of knowledge but destroys wisdom.

Only the naïve — or willfully ignorant — could equate support for Donald Trump with Nazism. Are most Israeli Jews Nazis? Are a third of America’s Jews Nazis? (Many on the Left would probably answer yes, which gives you an idea how mean and sick many on the Left are.)

2.) Boredom

Boredom, at least in our time, is the most overlooked source of evil. In the past, before people went to college and abandoned religion — the two greatest reasons there is so much moral idiocy in our time — people knew how dangerous boredom was. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop” was a commonly used aphorism that wouldn’t even make sense to most young people today.

By bored I am not referring to a lack of things to do. There is more opportunity to do and experience things today than ever before. By bored I mean a deep boredom of the soul, what the French call “ennui.” This is the boredom that emanates from lack of purpose and a yearning for excitement.

The combination of affluence and secularism produces boredom as surely as the combination of hydrogen and oxygen produces water. Without affluence, people have a built-in purpose: obtaining food and shelter, supporting oneself and one’s family, etc. And religion, with or without affluence, likewise has always provided people with meaning. Without religion, therefore, purpose is often lost. Add to that the number of people who are not married and do not have children (also a result of the combination of affluence and secularism) and you remove another universal source of meaning.

A disproportionate percentage of those on the Left (not traditional liberals) do not lack for material needs, have no religion and are single and/or childless. Those left-wing screamers you see in restaurants, the left-wing mobs on campus, the left-wing “antifa” thugs and the left-wing Black Lives Matter demonstrators who close down bridges and highways do not generally consist of married people with children who attended church the previous Sunday.

These people find this lack of purpose assuaged by leftism. It provides meaning and excitement, a very heady combination.

These are a few explanations. In Part II I will offer others.

SOURCE 

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Impact of ‘zero tolerance’ on display in Texas immigration court. One after another, asylum seekers are ordered deported

Very few are real asylum seekers.  They are just seeking a lifestyle upgrade

Sitting before an immigration judge in this south Texas detention center Thursday, a Central American mother separated from her son pleaded for asylum.

“Your honor, I’m just asking for one opportunity to be here,” said the woman wearing a blue prison uniform and a red plastic rosary around her neck. “You don’t know how much pain it has caused us to be separated from our children. We’re kind of losing it.”

Judge Robert Powell’s face was stern. During the past five years, he has denied 79% of asylum cases, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

“What you’re describing is not persecution,” he said.

“I’m asking for an opportunity,” the woman replied in Spanish through an interpreter.

“I’m not here to give you an opportunity.” He ordered her deported.

Immigrant family separations on the border were supposed to end after President Trump issued an executive order June 20. A federal judge in California ordered all children be reunited with their parents in a month, and those age 5 and under within 15 days. On Thursday, the administration said up to 3,000 children have been separated — hundreds more than initially reported — and DNA testing has begun to reunite families.

Port Isabel has been designated the “primary family reunification and removal center,” but lawyers here said they have yet to see detained parents reunited.

To qualify for asylum in the U.S., immigrants must prove they fear persecution at home because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or “membership in a particular social group,” and that their government is unwilling or unable to protect them. Most of the Central American parents detained here after “zero tolerance” fled gang and domestic violence. But that’s no longer grounds for seeking asylum, according to a guidance last month from Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions. Immigration courts are part of the Justice Department, so judges are following that guidance.

Because immigration courts are administrative, not criminal, immigrants are not entitled to public defenders. And so, each day, they attempt to represent themselves in hearings that sometimes last only a few minutes.

The courtrooms are empty. That’s because, like a half dozen others nationwide, the court is inside a fortified Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center. Access is restricted, and may be denied. The Times had to request to attend court hearings — which are public — 24 hours in advance. After access to the facility was approved last week, access was denied to the courtrooms when guards said the proceedings were closed, without explanation.

Detainees have little access to the outside world, including their children. It costs them 90 cents a minute to place a phone call. When they do, they can be nearly inaudible. They receive mail, but when reporters wrote to them last week, the letters were confiscated and guards questioned why they had been contacted, according to a lawyer. Lawyers also said some separated parents have been pressured into agreeing to deportation in order to reunite with their children.

UNICEF officials toured Port Isabel Thursday. A dozen pro bono lawyers visited immigrants. But they were spread thin. None represented parents at the credible fear reviews, where judges considered whether to uphold an asylum officer’s finding that they be deported.

Immigration Judge Morris Onyewuchi, a former Homeland Security lawyer appointed to the bench two years ago, questioned several parents’ appeals.

“You have children?” he asked a Honduran mother.

Yes, Elinda Aguilar said, she had three. “Two of them were with me when we got separated by immigration, the other is in Honduras,” said Aguilar, 44.

“How many times have you been to the U.S.?” the judge asked.

Aguilar said this was her first time. The judge reviewed what Aguilar had told an asylum officer: That she had fled an ex-husband who beat, raped and threatened her. “He told you he would kill you if you went with another man?” the judge said.

Yes, Aguilar replied.

The judge noted that Aguilar had reported the crimes to police, who charged her husband, although he never showed up in court. Then he announced his decision: deportation.

Aguilar looked confused. “Did the asylum officer talk to you and explain my case?” she said.

The judge said he was acting according to the law.

Although she was fleeing an abusive husband, he said, “your courts intervened and they put him through the legal process. That’s also how things work in this country.”

Aguilar knit her hands. She wasn’t leaving yet.

“I would like to know what’s going to happen to my children, the ones who came with me,” she asked the judge.

“The Department of Homeland Security will deal with that. Talk to your deportation officer,” he said. Guards led her away as she looked shocked, and brought in the next parent.

Denis Cardona, 31, told the judge he fled Honduras to the U.S. with his son Alexander.

“Where is he?” the judge asked.

“He’s here, detained, but I don’t know where,” Cardona said. “I was told he’s an hour away.”

The judge reviewed Cardona’s case. It was his first time crossing the border to the U.S. He had fled threats from the MS-13 gang after a land dispute with a cousin.

“And you did not report this to authorities in your country?” the judge said.

Yes, Cardona said, “but they didn’t listen.”

“It’s difficult for police to get where we were, and also the police do not help poor people,” he said.

Why hadn’t he told the asylum officer all that, the judge asked. Cardona said he had. He leaned his head on his hand. He looked tired.

Moments later, the judge ruled.

“This is a family dispute. This is not grounds for asylum in the United States,” he said. Deported.

SOURCE 

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

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

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A surprising call for bipartisanship from CNN, of all sources

Why? When it was Obama who was to blame.  Leftist "flexibilty" again


Complacent Obama fan Smerconish

CNN news anchor Michael Smerconish went on a rant Saturday morning calling the Russian election meddling a “terrorist attack” after reading a tweet on air asking if he’ll hold former President Obama accountable.

“Here’s what I’m looking for, instead of this going on between liberals and conservatives, Republican and Democrats, what happened to when we were united against a common enemy?” Smerconish asked rhetorically. “This was terrorism. We were the victims of a terror strike and will the commander-in-chief on Monday hold accountable the presumed perpetrator of that terror strike?”

“Stop all the liberal, conservative red state, blue state stuff. Our partisan differences used to end at the water’s edge,” he continued.

Smerconish made the comments after reading a tweet from a viewer, which he asked for. This tweet from @SwingDriver210 said, “Will you hold Obama accountable? You say you are fair. We will see. I mean all this meddling happened under Obama and no one cares.”

SOURCE

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Trump's tariffs revive Granite City jobs, and optimism

Grab a cup of coffee with a resident of Granite City and you’ll likely hear it said that the southern Illinois city was built around the local U.S. Steel plant, not the other way around.

It’s the locals’ way of conveying how heavily Granite City, just outside St. Louis, depends on the steel mill, both for the jobs and the sense of identity it provides.

For more than 100 years, Granite City has defined itself as a hardworking mill town, a place where young people eager to cement a solid financial future without a college degree have to look no further than the dirt and iron and fire of the local steel plant, which stretches over 2 square miles. The opportunity afforded by the plant came to a halt at the end of 2015, when the plant idled production, laying off 2,000 people.

But the first blast furnace now has been restarted and U.S. Steel is filling 800 jobs at the mill, a result of the steep tariffs that President Donald Trump announced on imported steel and aluminum earlier this year. The Trump administration has in recent months imposed tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico and China and on Friday imposed tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese imports. That country responded by levying tariffs of its own on American-made goods.

The trade war has spurred an outcry from most U.S. businesses. In Granite City, though — which voted narrowly for Trump in the 2016 election — the tariffs are helping bring back well-paying steel jobs and lifting its economy. But even as the community of 29,000 along the Mississippi River sees better days, some residents and business owners hold out hope that the city will find another economic engine to define itself by. What that will be, they don’t know yet.

The energy shift

Nearly half of the returning 800 U.S. Steel jobs will be filled with employees who were laid off in 2015 when the plant was idled, according to spokeswoman Meghan Cox, who wouldn’t disclose salary ranges for the jobs. But there’s new blood, too, with about 56 percent of those positions going to new hires.

The restart is causing an influx of customers at Park Grill, which is adjacent to the plant and was hit hard after the 2015 layoffs. Some steelworkers eat multiple meals a day at the grill. Railroad workers, truck drivers and others who have jobs supporting the plant also stop in or place orders for burgers and barbecue sandwiches.

“I’m hoping that everything goes back to where it was, and I think it will,” Park Grill owner Mike DeBruce said. “I think it’s going to be stronger and better.”

DeBruce said he tries to ignore the “political noise” and focus on what the U.S. Steel jobs mean for his business and the town as a whole.

SOURCE

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An Open Letter from Yale Law Students Illustrates the Decline of the Radical Legal Mind

Progressives’ anti-Kavanaugh hysteria is already in full bloom.
On Monday, Yale Law School had the audacity to do something that any and every law school would do if one of its graduates were nominated to the Supreme Court — issue a press release touting the occasion. And why not? To the extent that any conservative can be a part of the elite academic club, Brett Kavanaugh belongs. He’s a double Yale graduate (college and law school) and a former Harvard Law School professor. How did he get there? Allow the Boston Globe to tell the story:

When Elena Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School, she was in search of rising conservative legal stars. The traditionally liberal campus, the thinking went, could use a little ideological diversity with more robust debate and the challenge of different viewpoints.

Among Kagan’s hires, as a visiting professor, was a newly appointed federal appeals-court judge from Washington named Brett Kavanaugh.

Yes, that’s right. Justice Kagan hired Brett Kavanaugh at Harvard Law. He’s no radical. He’s a serious conservative legal mind, and it is entirely right and proper for a school that enrolls conservative students and even (on occasion) hires conservative professors to put out a simple press release celebrating the elevation of one of its own to the highest court in the land.

The rhetoric is amazing, reading more like a random Twitter tirade than a studied critique from the nation’s brightest legal minds. ‛Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination presents an emergency — for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country,’ the letter reads. Yes, an ‛emergency.’

Or maybe not. There’s now an open letter signed by a host of Yale Law School “students, alumni, and educators” not just declaring their opposition to the Kavanaugh nomination, but saying they are “ashamed” at Yale’s press release. To these signatories, Kavanaugh is nothing but a menace, and Yale’s celebration of his achievements is motivated by nothing more than its lust for “proximity to power and prestige.”

The rhetoric is amazing, reading more like a random Twitter tirade than a studied critique from the nation’s brightest legal minds. “Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination presents an emergency — for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country,” the letter reads. Yes, an “emergency.” Later, it even declares that “people will die if he is confirmed.”

Obviously, Flight 93 paranoia isn’t confined to the Trumpist right.

I do not expect a Yale progressive to support Kavanaugh; I expect progressives everywhere to rally to try to defeat his nomination. But where is the perspective? Where is the sense of proportion? Once again, increasingly radicalized Americans confront conventional politics and good-faith legal disputes and react as if the sky is falling — as if no decent human being could possibly disagree with their analysis.

And they’re saying this about Brett Kavanaugh. If there were a Mount Rushmore of establishment GOP lawyers, his face would be chiseled upon it. He’d have been a likely nominee in a Rubio or Jeb Bush administration. Stanford’s Michael McConnell, writing in Politico, said this about Kavanaugh’s role in the court:

The balance of the Court is never set in stone. Over the past two terms, Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan have more frequently broken from their more leftward colleagues to forge a more moderate path, often in conjunction with Chief Justice John Roberts. Temperamentally and jurisprudentially, Kavanaugh is more like to be part of this invigorated middle than to swing toward the extremes. It would be a good thing for the country if the Court moved in a less polarized direction.

In other words, if  Kavanaugh represents a life-threatening emergency, then virtually any originalist judge represents a life-threatening emergency.

At this point, a radical reader might nod along and say, “Yes, any originalist nominee will cost lives.” But if you look at the Yale letter, it fails to make its case. It’s a long screed claiming that, among other things, Kavanaugh is insufficiently protective of the administrative state (I wonder if any of the signatories are also demanding that Congress “abolish ICE”), overly protective of religious liberty, and lacking in sympathy for favored plaintiffs. It doesn’t contain an ounce of serious legal analysis.

Indeed, one gets the feeling that this is really all about Roe. After all, refusing to force Priests for Life to facilitate contraception access for its handful of employees — or determining the appropriate standard of judicial review for agency interpretations of governing statutes — hardly seem like decisions worthy of the apocalyptic rhetoric. But abortion-on-demand is the centerpiece of the sexual revolution, and the sexual revolution is a new American religion. The French had their Cult of Reason. The radicals have their Cult of Sex, and shame on anyone who offers respect to the heretics.

Yet even there — even on the ultimate question of the judicial wars — the letter fails to justify its alarm. After all, if Roe is overturned, abortion won’t be banned, certainly not in America’s blue bastions, and not anytime soon. The question of life and death will merely be sent back to the states and, ultimately, the people.

Remember, this open letter is no mere statement of opposition to Kavanaugh. It’s a demand that one of the country’s most respected institutions of higher learning be “ashamed” for celebrating the success of one of its graduates — a person who has a long track record of service to the academy and respect for his ideological opponents. It’s a call to enlist institutions of higher learning in a radical ideological crusade. It’s a message to conservative Americans that we hear loudly and clearly — that we’re evil, our views are not worthy of respect, and we should have no place in the highest echelons of the American academy.

To read the Yale letter is to peer into the future. It’s mainly signed by a collection of young lawyers and students who are already on a trajectory to lead the American academy, government, and economy. They represent a left-wing face of American intolerance, and that intolerance will haunt our politics for decades to come. If you think polarization is bad now, the radical students at Yale are sending a clear message: They have not yet begun to rage.

SOURCE

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Invented "rights"

The nut wing of the Democratic Party instantly denounced judge Kavanaugh by claiming that his elevation to the High Court would threaten all sorts of “rights.”

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) tweeted: “Our next justice should be a champion for protecting & advancing rights, not rolling them back — but Kavanaugh has a long history of demonstrating hostility toward defending the rights of everyday Americans.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) tweeted: “If Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court it will have a profoundly negative effect on workers’ rights, women’s rights and voting rights for decades to come. We must do everything we can to stop this nomination.”

If only these guys could get themselves elected to some sort of legislative body, they could pass laws protecting these rights!

Wait, I’m sorry. These are elected United States senators. Of all people, why are they carrying on about “rights”? If senators can’t protect these alleged “rights,” it can only be because most Americans do not agree that they should be “rights.”

That’s exactly why the Left is so hysterical about the Supreme Court. It runs to the courts to win its most unpopular policy ideas, gift-wrapped and handed to it as “constitutional rights.”

What liberals call “rights” are legislative proposals that they can’t pass through normal democratic processes — at least outside of the states they’ve already flipped with immigration, like California.

Realizing how widely reviled its ideas are, several decades ago the Left figured out a procedural scam to give it whatever it wanted without ever having to pass a law. Hey! You can’t review a Supreme Court decision!

Instead of persuading a majority of its fellow citizens, it would need to persuade only five justices to invent any rights it pleased. It didn’t have to ask twice. Apparently, justices find it much funner to be all-powerful despots than boring technocrats interpreting written law.

Soon the Court was creating “rights” promoting all the Left’s favorite causes — abortion, criminals, busing, pornography, stamping out religion, forcing military academies to admit girls and so on.

There was nothing America could do about it.

OK, liberals, you cheated and got all your demented policy ideas declared “constitutional rights.” But it’s very strange having elected legislators act as if they are helpless serfs, with no capacity to protect “rights.”

It’s stranger still for politicians to pretend that these putative “rights” are supported by a majority of Americans. By definition, the majority does not support them. Otherwise, they’d already be protected by law and not by Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s latest newsletter.

On MSNBC, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said people storming into the streets and making their voices heard about Kavanaugh is “the remarkable part about a democracy.”

Actually, that isn’t democracy at all. Liberals don’t do well at democracy. Why don’t politicians run for office promising to ban the death penalty, spring criminals from prison or enshrine late-term abortion? Hmmm … I wonder why those “I (heart) partial-birth abortion!” T-shirts aren’t selling?

Unless the Constitution forbids it — and there are very few things proscribed by the Constitution — democracy entails persuading a majority of your fellow Americans or state citizens to support something, and then either putting it on the ballot or electing representatives who will write it into law — perhaps even a constitutional amendment.

Otherwise, these “rights” whereof you speak are no more real than the Beastie Boys’ assertion of THE RIGHT TO PARTEEEEEEEE!

Gay marriage, for example, was foisted on the country not through ballot initiatives, persuasion, public acceptance, lobbying or politicians winning elections by promising to legalize it. No, what happened was, in 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Court suddenly discovered a right to gay marriage lurking in the state’s 223-year-old Constitution — written by the very religious John Adams. (Surprise!)

After that, the people rose up and banned gay marriage in state after state, even in liberal bastions like Oregon and California. The year after the Massachusetts court’s remarkable discovery, gay marriage lost in all 11 states where it was on the ballot.

Everywhere gay marriage was submitted to a popular vote, it lost. (Only one state’s voters briefly seemed to approve of gay marriage — Arizona, in 2006 — but that was evidently a problem with the wording of the initiative, because two years later, the voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional ban on gay marriage.)

Inasmuch as allowing people to vote resulted in a resounding “NO!” on gay marriage, liberals ran back to the courts. Still, the public rebelled. The year after the Iowa Supreme Court concocted a right to gay marriage, voters recalled three of the court’s seven justices.

A handful of blue state legislatures passed gay marriage laws, but even in the Soviet Republic of New York, a gay marriage bill failed in 2009.

And then the U.S. Supreme Court decided that was quite enough democracy on the question of gay marriage! It turned out that — just like the Massachusetts Constitution — a gay marriage clause had been hiding in our Constitution all along!

Conservatives could never dream of victories like this from the judiciary. Even nine Antonin Scalias on the Supreme Court are never going to discover a “constitutional right” to a border wall, mass deportations, a flat tax, publicly funded churches and gun ranges, the “right” to smoke or to consume 24-ounce sugary sodas.

These are “constitutional rights” every bit as much as the alleged “constitutional rights” to abortion, pornography, gay marriage, transgender bathrooms, the exclusionary rule and on and on and on.

The only rights conservatives ever seek under the Constitution are the ones that are written in black and white, such as the freedom of speech and the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Mostly, we sit trembling, waiting to see what new nonexistent rights the Court will impose on us, contravening everything we believe.

So when you hear liberals carrying on about all the “rights” threatened by Kavanaugh, remember that by “rights,” they mean “policy ideas so unpopular that we can’t pass a law creating such rights.”

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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An interesting image from President Trump's visit to Britain



Mr Trump holds the hand of Theresa May, the British PM, as they walk up a flight of stairs.  Do I see a picture of a dynamic USA dragging along a feeble Britain?  Her PR people will be mortified.

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And they pick at judge Kavanaugh

2009: In an interview in the New York Times Magazine, Justice Ginsburg offers this, er, interesting comment why she was “surprised” by the Court’s 1980 decision in Harris v. McRae, which ruled that the Hyde Amendment’s exclusion of nontherapeutic abortions from Medicaid reimbursement was constitutionally permissible:

Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them. But when the court decided McRae, the case came out the other way. And then I realized that my perception of it had been altogether wrong.

Gee, Justice Ginsburg, would you like to tell us more about your views on those “populations that we don’t want to have too many of”?

It's pretty clear that she is a follower of Margret Sanger, birth control pioneer, and author of the "Negro Project", who did her best to limit births among the poor, particularly among blacks

Strange that among all the invective thrown at judge Kavanaugh, we have heard not a whisper about Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Why are blacks and Leftists not following her around shouting "Resign, resign"!

SOURCE

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Virulent Leftist hate never ceases

Before meeting with Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister May Friday, President Trump took a seat in Winston Churchill’s chair at Chequers. Chequers is Winston Churchill’s longtime estate. Press secretary Sarah Sanders took a photo of Trump sitting gingerly in the chair.



As is the case with many seemingly harmless things the President does, however, the photo hit a nerve on the left. Twitter users called it the “top five worst photos I’ve ever seen” and called Trump a Nazi. "I hope the ghost of Winston Churchill rips Donald Trump's nazi cock off"

SOURCE

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Hysterical anti-Trump journalists explained



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What is an ideal outcome of Trump-Putin meeting? Russian FM tells Larry King

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has shared his view on what would be an “ideal” outcome of a Trump-Putin meeting, in an interview with Larry King that covered a wide range of topics, from Crimea to NATO and Syria.

Relations between the US and Russia are now at such a low point that a mere resumption of a normal dialog following a summit between US President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin could already be regarded as a success, Lavrov told the veteran TV host, on his show Politicking, aired on RT America.

The top Russian diplomat called the state of relations between the two nations “unfortunate” and said that “most channels of communications established over the last eight years have been frozen, including the ones on very important issues” such as the fight against terrorism and cyber-security.

“What we have now is sporadic meetings between diplomats and military, mostly on Syria,” Lavrov said. He then explained that if Trump and Putin would manage to “re-open all the channels [of dialog] on both divisive issues … and those issues where we can usefully cooperate” he would call such an outcome of the meeting “ideal.”

The foreign minister also said he believes that a spat in bilateral relations between Moscow and Washington began at a time when the US “realized” that Russia would not just blindly and eagerly follow the western line “on everything.” Moscow, in its turn, just wants its voice to be heard and perceived as the voice of an equal partner, he added.

US interventions left more people dead than ‘dictators’ they sought to depose

Answering a question about Russia’s continued support for Syrian President Bashar Assad, whom the West openly accuses of being a “dictator,” Lavrov said that one has to be “realistic and responsible about world security” as well as about the security of their own countries, which sometimes means cooperating with “those who would help create conditions to make our people safer.”

He also drew attention to the fact that, even though Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein were dictators, “when you compare the people’s suffering during their rule and now, following the US humanitarian intervention, then the numbers of those who were killed, wounded or [forced out] of their homes now, would be hundreds of thousands more than those who had suffered” under their rule.

"We do not justify dictators,” Lavrov said, adding that, instead, Russia wants every nation to first “take every step to ensure that your actions are not reckless” before deciding to embark on any “adventure.”

“We have to see the big picture and have to think about the price of being moral just for the sake of being moral,” Lavrov said, adding that those who “ruined Iraq and Libya, now want to put Syria in the same state.”

Ever-changing rules & double standards

However, misconceptions about Russia are far from being the only issue that complicate relations between Russia and the US, as well as other western countries which are still plagued by the legacy of the Cold War, while attempting to recklessly shape the world as they see fit.

The West “tries to invent rules of [each and every] individual case and then claims that it is unique,” Lavrov said. He went on to say that “for any other issue that they might not like there will be other rules.”

The Russian foreign minister particularly slammed Western double standards on the situation with Crimea, which reverted to being Russian following a referendum in which an absolute majority voted to rejoin Russia. He said that Crimea’s referendum, which the West still refuses to recognize, was “done in a more transparent and legitimate way than the unilateral recognition of Kosovo’s independence without any referendum.”

In the case of the Falkland Islands, the UK claimed the islands’ “status was determined in a free and fair referendum by its citizens in full accordance with the UN charter” while demanding that the sanctions imposed by Argentina over this referendum be condemned, Lavrov told Larry King, adding that, in the case of Crimea, the whole situation was suddenly treated in a totally different manner. So much for the “rules-based international order,” which the western countries would claim to be so adamantly championing.

He also criticized US actions in attempting to resolve the Ukrainian crisis. He said that a dialog between Russia and the US on the issue has virtually contributed nothing to this process, as the US actually “tries to deviate radically from the Minsk Agreements each time they meet with their Russian colleagues.”

‘Atavism of Cold War’

The minister also criticized the West’s policy aimed at further strengthening NATO, against the background of a total lack of dialog with such countries as Russia. “NATO is an atavism of Cold War times,” Lavrov said, adding that its continued condemnation of Crimea’s reunification with Russia in particular is nothing but the “inertia of Cold War thinking.”

“We do not believe what NATO is doing by trying to expand further and further closer to the Russian borders by swallowing countries that do not add anything to the security of the alliance. We do not believe that this is the way to resolve the problems of today,” the foreign minister said, adding that NATO fails to “effectively address” such issues as terrorism, climate change, drug trafficking and organized crime.

NATO, which, according to Lavrov, spends 12 times more money on defense than Russia, has yet to “understand that it cannot dictate to each and every country how to handle international security matters,” the minister said. “Dialog is required,” he asserted.

SOURCE

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Democrats plan a Soviet America where they have unaccountable power

Communists under the skin -- Tyrants in waiting

It would be an understatement to suggest that Democrats haven’t accepted or handled particularly well the election of President Donald Trump, especially as paired with Republican control of Congress and a now conservative-leaning Supreme Court, in a government ostensibly unified by the political right.

Indeed, many on the left remained engaged in what can easily be likened to a toddler’s temper tantrum nearly two years since failed Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton was soundly defeated by Trump in the 2016 election.

Now that temper tantrum has taken on a decidedly vindictive tone for some on the left, as evidenced by a lengthy piece in Politico by a political theorist named Rob Goodman, a piece titled, “Hey Democrats, Fighting Fair is for Suckers.”

The article began with the typical lamentations from the left about how Trump and Republicans are systematically destroying all of the “norms,” or unwritten rules of the political game, to seize and maintain their grip on power and influence in the country — ignorant of the fact that many of the “norms” Trump is accused of breaking were already broken by Democrats in the prior administration.

In response to the alleged destruction of political norms across the board by Trump and Republicans, Goodman suggested that Democrats should — when and if they ever resume unified control of the three branches of government, as they once held between 2008 and 2010 — take drastic steps to ensure they never relinquish their grip on power ever again.

To be sure, there is a solid contingent of folks on the left — joined by some NeverTrumpers from the GOP — who pine for the day when Democrats, or at least an establishment Republican, will take power and institute a “return to normalcy” that will re-enshrine all of the policy supposedly laid to waste by the Trump administration.

But Goodman appeared to have been inspired to urge a different route for Democrats by a new book written by political scientist David Faris about how Democrats should “fight dirty” in order to build and maintain a “lasting majority in American politics.”

That book asserts that it will be impossible for the nation to “return to Normalcy” in the aftermath of Trump, and instead posits that “Normal is over” and Democrats should act accordingly, busting any remaining norms standing in the way of their implementing a “progressive direction” for the nation that can’t be easily stopped or reversed anytime soon, if ever.

In order to achieve that “lasting majority” of progressive Democrat rule in America, Faris offered up several examples of drastic actions that could be taken by Democrats to ensure they never lose hold of their power again, which were dutifully echoed by Goodman.

That would include such actions as: “Grant statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico, and break California in seven, with the goal of adding 16 new Democrats to the Senate. Expand the Supreme Court and the federal courts, packing them with liberal judges.”

“Move to multi-member House districts to roll back the effects of partisan gerrymandering. Pass a new Voting Rights Act, including nationwide automatic voter registration, felon enfranchisement and an end to voter ID laws. Grant citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants, creating a host of new Democratic-leaning voters,” wrote Goodman.

Faris wrote, “Republicans have always feared that immigration would change the character of American society. Democrats should reward them with their very worst nightmare.”

None of those actions would require a constitutional amendment and could be achieved via legislation, but it would require Democrats to utterly smash any “norms” they currently hold or have held in the past with regard to protecting the foundations of our nation’s political system.

All of that said, Goodman recognized that such an effort by Democrats would inevitably bring about incredible — and justifiable — opposition from Republicans, thus the effort couldn’t use half-measures, as the right would eventually regain control and use the precedents set by the left to do the same in a tit-for-tat spiral of escalation that would inevitably lead to violence and bloodshed if not brought to a halt at some point.

The folks at Legal Insurrection could only laugh at these suggestions by Goodman and Faris and pointed out that the process of unraveling the “norms” that the left now misses so much was begun under the guidance of former President Barack Obama and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

But at least some Democrats are being open and honest about their vindictive plans to exact vengeance on Republicans if they ever hold unified power again, and we can only encourage them to run openly on a platform of blatant political revenge as they seek to reclaim their lost power in the upcoming 2018 and 2020 elections.

SOURCE

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Feds' new rules could stop asylum surge,/b>

The government’s citizenship agency issued new guidelines this week that will make it much tougher for many of the Central Americans streaming into the U.S. to claim asylum.

Asylum officers at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services were instructed to make asylum-seekers prove not only that they were specifically targeted in their home countries, but that their governments either condoned the persecution or were so indifferent that they might as well have been complicit.

That undercuts the standard argument given by many of the migrants making their way north from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, who describe dangerous neighborhoods and rough home lives — but struggle to prove they were victims of government-sanctioned violence.

Just proving that their governments were having trouble policing the problem is not enough, the guidance says.

The guidance also reminds asylum officers that someone who sneaks into the U.S., rather than asking for asylum through more traditional channels, is a major negative factor that can help doom asylum applications.

The guidance could head many would-be illegal immigrants off at the pass, denying them even a chance to remain on U.S. soil through bogus or ill-founded asylum claims.

“Our laws do not offer protection against instances of violence based on personal, private conflict that is not on account of a protected ground,” said Michael Bars, a spokesman for USCIS.

The guidance, dated June 11, carries out a decision handed down by Attorney General Jeff Sessions last month in which he said American asylum laws, while generous, cannot make the country an outlet for everyone facing difficulties across the globe.

Mr. Sessions said he was moving asylum back to its traditional understanding as an escape valve for people who faced persecution because of their religion, ethnicity or political beliefs.

Administration critics say the government will be cutting of a vital lifeline to tens of thousands of illegal immigrants fleeing rough conditions back home. They point to cases of people who say family members have been killed or children forced to join gangs, or husbands who made wives fear for their lives.

Yet security analysts said that over the last decade, asylum had become too nebulous, with people winning claims based on spousal abuse or gang-infested neighborhoods.

As the standards relaxed, the number of people making claims surged. Just 1 percent arriving migrants claimed asylum at the beginning of this decade, but that rate is now 10 percent.

Statistics show only about 3 percent of those will actually win their claims.

Yet just clearing the initial hurdle — claiming “credible fear” of being sent back home — is often enough to earn migrants a foothold in the U.S., getting them released into communities, where they can quickly qualify for work permits and some taxpayer benefits.

Even after they lose their cases, few are actually deported.

Smugglers, aware of the asylum “loophole,” began coaching their migrant clients on the “magic words” to use to clear the credible fear threshold and gain quick entry to the U.S.

Under the new guidance, though, officers were told to reject even pre-asylum “credible fear” claims that don’t meet the higher standards. That paves the way for the government to quickly deport them.

“Few gang-based or domestic-violence claims involving particular social groups defined by the members’ vulnerability to harm may merit a grant of asylum or refugee status,” the guidance says.

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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Brits jarred by Trump's straight talk

Writing in Britain's major Conservative newspaper, a senior journalist called Trump's recent interview about his trip to Europe an "astonishing snub to Theresa May" (the lame-duck British PM).  But Trump was just being realistic and BS free.  Below is what he said:

Trump: “It's going to be an interesting time in the UK, and it’s certainly going to be an interesting time with NATO.

“NATO has not treated us fairly but I think we'll work something out. We pay far too much and they pay far too little. But we will work it out and all countries will be happy.

“With the UK, that's a situation that's been going on for a long time. So I have NATO, I have the UK which is in somewhat turmoil, and I have Putin. Frankly, Putin may be the easiest of them all. Who would think? Who would think? But the UK certainly has a, they have a lot of things going on.”

Q: Have you talked with May since Boris left?

“No I have not. No I have not. But Boris Johnson’s a friend of mine. He’s been very, very nice to me. Very supportive. And maybe we’ll speak to him when I get over there. I like Boris Johnson. I’ve always liked him.”

Q: Should Theresa May remain in power?

“Well, that’s up to the people. I get along with her very well. I have a very good relationship. That’s certainly up to the people, not up to me.”

The journalist was  not entirely condemnatory, however. He also said:

Given the unfolding chaos at Westminster, one suspects any President would have privately felt that a meeting with Vladimir Putin would be easier than one with Theresa May. Only Donald Trump would have said so publicly. But it would, perhaps, be unfair on this occasion to condemn him for being honest.

SOURCE





Some Britons welcoming Trump, renewal of 'special relationship' amid Brexit jitters

There are the protests, the official snubs, the hostile petitions, the social media campaigns, the infamous orange diaper-draped baby blimp. Britons are expected to rain invective on President Trump when he arrives in the United Kingdom Thursday.

But some are ready to welcome Mr. Trump, and the dramatic meltdown over the future of Brexit this week gives a sense that the U.S. may be the only good alternative the U.K. has in the coming years.

Specifically, people express hope that Mr. Trump and embattled British Prime Minister Theresa May will propose a trade pact to help make up for potential consequences of the United Kingdom’s scheduled withdrawal from the European Union next year, which will likely cause at least short-term pain in the British economy.

“The trip is important to us getting a deal,” said Matthew Peters, 36, a schoolteacher in Stirling, Scotland. Mr. Peters said he felt it was time to renew the special relationship. “I hope he sees that Britain is a better partner in Europe than Brussels.”

Commentator Piers Morgan is openly feuding with London Mayor Sadiq Khan — a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s Twitter barbs — for allowing the blimp to be flown during the president’s stay. Mr. Morgan called it “a pathetically puerile stunt that makes Britain look woefully petty, small-minded and gratuitously offensive.”

“Whether you love or loathe Trump, for Britain to be greeting the leader of the United States of America, its greatest ally, in this way is appallingly disrespectful,” Mr. Morgan said in a fiery television debate with the mayor.

As many as 50,000 protesters are expected to hit the streets to denounce the U.S. president, who will arrive after a NATO meeting in Brussels and is slated to visit one of his golf resorts in Scotland and meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki during his weeklong trip to Europe. Leaving the White House on Tuesday, Mr. Trump joked that his meeting with Mr. Putin, head of America’s longtime Cold War rival, may be smoother than his visit to Britain, which has long boasted of a “special relationship” with Washington.

Critics say Mr. Trump’s British visit has been severely curtailed to shield the president from the protesters. Workers have put up a high metal fence around the U.S. ambassador’s central London residence where Mr. Trump will spend Thursday night, and the State Department has issued an alert warning Americans in London to keep a low profile while the president is in town.

“At first I thought [Mr. Trump] was a joke,” said Karrie Fransman, 36, a comic book artist who lives in North London. “Now I find I’m running out of things to laugh about.

“I find his policies deplorable,” she said. “I feel like we are watching a democratic country, not so dissimilar to ours, crumble at the hands of a government who spreads hate.”

Ms. Fransman’s comments reflected the sentiments of many others in the British capital. The 20-foot-high orange blimp portrays the president as an angry baby wearing a diaper and clutching a smartphone. It will be hovering over Westminster near the Houses of Parliament.

Boiling over Brexit

The anger also stems from the frustration over Brexit in this cosmopolitan city. The issue has dominated the press and politics in Britain in recent months as Mrs. May has been negotiating the country’s exit from the European bloc. British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson quit in protest Monday after saying Mrs. May conceded too much to the EU.

Ms. Fransman said Mr. Trump’s record on immigrants, Islamophobia and racial issues mirrors a worrisome nationalism that has arisen in the U.K.

“I want to send a clear message to Theresa May and Boris Johnson,” she said. “We refuse to stand quietly by as Trump spreads hate speech for the benefit of profit and our ‘special relationship.’ I fear our country might follow the U.S. and that now is the time to get out of our armchairs and protest.”

But by no means are all here embracing those sentiments. A majority of British voters opted for Brexit two years ago, said Mr. Peters, and many see it as a harbinger of Mr. Trump’s surprise election four months later.

“I think the EU is trying to stop us from making good trade deals with other countries,” said Mr. Peters. “There are some politicians in the British government who get this and want to keep good relations with the U.S. and Canada and other English-speaking allies, but too many are scared of the EU. We need to show the EU that we can go and make a deal with the U.S. just like we used to do before we joined the EU, as an equal partner.”

For many Brexiteers, Mr. Trump is a hero, one of the few Western figures to have positive things to say about an EU-U.K. divorce ahead of the momentous June 2016 referendum.

Director Robin Niblett of Chatham House, a London think tank, said the popular protests anticipated for Mr. Trump won’t necessarily be larger than those that greeted some past American presidents. British protesters staged huge demonstrations against Ronald Reagan over the deployment of U.S. nuclear missiles on the continent during the Cold War and against President George W. Bush in 2003 during the run-up to the Iraq War.

“At a popular level, it feels simply like another wave,” said Mr. Niblett. “I’m not convinced that the anti-Trump mood is more intense than those moments.”

And while some 50,000 people — and the blimp — are expected to join Friday’s protest, a counter-gathering is also being organized to welcome Mr. Trump.

Nonetheless, the analysts said many British officials are worried about Mr. Trump’s propensity to upend the status quo.

“Where the U.K.-U.S. split is emerging is not so much at the popular level,” he said. “Rather, it is that America is increasingly not trusted by those who develop policy in the United Kingdom. And that is profound and new.”

Sean Duffy, 30, a Labor Party supporter from Glasgow, Scotland, is no fan of Mr. Trump. But he said Mrs. May should listen closely to Mr. Trump because the American president won office for many of the same reasons British voters supported Brexit.

“I grew up with the people who drove Brexit to victory. They’re sick of being patronized, and any government which dismisses them will be destroyed at the next election,” said Mr. Duffy. “Brexit was a revolt against a complacent establishment that felt it was best-placed to dictate to ordinary working people what was right for their communities.”

SOURCE



Trump Ends Obama ‘Exception’ Rule That Gave Unions ‘Illegal’ Medicaid Cash

The Trump administration announced on Tuesday that it will end an Obama-era rule that gave an “exception” to unions so they could illegally take money from worker’s Medicaid.

According to Fox News, the Obama-era rule allowed unions to take large sums of money from state subsidies there were supposed to provide services and resources for home health workers, such as family caregivers. This rule allowed unions to steal money for years, and now President Donald Trump is stepping in.

Current federal law largely forbids states from siphoning money from Medicaid payments, which are allocated for in-home caregivers and workers.

However, Obama created an exception to the rule in 2014 that allowed states to divert a huge chunk of Medicaid money to unions.

Since it was signed into law, 11 liberal-leaning states have used the Obama rule to raise more than $200 million a year for unions. Between 2014 and 2017, unions across the country took more than $2.2 billion from Medicaid and those who need health professionals.

The Trump administration’s major announcement comes less than a month after the Supreme Court delivered a huge blow to unions and organized labor. The High Court held that non-union workers couldn’t be forced to pay agency fees to public-sector unions.

Experts project billions of dollars will now be diverted from unions.

SOURCE





Bartender Flips Stephen Miller the Bird, So Miller Turns Right Around & Tosses His Meal

The left has become extremely hostile to the right, particularly those in the Trump administration.

Rather than voicing their frustration through usual political means — voting or peaceful protest — leftists have taken their outrage to the private sphere, insisting that the crime of serving in the Trump administration deserves unending harassment even during private, non-work hours.

Last month, California Rep. Maxine Waters told her supporters to physically confront and harass Trump officials whenever possible so that it’s made clear to them that they’re not welcome, “anymore, anywhere.”

It seems many leftists have taken her instructions to heart, especially in our nation’s capital.

In a recent incident in downtown Washington, D.C., senior White House adviser Stephen Miller went to a local restaurant and ordered takeout sushi, The Washington Post reported.

After Miller had left the establishment with his food, a bartender from the same restaurant followed him outside. “Stephen!” he yelled.

Miller turned around, only to see the bartender with both middle fingers in the air, cursing at him.

Thankfully, Miller took the high road and didn’t throw the $80 worth of sushi in the bartender’s face. He did, however, toss it in the trash.

According to The Washington Post, “Miller threw the sushi away, afraid that someone in the restaurant had spit in or otherwise tampered with his food, he later told colleagues.”

Only a few months ago, Miller also found his face printed on “Wanted” posters placed in the area near his City Center apartment, the Washington Examiner reported.

Miller isn’t the only Trump official who has faced this kind of treatment by sneering leftists.

According to the Post, White House adviser Kellyanne Conway was in a downtown grocery store, when a man walking by with his shopping cart yelled, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! Go look in the mirror!”

And of course, Sarah Sanders was kicked out of a restaurant while peacefully eating with her family.

Every day it becomes clearer that the party that has always claimed to be tolerant is embodying the definition of intolerance — and it’s not going to end well.

SOURCE





Leftist hate in Australia too

I republish below something I wrote in 2014.  It's very reminiscent of what is happening in America at the moment

I am enrolled in the electorate of Griffith, Kevin Rudd's old seat.  I used to get a nice Christmas card from Kevvy every year while he was there.  So I will be voting in the by-election caused by Kevvy's retirement.

The LNP [conservative] candidate for the by-election is Dr. Bill Glasson, a most energetic campaigner and an ophthalmologist by trade.  His father, also Bill Glasson, was a minister in the long-running Bjelke-Petersen government of Queensland.  So the present Bill has name recognition.

I was sitting in my usual Buranda brunch destination about mid-morning yesterday when Bill and a campaign assistant walked in -- also seeking brunch.  The assistant was a nice-looking young lady who might have been his daughter.  She had "Vote Bill Glasson" written all over her t-shirt so she was at any event a helper.

Bill & Co. sat down beside a lady in a green dress.  The restaurant was busy so some tables were right up against one another.  Bill chose one such table.  As the lady beside him got up to leave, she launched a furious verbal assault on Bill:  Quite egregious behaviour in a restaurant.

I was too far away to hear what she was saying and I am pretty deaf anyway but a professional actor could not have done a better job of portraying rage and hate  than this woman did  -- finger pointing, tensed-up body and all other conceivable hostile body  language.  Bill just sat there.  She gave up after a few minutes and walked out.  She must have thought of more things to say, however, as she shortly thereafter came back into the restaurant and resumed her angry tirade at Bill.

It was a most remarkable assault on a man the woman did not know personally and who has never been a member of any government.  She appeared to have been blaming Bill for something some government had done but why she blamed Bill for it was  obscure.

When I had finished eating, I went over, shook Bill's hand, introduced myself as a Griffith voter and said I would be voting for him.  I then asked him what the lady had been on about.  He said it was confused but it was something about hospitals.  All Australian public hospitals are in a mess so that might be understandable.  The government that got Qld. hospitals into a mess was however the recently departed Leftist government.  So again, why blame Bill?

I then said to Bill:  "She was full of hate, wasn't she?".  He agreed.  Just his conservative political identity was enough to fire her up.

SOURCE

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

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

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The West Has Lost its Way Since the Cold War

Marxism is still vigorous and ready to pounce despite the Soviet implosion

Jon Hall

Since the liberation of Europe’s Soviet Bloc in 1989 and the demise in 1991 of the Soviet Union itself, the West has become so pathetic that one might be forgiven for having a little wistful nostalgia for the Cold War era. At least back then, thirty years ago, Pakistan and North Korea didn’t have the bomb, China didn’t have an economy so huge that it threatened to eclipse America’s, and Europe hadn’t been invaded by millions of unassimilable Muslims allowed to just walk in.

When the Soviet Union broke up, the West had an historic opportunity to try to export freedom to Russia and make the world a better place. But we were told that the Cold War had ended and that the West had won, and that communism was dead. Some even said it was the “end of history.”

The West was deluding itself. The need of some individuals to control others and the meek acceptance of it by those being controlled may well be genetic. The idea that the gene for tyranny or oppression might have died is like thinking rudeness (or even sin) could be eradicated. The socialist authoritarianism of the Soviets didn’t end with the end of the Cold War; it regrouped, adapted, and waited.

American conservatives may be heartened by Britain’s vote to leave the socialist European Union, but have the Brits really come to their senses? Huge swaths of them still want socialism, which was recently given evidence by Oliver Wiseman, the editor of CapX. On May 11 in The Weekly Standard, Wiseman tells us about a looming threat to the U.K. in “Old Labour, Old Danger”:

Before Jeremy Corbyn was unexpectedly elected Labour leader in 2015, he led a career of far-left obscurity, catching the attention of the public now and then only thanks to his support for Hamas, Hugo Chávez, and anyone lined up on his side in what he sees as a global battle against capitalism and the West. Three years later, he is the bookmakers’ favorite to be Britain’s next leader.

But according to Wiseman, Corbyn isn’t the main threat to Britain’s future, it’s Corbyn’s fellow Marxist John McDonnell, “shadow chancellor of the exchequer,” who would take over the British economy were Corbyn to become prime minister. Wiseman writes: “It is just possible that the real drag on the British economy isn’t Brexit, but the Marxists waiting in the wings”:

According to a recent profile in the Financial Times, the members of a trade union book club that McDonnell ran in the early 1980s used to joke that he prescribed the same book every week: Das Kapital. In 2006, he said that the biggest influences on his thought were “The fundamental Marxist writers of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky, basically.” In 2013, speaking about the financial crisis, he said, “I’m honest with people: I’m a Marxist. This is a classic crisis of the economy -- a classic capitalist crisis. I’ve been waiting for this for a generation... [For] Christ’s sake don’t waste it.” The man who could soon be in charge of the British economy is someone who sees a recession not as a time to limit economic damage, but as a chance for revolution.

One takeaway from Wiseman’s fine article is that the British people have been corrupted; they want their Big Government handouts. Wiseman reports that a majority actually support “Labour’s flagship economic policy of renationalization of utilities and the railways.” The British people may be too addled to grasp that their problems were not caused by capitalism but by the socialism they’ve had going back to Clement Attlee. Britain’s National Health Service wasn’t some creation of “rapacious” capitalists. Churchill and Thatcher couldn’t steer the U.K. completely away from socialism, because the citizenry was already hooked on “free stuff.”

I found that profile of McDonnell at the Financial Times Wiseman referred to; it’s a bit long but quite worth reading. But know that the FT gives nonsubscribers one free read only; if you leave the webpage and attempt to return you’ll be kept out. So you might want to print it or save it as a PDF right away. The print button is on Jim Pickard’s byline. The profile appeared on March 1.

McDonnell believes he is on the brink of making history, should the government collapse because of Brexit. “Our objectives are socialist. That means an irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people,” he explains. “When we go into government, everyone will be in government.”

Or, as Mussolini once said, “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” McDonnell is also inspired by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who cleaved to a belief in cultural hegemony whereby socialism would triumph by infiltrating education, the media, and even the church.

Throughout the West, the Left has taken over the “commanding heights” of the culture. We see fatuous Hollywood actors consorting with foreign tyrants in their socialist paradises. Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders is “way cool,” and revered by maleducated young people. Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may soon be a member of Congress. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War a new front has opened in the Eternal War between freedom and oppression, and it’s internal.

On June 30, National Review ran “Slavoj Žižek, Fashionable Revolutionary,” a fine article by Christian Alejandro Gonzalez. Žižek is a Marxist flunky straight out of central casting, and he’s on the payroll of British and American universities. (Perhaps “academic freedom” has gone a bit too far):

“Our task today,” Žižek writes… “is to reinvent emancipatory terror.” One cannot achieve true liberation without wanton violence… we must decide: Should we embrace “revolutionary-democratic terror?”…

"During the moment of revolutionary fervor, passivity is tantamount to complicity with the forces of reaction. Anyone who does not participate in the terror is fit for elimination… Those unwilling to inflict slaughter on behalf of revolution are “sensitive liberals”…

[W]hat makes the Žižek phenomenon truly remarkable is not that he openly advocates the mass murder of civilians, not that he is taken seriously by the Western academic establishment… It is, rather, that the terror he endorses is ultimately nihilistic… Seduced by the aesthetics of revolution rather than committed to a serious pursuit of justice, Žižek’s philosophy collapses under the weight of its incoherence.

In John le Carré’s 1974 Cold War novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the British Secret Service has a double agent at the very top. In the 2011 adaptation for cinema, many liberties were taken with the novel. Even so, that wasn’t enough to keep the author from appearing in a singing of the Soviet national anthem, (he’s the elderly guy on the right who stands as the anthem begins; video excerpt). One of the changes was this bit of added dialog which occurs after the mole has been brought to ground and is waiting to be sent to the USSR in a spy swap: “I had to pick a side, George. It was an aesthetic choice as much as a moral one. And the West has grown so very… ugly, don’t you think?”

But the West was rather handsome thirty years ago before the end of the Cold War. Although he may be adept at dialectics, le Carré’s traitor to the West understands very little about aesthetics and even less about morality; he’s even more deluded than those he betrayed.

If the West is indeed growing ugly, perhaps it’s because we’re becoming like the East; perhaps it’s because we give vile clowns employment at our universities. Perhaps our growing ugliness is the result of throwing in with awful ideas, like socialism. The West needs to get back to being the West.

SOURCE 

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Choking on the Cost of 'Medicare for All'
   
Last month, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an outspoken socialist, beat 10-term Congressman Joe Crowley, the fourth-highest-ranking House Democrat, in the primary election for New York's 14th congressional district.

Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and a former organizer for Sen. Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign. She's also a vocal advocate of "Medicare for All" -- a government takeover of America's healthcare system. Support for single-payer health care is now a requirement for securing many Democrats' votes.

But candidates who advocate single-payer on the campaign trail are increasingly balking once they actually get their hands on the levers of power. That's because single-payer is cost-prohibitive. Even the most dyed-in-the-wool leftists admit as much, after they take office and have to figure out how to pay for their campaign promises.

Single-payer's champions generally paint a lovely picture of healthcare utopia. Patients go to see the doctor of their choice whenever they like, get treatment, and leave the clinic without paying a cent. No copays, no deductibles, no cost-sharing, and no referrals -- health care is "free" at the point of service.

In reality, health care doesn't magically become free; people just pay for it outside the doctor's office, in the form of higher taxes.

Many Democrats have walked back their enthusiasm for single-payer after getting a look at the just how much public money they'd have to come up with.

Last month in North Carolina, Democratic State Representative Verla Insko moved to kill her own pro-single-payer bill. An assessment from the state legislature's Fiscal Research Division pegged the cost of single-payer at $70 billion, $42 billion of which would have to come from the state. That latter figure is almost twice the state budget.

The Civitas Institute, a free-market think tank in North Carolina, estimated that implementing single-payer would cost a whopping $101 billion just in year one.

North Carolina's tale is only the latest example of single-payer dreams crumbling after confronting reality. Last year, California State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, a Democrat, pulled the plug on single-payer legislation passed by the state Senate after deeming it "woefully incomplete." Even that was an understatement -- the bill was silent on how it would raise the $400 billion needed to fund single-payer each year.

In 2014 in Vermont, then-Gov. Peter Shumlin -- a long-time single-payer advocate -- gave up on a single-payer plan after he learned it would cost $4.3 billion annually. That amount was equivalent to 88 percent of the entire state budget. He reluctantly concluded that the proposed funding mechanism for single-payer -- a 12.5 percent state payroll tax and a sliding-scale individual tax of up to 9.5 percent of income "might hurt our economy."

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders, America's foremost proponent of single-payer, admitted in June that "there will be pain" if the nation adopts the government-run system he favors. The plan he touted on the presidential campaign trail in 2016 would have cost $1.4 trillion per year, according to his own estimates. To pay for it, he called for a new 2.2 percent income tax, a 6.2 tax on employers, and higher taxes on the wealthy.

An independent analysis of Sanders's plan conducted by the left-leaning Urban Institute estimated that it would cost $32 trillion over 10 years.

And those are just the financial costs. Socialized medicine's human costs are even greater. Single-payer systems the world over ration care and force patients to wait for treatment.

The United States can barely afford its existing healthcare obligations. In 2017, the federal government spent more than $700 billion on Medicare -- a 65 percent increase over just 10 years. Annual costs per capita are expected to increase 4.6 percent per year over the next decade. And the latest Medicare Trustees report, released in June, reported that the Part A Trust Fund, which covers payment for hospital care, will be depleted in 2026. That's three years earlier than previous projections. At that point, workers' payroll taxes earmarked for Medicare will no longer cover the program's costs.

In other words, America is struggling to pay for "Medicare for Some" -- much less "Medicare for All." As pro-single-payer candidates like Ocasio-Cortez will soon discover, no amount of enthusiasm for single-payer can overcome basic math.

SOURCE 

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The Numbers Are In, And It’s Looking Pretty Bad For Senate Dems In November

Democrats are in for an uphill battle in November’s midterm elections as they struggle to overtake the GOP-led Senate, according to an Axios and SurveyMonkey poll of key states released Tuesday.

Although Democrats only need to pick up two seats to gain the majority in the Senate, they are struggling to control 10 states already held by Democratic senators. These states are now predominantly red states with voters who are strong supporters of President Donald Trump. They include Indiana, Missouri, Montana and North Dakota, all of which Trump won in 2016, while his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton couldn’t even win over 40 percent of voters in any of those states, according to a Politico report.

Chances of flipping most states where Republican senators are up for reelection seems slim, with states like Nebraska, Utah and Wyoming most likely a solid GOP win, according to polling data by RealClearPolitics. Democrats’ only hope will be to replace GOP Sen. Jeff Flake from Arizona as he retires with one of their own, while simultaneously defeating GOP Sen. Dean Heller in Nevada

Midterm prediction polls show that in an effort to add two seats to Democrats’ existing 26, they will likely lose races in Nevada, Florida and Indiana, which will squash any chances of overtaking Republicans in the Senate races, according to the Axios and SurveyMonkey poll. The poll surveyed 12,677 registered voters from June 11 to July 2 with a margin of error of five percent.

The poll suggests that 49 percent of voters would vote for GOP Gov. Rick Scott over Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson in Florida, 52 percent would vote for GOP Rep. Kevin Cramer over Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota, and 49 percent would vote for Republican Mike Braun against Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly in Indiana.

SOURCE 

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Trump Hits Two More Countries With Visa Sanctions For Refusing To Take Back Deportees

The Trump administration has hit certain government officials from Burma and Laos with visa sanctions as punishment for both countries’ refusal to take back their citizens the U.S. is trying to deport, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced Tuesday.

Going forward, the U.S. embassy in Rangoon, Burma, will halt the issuance of tourist and business non-immigrant visas to senior officials in the ministries of Labor, Immigration, Population and Home Affairs. In Laos, the U.S. mission will no longer grant tourist and business nonimmigrant visas to senior officials from the Laotian Ministry of Public Security.

The restrictions also apply to the officials’ immediate families, DHS said.

The sanctions come after a review by DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who determined that Burma and Laos have “denied or unreasonably delayed” accepting citizens ordered removed from the U.S. They will remain in place until Nielsen notifies Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that cooperation on deportees has improved, according to DHS.

“The decision to sanction a recalcitrant country is not taken lightly,” the department said in a statement. “DHS makes significant efforts, in collaboration with the State Department, to encourage countries to accept the prompt, lawful return of their nationals who are subject to removal from the United States. Those efforts include diplomatic communications at the highest level of government.”

Tuesday’s announcement is not the first time the Trump administration has resorted to the use of visa sanctions against countries that don’t cooperate on deportations. Washington slapped Eritrea, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Cambodia in 2017 with varying levels of visa restrictions after then-acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke named all four as recalcitrant countries

Although the immigration code allows U.S. authorities apply visa sanctions on countries that refuse to take back their citizens, the punishment had rarely been used before the Trump administration. Until 2017, Washington had resorted to visa sanctions against non-accepting countries just twice — Guyana in 2001 and then Gambia in 2016.

The Trump administration has put heavy diplomatic pressure on countries that resist accepting deportees and has been able to convince some to become more cooperative. Since January 2017, DHS has removed eight countries — including Iraq and Somalia — from a list of recalcitrant countries maintained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The 12 nations still on the list as of last July were China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Iran, Cambodia, Burma, Morocco, Hong Kong, South Sudan, Guinea and Eritrea.

A Supreme Court decision, Zadvydas v. Davis, prevents the government from holding aliens with final orders of removal beyond six months if there is no “significant likelihood of removal in the reasonably foreseeable future.” ICE says it has had to release Burmese and Laotian nationals into the U.S. because neither country has an established process for issuing travel documents to their citizens who’ve been ordered removed.

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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Illegal Immigrant Kills Two Officers — Fined $280

Yet open-borders advocates pretend that immigration enforcement is the problem.

It sounds surreal: An illegal immigrant with a years-old rap sheet has to pay just a few hundred bucks after a vehicle crash killed two law enforcement officers. Unfortunately, this actually happened in Maryland. The fatal wreck occurred on Dec. 8, 2017, when Guatemalan national Roberto Garza Palacios “fatally struck an FBI agent and a fire investigator on the side of a Maryland highway,” The Washington Post reports. Yet on June 25, Garza Palacios “paid a $280 fine, concluding a case of negligent driving lodged against him.” The illegal immigrant “did not have to appear in court and did not receive jail time.”

According to the Post, “While he drove in a ‘careless and imprudent manner,’ prosecutors found, his actions did not rise to a ‘gross deviation’ from careful driving or a ‘reckless disregard’ for human life — the conditions needed to support more-serious charges.” But that’s hardly all there is to this heart-wrenching story. The post further notes:

On May 3, officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement took [Roberto Garza Palacios] into custody at his home in Gaithersburg and charged him with overstaying and violating the terms of a work visa that had expired in 2009, according to ICE officials. Three years earlier, ICE learned he had been arrested in Montgomery County and asked jail officials to place a hold on him, but that request was not honored and Garza Palacios was released, according to county and federal officials. … Garza Palacios had previous traffic and criminal convictions. In a 2015 case, he pleaded guilty to driving while impaired. Around that time, he also served about four months in jail after being arrested for smashing windows on about 16 cars and lighting a sofa on fire near a construction site. After the traffic case concluded, [one of the victim’s widows] said that particularly given Garza Palacios’s record, the penalty in the recent case seemed woefully inadequate.

No kidding. Authorities are currently determining whether Garza Palacios should be deported (that’s a no-brainer), but two deaths could have been avoided had Garza Palacios been deported when he was originally flagged and had he not been afforded sanctuary despite his record. Today, the Left wants to abolish ICE. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) even called the agency a “deportation force.” Yet Garza Palacios’ evading deportation resulted in two people being needlessly killed. Whether intentional or not, this is what open-borders advocates condone.

SOURCE

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Leftists Ramping Up Administration Confrontations

Two more incidents over the weekend add to the growing list of violent episodes against Republicans.

Who are the real fascists? “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!” stated Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) last month in her call to harass and bully anyone associated with President Donald Trump and, more broadly, the Republican Party. In the weeks since, it has become increasingly clear that leftists have taken Waters’ directive to heart. This past weekend saw two more episodes to add to the growing list of leftist harassment.

In Richmond, Virginia, former Trump advisor Steve Bannon was confronted in a book store by a woman who called him a “piece of trash.” Upon witnessing the harassing behavior, the store owner told the woman to leave, which she initially refused to do until he called the police. The store owner explained, “Steve Bannon was simply standing, looking at books, minding his own business. I asked [the antagonist] to leave, and she wouldn’t. And I said, ‘I’m going to call the police if you don’t,’ and I went to call the police and she left. And that’s the end of the story.” The owner then noted, “We are a bookshop. Bookshops are all about ideas and tolerating different opinions and not about verbally assaulting somebody, which is what was happening.”

But, as it turns out, the story didn’t end there. Upon learning of the incident, former Hillary Clinton aide Philippe Reines exposed the name and address of the bookstore along with the name of the owner, writing that the woman “took the opportunity to call [Bannon] a ‘piece of trash.’” When Reines was called out for seeking “a public beatdown” of the store, he disingenuously responded, “I’m providing a service to the public by providing the contact information the bookstore posted on their website — presumably with the hope of being contacted. I present facts [without] encouraging any behavior.” But he absurdly added, “I’d point out through [sic] it’s possible this woman stopped a book burning.”

Meanwhile, on Saturday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was exiting a restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky, when he and a colleague were surrounded by several people and harangued with shouts of “Abolish ICE” and “No justice, no peace.” At one point an individual is heard shouting, “We know where you live, Mitch. We know where you live.” Eventually, as McConnell enters his car and drives off, someone says, “We did good, fellow citizens.”

It should come as little surprise that Democrats have increasingly approved of the tactics of fascism as their party has increasingly embraced the agenda of the extreme Left. Rather than attempting to defend the “merits” of this bankrupt ideology (which is understandable, given the fact that leftist ideology is opposed to the whole concept of merit), they instead have supported the tactics of intimidation via verbal assault and shaming in seeking to pressure Republicans and conservatives to kowtow to their political demands. Are any elected Democrats willing and bold enough to definitively break with their party and call out this dangerous and deeply divisive behavior of the unhinged Left?

SOURCE

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McConnell Destroys Democratic Opposition To Potential SCOTUS Nominee

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke on the Senate floor Monday attacking Democratic opposition to President Donald Trump’s future Supreme Court nominee, citing Democrats’ historical panic at conservative SCOTUS nominees.

“Back in 1975, they assailed the nomination of John Paul Stephens. They said he lacked impartiality and opposed women’s rights … So these far left groups have been at the same scare tactics for over 40 years,” McConnell said. “This far left rhetoric comes out every single time. The apocalypse never comes.”

“No matter their qualifications, no matter their record, no matter their reputation, it’s the same hyperbole, the same accusations, the same old story,” McConnell said.

McConnell also cited the nomination of David Souter, who turned out to be a fairly liberal justice under former President George H. W. Bush.

“Guess what left-wing pressure groups said about David Souter right after President Bush selected him? That’s right. The very same things you’re hearing today. The same things you’ve heard from these same corners about every Supreme Court nominee named by a Republican president,” McConnell said in the speech.

McConnell also cited several Democrats’ opposition to the nominee without knowing who he or she will be, in particular California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris’s statement that Trump’s SCOTUS nominee will signal “the destruction of the Constitution of the United States.”

Harris predicted “the destruction of the constitution” on “Hardball with Chris Matthews” in June shortly after Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his resignation, according to The Daily Caller on June 27.

SOURCE

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Big Labor Hit with Another Class Action Suit

Janus decision spurs Washington State suit seeking back wages

The fallout from the Supreme Court's landmark Janus ruling continued as Washington state workers filed suit to recover their lost wages from forced unionism.

Several home health aides are suing Service Employees International Union Local 775 and the state to recover money deducted from Medicaid reimbursements designed to fund the care of disabled or elderly people. The state government automatically sent more than 3 percent of the provider payments to the union, despite the fact that workers never agreed to become members. The practice, according to the suit, violates both the U.S. and state constitutions.

"Plaintiffs and class members are not union members and never consented for the union or the state to withdraw union dues or dues equivalent fees from their wages, yet the state deducted such fees from their pay," the suit says. "Defendants conspired to deprive Plaintiffs and class members of their First Amendment rights by deducting union fees from their wages without their clear, prior, affirmative consent."

For years Washington state forced such providers, many of whom are caring for relatives, to pay a portion of those reimbursements to the union. The practice only stopped when the Supreme Court declared a similar policy in Illinois unconstitutional. That 2014 ruling led to the Supreme Court's June decision declaring mandatory payments to public sector unions, including SEIU, an unconstitutional violation of free speech in Janus.

The caregivers are receiving pro bono representation from the Freedom Foundation, a pro-free market think tank in the state. Foundation labor expert Maxford Nelson said the policy was exploitive and "wrong on every level."

"Any business that tried to charge customers without their permission would have the state attorney general trying to shut them down," he told the Washington Free Beacon. "We believe extracting union dues from caregivers' Medicaid checks without permission is not only unfair, but violates caregivers First Amendment rights."

The home health providers are asking for "punitive damages against defendants … because their conduct, described above, was and is motivated by evil motive or intent, or involves reckless or callous indifference to the federal and state rights of plaintiffs and class members." They also are asking the judge to force the union and state to pay for legal fees. The Washington aides are not the first to demand that unions refund forced unions dues and fees. Former government workers have filed class action suits in seven states, including Washington, to repay past deductions.

Nelson said the Janus decision has settled the question of forced fee payments and "made it clear that unions can't take money out of public employees' pay without their affirmative consent." He said the onus should be on the unions to win the support of public sector workers or personal medical aides and that both groups are motivated by political support, rather than care for the aides.

"We believe the same principle protects these caregivers against being exploited by unions like SEIU 775 and politicians like Gov. Inslee," Nelson said. "SEIU 775 wants to fill its own coffers and Gov. Inslee wants union campaign contributions, so they assume silence means consent and take caregivers' money until and unless the caregiver objects."

SOURCE

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Trump Hits Another Home Run With Supreme Court Pick Brett Kavanaugh



President Donald Trump announced on Monday night his nomination of D.C. Circuit Judge Brett Kavanaugh to succeed Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh, who was included in The Heritage Foundation’s original list of potential Supreme Court nominees, is a very promising choice.

Kavanaugh is a committed textualist. As Kavanaugh succinctly stated in a book review published in the Harvard Law Review, “The text of the law is the law.” He has reiterated this view in many of his opinions.

In Fourstar v. Garden City Group, Inc. (2017), he wrote, “It is not a judge’s job to add to or otherwise re-mold statutory text to try to meet a statute’s perceived policy objectives. Instead, we must apply the statute as written.” And in District of Columbia v. Department of Labor (2016), he write, “As judges, we are not authorized to rewrite statutory text simply because we might think it should be updated.”

Kavanaugh is a critic of Chevron deference, under which courts show considerable deference to executive branch agencies in interpreting arguably ambiguous statutes. In his view, “Chevron itself is an atextual invention by courts. In many ways, Chevron is nothing more than a judicially orchestrated shift of power from Congress to the Executive Branch.”

And in 2017, while delivering the Joseph Story Distinguished Lecture at The Heritage Foundation, Kavanaugh spoke eloquently about the judiciary’s essential role in maintaining the separation of powers and concluded:

Statutory interpretation is inherently complex, people say. It is all politics anyway, some contend. I have heard all the excuses. I have been doing this for 11 years. I am not buying it. In my view, it is a mistake to think that this current mess in statutory interpretation is somehow the natural and unalterable order of things. Put simply, we can do better in the realm of statutory interpretation. And for the sake of the neutral and impartial rule of law, we must do better.

His record as a judge reflects a skepticism toward Chevron deference. Indeed, Kavanaugh has written or joined dozens of opinions finding an agency’s actions unlawful as well as many dissenting opinions (some of which were ultimately vindicated by the Supreme Court) in which the court’s majority upheld agency actions.

For example, he dissented from his court’s ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency could disregard cost-benefit analysis when considering a proposed rule in Coalition for Responsible Regulation v. EPA (2012). The Supreme Court later reversed that decision, citing Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion.

And in U.S. Telecom Ass’n v. FCC (2017), a case involving net neutrality, Kavanaugh dissented from the court’s refusal to hear the case en banc. He argued that the Federal Communications Commission was not entitled to Chevron deference because Congress had not explicitly delegated authority to the FCC to treat the internet like a public utility subject to regulation.

As for the Second Amendment, Kavanaugh wrote a dissenting opinion in Heller v. District of Columbia (2011)—a follow-on case to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling acknowledging the Second Amendment’s protection of an individual right to keep and bear arms. Kavanaugh would have held D.C.’s ban on the possession of semi-automatic rifles unconstitutional, stating that “Heller and McDonald leave little doubt that courts are to assess gun bans and regulations based on text, history, and tradition, not by a balancing test such as strict or intermediate scrutiny.”

Anticipating the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, Kavanaugh ruled in Emily’s List v. FEC (2009) that the commission’s regulations limiting independent political expenditures by non-profit organizations violated the First Amendment. Kavanaugh also wrote the majority opinion in South Carolina v. Holder (2012), upholding South Carolina’s voter ID law.

Kavanaugh has been criticized by some on the right for not going far enough in opinions he wrote involving religious liberty (Newdow v. Roberts and Priests for Life v. HHS), abortion (Garza v. Hargan), and Obamacare (Seven-Sky v. Holder).

In evaluating each of these decisions, it is worth remembering that Kavanaugh sits on a court in which a majority of the judges were appointed by Democratic presidents and would certainly not be considered conservative jurists.

Moreover, a good conservative judge might well decide to fashion an opinion in a way designed to maximize the likelihood that a closely-divided Supreme Court would ultimately agree to hear the case and adopt his position, a strategy that Kavanaugh has effectively utilized on several occasions over the years. As Kavanaugh stated during his Story Lecture at Heritage, “[W]hen Justice Kennedy says something, I listen.”

In short, Kavanaugh has been playing the long game to advance an understanding of the laws and Constitution that is faithful to the text and original meaning.

Approach to the Law

In a 2017 speech at Notre Dame Law School, Kavanaugh spoke about Scalia’s impact on the law and the late justice’s view that federal judges “should not be making policy-laden judgments.” Kavanaugh remarked, “I believe very deeply in [the] visions of the rule of law as a law of rules, and of the judge as umpire. By that, I mean a neutral, impartial judiciary that decides cases based on settled principles without regard to policy preferences or political allegiances or which party is on which side in a particular case.”

He elaborated on what Scalia stood for as a judge:

[R]ead the words of the statute as written. Read the text of the Constitution as written, mindful of history and tradition. The Constitution is a document of majestic specificity defining governmental structure, individual rights, and the role of a judge. Remember that the structural provisions of the Constitution—the separation of powers and federalism—are not mere matters of etiquette or architecture, but are essential to protecting individual liberty. … Remember that courts have a critical role, when a party has standing, in enforcing those separation of powers and federalism limits.

Though Kavanaugh was speaking about Scalia, his words could very well describe his own approach to the law and his commitment to the Constitution.

Much more HERE 

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

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

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